Certain motifs that happen all over Europe, like the the Cinderella motif, you know, happens in pretty much every country in one fashion or another. But with that caveat, comes here to be something, to reflect something, sometimes even perhaps to do something, but with a gift to give the world. And I have no idea how they’d done it but they had re recreated they believed, the language that would have been around in southern England in pre-roman times as a forensic linguistic, archaeological project.

If I think about my mother’s generation, my parents generation, and a lot of the people that I know of that age, it is my projection but I watch them walk into death with no sense of preparedness for it at all. I wanted people to be inspired to think that there could be something quite magical after menopause, if we just take that as a, you know, a handy midpoint for for many people or change point for many people. You know, you can have glimpses of it in your teenage years if you particularly, if you’ve had a challenging childhood and difficult experiences.

Almost ended up between houses with nowhere to go with us and four dogs and a cat and what have you. So I think it’s if you’re going to actually find these stories useful, I think it’s important to try to step out of the more literal meaning and the more historical meaning and just say, okay, what is this story really telling us about the human condition? Sharon: So the Cailleach really would have been as ubiquitous, if not more ubiquitous in Irish myth as in Scottish myth. You, at one point in the book discuss, I think, four archetypes that were were both Jungian and intrinsic to folktales. So let’s not get hooked into language just yet, although I was fascinated to discover that your husband is now completely fluent in pretty much all of the Gaelic languages.

I thought that was more romantic and I didn’t relate very easily to Englishness as a history, as a colonial power or any of that kind of thing. Manda: Yes, because you say in the book, towards the end, as Elders our job is to die as eventually we came to live, always in the service of life. For a regular supply of ideas about humanity's next evolutionary step, insights into the thinking behind some of the podcasts, early updates on the guests we'll be having on the show - AND a free Water visualisation that will guide you through a deep immersion in water connection. This cookies is installed by Google Universal Analytics to throttle the request rate to limit the colllection of data on high traffic sites.Where she would effectively do shape shifting journeys, she would take on she would borrow the bodies of birds or whatever animals she wanted to. So many of the shamanic initiations involve either burials or, you know, nine days, nine nights hanging from the tree.

And there you mention, along with the mythology of people who are clearly mythological in the book, some stories of women whose histories have come down to us and some of them who were healers, who I think probably like homeopaths in the modern world, they’d be everybody’s last resort. So to me, to go to those stories, to look for examples, inspirations, something beautiful and magical that can really capture the imagination, was what I wanted to do. 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. She coined the title word, “Hagitude,” to refer to an aging woman’s refusal to be silenced or invisible, adding, “The overculture would so like to pretend they’re not there.Pay off the mortgage, retire at 60 or 65 and go off on world cruises or play golf a lot and then tick box, you know, done. Here Dr Sharon Blackie offers an alternative viewpoint, another way to look at the menopause and ageing, to see it with positivity, to essentially embrace it. Sharon: It’s incredibly difficult to trace things back in the oral tradition by definition, because it is the oral tradition where we are very fortunate in this part of the world, as in Ireland certainly,the stories began to be written down for the first time, you know, back in the in the seventh century. And there was a tradition, particularly in that part of the world, of being able to see the shape of reclining females in the shape of mountains.

And maybe some people will come to it younger and some people will come to it later, but I don’t think it’s something you find in your twenties. Just before I get to Granny Weatherwax, did you find other mythological or literary ways of envisioning and embracing death? Sharon: So, you know, we have all of these situations where young girls appear in the story and they are tested, let’s say, by the wise old woman who wants them to sort wheat from other types of grain. I really thought it was about women archetypes, myths and legacies of certain older women and their influences on our soc-economic landscapes.The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages visted in an anonymous form. She talks with animals and inanimate things and sees them as symbols or the universe sending messages. They seem perfectly happy accepting that non-mothers and mothers are both women; and that not having this pivotal experience does not mean one is not a woman. And as a consequence, I suspect of that, I got a full on inflammatory, incredibly severe and disabling inflammatory arthritis.