The power that transcends eras
Faery coins and prayer beads: How going away with the faeries brought me back to Divine Feminism
When it comes to connecting with the elemental kingdom, that’s not something I’ve done a great deal of.
For all I’ve been connecting with and talking to those other people can’t see for as long as I can remember, the idea of working with the faeries? That felt like a stretch even for me.
Recently though, what can only be described as elemental spirits began to talk with me, and every time I told them to go elsewhere, they only called louder:
The article that poured out of me for Psychic News this month was all about the elemental kingdom.
One of my teachers, a lady also from the North of England, told me that the old name for her part of the land – Elfmet – originally meant “Elf meet”.
The message was loud and clear: these energies had something to say to me and weren’t going away until I chose to listen. Yet the more I listened, the more I tried to learn something new from them, the more confused I became.
Then I took a trip to somewhere I can only describe as sacred, and suddenly it began to make sense.
Faery money and prayer beads
I spent last weekend on the beautiful Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a place just off the coast of Northumberland with a beautiful and powerful history.
One part of that history is St Cuthbert, an early Christian wise man and healer who went on to become patron saint of Northumbria and who is still said to wander the streets of the island on the night of a Full Moon.
It’s also said that he can often be seen on the tiny island to the edge of Holy Island where he spent some time as a hermit, making rosaries from the stones known as “St Cuddy’s beads” that he was said to carry and still makes wash up on the shore during a storm.
What are those beads? Science tells us they are fossilised pieces of the stems of crinoids: marine creatures that thrived in this part of the world during the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras, whose remains still lie in the sea and river beds all around us.
But long before science had discovered that to be the case; long before Cuthbert had ever so much as thought about moving into the church, they were known by another name: Faery money.
It was considered to be a hugely positive sign when someone found one of these little stones in a river, lake or at the edge of the sea. Why? Because it was clearly a gift from the elemental kingdom who used them as currency.
Isn’t it fascinating that one little item can lead us to three such vivid, but different stories?
And yet, walking by a craft shop over the weekend where I saw a bracelet featuring a silver version of them, I was struck by one simple fact: That no matter what name we call them and what story we tell about them, the beads/ fossils/ money themselves do not change.
Since those tiny marine creatures were fossilised their remains have continued to show up on the shores of this island – and many others and will keep doing exactly that long after the stories of Christianity too have been cast into mythology and we’ve begun to define them in a different way yet again.
And in a weird way that took me all the way back to the very start of my journey as a Divine Feminist.
Coming back to the core
At the very start of the Divine Feminist book I wrote:
“Our world is out of balance. So far out of balance we’ve almost forgotten there was ever an alternative.”
Over the next 260-odd pages of that book, I talked a lot about the different alternatives and my journey of exploring them. The thread underlying it all? That when we stepped back from the dualities and the binaries in our world, we start to see that the real power could only ever be found in the synergies, the commonalities, and the cores.
Because it is those places that never really change. And it is within them that we can find power, wisdom, and a deep truth.
Look at those tiny crinoids for example: We know they are the fossilised part-remains of marine creatures of course.
As for the rest, who alive knows whether St Cuthbert used them as prayer beads? Who can say for certain whether elemental beings used them as currency?
No one. But that doesn’t mean they’re not beautiful, rare, and more than a little magical to hold in our hands.
Turning that lens on ourselves
Why am I talking about prayer beads and faery money? Because the more I’ve thought about them over the past couple of days, the more they’ve reminded me of myself.
Over the past year and a half I’ve been forced to take that lens of looking deeper than the stories I’ve been told, and turn it on myself.
At times that’s been hard; asking me to revisit my greatest shames and the moments that feel heaviest to carry in my body, leading me to shake off labels and roles that other people had placed upon me and start the terrifying journey to find out who I was beneath them.
But the outcomes of that? My gods have they been worth every moment. Because the deeper I’ve dived, the more I’ve come back to my own deep truth. And with it, the kind of power, wisdom and freedom I’ve been searching for my whole life.
It’s lit a fire in me that I didn’t expect, and one that I absolutely can’t wait to share with other people on the road to illuminating their own truth and freedom too.
Next month, for the first time, I’ll be taking the insights I’ve gained over that time – together with everything I’ve learned in almost two years of running Re-Kindling Her Story sessions, the perspectives that come from over a decade of supporting clients to unpack and shift their own stories, and running Re-Kindling Your Story and, yes, the insights that are being shouted at me every day now from the ancient faery queens of this land I call home (because believe me, they are LOUD!).
It’s a ten-week course structured loosely around Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey which will combine the latest insights of transpersonal psychology with the cosy, safe spaces and powerful spiritual connections that come in the deep story caves of our ancestors.
To say I’m excited would be an understatement. And if you’d like to know more you can read more about it, and learn how you can join me, on the link below.
And, whether you choose to join me or not, I ask you to remember something about yourself and your own story:
That, just like the faeries who began talking to me even when I staunchly refused to believe in them, your power can transcend eras.
Because, no matter how the stories of that power may be re-told and rewoven over time, just like the currency made into prayer beads, it is the power itself that will always remain true.