The Quest for Your True Name — For my Trans Identified Kid (who I love dearly)
For Andy — July 2021
For Andy — July 2021
Every generation that comes believes that their struggles are unique but the quest of each generation remains the same: to understand our True Names. This has been the truth for a thousand generations. In the western circles of the Occult, which saw a resurgence beginning a-hundred-and-fifty years ago, the sentiment was that The Secret of Magic had to be rediscovered by each generation. It could not be taught. In the shamanic traditions and the indigenous medicine traditions this quest is known as the vision quest, and it is by this quest that one arrives at their Spirit Name. One’s true understanding of what the last great occultist of that age called “The Self.” It has been known by many other names including: the lapis philosophorum, the elixir of life, and the Holy Grail. It is not trivial medicine.
Your True Nature and your True Purpose in life cannot be told to you by anyone, though some may help reveal it to you. As someone who survived this initiation, I know that I cannot give you the answers, I can only hope that as your parent I have prepared you for this calling.
This ritual of “youth-become-adult” is universal in all cultures of the world. From a metaphysical and mythological language set, the youth cannot refuse this call because The Calling originates in the domain of the transpersonal and supernatural. It is also rooted in biology because we are wired as humans to transition several mandatory stages in life, like puberty. But this stage is an optional one that many people don’t ever access.
The calling connects the child to their soul and to their Spirit Guide and is initiated through a series of tests and challenges, the young initiate faces a dark night of the soul and in some cases a ritualized encounter with Death itself. Some spend days alone in the wilderness. Some are sent on journeys filled with obstacles. There is a process of purification and a process of being reborn into one’s new role in life, as one’s True Self. Some call this a vision quest. Some call it a warrior’s initiation. Some celebrate it as bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. Some call it the Confirmation and some call it Baptism — which are rituals and celebrations that point to the event of true awakening and concretize it in our ritual memories so we never lose it.
In psychology this is sometimes called the process of individuation and it is recognized in developmental models from the psychological, to the spiritual to the supernatural, as a step we take into adulthood.
There is a teleology, a direction, and an unavoidable momentum to the soul.
In the tradition I learned, when it is the right time, an individual initiates the quest and seeks out an elder or medicine person. They receive a teaching from this elder and venture into a place of spiritual power in the wilderness. They begin a period of fasting and reflection on life. One abstains from food for several days. Then after fasting, along with the other young warriors, with the instruction of the elder, the medicine man, the initiates build a sweat lodge and assemble the Grandfathers and Ancestors for the ritual. A firekeeper tends the flames and heats the Grandfather-Stones in the fire for hours and hours until the elder invites the initiates into the sweat lodge.
They sit in a sacred circle in the hut as the medicine man begins the many rounds of prayers, acknowledging the trees who gave their branches to build the lodge and the animals who gave their skins for its covering. The elder then asks the fire-keeper to bring in the first round of Grandfathers, the glowing red stones from the fire, which the fire-keeper carries in with a pair of deer antlers, and drops them into the shallow pit in the middle of the lodge.
The elder calls for the door to be closed. With wet cedar branches he splashes water onto the hot stones. He begins to sing and chant his prayers for the young warriors. He uses aromatic herbs and powders on the successive series of Grandfathers who are brought into the lodge. As he gifts these medicines to the Grandfathers, dancing sparks pop and crackle on the red-hot stones as he continues the rounds of prayers. With each round the initiates are called upon to reveal their sacred stories, to explore the great questions of their lives. The elder, calling for more and more grandfather stones as the heat from each round dies down, increases the length of each round and the depth of each question, he does this for hours and hours until the novices are faint from fasting and empty of their egos.
The purpose of this is to create a situation so intense with the fasting, abstaining from water and the unbearable heat, to break down the psyche and the ego of the initiates. To break down the resistance of the mind and all its attachment to what is believes to be true, and to reveal the only thing that is left. The True Self, the True Name, the True Spirit.
After days of fasting, the heat does its work. The warrior releases their resistance. In some traditions this is symbolized by the Eternal, or Sacred Flame that burns away the dross of mundane living, leaving only the purified Self after it has passed. Some have out-of-body experiences, some have visions, some pass out and are carried from the lodge.
Some years ago, when you were still going to elementary school, we were driving home together from school at the end of the day and you were telling me stories about the Greek Myths, which you were very excited about, and you said wistfully as only a child can, “I wish I could visit Mount Olympus!” and I answered the best way I could that I believe that We Can. In fact, your question is what formed the basis of Chasing Quicksilver, the book I took a year contemplate and to write. This is the quest, and the spirit known as Quicksilver is the archetypal guide once celebrated in what we know of as the classical age. And to be explicit here kiddo, YOU inspired me to write a book about the quest to understand our True Names and the nature of our souls because I wanted to share it with you and you were born with a purpose to fulfill.
The traditional way of embarking upon this quest, just as the Hellenistic mystics, the Viking Shaman, the Celtic Magicians all believed: was to pass through the Underworld first. It is through this passage of darkness and trial and psychic pain, like in the sweat lodge, that we confront our inner demons and integrate them into our psyches. The natural transition from one stage of life to the next involves confronting these grotesque shadows, fears, forms, internal dialogues, and intense emotions; and it involves doing battle with them and integrating them into our newly formed Self.
I know that at this moment you are experiencing a Spiritual Crisis. It’s a universal experience to all cultures and people. And all of this is normal and understood many of the cultures to far greater degrees than we understand them commonly within our own epistemic frames. However normal it is however, it is perhaps the most difficult thing we will ever do in our lives if we are called to this.
These Great Myths and Great Legends tell us of the challenges that we will all face along the way and ultimately lead us to the sacred mountain top which is the high-country of the soul. The domain of the gods themselves.
In many cultures these initiation rituals are reserved for men (much to the affrontery of feminists and the PC crowd) but what is understood and believed is that women naturally have a sacred initiation into adulthood when they begin to menstruate; it’s a celebration of The Most Sacred of human powers: the ability to give life. Men, without the experience of this natural event and without the regular sacred cycles of womanhood, being deficient, need to have ritual to integrate this transition from one stage of life into the next and need to have regular reminders. But this is not always the case and people who are born women sometimes will undertake formal rites of initiation themselves when there is a stuckness and pain in the Spirit. It’s traditionally a male called to the journey because women have their own call to initiations and transformations.
Many children will naturally and easily make the transition into adulthood whether AFAB or AMAB, and will do so more-or-less on their own, but significant numbers will struggle longer and suffer more to understand their True Names. This inevitably reveals that they have a greater purpose in life because the greater the price your soul demands, the greater the spiritual gifts you will realize.
In one tradition I read about the plains people known as Navajo, allow their young women to call for their True Names themselves and to reveal it to the community in ceremony, but the young boys, soon to become men, are given their names by their elders because it is believed that young men’s egos are too powerful an influence to naturally surrender to humility and vulnerability. All the young boys would chose to be Raging Bear, or Lightning Hawk, Alpha Black-Wolf instead of getting the spiritual message that they have Skunk Medicine or should be called Mangy Weasel.
When the young girls put forward their sacred names, the women elders judge them before the women’s circle where if the elders believe they haven’t been honest with themselves, they may choose to veto the name claimed. Then, as part of the lesson in self-honesty, they would initiate the young woman through ritual ego destruction and rebirth.
These Sacred Names contain the medicine and the message of the soul of the child: the spiritual challenges, the karmic lessons, the time in history, and they people whose lives they come into. You True Name is the awaking of gifts you were born with, and this experience is the key to unlocking the power of those gifts in your life.
At the moment I believe that you have confused the pain you feel with believing that an external process, a change in appearance, a change in dress and manner and voice, and a contrived change in name, will lead you towards this happiness. It will not.
The world is full of miserable people who chose their path in life believing that the path they chose would make them happy. These are the metaphors for the illusions we put our hopes of happiness in: they are the temptations of the Buddha and the Temptations of Christ before their enlightenments: money and material wealth, power and social Status, happiness. All of these things are false promises. All of them are external solutions to internal problems.
This is the trickster nature of the spirit we still have memories of in the west. They are known as Quicksilver: the androgynous youth, the Lord of The Crossroads, custodian of the soul in death, messenger of the gods. The Logos itself.