And so, at sixty-one years old, I have come to the place of ashes. My wife died five years ago. I went bankrupt trying to save her. My kids barely talk to me. My new partner and I split. I live alone. In the woods. All of my old community has fallen away. There is just me, and the fire, and the warm ashes.
Like the soldier in the Grimm’s tale The Devil’s Sooty Brother, I seem condemned to seven years of stirring the ashes, tending the fire under the kettles, and gathering the sweepings. The soldier is also told that during this time “…you must not wash, comb, or trim yourself, or cut your hair or nails, or wipe the water from your eyes.” As I consider this, I think: seven years is a long time — especially when you are already sixty-one! Of course, “seven years” is a mythological time period, like “once upon a time” or “a year and a day.” No matter how you look at it, the story says that this is going to take some time, and it is not going to be pleasant.
This stirring of ashes arrives to me like it did the soldier. I spent my life on the battlefield of business. Yet the failures, bankruptcies, collapses, and deaths have left me dazed and a bit lost. Discombobulated, is a good word. In the story’s words, the soldier “had no money left and did not know how to get on.” Confused. Disillusioned. Directionless. Somehow down to the bare minimum and the need to survive.
In the book known as The Kyballion, the authors outline the hermetic tradition which includes a principle of correspondence: “As above, so below. As below, so above.” Or, as I would say, “as outward, so inward.” The confusion and directionless feeling in this outer world circumstance reflects perfectly the inner world, too. Where am I? What is important now? Who am I anyway? My energy is different from ten and twenty years ago, but what is this energy? Do I harness the ego? Or the Self? Do I even know the Self? And yet every direction I seem to want to take falls flat.
And so I sit at the edge of the metaphorical fire, but also at the literal one outside — my fire ring. The fire burns, the coals are hot, the ashes build. I stir the ashes to try to keep the fire going. The smoke rises and swirls. My jacket begins to smell like smoke.
The story suggests that this is a time for inner development, not outward appearances. It is not a time for self grooming. Those things require you to consider the outside standards, social practices, and community acceptability. There will come a time for that after the seven years, but it is not now. Sink inward. Reflect deeply. Discover who you really are. Stir the ashes of your life. So the story says.
In the story, this soldier’s guide is a devil, and he does the obvious thing; the devil leads the soldier straight into hell. The fires burn under three kettles, and this is where the soldier is to do his tending. In other versions of the story, it isn’t hell, but rather the kitchen in the basement of a castle. Yet, there are still three large kettles, fires to tend, and all the rest. The devil-guide offers one more admonishment: “…but if he once peeped into the kettles, it would go ill with him.”
Alas, the soldier starts out well but eventually cannot restrain himself. He peeks into each of the kettles. The first has his old corporal in it. Realizing he now has the power, he stokes up the fire and closes the lid. The second has his old ensign, and he does the same. The last kettle has a general, and he does the same. Each time, the old soldier says, “Aha, old bird, do I meet you here? Once you had me in your power, now I have you.”
It seems to be like this as we grow into our senior years — the power shifts. Our old demons and the bosses that controlled us enter into our control. In the outer world, the new money of retirement changes everything. We adjust, down-size, or right size, and our lifestyle comes into alignment with our resources. We take control of what pushed us all our lives. In the inner world, some transformation happens to these old demons. The hermetic tradition predicts that we will encounter such a transformation — pain transforms into pleasure as a part of the universal principles of the universe. At the same time, the story shows us how — by stirring the ashes, peeking into the cauldrons, and, when we see the old forces boiling away, turning up the fire.
What I notice here is that there is along service to the ashes, the kitchen, the fire, and the place with all its sweepings and orderliness, but the transformation doesn’t occur until the soldier peeks against the rules and turns up the heat. We have to turn up the heat to get the transformation. We also have to cheat the rules. But either way, it is a slow process. It needs seven years.
I’m guessing a lot of men and women go through a similar process, especially if our love has been visited by that other devil — Death. I am a widower. The death of our spouses is transformational, each in its own way, no matter how good or bad your marriage was in recent years. While the story uses a soldier and his superiors, our lives place us as lovers to a dead spouse, and when you lift the lids of those kettles, you see a different aspect of that spouse. You see part of their power over you — a natural part of the marriage experience. Each kettle represents a different aspect, and now that your person is gone, the best thing to do is to boil off that power and take it back to yourself.
The story confirms this necessity. The devil-guide says, “But you have peeped into the kettles as well; it is lucky for you that you added fresh logs to them, or else your life would have been forfeited.” Do you see? We have to boil off that old karma. We have to cook off all those old habits and ways of being, for they were all forged in the crucible of our marriages. And if we fail to do that, we collapse into the despair of old habits and transform nothing. Life collapses. This is why paying attention to ashes is so critical.
The form of this attention is variable by situation. If your spouse’s death involved a lot of trauma, like mine did, healing the trauma is paramount. Experiencing the grief is crucial, but many deaths are complicated and grief isn’t the only experience. There is anger, torment, pain, rage, broken longing, love, and sometimes the total torture of posthumously discovered betrayal. These are the true ashes. We stir them through the long days and long night. We stir them in our dreams. We stir them with a stick and mix them with our tears. And when the time is right, we turn up the heat. The story shows that we are turning up the heat, but the heat we are turning up is on ourselves.
Our lost loved one is merely the personification of our own agony — that is, our own ashes — and so we stir the ashes on ourselves, we peak under the lid on ourselves, we turn up the heat on ourselves in order to achieve the transformation. The story says it. The hermetic tradition says it. The alchemical process says it. We have to go through it. We have to give it time. And we have to trust that we come out on the other side.
Bring your stick. Dress for the weather. I’ll see you next to the fire.
Anthony Signorelli