Circles of Initiation

I've been meditating on levels of initiation. And times when there are things to say and times when there is nothing to say. Things crowd in and all sorts of thoughts, feelings, images, natural objects ... seem significant, or are imbued with significance. Then things clarify. What was a rush of significance resolves into something deeper, clearer, transparent: into knowledge. You've arrived. After all the things that were to say, to experience, to embrace, there is nothing .....

For a while you mark time. Your initiation feels complete. Until another level, a deeper circle within the Abyss, a higher zone on the Astral Plane, forms and opens new avenues for exploration. The enticing path through the Forest that you thought had come out into the light turns back into the trees again and the Forest beckons once more, darker, deeper, more significant than ever.

No-one can foresee this and tell you when it will happen. There are guides to point the way if you can recognise them. Guardians to warn you if you can hear their voices. But you are alone on the path. Only you can walk it. Only you can learn the lessons deep in the Forest. You?  Me  

Saints and Goddesses

I've been thinking and meditating a lot on the links between pagan goddessess/gods, land spirits (wights) and christian saints. I know that some saints were actual people in history who have been declared to be saints. I don't really understand that except as a way of honouring people and then associating them with aspects of deity as time goes on.  But in some cases no-one seems able to say if or when  a saint was an historical person. I think here that a protective spirit of some place began to live more widely in a story and grew in the spirit world because of the prevalence of the story and so became a goddess or god in the pagan world or a saint in the christian world.

I've been thinking about such things since putting the icon painting of Saint Melangell on my last blog entry and trying to understand why I felt that I should do that. After all I'm a witch. I'm led by my meditations, my thoughts, my reading and my discussions with people to conclude that Melangell is a presence in her valley of Pennant in Wales, that she has a life as a hare goddess and as a saint associated with her church in her remote valley, and that none of these are incompatible with each other. Her story lives in me. So she is with me, whether as a saint or a goddess or a protective spirit. She is beyond such words.

MELANGELL

In the dark time between Samhain and Imbolc I have been quiet and withdrawn. For Imbolc I lit an array of candles for the awakening light. I have been - spiritually - in a hidden valley learning about Melangell. I've known something about her for a while, the story that she hid a hare under her frock to hide it from a hunter. Last summer I visited the valley of Pennant Melangell in Wales where this story is set. It's very remote and the little medieval church is as far as the narrow road goes. It's a place of retreat and I sat outside under the yew trees thinking about her story, and it hasn't left me, and neither has she.

So I've been meditating and researching all I can and all the time bringing her closer. She has been adopted as a christian saint, but some see her as a pagan hare goddess or a protective deity of the Pennant valley. But her protective veil goes wider than that, and I feel myself under her care in a way that i have never felt before. Like that hare under her frock. Safe in the darkness.. Now the light is returning, and the hare can run free.

There's some  info about her on the web from Wikipedia to the website of the centre in Pennant, and this site which has some interesting discussions: MELANGELL

It's now my quest to find out anything more that I can by reading and by personal meditation, which I think she encourages.

Thoughts in Withered Bracken

 

Sitting on a hillside between withered stalks of bracken and sodden leaves I feel something inside me responding to the season. As if the faintest stirring of something, unready to show itself, but waiting its time. I am becoming so focussed now on the natural rhythms of the land and I feel myself responding so sensitively to them from within me.

 Finding a way to face the Dark One in her deepest darkness seems to have brought me on to a clear path - not dark at all but like crystal in its quality, or deep clear water I can see through to another world. I'm finding it more and more difficult to find words for what I want to say, even though my mind is clearer now than it's ever been.

I hope to say something of my discovered path, though I'm becoming more convinced that what I need to say is beyond words. Once i would have felt that it is all too sacred to make public. Now I'm sure that whatever I try to say will be in code except  for those who already know and will recognise the meanings between the words.