Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

Product Information

In the oldest known cosmology of my native lands, it wasn't a sky-bound old man with a beard who made and shaped this world. It was an old woman. A giant old woman, who has been with us down all the long ages, since the beginning of time.' I am a longtime appreciator of Sharon’s work and have taken her classes and seminars. Until this book I would have said that I didn’t feel much of a divide; her ideas have excited and validated me.

A wonderfully inspiring rallying cry, an eloquent and engaging offering of a world of hope and possibilities to all the women about to enter or who are already in, the second half of life.’ I was really excited about the insight this book offers about the later stages of life and some of the characterizations we see about this in folklore and other stories. I found it very compelling until it slipped into a long, sort of meandering tirade invalidating trans women. Stating that trans rights are human rights and in the same breath asserting that they essentially cannot be considered women is weird and gross. Moya will offer us a workshop on working with the energy of Death. Moya has been apprenticed to Death for a lifetime, beginning with a brush with Death as a child in a near-drowning experience; subsequently, she worked as a nurse in Complementary Therapies with a Specialist Palliative Care Service. She now consciously walks with Death by her side – which, she considers, makes every step sacred. Moya considers Death to be her greatest teacher and friend, and her life is enriched by the presence of Death.

Carolyn will join us to talk about her Book of Hag, wrapped around travels into old age and towards ancientness, and the grandmothers from her Weaver’s Oracle, created from thirty years of paintings, mythic tales and work with women’s archetypal mysteries. I’m honestly amazed that someone who speaks out against the patriarchy and who values women’s spaces and who sees how truly marginalized women are cannot see the how her perceived threat - by THE most marginalized segment of society - mirrors the way men under patriarchy are threatened by the women they oppress. Hagitude is already becoming a beloved cult classic, as a myth-infused manifesto for the possibilities for life from middle age onwards.’

I was all set to recommend this. The early chapters where the author discusses elder archetypes, reclaiming the wise woman archetype and no longer accepting the modern patriarchal attempts to invalidate and dehumanize women past child bearing years, especially those women who never gave birth to children, were great. They were interesting and empowering, although it does help to be a Jungian scholar for a good portion of her text (I am not). Author of A Wild Soul Woman and Reclaiming the Wild Soul, a 2015 Nautilus Award-winner, Mary’s writings have also appeared in numerous other publications and anthologies. Through her books, courses, and talks, she reaches creatives, change-makers, and seekers who long to awaken to their most courageous and Earth-connected selves and have the impact they desire.

My husband David Knowles and I founded literary publisher Two Ravens Press (now under new ownership) in 2006, and in 2012 launched EarthLines Magazine, a full-colour print publication for writing about nature, place and the environment. If you’re standing on the threshold of menopause and looking for support to navigate this intense and transformative alchemical journey, this program is for you. It is elegantly written and seems to be well researched and supported in some places. Other places it’s very diary entry, literary review with no clear thesis.

How can we find inspiration from archetypal women in our old myths and fairy tales to help us navigate this transition? This twelve-Module self-study program explores the ways in which we might flourish at midlife and beyond, in the decades that so often are portrayed as a time of decline. How can we map the territory, prepare ourselves for yet another searing transformation, and move into the second half of life with a new sense of vitality, creativity and vision? 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. Bring on inconvenience, I say.’ Her passion for teaching and leading springs from her own experience with dance and embodied awakening as a path to health and wholeness. As a young woman dance was crucial in her journey of surviving and integrating lessons from drug addiction, anxiety, depression and loss. As an elder she is committed to creating spaces where movement and music facilitate greater resilience, resource and vitality. She inducts a felt sense of permission and deep presence, inviting each woman to claim her unique engagement with the dance of life. Carolyn Hillyer is a renowned musician and artist who lives and works on a thousand-year-old farm in the ancient belly of Dartmoor, a mist-veiled landscape of wild hills, peat bogs and heather moors in the south-west of England. The inspiration for all her work is drawn from the raw beauty, untamed spirit and primordial memory of this ancestral land. Her creative output includes albums of powerful songs and chants, concerts, books and workshops, paintings and art installations, and traditional drum-making.It may be the first time CBC or BBC book recommendation and interviews have let me down. Hagatude is almost in it’s entirety a memoir of their menopause and post-menopausal life. Did I need to know about their husband’s midlife crisis, NO. Did I really need so much information about their cancer, NO. Not more than as a transition point that made them face their own mortality and thus an intro into the next elder woman archetype. There isn’t enough information about elderhood, for those interested. There certainly isn’t enough written in a positive framework about women who age, nor enough mythical introductions which aren’t preaching from the current fashion of witchstagram (again many who are authentic get drowned out by trolls, who have the patience of a pamphlet) THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED NEW BOOK BY THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED , EMPOWERING WOMEN IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE. Truly disappointing due almost entirely from my expectations. I really thought it was about women archetypes, myths and legacies of certain older women and their influences on our soc-economic landscapes. This is only sprinkled. This book is full of interesting ideas, but also full of old school feminism that leaves little room for trans women, or women who don’t make the same choices as the author. It often came across as arrogant to me, in a way I found off-putting. When she mentioned that no experience is as transformative as having cancer, I wanted to scream “And you’d know this how?” She’s never had kids. Never have a spouse of a child die. Never done lots of things. I just personally can’t stand when people assume their little t truth is everyone’s Capital T TRUTH. Rant over. For now.

Anne is a Jungian analyst based in England, and is the author and co-author of seven books, including her groundbreaking 1993 volume, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, with Jules Cashford. Her latest book is The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul. She is passionately interested in the fate of the Earth and the survival of our species in this critically important time of evolutionary change. Her work is devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world, and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the invisible dimension of the universe that is the source or ground of all that we call ‘life’.My first novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue was described by The Independent on Sunday as ‘Hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story’ and by The Scotsman as ‘… powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.’ 'If Women Rose Rooted', a nonfiction book about women, Celtic myth, place and belonging was published in 2016, 'The Enchanted Life' in 2018, and 'Foxfire, Wolfskin and other stories of shapeshifting women' in September 2019.. Please find below the audio versions of a few of my retellings and reimaginings of stories about older women. I was born in the north-east of England, a Celt through and through: my family and ancestry is both Scottish and Irish, and I was raised on an imaginatively rich diet of Irish myth, poetry, music and history. After studying psychology, I spent several years as an academic neuroscientist/ psychologist specialising in the field of anxiety and panic, and working at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris and the Institute of Neurology in London. After a few twists and turns, including some unwise years advising a tobacco company on smoking and health and safer cigarettes, and the acquisition of a master’s degree in Creative Writing, I moved to a croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. There I returned to my roots, in practice as a therapist specialising in narrative psychology, myth- and storytelling, as well as in other creative imagination techniques and clinical hypnotherapy. My passion during those years was, and still is, creating transformation in individuals and groups. Today, Mary teaches classes in Gaelic song and its surrounding culture, mostly online. She specialises in The Keen (Irish Funeral Lament) and Fairy Song. She holds certificates in Vocal and General Education, Shamanic Studies and Sound Therapy. She also has an MA in Chant and Ritual Song and a PhD in Traditional Irish Song Studies, which she began at the age of 60. She is currently working on a book about the Irish Keen. This twelve-Module program explores the ways in which we might flourish at midlife and beyond, in the decades that so often are portrayed as a time of decline. How can we map the territory, prepare ourselves for yet another searing transformation, and move into the second half of life with a new sense of vitality, creativity and vision?