The Great Triad : Maiden, Mother and Crone

We all know about the great triad : Maiden, Mother and Crone. This three fold archetype resonates deeply in our psyches as Begining, Middle and End of all things, and is likely to be with us always. Yet a fourth aspect might appear within the triad — as well as a fifth or sixth. “When the myths come alive for us they change,” says Starhawk. Truly, there are no limits to the Goddess, and all things are possible.

But why the special attention to the Bright and Dark Maidens? For one thing, they make a marvelous all-female alternative to the male-opposite- female symbolism of patriarchy. The Bright Maiden who waxes, moves towards the Light and the Sun. She is the young Goddess who is growing, the Amazon, the woman who takes her powers of freedom, action, strength and independence. She is the risk-taker, the woman who dares. in other words, she is all things our society tells us should be considered “male.” Because of our loss of Her image in our psyches, women find themselves accused of becoming “like a man,” when they express Her qualities. Known to us as Diana, Artemis, Boudicea, the Amazon Warrior Woman… the Bright Maiden is more familiar to us than the Dark.

The Dark Maiden who wanes, moves towards the Underworld, The Crone. She is associated with aging, descent, introspection and magic. The Dark Maiden is teh enchantress, She Who Pulls. In her positive attributes, She represents some of the lost powers of woman. She surrenders to the flow and pulls, like the pull of the moon, the suction of the undertow. This is the magnetism of magic, our power to draw to us all that we require. Images of the Dark Maiden appear to us as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, the Mermaid, Sirens, Sorceress.

In patriarchy the Bright and Dark Maidens tend to appear in negative expression, and because of this, our impression of them can become distorted. Patriarchs love to keep our Dark Maidens weak and dependent upon them, and if we decide to act out of our Bright Maiden selves,

Mother Crone

Mother, we knew the caress of your deep currents
before we grew feathers and took wing.
We knew the rock and lullaby of your waves
before we grew legs and tottered out from
between your sunkissed limbs onto the shore.

Mother, we knew the salty sustenance of your body,
the irresistible pull of your tides
nudging us ever forward, until—incredibly—
we walked on two legs, shaky at first.

Mother, we grew and grew and drifted distant.
Forgetting the way your suspiration
drives our own very breath, we forsook you for
high octane, for spray starch, for Big Macs and chilly houses.
We forgot you in our greed for everything we made or thought we made.

We spat poisons in your pristine air.
In the depths of your belly, we unleashed the water monster,
its slick tendrils endlessly unfurling,
their long fingers snaking out to wrap around
the throats of your sea turtles and egrets,
stopping the water dance of the curved fin,
ending the dip of feathered wing in air,
garroting your children in its putrid embrace.

Is there a sign, is there a chant, to bring us to our senses?
Give us a song, give us a way,
is there an incantation to say to put the mad genie
internal combustion back into its bottle,
to dispel evil spirits set loose by our monstrous chemical brews,
our fission of nuclear bad news.
Give us a sign, give us a way, give us an incantation to say. 

Charge of the Crone

Hear the words of the Grandmother of Time:
She who has been known as
Hecate, Erishkagel, Cerridwen, Kali-Ma,
Anna, Perenna, Spider Woman,
and many other names
– some feared; some loved;
but none ever ignored.
She it is who brings wisdom and
the awareness of eternity.

She has been the Maiden, and remembers that joy.
She has been the Mother, and recalls that pleasure.
But age has changed her,
and taught her the mysteries of
the Wheel that is ever turning,
the Wheel that is life, death, and rebirth.

She is the whirling tornado, the erupting volcano,
the rising tidal wave, the trembling of the earth’s crust.
With age comes an understanding of the past,
and a glimpse of the future.
For, in the turning of the Wheel,
the past is the future,
and the future is the past.
She is the Learned One, the Teacher,
the Bringer of Inevitable Change.

She is the Dark of the Moon, the Hidden One,
the invisible unknown that lies ahead.
But do not fear her for she is not malicious,
and her touch, however harsh, is love.

Only in ignorance is she scorned and reviled.
Those who do not know her,
parody her as the ugly old woman
whose powers were said to blight crops
and sour the milk in the cow.
It is fear that turns her age into abomination,
her wrinkles into hideous deformity,
and her voice into an evil and manipulative cackle.
For those who sought power over the earth were afraid
to face her wisdom and her unalterable truth.

But in the old days, we sat at her feet to learn the most ancient lore.
From her came the knowledge of the healing herbs,
and the chants and songs that shaped our lives.
She sat in honour at our councils, our marketplaces, in our homes.
She governed our governing, and interpreted our laws.
She gave focus to our changing seasons.
She was our teacher, our oracle, our promise of rebirth.

Come, honour her as of old,
listen now to the words of the Wise One,
the ancient Seer, the Crone! 

THE WINTER CRONE


We enter the season of the Crone, the Hag of Winter. Beware, this is no gentle old lady – she is wild, fierce and elemental, just like winter itself. She is the storm rider, the shapeshifter, the ground freezer, the plant witherer, the bringer of death and the collector of souls. She has had many names in many places – Ceridwen, Hecate, Frau Gauden, Perchta, Nicneven, Reisarova, Frau Holda, Befana, the Hag of Beare, Babushka, Beira, Gyre-Carline, Mag Moullach, Gentle Annie, Lussi, and Saelde amongst numerous others.
In Scotland she is the Cailleach Bheur (‘The Blue Hag’), whose face is blue with cold, her hair as white as frost. With her holly staff in her hand and a carrion crow perched on her shoulder she strides across the land, beating down the vegetation, and hardening the earth with ice. [1] In her great cauldron, the whirlpool of Corryvreckan, she washes ‘the plaid of old Scotland’ until it is white with snow. [2] In she is Germany Frau Holda (or Frau Holle) who makes it snow when she shakes her feather pillows out. In Leicestershire, my home county, she is Black Annis, the blue-faced hag who haunts the Dane Hills, dealing death.
Winter is a time of death – the death of plants, the death of animals, and the death of those humans for whom the season is too harsh, so it is not surprising that the Hag of Winter is a death goddess and a collector of souls. In this role she often leads the Wild Hunt, flying through the midnight skies accompanied by wild women and ghosts, gathering the recently dead. In Norse myth these are the túnridur, the ‘hag riders’, or the gandreid ‘witch ride’. In Norway, the goddess Reisarova leads the aaskereida (‘lightning and thunder’), a spectral host who rode black horses with eyes like embers, while in Germany the Furious Host rode is led by Frau Holle, Percht or Berchta (‘Shining’). Slovenians call the goddess leading the hosts of the dead Zlata Baba or ‘Golden Crone’.
The Tyroleans said that whoever got in Wild Berchta’s way as she tore through the night with the Wild Hunt would sink into trance and upon awakening, be able to predict how the next harvest would be, and this leads us to something important about the Hag of Winter – there is a deep connection between fertility and winter death. Perchta fructified the land by ploughing it underground, while her heimchen (the souls of the dead babies she collected) watered the fields. While the Maiden begins it, the Mother bears it, and the Harvest Queen reaps it, the fertility of the next year’s harvest is fundamentally the Crone’s gift – the sleeping seeds in the underworld are in her care.
The fierce and powerful vision of the Crone Goddess found in myth is fundamentally at odds with the sanitised and patronising view of her I often come across – the Crone as the kindly wise old woman, waiting for death, who exists solely to patiently pass on her years of accumulated wisdom – a concept reflecting our own society, with its heritage of patriarchal monotheism, where old women are seen as useless, past sex, past childbearing, past working. That characterisation doesn’t fit any of the old ladies I know – most of whom are pretty formidable – and it certainly doesn’t fit the stories of the Hag who might be considered the most elementally powerful goddess of all.
In this dismal season, when the earth is bare and the trees skeletal, when everything showy is stripped away, we feel the underlying bones of creation and we see more clearly into its deepest secrets. We approach its elemental power, and this is the true knowledge of the Crone, the coron or ‘crowned one’, the Cailleach the veiled one, the hag, ‘the sacred one’

Dedication to the Rise

We are calling
the Grandmothers, Mothers,
Sisters, Aunts, Daughters
The Wild Women
The Crones
The seers & midwives
The mountain & desert women
The soul summoners
The water carriers
The tenders & feelers of Earth
The ocean women who are rising the tide
The fire women who are ready to roar
The girls who already breathe consciously with the trees
and the elders who choose to sing the song
that ends the desecration of our world.
We are calling you to RISE together now.
You are invited to unite & awaken
to who, what you really are,
on behalf of the forests,
on behalf of the trees,
on behalf of Life.”

TO THE WOMAN WHO IS SLOWLY FADING AWAY…

To the woman who has lost her spark.

To the woman whose get up and go, has well and truly gone.

This is for you.

This is to remind you whose daughter you are.

This is to remind you, that you don’t have to be everything to everyone, every day.

You didn’t sign up for that.

Remember when you used to laugh? Sing? Throw caution to the wind?

Remember when you used to forgive yourself more quickly for not always being perfect.

You can get that back again.

You really can.

And that doesn’t have to mean letting people down or walking away.

It just means being kinder to you, feeling brave enough to say no sometimes.

Being brave enough to stop sometimes.

And rest.

It starts the moment you realise that you’re not quite who you used to be.

Some of that is good, some of that is not.

There are parts of you that need to be brought back.

And if anyone in your life is not okay with that… they are not your people.

Your people will be glad to see that spark starting to light up again.

So, if you have been slowly fading away my friend, this is the time to start saying yes to things that bring you joy and no to things that don’t.

It’s really pretty simple.

A Very Old Crone

Been looking through journal of very old crone and find couple interesting spells. Will share them with you.

Dry and crush with pestle the yellow roots of gander goose. Mix it with menstrual blood and add to the food of him you love. He will return your love.

or

To regain the lover who has left you,make the figure of wax representing him, mix with dragon’s blood, sulphur, quicksilver and saltpetre and through it in blazing fire repeating his name all the while. As these things burn, so his heart will burn with love for you.

Warning: be careful handling quicksilver, it is poisonous. Better wear gloves and don’t inhale it’s steam.

The crone aspect of the Female Metaphor

“The crone aspect of the Female Metaphor is not only about age, it is also about the acceptance and valuing of darkness as essential to the life process. Once this aspect was connected to regeneration and Wisdom, and some cultures understood darkness as the source of being. In a culture where the darkness is morally set as evil, where there is no place for the compost, this aspect is feared and loathed. Where only the Light is valued as positive, where the furtherance of the Dark has been forgotten, real wisdom and compassion will never be discovered.” -Glenys Livingstone
Hecate Mask by Lauren Raine
Darkness was never evil, only like space .. challenging, and this is why few get to be closer to the stars then those who move through it, instead of it moving through them..
Evil is when one robs another of their future, in mind, body, and or soul… evil has only one thing it serves and that’s not to serve the future…but the lost of it…

The Crone

“Women get more beautiful as they grow older. Not less.
Female youth is only prized in modern culture because it doesn’t represent as much of a threat spiritually to anyone who is frightened of divine feminine power.
As women grow and mature, they call in stronger forces of sacred feminine wisdom. They vibrate with the creative power of their stories.
They are more of a force to be reckoned with.
They see more, know more, feel more. They put up with a lot less bullshit.
When women are trained into thinking there is something fundamentally wrong with getting older, and are coerced into spending money, energy and power investing in ‘slowing the signs of ageing’, an enormous vault of divine love is lost.
Just think what would happen if all the women in the world started loving themselves even more with every year that passed.
Perhaps a total revolution would occur.”