Madness road

Last month I explained an idea that had occurred to me many years ago, that there was a connection between Wife's openness to the invisible world and her mental illness. On the one hand, she did seem (at least in the early years) to have some demonstrable level of psychism, sometimes knowing what was going to happen before it did. The psychism, for that matter, seemed to run in the family: her mother had the same Gift, and talked about it in the same matter-of-fact way that she would talk about her sewing or her needlepoint or the latest gossip from the local Historical Society. Wife's oldest sister had the Gift as well; she lived in another state so I didn't know her nearly as well, but again she took it as a matter of course. Wife's middle sister never talked about the Gift, not even with Wife or their mother, and apparently didn't have it (or else turned her back on it). All three brothers — so I was told — lacked it as well. (I met the middle sister many times, but never met any of the brothers: one had killed himself, one had died of cancer, and one had abandoned the family — all many years before I ever met her.)

As I say, sometimes Wife knew what was going to happen before it did. Not always, of course, but once in a while. She also had remarkably good success reading Tarot for herself or others. I watched her do reading after reading while she was learning the cards, with the result that I kind of picked up the textbook meanings associated with each card. And I learned the layout she usually used. But then I would watch her read for a total stranger — some friend of a friend that she met at a party, who asked her to do it. She would shuffle, lay out the cards, ... and then confidently tell them things about their lives that had nothing to do with the textbook meanings of any of those cards. Afterwards it would turn out that she was right.

And she was very good at "aspecting" the Wiccan gods or goddesses, most often Cerridwen (her patron) but any of the others as well. I mean by this that she was good at making herself a vessel or channel through which one of Them could speak — good at letting her own personality step aside so that the Deity could possess her body and speak with her voice. (I mention this briefly in a couple of paragraphs here, and I allude to it in this poem. Not sure if I explain it anywhere else in the blog.)

Anyway, some years ago I began to wonder whether there might not be some kind of link between these abilities and her mental illness. I don't mean it in an insulting way ("People who think they are psychic must be crazy!"), but in a clinical or diagnostic way. In other words, I wondered whether the reason that some people have a greater ability to do these things than the rest of us is that they are somehow born with naturally thinner shielding around their minds. The rest of us have naturally thick shields, and screen out all the psychic or supernatural data that is normally in the environment; therefore we don't see it, and assume it doesn't exist. But maybe a few people are born with thinner mental shields: then on the one hand, they are able to perceive data that the rest of us miss (so that they exhibit psychic abilities); but on the other hand, their minds are correspondingly more fragile and break down a lot more easily.

On this view, Wife's mental illness — along with all the misery that it caused her and me and everyone around her — was somehow in the nature of a tragedy. On this view, her neuroses and all her craziness were just side-effects made possible by the same natural endowment that provided her Gift. And on this view, her total collapse once she got sick was just a predictable consequence of the same thing. She came into the world as a delicate instrument who could pick up signals the rest of us could never hear. But delicate instruments don't fare well when they are dropped. And when, because of the normal vicissitudes of life, she slipped off the shelf ... she hit the floor and smashed into a hundred pieces.

For several years I tried to comfort myself with that story. In some ways, it is a very generous story because it makes so much of what happened to be Not Her Fault. But I never knew if it was just a private conceit, or if it was the kind of thing somebody else might come up with too.

Until today.

Today, while I was wasting time on the Internet, and found a link which took me to Galina Krasskova's blog Gangleri's Grove. Once there, I saw a post from New Year's Eve called "Treading the Path of Memory," in which Ms. Krasskova spells out the striking similarities between ballet and shamanism. (If those don't sound related to you, read the article. Once she gets into the details, it becomes a lot clearer.) In particular, though, she has some very specific things to say about the relationship between shamanism and madness. She writes as follows:

Long ago, I learned that there were two paths to becoming what many might term a ‘shaman': madness road or death road. The idea is that you are cast down from your world, shattered and in the process of rebuilding and restoration, one comes back stronger and more resilient than before. There is a third way though, and that is the road of art. What is that? It is living a life where you are fully given over to the daimon of an art – in my case dance. Every inch of your identity, everything inside and out by which you exist and define yourself as a human being, centers around, relies upon, and is defined by one’s art. Then…usually at a terrible and critical juncture, that is stripped away and the result is a psychic shattering of the self. You rebuild (or not, but “not” involves consequences that are a luxury for a spirit worker. “Not” involves destruction, devolution, sometimes madness, drug addiction, and death). You claw your way back into some semblance of existence. You learn to live again and eventually, if you’re lucky, to find some measure of joy. If this is part of a spirit-worker’s journey, then this is when the Gods begin the process of direct formation. (In the end, I think every spirit worker or shaman ends up traipsing painfully down every one of the roads at some point in their life as we are remade again and again in service to our Gods. It is the way of things – formation never ends). The easiest and most productive thing to do is to embrace the process.

This could have been Wife's story, with only cosmetic edits. 

• She started out wanting to play music, and became accomplished on the pipe organ. Then her teacher told her she could never play professionally because her hands were too small — playing for church services was the best she could hope for. 
• So she gave up music and threw herself into scholarship and teaching. That lasted until she failed her qualifying exams in her second graduate program and had to leave school. 
• Then she gave up scholarship and teaching for the world of business. And that was taken away from her when her health finally collapsed and she could not go on another step. 

One by one, her goals were taken away from her until she had none left. If you ever wondered about the source for the despair she shrieked out in this post ... well, this is where it came from.

An interesting consequence of Ms. Krasskova's perspective is that Wife's losses stop looking like disasters, and start looking like tests, ... steps along the way towards learning to become a Priestess. I don't remember if I ever proposed that she look at things this way. Some days she would have taken my head off for saying anything like that. But that's the kind of thought I had in mind when I wrote:

The road marked for my wife is hard,
With pain and sickness closely barred.
But those who will to serve the gods
Must meet their tests, despite the odds.

Anyway, it was nice to find that someone else sees it all the same way.

__________

P.S. [added the next day]: The thoughts in this post are also connected to the line of thought I pursue in this post from three years ago. The difference is that the kind of "dying" I talked about back then is nothing like as dramatic as the things Ms. Krasskova discusses above, and nothing like as dramatic as the physical or mental illnesses that wracked Wife and destroyed her life. Also I have never claimed to be a shaman or spirit-worker. But there is an echo here, however distant.