Hagitude E-Book

Sharon Blackie

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 482

Beschreibung

'There can be a perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.' Sharon Blackie What is Hagitude? It means being at ease with the unique power women embody in the second half of their life. It means having a strong sense of who we are and what we have to offer the world. And a firm belief in our place in the ever-shifting web of life. For the woman who wishes to flourish without chasing eternal youth comes Hagitude. Interweaving myth, psychology, landscape and ecofeminism, acclaimed author Sharon Blackie reclaims the mid years as an alchemical moment - from which to shift into your chosen, authentic and fulfilling future - and the elder years as a path to dynamic influence. 'A fascinating book ... well researched, packed with stories and bursting with lovely descriptions of the natural world. There's plenty in it to inspire women of every age.' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

Leseprobe

Hagitude

Also by Sharon Blackie:

Non-fiction

If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

The Enchanted Life: Reclaiming the Magic and Wisdom of the Natural World

Fiction

The Long Delirious Burning Blue

Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women

Hagitude

Reimagining the second half of life

Sharon Blackie

Illustrations by Natalie Eslick

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First published in 2022 by September Publishing

Copyright © Sharon Blackie 2022

The right of Sharon Blackie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Illustrations copyright © Natalie Eslick 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781914613098

EPUB ISBN 9781914613104

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

Contents

The Hag’s Call

Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin

How the journey begins

STANDING ON THE THRESHOLD

1 The alchemy of menopause

The fire and the Furies

2 Someday your witch will come

The Medial Woman

3 A radical beauty

Kissing the hag

THE HOUSE OF ELDERS

4 The Creatrix

Old women weaving the world

5 A force of nature

Guardians and protectors of the land

6 Fairy Godmothers, and purveyors of old wives’ tales

7 Tricksters and truth-tellers

Holding the culture to account

8 The Wise Woman

Deep vision

9 The Dangerous Old Woman

Carriers of the fire

LEAVING THROUGH THE HOLE IN THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE

10 The valley of the shadow of Death

Acknowledgements

About the Author

The Hag’s Call

Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin

She is the essence of weather itself.

She is the wind

tearing violently at the roof,

squealing on the old gate,

calling down the chimney.

She is my fear taking human form,

calling into me tonight –

unexpected –

seeking lodgings.

Dressed as Karalalam,

she torments me

’til, at first sight of day,

she flees.

Let me out to the wind after her.

out of my concrete skin,

out of my iron skull,

because there’s a fierceness in me

that desires the edge,

the tempest,

the change.

Marrow stirs in my bones

reviving the awe of youth

in my flesh,

ending

the inertia of winter,

reopening my sword-sharp eye.1


This book is dedicated to the feisty and irrepressible old matriarchs of the far north-east of England, who enlivened my younger years and taught me never to let the illegitimi get me down.

How the journey begins

In the oldest known cosmology of my native lands, it wasn’t a skybound old man with a beard who made and shaped this world. It was an old woman. A giant old woman, who has been with us down all the long ages, since the beginning of time. ‘When I was a young lass, the ocean was a forest, full of trees,’ she says, in some of the stories about her – stories that are still told today, firmly embedded in the oral tradition.

This mythology is from right here. From these islands of Britain and Ireland, strung out along the farthest western reaches of Europe where I was born, and where I live still today. In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honoured a ‘Great Mother’ goddess, in these islands we were actually honouring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; they’re probably the oldest deities of all.

How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. Today, we don’t see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems – rather, they’re presented to us as folk tales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.

Whatever we’ve been taught they are – they’re not. They are remnants of pre-Christian cosmologies – cosmologies that are firmly embedded in the land, the sea, the sky, and the human-, animal- and plant-populated cultures to which we belong. Cosmologies in which old women mattered.

What I love most about our Old Woman is that she clearly wasn’t a character to be messed with. Take this story from the south-west of Ireland. One day, a parish priest visited the Cailleach’s house to ask how old she was. He thought, as such men do, that he was a fine fellow, and very clever; he’d heard that she claimed to be as old as time, and he wanted to catch her out. Well, the old woman replied that she couldn’t quite remember her exact age, but every year on her birthday, she told him, she would kill a bullock, and after she’d eaten it, she would throw one of its thigh bones into her attic. So if he wanted to, he could go up to the attic and count the bones. For every bone you find up there in that attic, she said to him, you can add a year of my life. Well, he counted the bones for a day and a night and still he couldn’t make a dent in them. His hands, they say, were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.

A few years ago, on the opening night of a women’s retreat I was leading on the far coastal tip of the Beara Peninsula in south-west Ireland – heartland of Cailleach folklore – I had a dream about her. I was part of a small group of resistance fighters, women and men together. We were captured by the establishment’s military, then securely locked away in a prison with thick stone walls. I spoke to the leader through the bars of our cell door. ‘You’d better be careful,’ I said. ‘She’s coming.’ He laughed, and shook a set of big shiny keys in my face. Just as he turned away from me, there was a rumbling outside, like thunder. A giant old woman in a black hooded cloak walked right through the prison walls as if they weren’t there, and all the stones came tumbling down around her feet. The iron door to our cell crashed to the floor, and we walked right out of that prison behind her.

I’ll go for that.

In 2018, in the middle of the night and in the throes of some rather cloudier dream, I woke up suddenly and proclaimed the word ‘hagitude’ to an empty, silent room. As you do. I had no idea what it meant, or where it had come from. But, the next morning, I realised it was going to be the title of my next book. Hagitude: hags with attitude. Like the Cailleach, and all the other feisty, ageing women of European myth and folklore who we’ve so thoroughly buried – just as we’ve relegated the ageing women of contemporary life to the shadows. They’re the inconvenient ones, the invisible ones. The over-culture would so like to pretend they’re not there.

On the threshold of elderhood, celebrating sixty years on this beautiful, troubled planet as I complete this book, I have no intention of being invisible. But I’m quite prepared to be inconvenient. As inconvenient as the Cailleach was to the Christian priests who tried to stamp out her memory – and failed. Failed, because everywhere you go in Scotland and Ireland there are stories about her. There are places in every county named after her, mountains that are believed to embody her and ancient monuments where her presence is still honoured.

But really, why should the Cailleach matter now? Why should the other fierce and shining old women of European myth and folklore who populate the pages of this book matter? Why should any of these old stories matter? Aren’t they just ancient history? Nice to know, but irrelevant to our infinitely more sophisticated lives today? Well, they matter because the ways in which we think about ageing depend on the stories we tell about it. How we think about ageing women depends on the images we hold of them. And the images we hold of ageing women today aren’t healthy. Truth is, there is no clear image of enviable female elderhood in the contemporary cultural mythology of the West; it’s not an archetype we recognise any more. In our culture, old women are mostly ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous, or held up as objects of derision and satire.

But our old mythology and folklore tell us something very much more interesting: that it hasn’t always been so. In our more distant past, as of course in many indigenous cultures today, female elders were respected, and had important and meaningful roles to play. They are the ones who hold the myths and the wisdom stories; the ones who know where the medicine plants grow and what their uses are. They serve as guides for younger adults; they’re the caregivers and mentors for the community’s children. They know when the community is going to the dogs, and they’re not afraid to speak out and say so. When they do, they’re listened to. Their focus is on giving back – on bringing out, for the sake of Earth and community, the hard-earned wisdom which they’ve grown within themselves.

It’s not surprising that these old myths and stories of Europe that I’m offering up should be populated with European women. Although migration has been a major force throughout human history, most of these old folk tales have their roots in poor, often rural communities in which travel – either in or out – was much less of an option, and in which there was much less diversity than we experience in our world today. But that doesn’t mean that they exclude others. These stories offer up wisdom which is accessible and relevant to all women who are now rooted in these lands – whatever their skin colour or ancestry. It’s a wisdom that’s accessible and relevant, in many different ways, to all those who identify as women. These old folk tales are not in the business of excluding. Archetypes are, by definition, universal, and students of folklore know perfectly well that all the major themes and motifs in these stories are cross-cultural. The simplicity of the tales, and the sketchiness of their description and characterisation, allows each of us to bring to them our own history, our own concerns and our own interpretations. We draw from them what we need, and they give to all of us with equal generosity.

Myths and stories such as these help us not only to understand life as it is, or was – but to dream life as it ought to be. We perceive, explain and make sense of the world through stories. They are the stars we navigate by, and that’s why storytelling is a universal human phenomenon, a vital aspect of communal life across all cultures and throughout the entirety of our known history. Stories teach us everything we know, and their lessons are deep and rich. Stories can reveal to us longings that we never knew we had, fire us up with new ideas and insights, and inspire us to grow and change. The characters in stories are great teachers, too: they are role models for our development, helping us to reimagine ourselves. Helping us to unravel who we are, and to work out who we want to become.

It’s always been that way for me. Since I was a small child, discovering fairy tales for the first time, my favourite characters have always been iterations of the dangerous, ambiguous but infinitely wise old woman in the woods. I didn’t ever relate to beautiful princesses with wide blue eyes and golden locks, no matter how abandoned or down on their luck. Their experience was so far from my own, growing up as I did on the fringes of impoverished council estates in the far north-east of England, that I couldn’t see myself in them in any way at all. But I always related to the Old Woman. The one who haunted the edgelands; the mysterious shadow in the heart of the darkwood. The exile, the rebel, the one who shrugged off the fetters of conventional society; the one who imagined and cultivated her own vision of how the world should be, thank you very much. At the earliest of ages, I already knew that was the old woman I wanted to grow into. The spirited, unpredictable, not-to-be-messed-with elder. An elder who’s always ready to tell you the often-unwelcome truths about the condition of your life – leavened, of course, with compassion, and a glint of fierce humour in her eyes.

But here in the contemporary West, we don’t really do elders: instead, we have ‘the elderly’. The connotations are quite different. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary online, ‘elderly’ is nothing more than ‘a polite word for old’. The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary informs us that ‘elderly’ can also mean ‘old-fashioned’. In Lexico, the Oxford online thesaurus, the word is associated with synonyms such as ‘doddering’, ‘decrepit’, ‘in one’s dotage’, ‘past one’s prime’, ‘past it’ and ‘over the hill’.

It doesn’t paint a pretty picture; these are not exactly the adjectives that most ageing women would aspire to embody. But the ageing woman has had a particularly troubled history in Western culture. The last convictions might have taken place in the eighteenth century, but in many ways we still haven’t quite recovered from our demonisation in the witch trials. Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still trivialised and marginalised, and often actively ridiculed. ‘Little old ladies’, we call them here in Britain; ‘old bats’ (if we think they’re crazy), or ‘old bags’ and ‘old trouts’ (if they don’t live up to our expectations that old women should rarely be seen, and certainly should never be heard). The 2019 ‘Ageist Britain’ report, which surveyed 4,000 UK adults and analysed thousands of tweets and blogposts in the UK, found that this kind of everyday ageism is increasingly of concern to mental health experts, as evidence grows which suggests that it can impact people’s physical performance, impair mental health, hasten the onset of dementia and even shorten life expectancy.2

What would it mean, instead of being an elderly woman, to be an elder woman? Because to be an elder implies something rather different – it implies authority: ‘a leader or senior figure in a tribe or other group’, says Lexico. According to Merriam-Webster, ‘a person having authority because of age and experience’. The Cambridge Dictionary tells us it’s ‘an older person, especially one with a respected position in society’. So how do women transition from becoming elderly to becoming elder?

There are a lot of ageing women out there. Between 1918 and 2018, average life expectancy increased by around twenty-five to thirty years in the United Kingdom, the United States and other developed countries of the world. In most of those countries, women also live on average four or five years longer than men. The elderly – by most societal definitions, adults aged sixty and older – are now the fastest-growing segment of most Western populations, and a majority of them are women.

What should we do with those extra years of life? How should we choose to spend them, in this culture which offers few inspiring role models, and no well-trodden paths for us to follow? Because in contemporary Western society, to be old is rarely to be thought of as gifted and wise. We see old age as a time of loss, of decay; we focus on holding ageing and death at bay. We find the process embarrassing, verging on distasteful. It’s not something we really want to hear about, and yet the media is full of it, and all of it negative. We’re constantly flooded with stories about the ‘burden’ that old people place on health services, and with news about Alzheimer’s disease, designed to strike horror into all ageing hearts. There are endless exposés of appalling conditions in care homes; stories about older women being preyed upon, scammed and even raped; stories about the impossibility of finding or even holding down a job once you’re over fifty and are effectively written off by a culture which prides itself on productivity rather than quality. Where are the stories of empowered and fulfilled elders? Where are the stories of the ways in which they can bring meaning and hope into the lives of the young? Where are the still-thriving lives?

This lack of cultural recognition and support for the process of becoming elder is why so many people with ageing bodies insist on trying to live as though they were still approaching midlife. It’s why so few of us investigate the rich possibilities of growing older, or undertake the necessary inner work that prepares us for a passage into a more conscious and meaningful elderhood. And even if we can bring ourselves to talk about the biological and psychological dimensions of ageing, more often than not we back away from discussing the existential – or spiritual – dimensions. We avoid the only question that it makes sense for us to ask now: what is all of this life for? Why are we still here; what do we still have to offer?

But we don’t much talk about spirituality in this post-Enlightenment culture which respects and rewards only rationality. We live in a society whose power systems value only the material, and which dismiss, become vaguely embarrassed about or actively ridicule the spiritual. Elderhood is a passage that ends in death by design, and we don’t much talk about death, either. So many taboos to overcome; so many strong feelings which arise.

And yet, ever since the groundbreaking work of Carl Jung in the first half of the twentieth century, most depth psychologists have argued that the journey into elderhood is a spiritual passage above all, and that the purpose of the second half of our lives is to grow into the person that we were always meant to become. Jung believed that ageing fulfilled a necessary function, saying: ‘A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own …’3 I’m a psychologist with a profound affection for Jung and his successors, and so throughout this book I’ll be sharing with you some of the wisdom which this flourishing discipline offers to help us address these questions. But as a folklorist and mythologist too, I firmly believe that story is our primary inspiration – an ancient, much-neglected tool which helps us conjure up sharply honed images of who exactly it is that we might want to become if we are lucky enough to grow old. Because stories are spells; they change things. When they hook us and reel us into their magic, they change us. It’s stories that will save us, in the end. Not just the stories we read or tell, or the stories we want to be in, but the ones that live inside us and the ones we live inside. The stories we invite in; those that we choose to inhabit.

As a culture, our failure to understand or embrace ageing is also related to the fact that we are increasingly and profoundly cut off from nature, and so from the natural cycles and rhythms of our human life. And yet the old women in our old stories, without exception, are forces of nature, and of the ancestral Otherworld which is so beautifully entangled with this world. There are no twice-removed, transcendental star-goddesses here; no twinkly fairy queens, reluctant to sully themselves with the dirt and mess of physical incarnation. Our old women are the dark heart of the forest, the stone womb of the mountain, immanent in the living land itself. They’re elemental beings: storm-hags, fire-keepers, grandmothers of the sea. They show us how to live when everything we thought mattered to us has been stripped away; they teach us how to stay rooted in the face of inevitable death. They teach us how to stand firm in the face of all the culture’s bullshit, and laugh.

It’s interesting, nevertheless, that there are very few European folk and fairy tales with older women as their main protagonists. I have found no stories that clearly teach us how to transition into a rich and meaningful elderhood, or which hold up a mirror of clarity to the nature of our life journey at this time. But still, there exist many different kinds of archetypal old women who play pivotal roles in the stories: characters who pull the strings, weave the webs, test or advise the heroes and heroines. These elders are usually presented as wise – though they manifest their wisdom in very different ways. What, then, is the nature of an elder woman’s wisdom, and how might myths and fairy tales offer us insight into the ways that each of us could uniquely embody it? That’s the key question at the heart of this book: how an exploration of these wonderfully vivid and diverse archetypal characters in our fairy tales and myths might help us to recreate a map of what it is to become a good elder. How do we make the most of the fertile decades which stretch out between the first tentative buddings of menopause and the final fruits of elderhood? How can we build on those old tales and combine them with the richness of our own experience to create new elder-woman stories, so inspiring the next generation? The good news is that all the archetypes in this book offer the potential to become something you couldn’t have imagined before you began to grow old.

The adventure begins now.


Standing on the threshold

1 
The alchemy of menopause

The fire and the Furies

When I look back to the early years of my menopause, what I remember most is a quality of experience that resembled British journalist Suzanne Moore’s description of her own: ‘I don’t really have the mood swings that some talk about. I have just the one mood. Rage.’4 And that fast-flowing, turbulent river of rage seething under the surface of my calm and sorted everyday persona – rage which sometimes I just couldn’t find a way to contain – was more petrifying than empowering, for someone who had never been allowed to express it as a child. Whenever anything remotely resembling anger had threatened to emerge, and especially during my teenage years, my mother would clench her jaw, look me hard in the eyes and tell me that I was ‘just like my father’. That would be the man who had beaten her regularly throughout their (blessedly short-lived) marriage. As you can imagine, that did the job. I looked like my father; it was easy enough to believe I might unknowingly harbour some of his worse personality characteristics too.

Well, that’s menopause for you: whatever else it does, it torches taboos. My inner anger-control mechanism had operated infallibly throughout my adult life, but at the age of fifty, rage seemed to have taken up residence at the back of my throat, hovering on the threshold of speech, always ready to make a break for it. It didn’t take much to trigger. Once upon a time, in what now seems like another life, I hiked up to the edge of the Masaya volcano in Nicaragua. I stood there for ages, looking down into the sulphurous, smoking hole, over-awed by the melted, contorted rock of the earth all around me. That night, I had a dream of a woman walking out of that volcano, and everywhere her feet touched down she set the earth alight. I felt like that woman. I’d been storing up rage like ancient magma, and I was all set to erupt.

Even now, from time to time, the old familial conditioning kicks in and I look back in horror, wondering how many situations I might have over-reacted to – but I know, really, that most of the rage I was feeling then wasn’t an over-reaction at all. I was simply reacting honestly, for once in my life, to ideas and situations that shouldn’t ever have been tolerable in the first place. Because the rage I experienced was rarely petty; it was well within the boundaries of what I think of now as ‘righteous wrath’. There are times in our lives when it’s necessary to release anger. There are times when it’s entirely appropriate for the honest, healthy animal in us to bite. I reserved my finest vintage of fury for the usually younger (and, frankly, almost always less qualified or experienced) men of my acquaintance who either patronised me, ignored my voice completely, or kindly explained to me that I’d obviously completely misunderstood this or that subject throughout my many decades of relevant scholarship, training and experience, when they’d been so clearly capable of understanding everything after simply reading a book or two – heavens, some of them were clever enough to understand the entire field of psychology and neuroscience just after skimming a couple of nicely laid-out websites! What a pity it was that I insisted on actual study, qualifications, insight, experience, before expressing an opinion on complicated subjects, or setting oneself up as an expert in them. What a pity it was that I insisted that I knew things, and maybe even knew more about some things than they did.

As you can see, sometimes the anger persists, even today … but all through my academic and corporate years, I’d been sidelined by men who weren’t entirely sure that women should be allowed in the workplace, except of course as secretaries, tea ladies (yes, we still had them in those days, trolleys and all), and cleaners. I was so very tired of the patriarchy by the time menopause happened along, and a good few of the men I was responding to had made anger a feature of their public persona, a selling point. The ‘angry young man’ archetype still has a certain romance about it, in some circles. It was okay for them to express public fury, lash out at or troll people on Twitter, but if a woman had the audacity to express a little irritation or indignation every now and again, we were hysterical harridans, or worse.

It hasn’t always been so. In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behaviour that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanours such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests – to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators.

The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto – ‘unceasing in anger’, the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera – ‘jealous one’, the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking and theft; and Tisiphone – ‘avenger of murder’. They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harboured such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order.

The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look.

I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause. In her passionate and meticulously argued book The Change, Australian feminist writer Germaine Greer suggests that society’s aversion to menopausal women is, more than anything, ‘the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger’.

But why do we find women’s rage so unacceptable, so threatening? It is for sure an attitude which is deeply embedded in the culture. Several studies conducted over the past few decades have reported that men who express anger are perceived to be strong, decisive and powerful, while women who express the same emotion are perceived to be difficult, over-emotional, irrational, shrill and unfeminine. Anger, it seems, doesn’t fit at all with our cultural image of femininity, and so must be thoroughly suppressed whenever it is presumptuous enough to surface. One of the saddest findings of these studies is that this narrative is so deeply ingrained that it even exists among women – and we internalise it from an early age. Soraya Chemaly, American author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, writes:

Studies show that by the time most children are toddlers they already associate angry expressions with male faces … Girls and women, on the other hand, are subtly encouraged to put anger and other ‘negative’ emotions aside, as unfeminine. Studies show that girls are frequently discouraged from even recognising their own anger, from talking about negative feelings, or being demanding in ways that focus on their own needs.

Girls are encouraged to smile more, use their ‘nice’ voices and sublimate how they themselves may feel in deference to the comfort of others. Suppressed, repressed, diverted and ignored anger is now understood as a factor in many ‘women’s illnesses’, including various forms of disordered eating, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue and pain.5

We hide our anger by refusing even to use the word – instead of saying we’re utterly furious, we talk about being ‘annoyed’, ‘upset’ or ‘irritated’. We take refuge in sarcasm, we nurse grudges or we simply withdraw. And as a consequence of these actions and attitudes, anger is an emotion that, more often than not, makes women feel powerless – not just because we’ve been made to feel as if we’re not allowed to express it, but, accordingly, because we’ve never learned healthy ways to express it.

In the hot-flushed fury of my own menopause I gazed, awestruck, at a neighbour who blithely reported that she’d hurled a frying pan across the kitchen at her husband in the heat of hers. It’s not that I imagined this would ever be a good thing to do – I spent the first three years of my life with a father for whom flinging fists around the room was the preferred strategy for coping with the perceived vicissitudes of his life, and it wasn’t fun – but I was profoundly envious of the unstated but clearly implicit assumption that expressing anger was her right. I longed for the ability to somehow let go of my anger in simple physical expression – ideally without running the risk of injuring someone else! – because studies also show that we women often hold anger in our bodies. Unacknowledged or actively repressed, anger takes its toll on us. Numerous psychological studies have unequivocally shown that women who mask, externalise or project their anger are at greater risk for anxiety, nervousness, tension, panic attacks and depression. A growing number of clinical studies have linked suppressed anger to serious medical conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders and the development of certain cancers.

There are, of course, fundamental differences between anger and aggression; the one doesn’t lead inexorably to the other. Rage, properly explored, can be a great teacher. Properly expressed, it can be a great healer – because all rage hides a wound; all rage emerges from pain. My own menopausal rage, I believe, derived from the pain of being excluded, from not being allowed to have a voice, from a strong sense of exile and unbelonging which had been with me ever since I was a child. Anger, then, once examined, contains the potential for profound discovery, for a deepened knowledge of the self; working with it and through it can provide the inspiration for change. Recognised, it can be transformed, and once it’s been transformed, it can be harnessed. It’s a creative force. It shows us that we’re still alive, still breathing, still caring, still invested in the world. Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, writes: ‘In the fury of women comes the power to change the world’, and in her book she tracks the history of female anger as political fuel – from suffragettes marching on the White House, to office workers vacating their buildings in protest after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court.6 More recently, we’ve seen the same hunger for social transformation fuelled by women’s rage and given healthy expression in the #metoo movement, and three women who were furious at the violence inflicted on Black American communities by the police and others, originated the movement that is now Black Lives Matter. At its best, anger is a perfectly rational as well as an emotional response to threat, violation and immorality of all kinds. It helps us to bridge the gap between the dreary unendurable which seems to exist now, and a more beautiful world of vivid possibility which stretches ahead of us into the future.

Men’s attitudes to menopausal women have been a particular source of ire for many of us, and it’s hard to countenance some of the perspectives which have been expressed over the past century or so. ‘It is a well-known fact, and one that has given much ground for complaint, that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration, they become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy, that is to say that they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier during their period of womanliness,’ Sigmund Freud declared in 1913.7 Well, you can argue that he was a man of his time; the first couple of decades of the twentieth century weren’t exactly known for their respect for women’s finer qualities. But unfortunately, the nonsense didn’t stop there. ‘The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,’ pronounced American gynaecologist Robert Wilson in a 1963 essay; he then elaborated fulsomely on this theme in his 1966 bestseller Feminine Forever.8 This frighteningly influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone replacement therapy. ‘Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,’ psychiatrist David Reuben wrote in 1969 in another bestseller, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.9 The postmenopausal woman, he added, comes ‘as close as she can to being a man’. Or rather, ‘not really a man but no longer a functional woman’.

Half a century on, has anything really changed? Sadly, I don’t think so. It might not be acceptable in most circles to write that kind of thing any more, but menopausal women are too often the butt of men’s jokes for me really to believe that the attitudes themselves have shifted. They’ve just gone a little more underground.

So if these are the stories men are telling about us, where are the stories we’re telling about ourselves? Unfortunately, they’re not always very much more helpful. A surprising number of self-help or quasi-medical books by female authors toe the male line, enjoining women to try to stay young and beautiful at all costs, and head off to their doctor to get hormone replacement therapy to hold off the ‘symptoms’ of the dreaded ageing ‘disease’ for as long as possible. Their aim, it seems, is above all a suspension of the ageing process, an exhortation to live in a state of suspended animation. And although more women are beginning to write about menopause as a natural and profoundly transformational life-passage, in the culture at large it is still primarily viewed as something to be managed, held off, even fought. Well, you can either see menopause as a possible ending or you can see it as a possible beginning. Arguably, it should be a bit of both. The ending of one phase of life, but also the beginning of a whole new journey – a challenging but ultimately fertile journey across the threshold of elderhood.

From the outside, looking at a woman objectively, there’s no obvious single transition point which marks the beginning of this odyssey. Menarche, the first occurrence of menstruation and a gateway to adulthood, is easily identifiable; pregnancy, a gateway to motherhood, is even more visible. But the features of menopause – that final, great biological upheaval in a woman’s life – aren’t nearly so obvious from the outside and are often deliberately concealed.

To add to the complexity, the passage lasts for a much longer period of time. Usually, it starts during our ‘midlife’ years. Perimenopause, sometimes called ‘menopause transition’, kicks off several years before menopause itself, and is defined as the time during which our ovaries gradually begin to make less oestrogen. This usually happens in our forties, but in some instances it can begin in our thirties or, in rare cases, even earlier. During perimenopause, the ovaries are effectively winding down, and irregularities are common. Some months women continue to ovulate – sometimes even twice in the same cycle – while in other months no egg is released. Though four to six years is the average span, perimenopause can last for as little as a year or it can go on for more than ten. Menopause is usually declared after twelve months have passed without a period. In the UK, the average age at which menopause is recorded is fifty-two years, though around one in a hundred women reach this point before the age of forty. Four years is the typical duration of menopause, but around one in ten women experiences physical and psychological challenges that last for up to twelve years – challenges which include depression, anxiety, insomnia, hot flushes, night sweats and reduced libido.

Sometimes, these challenges are significant; at their most severe they can present as risks to physical or mental health, and women need help to manage them. But one of the main reasons why women fail to see menopause as part of a natural – and even desirable – life transition is that, in Western culture, it has been thoroughly and effectively medicalised. It’s presented as a disability, a dysfunction in need of medication, a set of ‘symptoms’ – rather than being imagined as a natural and necessary entry point into the next stage of life, as it once was in traditional societies, and as it still is in many indigenous cultures today.

Interestingly, menopause didn’t become a matter of medical concern until the eighteenth century, when it was often referred to as the ‘climacteric’ – a word derived from mediaeval theories that divided life into periods of seven to nine years that were punctuated by crises. During this period, male physicians throughout Europe began to write learned theses about the end of menstruation, suggesting that it initiated an assortment of physical and psychological diseases in women. In the early twentieth century, with the discovery of hormones and the development of the new field of endocrinology, menopause began to be viewed primarily as a deficiency of oestrogen – a hormone which consequently became heavily identified with femininity. This perspective led to the development of hormone replacement therapy, and throughout the twentieth century menopause continued to be presented, in the world’s leading medical journals and books, as a disease to be ‘cured’ with medication – one which, to add insult to injury, was capable of triggering the onset of other diseases.

Everyone in Western cultures reading this book, then, young or old, will have been born into a culture which teaches us that menopause is a disease, a failure, a dysfunction. Menopause is presented to us as a lack – specifically, a lack of oestrogen, the ‘femininity and fertility’ hormone. And, consequently, modern conceptions of menopause encourage images of midlife women as weak, and as subject to drastic mood swings, forgetfulness and laughable hot flushes. We ourselves tend to focus on what we’ve lost – dewy, unlined skin, hair colour, firm muscles, the ability to give birth – and the only things we imagine we’ve gained in return are wrinkles, sagging backsides, painfully dry vaginas, sweat-ridden bedsheets and osteoporosis. We’re told that we should still, above all things, disguise ourselves as young women in order to be sexually attractive to prospective or existing partners at sixty. We’re told that a reduction in libido at this stage in our lives is abnormal: something to panic about, to fix – again, to medicate ourselves out of, when many women are actually quite content to slip naturally into a phase of life which is much less focused on their sexuality. We think of ageing as a failure, something to be fought against – rather than as a natural part of life which, like all of life, we must find a way to adapt to, and to welcome, not merely to endure.

These attitudes aside, the problems that many women face in adjusting to menopause are simply down to the fact of living in a culture that doesn’t allow us to build time into our lives for key transitions. We’re not permitted to take time out, so many of us try to carry on exactly as we were before. Being everything to everybody. Holding down the job, still looking after the kids, the cats, the partner. Piling on the need to care for older and ailing relatives to the backbreaking stack of existing responsibilities. Running from work to the gym to the supermarket then home to cook dinner, trying to soldier on as if nothing were happening, and medicating ourselves to cover the inevitable cracks. And then we wonder why we break. Because what we should be doing during menopause is gently and consciously letting go of one period of our lives, and slowly and mindfully easing the progression into another.

That letting go is hard – of course it is. It needs time; it needs tenderness. It can be hard to relinquish our identification with society’s view of youth as the owner of beauty, hard to turn our backs on its cult of sexuality. But we must. No matter how long we try to postpone the inevitable, our body’s ultimate trajectory leaves us no choice. Often, that necessary surrender to the inevitable gives rise to a time of deep grieving – and it should. Because menopause is an ending of sorts, and it is natural to mourn an ending – but it is also a new beginning. It is above all a transformation. The late author Ursula K. Le Guin expresses this idea beautifully: ‘The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age.’10 I love this idea, because to me transformation is everything: it’s the purpose of life. We women do it all the time, and often in the most cataclysmic of ways. From puberty to pregnancy … and then, just when we think it’s all over, along comes menopause, to shake us to the core again. We’re never done with our transformations; they just keep on coming round. We shapeshift all the way up to the end, casting off certainties like a selkie casts off her sealskin.

One aspect of menopause that is particularly difficult for many women is the need to let go of our tendency to define ourselves by our potential to birth new life – whether we have actually chosen to do so or not. Women are still, in many societies around the world, valued predominantly for their child-bearing abilities. Once all that’s over, so are we. We become irrelevant, inconsequential. And of course, throughout history, that was women’s primary function. Until very recently, few women made it past child-bearing age; most women never reached menopause at all, and hardly any passed through it into elderhood. But now that we are living longer, it’s important to remember that fertility isn’t actually the norm in the context of an entire lifespan. We’re fertile (more or less) from approximately fifteen years old to around forty: twenty-five years out of an average, in Western countries today, of eighty.

Regardless of that, society doesn’t make letting go of fertility easy for us. In 2019, a medical procedure that aims to delay the menopause in women for up to twenty years was launched by ProFam – a company of IVF specialists in Britain (headed, inevitably, by a primarily male team). The procedure involves surgical removal of a fraction of ovarian tissue by laparoscopy. The tissue is sliced, then frozen at very low temperatures so the tissue and eggs can be preserved. The idea is that, if you want to become pregnant or to delay menopause at some stage in the future, the tissue will be thawed and transferred (grafted) back into your body. After that’s been done, the company claims, most women gain full hormone production within four to six months. The justification for this procedure, according to the company’s website, is that:

Young women today are destined to live in the menopausal stage for 30–40 years (or more), but throughout history most women did not live much beyond their fertile period. Although modern lifestyle and medicine are ensuring we live much longer, the intrinsic nature of the ovaries has not changed, and unless we use modern technology to preserve them, the ovaries will cease to function at around 45–50 years of age, leaving a woman with 4 or 5 decades of menopausal issues. Delaying menopause with ovarian tissue cryopreservation and transplantation later in life can extend the period a woman lives in pre-menopausal stage. Years of meticulous research has now allowed women to delay their biological clock.’11

Four or five decades of ‘menopausal issues’? Even though some effects of oestrogen depletion, such as osteoporosis, do persist for the rest of one’s life, frankly that’s nonsense. As I indicated earlier, the challenges associated with menopause have almost always passed within a maximum of twelve years. What the company actually appears to be suggesting here is that fertility is normal, and infertility is not. That there is something aberrant in the idea of women living for decades in which they’re free from the burden of menstruation and potential pregnancy. That there is something transgressive in the idea that we might have a useful and meaningful life which isn’t dependent upon, and which outlasts, our fertility. This kind of attitude perpetuates the (surely, by now, outdated) idea that women are valuable, and can have self-worth, only in the context of that fertility. It’s enough to make you want to call in the Furies, for sure.

My own entry into menopause was hardly typical; it all happened quite suddenly. It was less of a nice slow transition, and rather more of a car crash. I had suffered from severe endometriosis for all of my adult life, and the only effective way I’d ever found to manage the monthly agony and excessive bleeding was to take the contraceptive pill to ‘normalise’ my cycles. But I had always planned to stop taking the pill once I reached the age of fifty, because the medical evidence clearly suggested that it was unlikely to be safe after that. I imagined I’d just have to deal with the ongoing pain, and hope that it would all miraculously vanish when menopause finally happened and I could kiss goodbye to menstruation forever. So, my fiftieth birthday arrived, I stopped taking the pill shortly afterwards – and never had another period. Not so much as an ache or a twinge; not even the slightest spotting of blood. Menopause, it seemed, had been happening quietly in the background while I wasn’t paying attention; it had been masked by the effects of the contraceptive pill.

At first, it seemed to me that all this was a very fine thing; not only had I been liberated from a lifetime of heavy and painful periods, but I hadn’t even had to endure any of the menstrual irregularities most women face in the run-up to menopause. I hadn’t had a perimenopause at all. But of course, there were still changes to go through – and now, they all descended on me at once. That sudden volcanic eruption of rage I’ve described defined my psychological experience; fire defined my physical experience too. I was burning woman; I was a walking hellfire. Some great conflagration was occurring, and I felt as if I were being consumed from the inside out.

My friend Fern, an artist, facilitator and wilderness guide here in Wales, had the same experience. She remembers regularly going to bed wrapped in a king-sized bath towel to absorb the buckets of sweat which would otherwise soak the sheets. The sweats also happened during the day. ‘I’d often have to do an Olympic sprint to remove at least two layers of clothing in less than three seconds flat,’ she laughs. ‘This was rather less easy if I was in company. Thirty seconds later, I’d feel chilled and have to pile it all back on again. I became magnetised by watching my body “fire up”,’ she tells me. ‘There was a sound I inwardly made – the mimicking of a small explosion or nuclear-fuelled rocket powering itself into orbit – Pwchhhh! That’s what it felt like. To so strongly and instantaneously feel my own physiology and metabolism was incredible. I started to understand that this was about accessing a new kind of power – crone power, hag power – the power of fusion or fission, if you like. It certainly felt elemental, atomic. I became fascinated by what kind of power this might potentially release in ageing women if we could consciously access it.’

There is power in fire, clearly, and throughout the burning times of my menopause, W. B. Yeats’ beautiful poem ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ was never far from my mind: ‘I went out to the hazel-wood/ Because a fire was in my head …’ And it was. I didn’t experience any of the ‘brain fug’ or forgetfulness that many women report having to deal with – quite the opposite. Now that I was no longer tied to the endless ups and downs of monthly hormonal fluctuations, and the endless seething cycles of up-and-down emotion that accompanied them, I felt not only liberated, but clarified. My thinking was sharper and more focused; I felt as if my energy was turning to things that actually mattered. It was as if a cloud had been lifted, and there followed a period of three or four years that I’ve always thought of, and described, as ‘incandescent’ – a word derived originally from the Latin incandascere, which means to glow, to kindle from within. Because fire, kindled and properly tempered, is the element of creativity, illumination and inspiration, of the life-force that burns brightly inside each of us.

For several months I not only embodied fire, but I dreamed of it. I dreamed of firepits, of forges, of naked flames dancing around my bed; I dreamed of dragons – and I dreamed of crucibles. Crucibles: the fireproof vessels in which the first stages of alchemy occur. And that is precisely what menopause is, if we allow it: a profoundly alchemical process, designed to transform us from the inside out.

~

Cleopatra the Alchemist, who is believed to have lived in Alexandria around the third or fourth centuries CE, is one of four female alchemists who were thought to have been able to produce the rare and much-sought-after Philosopher’s Stone. She is a foundational figure in alchemy, and made great use of original imagery which reflects conception and birth – representing the renewal and transformation of life. She also experimented with practical alchemy (the forerunner of modern chemistry) and is credited by some with having invented the alembic, an apparatus used for distillation. Her mentor was Maria the Jewess, who lived in Alexandria sometime between the first and third centuries CE; she is similarly credited with the invention of several kinds of chemical apparatus and is considered to be the first true alchemist of the Western world. In 1964, the great surrealist artist Leonora Carrington painted Maria, depicting her as a woman-lion chimera with breasts exposed and hair wildly flailing around her, as she weaves magical gold-summoning spells.

Actually, female alchemists in Greco-Roman Egypt weren’t uncommon, though they were mostly preoccupied with concocting fragrances and cosmetics. In fact, it was a collective of female alchemists in ancient Egypt who invented beer, setting up an unsurprisingly booming business by the Nile. This is all a far cry from the popular image of an alchemist: that of a lavishly dressed and usually bearded man in a mediaeval laboratory, bending over a fire and surrounded by all manner of arcane contraptions, trying to turn lead into gold.

However you imagine its perpetrators, alchemy is, in a nutshell, the art of transformation. It’s an ancient branch of ‘natural philosophy’, a philosophical and proto-scientific tradition which was practiced in a variety of manifestations throughout Europe, Africa, China and Asia. Put simply, it is focused on the ways in which one thing can be changed into another, and its goal is to perfect, purify or evolve the material in question. In Europe, alchemists with a predilection for the practical certainly spent time trying to create gold from base metals like lead, but alchemy – as Cleopatra’s imagery clearly demonstrates – has always been as much about the transformation of the individual as it is about changes on the physical plane. ‘Perfection’ of the human soul could result, it was believed, from the alchemical magnum opus (Great Work), and in the alchemy-inspired Western mystery traditions, the achievement of gnosis – personal knowledge and enlightenment – was a crucial part of the process.

We don’t really understand exactly how alchemists accomplished their transformations; the exact sequence of the operations that were involved in the Great Work was the greatest secret of a notoriously secretive group of people. So there are no specific protocols: early alchemists referred in their writings only to key stages of their work and, in quite general terms, to the different operations that characterised each stage. The precise number varies in different alchemical traditions, but three key colour-coded phases are usually agreed upon: an initial Black Phase (Nigredo), which gives way to an intermediary White Phase (Albedo) and culminates in a Red Phase (Rubedo). Today, in the world of Jungian and other depth psychologies, we use these same Latin terms to refer to stages of psychological transformation. The Nigredo refers to the ‘dark night of the soul’ that we pass through when we’re enduring deep changes in our lives; the Albedo represents the psychospiritual purification that results from our suffering during the Nigredo, and the Rubedo reflects the sense of completeness and possibility that results from integrating various aspects of the psyche during the final phases of transformation.

The work of the blackening, the Nigredo, was the longest and most difficult phase in alchemy, and it’s this stage which seems to me to be the perfect representation of what is happening to us during menopause. During Nigredo, alchemists believed, the substance that is transforming suffers deeply, and it’s forced to shed superfluities so that its true nature can be revealed. From a psychological perspective, then, the goal during this initial phase of transformation is to reduce the individual to her bare essence, to strip her down to her most essential parts. As with physical alchemy, all the dross, all the ‘impure’ and redundant material, must be removed before she can move on to the next stages of transformation.

Alchemists called this work mortification: literally, ‘facing the dead parts’. In the laboratory, mortification produces ashes, so that the characteristics of the original material are no longer recognisable. From a psychological perspective, finding the dead parts means accessing and revealing the unconscious, and confronting the Shadow that we find there – the unknown, and often darker, side of our personality. For Jung, encountering and then assimilating the Shadow were necessary steps in individuation – the process of integrating disparate and neglected parts of the psyche into a functioning whole. In psychological alchemy, mortification is accompanied by difficult emotions – shame, embarrassment, guilt or worthlessness, for example – as we finally face up to these old issues which we’ve hidden away.

The first stage of mortification involves calcination: a process in which the transforming material is ‘reduced to bone by burning’. In psychological terms, calcination represents the destruction of false aspects of the ego:12 the ways of presenting ourselves to the world that we’ve constructed in response to social and personal pressures, but which don’t reflect who we really are today – or who we want to become. Personal calcination begins when we begin to understand that so much of what we’ve imagined to be true and important in our lives might not, as we grow older, really matter at all. And so the blackness that obscures the true light of our being must be burned away to reveal our true essence. We’re required, during this process, to re-evaluate our whole way of being in the world.

To be human means always to be growing, to be transforming. We’re all alchemists, deep inside – it’s just that women have learned that fires must be put out, not encouraged to burn. We’re afraid of conflagration. We’re afraid of losing control. But during menopause we generally find that we have no choice. We’re not in the conflagration – we are the conflagration.