Time is a Goddess Too

Don't call her an illusion if you want her to grow your creations....

When I was 24 I had a life-changing meeting with the Goddess Kali in India, who broke me down like I was a morsel of food she was digesting into her greater body.

Later on, in the Himalayas, where two rivers met, the lineage I was ushered into was held under the auspices of Chamunda-Devi, the 'demon slayer' who is a form of Kali, and can also be depicted as a skeletal and scary crone woman or a sheela-na-gig type vulvic sorceress. In the Chamunda-Devi temple, I crawled into a small earth cave under the man-made structure, and felt in my bones the root of this worship, cramped over in the darkness, in the cool yin energy of the underground rock cavern, the energy silent, thick and rich, as I was anointed with the red mark by the priest. I have remembered that cool dark energy and been called to it time and time again.

Chamunda Devi had a wrathful side, but she also had a hidden enchantress side, her secret face. She was the lover of Bhairava, the wild god of the old tantric lineages.

Like Madama Pele, there is a red, fierce, raging, fiery side of this ancient deity, but that was not how she had marked me out as hers that day in the cave. Instead for me, it was the cool Kali, black as lava rock, the darkness that is enchanting and spacious, cosmic and starry. It was Kali in her aspect of Time, KAL, mistress of memory, time-keeper of the cosmic clock, the slow and sure wheel of karma as cycles come round.

Over years this invitation from Lady Time that had been first issued in India, now switched to the Black Madonna in Europe, and I sat in caverns and crypts in darkness and silence, and I again I was touched by the deep glamour of earth, something that might even be described as terrestrial erotica, a current of cosmic memory, buried.

I remember the first time I stepped into the Magdalene Cave in St Baume, France, the same energy came to greet me. After the warm, fragrant, green earthy walk through the old forest, I crossed the threshold of the grotto into the cold, silent, darkness.

The space was both vast like a night sky, illuminated with star-like candles, and enclosed like a womb, the signature of the enchanted feminine magic energetics.

So that was how Magdalene first spoke to me, not hot or red, or white and pure - but dark, mysterious, glamorous and enchanted, a cavern into the otherworld of the unknown. Not the mysteries practiced in temples, but the mystique of dark crystals.

I was being educated by the substance and structures of rock, and soft silences and black velvet emptiness, that magnetized me into its frequency of delic memory.

Next I visited the regal lair of the Black Madonna of Montserrat in Catalonia, enthroned on a jagged primeval mountain that looks like Mount Doom (the womb mountain of Tolkien’s folklore), except this sacred mountain still has the Black Lady enshrined in her royal office as the Grande Dame of Earth, holding the world together.

Inside the basilica, it is like entering a terrestrial black hole. Transpersonal. Vast. Magnetic. Inhuman. A cosmic mother who fell down to earth and planted roots. As I start to cry in her presences, she chides me sternly “do not cry”. This is not a merciful madonna to lay your sorrows down like treasures. This is a magnetic mother who demands your allegiance to earth’s unfolding, and tests your magic for its strength.

Magic, across all traditions is initiated, adulted, individuated. If you want to be a child, then the maternal will cradle you. But the Grande Dame will demand so much more.

My education in rock and crystal finally headed home to my motherlands, when I entered the dark womb of the “witch cave” in Mam Tor, in the Hope Valley of the Peak District, and travelled upon my mother’s death to the neanderthal caves of Creswell Crags, where the largest array of Witch Marks had been discovered inside caves dedicated to “Robin Hood” and his merry lingeage. Caves have mouths to talk.

I wasn’t satisfied with images of Mother Earth as an all-good mother, smiling and banal at all times, goddess of “puritanimism” - the current eco movement that projects puritan-like ideals on earth and avoids her complex, sensual, dual nature.

Neither was I fully convinced of the underworld narratives of an energy that was always prodding your wounds, and doing shadow work as if earth was a therapist.

I needed a new spell to feel my way around these energies I had met amongst my physical and metaphysical travels, and finally in a dream, the enchantress emerged.

She came as Lady Saturn, the energy inside the earth that makes the sun shine into her - magnetic, charming, fascinating, cool, dark, glamourous, strict, and tantalizing. Yes she has a planetary double, but her magic is earth rooted, a hologram in soil.

If you have ever felt this magic in a dark grotto or a dark starlit night, then Lady Saturn has reached her black velvet hand across the threshold to invite you on a journey.

If this were a gnostic poem we might say she was the goddess in the dungeon who had forgotten her safe word. The sun is so magnetized to her presence he fertilizes the whole world in his ardor, showering the world with his radiance. The frisson of thie marriage literally makes the world go round, warmth and coolness, dark and light.

Saturn in traditional lore is depicted as "Lord of Time and Karma"....meanwhile, over yonder KAL(I) is filing her nails as Lady of Time and Karma, waiting patiently for humans to realise she is not an outdated old patricrachal overlord. In old Europe, Saturn was once a woman, and worshipped as the structural memory of life itself, the great yin womb out of which all new ventures, say a renewned earth, would be formed and birthed. Her great festival, the Saturnalia, celebrated the black womb that birthed the light of the sun at Solstice. Originally, this energy was considered to be feminine, foundational, and auspicious. It was the dark, structural womb that initiates the light.

Until she was forgotten, or twisted into unwanted old structures and depicted as ‘old father time’, or captured by clueless occultists. Time was once a mother. She enchanted the world, birthed life and seasons and crops by her magic womb clock.

This aspect of earth that is cool, yin, dark, magical was also connected to money and wealth - “the harvest”. Indeed in the body, the planetary energy of Saturn governs the root. Our security, our matter made manifest. Lady Saturn often presided over temples that were also 'banks' where community wealth was stored, until it was co-opted. But she is Lady of Time and Memory - and Karma. So, she has not forgotten.

One of the paradoxical aspects of feminine lore, is that the root of this feminine foundation, lives at the heart of the cosmos AND at the heart of earth, simultaneously, with a quantum wormhole between them, where time and memory and space as we know it melt down into magic. Enchantress medicine women rode it like a slide. With their words and songs and siren gaze, they could coax a new era out of that void.

What does this mean for us now? I'm listening intently to the earth and the dark night skies. They are whispering, humming and singing to me about a forgotten energy that must be remembered. It’s not ‘all-good’ and doesn't fit into neatly stacked boxes.

What this energy is asking of us, is to find our power and fire, open into the feminine flow, and alchemize this energy into something utterly beautiful, elegant and wise.

This cool, elegant, wise feminine energy is what our world needs most at this time.

It holds a quality that has so drained-out from the world, we jump when it returns. We startle ourselves as we see the structural feminine return, in her wealth and glamor.

This magic can be found in stillness, silence, cool energy that brings focus and elegance, not rash angry outbursts. It is expressive, yet it understands consequences.

It can feel like confinement at first, rapping your hands as you want to spray energy everywhere, and calling you to hold it, contain it, alchemize it and distill the essence.

This confinement is that of the pregnant mother or the initiate inside the dark cave.

Eventually a refined song emerges from this place that re-enchants the whole world.

If we don't believe its power, it was a black-velvet-clad Lady Saturn conjunction that ushered in the pandemic in 2020 and then sealed the deal, so as to speak, at Winter Solstice 2020, with the grand conjunction of the ages, co-joined with Jupiter. I think we know something is afoot. Bigger gods than our small worlds are on the move.

This March, in 2023, as I was inspired to open a 'pop-up portal' for a Feminine Magic School, which will return back to the roots of the forest afterwards like a strange and wonderful fairy toadstool, we have another Saturn move, as she shimmies into Pisces.

Pisces is the flowing feminine, our inner dreaming mermaid, our hopes, our feelings, our fluid visions. These are our knowings, our intuitions, of what the world could be.

Saturn is the structural feminine, cunning and elegant, able to build our visions into rooted reality. She has the maps, and the magnetism to bring it all together by magic.

When they merge the birth begins. It is time to build our dreams into reality.

Construction has begun.

Addendum:

After I posted this article I went outside to take a breath of fresh air and meet the night. On the porch the night was cold and refreshing, and I could relax my eyes and body into that darkness. It was such a relief from all the intense, busy energy of the light-filled days. Our systems need to relax in this way. It feels like pure magic.

Go out and greet the night when you have read this, and breathe in the spaciousness.