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| (available online, from Amazon as a paperbacks as well as on Kindle) |
In the Moors was the first of the Shaman Mysteries published by Midnight Ink. On The Gallows
(Unraveled Visions in the US)
continues to follow Sabbie’s adventures as she runs a therapeutic shamanic business in Bridgwater. The third in the trilogy,
Beneath the Tor,
was released in November 2015 with a Glastonbury Launch Party
Through the Floodgates
was released in 2020
and continues the story of therapeutic shaman
Sabbie Dare – and her life in paganism and shamanism.
The Weird Genesis to the Shaman Mysteries
When I became a druid, in the late 1990’s, I’d been on a search towards the deeper meanings of life for a long time as a Rosicrucian, but I knew that something was missing for me in those teachings…a true love and honouring of the land and the ancient deities that still look over this land. I found this aspect in druidry.
I’m an OBOD, which means moving through the three ‘grades’ of Bard, Ovate
The summer I became an Ovate, I had my star chart read at a Rainbow Camp. “Something’s afoot in your chart,” the astrologist told me. “Things are on the move for you. Tremendous changes.”
I told him I was booked on a Shamanic Training weekend. Maybe that was it? I already knew that once you begin to walk between the worlds, nothing is the same again – you are not the same again. “That’ll be it, then,” said the astrologer. He was right, but neither of us guessed quite how.
On a sunny morning that autumn, I shipped up in Bath, at John Matthews’ introductory workshop. Thirty of us, making hot drinks in a tiny kitchen, chatting a bit nervously and introducing ourselves. Like a lot of the participants, I had read John and Caitlin Matthew’s books, and knew their reputation went before them, but John looked ordinary, sitting cross-legged between us, and he opened the workshop in a quiet, almost muted voice.
He reminded us that although shamanism can be a spiritual path, from its very early beginnings, it had been a tool; a method of getting close to another world – the world of spirits. It’s a very ancient practice indeed; there are those who think shamans are depicted in the Neolithic cave paintings found all over Europe. Shamans are thought of as special people by the communities they function within. By entering a trance, often using nothing more than a drum beat or the rhythm of a dance, they move between the solid world we all live in, and the otherworlds, bringing back answers to questions that have no answers.
It is said that to become a shaman, one must be called by spirits, but I think the spirits are calling us all...it’s just that only some people listen. When I talked to the other work-shoppers that weekend, I found several who described having the ‘shaman’s sickness’, a health crisis that had brought them visionary dreams. Other had found their minds opening during a ‘vision quest’ in wild country or during a dark night.
The more I delved, the more fascinated I became. By closing my eyes, listening to a fast, regular drum beat and allowing my mind to steady and focus, I found I was able to walk between the worlds, accompanied by my spirit ally who came to me in the guise of a mole, able to burrow down into lower realms. When I stroked his back with one finger, his coat felt as soft, warm and sleek as any mole of this world. Mole and I would come upon otherworldly presences who spoke to me, either in perfectly normal conversations or in mysterious symbols and signs. They often advised or directed me, or offered a gift of significance. I’d emerge feeling refreshed...amazed.
I was already a writer at this time. In fact, I think I’ve always been one, ever since, when I was five, my first infant school teacher, Mrs Marsden, read an animal fable to the class, then asked us to write a similar sort of story. I was dumfounded – for the first time I realized that the books I loved had actually been written by real human beings. Before that, I believed they must have fallen from some sort of story heaven. It was a revelation – from then on I was scribbling down stories all the time, and I wrote my first novel at the age of fifteen. Well, okay, I started to write a novel which I never finished. But by the time I started work as a nurse, I was regularly publishing short stories in women’s magazines, and when my children were born, I began my career as a children’s writer. But I’d never had much success writing for adults and sometimes wondered if I ever would.
I had been moving through Caitlin Matthew’s series of shamanic workshops, and working with other British shaman too, building up my skills, and using them to some degree in my work as a palliative care nurse, when a new character walked into my head.
“Hi,” she said. I was driving to work, at the time, and she seemed almost to plonk herself down on the passenger seat. “I’m Sabbie Dare.”
She looked like a woman in her late twenties, of mixed race, with a cute little gap between her teeth and very long, almost black hair, which kinked as it fell. “I’m a shaman,” she went on. “A therapeutic shaman.”
“Ah, I responded,” (in my head, and keeping my eyes on the road, of course), “you take clients with problems. Probably problems they’ve already seen a gamut of professionals about; doctors, chiropractors, even hypnotherapists.”
She’d nodded. “Some have souls that are complete shattered. And some bring me some very...difficult problems. They are people on the edge.”
She isn’t the sort to use the word ‘scary’. I’ve discovered that not much scares Sabbie Dare. But in my first Shaman Mystery, In the Moors, things get very scary indeed for Sabbie, as she tries to help someone in trouble. She’s a girl who only wants the best for those she meets, and she’ll regularly put herself on the line for her clients, not only in the spirit world, but also in the apparent world, because of course, The Shaman Mysteries, published by Llewellyn’s Midnight Ink imprint, are thrillers, albeit with an edge of spiritually.
I write them for pagans and crime fiction lovers alike, so I have to be careful to walk a line between the truth of my own spiritual path, and the fictions I create. I don’t want to spin a line, that shamanism can ‘solve crime’ or ‘get people out of trouble’. And as the series progresses I am trying to introduce some of the aspects of shamanism, and paganism that might enlighten the ‘muggle reader’. Book one, In the Moors explains the shamanic journey, and introduces Sabbie’s animal ally, an otter called Trendle. In the second book, I begin to develop Sabbie’s otherworld associations, especially her guardian, a river goddess who she doesn’t yet quite trust. Book three, Beneath the Tor, uses a theme of transformation, including shapeshifting.This book is set in Glastonbury, and it was my great delight to be able to use some of the legends of the Vale of Avalon I also introduce the reader to the lower realms of the otherworld.
Meanwhile Sabbie herself begins to understand who she is. She was brought up in the care system, after her mother died when she was six, and she’s never known her father. As the books develop, she uses her shamanic pathways to find out more about her own past.
One thing I love about the Shaman Mysteries is the landscapes I’m able to describe. I set the books in the Somerset Levels, a place with a truly fay and mysterious atmosphere, which can turn tricksy and dark, when mists come down, or floods rise. We visit Bridgewater Bay with its looming hulk of a nuclear power station in book two, walk through the mysteries of Glastonbury in book three and, in book four, visit the devastating floods that swept over the levels in 2014.
That conversation I had on Druid Camp five years ago, is beginning to ring true. Something did move and shake in my life, when I signed up to the Matthews shamanic workshops. Once you know how to access the world of spirits, you really never know what might happen next.
What happened to me was that I now write books I love, and that people seem to love reading them. It was the one thing I’d longed to be able to do, and I am sure that the spirit world brought me this blessing.
