What the Fire Always Knew About the Dance Between Masculine and Feminine
- Jun 7
- 5 min read
By Charel Morris
Transformational Artist & 21st Century Shaman | Stone Circle Productions
Your story didn't begin with a business plan or a pitch deck. It began around a fire. And the fire has always held something we have slowly forgotten — that the most powerful knowledge transmission requires both the masculine and the feminine in the dance. In art, in creation, and in life.
It began with the fire. And the fire has always held both.
The Renaissance gave us Gutenberg. The printing press. The birth of the individual author. It feels like the beginning of the knowledge economy.
It is also too recent. By about 295,000 years. And in celebrating the lone genius it quietly separated the masculine from the feminine in the act of creation — tipping a balance that had held for hundreds of thousands of years.
The fire — the original publisher — has been waiting for us to remember what it always knew.
What the Fire Has Always Held
Fire has never belonged to one polarity. Fire goddesses appear in every culture on earth — Oya in West Africa, Brigid in Celtic tradition, Pele in Hawaii, Sekhmet in Egypt. In the Native American pipe ceremony, the stem is masculine and the bowl is feminine. Fire completes the ceremony — uniting both into smoke that carries prayer to the spirit world.
The fire has always held both. That is the original knowledge transmission system — the place where masculine and feminine came into the oldest and most productive of dances.
Fire and the Fourth Chakra
In the body's energy system, Fire is the fourth chakra.
The Heart.
And this is not coincidence. The heart is the meeting place of the masculine and feminine within every human being — the point where the lower three chakras, which carry our earthly, embodied, instinctual nature, meet the upper three, which carry our spiritual, visionary, and expressive nature. The heart is the bridge. The integrating fire.
Every author in this community knows this place.
It is the place you write from when you are writing the truest thing you know. Not the clever thing. Not the marketable thing. The true thing.
The original fire circle activated exactly this. The flame opened the heart field. Made people truthful. Made wisdom land at a depth that words alone could not reach. The knowledge passed in those circles was not just intellectual. It was felt. It was received in the body. It changed the people who received it.
The Boulder and the Forest
La Sainte-Baume, South of France — Spring Equinox
You may have heard of La Sainte-Baume. After Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code — the book in 2003, the film in 2006 — millions of people suddenly knew her name. Mary Magdalene. The South of France. The cave where she is said to have spent the last thirty years of her life in prayer and contemplation, high on a mountain above a forest that was sacred to the Druids and Celts long before it was ever hers.
I was there on Spring Equinox. And I had not come lightly.
The path up to La Sainte-Baume — the Holy Cave — follows what is called the Chemin des Roys, the Kings Path, carved in stone in 900 AD. I was not exactly a mountain climbing woman at that point in my life. So before we set out, I did what I have always done when I need to move through something larger than my current capacity.
I called on my Jaguar.
He is a male Jaguar — my power animal of forty years — and I asked if he would walk with me through that ancient forest and up that mountain. He said he would. Happily. I also turned inward to the masculine energy within me and asked it to rise — to bring its strength into my legs, my body, my stride.
Yes, it said. We are here.
A student who lived in that part of France was with me that day and we arrived at the small church at the foot of the mountain. Between us and the cave was the forest. Just coming into its spring leaves. Tender green. The kind of light that only exists for a few days of the year.
We walked in.
My Jaguar and my masculine energy were doing their work beautifully. My legs were strong. My body was steady. We were moving well through that sacred Druid forest.
And then without warning they both stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. And stepped out of my body entirely.
I stood in the forest path feeling suddenly separate. The power I had been walking in — simply gone.
You don't need us anymore, they said. Not the way you did.
They would continue up the mountain with me — but as separate energies now, walking beside me rather than inside me.
I was still absorbing this when we turned a corner and found a boulder. Large — five or six feet across, four feet high. Ancient. My friend and I looked at each other.
We climbed up.
We placed a candle between us and lit it.
Fire. In the middle of the Druid forest. On Spring Equinox.
We went within.
Sitting on that rock in the cool spring air — the Jaguar present on one side, the masculine energy on another, my friend and I holding the feminine — something settled. All of it in balance. All of it present.
Something told me to open my eyes.
About five feet away, standing in the forest, was Mary Magdalene.
Her beauty. Her power. Her absolute presence in that spring light.
She looked at me and said: You don't need to go up to the cave. It is Spring Equinox. I want to be down here in the forest — in the new growth, with all the small living things, walking into spring. This is where I am.
Above us a group of golden eagles passed overhead.
Blessings, she said. I will see you soon.
And she was gone.
What the Da Vinci Code gave the world was a doorway. Millions walked through it searching for the feminine divine in history and art. What I found that morning was something no code could contain — Mary Magdalene standing in a Druid forest on the first day of spring, more interested in the new leaves and the small living things than in any cave carved by human hands.
The masculine and feminine in full balance. The fire lit on an ancient boulder. All five elements present.
That is what the fire circle has always made possible.
What You Are Restoring
Every author in this community is restoring that balance. Not by abandoning individual voice — but by writing from the heart, from the fire that holds both, and by building community rather than competing in isolation.
When you share another author's work. When you show up for the circle. When you write the true thing rather than the safe thing — you are not doing something new.
You are tending the oldest fire on earth.
It began with the fire.
And the fire has always held both — the masculine and the feminine, the direction and the depth, the individual voice and the circle that receives it.
Your writing is not a solo act.
It is your part of the dance.
Next in this series: When We Forgot the Invisible 90% — the historical moment we stopped counting the intelligence that kept us alive for 300,000 years, and what it cost us.
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