| Faith > Maiden, Mother, Crone….Becoming Whole | by Amara Morrigan |
11/1/2005 |
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I have to admit, the whole “Maiden, Mother and Crone” triple goddess stuff pulled me in when I was new to Paganism in general. It seemed to me at the time to really encompass the journey of a woman’s life, and taken as a whole as a metaphor for living.
Of course, I was young and disillusioned with patriarchal religions and it was all new and amazing to me. My religious life to that point had been pretty sheltered and I was wide eyed and wondrous looking at the world of possible religious options. I was also still believing the social myth of womanhood, that a girl is raised, reaches adulthood, marries, has babies and grows old. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that life is seldom that sweetly and neatly packaged and that no two women do it exactly the same way, especially not in this modern era where we are allowed to provide for ourselves, and no longer marry for the convenience of a having a spouse who takes care of us.
So, here I am at thirty-seven, which according to the “Maiden, Mother, Crone” set up puts me squarely in my Mother years. I’m not a mother. I am an aunt, and I guess I do some Mothering through my relationship with my niece and nephew, but I’m not a mother. I have no desire to be a mother.
In many ways I’ve already begun progressing to Crone. I like my time alone. I like maturity and wisdom, and I seek it out in my companions. I don’t tolerate willful ignorance or bigotry. I am able and willing to teach what I have learned to those younger or less experienced than I.
Yet, in many other ways I still embrace the Maiden. I am, at times, playful, flirtatious. I still have some of that wide-eyed wonderment of my first ritual. I like to see new things and explore. I have moments of fiery passion, both in my pursuit of pleasure and in my work.
I remember my first experience with Morrigan…okay, maybe not that first one where she claimed me, but the first time I set out to find her on purpose. I had read a lot about how she was one of the “triple goddesses” but when I came face to face with her, I saw a woman. A solid, complete, whole woman, who was somehow all three of these archetypes and none of them all at the same time.
Shortly after that I experienced the ritual theater that is The Nine Sisters Ritual Group for the first time. I had already been looking at the concepts of Maiden, Mother and Crone differently due to my work with Morrigan and Kali and Hecate, but this took my thinking processes a step further.
Simply put the nine sisters are the multiples of the triple goddess:
Maiden-Maiden
Maiden-Mother
Maiden-Crone
Mother-Maiden
Mother-Mother
Mother-Crone
Crone-Maiden
Crone-Mother
Crone-Crone
Each of these can be seen as a step on the journey, cycles with the cycle. Each of them rang truer to me than the idea of a single path through womanhood. I left that ritual deeply moved, and not just from the message I received from the Maiden-Maiden oracle.
That was two years ago. In the meantime, I’ve had some ups and downs and life has carried me far away from the place I was then. My daily practice is not what it used to be as I have been swept up in the pressures of work, school, family and the Pagan Alliance.
This time of year though puts me in a mind to move back toward the practices that bring me peace. This Samhain I rededicated myself to my calling, to my work. I was extremely nervous about the journey that would bring me face to face with Morrigan again. It had been over a year, and I had not kept my word. My journey took me down into the Underworld, through the dense grove to the cave where I first encountered her. There I built a fire and waited.
When she emerged from the dark womb of stone, I was struck again by my earlier impressions. No human definition was going to capture the complexity I was seeing. This was fire with the cold gaze of ice, physical strength matched with intelligence, the control of the crone mixed with the discipline of the mother and the passion of the maiden.
The work that went on there was private, but it left me feeling that it was time to step outside of the established hierarchy and look at this journey a little differently. The point isn’t to move through them like some pyramid marketing scheme, but to collect them, experience them and figure out which parts of each phase suit us, and which parts don’t.
Maybe the Maiden-Mother-Crone paradigm fits better over the year than it does a human life. With Spring, the Earth is the maiden, fresh, hopeful, fertile. Late Summer-Early Autumn sees her mature, the fertile lands are ripening as a mother’s womb, and the food produced in the fields and through hunting and farming, nurture and sustain us. As Autumn progresses, She moves into Cronehood, when we turn inward and rely on the harvest already gathered.
Our lives, no matter what the path we are on, are not as simple as that anymore. The societal construct that was “woman” has shattered and in its place are a multitude of new models. Modern Pagan women need a multitude of images through which to access the Divine Feminine. For some, the generic Maiden, Mother and Crone works. For others it is only a beginning, a starting point. For others, like me, it is a notion that no longer applies. The more I study, the less I see the historical accuracy of it in the religions of those who came before. The more I interact with Deity, the more I realize my calling is to become whole, not a new piece of the whole. My job for the coming year has become clear, integration, the movement of who I am toward who I am called to be, the culling of the unnecessary bits and the acceptance of what remains. Discard the labels, embrace myself. |
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