Category: Lineages of the Craft

She lived four thousand three hundred years ago, in a city whose ruins now lie beneath the desert sands of southern Iraq. She held one of the most powerful religious offices in the ancient world. She wrote poems of such force and precision that they were copied by scribes for two thousand years after her death. And she signed her name to them. Which is why we know who she was at all.

Her name was Enheduanna. And she is not merely the first named author in the history of Mesopotamia, or the first named author in the ancient Near East. She is the first named author in the recorded history of the human species.

In Japan, if you visit almost any Shinto shrine, you will encounter them. Young women in white robes and deep red hakama skirts, moving quietly through the grounds, assisting priests, distributing talismans, performing sacred dances. They are called miko (巫女), and the image has become so familiar . So thoroughly absorbed into the aesthetic of Japanese religious life, that it is easy to mistake it for the whole story.

It is not the whole story.

There is a man at the heart of one of China’s most enduring spiritual lineages whom no one can quite locate in history.

He may have lived in the twelfth century, or the thirteenth, or the fifteenth. He may have been a former Shaolin monk who walked away from one tradition to found another. He may have been a composite figure, the accumulated legend of several teachers collapsed into a single name across several generations of storytelling. He may, according to some accounts, have achieved immortality and simply never died.

His name is Zhang Sanfeng (張三豐), and he is the legendary founder of the Wudang tradition. One of the most significant streams of Taoist internal practice ever to emerge from the sacred mountains of China.

There is a cave above the River Nidd in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, that has been drawing visitors since 1630. It is, by some counts, the oldest tourist attraction in England. People have been coming to look at it – and to feel whatever it is that places of concentrated legend carry in their stones – for nearly four hundred years.

Every culture that has lasted long enough has had to find a way to hold death.

Not to explain it, not to make it comfortable, not to wrap it in promises about what comes after – but to hold it. To give it a face and a name and a place in the world that allows the living to go on living while staying in honest relationship with the fact that they won’t always be able to. The deities who preside over death in the world’s traditions are, for this reason, among the oldest and most consistently present figures in the human spiritual imagination. They predate most theology. They outlast most of the civilisations that named them.

The Aztec civilization named theirs with particular precision.

Her name in Nahuatl is Mictecacihuatl – pronounced Meek-te-kah-see-wah-tl – and it means, simply, Lady of the Dead. She has been watching over the bones of the deceased for at least eight centuries of documented history. She survived the Spanish conquest that destroyed most of what Aztec civilisation had built. She survived the forced conversion that replaced her temples with churches and her priests with Catholic missionaries. She survived – transformed, syncretised, renamed, driven underground and then surfacing again under different faces – and today she presides over Día de los Muertos, the most widely celebrated death festival in the Western Hemisphere.

Every culture has a story about what happens when you go too far into the forest.

Not the forest that is merely trees and darkness and the absence of paths – but the deeper forest, the one that represents in the symbolic logic of the human imagination the place beyond the reach of ordinary rules. Where the social structures that tell you who you are do not follow. Where the protections of the known world fall away. Where what you encounter depends entirely on what you are, stripped of everything circumstantial.

She was about forty-five years old when she died, which was old for her time. She had lived long enough to become someone her community could not easily replace. We know this because of the way they buried her.

Not the way they buried hunters, or warriors, or the politically powerful. Those burials have their own grammar: weapons, tools, the markers of a role that others could step into after the person was gone.

Her burial was different. Her burial was built around her specifically, around what she was and what she had done and what she continued to be, in some understanding her community held, after death.