My Gratitude Incantation, Part 1
Winter, The Night, The North, The Magician
Winter, The Night, The North, The Magician
Note: This is the first in a series of planned blog posts about a gratitude incantation I’ve created which I do at the end of a meditation practice as part of my morning routine that you can read about here. Each one combines the archetypes of the following four things: directions, time of day, seasons, and the masculine archetypes as defined by Douglas Gillette and Robert Moore in their book, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. Today’s post, released in mid-winter, will start with the North, for reasons stated below, and sometime in the spring we’ll head East before going South for the summer and finishing with the West in the fall.
Four directions, all of equal value, where to start? Well, if you take up this practice, that’s entirely up to you. Today’s post is just the way I do it after developing it over several months of trial and error in 2019.
I decided that because I was born in early January in the Northern Hemisphere I would I start by facing the North, which I align with the winter, the night, and the Magician. In addition, this points me in the direction of the North Star, which has been used by navigators in the Northern Hemisphere for thousands of years. This has resonance for me because one of the reasons I started this practice was to become more aligned with Nature’s guidance.
Before I get to this practice, though, I have about a 20-minute routine described briefly in these four steps:
Three rounds of Wim Hof Breathwork, laying down.
A brief meditation, usually no longer than 15 minutes (also usually laying down).
Three rounds of 4–7–8 breathing — four seconds inhaling, seven seconds holding, eight seconds exhaling, saying these words after each exhale. Round 1: “Thank you for the Gift of another day.” Round 2: “Thank you for the opportunities presented by this Gift.” Round 3: “May Thy will be my will.”
Some sit-ups, usually 100, maybe some push-ups even though I hate ’em. (If you want this practice spelled out in much more detail, please read this post.)
After doing these four steps, I’m feeling both energized and grounded, a positive state to start any day in, and I stand up to do this part of the routine. This incantation aligns us with the four directions, helps us honor the four times of day, and connects us to the energies of the four seasons and the four masculine archetypes. For today’s post, those are the north (direction), the middle of the night (time of day), the winter (season), and the Magician (masculine archetype). However, as explained in this post, this is just the first of six incantations.
So standing with my eyes closed, I face north and say the following,
“To the North / The Night / The Winter / The Magician
Your attributes are intuition, intelligence, wisdom, and transformation.
Thank you for these attributes.
May I access them as I may need them throughout my day.”
Let’s begin by discussing some of the ways the night, the north, the winter, and the Magician connect. I’m sure there are many ways; these are just the ones I came up with.
First, if you have to align the cardinal directions with the seasons, where else would you place the north but winter? After all, Santa Claus doesn’t live in the South Pole!
Winter and the deep nighttime hours from midnight to 6 a.m. (roughly dawn) are opportunities for inner transformation. The dark and cold of winter is perfect for staying indoors and doing introspective activities like meditation, reading, and journaling. Also, the days are shorter so there’s a great chance to do some napping! Some animals have the wise idea to hibernate the whole season away so maybe we should follow their lead and get more sleep in the darker months. I know I do!
Regardless if we sleep more or not, every night when we go to bed we give our bodies time to rest (a mini-death in a sense) and we go into the world of our dreams, only to emerge the next day with a fresh slate (and maybe some insight from our dreams that can propel our inner growth).
Yet even though winter, along with fall, is one of the two dark seasons, unlike fall, throughout winter there is also slow growth toward new life. This is because the sun reaches its lowest point on the winter solstice at the start of winter and then steadily throughout the winter each day lengthens. Yet it’s as though the weather doesn’t get the memo because the days usually become colder for a time while they are lengthening.
Thus, a human who is in tune with the energies of winter will recognize that while it’s hard to perceive (especially in the first half), each day has a rising energy, each day is lengthening and brightening and each day signals creative potential. Underneath our feet, while the ground may often be frozen and show no signs of life, there is a stirring if you listen hard enough. It may simply be Persephone with an extra pep in her step as she is recognizing that she’s more than halfway through her yearly stay in the Underworld. Or perhaps, it’s something deeper, something unknown to all but Mother Gaia, something that will take its time to respond to Father Sun but is responding all the same.
That brings us to the Magician.
Now, use your imagination: We are flying in total darkness, snow caresses our feathers and thunder crashes as we descend. We burst out of the clouds and see a castle nestled onto a hillside below and in one bank of windows at the top of the castle, candlelight glows.
If we could fly through that window we’d find him there, a man deep in concentration, long, wispy, disheveled white hair flowing over his long robe, staring at a book of spells. He does his best work on these winter nights because no one’s going to interrupt him. On this night as he was drifting off to sleep, he had it — the invention that was going to rescue his Kingdom! — in an intuitive flash!
He jumped out of his bed into his warmest winter robe. Sleep would have to wait because if he didn’t strike while the iron was hot, the intuition would pass, perhaps breaking through some other Magician’s sleep or perhaps disappearing altogether. No, that wouldn’t do, so he’s here, trying to figure out what it means!
This is why I start the four attributes — intuition, intelligence, wisdom, and transformation — with intuition. Intuition is like getting the final answer to a test you had no idea you were taking. All you know is it’s an idea that seems worth following. Intuitions seem to emerge from another realm and who better than the Magician to recognize that from such realms come gifts that shape civilizations?
You see, the Magician archetype holds and masters hidden knowledge, and then creates technology and art with it. A person tapping into the Magician archetype has an intuitive understanding of the hidden forces behind things and can explain difficult-to-grasp concepts in ways that everyday people can understand.
But it all starts with intuition which even he, if he is humble and gracious, will admit isn’t something he can easily explain. All he knows is that when he gets that intuitive flash, it’s up to him to follow it.
Once he gets himself out of bed, pours himself some black tea, and lights up his pipe, the Magician is ready to sit down with his spell books and employ his intelligence to inquire into that intuition. Is it worth following? It takes intelligence to figure that out. He’s got to be careful not to chase down every intuition, but he’s also got to take his time and apply his intelligence because that intuition might just be the thing he was waiting for. After all, the history of science is filled with examples of scientists letting a problem rest in their minds and then having a flash of intuition that moved them forward. Thus, intuition and intelligence work hand in hand, as does one’s knowledge from years of experience.
In fact, I’d like to propose that when we combine intuition and intelligence, we then have the possibility for wisdom. Quite simply, I like this formula:
Intuition + Intelligence = Wisdom
What do you think? Wisdom is hard to pin down, but I feel like it’s not something strictly obtained through the head (intelligence) or strictly through intuition. I’d probably make the case that the heart needs to be included as well, so I’m mostly just playing with these four attributes here, trying to see how they connect as I’ve never taken the time to consciously spell out on paper how to connect these four attributes in this incantation of mine.
Anyway, that leads us to the final attribute: transformation. I’d like to think that if one went through this process of having an intuition, applying intelligence to it, and gaining wisdom as a result, one would then experience some transformation. Furthermore, going back to our story of the Magician, one could then use this experience to transform the world in some way. Can we save the Kingdom? Perhaps, but it’s going to take a process and our engagement with it.
So there you have it, a breakdown of the first of my six gratitude incantations. Ultimately, the reason I do this (most) every day is that I want to consciously be aware of these attributes and invite them into my life. Some of these attributes are things I feel more naturally strong at than others and I’ve found that in the few years I’ve been working with this process, I’ve become better at some of the ones I consider my weaknesses.
Anyway, in the next post in this series, which I’ll publish in the spring, we’ll move on to East/morning/spring/Adventurer/Warrior.
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