An important component of any ritual practice is keeping a record of your process.

I've taken to calling my gnosis based, relationship based spiritual path ancestral animism, and my reasons for that are multiple.

Who is the Bog Hag? This archetype, familiar to us, known in our bones, surfaced for me in late 2023 when I was skulking a thread about perimenopause that came up in my search results. A woman wrote something about embracing the Hag she was becoming, flipping the bird to expectations and taking up residence in her Hag hut. Yes. That will do, I thought, my heart opened and immediately wrote the poem that ends this letter.

What are the names of the spirits in your ancestral languages? What are the names of the spirits in the land where you live now? How does our relationship to place transform when we view it as relationship, necessitating respect and reciprocity?

These herbs were called Wuldortanas. Wuldor means glory, tanas is related to the word tanian, which means to decide by lots.

The second our lives become a ritual story — honing us, annealing us, moving us outside of the known and into the unknown — we have again agency, choice. This is where working with myth can support our journey, and understanding the ancient form of the most human stories can give our own strange, underworld travels a comprehensive shape.