Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

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So one day I was walking along the river and we lived near a heronry and there was a heron in the middle of the river and we startled her. So that to me is how you can find and connect with old woman energies in the land without having to necessarily have pre-existing stories. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site.

And then she had written songs based on it and singing those songs as a group of women, just in a village hall in Devon, made my marrow melt. It's for any person going through a transition and hoping to come out the other side more in touch with their inner hag.Blackie wants to reconnect you to the natural world, to life-giving goddesses (“no twinkly fairy queens”), to laughter, to argument, and to meaning. In our culture,” she says, “old women are mostly ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous, or held up as objects of derision and satire. So that in the first half of your life, you’ve done all of the building and the creating and the playing and the growing and, you know, in whatever fashion that has taken. We have the best known of them being the banshee, the Bean Sidhe in Gaelic mythology, the washerwoman at the ford as well. And particularly in our fairly toxic, fairly damaged, it has to be said Western culture, where growing old feels – and you say this somewhere in the book – as if it’s it’s a penance and a punishment.

But that was the first time, and I know it sounds unusual, but that’s the first time that anybody really close to me had faced death.Only a quarter done (and writing this now bc I plan to savor this book slowly over the next few weeks) but I'm already convinced Sharon Blackie has worked her magic once more and created a spiritual guide book that is at once a pleasure to read and also immeasurably profound. And yet, that kind of… And she’d been told all of this… The person, a figure who in fact rescued her from the well was a wise old woman, a sort of a Baba Yaga kind of a figure. It’s a Greek word for kind of a prostitute, but a high level prostitute who is more of an inspiration rather than just a kind of physical vessel. It’s all… Granny paused and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry: jommetry. Dr Sharon Blackie is a psychologist, folklorist and mythologist too, and shares her knowledge and own story.

Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise. Because that whole idea of, you know, you put on a pair of shoes and then the shoes end up dancing you. Not more than as a transition point that made them face their own mortality and thus an intro into the next elder woman archetype.

A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story’ and by The Scotsman as ‘… powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach. Cait Johnson’s “Witch Wisdom for Magical Aging” is divided into four parts, reflecting the four seasons. But I did actually curiously land in a part of Donegal, in a part of Ireland and a part of Donegal where there was no Cailleach to be seen. Because everybody’s inner hag, if I can use that term that I use in the book, is probably very different because it’s a reflection of who you are as a unique individual in the world.

And so I think that there are real needs and benefits to the idea that we think about how we mark those and how we treat them as initiations. The Chalke History Festival announces a new name, new look, and tons for history buffs to get their teeth into! Enormous thanks to Sharon for weaving the wonder of the book that is Hagitude and then for engaging with such heart and authenticity and integrity and intelligence and wisdom, with all that we explored.I loved this book up until chapter 12, when she prattles on about trans-identified males and their ideas of womanhood (a male can't understand womanhood utside of stereotypes and sexist media) which has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE POINT OF THE BOOK! You, at one point in the book discuss, I think, four archetypes that were were both Jungian and intrinsic to folktales.