The Grief Mysteries

Grief is an ancient art and a sacred dimension....

Today I want to speak about The Feminine Art of Grief. This is the lake of magic that softens the structural feminine into the deep heart. It holds the mystery of love.

I first became initiated into grief many years ago, working with earth grief ceremonies, where we could keen the losses not just of our own life, or of human culture, but grieve all the way down into the bones of Gaia, where her many sorrows are held .

Then, a decade ago I experienced an extraordinary moment in a tribal village in India, where I saw a shooting star fall downwards into a small wattle and daub house at the exact moment of death of a young girl. What followed changed me, as I witnessed a night-long keening and grief ceremony by the tribal women during that long, anguished night, followed by the male rites as the sun rose, with their sacred chants.

Later on, I attended a grief ceremony with beloved Sobonfu Some, where we grieved in a mandala of elemental altars, held in the world womb, and danced to drumbeats.

Then I entered the ‘decade of death’, losing my father, uncle, cousin and mother.

The old lady Grief took me under her wing, so that I would not have to weep alone.

Grief is what makes our power soft, human and resilient, not hard and out of touch.

If we don’t grieve, our structures become rigid, our fires rage out of control, our sacred waters become deserts. Our magical feminine spirit wilts. 

Grief is the Goddess who lives inside all experience. This is why we have sacred wells inside our eyes to cry.

There is a Time for Grief: 

Under our anger….is our grief.

Under our confusion….is our grief.

Under our numbness…is our grief.

Under our judgment…is our grief.

Under our loneliness…is our grief.

Under our fear…is our grief.

Feminine Magic is a Path of Grief

Everything we love, we must also grieve.

Everything we desire, will cost us grief.

The womb is a portal of life and love,

The womb is also a gate of loss and death.

Feminine Magic is the Way of Life

This is why the feminine is so feared.

She teaches us the true ways of Gaia.

She does not give us escape routes.

Instead, she gives us deep roots.

When we work with our birth womb karma, and our emerging magic, and when we begin to dream in a new reality, and meet the old, we must grieve. We must meet grief.

But we meet grief dressed in robes you may have never seen her wear before. 

Grief as a Grande Dame.

Older than death she is, older than the oldest mountains, she was inside the tears that poured into the original dark oceans from the first thought of God, as she was menstruating an old universe she loved, and bringing ours into being.

Her magical cape is brushed with stars, her glamour is galactic in origin, and she has keened over billions of years. Her tears form spiral arms that measure the cycles of the multiverse. She is Kal, she is Time, she is Memory. She is the one who placed worlds in quantum graves, and fertilized bursting stars with memories, and she is the one who remembers. She carries grief in black-baskets, she sobbed the life into the oceans of earth, crooned in our creeks, and sang keens into our sacred springs.

You will know her when you meet her.

You will remember her, and her grief will be the medicine you have wept for.

And the strangest thing happens…when you hear her sing, and feel her black cape upon you…the light crests on your heart horizon, and the song birds start their serenade again, praising this great mystical love magic of Old Lady Grief.

We have to meet our grief to birth our magic.

It is time to grieve AND reclaim our magical power, all together.

Enchanting Grief is a key art of Feminine Magic

Grief is one of the key practices and gifts of the Way of the Enchantress.

It was known that women who were mistresses of canting grief, could charm the Ancestors and carry souls all the way back to the Womb of God. An Enchantress is a Soul doula between the worlds, a magician of thresholds and transformation.

Mary Magdalene and her line are Enchantresses of the arts of Grief Magic. 

When the Enchantress Arts got lost, and the feminine magic schools abandoned, many souls got lost on the way. The root paths of spirit travel were forgotten. 

We need to tend spaces so we can meet our grief. Not the ‘grief’ that society allows us to have, but something vaster, more mystical. A grief that actually restructures our psyche and is the substance of the Underworld. You will never ‘recover’ from grief. Grief initiates you. Grief is a feminine dimension of being inside the heart of the world.

As we become Elders, we learn to live inside grief, to mourn and praise life, right down into every nook and cranny. Our heart fills up with the medicine of old keens.

It is the secret wisdom of Sophia. It is the heart dissolved back into primordial soup, so new life emerges.

It is a mystical portal of grief which does not have to relate to a physical or literal death. Like the Tarot card ‘Death’ – we let go of something in order to enter into a new dimension of experience. It is death and rebirth; it is a portal our soul travels through on a journey of renewal. We allow old worlds and versions of ourselves to die.

Grief is above all else a mystical dimension of feminine magic, and its powers unveil when beauty, ravishing love, eros and devastation, loss, melancholy, meet to kiss and re-fertilize us. Grief becomes ecstatic, orgasmic, and pleasure opens us to more grief.

This portal belongs to the mysteries of cosmic or magical menstruation.

A woman’s womb cycle teaches us about a much deeper spiritual journey. Like the Moon, we have the ability to experience light and dark. We need to honor these cycles, and their gifts, not try and be ‘always light’. We must acknowledge we have a dark phase, to shed our skins.

We are all menstruating aspects of our life and being, all the time.

Grief is the dimension of being that allows us to truly let go and rebirth.

We can grieve for many things, including loss, but even joy and success:

• We can enter grief when our body changes, through aging, illness, pregnancy and birth, we can even enter grief when our body heals

• We can enter grief when we are letting go of jobs, homes, people, friendships, through loss or change, or even a personal ‘upgrade’

• We can enter grief when the world changes beyond our control

• We can enter grief when we evolve and find success or birth new aspects of ourselves, and need to let go of old stories and patterns

• We can enter grief when we lose a person or animal we love

• We can enter grief when we move homes, locations or countries

• We can enter grief when we let go of old beliefs and lose our ‘old self’

• We can grieve our relationships to money, to power, to our destiny still waiting

• We can grieve with our Ancestors for all the loss inside our lineage

• One of the deepest griefs we hold is that we had to hide or deny our feminine magic

Paradoxically, when we really surrender ourselves to the realm of Grief Magic, we create a greater flow of abundance, connection and love in our lives. I know personally that after each huge ‘Grief Portal’ initiation, in the aftermath I have called in new relationships, and more love and support for what I want to create.

Lineages of Feminine Grief Enchantresses

Grief also leads us into a forgotten aspect of feminine magic, which is ‘Awakening in the Nightworld’, which is presided over by various deities, who tend the inner earth and the magic fairy paths the Ancestors walk. In Egyptian tradition, the Daughters of Isis were famous for the Lamentation Rites and grief magic. In Irish tradition it is the “Banshee” – The Fairy Woman, who guards the thresholds betwixt the worlds, and the Keening women who work alongside her in middle world, crooning spirit songs.

For those who learn how to traverse these fairy paths of Otherworld, there is an enormous magical power, that can be used in service of the community, in order to birth souls in and out of this dimension, and even to doula new cultural and spiritual epochs. Reality can be seen as mostly an enchantment, that can be re-incanted.

The feminine mystical state that we call ‘grief’ is connected with the Earth Mysteries, and the descending feminine path of love. It is a spiritual path walked by many lineages of female magicians. It a way of the troubadours of grief in every age.

It teaches us about the power of love. It is the opposite of detachment from feelings, from love, from earth. It is a deep embodiment. It is the mystical story of Sophia, who myths say descended into the heart of Earth, passing through every human experience and alchemizing it.

When she returned ‘to the light’ she had been saturated in a love frequency that had never been experienced or embodied before.

Lineages of women who embodied this gift include:

• Priestesses of Isis in Egypt

• Priestesses of Inanna in Sumeria

• Celtic Bandrui Priestesses in Europe

• Mary Magdalene and the Grail Keepers

• Bean Chaointe (Keening Women) of Ireland

• Feminine Magicians of the Faery Faith (encoded in Fairytales)

• Shamanic Midwives/Doulas from many traditions

One of the deeper ways to work with grief, is when we can locate it inside a tradition of teachings and a lineage of magical feminine practitioners. This helps us viscerally elevate grief from a personal feeling or emotion to a mystical dimension that many people before us have entered and mapped out, and can give us keys as we walk through the ‘valley of grief’ so that we do not feel so alone or terrifyingly lost.

Grief Keepers around the world have kept lore, rituals and maps of how to navigate grief, at a personal level, a community level, and also at a magical, quantum level.

A modern Grief Keeper was Sobonfu Somé, a Burkinabe teacher and writer, who shared the wisdom her own own experiences of grief work from her tradition.

Like many taboo realms, such as birth and menstruation, death and grief was often tended too by women, who in old times passed lineage wisdom through the maternal line, from mother or grandmother or auntie to daughter, to preserve the knowledge.

Cathar magical women, known as “perfected ones” would first receive the consolamentum to become Priestesses of the Holy Spirit, and would then give the consolamentum to community members as they approached death. This immersion in the magic of the Holy Spirit opened them to the spiritual gift of life after death.

This liminal moment was full of feminine magic, and often included the laying of hands and the speaking of tongues (glossolalia) in ecstatic utterances. The tradition of speaking in tongues was established by mystical women in the 1st and 2nd century, as they held intimate and ecstatic gnostic churches and circles in their homes.

Mary Magdalene as a Priestess of Grief

Mary Magdalene and the Mary lineage hold secret traditions for grief, loss, keening, otherworld and underworld travel, and resurrection through the power of grieved love.

In the Magdalene Mysteries we wrote about this many-thousands-year-old tradition, and how lamenting, mourning, keening, weeping, being present with sadness and loss can actually help our body soften and embody, rather than contract and hold trauma.

"Often grief can bring us into this state of humility and a softening into love, which is the natural state of our body. When we hold on to grief and emotion, it becomes stuck in the body, making us rigid, tense, and hard—the opposite of flow. This is why grief rituals and lamenting were so important in the feminine priestess traditions, as this connection to and expression of grief allowed flow and softness."

Holding grief in a lineage, means you can walk surrounded by magical women and Ancestors who understand this deep feminine path, and have earned wisdom for you.

“The picture of Magdalene that emerges is vivid and compelling, with her scarlet hair, green eyes, alabaster or ebony skin, and rich wine-red hooded cloak. This is a woman who has become a “low priestess”—who is on her knees, weeping with the world, yet infused with the rich, abundant fertility of the soil; she can be ecstatic and enraptured with love, the one who loves “too much,” or she can be found walking amongst the fallen and forgotten, in the taverns and inns of ill repute, suffering alongside the wounded, sobbing and lamenting for the losses of humanity.” 

Mary Magdalene continues a long lineage of grief work: including the subtle feminine arts of cyclical earth grief rituals for the rise and fall of life. In some accounts, Magdalene acts as grief doula of sorts to Mary. In a thirteenth-century Italian hymn the Virgin Mary sings to Magdalene: “Help me Magdalene; grief overwhelms me”.

This mythic layer of the Mary story as grief magic, comes from an ancient tradition.

The grief rituals of Isis were particularly renowned for the intensity of their emotional outpouring, as priestesses of Isis mirrored the goddess Isis as she mourned and searched for her lost husband, Osiris, the sacred masculine, in order to rebirth him. Priestesses would walk in procession lamenting and sobbing for the beloved, their hair hung down wild, the salt of their tears flowing from the womb of their souls,

In Sumeria, in the traditions of the Goddess Inanna, priestesses of the temple might incant lamentations of her sorrows at the loss her beloved Dumuzi each autumn, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts as they empathically shared her pain.

The Keening Rite - Calling in a New Era

Most recently, I have become enchanted by the lost keening traditions of Ireland, land of my recent ancestors in Sligo and Galway. In 2020 as the world was ushered into sacred ceremony, I began studying the path of the Bean Chaointe - Keening Woman.

What struck me was the uncanny similarity of the death rites of the Irish Wake and the Keening Woman with the magical grief traditions of the Goddess rites of Isis and Inanna, and later Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary. Indeed, the word “Keen” is hard to place in the Irish language, and may have its origins in semitic language. Keening Women are taboo women, they wear their hair loose, wail, tear their clothes, jump on coffins, keen songs and incant the chthonic spirit of the dead along Faery paths.

My own theory is that the origin of this tradition comes from ancient Priestess-Queens who lamented the death of the King, the guardian of the green, and chanted him back into the Earth Mother’s womb, before initiating the next King into the role.

I can see in my oracular eye the dreadful and striking scene, of the once beautiful and gilded priestess-queen, always stately and adorned, every hair on her hair styled and coiffed, her clothes rich and well tailored, a woman who walked in regal magic with every outing, suddenly appear on the public stage as a “banshee” before the courts and people of the land, uttering wails to raise the heckles of the dead, her hair unkempt and falling to her feet, here eyes maddened and staring with grief, her every move jarring, ripping her clothes to rags, jumping on the coffin like a wild animal. Her priestesses following, with the cacophony of drums, rattles, ululations, sobbing.

We cannot underestimate the service of this magical feminine keening ritual.

Maybe it became known as: “The Queening”? The Rite of the Queen.

It signaled the end of an era, the dissolution of the way of life gone before.

In ancient times this could be a very precarious time, with much uncertainty, as the place-between-power put the people at risk of war, violence and instability.

It transitioned a society from one era to the next, from one world to another.

Like a psychic menstruation of society it would be terrifying, liminal, awe-full.

We need these time-out-of-time moments, to unravel, and to feel the sorrow.

Last year, I felt the hot whisper of those keeners on my neck with the passing of Queen Elizabeth, not someone I was particularly fond of, but I understood the incredible symbolic magic of one era dying, and the need to keen in a new one.

Last September, I wrote:

Death of a Matriarch

Earlier today I was crying in the car, and Orphea asked why - Azra answered, “because an old lady died who your mummy knew when she was a child, she's the Queen of England”. Oh, said Orphea and reached out and held my hand.

The Queen is dead. It feels important, symbolic, portentous.

I don't need to hear about the socio-poitical or conspiracy angles on the Queen, I understand them. Just leave me here in the corner with my cup of tea and grief, remembering the Jubilee street parties of my childhood, and the boring Queen's speech every Christmas that I had to sit through until Top of the Pops came on. The old lady, larger than life on the television, with grey coiffed hair like the old ladies on our street, but who wore a diamond crown and a cape. I have not known this world without the Queen of England in it. She has become archetypal.

She is like a psychic Great Auntie or a Fairytale Godmother in my imagination. She was female, regal, part of a structure I don't necessarily agree with, but one that formed my world. The bridge is crumbling between realities, time magic is weaving, change is afoot; a severance has occured. Is it good or bad? I don't know, but I know enough to at least take my hat off and acknowledge a rite of passage for an old world. Because more ghosts than we can know walk beside that coffin...ancient keeners from lost eras will unbind their hair and incant the last 'queening' cry. I think you know an old world is dying. It needs mourning. It needs the sacred mark.

I remember after my mother died, a dream where I walked like a banshee across my childhood streets, weeping and wailing as an old way of being, and old world, melted and drained out before my eyes. The houses and people shapeshifted, and all the village magic poured back into the earth, and the houses became empty and lifeless and filled with hollow eyes. I lowered my eyes and thanked the goddess that my mum had not lived to see this new world, threadbare, lost, devoid of the magic of the Matriarchs of the North.

Mother grief is a loss that is irreparable. But new Matriarch Elders will emerge for these times, crowned by Earth's magic.

I am in no way a royalist, but I was caught off guard by the sorrow that came. Grief does that. It takes you by surprise, in sudden ambushes, or slow, long serenades.

It brought up my own grief, the lake of loss, the longing that grief carves in the heart. A week or so later I wrote this, as I entered that liminal place of chaos and catharsis:

There is a Time To Grieve

This was the title of one of my essays, in Spirit Weaver about my dad's death.

The grief cycle is round again. This time four years after my mum's death, the grief is starting to hit me in a deeper way. If you have ever taken mind altering substances, you might know the feeling, where the initial wave feels mangeable, only to have a second wave come and realise you have taken way too much medicine. You can't undo it. You can't undo death. That is the severity of grief magic, of loss.

Earlier this year I had a dream where I was by an altar, surrounded by old friends, and I said "imagine if your mum died, I think I would have a panic attack." I woke up and realised it was true.

My body is keening. I have been having vertigo, panic attacks, migraines, back pain, fatigue.

I can't do the things I always did, I am having to say "no" so many times and surrender.

It's bringing me into an unfamiliar vulnerability, not the "vulnerable share" of our known flaws, but the fragility of the unknown.

This grief is closer to terror than sorrow. The mother world is sliding away...and there you are left standing, alone and afraid in the darkness of your own alchemical individuation. This is initiation. It is not the grief that bends down to give you mercy. It is the grief that demands sacrifice. It demands you lay down your old ways of being, and mourn for losses you can't even name.

The other day, I had a call with one of my teachers. She has been going through it too. I said, "let's sing the Keen". Of course, what else can we do. So we sang the Keen of the Three Mary's, "Caoineadh na dTrí Muire" from the Irish tradition. I love hearing the collected songs of old Irish keeners; there is something so brutal and simple in their singing, no frills at all.

I sang that way. The ritual of lament. The voice is not just an instrument of harmony and beauty, it is a howl from the belly of earth.

The tears come, swelling up on the sounds of an ancient lineage I belong to, and they carry me along in the darkness.

Voices join with mine, and my broken heart can just be here, with the broken heart of the world - because this is ceremony now.