I am standing on the edge of a sea cliff. Waves crash onto rocks 400 feet beneath me. The moonlight turns the skin of my hand pale and translucent. I wonder at the detail inherent in my body. The convincing reality of it. I glance up at the Moon, and the movement makes me sway, light-headed. I take a step forward and find no solid ground on which to land. I fall. I fall by accident and I choose to fall at the same time.
Every memory I've ever had is rushing by. Not experiences, because those are gone, never to return. On my way down, I pass the recorded imprints of those experiences on me. This is who I am. It is a flimsy creation and has a tendency to tear apart, with that tissue-paper consistency of our personalities that we spend our days reinforcing with routine, habit and the familiar. The scaffolding of the psyche is made of assumptions, denials and an insistence on solidity. We assume that the universe is consistent, that if you drop the rock it will fall -- every time. It is, for the most part, a necessity for functioning in life. Interacting with other people at the high level of context and assumed similarity that we do would not work if we doubted everything all the time.
But insisting on consistency doesn't make it true. Sometimes in magickal work you are forced to face not the truth, but the complete absence of it. If nothing is true, then all the sense of your self falls away. What is left behind is pure, clear, enlightened and stark, raving mad. Magick can drive you insane. Luckily for us, our rubber-ball minds are quite resilient, so this insanity is not a permanent state. It is, however, a state that has been both encouraged and revered in the past. Today it is seen more as a disease and a threat to the people experiencing it and those around them. Both of these views are correct, and of course neither of them is true.
I cannot argue that insanity is a good place to be, because it's not. I have touched on its borders, and I would not relish another visit. But I don't regret my experiences, and I wouldn't give them up. By being outside of the box designated as sane, you can see how that box is constructed and how illusory it actually is. The box has moved over time, and what is considered insane today is different from what was considered insane in times past. This realization alone is worth the trauma of "losing it" for a while.
I'm plummeting through the air. As I turn over and over, the hard, unforgiving cliff face flashes past. Perched on a ledge halfway up is a shaman. She's dirty, ragged and holds a half-dozen bits of rubbish. Bones, cloth, a leaf, a feather -- bits of things that other people discarded and she collected as precious. She is mad. She is also a functioning healer, diviner, sorcerer and finder of souls. People fear and respect her. They avoid her, yet seek her out when they are troubled. She is isolated, and a central part of her community. She's also halfway up the cliff, while I'm falling like a stone, so she obviously knows something I don't.
She's undergone a terrible sickness. In many ways, it broke her. She resisted it, and it took her apart. She was dismembered, stripped down to the bone, boiled down to soup and consumed by ravenous wolves. She came back. She was shiny and new. Glowing-eyed and full of fearsome energy. She had lost her right to a normal place in society and been left with something else. She had obligations. Not just to the people around her, but also to the spirits no one else could see. To the voices no else could hear. They spoke to her constantly, and when she didn't listen, they shouted and screamed and raved until she fled wailing from her hut in the middle of the night. She found it easier to listen to them and do what they needed done. At least she got to rest at night that way.
I'm pretty close to the bottom now. Somehow, my thoughts of imminent crushing death have been distracted by that crone on the cliff. What does she know that I don't? What does it mean that I'm about to die and she's sitting pretty? She smiles at me and points at the Moon. I look at its glowing, loving, caring, loony face and figure it out.
I'm not falling at all. I never took that step. I'm on top of the cliff, steady and waiting. I look at my hand, in wonder at the details. I can still remember the fall, the sea, the witch woman. So this is functional. It doesn't matter whether I'm in the box or not. It doesn't matter whether I hear the voices or not. What matters is that I'm not falling out of control. I'm free from control, but that doesn't mean I'm raving.
I wonder at the detail in other people's hands. I wonder how many of the people walking down the street are crazy. In the end, it doesn't really matter how touched by Luna you are. What matters is whether you can live your life regardless.
March Rogers is a healer using Irish shamanic techniques. He lives in Seattle and can be contacted at march@froghealing.com.