In my favorite of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, Prince Caspian, the children are headed back to boarding school when, at the train station, they feel themselves mysteriously “tugged” and pulled into another realm. They find themselves exploring the ruins on a forested island that are mysterious to them…and strangely familiar.
Many of us have had the experience, acknowledged or not, of arriving in a new place and knowing we’ve been there before. Sometimes it is a feeling of rightness, of belonging, of deep inexplicable joy. Sometimes it is the unnerving sensation that we are in imminent danger, that we must flee, that there is deep old trouble in this place. In my book Take Back the Magic I write about such experiences—what it felt like as a clueless 20-year-old to arrive in southwestern France, Cathar country, and descend into terror and panic. I also write about the Catskill mountains and how much they have always felt like my “home.”
The confusion for the Pevensie children in Prince Caspian as they begin to tap into these memories of the long story is that some things make sense—that was “my” chess piece, I remember this wall—and much does not…the castle was not on an island, the orchard is too old, but we weren’t children when we were last here, we were kings and queens of Narnia.
As they begin to claim their experiences (and contend with the mindbending reality that they have been gone from this world for thousands of years), they are transformed by their memories. Old skills return—from how to wield a sword to how to heal a wound. Still children, they nevertheless have access again to the hardwon lived wisdom of these other selves.
What if each and every one of us could allow the land where we have found ourselves, where we have been tugged and pulled by mysterious forces, to work its magic upon us—and help us recover the inner resources and forgotten talents of our soul’s long story through deep time?
The children’s reclamation of who they have been is an urgent necessity for the times they find themselves in, a world where men and the natural world are at war with each other. Not only must they claim their earlier incarnations but they must revive ancient ways of knowing and being in the world—when the animals spoke, the trees danced, and the rivers were alive.
We do not “remember” past lives unless there are urgent reasons for us to do so, reasons that are so much bigger than the everyday concerns of a single life.
Of course we are in a moment when what my daughter calls “the animate everything” has been silenced, when the last forests are being felled, when the rivers have been drained. How do we call forth all that we need, that the earth needs, from the long story of our souls?
Thirty years ago I found myself after an extended daydream staring up at a wall of mountains I’d never seen before and which I recognized in every cell of my body. When I eventually moved to the Catskills I realized that I had been visiting them in my dreams my whole life. I knew the rocks and the moss, the twists and turns of the roads, the kills and the waterfalls. Had I been here before? When?
I’ll tell you a secret for which I have no proof to offer, nothing other than a hunch, than an intuitive knowing, than a feeling.
Soon after we moved here I found myself “obsessed” with imagining what these mountains would have been like before the arrival of the European invaders. My husband found a book for me called Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery but it took me years to finish it. Each paragraph was a horrific account of the devastating ecocide, the vanishing of entire species, that happened within the first decades of colonization. Gone were flocks of ducks, azure clouds of butterflies, schools of dolphins, rivers alive with fish, skies darkened by birds, and even entire forests of trees. Shaking and enraged and weeping, I could not stop trying to imagine these vanished woodlands. I read about The American Chestnut tree, the mighty redwoods of the Eastern forest, whose elders had been slaughtered for lumber, who after the final extinction of the passenger pigeons who nourished them with nitrogen, succumbed to a blight and vanished. I wept. Uncontrollably. I found an old oak tree on the side of the mountains where I wandered, a tree that was probably at least 400 years old, and I sat and looked out with her across the valley. Tell me what was, I asked her. Tell me what you have seen. Tell me, I asked at last, who I have been here and what I have known. Why am I here?
For we have not all been kings and queens of Narnia, or rather we have not all been human royalty in times past. We have been passenger pigeons feelings our numbers diminish unable to find a mate. We have been the last flowers and butterflies of our kind. We have been trees, we have been birds, we have been beings of all kind upon this earth. Never has it been so urgent that we remember all that we are.
Where are you? Do you feel the tug of your soul’s long thread through deep time? What old ways of knowing does the world need for you to resurrect? Where are you? Why are you there?
My next workshop, four sessions in February, on Zoom is about claiming the wisdom and resources of The Long Story of Our Souls. You can find out more about it here and do reach out with any question. The high holy day of Reincarnate Wisdom is, of course, Groundhog Day, and I will be offering a live video presentation on that day. As spring approaches let us coax together old bulbs of knowing into bloom.
This has been the FREE version of my Substack. My paid substack includes excerpts from books-in-progress and Monthly Magic, an open zoom session about our conversations with the unseen world.
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. They are currently at work on their next book together Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy. To find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” visit wayoftherose.org
In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother.
She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.