Wood Sisters and Sacrifice

Dartington Daffodils

It’s just a few weeks now until our next Wood Sisters Day on Saturday 26th March, when we’ll be celebrating the Spring Equinox with our usual rich feast of meditation, myth and storytelling, simple ritual and sacred time in nature. More details coming soon from Sue…all I’ll say for now is that we’ll be drawing inspiration from the ancient Greek Goddess Persephone….so it’s a taste of the Eleusinian Mysteries for the wild women of the Wood Sisters this time!

As Sue prepares a storytelling of Persephone, I’m reflecting on the themes from this story and the season for meditation…along the lines of my last entry. I’m very struck by how there is often a sacrificial element that is part of the transformation of the soul in its descent and emergence from the underworld (spiritual emergency). Inanna has to find a substitute in order to return, Persephone can only emerge for half the year. This feels to be very true to me…there is no ‘returning to normal’ after profound experience. Rather we become ‘walkers between worlds’…with one foot in the otherworld and one in the everyday world…

I’ve been pondering this sacrificial element in reading celtic history. Many of the archaeological artefacts found in Europe and Britain are now understood to have been ‘given to the Gods’. It seems that sometimes the best and most beautiful items, from weapons to cauldrons, were made specifically for sacrificial purposes, usually through being placed in rivers. (The River Thames has provided many examples).

This seems quite counter intuitive to most people in our postmodern materialistic times. It’s hard for us to imagine giving up the best and most treasured aspects of either our belongings or ourselves. From the everyday ego perspective accumulating personal wealth and status is a driving force and our economies of ‘growth’ are based in it. But the soul is fed by myth and story, which upholds a quite different agenda…one in which the deeper aspects of our being are actually enriched and freed by the demanding process of letting go of purely personal preoccupations.

The subtle art it seems to me is to find some real way of experiencing a larger reality and going through a process of realignment. So it’s not simply an unskilful business of self denial… I’ve found this is so often (in my terms) misunderstood in Christian contexts, where the beauties and talents of the self are downplayed or seen as ‘sinful’ in a way that has much more to do with self hatred than true sacrifice. The Celtic artefacts give us a clue here – they created the best and most beautiful things to give away… and this was in the context not of destroying them but releasing them into the larger life of the Otherworld. This is not a process of self harm, of cutting ourselves or throwing our beauties away, but rather a journey into re-orientating ourselves as part of some greater whole.

I feel this in my own life. I struggle with the deeper patterns of change in my life and sometimes I suffer as the forms I thought I knew are stripped away. But in my more conscious moments I see myself being gradually freed of confusion and rooted into some greater network of being, from which deep Source vitality and energy flows back into the world.