West is transitional, liminal, conscious, unconscious, shadow, introspection and reflection place. It has a voice in matters of life and death & traverses the waterway of the conscious self, leaving one side of the shore, the place of illumination, to the awakening of the deep self on the shores of the land of the dead.
Tuonen (Tuu nun) tytti (TUU Te) is a ferrywoman, who ferries dead people over the River Twaw Ne Luh. She only ferried people who she believed to be dead – but Vainamoonen, you may have heard of some of my adventures with “he who believes he was the First Shaman” among my people, the Saami. But, like many shaman after, he had to travel to the Land of the Dead, and of course he would encounter the Ferry Woman, Tuonen Tytti. She knew he was alive. Now I personally would have LOVED to hear the negotiation between the two, to get him there, and thus said the daughter of Tuonen as her warning to him
“Thou art sure a stupid fellow,
Foresight wanting, judgment lacking,
Having neither wit nor wisdom,
Coming here without a reason,
Coming to Tuoni’s empire;
Better far if thou shouldst journey
To thy distant home and kindred;
Man they that visit Mana,
Few return from Maria’s kingdom.
West is where the Alchemy of unconscious to conscious and conscious to unconscious takes place. We all know we can’t keep everything in our conscious minds. It slowly floats into “just beyond my conscious reach” to deeply settling into the unconscious. But, we know the wheel is forever moving reminding us ~ past is prologue. Where are we going? Where have we come from? What have we learnt? What have we dropped along the way?
The paradox of water – you are brought to life by water, and yet a deadly place, a watery grave.
Historical symbolic representations of water – such as the alchemical/magical symbol of an inverted triangle that symbolizes the downward, gravitational flow of water – and the Cup or Chalice – symbolic of the water triangle – parallel the ancient feminine symbolisms of a downward pointing triangle (the representation of female genitalia) and the feminine elements of intuition, gestation, psychic ability, and the subconscious, respectively. Moreover, the Cup also stands as a symbol of the Goddess, the womb and the female generative organs.
West is the place of the soul. I have recorded sealskin/soulskin I leave the link here incase you would like a deeper dive (pun intended) into the story. Seal Skin Soul Skin
The questions west asks:
Can we also heal ourselves by returning to our inner lives?
Belonging to ourselves?
With radical self-care and self-inquiry?
I think we need to explore how to relate to the world we live in. If we explore how the world feels to our individual self, we can explore ways to answer the questions posed above. I believe most of us are instinct injured. We have normalized the abnormal and abnormalized the normal. I have devoted a podcast to the very real wound of Instinct injured. Healing our instincts and inner life incorporates enclosure, metamorphosis, and re-emergence. Instict Injured
West the place of mystery where we are also known to shape-shifter, access our medicine gifts, taking on the form of another, an ancestor, animal, or element. In our shamanic view we do our healing work in the psychic landscape – that interior guarded ground.
