The moon in Cancer is approaching fullness right now and the garden at night looks lunar and eerie, white as a skull. (And yes, I do know that Mercury is about to go retrograde this weekend, so my computer will have a wobly and the stove implode!)
There is nothing like a failed love affair to bring one into the realm of Hekate and her empty underworld. In ancient mythology, this moon goddess presided over the gates to Hades and her pillars were raised at crossroads and in doorways. The moon as her torch, she shed a deceptive and often cold barren light on the void, the darkness and sense of failure and loss we all experience at one time or another.
I have often heard it said that the first principle of magic is sympathy with nature ( even Derek Jarman’s urbanised and deracinated modern nature) and so it intrigues me that Hekate was linked with wolfsbane ( Aconite), the willow that hangs over water and has such pendulous enclosing branches, as well as the yew. When I was travelling around the lonelier hamlets and villages of the Welsh Borders, Longtown or up in Gospel Pass, I would find great black yews brooding over churchyards and graveyards and wells , old sites of worship and mourning.
Along with owls, Hekate had serpents as her guides to the knowledge of the dead, cold and reptilian with flickering tongues and dispassionate gazes. A wisdom that reached into nothingness, the nada of sensibility, the wasteland of and beyond the human spirit.
At times like this Hekate is my cold mother, the older women in black with her face averted. She is most at home in the shades of the Dark Moon and is accompanied by red-eyed hounds, ravenous and bloodthirsty. She is the killing mother, kin to Kali. Laying waste and redeeming waste. She holds the key to the underworld and another of her symbols is the Wheel of Hekate, the spinning and cyclic journey from life to death, from birth to renewal to death, and the unknown beyond death.
Once in an earlier incarnation, Hekate was worshipped as a beautiful young goddess carrying torches and wearing a crown of stars, a glittering and enchanted figure of nightlight, but she took on darkness as she matured. And moved into the invisibility of the underworld, the Unconscious, the not-feeling and insensate realms of self-loss.
When I entered this time of loss and chose to explore and suffer emptiness, a friend who is a student of homeopathy suggested I take aconite. Wolfsbane or Monkshood is not a plant found here in Africa. Its name comes from the Greek akon or arrow because darts were tipped with aconite as a deadly poison. It is linked to belladonna in its toxicity as an irritant poison. In the older myths, aconite grew up from drops of spittle cast by the three-headed hound Cerberus, the dog guardeng the gates to the underworld, who was dragged out by Hekate. Aconite for me is my cup of bitterness.
And if aconite seeds are wrapped in lizard-skin, the bearer of this talisman will become invisible. The reptilian is very much with me, a cold Otherness that is both repugnant and desirable, a chilling and distance that is a begetting of wisdom. Not that I intend to go around skinning any of my beautiful lizards, but the snakes and lizards and frogs that attend in these days hint at my invisibility to myself, the void within, the blankness and sterility.
It is not depression, there is a difference and I have not suffered that ebbing energy or distorted perspective typical of depression. This is something else, a cold and forbidding place that I had not entered before, a room locked in my psyche.
The smoky blue flowers of aconite, Hekate’s flower, stand for hated and mistrust. This is the via negativa that follows in the aftermath of failed love, the banishing and the loss of enchantment. The falling out of love and the inward raging and grief at losing that self-in-love, that enhanced and miraculous being, transformed in the fleeting moment of passion.
And linked to aconite and the necessary depleting powers of Hekate is rue, with its healing properties that work paradoxically through bitterness and regret, my loved but untouchable rue. I have become hypersensitive to this greeny-blue beauty and cannot touch it without blistering. That pungent and dark healing has touched me somewhere very dangerous and initiates me into another kind of discomfort.
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