Today I am grateful for: 1. The dark half of the year. Time to slow down, dream, reflect, contemplate. #Darkness
2. Welsh Goddess Arianrhod. She lives in a wheel of stars at the center of the night sky. Arianrhod keeps the dead safe until it is time for them to be reborn. #RestingPlace
3. Celtic Goddess Elen of the Ways. She is a whisper, a gentle wind in the wilderness. Elen shows us our true path. #WayShower
4. The bone collector, a Celtic Crone Goddess who collects the bones of the dead animals all winter and sings them across the void to be reborn. #BoneSong
5. Hindu Goddess Kali. She dances a power dance and demands we embrace our shadow. #LookInTheDark
6. Babylonian Goddess Tiamat, the primordial power and chaos of the depths. She both creates and destroys. The early patriarchal kings claimed to have destroyed Tiamat, but we all know better. #Primordial
7. Ancient feminine energies / archetypes of darkness. These dark goddesses hold so much wisdom and power. #DarkWisdom
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Originally posted on Facebook, 11/28/19 Image: Paris Catacombs by Nancy L
We are in the dark of a new moon in watery Scorpio now. And Uranus, the agent of radical change in opposition is increasing Scorpio’s normal intensity.
“The only way out is in. The only way beyond is through.” ~Bryan Ellis
The dark goddess who rules Scorpio embodies the deep truth of this quote. She beckons to us from the dark, whispering that deep healing will be ours if only we will look within and own every part of ourselves; the fears, the shame, the rage, the guilt… even the desires we won’t give voice to.
Don’t run way. Sit in your dark. Feel it’s healing power. Hold it close. Love it. Love it all.
Hecate, the goddess of the crossroads, is the Crone. The crossroads in Europe still have little cairns where people drop their stones in honor of the goddess. Those cairns have always been the places of Hecate. The crossroads represents a place where consciousness is crossed by the unconscious, in other words, a place where you have to surrender your ego will to a higher will. The Crone has gone though one crossroads after another. She has reached a place of surrender where her ego demands are no longer relevant. This is the positive side of the Crone. She is a surrendered instrument and therefore detached.
Detachment doesn’t mean indifference. It means she has been there. She has suffered, but she can draw back from the suffering. A conscious person in the presence of an unconscious person’s pain may suffer more than the unconscious person. So, it’s not that she doesn’t suffer. It’s not that she’s indifferent or withdrawn. She’s right there, totally present. She’s got nothing to lose.
She can be who she is and live with the straight, flat-out, naked truth. Therefore the Crone acts as a tuning fork in an environment because she is so real herself. She rings a true tone. People are brought into harmony with that tuning, so it’s very releasing. People can respond to their own true tone. The Crone can afford to be honest. She’s not playing games anymore. She brings people into that soul space where all outer conflicts dissolve and they can experience their own essence.
She has nothing to lose. Who she is cannot be taken away from her. She has no investment in ego. Therefore, there is no power operating. She’s the kind of person you can honestly talk to, profoundly trust. She has no reason to persuade you to do anything or be anything other than who you are.
I would think of her masculinity as being very discerning, with no sentimentality. She would be able to cut with a well-honed sword. She would be able to see what is no longer essential to life, a relationship, for example, that has become destructive. She would perceive it, see through to the heart of it, and cut where necessary, but cut with love. I always envision her wielding a golden sword with a silver handle. All the perceptivity of gold, but handled with the love of silver. The masculine and feminine together. She has the kind of wisdom that takes life with a grain of salt, smiles at the divine comedy….
I have known four or five Crones, two of them men. I have gone to them when I thought I couldn’t go any further. Their love was palpable. No advice. Simply being, saying almost nothing. I knew I was totally seen and totally understood.
They could constellate my own inner healer because they could see me as I am.
~ Marion Woodman
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Image: Night Woman / Crone Tree by Carolyn Hillyer
Full moon in earthy Capricorn. Retrograde Saturn, Pluto and a partial lunar eclipse add to the mix. The normally creative builder energy of Capricorn, Is in a more destructive clearing away phase right now.
Ready or not, your shadow is out. The old rules of life may not hold much longer. Literally everything is up for debate.
Self care is key to managing this level of change. Create a calm safe space you can root into and relax within. Try to love every wiggle and wobble you make as you feel your way into a new future.
Watery full moon in Scorpio, dark goddess of the deep. Yin feminine energy and shadow wisdom are surfacing right now.
Meditate or journey inward. Connect with your true emotions and desires. What needs to be forgiven and /or released? What needs to be acknowledged and embraced?
“I think the nature of what needs to be conveyed by women now is wrath rather than rage,’
she says firmly. ‘Wrath is different. To me, it means an incontrovertible statement,
put across fiercely, and also carrying an urgent instruction about what needs to happen.
Wrath carries no hate, but for sure –just like the utterances of
the women Oracles of old –it comes with dire warning.”
~Scilla Elworthy
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Call on Kali Maa. One meaning of Goddess Kali’s name is “force of time.” She stands outside the constraints of space-time. Kali existed before the Universe was created and she will continue to exist after the Universe ends. No physical limitations apply to Kali. She is pure primordial energy.
Both creative and destructive, Kali Maa is a symbol of Mother Nature herself. She is capable of both devouring and nurturing us. She is the strong mother archetype, the fiery mama who protects us and fights for us. Kali’s dual nature shows us both the beauty of life and the harsh reality of death. She leads us to understand that one cannot exist without the other.
Opening to the power of Kali is both exhilarating and frightening. She transforms whatever she touches. Every woman carries the seed of Kali’s primordial energy within her.
Kali is the fierce feminine warrior; the sacred Goddess who kicks butt and takes no prisoners. Her energy is needed when demons are running amuck in the world.
Celtic Goddess Arianrhod (ah-ree-AHN-rhohd) has a long and celebrated history. Through the years, she has gone by many names: Goddess of the Silver Wheel, Goddess of Reincarnation, Welsh Star, Mother-Moon Goddess, and the Silver Wheel that Descends into the Sea. Her name actually translates as ‘silver’ (Arian) ‘wheel’ (Rhod) in Welsh.
With skin as pale as the moon, Arianrhod is a beautiful and powerful Dark Goddess. She is the daughter of the Great Mother Goddess Don and her consort Beli. And like her mother before her, Arianrhod is a symbol of feminine power and sovereignty. She rules fertility, birth and rebirth. She is also a weaver of cosmic time and fate, the one who decides when a Soul is ready to be reborn.
Arianrhod lives in the far north, on the magical island of Caer Sidi (Revolving Castle) with her female attendants. The ancients believed that her castle, Caer Arianrhod, was located in the Corona Borealis, a group of circumpolar stars that appear to rotate around the North Star. Corona Borealis means Northern Crown, which is very fitting for a powerful sovereign Goddess. Legend tells us that poets and astrologers learned the wisdom of the stars at Caer Sidi.
The moon is an archetypal symbol of the ancient Mother Goddess that is connected to the female womb, death, rebirth and the sacred feminine power of creation. The Celtic people counted time not by days, but by nights, and made their calendars focused on the moon instead of the sun. Ancient Celtic astrologers took their observations from the position of the moon and its progress in relation to the northern stars. They were guided by Arianrhod’s silver wheel of stars.
Arianrhod’s starry home is also known as Annwn, the Otherworld or Land of the Dead. When people die, it is said that Arianrhod’s attendants bring them to Caer Sidi. There, in the stillness of the hub of Arianrhod’s silver wheel, the Souls of the dead are nurtured by Arianrhod’s attendants while waiting for their fate to be decided. Arianrhod is able to shape shift into a large owl. Like the moon, the owl is an ancient symbol of death, rebirth, magic, spiritual wisdom and initiation. With her great owl eyes, Arianrhod can see into the depths of each human soul. She is said to move through the dark of night with power and purpose, her wings spreading to give comfort and healing to all who seek her.
As is the case with most of the powerful Goddesses, stories tell us that Arianrhod was eventually humiliated, tricked and stripped of her children and her sovereignty by a Christian warlord. For Arianrhod, death was said to come when the sea reclaimed the land where the Christian lord had forced her to live in exile.
And yet… when I look up and see her silver wheel of circumpolar stars that continues to revolve in our night sky year after year, I can still feel her power and grace. Arianrhod is there amongst the stars, patiently waiting for us to rediscover her.
