There are few people who have never felt blue at some point in their life. It can happen to all of us, to varying degrees. Maybe it was the powder blue of fleeting disappointment, or the deep, dark, bruising indigo of grief and heartbreak, or somewhere in between. Live long enough, and life will offer plenty of unwanted opportunity to experience the darker end of the blue spectrum. However, with time and support, most of us also learn to navigate through those dark blue phases, and eventually the hue lightens, and one day we notice that we’re living, loving, and laughing again.
Those shades of blue are at opposite ends of the scale, which tip up and down with life’s random challenges, but what about the center of the scale… a neither-here-nor-there deep, dull blue-gray. Just like the center of an actual scale or teeter totter, that spot on the sadness spectrum is static and has little, if any, movement. Meanwhile, life in all its colors bustles around in 360 degrees, but that center point remains still. This is where depression sits on the sadness spectrum, dead center and unmoving. It’s a dull, dark fog that blocks out the sunlight and mutes all colors, and when the depression is chronic, that fog never lifts much. It just is.
So, what does a person living under this fog do with that? Besides wrangling with the emotion itself, for some, there’s a perpetual expectation that someday it will lift and they’ll “get better.” Or be “cured.” That’s why people take medication or get therapy, and for some, it’s helpful. For a Pagan, seeking help from a non-Pagan therapist presents a whole new dimension of difficulty — start talking about spirits or magic, and a depressed Pagan might get slapped with an additional diagnosis: schizophrenia. What about those for whom traditional strategies don’t work, or those who just want a different solution? Additionally,
Exacerbating the experience of chronic depression are nagging, unpleasant — and unhelpful — thoughts: “Will I always feel this way? Why can’t I just be happy? What is wrong with me?” Mix into this blend friends and loved ones who attempt to cheer depressed people up, saying things like, “Just snap out of it” or “Try to think happy thoughts.” Nothing makes a depressed person gag faster than a heaping helping of toxic positivity. It layers additional feelings of shame and failure on top of the depression. Ultimately, others may just give up on a depressed person and start avoiding them, and then isolation and loneliness are the blue cherry on top.
What if… a person could learn to accept and manage that depression? Release the added layers of shame and failure, and learn to surf that blue wave and live anyway? This is the novel approach taken by author Terence Ward in his book, “Empty Cauldrons — Navigating Depression Through Magic and Ritual.”
Terence offers a new paradigm of self-acceptance for those living with depression, emancipating them from all the “shoulds” of their emotional stasis. That alone generates a sense of relief, but Ward takes it many steps further, from exploring the experiences of real people with chronic depression (including himself), to understanding how traditional medications or therapies work, to entering an entirely new dimension of approaching this situation as a Pagan — with magic and meditation, connecting with supportive deities, and lots of self-exploration.
Terence is intimately familiar with chronic depression, having navigated it his whole life. Sometimes it dissapates a bit, and there’s some relief, but when it does, there’s anxiety about when it will return. And it will return. Rather than dread it or resist it, Ward taught himself to go with it, magically, rather than fight it.
“My relationship with depression was most impacted by my choice to relate to this condition as a spirit. That changes the core question from, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ to ‘What do you want?’ It’s also a shift from talking to oneself to having a conversation with someone else.
“By choosing that framing, I’ve been able to explore different ways to engage in a dialogue, including the use of guided meditation and journals, and to consider what kinds of magic might work best, and whether there are particular gods or spirits I should be in relationship with to mitigate the fact that I’m already in a relationship with depression.”
Terence says that developing magical practices can be very helpful for making sense of and dealing with one’s own depression, however, his own experience doing this on his own wasn’t easy. He just kept trying, even though at the time, he says he was “deep in depression,” which altered magic’s positive effects.
“Left unchecked, depression modifies behavior to steer one away from anything that can loosen depression’s grip. That might include having a social life, having a job, cleaning one’s home or one’s body, organizing one’s finances, remembering to keep appointments with therapists, remembering where the therapist’s office is located (I did once have to cancel an appointment because I couldn’t locate the office; this was the second or third time going to the same place), exercising, eating healthy foods, praying, and practicing magic. I developed ethical concerns about practicing any magic at all, which stuck with me for a couple of decades. I now stick to magic that involves consensual relationships with spirits.”
Even though magical practices might have been very helpful in retrospect, he notes that setting things into motion can be very difficult, for a variety of reasons.
“I have a better understanding of the relationship of magic and depression now. I would not recommend beginning magical training during depression, like I did, but anyone who has developed the discipline should be able to continue working magic regardless. One’s physical and subtle senses may be depressed, which can make it like playing piano while wearing gloves, but the work is still the work. What’s more likely than anything is that someone in depression just won’t be bothered with magic at all.”
He adds that there’s a spiritual component to depression as well, which may alter one’s relationship with deity, which is another good reason to keep practicing anyway, even when it feels like nothing’s happening. Divine ears may be listening.
“Not only do the gods not abandon us during periods of depression, it’s possible that certain deities will be more present than otherwise. As with sensitivity to magic, awareness of the gods can be depressed, and that can be interpreted as abandonment. One of the reasons I find a daily practice valuable is because I am less likely to expect validation every single time I pray or make an offering. Gods move in and out of our lives for reasons unrelated to mortals, but during depression anything negative might be amplified. A daily practice helps me remember that I make offerings because I love my gods — being acknowledged is nice, but it’s not the point.”
Terence says that in some ways, recognizing that deity understands human emotion strengthens the bond and also alleviates the loneliness — particularly when relationships with humans have become frayed.
“How beautiful it is that some gods hold a concern for those of us living with depression specifically. Humans are not cut out to be solitary animals for long periods of time. We need to spend time with our own kind, but also with gods and spirits in all their other forms.”
After giving up Catholicism for Lent in 1989 (Terence has retained his wry humor despite his depression) he still struggled with his relationship with Jesus and Christianity for a few more years before finding a different spiritual path. He connected with a minister from the Wiccan Church of Vermont (now the Church of the Sacred Earth) who moved into Terence’s area, and says, “I found myself drawn to the syncretized Herne-Christos.” During this time, he participated in a guided meditation, facilitated by an Episcopal priest, that involved meeting Jesus.
“During that encounter, Jesus said to me, ‘I will be with you always,’ and turned into Herne, but it was months later before I was finally clear to leave Christianity behind.
“While I believed at the time that my encounter with Jesus gave me permission to explore other paths, my view on that message has changed over time. I now interpret that message as Jesus trying to convince me that whoever I worship, I’m always going to be worshiping the same god — this amounts to monotheistic gaslighting.
“Once I released myself from Christianity, my journey became polytraditional: I became the jester of an oathbound Wiccan coven, circled with a group that was exploring Druidry, took myself up mountains as part of a sacred backpacking tradition I call ‘gaiaped,’ and participated in as many group rituals as I could get myself invited to.”
Eventually he evolved into a “Hellenic polytheist, with a side of Quaker.” He joined a Hellenic temple, and sought out a teacher to help him learn a traditional way of honoring ancient Hellenic (Greek) gods, and was particularly drawn to Poseidon, who became central in his spiritual and magical practice, and in his understanding of his own depression. Because the drive to a Hellenic temple was a multi-hour journey, Terence developed a solitary practice to fill the gaps.
“I tend to join them virtually while maintaining a daily, personal practice of offering to my gods and ancestors. A daily practice is the only way I have discovered to remain committed to a spiritual path, but nothing compares to worshiping in groups.
“Paganism being a category, rather than a specific path, has allowed me to discover a wide variety of group practices that speak to my spirit. I adore participating in rituals that allow me to encounter gods through possession, trance, dance, and song. One of the ways that I test how I feel about a particular spiritual tradition or technology is how easily I can write about it: If I struggle, either I do not understand it well enough, or it moved me profoundly. It’s that latter quality of ineffability that I relish.”
The urge to write passionately pointed Terence toward writing a book on his experience with navigating depression from a Pagan angle, and offering his own story, mindset, and methods so others wouldn’t have to crawl through the blue-gray fog on their own as he did. With a solid background in journalism, he knew he had the skills and experience to write such a book. Ironically, he resisted the idea at first. What finally inspired him?
“The pithy answer that I put in the book is that I didn’t want to write it at all! That’s one-hundred percent true, and also completely inaccurate. Living with depression is a lot like living with any abuser — the tendency is to not draw attention to oneself: don’t enjoy life independent of your abuser; don’t express yourself, or your opinions; under no circumstances will it ever feel safe to ask for help. Any of these may invoke your abuser, and result in suffering. That can carry on long after the abuse has ended, too: Is it safe to think or talk about those experiences, or will it invite that abuser to return?
“Depression has been one of my abusers, and during times when it was absent, I very much wanted to understand the experience through my writing, and I experimented with that off and on, in a variety of private and public formats.
When Llewellyn acquisitions editor Heather Greene asked me to expand this into a book, I had some misgivings. I’m primarily a journalist, but I was clear that the authenticity of this book would come from shared experience.”
He admits that even though he felt encouraged to write the book, it wasn’t without trepidation.
“Would that level of self-reflection summon this spirit back into me? What if it got panned after it was published? Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have been safe for me to try at all, but I decided that the potential to help others who are struggling was worth the risk.”
In the process of writing the book, Terence reached out to others in the Pagan community to find out about their insights and experiences.
“I was quite surprised at how easy it was to find others willing to talk to me. One of the reasons that anyone who has experienced a mental health crisis or challenge might be reluctant to open up is because it can feel like everyone relates to you differently, and I was expecting that finding sources could be tough. What actually happened is that I trusted my gut, and all but one person that I asked either had experienced depression, or worked in a mental health field, or both.
“While the willingness to share surprised me, the fact that depression is endemic was backed up by research I did on the condition. Half of U.S. adults have some sort of mood disorder, and 350 million humans worldwide have lived with depression. What’s worse, depression is starting earlier: The average age of onset in 1980 was 30, but it’s now dropped into the teens.”
Clearly, there was a burgeoning need for a book on depression from an entirely different viewpoint, and Terence filled that vacuum. However, this required translating his own practices, beliefs, and successes into a format that others could understand and make use of, and even though his experience as a professional writer is extensive, it nonetheless required him to stretch his communication skills beyond his own skin.
“It’s one thing to master a skill, and quite another to be able to explain it. I had to refine and test some of my half-formed ideas. That included constructing a depression shrine and totem, developing mirror spells, and deconstructing how I use magical paths. I also found myself revisiting how I use journals in my work, which led me down a few more rabbit-holes and allowed me to generate some new prompts and approaches for using writing as a mental-health tool.”
These are amongst the approaches to be found in “Empty Cauldrons.” Beyond offering a multitude of magical practices and meditations, Terence can attest that these strategies do, in fact, work. Is he “cured” of depression now? No. That uninvited spirit is still present, but he’s made peace with it. How? “Mindfully,” he responds, adding that balancing his life with this spirit requires ongoing maintenance and self-reflection.
“Depression has very strong protective coloration. It finds ways to avoid being detected by the host or the host’s loved ones. I would describe my current state as ‘vigilance through meditation.’ It’s by observing and assessing my own behavior that I can recognize the negative space in which depression exists.” Achieving this, he says, is facilitated by a Pagan perspective; while prayer is good, Pagan practices work better.
“Within our varied traditions there’s also a lot of techniques that are much more active than prayer. I do believe prayer to be an effective tool, but it’s not the only tool. We interact with our gods by making offerings and using divination, and some of our gods have a particular interest in this type of struggle. Many of us have magical approaches that allow us to take on some of the healing work personally, or within our human communities. Those who are animists like me can enter into dialogue with this spirit, maybe instead of fighting it.
“I imagine that a purely secular approach, just like an Abrahamic one, is a bit more limited than what we have available. Humans have spirit, and ignoring the spiritual aspect of depression is to rely more fully on pills and talk therapy. Pagans are more likely to be able to address the whole person, rather than arbitrarily decide that the mind needs help but the body is fine.”
While his book has many specific journal prompts and activities (amongst which is a truly innovative construction of an altar, intended to offer the spirit of depression a place to dwell rather than in one’s psyche), Terence offers some insights for those dealing with depression:
~ Pay attention to what depression wants, and do the opposite.
~ Spending time with other humans is good for you.
~ You have not been abandoned by your gods.
~ Move your body more than you have been.
~ Eat real food whenever possible.
~ Practicing magic in depression is like typing with mittens: not impossible, but it requires patience.
~ No darkness is impenetrable.
Much, much more is offered in his book, which is available at local bookstores, Llewellyn.com, and on Amazon. For more information or to contact Terence, visit truepaganwarrior.com, which includes his social media links.
