Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

Product Information

This dynamic book sets out an approach to ageing, that is not about staying at all costs young but instead advocates harnessing your power, learning from myths, archetypes and role models, and plotting a liberating new path to an elder (as opposed to elderly) woman. It's for any person going through a transition and hoping to come out the other side more in touch with their inner hag.

This limited printing of Hagitude comes as a luxury slipcased hardback with a unique design and exclusive content – a new and original story.Were there equivalent stories for young men that I just don’t know about, because folktales are not my thing? On the one hand, we have to agree that folktales and fairy tales, their function is in good part to provide kind of teaching stories, if you like, for how the local world is and how one should behave and the kind of characters that one will meet. And if any book and concept and the course that you run from it, is ever able to rid our society of its fear of age and death and look up to the wise people who have gone through the alchemical process and come out the other side. Wearing different clothing from story to story, but nevertheless you recognise they are archetypes, we recognise archetypes. And I can see that there may be a metaphorical sorting the wheat from the whatever else, the mouldy rye.

And the argument, I think, or the way that I see it, would be that there are two purposes that are intertwined in the soul’s journey through the world.And yet, that kind of… And she’d been told all of this… The person, a figure who in fact rescued her from the well was a wise old woman, a sort of a Baba Yaga kind of a figure. These days we own just a small patch of land, and so I am focused more narrowly on the keeping of bees and hens, and the growing of vegetables and herbs.

And, yes, I think the Scottish and the Irish parts of my heritage, which are quite a lot of it, certainly the majority of it, always lead me to those particular wild and bleak and very dramatic locations where I can find that connection with the land and with the other world that Irish and Gaelic mythology tells us is completely embedded in the land. Sharon Blackie weaves a rich tableau of what a life full of wonder and authentic connection might look like, supplying practical ways to approach ancient wisdom.Today we’re looking at “Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life” by Sharon Blackie and “Witch Wisdom for Magical Aging: Finding Your Power through the Changing Seasons” by Cait Johnson. So I was kind of attuned to the fact that there were these characters in the mountains, and I’m a bit of a pareidoliac I do tend to see faces and shapes and figures in things. So you see these situations that are a function of the time in which these stories arose and in which they became very widely disseminated. And so she is kind of very much a product of her environment in the way that the Cailleach was associated, literally kind of almost immanent in it. We’ll come back to the book in a bit, but did you have a sense when you were in Ireland and perhaps in the West of Scotland and perhaps now in Wales, of connecting with that?

And all of these are woven into today’s podcast as we explore them and go down the rabbit holes of fascination, with someone whose mind expands and extends far, far beyond the usual run of the mill.And rather than suffer the wrath of her stepmother, she throws herself into the well, because that’s obviously a wise thing to do and then has a series of visions, which, as far as I could tell, if you boil them down were: be a very good little girl, do exactly what you’re told. That long, hard work, which required us to be outside in all weathers, as well as a continuing daily need for long walks to explore rocky shoreline, bog and mountain, has given me a deep and nourishing sense of connectedness to place that I feel drawn to share with others.