The Red Road: Part 2
Crossing into the Medicine Path
The ordeal of hapé didn’t just clear me—it changed the web around me. The shadow I released eased in another. Medicine doesn’t heal the thread; it heals the weave.
Part Two of my new essay explores how ordeal becomes soul journey, how shamanism, Witchcraft, and Jungian depth psychology all echo the same archetypal truth: the Great Mother returns through ordeal.
Soul Journeys and the Return of the Great Mother
The morning after the hapé ceremony, the air felt strangely clear. Not just in the streets of Newtown, where early commuters were already spilling out of trains and cafés, but in the atmosphere inside my own chest. Breath came easier. My aura, if I may use that unfashionable word, felt less like a fog and more like an open sky.
When I wrote to Tara that morning, I told her: “It feels like a little death with a great rebirth.” What I meant was that the ordeal had left me hollowed, like a gourd scraped clean of seeds. Something had been removed—snakes, projections, accumulated venom—and something else had moved in. Not clarity exactly, but space for clarity.
The Red Road is not a highway to bliss. It is a medicine path, and medicine, by definition, tastes bitter.
