Hags Everywhere, Hallelujah!

We get to live at the same time as Victoria Smith and Sharon Blackie!

I’ve been listening to Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life  over the last days. I’ve been a long time fan of Blackie’s Jungian/mythopoetic approach to the myths and stories of the Celtic world particularly and of Europe generally. She’s a special expert in reading these stories for what they can tell us about possibilities for re-grounding in our lands, singing ourselves back into a relationship with Earth, with our local earths. She’s a soul guide into healing the wounds of abstraction and instrumentalization that western/sky-god/capitalist cultures have imposed on both humans and our earths–especially women and the homes we can weave of these stories in a world that shelters us so very poorly. I have found so much women’s wisdom in her books that I insisted on interviewing her for the Ecology issue of THE RADICAL NOTION (print and PDF at the shop). You can find her talks on YouTube, and an interview about Hagitude at Banyan Books’ channel. 

Given Victoria Smith’s Hags and Blackie’s books have come out within months of each other, I’d say that GenX women are not going into our elderhood quietly or invisibly. Where Smith’s book takes a cultural and sociological feminist approach to western culture’s–ahem–attitudes towards menopausal and elder women (we should STFU, sit down, and stop reminding people that we exist, have rights, selves, desires, and loads of reserved rambunctiousness yet to unleash), Blackie’s Hagitude describes ways to live into that rambunctiousness well and happily unleashed.*

Like I said, I’ve been listening to the book. One of these days, I’ll sit and read it too, as it’s very much worth taking in slowly and with deep attention. But, last night I was listening to it to clear my mind before sleep (my mind is very buzzy these days so I need a gap between the day and rest), and chapter 6 kept me well awake because it addresses a problem for feminist and women’s lineage which is that this lineage is being more and more effectively broken than ever. –Or maybe not, maybe it’s just my turn to grow into a wilder and wiley-er hag and look around to see that lots of women gleefully don’t give a shit about the history that made their current activism possible and that younger women are being scared off the wisdom and creativity that fed me so well. Again, because the women holding this lineage are older now, and young women have been taught by both fairy tale and fashion mags that women like me are at best dotty and at worst deadly to their youth, intersectionality, fuckability, and very lives. 

For all the talk fauxmenists foment of family and good of male protection, today’s gender traditionalists don’t think much about grandmothers, aunts, and the excellence of women having older women friends. “Fairy Godmothers, and Purveyors of Old Wives’ Tales” thinks about these relationships and how they can support, challenge, and nurture women both young and older. 

What hags are, in Blackie’s reading of the word, are women who are whole unto ourselves, no longer (or never been) defined by what a male-centered world wants from women. Thanks to the fire-trial of menopause, we enter a new phase of embodiment where we are much more for ourselves, much less even interested in the demands of a culture that tried to take more than its share of us, and often succeeded. We’re not defined by our relationships to others, but are rather defined by how we stand in our own power. We’re happy out here, in the hedges and margins, making our ways and writing our own stories, influencing policy and law from conference rooms with our earned and lived knowledges, speaking our rage and pain and poetry in parks. 

The work of the strong grandmother, or the good and wiser older woman-friend can be like the work of the fairy godmother in story. Our role is to show younger women what’s possible beyond motherhood, career work, the undermining celebrations of the male gaze. Because, if a woman is lucky and lives through the dangers of life to this point, there is a beyond of all that, and again if you’re lucky there’s going to be 30 or 40 years of it, so having some sense of how to walk into it with your chin up is a good plan. Blackie agrees with Jung that humans live so long beyond our hale and hearty youth that there must be some reason for it. Jung thought that reason was to be “guardians of mysteries and of his/her culture,” or a feminist lineage and women’s ways of knowing and working. The older person “is called to foster wholeness in younger people, and to help them deepen their appreciation of life’s meaning,” not by “telling young people what to do, but rather [by] pushing them beyond the perceived limitations which define and confine what they imagine they can be.” Basically, our job is to open the real mysteries beneath the commanding stories of the overculture. +

Blackie tells several stories of characters like Frau Holle or Baba Yaga who invite you to learn who you really are or take the consequences of humiliation or even death. These women “emerge suddenly out of the dark heart of the frightening forest with precisely the gift which the protagonist needs to stay alive and allow their story to progress. Sometimes they make apprentices of them, teaching them to engage in the hard but necessary work of discernment and order, and allowing them to acquire the necessary qualities (usually involving kindness, and cooperation with the other-than-human world) which will enable them to go back home and lead a fulfilled, useful, and meaningful life” (178-9).

Blackie has some powerful and thoughtful things to say about GenX’s hags and this younger generation coming up. We live so long now in the rich west that never before have so many elder childfree women lived–whether our children have grown, or we chose a childfree life, or more touchingly we could not have our own children. All here at the same time, we are, historically speaking, legion. “What if this was no accident?” Blackie asks, in good Jungian tradition of trusting in serendipity. “Could it be that our edge-walking wisdom and outsider sensibility gifted to us by patriarchy is just what is needed? New solutions never arise from the mainstream and so we are the natural allies of youthful radical, if we allow ourselves to be: they have everything to lose; we have nothing to lose; to me, that sounds like a powerful relationship between mentor and student; a cauldron in which both can be transformed” (179). I particularly like that last clause, the back-and-forth of conversation and influence among differences that is the fertile ground where new spirits of life and new ways of meeting needs can emerge. 

It’s a real challenge we face in this liminal and jittery era: humans need to get more connected to our Earth/earths than we have been in eight or nine generations in the cultures that become of techno-imperial, and our systems encourage us to slouch over keyboards and photofilter our way out of our bodyselves and into our pret a porter identities. We Hags of GenX remember the analog world, the underground scenes, the zines and word of mouth and road trips to that record store. It wasn’t a feminist paradise by any means, but we did learn about how to encounter each other’s bodies more from each other than from the isolated blue light of Pornhub and hentai. Going outside to touch grass isn’t just glib advice to the chronically online, it’s the first step in saving the human world from the almighty consequences of Gaia’s chemistry and physics. 

I lived in central Europe for a while in a strange community of men and women from a clutch of countries, and most of them were people anyone would be proud to know. Near the end of my time there, four of us women and one’s 11 year old daughter took a drive way off into nowhere to visit the traditional Hungarian equestrian school magicked out of time and luck by Lajos Kassai. To get there, one turns off one of those narrow Hungarian “highways” onto a road that runs out of gravel pretty soon to be just a generous track heading off into the forest. We were talking of the Jedi like techniques of horse relation developed and taught by Lajos, and stories of witches in the woods who knew the languages of animals and the wind. The girl got fidgety as we drove farther into the dappled light and away from civilization and asked if we knew where this road went. I said, well, that’s mostly what witches do, girl child, we go down the roads until we find out. 

---

*All of Blackie’s books are guidesongs for women to dig into the bedrock of our collective and unique authenticities, to enchant (sing into) and inhabit (live into) our bodies and lives and lands as fully as we can. She offers courses and links all her interviews, talks, and wisdom at sharonblackie.net. 

+I’m taking quotations from the Kindle version of Hagitude. Here, page 175.