Dark Goddess Craft

by Stephanie Woodfield

  Putting the Pieces Back Together Spell

  You Will Need:

  Old puzzle

  Permanent marker

  Candle

  For this spell, we will be calling on Akhilandeshvari to help us put the pieces of our lives back together.

  There may be no guarantees as we go through the process of transformation, but whether it is the hero or the goddess who makes the journey, they always have a clear mission in mind. Think about what you wish to accomplish or what you want to change. How do you want to reshape your life? Which pieces no longer fit—relationships, behaviors? Is it a habit? An issue from the past holding you back? Whatever it is, really take some time to sit down and write out what you hope to accomplish, what you want to change, and what to the best of your knowledge you want the outcome to look like. This may mean you need to take time to really outline the problem or challenge your views on the problem. You must also consider your ability to achieve the goal. For example, does the goal involve other people? You may have to accept that you can only change your own behavior and that you cannot influence the choices of others.

  Now create a mission statement. This should be something short, a sentence or two that clearly defines your goal. Once you have that, the next thing you will need is an old puzzle. You can find them in the kids’ aisle in stores or in most dollar stores. Pick one that doesn’t have a large number of pieces (between ten and twenty-five is a good range; avoid one with over a hundred tiny pieces you can’t write on). If you find a puzzle that has a picture on the front that appeals to you, then you can simply put the puzzle together and use a sharpie and write on the picture side your mission statement. You could also use paints of your choice to paint over the image and either draw something that represents your mission statement or paint it a solid color and then when it dries write out the mission statement with a permanent marker or paint. Once that dries, take the puzzle apart and turn the individual pieces over to the blank side (the opposite side from the one you painted). Use the marker to write one or two words that describe parts of your goal on all the pieces. These should be important “puzzle pieces” that will help you accomplish the goal you wrote out on the front of the puzzle.

  When everything is dry, go to your ritual space. Invoke Akhilandeshvari and place the puzzle pieces in a pile before the candle. Light the candle, saying,

  Akhilandeshvari, this candle’s flame is the force of my will

  It burns bright against the obstacles I face

  Goddess who is never not broken

  Help me to reshape the pieces of my life

  Let me forge a new path through the fire of my will

  Let me arrange the scattered pieces of my life into a new whole

  Akhilandeshvari, aid me in this task!

  Move the puzzle pieces around with your hands, and then slowly start putting it together. Look at the word written on the back of each piece. Allow this process to be a quiet meditation, while also holding the image of your final goal in your mind. Once you have put the puzzle together, say,

  Akhilandeshvari, I reform and reshape my reality

  Help me manifest the change I seek

  Thank Akhilandeshvari and leave her an offering. You can leave the puzzle in a safe place or on your altar space until the change has manifested, or you can routinely take it apart and put it back together every so often to add energy to your working.

  [contents]

  * * *

  11. Preeity Verma, Small Changes, Big Difference: 7 Ideas for Personal Transformation (Gurgaon: Partridge India, 2014), p. 55.

  12. J. K. Rowling, “Text of J.K. Rowling’s Speech,” Harvard Gazette, June 5, 2008, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech.

  13. Morgan Daimler, “Irish-American Witchcraft: The Value of Our Shadow,” Patheos (blog), February 2, 2016, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/agora/2016/02/irish-american-witchcraft-the-value-of-our-shadow/.

  14. Robert Augustus Masters, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010), p. 1.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  7

  Hekate

  You find yourself encompassed in the pitch black of a great cavern. Although you know you have your eyes open, you can see nothing. You feel a hard stone surface under your feet, jagged and rough, like a cave floor. Reaching out your hands in either direction, you expect to feel stone walls on either side, but they touch nothing but air. Even when you reach above you, the ceiling, for you feel certain you are underground, is distant and unreachable.

  Uncertain, you walk carefully through the dark, feeling ahead of you with your bare feet. The cave floor is rough, but you find it even enough to walk comfortably along. You continue on for what feels like a long while, the darkness never breaking. There is no prick of light to indicate there is a way back to the world above. Only endless darkness. No matter how quickly you move through the cave, no matter what direction you move, it feels like you might as well have not moved at all. It occurs to you that you even might have been moving in a circle. Without light there is no way of telling, really. In a moment of despair you sit upon the floor, ready to give up. Then your hands brush up against something on the cavern floor. It makes a metallic sound as your fingers push it accidently across the stone. As you reach out, your fingers close around a large, circular piece of metal. You lift it up and feel the other pieces of metal that hang from it with your other hand. They are keys, large ones, on a metal ring. You feel them in turn, each different from the other. And that’s when you see it. It’s tiny, but it stands out in the unending darkness: a prick of light far in the distance. It flickers and sways almost like a tiny flame.

  Clutching the keys in your hand, you hurriedly move toward it. The flame grows bigger, encouraging you to move faster, and soon you realize it’s not one but two flames, torches perhaps. And you realize the light is moving. Although you saw no walls before, now you clearly see a rough-hewn wall of black stone to your right. Whatever the light is, it starts to fade a bit as it begins to round a bend into another section of the cavern. Eagerly you pick up speed, no longer careful of your footfalls, not willing to lose the light.

  Rounding the curve in the stone wall, you almost collide with the source of the light. They are in fact two torches. They are long and bronze, their flames emanating brightly, though there is no evident source of fuel. They are held by a woman, one in each hand. At first you had not noticed her at all, though now that you look at her it is impossible to notice anything else. She is quite clearly a woman; you can see the curve of her face framed with dark hair and the folds of the dark-colored robes she wears. But behind all that there is something else. Although you see the woman, another image overlays that reality. You see a black void, and you realize she is the source of the darkness. The void you see, with the vague outline of a woman, pulses and hums with its own kind of life. And you fear if you gaze at it too long it will suck you in, like the crushing gravity of a black hole. The woman speaks, and gladly you concentrate instead on the woman’s face and not the black depth behind and beneath her. She is young and ageless all at the same time.

  “You seek me, yet you do not know why. You seek my help, yet you turn it away. You have wandered through the dark, thinking you were meant to escape it, when instead you must embrace it.”

  You look down dubiously at the keys in your hands. There has to be a way out.

  “I light the way, but I am the darkness. I am the sin-eater, I am the velvet void that devours, I am annihilation and deliverance. I am the void of space that is the night sky and the depths of the sea, and I stand watch at the heart of the storm within you. The keys unlock the things within you that you have buried away, the choices you refuse to look at. I am the keeper of many doorways, many crossroads, and there is no time l
eft for you. You must choose. You cannot dwell in the dark forever.”

  And for a moment you no longer stand in the cave but at the gates of a large city. A small nook next to a massive stone entranceway holds a small shrine. In it is a carved image of a woman holding two torches, with candles and offerings laid before the image. Then you find yourself standing at a crossroads, two dirt paths extending into a dark forest with the barest sliver of a moon shining above. Then you find yourself in the cave again, keys still clutched in your hands. You bring them to your chest and clutch them close, thinking of the things you fear to choose, the choices you wish you could avoid making.

  “I am Hekate, I am the sin-eater, I am the darkness, and I am the light that guides the way. Do not avoid gazing at me, but know me for truly what I am,” she says, and you look into her eyes. They seem to be the torches now, bright fires that burn at the heart of the darkness. And you give yourself over to that void. You look into it now, no longer cringing. You let the things you have kept buried, the things you cannot bring yourself to speak, flow into it. And you feel the immensity of Hekate as well, an ancientness and vastness. We call her a goddess, a woman, a hag, a maiden, but now you feel the vast power she contains, and it is overwhelming. She is primordial, a force of nature.

  You blink and it is all gone. You no longer stand in the cave but at the old crossroads, two dirt paths going deeper into a wood in either direction. The moon lights a wooden sign post. Below it other travelers have left out offerings to Hekate. You kneel down and leave the only thing you have to offer, the key you still grasp from the underworld.

  You hear the goddess’s words on the breeze: “There is no more time left. Choose.” And you do. Without another thought, with fear no longer coiling around your heart, you choose one of the paths and begin walking down it.

  When I first encountered Hekate, what struck me the most was how ancient she is. She is truly ancient; in a way she feels almost more like a force of nature than anything else. She is primordial. Her presence feels towering to me, fluid yet as solid as stone. In my mind’s eye, I picture her as one of those towering stone statues that come to life in the original Clash of the Titans. Other times she is the void, a darkness that pulls toward it the outcasts and wanderers of whom she is patron, a darkness that pulls toward it all the things you hold on to but need to release. In a devotional ritual to Hekate I attended, several priestesses were channeling different aspects of the goddess at the same time. Participants were asked to come up to hear a message from Hekate, and when I spoke to the priestess, there was an odd double image. I could see the priestess in her trance, and behind her I saw the void of darkness that was Hekate. It was not the cold void of space, but something more akin to the warm abyss of the womb, with the barest suggestion of a human face in the darkness and eyes that burned with a hot fire like her torches. She reminds me that the gods are more than just the human faces we perceive them as wearing. They are something far vaster and unknowable.

  Hekate is at her core, and even within her mythology, primordial. She is older than the gods of Olympus, who themselves show deference to her. She is a Titan, a class of deity that in the Greek cosmology first stepped out of the chaos that created the world. Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, is most well-known for defeating his Titan father, Kronos, and the other Titans in a great war. While he imprisons or destroys the other Titans, he finds no fault in Hekate. In his Theogony Hesiod says of her, “She received honour also in starry heaven, and is honoured exceedingly by the deathless gods. For to this day, whenever anyone of men on earth offers rich sacrifices and prays for favour according to custom, he calls upon Hecate. … Also, because she is an only child, the goddess receives not less honour, but much more still, for Zeus honours her.” 17

  Hekate is known, among other things, as a goddess of magic, the night, crossroads, witchcraft, and necromancy. She has over twenty titles, Nyctipolus (night-wandering), Atalus (tender, delicate), Chthonia (of the underworld), Curotrophus (nurse of the young), Scylacagetis (leader of dogs), Liparocredemnus (bright-coiffed), Dadouchos (torch bearer), and Propylaia (before the gate). Although she is often depicted in triple form, her numerous titles and their varied attributes show her to be a deity ruling over a wide range of influence in our lives. Although most modern depictions show her as a crone, most likely due to her connection to the underworld, in many ancient sculptures and depictions Hekate is shown as a maiden or young woman. In Greek vase paintings she is often shown as a woman holding twin torches dressed in a knee-length maiden’s skirt and hunting boots, much like Artemis.

  It is Hekate who assisted Demeter in her search for Persephone, guiding her through the night with flaming torches. After the mother-daughter reunion, she becomes Persephone’s guide as well and her companion while she dwells in Hades. Hekate is associated with borders, crossroads, doorways (especially in city walls), and, in a more liminal sense, the thresholds between the worlds of the dead and the living. It was thought that she could in her more vengeful aspects beset people with evil spirits as well as deter harmful spirits from cities or households. Small temples honoring Hekate were placed near the city gates in Byzantium, and when Philip II of Macedon was about to invade the city, it was said that Hekate warned them with the sounds of her sacred dogs and her torches. It had been suggested that Hekate’s connection to the dog as one of her sacred animals is in part from the Roman and Greek use of watchdogs for raising alarms, in particular at night.18 Like the Titaness, “the dog is a creature of the threshold, the guardian of doors and portals, and so it is appropriately associated with the frontier between life and death. … The yawing gates of Hades were guarded by the monstrous watchdog Cerberus, whose function was to prevent the living from entering the underworld and the dead from leaving it.”19 Female dogs were particularly sacred to Hekate. One myth tells of how Queen Hekabe of Troy leapt into the sea after seeing her city fall and Hekate, taking pity on the queen, transformed her into a dog, who served the goddess as her familiar. Other animals associated with her, sometimes with the goddess depicted as having the heads of said animals, include the boar, cow, serpent, and horse.20

  Sin-Eating

  Hekate has the distinction of not just being a goddess but also a Titaness. Several generations of the Greek gods overthrew their predecessors: Uranus was overthrown by his son Kronos, who was in turn overthrown by his son Zeus. Each generation of deities stepped further away from being forces of primordial energy to the more civilized gods, the Olympians. Yet Hekate remains a constant in it all, having the respect of both the gods (of each subsequent generation) and mortals alike. And perhaps it’s that closeness to the primordial that is part of this. Hekate stands in the vast chaos, like a black hole that pulls bits of the universe and yourself toward her. I have met more than one devotee to this queen of the underworld who has described her as a sin-eater, and in many ways she is one.

  To see Hekate in this context we have to consider the meanings of sin and sin-eating. For many people, part of becoming a Pagan and leaving mainstream monotheism involves a rejection of concepts like sin. Just because there is no concept of sin within Paganism does not mean that we don’t have to deal with things like the consequences of our mistakes, our failures, and the self-doubts that weigh on us because of them. We use different vernacular and relate to these concepts in different ways but that doesn’t make it any less part of our existence.

  The term “sin-eater” is thought to originate in southern England, where the folk custom describes a person who takes on the sins of the dead.21 English antiquarian and philosopher John Aubrey described the practice in 1686: “The Manner was that when the Corps was brought out of the house and layd on the Biere; a Loafe of bread was brought out, and delivered to the Sinne-eater over the corps, as also a Mazar-bowle of maple (Gossips bowle) full of beer, wch he was to drinke up, and sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he tooke upon him (ipso facto) all the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or he
r) from walking after they were dead.”22 There is also the Aztec goddess Tlazoltéotl, who, if one confessed misdeeds to her, was thought to cleanse the soul by eating its filth. The difference here is that while the sin-eater of English folklore performs this function at the end of life, Hekate becomes a cleaning force while we are still in life. She cleanses us of the things that prevent us from moving on within our lives rather than the ones that prevent us from finding peace in death. It is certainly not her only role or function, but it is very much part of her being. There are times when we must release and let go of the things we find at fault with ourselves, release the baggage that comes with our decisions. More often than not, it is more about allowing ourselves to be at peace with ourselves, rather than negotiating penance with a deity. Hekate provides an avenue for us to do that, to look into the void and release the pain of the past or the unhealthy expectations we place upon ourselves.

  The closest concept to sin, as we think of it today, in the Greek mind would have been miasma. Miasma essentially is a contagious power that can take on a life of its own. It is an impurity that can be caused by an individual’s or a community’s actions. Until the proper sacrifices are made and the impurity is purged, the wrongdoer, or even an entire society, was thought to be infected and catastrophes would ensue: “There was in Greek belief, no such thing as non-contagious religious danger. Some dangers were more commonly seen as communicable by contact, while others rather threatened the guilty party’s descendants. … Every member of any community, therefore, in principle lived under the threat of suffering for his neighbors’ offences. The ways in which divine anger against a community could be expressed were diverse.”23 The contamination of miasma was thought to have infected the family of Atreus and was considered the root cause of several violent crimes, one leading to and compounding another.