Coming Into My Cronage

and lessons 21-30 in a course in goddess

Tuesday I celebrated my 69th solar return and decided it’s high time to embrace the Goddess-given role of crone. I start this episode with some quotes from Artemis Forest Fairy on The Psychic Landscape of the Crone and Barbara Sinclair on My World of Woo. I cite a book called The Crone Zone by Nina Bargiel. I continue with lessons 21-30 from A Course in Miracles that I’m translating into A Course in Goddess. Isaac Middle has gifted me a celestial reading in Astrology 2.0 translated from the patriarchal into the emergent feminine. And I end with Sex and the Crone!

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the crone re-membering

Artemis Forest Fairy, on another comment thread, pointed me to her excellent article on The Psychic Landscape of the Crone. In her words:

There has been, a "Great Forgetting" ... and there is much sadness and loss in these words. There is also, to my right a great portal...where a powerful energy pulls everything into it, like a great black hole......and this, is how the future is made.... you are always throwing stuff down it and you do not know. A Crone, can send something On purpose. a few seconds of information, maybe 8, Of her history. What she witnessed that should be remembered. You have been sending thought forms, narratives, and beliefs down there unconsciously enough as it is ... some of which should probably, be UN-done, to protect the future generations. Be AWARE! Rituals, and times of year really do come into play here. Especially the Moon phases. Also, if you have not dealt with your shadow to a very high degree, don't even try it. You have no idea how much you can suffer when that trickster slips a spin on what you THOUGHT was a perfectly good idea. It may be, This is only really safe for Crones.

And here is her beautiful ritual:

By the midnight
By the moon
Send this memory
Through the womb

By the heart
By the blood
Know the truth
For the good

By the starlight
By the song
May this knowing
Make you strong

By the water
By the well
Keep this insight
Dark and fell

I the crone
I the crown
Northern Source-ress
Of renown

By the thorn
By the seed
Craft the wit
To the need

By the focus
By the will
Drum and fire
Forge it real

By the silver
Thread of night
Gifts are woven
Strong and Bright

By the portal
I command
Take this knowledge
In your hands.

#21. The Psychic Landscape of the Crone

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the woo wooman

Barbara Sinclair, who writes The Quaking Poplar, in-spirits the crone, which is more apt than em-body. In My World of Woo, she talks about her love of art and stories as a child, and how she loved solitude even then—to which I relate. She started writing an article called Embracing the Woo, and was dismayed by the disparaging definitions of the word. Then, she writes:

I took a break from writing this to make myself a cup of tea and listen to Asia Suler’s wonderful podcast. “Remember Why You Are Here.”

It was a Q&A episode titled “How do I find rhythm in a life that keeps changing?” I almost spilled my tea when Asia responded to someone’s question by saying, “Embracing the Woo.” Guess what the title of this post was while it was languishing in my Dashboard? You guessed it! It was “Embracing the Woo!”

The first thing I did was come up with a different title. :)

Asia did a little digging on the etymology, and I’m so grateful she did.

This word “woo” comes from ancient China. And this word “woo” in ancient China, meant female, shaman, healer, and herbalist. So, really, this word woo is a word for a class of women who were incredibly powerful, and held power through their ability to be in connection with the non-physical world, with the spirit world, to be in connection with the healing power of the plants, and with their own intuition. And so this sacred term for this sacred class of people was taken by the West and twisted into something that was ungrounded, that was shameful, that was “out there”. And why I say this, is because embracing our woo is a reclamation.

—Asia Suler

My World of Woo

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the crone alone

I picked up Nina Bargiel’s The Crone Zone from the impulse-buy table at my bookstore without high expectations. I thought it would be mystical in a trendy way or grannies-a-gogo in a pandering way, but couldn’t resist the name. Instead I’ve found it both sassy and insightful even though, at 51, Nina is really just a baby crone. Her clever titles are after my own heart: “Let’s Sit a Spell,” “A Room of One’s Crone,” “Romancing the Crone,” and “Crone Sweet Home,” to name a few.

She lists three touchstones of the crone: Knowledge, Wisdom and Fuck It. The third is particularly handy for making yourself useless, which is key to being a crone. You need to say no to all those people and tasks tugging on you. My friend has wanted to write the book 'Give Up Sooner’ and I told her I’d write the sequel, ‘Waste More Time.’

Nina states that the crone designation didn’t emerge until Robert Graves, in his book The White Goddess, rebranded Hecate’s three faces as ‘maiden, mother, crone’ or ‘young and hot,’ ‘mommy’ and ‘old and useless.’ She writes, “you can be a fucking goddess for more than two thousand years and one day some guy comes along and decides, nah, she’s a crone. And that’s that.”

I realized that I had been a maiden for 34 years, since I had my oldest daughter at 35. I’ve been a mother now for as long as I was a maiden, another 34 years to 68. If my third phase as crone lasts as long, I’d live to 102 … and why not?

In a chapter called ‘Hello Darkness My Old Friend,’ Nina chronicles her need, from a young age, for time alone. However, she finds herself lonely in her marriage, which is different. When she divorces and is alone, she stops being lonely. I can relate to that.

Gerda Lerner ends her book, The Creation of Patriarchy, by writing:

To step outside of patriarchal thought means … developing intellectual courage, the courage to stand alone, the courage to reach farther than our grasp, the courage to risk failure. Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most ‘unfeminine’ quality of all—that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The hubris of the god-makers, the hubris of the male system-builders. The system of patriarchy is a historical construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end.

To which I wrote in the margin: “I’ve waited 200 generations to speak. I can wait a little longer to be heard.” This is a job for the crone.

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a course in goddess 21-30

21. I am determined to see things differently.
22. What I see is a form of vengeance.
23. I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.
24. I do not perceive my own best interests.
25. I do not know what anything is for.

26. My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability.
27. Above all else, I want to see.
28. Above all else, I want to see things differently.
29. Goddess is in everything I see.
30. Goddess is in everything I see because Goddess is in my mind.

The word crone contains c-r-one: see-er one or seer one. It’s no longer a do-er one. All that’s needed to change the world is to see it without placing blame. Attack isn’t a bad thing you do to others, it’s self-destructive. Blame and guilt and fear are the un-wholly trinity—you can’t have one without the other two tagging along.

When something happens that you think is bad, you don’t need to figure out the lesson in it. It may take time—years, decades, eternity—to reveal its purpose. But its purpose will always be your greatest happiness. It brings eternity closer by taking a shortcut, when you meant to go around in circles. You are invulnerable. That you can trust. All things are for your greatest happiness. That is what everything is for.

There are only two ways of seeing: vengeance and Goddess. Vengeance can only be desired by a victim who sees themselves as morally superior, deserving better. The quickest way to a Goddess state of mind is dropping superiority, which comes disguised in woke clothing as ‘defending the oppressed.’ Have the hubris to reorder the world, don’t lecture from the podium of your bumper sticker or lawn sign.

The same Goddess in your Mind is in everyone else’s Mind as well. You are the Seer and so are They. If you want to see your superiority to them, don’t blame Goddess if you’re surrounded by idiots. That’s what you chose. As the anti-labelist Antila H. Belist posted:

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the dark moon mistress

For my 69th solar return, Isaac Middle of Down the Wombat Hole kindly gifted me a reading of my stars, planets and asteroids, Goddess version. We have been wholesomely conspiring on exposing the patriarchy of the Sky Gods, a mythology of mock battle between Greek and Roman characters who both play the same role.

The chapter of OMGdess I’m writing now is Unravelling the Baal. Among the earliest symbols of Goddess were the Egyptian horned cow Baat and the Celtic white cow Boann, whose Way of the Wandering Cow became the Milky Way. Baat gets turned into Baal, the power of the feminine usurped and made masculine.

The constellation Scorpio was mythically related to the death of Orion. The historical warlord called the Scorpion was connected to the death of the first Egyptian patriarch from the conquering Hor, who would be a Horion. Aries/ Mars have Aryan warlord in their names. Jupiter is the Ju-patr of the Aryan Sky Father Dyeus Patr, while Zeus is the other half of the name. It’s a false dichotomy.

Taurus comes from the Aryan táwros, from which also derives tora (Torah) as Aramaic for bull. The word decipherer Rhonda, commenting as wildrhody, used to point out that Bible was buy-bull. But now it turns out to be by-Baal. It’s the coded antithesis of the Goddess code of ethics, turned into sacrifice to a bloodthirsty idol of gold.

So Taurus should really be Baat, giver of a river of milk and wisdom. Leo should be Mehit, lioness guardian of that river. And the serpent is Ua Zet, who became Au Set who became Isis who was genderbent into Jesus, since J represents I in Hebrew. I wonder if Scorpio was the vulture Goddess Nekhbet, who cleaned the bones of the dead so they could be buried under the bed.

I was born under the sign of Baat, with one horn facing the material world of practicality and domesticity, as a doer. The other faces the mystical world of symbology and intuition, as a seer. Socio-spirituality. The horned cow was not defenseless in the wild against a horny bull. Baat is no tawdry táwros.

Isaac sees the fixed luminaries as the place where the Goddess stories play out. He looks at Juno in my chart, the wife of Jupiter/ Zeus, who wants to help and be faithful to the self-centered masculine leader and is betrayed. Algol is especially interesting as the Medusa head. Female power is cut off from serving the feminine and inverted to be a shield for the male. As the most powerful of the luminaries, she ends up named for alcohol and becomes the demon spirit. He says:

Goddess energy can be hijacked through trauma and rape and violation. They take the head and then literally destroy the psychology of someone with the Lilith spirit, and then turn that against the female and use that to wreak havoc.

He continues:

You, to the surprise of no one, dear, have Lilith very focused in your chart. Your Lilith point, your black moon, is exactly square. And in the sixth house, the house of service, you channel the dark goddess as work, doing the unpopular things. You have Chiron right there as well, bringing the nobility, the self-sacrifice, showing the wounds of the Mother, the Goddess.

The Lilith-Chiron pairing is key to your evolutionary journey because it’s square to the eclipse axis, the skip-step of what we may have got wrong the last time and this time are narrowing in on.

Intriguingly, Isaac sees the moon as a decoy of the feminine power, which makes sense as a reflection of the Sun God. The dark moon, belonging to itself alone, is the true feminine. The dark moon is the crone.

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sex and the crone

As readers know, my latest passion has been salsa dancing. Although I started dancing a decade ago, there are three things my Worldanz classes don’t give me:

1. Men.

2. Close proximity to men.

3. Being touched by men.

Social dancing breaks the physical barrier. It seems to be making a comeback as a rare ‘third space’ apart from work and home—which are merging into one high-rent jail cell tethered to a screen. It is polyamorous and polyglamorous, with all kinds of bodies and all kinds of styles welcome. The classes rotate partners, so it’s an inclusive orgy of collective fumbling and eventual epiphanies, when the moves finally come together. Moans of satisfaction can be heard.

It’s a dance with high gender contrast, although there are women in the classes learning to lead, and men who dance together but don’t rotate. In the social dances, women often dance together and sometimes so do men. It’s fun to see tall guys finally dancing with someone their height. The most in-demand leaders, however, are often short and confident, dancing with women standing tall in four-inch heels. Bachata, a more intimate Latin dance, isn’t as interesting at the level of a man’s chest or neck.

Most important to my point, salsa is age-indifferent. Latin clubs, I hear, are a hook-up culture with dance on the side, but for venues with no alcohol, dance is the main course. Some women are newly married, securely married, or married with the husband at home watching the kids. That doesn’t work for the men in reverse.

Contrary to lying about my age, I brag about it. Women need to know age isn’t a downhill slide. This puts me in a different role with young men. Being outside the mating dance makes for an easy and comfortable rapport. I don’t worry about the signals I’m sending and how they’re being received. It’s all just play and flirting. I like to think this is good practice for their actual mating dance—sending a signal to other women that this guy is Goddess approved.

The pairing of the priestess and young consort goes back to the Stone Age. When sex was sacred and happened at the woman’s choosing on temple grounds, fertile young women had to be choosy. The consequences of bearing and raising a child wasn’t entered into lightly. Women past that age were more free. Images of the Sumerian high priestess show her as a crone. The rituals of initiation may have skipped generations, with the older women helping young men know how to please a partner—and reporting back on their results.

Or maybe the priestess crones said ‘fuck it, learn on your own time. I am done with being useful or used by anyone else. This is my time to come into a room of one’s crone.’ Welcome to the Crone Age.

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On my 68th birthday, I call on mothers to reclaim their power as the Creatrix and their Goddess-given right to the family shelter. I go back 5000 years to Set, the sociopath son, who killed Au-Set the Goddess Mother and put himself on Her Throne through blood sacrifice and burnt offerings. As the Hexing Cult goes for the Great Re-Set, the Goddess returns.

Isaac Middle is the Australian author of Wholesome Conspiratorial Astrology. From his 90-pp reading of my chart, I explain the differences in Vedic, True Sidereal, Sidereal and Tropical, Raku and Ketu and the Nakshatras. Then I read Luna's view of plotting a revolution with a Plutonic Power Generator, Holy Warriors, and a Spiritual Messenger from the Past.

I combine Isaac Middle's wholesome wombat astrology with A Course in Miracles and the story of a backless sock box and a laundry room door. Chiron gets a scolding and retaliates immediately. Aphrodite and Luna take over the role of radiant healer. WTF becomes 'What's This For?'