The Year of Ancient Magic

10 Apr The Year of Ancient Magic

By Liz Janowski

For 200,000 years, we have been telling ourselves stories in an attempt to make sense of the world. These stories matter. The ideas in these stories, the characters, the themes, the structures, the storylines, what is included, and what is not includes matters. 

I have spent my life reading these stories in an attempt to understand what life means – not just for me, but for those who have come before me. I have been looking for signs and clues, symbols to decipher, to help me see more clearly.

If there has been one throughline in the many disparate interests in my life, it has been deciphering the metaphors and unpacking the symbols around me. I spend hours, days, weeks on end reworking pieces of text, fragments of images, lines from songs into storylines that explain ideas and underline universal themes that I see around me – themes about who we are as people, how we are meant to act, what we are supposed to think, and how we are meant to understand the world. I am a detective of these universal truths hidden in plain sight, and I’ve always longed to dig in deeper, to sink my fingers into the ground and bury my head in the library of dusty truths.

I heard a very loud call at the end of last year to “go more ancient” and to look further back in the source materials than I had been. To find more ancestral iterations of the goddess work I had been teaching, to read older manuscripts, and to look for the origin of the ideas. We live in a society that asks us to regurgitate ideas immediately, to post pictures of our food before we have eaten it, to share an idea before it’s been digested, and to believe the surface of a concept. At the end of 2022, I decided to not post anything on social media for as long in 2023 as I could stand to, in an effort to pull back my own research process and allow my own work to stew and simmer, to condense and deepen. It has been challenging to not share my photography or the teaching work I have been doing – both of which have been the best of my career. The teaching we have been doing on Master Archetypes have rocked my life and transformed my understanding of what is possible. My photography projects have elevated far beyond fun, game-y work into profound offerings that are truly art I am proud of … and in many ways, I believe it is because I stepped way back, and offered my system the chance to settle, to widen, and to listen. I don’t know where all of this is going, but I know that together, my students and collaborators and I have met our Great Mothers, found and made right relationship with our Protectors, and are about to walk in to the underworld to meet those figures who have held marginal space for millennia as Realm Walkers. We are going to continue walking together, through Creatrix and Alchemist, right back to the Origin, and from there, who knows?

My hunger now is to go even older, even more ancient. I hunger to find the source beyond the source. I read everything I can find from Egypt, Sumeria, and the Aztecs. I long for the symbol before the symbol. To be one with the time before all the words got in the way and the linguistics made things so complex and so veiled. Before organized religion and politics took over the narrative structure.

I also long for a deeper presence. On a very fortunate spring break trip to the jungle of Oaxaca this year, I told my friends that my personal goal is to awaken my senses. I believe one of the core differences between us as modern humans, and our ancient counterparts is that we have grown accustomed to sensory overload. We have become so used to daily sensorial overload that we have forgotten how to truly see, how to hear, how to touch, how to smell and how to taste. We are used to running our fingers along shiny surfaces, ever fingering smooth things to touch, easily consuming complex tastes, and watching ever-changing, flashing, bright images on the toilet at dawn. This is not natural and I am not sure how our animal bodies are going to process these changes to our nature.

I don’t yet have the discipline to lay for very long on the ground and patiently let my senses awaken in the way I desire, but I am working towards an arrival of just a basic capacity to be present with aliveness of touch, taste, sight, smell and sound in a way that I imagine our foremothers had as just their basic way of being. For millennia, people awakened to the dawn with birds chirping, babies crying or animals braying, to the weather as it was without artificial heating or cooling, they ate what was naturally available to eat (or not eat, as may have been the case), and they saw what was in their field for them to see, not what people were doing on a tiny screen thousands of miles away from them.

I don’t know where my longing for the ancient will take me. I have such high regard and such reverie for our ancestors and for what it took for them to bring their wisdom to us, and what a miracle it is to have their voices memorialized for us. As so many of us look to the future, with ChatGPT and AI and the relentless drive towards the new, I find myself wanting to hold the pole of the old, to dig my feet in to the ground of the eonic and to nestle down with the stars, not as a Luddite but as a counterbalance in the race towards ease and speed. 

My desire is for aliveness in all its forms…to feel, and as I often say to my students, “to use this one great, glorious, tender, flawed and fragile body to live this one great, glorious, tender, flawed and fragile life”. And I find myself feeling that raw sensation of being most alive less in the digital smooth ease of the new and more in the complex, unvarnished, howl of the old.