by FLORA (Auntie FLORA)
In January 2004, a practitioner named Carrie posted to alt.religion.shamanism asking about "the dark night of the soul" — she had been told she was in one, and was frightened. The response she received from FLORA (known to the group as Auntie FLORA) is one of the finest pieces of practical shamanic wisdom in the archive: a comprehensive framework for understanding shamanic initiation not as a single crisis but as a recurring cycle across an entire life.
FLORA was a longtime practitioner and community elder in the alt.religion.shamanism newsgroup, known for her direct voice, hard-won experience, and generous teaching. She had lived through childhood illness that stole her memories, the death of her primary shamanic mentor, a nervous breakdown, chronic health issues including lupus, the near-dissolution of her marriage, the loss of her familiar animal, and multiple personal disruptions — and had come through each one transformed.
This post strips away the romanticism that often surrounds the concept of the dark night and replaces it with something harder and more sustaining: the recognition that darkness is seasonal, not terminal. The sun has not stopped rising. The darker it is, the more stars you will see.
Original question from Carrie, alt.religion.shamanism, January 22, 2004: "I am a solitary practitioner of Shamanism. I didn't pick Shamanism; it picked me. I have been informed that I am in the Dark Night of the Soul. Does anyone know what that is to a Shaman? This really feels bad right now. Any positive feedback would be greatly appreciated."
Look, a lot of books treat this "Long, Dark Night Of the Soul" as a sort of one-time initiatory Trauma. Initiatory Trauma happens not once, but every time you move up a rung on the Developmental Ladder.
You are thrown into the crucible many times, over your life, even in non-shamanic lives.
Here are some non-shamanic crucible situations:
You go through the crucible when you graduate high school, take the SAT, and childhood is officially over.
You go through it when you move out of your folks' house, find out you have to study on your own, hold down some kind of job, and have to pass all those tests every year to get your education.
Every time you move, you go through a crucible.
When you get married, and find out what the reality of "Sharing Everything" — both the good and the bad — is like. Usually about the third or fourth year, maybe sooner if you have a baby right away.
Then there's the baby. That's a long dark night of its own.
Then there's losing your parents. They die. There's no stopping it. One at a time, hopefully not together, you learn about some of the ultimate losses life throws at you. When the last parent dies, you have passed another initiation: no longer "somebody's child," you are then an official grownup of your family, a Senior member of the family structure and society. It's a hard one to deal with. A very serious long dark night ensues as you contemplate not just the loss of a loved one, but the Responsibility of having to fill the shoes of your parents, as you no longer fill the place of "their child."
Now, these are just the long dark nights of mundane life. They are not just for shamanic practitioners — they are possible to every person on the planet.
Divorce is another long dark night, if you have to do it.
Your house burning down or being somehow destroyed is another.
God forbid you should endure the loss of a child — few marriages survive that one. It is a shattering experience, because it bucks the natural order of the generational losses we are conditioned by our culture to expect.
Hopefully murder of a person close to you will not happen, but it is another dark night, where we are forced to confront that there really is Evil, and Good, in the black and white sense that our culture tells us we shouldn't be so judgmental about. The conflict of the "nonjudgmental" ideal and the confrontation with "evil" is a really world-shaking and transformative conflict.
War is a long dark night we all faced when we watched the towers fall on September 11th. It seems to work like a combination of your house being destroyed, murder, and moving out from your parents. It changes how you see the world forever. It is the realization that no matter who you are, or where you live — life is not safe.
There are no guarantees in life. No eternal promises are kept, but change, loss, and eventual death. But this is no bad thing. You cannot stop these changes and losses, but you can control how you respond to them. You can change how you look at these events. Because perspective is everything. If you think of change, loss, and death not as tragedies (because you certainly can make them tragedies) but instead as making room for more good stuff in life — then you will be happy. It kind of gives you the strength to accept what you don't like, and anticipating that change is for the better is just as possible as worrying that change is going to be for the worse. Ironically, the choice as to what it's going to be — good or bad — is in your hands.
That's the whole key to dealing with the long dark nights successfully. I've had a few.
I have had childhood illness that robbed me of my memories.
My mentor died, when I felt I was not ready to lose him.
My Mentor
He was my mentor in shamanic practice and life, and taught me what a shaman was, even though he would have angrily rejected that label. He was a cowboy.
After his death, I was targeted by aggressors — people who tried to take advantage of my grief. They threatened to institutionalize me when I had a nervous breakdown because of it. There was no upside to this except in retrospect. Now I see that without that time I would never have discovered what a shaman was, or learned that that was what my mentor had been.
My husband left, because he couldn't handle the difficult things anymore. But he came home again, because I made the move-out the best thing that ever happened to me.
I found out I have Lupus. As though I didn't have enough health problems — this at least offered an explanation as to why I had them.
Then I moved to a new place, and it was a sucky lesson in humility to put the new farm together. But it was also a wonderful experience in that it taught me how capable I was.
Immediately every animal on the place got sick, including my beloved familiar. Then she died. I haven't felt such terrible loss and emotional pain since my mentor died.
This is just a very abbreviated list of losses. But what I want to show is that there are seasons of the soul that we will cycle through all our lives, and they are a normal part of what being a human is all about. Losses and darkness are not one-time experiences, but recurring events that hopefully we deal with in better ways each time they rear their ugly snouts in our lives.
The Shamanic Crucible
It's just a sad truth for us that the long dark nights will keep coming. They are as inevitable as Winter Solstice. But growth and improvement is also as inevitable as the Spring.
Think of Demeter and Persephone. The archetype exists because it expresses a truth that is meaningful even to twenty-first century people — as meaningful as the dying god, personified as Mabon or Jesus. It doesn't matter what era you live in: we all have to make that underworld journey, and stay some time with the chill hand of the King of the Dead on our shoulder, before we can spring from the darkness, renewed in our enthusiasm, and appreciative of the miracle of just "clear sky, new grass and sun." Without the dark times, would we get bored with the light?
As a shamanist, there are more crucibles to go through than for a mundane person. You see things that most folks don't even know are out there. But that's okay. When the choice is "accept or go crazy," the choice usually gets made. And even if you choose crazy for a while, often it is possible that you can walk out of the wilderness and choose sanity, later.
Lots of "wise men" in stories do this. Those stories exist for a reason: to give us hope when we are losing our minds and our positive perspective.
I had a journey once whose message was so dark, my husband shook me to awareness of this world because he could not stand the agonized sounds I was making. I was nearly silent for two or three weeks because of the terrible images I had left from that journey. When I finally tranced down to complete it, the confrontation with the inner vision of darkness gave birth to the very most comforting journey I have ever had. It started a generative phase in my life that has not stopped. It was the most healing journey I have ever had.
So have good hope, Carrie. I swear that as sure as eggs is eggs, that this darkness will lead to something better if you will let it. The sun hasn't stopped rising yet. It's not likely to stop soon.
A dear friend told me a long while ago, when the darkness all around was nearly complete for me: "Sweetie, life is an adventure, and nobody ever promised you that adventures would be safe."
Perhaps someday you will learn to love the darkness as I have learned, because only in the most complete darkness can you see the stars. And the darker it is, the more stars you will see. Think about that.
Colophon
Written by FLORA (known as "Auntie FLORA" in the alt.religion.shamanism community), posted January 24, 2004, in response to a question from Carrie about what the Dark Night of the Soul means to a shamanic practitioner. FLORA was a longtime community elder and practitioner, known for direct teaching grounded in lived experience.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected]
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