When you hone your skills in boundary creation, you do yourself a formidable service in protecting your sacred self against both malicious and unwitting trespassers. A woman who nurtures herself so nurtures every woman in the world. So may it be for you, and so may it be for every one of us.
THE DARK MOON AND NESTING IN NOTHINGNESS
Closely associated with the aspects of the feminine that have been most feared, most condemned throughout time, the dark moon phase is marked by a lunar void. This phase, my brave Witch, is your lunar winter. Here you are a seed resting in the deep soil, waiting for the spark of life to ignite an inevitable stir in your heart. The dark of the moon is a time of seeming finality and death, and it is associated with your inner Wise Woman, an all-knowing Witch consciousness that lives in quiet solitude and perfect stillness.
At the dark of the moon, my love, it is best to work no manifestation magick unless you feel called loudly to work. Now is the time for clear seeing, divine reception, and surrender. Rituals and self-designed ceremonies marking transitions, validating cyclical conclusions, or supporting feminine intuition are ideal for this psychically fertile phase of the moon. Sink into the void with all that you are, and relish this time of thick, psychic energy and nourishing rest. Take time to be alone during those nights when the moon seems to be abandoning the world. Consider what you may be grieving for. Ask yourself: What has been released from your life during this past lunar month? Have you truly accepted this change?
The Witch of the Dark Moon embodies a subtle reverence for nothingness and stillness. She looks neither ahead nor behind her. She resists the urge to plan and perfect, and, in that empty space, she becomes a receptor for tiny pinpoints of light, divine nudges, and infinitesimal hints that she collects in a psychic knapsack. She does not try to order this information or make too much sense of it; she simply gathers, giving herself permission to feel her way through the dark by the power of her keenest senses.
The Nine of Swords: A Dark Moon Ritual
The levels of grief are both complex and personal. As women we are often taught to suppress our emotions for fear of being perceived as weak, and depression, we learn, is unforgivable. Women’s deep dive into periods of sadness, lethargy, and complete surrender is often a necessary time of respite. Something is not working in your life, be it physically, emotionally, or spiritually, and depression groundswells from your feminine roots in an effort to pull you down into urgently needed contemplation. Here, in your dark night of the Witch’s soul, you give yourself permission to feel it all. You will weep and let the tears have their way with you.
The nine of swords in a Tarot deck marks a woman in pain; very often she is affected by quintessential wounds of the feminine. Ponder this, love: If you were asked to be the creatrix of a ritual, a self-designed ceremony of letting go, what would you dedicate this ritual to? In the darkness of this moon, design a sacred ceremony of release and transition that will give you time and space both to acknowledge loss and to welcome transformation.
Light a white candle and burn sage and sweetgrass. Whisper now the intention for this ritual: Tonight, I am marking the end/death/release/conclusion of ___________. I offer gratitude for how I was served by this powerful force when it was in my life, but now I am letting it go. I accept this change and give myself permission to feel the emotions deep in my womb. Let these feelings bloom and bubble from within you in whatever way seems fitting, for as long as you have. You will know when the ritual is complete, my love, for you will feel a tingle of rebirth; you will find a small bit of space into which you can nestle, one that was not there at the ceremony’s inception.
Snuff out the candle and sink into an unburdened sleep, waking just as the new moon dawns. Do not try too hard to label your emotions, positive or negative, for our language very often has no words for the complexity of our feelings. In this dark moon space, simply acknowledge that a change has occurred, feel supported by the gift of ground beneath you, and breathe. Know that just enough psychic clutter has been cleared to offer you a window through which you can look, wielding the fierce foresight of a mother hawk.
The wild woman is adept at quieting the urge to label and quantify the changes occurring both within and outside her being. You may not feel immediate shifts following rituals and magick work, but you must know in your bones that you have done all you can. Though we have nothing to call this particular transformation, this small bit of space making you have done, the insufficiency of our language does not diminish the weight of your work. I find that when I have no names for how I feel after a ritual, the greatest shifts are just on the horizon.
Contemplating True Vision: Wild Divination
The restlessness of the dark moon phase can be remedied by practices of divination. Go into nature, wild woman that you are, and gather small objects that speak to your soul; these might be seeds, twigs, shells, bones, rocks, eggshells, or anything else that you can hold in your hand. Place each of these in a bag, box, or other container that seems magickal. Find a place outdoors where you will not be disturbed, or go into your home’s wild sanctuary, ideally at night when the moon is dark.
Now, sacred Sister, ask your inner Witch to speak to you of a crucial area in your life right now. Is it your work? Your relationship? She will answer you, my love. Give her a moment. Focusing on that life area with a laser-point intention, cast your wild objects in front of you. Perhaps it feels right to pour them onto the ground in a spiral motion, or to throw them into the distance. Whatever seems right, do it. Now look. What are these unlabeled runes telling you? What is your initial response to how these things are arranged? What object stands out the most? How are the objects connected, if at all? What does this wild spread tell you of your life?
Use wild divination as a bucket to draw from the deep well of your intuition. Consider that you already know everything you are meant to know at any given moment, but there are so many demands on our attention that we do not often look inward. Our animal brains are designed to protect us first from physical threats; the subtle becomes suppressed by the heavy and the physical. Focusing on whatever vehicle you use for the purposes of divining does not gift you with anything you do not already know; it simply clarifies, pulling from the shadows and making visible what otherwise would be easily ignored. A wild woman can divine as easily from a sink full of dirty dishes or a bit of sidewalk gum as she can from a gold-embossed oracle deck. See magick in the mundane, and know yourself as Witch.
THE SACRED MARRIAGE OF THE FEMININE MOON AND THE MASCULINE SUN
You may liken lunar wisdom to that of a wise grandmother. The moon is maternal and offers you hearty but subtle nourishment. By contrast, solar energies are paternal, heated, and active. The marriage of the moon and sun sustains the whole of your being as a daughter of the cosmos. Know that I use these parental terms less to refer to gender and more to refer to the feminine and masculine aspects within our human psyches. You, child of the moon and stars, must honor your alignment with both the fertile darkness of the night and the vibrant light of day. You are everything. Everything is you. Awaken your lunar memory, and embrace your birthright. Claim the sign of the multiphased moon as a symbol of wild womanhood, and plant that symbol deep in your Maiden’s sensual womb, your Mother’s creative belly, and your Crone’s intuitive third eye. My Sister, they will not see you coming, for you are truly and madly a Woman Most Wild.
The Righteous Sun and Your Priestess’s Fire
If the moon is your temple dancer’s silver-charmed sheer skirts, the sun is your bejeweled Priestess’s crown. The sun has no patience for mystery or shadow; it is a brilliant beacon of the unrelenting spiral of time. Your solar-season cycles are far lengthier than your lunar cycles, but their impact is no less profound on your psyche. While the moon calls you to surrender to your soul’s purpose on Earth, the