Who is the Bog Hag? This archetype, familiar to us, known in our bones, surfaced for me in late 2023 when I was skulking a thread about perimenopause that came up in my search results. A woman wrote something about embracing the Hag she was becoming, flipping the bird to expectations and taking up residence in her Hag hut. Yes. That will do, I thought, my heart opened and immediately wrote the poem that ends this letter.

The journey to the Dark Goddess is a natural part of any death transition — any difficult rite of passage that takes us out of our ordinary experiences and places us into a liminal cycle. Death transitions may be those transitions classically seen as negative — such as a serious illness or accident, death of a loved one, job loss or divorce — but even so-called positive transitions such as marriage or the birth of a child carry the weight of endings. Largely we navigate our c