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How I Priestess is affected by the Wheel of the Year and the element that I find myself in each season.
By nature I can get quite cerebral about my spiritual practice, this has both served and hindered me. As I began to work with the Wheel of the Year and implement the four elements into my growth, I found balance. Earth grounded me, water connected me, and fire ignited me, these three elements balanced the cerebral airy nature that I often lean into.
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I’ve known years when the trees were bare of leaves by the end of September. In recent years I’ve seen leaves still on trees during my habitual Christmas day walk to my mother’s house. No two autumns ever have quite the same shape, and what turns when has a lot to do with the shape of the land, and where exactly your land is, as well.
This year, some trees started showing autumnal colours fairly early in September. I write this blog at the beginning of October, with an array of yellow, copper and happily photosynthesising greens outside my window. The story of leaves is not one that fits tidily into the wheel of the year, not least because during the part of the winter when the trees are supposedly sleeping, they make their buds, all ready for next year’s growth. the falling of leaves is a process that can start before the autumn equinox and go through to midwinter.
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As I emerged from our Cauldron Month, I received the Seed card from Womanrunes. This is a rune of waiting and ripening and is the perfect rune to consider during a time of processing and exploration. What did you find in the cauldron? What tender seed are you nourishing? What is getting ready to grow for you? To push up its first tender shoots of exploration and discovery?
Maybe this seems like an odd time of year to be speaking of new growth as the wheel of the year in the Northern Hemisphere moves towards autumn, but as we deepen into the shadows of the colder months of the year, I find my attention turns to those seeds we plant and nourish in our dark spaces.
where the hidden seed lies unfolding, the unseen power that rises within us, the dark of sacred human flesh, the depths of the ocean, the night—when our senses quicken; we reclaim all the lost parts of ourselves we have shoved down into the dark. Instead of enlightenment, we begin to speak of deepening…”
Lammas, Lugnasadh, the celebration of the grain harvest is a few days behind us. However, not all plant life corresponds with the grain, there are many things out there in the UK at different points in their life cycles right now so I thought I’d talk about those to offer some alternative takes on the wheel of the year for this month.
Lammas rituals often encourage us to focus on personal harvests and bounty, but there’s nothing in nature that says it is natural to be at the harvest stage at specifically this point in the year. If your life is not aligning you to the grain harvest, look around to see what you do connect with.
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The Wheel of the Year is widely honored by we Wiccans, along with Druids, and many other NeoPagans. The eight Sabbats arranged along the Wheel are divided into universal solar cycles celebrating the solstices and equinoxes and four place-specific ones representing the agricultural cycles of planting, growth, harvest, and death. The Wheel’s symbolism is beautifully adapted to illustrate profound insights in regions with four seasons because both cycles are coordinated, but its basic insights are true everywhere.
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I’ve repeatedly run into wheel of the year narratives that encourage us to align our lives with the sun’s cycle. This, we are told, is more natural. We should dream and hibernate in the depths of winter, plant the seeds for our projects in the spring, watch them grow through the summer and take our harvest in the autumn. Never mind that many projects are not shaped like growing grain in the first place.
What do you do if the winter is a depressing time? What do you do if you need the warmth and comfort of sunny days to do your dreaming and planning? What do you do if you work best in the winter, locked away from the world? If your nature doesn’t align you to the solar wheel, how can forcing yourself to fit with it be natural?
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Magic happens. I know that absolutely to be true. Magic shows up when you have been running around gathering all the elements needed to prepare your Maypole for a ritual that is going to be happening in 3 days – and you have nothing but Maypole on the brain – and the individual chosen to pull the Goddess card for the focus of this week’s meditation completely randomly chooses Eurynome. As above, so below. There is dance in the air and She showed up to meditate.
There are a few different Eurynomes (or versions of Her story) that show up in mythology. Homer mentions Her as a daughter of the Ocean who nursed Hephaestus, and Hesiod claims She was mother to the Graces. The Eurynome we met on Wednesday (as presented in The Goddess Oracle by Amy Marashinsky, illustrated by Hrana Janto) is possibly an older iteration that reflects a primordial creation myth. Born out of Chaos and a Titan ruler in Her own right, this Eurynome danced until She created the wind, out of which She fashioned the snake, Orphion. As she continued Her dance, Orphion was so enamored of Her movements that he was overtaken with lust. The union of Eurynome and Orphion produced the Universal Egg, out of which all the animals and plants of the world are hatched.
