Memory and Magic

Memory was known as a goddess and a magician....

We pay so little attention to memory. Yet it contains whole lives and whole worlds.

Often we treat memory like trash, something that must be taken out and disposed of. We revere the ‘now’ or the present or eternal moment, and forsake the magic of memory. Yet our ancestors and the ancients viewed Memory as a Goddess.

In modern times, we often focus on the negative aspects of memory - the bad memories, the traumatic memories, and we skirt around the knowing that we can’t even truly remember what we need to forget. We are not adept at memory magic.

Memory lives at the heart of Feminine Magic; it brings us into the wisdom of Legacy.

There is something we need to remember, a memory to treasure like an heirloom.

On the Eve of Imbolc, I reflect on my own journey into the mystery of memory - and how the Ancestresses of my lands came to retrieve me from the forgotten realms, and make me drink the water of the wells, so I could remember the old enchantments.

One Imbolc eve, many moons ago, in a small London flat, before the internet was even a ‘thing’ I performed a small ritual. This was before the age of information or the explosion of feminine wisdom. As if memory had poured through my cells, moving my nervous system like puppet strings, I lit a small tea light and placed it on my window ledge. I had heard that Bride would see the flame and pay a visit and grant a wish.

Like so many women before me, in those quiet moments, in the dark intimacy of my bedroom, I was not praying for world peace: I was asking for love, to find a true heart.

In the glow of the candlelight, a gathering of women arose from my bones and blood, and whispered the prayers alongside me. It felt utterly weird, and strangely natural.

I believed. I trusted. When I lit that small, cheap, tea light - I opened the vaults of memory and stood side by side women who had kept the flames of Brigit alive, the bean feasa of my Irish kin, from the shores of Sligo and Galway, and the women of my homelands in Yorkshire who had served the Fire of their Brigantia; the Bright One.

Years later, in the run up to Imbolc, I found myself crafting a small doll with bright red wool hair and a beautiful green mantle. Inside her I stored all my prayers; this time for a baby. Maybe the goddess could leave her under a magic four-leaf clover for me?

There were a thousand hands crafting that doll beside me. A thousand wombs aching alongside me. A thousand worn and tired faces, draped in the red mantles of the keeners, hands stained green with herbs, who shaped those prayers within me.

I was inside the fairy mound of Legacy, the secret magic of memory that lives inside us. The belonging that never leaves us, no matter where we live or what we lose.

What I have learned about memory is that it dissolves the little ‘you’ - you become immense, measured in vast timelines, populated by other bodies and worlds. In the ocean of memory you start to lose the sense of where you start and end. That is why it is advanced magic. It is easy to lose your ‘self’ in that vastness; it’s easier to forget.

I have had to remember so many stories. Memory is the mother of my dreaming.

As Walt Whitman says in Song of Myself,

“The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Memory is a bit of a seductress - she lures you in with a whisper, a glimpse, and then you are walking on a long, tough road, a wild terrain to find the light you saw in the far off forest. But you must stay the distance. Because the light that is calling is your soul.

I became very conscious of this divine aspect of memory when I was writing the book Magdalene Mysteries. Who was Mary Magdalene, I was asking the vastness of the skies? Who was she really? Who remembered her? Her true memory? Who had bathed her as a baby, and baptized her as a medicine woman? Who were her soul kin?

The books kept their lips pursed. The scrolls were being very secretive. Her memory had been lost, or obscured, or destroyed. (her memory as the spirit keeper of magic).

So we invoked the great Mother of Time Magic, the Memory Keeper - Mnemosyne.

Below is one of the introductions of the book we wrote - I’m not sure if it made it into the final edit, but its DNA remains in the book. We are the children of memory and myth. We are born from the womb of great stories, and also orphaned from the stories we needed to nurture us and guide our way. Enchantments are stories that hold vast creative power, to forge or undo worlds. We asked the stories to be reborn.

Invocation of the Muses

Deep within the heart,

Of all human beings,

Sit nine muses, spinning,

Weaving their labyrinth,

Stitching worlds together,

With the red fabric of life.

Their wise old eyes look up,

To see you standing here,

At the doorway of these words,

And with words of wild blessing,

They reach out to offer you,

The red thread of their weaving,

For you to carry this memory

And stitch it back into Love.

This is not a work that is just about facts. It runs deeper. It is about our story. It is about memory, the final gateway and all-knowing membrane of the feminine soul. 

Stories are the mother of the truth inside history. We belong inside stories; we don’t ‘make’ them up. They create us. This work is about the importance of stories and the inheritance of stories. We live inside stories, and in fact, stories are like wombs. When we are born, we are born from and into a personal and ancestral and cultural story. A story is the dark matter of our flesh and bones, 95% unseen, but the basis of all things. A story weaves our consciousness together, and our story becomes the memory of our species. There are many stories both lost and forgotten. When we lose or destroy a story we lose part of our memory as a species - just as Zeus raped Mnemosyne, Memory, in Greek myth. Memory is the muse, the mother of the All Living. Within the womb we inherit a story, which science calls epigenetic memory, but no one yet truly understands memory, because no one can yet remember the story. Remembering the story is a resurrection. In indigenous cultures a story is the treasure of the people, the center of life. It is as precious as a relic or rite. In Celtic bard cultures, the story and its memory and oral incantation is the hearth of the religion. When people lose their stories, they lose a part of their ancient soul.

We must remember the story of our lost legacy of love to birth our future story.

We call forth that Great Goddess, Divine Memory, to be with us.

We live encircled within She Who Remembers All.

We give all to this great remembering.