My body as a portal to other worlds. Ritual transmutation of settler-colonial violence into something compostable for the Land.

Content warning: direct discussion and acknowledgment of settler-colonizer and white supremacist violence as it exists specifically in “South” and throughout the United States.

CONTEXT

In many ways this project is emergent and ongoing. It is a deep listening to the soul of the place I live alongside. It is at once ancestral to my blood lineage, and ancestral to the lineage of this land I live on. It is my body in context as descendant of settler colonizers. It is my body in the context of settler, trying to unsettle. It is my living frame, my skin, as a white person raised on Southern evangelical flavored colonizer religion, and polite racism. It is grappling with my heritage and coming out of the fray scathed. Marked. Affected.

It is at once performance art, and my work as Bean Feasa; it is earth-based spiritual medicine. It is sin-eating psychopomp work: a banishing and clearing. It is at request of land spirits that I use my blackthorn branch as a blasting rod.

The Banshee (Bain Sidhe or Bean Sidhe,) the “washer woman at the ford” or “woman of the faery mound” is a spectre of death. She is of the Otherworld, the parallel realm. Folks will know her when they see her: pain, fear, disgust, outrage. In this project, she haunts the lands of “the South,” out of place, out of the norm, and keening in the mass murder, the torture, the violence and extraction inherent in her existence there. A mirror indeed.

As a living death rattle, I invite Bain Sidhe into my body and channel the energy present in the objects I gather and within the land and spirits I am co-creating with.

I move my body, holding intent that the alchemy in my living cells transmute layered pain in the soils I stand on toward something compostable for the earth. I intend this alchemy to take place toward awakening Land Spirits and any Wards in the earth so that they may reclaim their space. I intend this alchemy in my body to take place toward making the genius loci so inhospitable to the culture of white supremacy, that something new has time to take root.

METHOD

I do this work using the most ancient human technology available:

• I fast for at least 24 hours prior to this working. I consume only herbal decoctions, tinctures, teas.

• I adorn my body in ritual objects, and symbolism that welcome Bain Sidhe.

• I welcome my well ancestors in my Celtic and Fae lineages to come forth and activate in my bones and my blood.

• I put bare feet on soil, ground, asphalt, whatever the case may be in a physical location ritually chosen with my guides and spirits of place and space.

• I make an offering to the land and the ancestors of the land (in the case of my locale, the Cherokee and Catawba, when this project was born. Now Cherokee, Osage, Shawnee, Hopewell, Adena, and Kaskaskia.

• I set the boundary that what passes through me will not stick around, and enlist my spiritual allies to help enforce this boundary.

• I move my body in primal shapes and make sounds as a vehicle for trance in parallel spaces until I am in an ecstatic grief state, and it feels as if things that are not of me are coming through. I move my body until the work feels complete or until signals from my physical vessel pull me back to self-tend.

• I make another offering to land, ancestors, and boundary-working guides, with much reverence and gratitude.

• I self-cleanse using water, salt, smoke, and dirt.

• I ground, and here, the work is temporarily complete.