Sophie Strand

Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legend readily cut down forests, slaughtered the old deities, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, trickster harpists, and vegetal magicians with flowering wands. As eco-feminist scholar Sophie Strand discovered, these wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden in plain sight. Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths, revealing the beautiful range of the divine masculine, including expressions of male friendship, male intimacy, and male creative collaborations. Starting with Osiris and Genesis, Strand encourages us to think like an ecosystem, instead of like an individual. She connects dying, vegetal gods to the virtuous cycle of composting and decay, highlighting the ways in which mushrooms can restore soil and heal polluted landscapes. Exploring esoteric Christianity, the author celebrates the Gnostic Jesus of The Gospel of Thomas, imagining the ecology that the Rabbi Yeshua would have actually been referencing in his nature-focused parables. Moving into medieval history, legends, and fairytales, Strand frees Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge. By rewilding the myths of the masculine, Strand reseeds our minds with new visions of male identity and shows how each of us, regardless of gender, can develop a matured ecological empathy, reinvigorate the magic of the world around us, and witness a blossoming of sacred masculine powers that are soft, curious, connective, and celebratory.

Rewilding the Sacred Masculine: Lunar Kings, Trans-Species Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists

The Flowering Wand

Definitely relating to that feeling of freedom. It's nice to see it put into words how I feel when I'm looking for myself.

Giovanni Silva

No wonder claiming a new name, never mind nonbinary pronouns, is often experienced as freedom. We escape the imposed names and strictures of our parents, our institutions, our cultural oppression, by attempting to "own" ourselves with the magic of a self-generated nominal.

How can men learn from women to access the feminine within themselves? How can honoring our "both-ness" change courtship into a terrain that is more egalitarian, playful, and reciprocal than the patriarchal modes of romance that seem to invite sexual violence and domination?

When Theseus slays the Minotaur, he is not slaying a monster. He is slaying an entire culture—a Cretan culture dominated by the image of a feminine divinity, flanked by lions and bulls, celebrating epiphanic communion with the natural world.

Finally, let the Minotaur stand as a reminder: There are no monsters. Only bad rewrites of forgotten stories.

Let us all nourish our bodies, our dreams, our hearts, so that we can become a lap for those who need a soft place to rest. Let the Empresa card turn into the field where wildflowers, bears, blackbirds, sunshine, mushrooms, monsoon rain, and moonlight all meet to break bread.

Let us give masculinity back its flowering wand of reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Let us call Dionysus to the gates of our cities and homes. A man who can dance with plants and honor beats, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than gender. He is a celebration. A hive of humming bees. A secret network of fungus ready to erupt as the air moistens. A murmuration of birds. A cluster of grapes. A throng of singing women. A magician.

His (Merlin) teaching is simple: When you need advice, don't always go to another human being. Go to the woods. The animals. The weather. The American chestnut, all but extinct, but somehow still standing behind your apartment. Make new kin. Tell new stories.

The song of the Kaua'i'ō'ō is the song of Orpheus. The soulful dirge of the lover whose Eurydice is gone and will not return. This music that is raucous with frustration and longing, while also celebrating and delighting in the mate that no longer exists. Music that can convince the God of the underworld to relinquish the linear arrow of human time.

The outcome of the fairy tale is much sweeter and more surprising sensing the arrival of her beloved, the princess wakes and exclaims, "Is it you, my prince?"

The Prince, charmed with these words, and much more with the manner in which they're spoken, knew not how to show his joy and gratitude... They did weep more than talk—little eloquence, a great deal of love. He was more at a loss than she, and we need not wonder at it: she had time to think on what to say to him; for it is very probable that the good Fariy, during so long a sleep had given her very agreeable dreams. In short they talked for four hours together, and yet they said not half what they had to say.

Men are socialized by patriarchal capitalism to believe that anything that isn't strictly quantifiable, "scientific," or profitable can't possibly behelpful. They are trained again and again to outsource their feeling sense. Men are exiled from the very practices that could help them knock upon their own door and get in touch with their true vocations and self-expression.

The Flowering Wand quotes

Join the club