The Nine Kingdoms

Recently, in an active imagination, the word Kingdoms appeared with precision and clarity. Nine distinct realms were named: seven of Wisdom, two of Compassion. 

The active imagination is recorded here.  

The word Kingdoms felt very odd to me, as it isn’t one I would consciously choose. It carries an overt masculine tone; kings, rule, sovereignty; and with it a sense of hierarchy that doesn’t sit easily with my work on distributed networks. My first instinct was to update it, to replace it with something more communal and feminine in tone.

But I didn’t.

Part of this work, I’m learning, is to let the image stand. Not to reshape it too quickly into something more comfortable. Something in me chose kingdoms, and so I stay with that choice.

I think of a kingdom as a bounded place. With edges. It gathers things together and holds them. It suggests authority and responsibility; a domain that must be protected, tended, sustained, and lived within. Power and care. The ongoing work of holding something in form and in some kind of relation.

In this sense, the kingdoms feel like places where questions of order, value, labour, and responsibility are being worked out. They seem dynamic. They are lived in. It’s not clear who does the work and who does the governing. They are experienced differently by their various inhabitants.

Each kingdom gathers a kind of activity: growth, making, maintaining, exchanging, discovering, orienting, sustaining life. Together they begin to outline a way of living; a pattern in which different aspects of life are given form, named, and held.

A fragment at the bottom of the first page of my handwritten notes reads: finding, making, protecting that which is precious.  I don’t yet know whether this belongs only to the Seventh Kingdom: Gold, or whether it might extend more widely, but it seems to gather something of its orientation.

And then followed the two Kingdoms of Compassion: family, and love.

They feel different. Closer to relationship and ethics than function. Perhaps less easily reduced to task or outcome. And yet, they too are named as kingdoms. They too are bounded, placed, formed alongside the others.

This is where something becomes less clear.

I would ordinarily think of compassion, love, and relationality as qualities belonging to the ‘feminine’ aspects of the psyche. I’d even be tempted to introduce a masculine/feminine binary into this image and divide the domains between King and Queen: seven for the king and two for the queen. However, this isn’t what the image shows. All domains are kingdoms. The image seems to apply a single way of shaping experience across everything. Growth, work, care, intimacy; all are gathered and held as if they can be named, bounded, and sustained within the same kind of structure, the same kind of logic.

But what does it mean to understand all of these aspects of life through the form of a kingdom?

A kingdom gathers, defines, and holds. It suggests continuity, stewardship, and responsibility. It also implies boundaries, roles, and a certain way of ordering what matters. And who decides what matters? What are the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of that?

What values are implied in that form; what is valued, what is rewarded, and what is set aside and ceases to have meaning?

If these same activities; growing, making, loving, caring; were shaped through a different kind of form, how might they appear?

What would they look like if they were not gathered into domains, but understood through an entirely different logic? If they were not organised around holding and sustaining, but around encountering, changing, dissolving, re-forming? If they were based on a relation of mutual movement and mutual transformation? If they were based on exchange without ownership?

There may be ways of living these same realities that do not take the shape of kingdoms at all.

These are just my initial thoughts.

I’m aware, too, of an earlier dream that spoke of “following the Marian way,” which I am exploring in relation to the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. It’s tempting to draw a direct line between these experiences, to see them as parts of a single pattern. But for now, I’m letting them remain alongside one another, without forcing them to agree.

So, I hold the kingdoms as a kind of map; a provisional one. I expect to return to them more directly and explore what each holds.

They help me notice where I am:
what is being grown, what is being maintained, what is being shaped or exchanged, what is being sought, what gives direction, what supports life.

And alongside that:
where care appears, where connection opens, where something asks to be met and to meet rather than managed.

I expect the map to shift.

For now, it offers a way of orienting; giving form to what can be held, and then letting go, leaving open the question of what might take shape differently, or not hold its shape at all.