“The Crone is a shapeshifter, the young embraced by the old, the woman with the animal inside or beside her. I think this is what makes her so damned scary. She screams our fears into the night, and forces us to confront ourselves”.*
I’m not sure we’re (well, I’m) so great at Crones. The problem is, she’s flippin’ scary, and it’s much easier to just ignore her and hope she doesn’t pick on us.
Samhain is a scary time – it is Crone energy time. It’s about fears, the long dark night of the soul, being broken and terrified and having to push through it. It’s not so much that the Crone Goddess is guaranteed to mess you up this Halloween season, but she could do so, and we have to respect that.
She’s not doling out pain and fear-facing for the hell of it. As people we collect fears and habits and ideas that are not good for us and that do not serve our truth. Our truth (or our inner goddess, goddess self, soul, blue god, whatever) is the part of us that is the most concentrated expression of who we are/the divine in us, and we tend to clog it up with junk. We can’t be happy and authentic with a fog of crap blocking our truth up. We have got to face our crap, peeps.
In honour of the Crone Goddess, it’s a great idea to spend some introspective time confronting your fears and investigating what is getting in the way of you being you. Some of it will be easy, some of it will involve some hard core detective work. You can turn your list and explanation of fears into a ritual, burning your fears and proclaiming your freedom from them in a sacred Samhain Fire. Or you could lock yourself in the bath room, allow yourself to feel and experience these fears one buy one and mark yourself with paint/dark face pack with each one, which you wash off in a shower afterwards.
Buried under the Crone’s scary confronting exterior is a being of huge, deep, fathomless love. The Crone knows that the easy way doesn’t always create the change we need, and she is not afraid to lead us through the hard and painful way if that is what we need to change and grow.
*That’s an exerpt from my witchy diary, paraphrasing and exploring part of Kathy Jones’ chapter on Samhain in Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of the Goddess. It completely sums up Crone Goddess energy for me.
This is a lovely post! I think that when you are willing to delve deeply in to those feelings that may appear intense and dark at first and just sit with them, they reveal the source of your motivations, fears and self-imposed limits which enable you to fully shed the past because it no longer has a hold over you.
Wonderful post. I have been visited by the Crone Goddess much these past few weeks and doing some deep soul searching. I love how you explained above, that we take on so many fears and habits that are not our truths, yet still hold on to them. I see a wonderful sacred Samhain Fire this year to help me release what does not serve me anymore.
As one who is becoming a Crone, I appreciate this post. Conversation about the shadow side is important.
In the story of Persephone and Demeter, it is the Crone, Hecate, who represents Winter. She is the mother howling in grief over losing her daughter and punishes the earth by preventing growth. The energy is also like Kali, that of destruction. We cannot have rebirth without death. It’s the fear of dying and death that makes this imagery so potent.
Beautiful. The idea that there is such strong and abiding love behind the Crone’s actions makes so much sense to me — sometimes looking into the darkness and learning my own strength is the only way I can truly move forward from the stuck places.
love this.. Samhain has always been a difficult time for me.. i tried to get involved with festivities but my soul just doesn’t feel this is what this time of year is about.. Beautiful lonely introspection.. thank you
A wonderful post and so fitting for the season. I am just myself starting to feel less scared of the Crone energy. I still find it difficult to connect with her but I’m getting more comfortable, slowly but surely.
Thanks Dominee. I have found it quite hard to connect with her: we don’t really get a lot of focus on older women being badass in our culture, or respecting them for it if they are, and we aren’t great at angry women either. I’m just starting to get into it too 🙂
I quoted you on my blog today!
http://www.soulspackle.com/1/post/2011/11/hurricane-hecate-in-the-dark.html 🙂
Woohoo! And what a great blog post it was!