Who is the Dark Goddess

The Question's Answer Became a Book

howling clawing chiding quiet gathering in the relics past

holding ancient tooth and riot

Wild in hair and root and cast

Pocket full of suppressed wisdom

Bucket full of toothless crone

Hedging rider ever tarry

Near star and moon and earth and bone

Watch now kindred she is in you

Ever present wing and hand

Cell to cell weaving with you

All the shoulds you can disband

In this night the stars crack open

Waters drip and tie with drum

Rushing in your heart a rhythm

Ancestral reckoning to come

Sing you with us in the forest

Dance you with us in this night

Be you with us one of chorus

Host and entity take flight

Hey now wyrd one ever open

Breaking forth a mother tongue

Chanting words so long forgotten

Releasing self then rung by rung

All the making called you memory

All the darkness called you light

Now thread by thread a whole self woven

Celebrated on this night.

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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 challenging transitions in isolation, and the dominant cultural narrative is that we should “move on” or “get back to normal”.

In studying myth, however, we come to understand that the purpose of challenging life transformations is not caught in the binary of positive and negative. It is a cycle of transformation that, when integrated, offers us strength, empowers our innate gifts and allows for our growth into a new phase of life. Some of these paths are shared, most are solitary, all are a potent part of our initiatory movement into our purpose in life.

​The Dark Goddess awaits us in the myth cycles of our lives. Often a symbol of death or the shadow, the initiatory journey of the Dark Goddess brings us into the hidden, chthonic places. It is here that we leave our offering, the sacrifice of our transformations, and emerge with a new status and a new name.

The Dark Goddess has many names — some in my ancestral traditions include Hel, Gyre Carling, Angrbo∂a— and more faces. Sometimes the mantle is animal, wolf, crow, vulture. Sometimes symbolically natural, compost, mold, decay. We are taught to fear the symbolic dark, and yet in one long lifetime will make the descent of initiation many times — through natural embodied transitions, and those of loss, grief, endings, death.

Who is the Dark Goddess? She is what we fear most — change, hardship — and what we long for most — to make meaning from challenge, to be transformed by difficulty, to find purpose in our wending path. When we bring the descents of our lives into awareness, hallow the initiatory patterns into cycles of regenerative growth, we can find the ancient mystery of our ancestral stories restorative. We may lean into the sacred pattern, and be empowered.

By this and every effort may the balance be regained.

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