Death Cycles and Life Transitions: Waking the Sleeping Soul
🕸✨🕸In myth we learn the purpose of trial, the function of death and the necessary mysteries we inhabit through a human lifetime. Myth contains the threads of ritual secret--how to prepare for initiation into those mysteries, how to survive the descent into the underworld, how to claim your new status and name on emergence, what ceremonies aid in integration. This we have forgotten. : The stories have become wan, stripped of their depth for entertainment, rounded to contain a simplified version of the whole: good vs. evil, good always wins. The face of the Dark Goddess is one we fear, for she means harm, annihilation, oblivion in the language of contemporary culture. Yet in the mysteries she was desired, the hag to kiss, the wisdom keeper who could wake our sleeping souls out of complacency. The Dark Goddess is who we meet in the underworld during transition, she grinds our being to bits in her quern, and our souls flow from her cauldron into the rivers of the world where they take shape again, in the endless dance of birth and decay that is all existence. To appease her cycles we must learn to make offerings, to surrender all we think we know and trust her transformations. If we listen to the wyrd we can hear the hum of our ancestral earth ways, all the way back before this myth of linearity took hold. "The cycle is the rule," they chant, "be bold." : If you are in a transition and feeling despair at the death--physical, psychological, shapely and forlorn--of something loved, desired or depended on, know: there are ways of cycle and spiral older than any story of time, and on those ways the people of your blood are gathered. They remind you: this is initiation, it happens over and over until the great initiation of physical death. It is healer, teacher, strength builder, myth maker. It is the story of our souls, awake. A necessary story. Now is the time to make ritual.
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Next month we will begin the Dark Goddess Project, a rite of passage journey for integrating the challenging changes, the death transitions. In bringing intention to our interactions with the Dark Goddess we may find communion and empowerment.
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There are many ways to participate in the Dark Goddess Project. You can walk with us peripherally by following posts here or joining the Myth and Moon Letters for seasonally specific rites. If you can feel the pull of connection and commitment, I will be offering both on Patreon--the most spacious option being the Year of Ceremony, available to all patrons. Or you can join the Coven Invisible patron level, and walk with a community through support and web weaving while receiving access to all of the self-study Wild Soul School classes.
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These last years have been a challenge for me, a push and pull through illness again. After so many years of disabling chronic disease it is hard to not be disheartened. But I choose to see this as a guidance from spirit, a lesson in endurance from my ancestors, an empowering opportunity to become more fully alive, more wholly awake.
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The Dark Goddess asks: what will you leave in the underworld of this initiation? And perhaps, more importantly, what are you becoming?
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To her, to the balance. ALU