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The Skull and the Sanctuary

There are some paths that do not begin with a decision. They begin with a longing. A wordless ache. A pulse beneath the skin that says, This isn’t all. Go deeper. Reach higher.

After years of studying and teaching fairytales, after decades in the analytical chair, I set out to write this book. A book of reconciliation between my love of these old stories, Jungian psychology, and my unexpected and reawakened love of the Church. By Church I do not mean the institution. I have never gotten along very well with institutions. Whether Jungian or ecclesiastical, institutions have often disappointed me. Large collective containers that eclipse rather than contain the individual soul, for me, become dogmatic or they shatter. Or both. This book is my best attempt at an archetypal story of rupture and return. Is it also profoundly personal. This is a story of how I, a woman, an analyst, and a Catholic, found my way back to the fire after the hearth had gone cold.

I found the Baba Yaga in the ashes. Or rather, that is where Baba Yaga found me. Baba Yaga stood out like a tree struck by lightning—terrible and luminous. She was neither tame nor consoling. She was demanding. She instructed by ordeal. And yet, something in me recognized her immediately. The Baba of the old Slavic tales—with her iron teeth and house on chicken legs, her mortar and pestle, her ever-sweeping broom—was an ancient figure, yes, but also a living one. The archetypes (these arch typical patterns) we glimpse in our fairy tales, our parables, our hagiographa, and our dreams, are alive. They are not just symbols. That aliveness is the resounding heartbeat of this book. When an image has been tempered and tested enough to hold the fire, it rises from the ashes and lives again. I met Baba Yaga and Christ, alive in dreams, in forests, and in the cracked places of my life. When I first followed Baba Yaga into the woods, she placed a flaming skull in my hands and sent me home. Not to the home I had left nor to the home I expected. But to the one I had yet to recognize as mine. Upon this rock, built my Church. 

The fire Baba gave me didn’t go out when I stepped beyond the threshold of the tale. The fire burned brighter. It burned away what was false and warmed what was true. True in me, and in all the structures and attitudes that once held me and kept me sane. Nothing was guaranteed when Baba put the light in my hands. As the poet warns, this journey will cost you nothing less than everything. With the metaphorical light, the living symbolic encounter, I found the sanctuary I had once abandoned—the Catholic Church. Not the institution I had fled, but the deep current beneath it. The mystical body. The sacred vessel. The Word that became flesh and for me, set up a hut among the trees.

You may wonder how Baba Yaga and Christ can dwell in the same book—how the wild witch of the forest and the wounded healer of Galilee could possibly be kin. I wondered too. I am still wondering. This book is my attempt at an answer.

Both the Baba Yaga tale and the mystical current of the Church dwell at thresholds. Both are living symbols and carry the medicine of death and rebirth. One sweeps away illusion with a broom of twigs; the other draws in the sand and lifts the fallen. Baba Yaga hands you a skull full of flame; the mystical Christ offers his own body as bread. One teaches through tasks and trial, the other through parable and prayer. And in their own way, both burn down what cannot last and illuminate what can, so that something eternal might be born. Again. I surmise that culturally, this emergent heiro gamas, this sacred marriage, is the threshold where the West currently stands and teeters.

This book is not a system of belief nor is it an argument. At best it is a trail of crumbs dropped behind me as I made my way through the woods. You may not follow my path. I don’t expect you to. It is mine. Woven from childhood dreams, adult disillusionment, analytical work, and the slow resurrection of the sacred feminine as the mystical Christ within me. I offer this trail as invitation. Follow me into your forest. Because you have one too. And you have a skull to carry your own soul-fire, a vessel that holds the alchemy of your own becoming. Your container may be religion, or art, or activism, or a long walk, or a hard conversation, or a night you stayed up with grief. What matters is not the name of the vessel but whether it is strong enough and tempered enough to hold the heat of transformation.

What follows are stories—some ancient, some personal, all true in the way that myth is true: psychologically, spiritually, archetypally. They are stories that guided me through descent, darkness, initiation, and return. Stories that revealed the hidden workings of the soul. Stories that carried me down to the roots of the world and back up to the altar. This I claim: I am a Jungian analyst, a Catholic, and at best, a storyteller. Come sit at the hearth. Baba is here. Christ is here. And so am I. And so are you.

I’ve written this story as a spiritual memoir disguised as a fairytale commentary—or perhaps a fairytale commentary disguised as a spiritual memoir. Either way, it is a record of one woman’s encounter with soul-fire. Not the fire that destroys, but the fire that reveals. The archetypal fire that warms. The eternal fire that calls us all home.

So come. Bring your weariness, your wonder, your questions too deep for words. Let us enter the stories together. In walking this path with me, my prayer is that you find your own forest. And if you must carry something, let it be this: the skull you bear is a lamp. And the light inside? That’s yours.

—Muriel McMahon

FoxHaven