In the Long Stories of Our Souls

Perdita Finn's new book & the re-release of an old story

“In the long stories of our souls, we’ve all been each other’s mothers.”

The candles glowed. The incense curled its way to the ceiling of the A-frame chapel. We were gathered there on All Souls’ Night, and

Perdita Finn

was weaving us in her witch’s cloak.

We were held by our beloved dead and the entire cosmos of more-than-human beings that have lived and died, and yet endure.

I grew up a Catholic kid. The “faithful departed” was a phrase I knew as part of rote ritual. The realness of the dead was encoded in my bones, but it wasn’t something I could hold in my conscious mind. 

I knew my mom used to talk to her mom after her death, just as my Nanna had talked to her husband, my grandfather. And I certainly have muttered a plaintive “oh, Mammy, help” in moments of desperation. But still… that was just the legacy of grief and yearning, right? It was magical thinking, not magic, right?

Perdita’s new book, Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World was a revelation for me when I devoured my advanced reader’s copy this summer. Her words gave me permission to know what I had always fervently wanted to believe: “all the dead were standing ready to guide us where we needed to go.”

Hi, Mom. And hi to all the moms across time whose stories are always and everywhere interwoven with mine

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What If Everyday Was the Day of the Dead?

I took the poetic license to refer to last night, November 2, as All Souls’ Night. That phrase has the lilt of a Loreena McKennitt song, and it fit “the veil between the worlds is thin” mood of the evening. But that churchly designation conjures images of purification and purgatory and any other number of weighty doctrines that have a lot more to do with earthly control and conjecture than they do with the wild gorgeous riot of creation.

It would be more correct to call it a Day of the Dead celebration, as Perdita did. 

As I understand Día de los Muertos, it is largely free of dogma and rich with celebration, marking the lives and continuing relationship of the ancestors. 

The Day of the Dead leaves us space for reincarnation and mysteries that have never been codified or creedified. It leaves us room to reach out to our mothers from this life and to trust that we are in fact part of that unbroken web of birth, death, and rebirth.

It was such a pleasure to have Perdita on KnotWork Storytelling last season with her stories of the mystery of the rosary. I hope to have her on the show again very soon to talk about the book and the process of writing what’s both an essential guide and a powerful spiritual memoir.

Maybe that Irish Queen Was My Mother in Another Life?

This week on KnotWork Storytelling, we re-released the very first story I told on the show. It’s the story of Mongfind, who you have heard me describe as the Irish sovereignty goddess-queen-witch who has become the mythic guide who inspired me to start this project in the first place.

Sometimes, when I am up to my elbows in a story that includes betrayal, slavery, and murder, I wonder just why I am so obsessed with Mongfind. As you’ll hear in this week’s story, in part, it is because she was maligned by power brokers intent on putting someone else’s son on the throne. But really, it’s more than sisterhood and solidarity that call me to keep telling and retelling her tale.

Maybe, just maybe, some essence of Mongfind is in my own spiritual DNA. If we can lean into Perdita’s ideas, and we have all been woven into the maternal web together, it’s more than possible, right? It is, in fact, inevitable…

This story relies on the source material in the 14th century Irish monastic text, the Yellow Book of Lecan as well as new scholarly interpretations of the tale by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich (as described in Thee Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer).

I invite you to immerse yourself in what you might think of as the “comprehensive version” of the tale so that, in next week’s episode, you’ll be able to play with me in the imaginal realms where I conjure Mongfind’s origin story and dream deep into a world thrown all out of balance by greed and bids for power.