Initiatory process is one of the most consistent and least understood features of human culture. Across every indigenous tradition that has maintained its integrity, there are stories, rituals, and ordeals designed to carry a person through a fundamental threshold, from one order of being into another.

 

What those traditions understood, and what modernity has largely lost, is that this passage cannot be reasoned into. It requires encounter. It requires fire.

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Over three Tuesday evenings in Hout Bay, Colin Campbell will work with two of the great initiatory story-complexes of the world: the Southern African lightning bird, and the Russian firebird.

 

Drawn from Tswana and Eastern European indigenous traditions respectively, both stories carry the same deep grammar: the encounter between fire and water, between the warrior and the lover, between the force that destroys and the force that renews. Colin will tell these stories in full, drawing on multiple versions and variants, before unpacking them through the frameworks of Jungian and existential psychology.

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The organising question across all three evenings is authenticity: what it actually consists of, how initiatory experience relates to it, and what it asks of a person to  embody it in the conditions of contemporary life. 

 

Colin brings to these evenings fifty years of immersion in Southern African traditional medicine, a lifelong engagement with Jungian thought, and a practice grounded in the living transmission of ancestral knowledge. 

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Each evening runs for approximately two hours and there will be time for questions. These are intimate evenings held at Colin's home, and places are limited.