11.11 - The Return of Ancestral Swan Magic

November eleventh was once the 'heathen' halloween in Ireland and is full of myth and magic, as an enchanting ancestral portal for mediumship, death and grief 'swan' rites.

I can hear the flutter of ancient swan wings ready to lift our heavy hearts….

I had my first ‘formal’ magic wink through the numbers 11.11 – it was many years ago, back in university, when there was no internet, barely any information on magic (absolutely zero on feminine womb magic) and dinosaurs still roamed the land.

It was a Friday night and me and a friend were driving to London for a weekend of hedonism, and were playing loud dance music in the car as we sped down the motorway, surrounded by a darkly thick night. “Look at the clock” she said suddenly. I glanced over, and in the darkness the numbers 11:11 positively glowed. “I keep seeing these numbers” she told me. I think we understood it had a magical meaning, a ‘wink’, a strange communication – but we didn’t know words like awakening back then.

This was what I came to know as an “uncanny” moment, when there is an intrusion from the spirit realms, a quickening. A template imprinted.

Speed up a few years later, when the internet had started to pollinate ideas wildly and widely, I learned more about these magical ‘angel’ numbers. I wasn’t entirely sold on them though, but still the numbers followed me. Like a cosmic dialing code.

Something that I have been, and am, slowly and surely stalking with curiosity is the intersection points between so-called ‘new age’ ideas and ancestral traditions. After my dalliances with the 11.11 mythology, next the “Swan” landed on my spiritual turf.

It’s hard to explain now, when ideas proliferate and spread in lunar tidal surges to become ‘the norm’, how utterly bizarre it was back then when an idea or frequency popped up unexpectedly, that was absolutely unheard of, and hard to fathom.

That was my experience with Swan Magic. I had zero interest in swans. And no idea of the immense mythological, spiritual, multi-dimensional magic they conveyed for many ancient traditions, across many cultural epochs. Sure, I knew that Saraswati travelled on a swan or goose, making her music. I could have probably fathomed that the wings of Isis, were bird wings – such as a swan or vulture, or I might have remembered those old Greek vases I had seen in the museum in Heraklion in Crete, Greece, when I was a younger travelling nomad, where Aphrodite rode a swan. And yes, the old fairytales featured swan maidens, and I had heard of swan songs, and even swooned over Tolkien’s swan barge to Faery. I could have added it together, but I didn’t.

Until one day I did. Not by thinking it all together, but by scrying in the crystal ball of my womb magic, who said SWANS. (Originating in the constellation of Cygnus).

Without realizing it, so began my long and crazy journeys with swans, ancestors, Mary Magdalene and feminine magic, leading to some unfathomable co-incidences, including receiving a large swan lyre (which at that time, back in 2015, was one of the only ones in the world) that re-instated a Greek feminine mystery tradition of women playing swan lyre in oracular ceremony that had been broken for at least 1,000 years.

The day we picked the swan lyre up in Paris, due to weird traffic, we had to stop off at a random place and walk by foot to meet the Lyre Maker’s wife, and receive the (very heavy) lyre. When I looked up, we were on Rue De Cygne, The Road of the Swan.

Many years later, on my last day of pregnancy, my husband and I recorded ourselves playing the Swan Lyre, each in turn and then together, and this was the music playing when our daughter first entered the world. A birthing Swan Song. My daughter’s name Orphea, had come to me in a dream (which I had at first mistaken for ‘Sophia’) was a Greek word that meant beautiful voice, and denoted the female harpists and singers in the mystery traditions, who created sound webs to weave their magic.

Swan Songs – are frequencies that open the portal between the worlds, the ‘womb door’ that brings us life – or death. This can be literal or more often metaphysical.

Swan rites and magic from our ancient Elven heritage

So, this magical adventure finally landed me on the doorstep of 11.11 and the Irish and Brythonic Swan Festivals of Britain, now reduced to merely a new age ‘angel’ fancy.

It felt like this ancient sacred day was calling to offer refuge from the candy-stuffed, horror movie kitsch or the religious hue of modern day celebrations during this time.

What is wondrous, and utterly fascinating to me, is that what we now call ‘halloween’ –represented by ghouls and darkness and a fearful or haunted frequency around death and grief magic – was once a magical Swan Festival, and a rite of death and rebirth.

I love how the Swan lore is supremely magical and feminine, enchanting, compassionate and glittering with diamond light. Not grizzly or overbearing. This is death in her most regal gowns, oracular, stern yet kind, both icy and motherly. It is not a cheap gaudy mask, but a rite that is woven by women across time in deep beauty.

Our Ancestors in England saw that the swans returned in November, and then left again in February. This time of the ‘return of the swans’ was a deeply liminal time, a womb of magic, a time of shapeshifting and miracles. A time when the dead spoke.  

This special date of November 11th has been sacred to the goddess for thousands of years, and although it is now famous as Martinmas (named after a Christian Saint), it was once known as the “Old Halloween”, a time of supreme magic of the old fair folk.

in fact, I wonder if it's the true origin or inspiration of Thanksgiving, an 'autumn harvest meal' in America, that was brought over the seas? A modern swan feast?

From my lens, 11:11 was the original 'thanksgiving' festival of Europe, where across the lands people roasted a water bird - either a goose or swan and participated in huge celebrations and feasting, known as the "old halloween" that was a sacred day of the Goddess, as the swan or goose was the sacred bird familiar of the Goddess. It was a day for feminine magic. It was a day to acknowledge our return to the womb.

The true date of ‘Old Halloween’ is supported by evidence from folk collectors. In an interview with a local villager about the lost Swan Feast witch tradition, conducted by the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University back in 1964, a local man confirmed that November 11 was the day Halloween was marked in Killin until World War One. He described November 11 as the “old heathen” date for the celebration.

I’m sure in the oldest of the old, it was a lunar celebration - at new or full moon.

This year we have a new moon in Scorpio on November 13th, in the same portal.

After the Swan Feasts, true winter fell over the lands, and people entered the oracular darkness and rested after the summer's work. During this time Ancestress worship of the motherline was common, as in winter it was thought supernatural females, such as the Cailleach roamed the land and it was a time for ancestral feminine magic. 

It marked the end of the harvest, and was a time to feast and festival and turn towards the magical descent into Winter Solstice for rest, regeneration and vision. It was a time to feel, to grieve, to lament, to praise, give thanks, and seek solace in community.

It was a very ecomantic time for magic. Around 11:11, often on a full moon, swans would populate the skies with their strange and otherworldly cries as they migrated back from the arctic for the winter. Around Imbolc, 1st February – also a sacred day of Brighid- the swans would depart and fly back to the far north again. 

The Goddess Brighid as a Swan Maiden in the Swan Cape by Wendy Andrews

It was believed the Swans were female shapeshifters and shamans who carried souls between worlds and escorted the dead to and from the Otherworld.  It was known as a time when the veils were thin, and souls were departing, and ancestors walking and communicating. It was a time for magic, for scrying, for transformation and ritual.

The Swan or goose was closely related to the goddess and her worship around the world, and was the familiar of Brighid, Isis and Aphrodite, and Sarasvati in India. 

In Britain, the Swan was most closely associated with the Celtic Brighid or Bride, and the enchantress witches who sung the magical sacred ‘swan songs’. 

Bards, druids and druidesses – feminine magicians and chantresses – wore floor-length swan feathered capes or cloaks during their magical ceremonies. 

The Banshee – the ‘Fairy Woman’ or Bean Sidhe - who greeted dead souls in Irish tradition, was likely connected to this lore of an ancient magical feminine tradition, often symbolized by the animal familiars Swan and Raven, bringing grief, death and also heavenly transmission and renewal. Their Queen was from the old ‘Elf Home’.

In Irish tradition, the bards would wear a cloak made of swan feathers to incant their poetry. This special shamanic cloak called a tuigen is associated with shamanic flight into the Otherworld.

In Irish mythology, Caer Ibormeith, a prince’s daughter, would shape-shift into a swan every alternate Samhain, residing in her swan form for an entire year until the next Samhain.

Mac Ind Olc, son of the Dagda and one of the Tuatha de Danann, searches for Caer Ibormeith in his dreams—where he finds her and 150 other women chained up in pairs at the lake of the Dragon’s Mouth. Mac is told that if he can identify Caer Ibormeith in her swan form, he can marry her. He chooses correctly, and they both fly to the River Boyne as swans. During their swan flight, they sing such beautiful songs they put Ireland to sleep for three days and nights.

Tales of transformation into swans refer to forgotten shamanic flights of consciousness, which are associated with the feminine path of magic, as the swan is a feminine totem. Oracular gnosis or crossing the veil is the ‘flight of the swans’

In England some noble families even claimed that their bloodline lineage is descended from a Knight who was born from magical shapeshifting swan maidens, most likely a reference to a bloodline of bardic magicians who revered sacred women who were known for their magical and Oracular powers and gift of tongues and prophecy.

Many years ago, in 2009 I began to write a novel that wove between a story of Jesus and Magdalene’s love story, and the lost traditions of a “Sisterhood of the Swan”. This book is still in process, as the swans are still singing in my ears to guide me…

Now the dust has settled on Halloween, we can soften into the magic of this liminal time, and sense across the veil of ancient rites of grief magic and renewal that call us.

This year I am holding a Grief Salon on the 11.11 portal, where we will take the opportunity of this ‘swanning’ of the veils of feminine magic, to serenade our own souls with the forgotten swan songs, and to initiate the grief that renews the land.

You can join Feminine Magic School, which includes the Grief Salon for free.

Or you can join the Grief Salon as a stand-alone gathering