A Sweet Elixir of Re-Membering
Our next Magical Book Club read and why it will restructure your body and your life to bring you into greater interconnection with the ancestors, the Earth, and the ancient Feminine energy we all need
NOTE TO ALL HERETICS:
This is an invitation to participate with us in our next Magical Book Club.
It is also an invitation into a deeper way of being.
Being born to this modern age requires a form of amnesia. To live in our culture is to be unwillingly complicit in domination. Forgetting is necessary. Without this capacity for dissonance, we would long-since have fallen into despair.
But some of us were destined to awaken…
Snapping out of our inherited somnambulance, we find ourselves desperate to connect with the thread of Wisdom that runs through the ages.
From the first moment when we See the magical reality beneath the everyday world… we begin to seek out clues. Like spiritual sleuths, we search high and low for anything that reconnects us with the Divine Mystery.
Teachings that help us re-member the Magic of our ancestors and invite us to re-discover the Wisdom woven into our bones become a precious nectar.
And when we find such an elixir…
we must share it.
A book has recently entered my sphere that—from the moment I pushed play and heard a young woman’s voice reading in quixotic, syncopated pattern—I knew would restructure my entire body, if not my life.
In a bold reclaiming of the story of Earth, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine takes back the narrative distorted by our dominator culture and re-empowers it, re-weaving our world with myth stories of the ancient, pre-patriarchal partnership societies of our ancestors.
A deeply inclusive re-membering of human history, this book is an invitation to rewire and rewild our hearts, bodies, and minds.
For those who are not already familiar with the deep undercurrent of mythology and connection that Sophie Strand points to continually, reading The Flowering Wand may be a rude awakening or a dissociative experiment in philosophy.
For me it is a Homecoming.
… An invitation into a deeper reality, hidden through the ages but not lost.
Beneath and beyond the worldview we inherited is something earthier and more satisfying—a cosmic, unnameable truth, which we sense in our bones, but which our Western minds can only relate to with deliberate ignorance. From the first page, this book begins to displace the soil of that cultural conditioning, filling our hands and mouths instead with the rich taste of iron and earth.
To try to capture, claim, describe, or name this book is to miss the point. As the author points out—naming is a form of control… a way to make something small enough to consume. In that frame, this book shall ever remain nameless—uncategorized and unbridled.
At times, it flits from one idea to the next—tossing myths and archetypes, tarot cards and quotes into the pile—and we are left only with the impression of a bird building a nest, gathering materials at whim to weave a pattern it alone understands. Yet in its seeming chaos of form… in its refusing to fit into the orderly, patriarchal structure we have come to expect from our lives, this book is teeming with Life.
That is the promise of rewilding.
Not simply understanding a thing, but accepting your own deeply relational participation with Life.
This story washes around me like the ocean, alternately rocking and roaring, depending on the winds and currents.
It is an active transmission, and in the reading of it, Sophie allows the echoed voices of our long-distant ancestors to be heard again.
It is they who remind us of the magic all around.
They who call to us from the depths of our being. They who know that whether we choose to re-member the Truth or not, we are part of a vast, interconnected system.
Through new, ancient interpretations of well-known myths, we are re-introduced to the Animate Everything, re-invited to participate in our birthright. A world that includes us, but is not of us, dissipating and dispelling the illusion of progress and the injurious idea that our planet exists for human beings.
Instead, Sophie crafts the miraculous, rebuilding us from “pond scum and frog eyes“. In this re-envisioned naturalness, a connection becomes possible that lives outside of language, felt in the blood, rattling the bones, and inviting us to plant ourselves into the soil, without knowing what our own flowering will look like. It is a landscape of fungal networks, of vast information and awakening, at once foreign and familiar, intimately known yet indefinable.
But be warned, intrepid reader—
Sophie Strand’s vocabulary is vast and will surely engage whatever baggage you have about verbosity and magniloquence.
I can’t help but feel there is something deliberate beyond an excellent education at work here, as if the author’s sequipedal tendency is an invitation into that which we do not understand, a language necessary to shake us from our every day way of being. Her prose is cunningly crafted to make it difficult—impossible even—to fully grasp the threads she’s weaving with the intellectual mind.
Instead, the fecund energy of the Earth Herself entwines with the language myth and poetry, informed by science and study, to create a grand tapestry of invitation.
In this wildwood of thought and image, we who speak the language of the modern West, are given science and citations the modern mind can latch onto…
All the while, something ancient and secret stirs beneath the surface.
While the subtitle of this tome speaks to rewilding the sacred masculine, the book is not simply for men or about men. It is radically inclusive, an introduction to the non-binary world of being, a realm of multiplicity and possibility, where everything is interconnected.
This deep-rooted foundation is a telling that belongs to all of us—the story of our shared history. A story we have forgotten, in which we grew from a species suckling at the breast of a Great Mother to a society that dominates all life, including our own.
Beneath the cultural inheritance of the disconnected West…
The roots of our own blossoming are ancient. We are only the current fruit of a an eternal vine… born to this time and place, but never bound to who we are expected to be.
Reclaiming the thread of an older masculinity…
intricately interwoven with the Animate Everything…
we begin to discover…
buried in the underbrush and overgrowth…
an ancient Path…
an animal track through the wildwood…
which, if we allow it…
may finally lead us Home.
I can feel this book working in me.
I am more fully alive when I participate with it. It expands who I know myself to be, shores up hastily-built foundations, and offers a way forward—a valid, if fluid, alternative to the unsustainable modus operandi of our modern lives.
I’m happy to announce that The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be our next book for the Heretic Reading Circle.
During the gathering, you’ll have the opportunity to share your experience with the book, diving deeply into your impressions, the impact it’s had on your life, and anything else you feel called to share.
We’ll also have a chat thread dedicated to our explorations.
The point of our magical book club is not to dissect or critique the book, but to learn more about ourselves and the world through relationship with our reading.
Sharing our insights in a group not only helps bring them into our bodies so that we learn them in a deeper way, but it’s also a beautiful contribution to others who are engaged in exploration as well.
What to do:
Grab a copy of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine by Sophie Strand
Immerse yourself in the book—read it, listen to it, dance with it play with it. Whether you finish or not, immersion is what’s important.
Share your insights in our Heretic Reading Circle chat thread.
Join us for a sacred gathering on Monday, December 1 at 10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET / 5am AEDT.