Crone Visions

Miriam Harline

Outside, in the local, secular, American world, Halloween is the time of the Crone. Along with black cats, skeletons, ghosts, jack o' lanterns and brooms, cardboard old women with green and warty faces, joints connected by brass pins, hang on doors and windows all around us. They're drawn in special paint on grocery-store fronts. Caricatures of witches; crones.

Some witches militate against this version of crone as a negative stereotype, and I understand this fight. Neither do I want to be reduced to some half-mad figure leering into the steam of a cauldron plotting evil, perhaps worshipping Jehovah's dark twin. I have no interest in turning anyone into a frog. I appreciate the efforts of those who've worked to de-demonize the Craft.

But for me this does not involve taking the crones off the grocery store windows. Rather the opposite. Raise them high. Let the children draw them with long chins and warty noses. Let them frighten us.

Kids like Halloween because it's got some juice. A frisson of fear. Ghosts in the shadows, costumes in which for a moment you're not recognized. And of course trick-or-treat candy, the sheer luxe pleasure of possessing that much sugar in one bag. But also the darkness, mediated by light: stepping out a little into fear, then quickly retreating. I salute that excitement. I too loved the harvest moon, the pumpkin lantern, the mask and the idea of witches. They helped make me a witch. So let the cardboard Crone dangle, in her black Puritan hat, or better yet draw Her as you like. But tell the kids why She's scary. If we have Santa Claus, the beneficent Father, at the rebirth of the light, now in the season of darkness it's appropriate to hail the Crone.

Fear is part of her insignia. She's the handmaiden of death. It is right that as warm-blooded living creatures we fear death - along with feeling curiosity and, possibly, acceptance. I think we must respect that black pause waiting. None of us can be positive what will happen when we enter that country, from which no one returns as before to report. We can learn ways to approach death; we can learn ways to transcend our fear. But before we transcend it, we must recognize and honor it. In her webbed hands She holds death toward us, a cat's cradle of soft black yarn. Three dark goddesses to consider are Ereshkigal of Sumer, Hecate of Greece and Cerridwen of Wales. Three faces of the Crone, each different.

Ereshkigal and the Great Below
Ereshkigal's is a bleak view of the Crone. Her Hell is dry, dark and empty, and she did not choose to rule it but was abducted there after heaven and earth separated. In the underworld, she is naked; she eats clay and drinks dirty water. She has lost her childhood - in one Sumerian verse, she complains to the gods of heaven:

"Since I, thy daughter, was young,I have not known the play of maidens,I have not known the frolic of young girls."(quoted by Diane Wolkstein in Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth) Furthermore, her husband, Gugulanna, the Bull of Heaven, dies and is lost to her. She is jealous of the gods of the upper world; when her sister Inanna, Queen of Heaven, comes to the Great Below for Gugulanna's funeral, Ereshkigal strikes and kills her and hangs her from a hook on the wall.There Ereshkigal intends her to stay. Diane Wolkstein, a reteller of Sumerian myths, writes: "This underground goddess, whose realm is dry and dark, whose husband Gugulanna is dead, who has no protective or caring mother, father, or brother (that we know of), who wears no clothes, and whose childhood is lost, can be considered the prototype of a witch - unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual and full of rage, greed and desperate loneliness." I would say, more specifically, that Ereshkigal is one prototype of the Crone.

This prototype is fearful to contemplate. If, as Elspeth says in the interview in this issue, She brings us the gifts we would rather not have, Ereshkigal bring us not only death, but also despair and grey depression. Ereshkigal's world is defined by lack - no lover, no relatives, no clothes, no decent food, no sympathy. That is a place all of us go, sometimes. The abyss. Nothingness.

We would rather not be there. But do we get nothing from going there? I think when we face nothingness we see in heightened relief what defines us. For some, it is our love for our children. For some, it is the value of our work. Against the grey, the colors of our lives stand sharp, and we learn why to stay alive. Or not. One thing is certain: The Crone's realm is nowhere to tell white lies. Some people come to the edge and throw themselves off. We may not think their reasons good, we may wish them back, but they are gone. That is part of what is. Ereshkigal's realm is a place not only to meet our fears, hail and pass them, but also to recognize what is real behind them. We like to write happy endings for every story. In the Great Place Below, not every story ends happily. Our stories have only one certain ending - death. If we start by agreeing to that truth, harsh as it may be, we have a surer foundation to build upon.

Despair, depression and death can be honored as a gift, and not just in a superficial chirpy way that assumes they can thus be placated and avoided. If we enter their realm with open eyes, look about us and honor the goddess of that place, the Crone Ereshkigal, we have honored a part of the universe. No life exists without death. No light exists without darkness. No colors play without the abyss to show them up.

It's also true that only once we truly honor Ereshkigal can we, like Inanna, get off the hook and return to the upper world. In the myth of Inanna's journey, the water-god Enki, Inanna's ally, sends to Ereshkigal two small creatures he's made from the dirt under his fingernails. They honor Ereshkigal, mourning with her in her pain. Ereshkigal, touched, gives them a gift in return - Inanna's corpse, which they return to life, as Enki has instructed them. In facing the Crone, we face death, despair and destruction and honor them, because they are part of all that is. In honoring Ereshkigal, we respect the depths of the abyss and earn our right, we hope, to return.

Hecate and the Dark Moon
Hecate is another face of the Crone, the Lady of the Crossroads and of the Waning Moon. In A.E. Waite's Tarot, the Moon on her card looks down, shedding tears of light, on a landscape with two towers. Between the towers, a road winds over hills to the foreground, where a dog and a wolf stand to the road's either side. The road ends in water, from which a crab climbs. Waite notes in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot that on this trump the moon traditionally is waning - Hecate's moon.

This is Hecate's territory - the wild night, the crossroads, with her black cloak whipping about her and her black dogs beside. She rules dogs, who howl to greet her, and like Hell's dog-guardian Cerberus she can manifest with three heads - lioness and mare, in her case, as well as dog. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford note in The Myth of the Goddess that the link between dog, dark moon, night and goddess is as old as the fourth millennium B.C. "Queen of Night," as the poet Sappho calls her, Hecate carries two torches to light the dark. With the traveling god Hermes, she is guardian of the crossroads, particularly the crossroads where three roads meet.

Hecate is the Crone of a Triple Goddess. She connects with two triplicates, both with Artemis, the huntress of the waxing crescent, and the full-moon goddess Selene, and with the barley-mother Demeter and the maiden Kore, who becomes Persephone. Baring and Cashford point out "The myth of loss, searching and finding is a lunar myth, and Demeter's quest for the lost part of herself follows the course of the moon after the full, when it wanders across the heavens in search of its vanishing light until the darkness seizes it completely and it is gone. The new moon that returns after three days is then the light that the old moon has found, so the moon has been restored to itself."

The three days of the dark moon was the time of the Thesmophoria, the ancient autumn pig-sacrifice to Demeter from which, Baring and Cashford assert, the Eleusinian Mysteries grew. So too, they write, did moon-timing rule the Eleusinian Mysteries, held in the last third of the month by lunar calendar. The Eleusinian Mysteries centered around the Demeter-Persephone myth; Demeter was said to remeet Persephone at Eleusis. In this myth, Hecate participates as watcher. As Robert Graves notes in The Greek Myths, she sees Hades' rape of the Kore, and after Kore becomes Persephone Hecate watches to make sure she stays three months yearly in Hell. In Hell, Hecate is Persephone's favored companion. Hecate watches and wanders. As the Moon She travels everywhere; her powers extend to all regions. Seeing all, she knows all. She can grant wishes, can bestow wealth and wisdom.

She is the old sly one, the witch. In her cloak she might hide riches, or at the crossroads she might set on you her daughters the Empusae, ass-haunched girls who wear bronze slippers, who like to frighten travelers and who in the guise of beautiful women sleep with men to drain their vital forces. Scylla too is Hecate's daughter, the dog-headed monster who threatened Odysseus's ships. The Crone's smile is dark and riddling. Cry to her, and she will protect you - unless she's made up her mind otherwise.

The skitter of leaves on pavement; the howl of dogs at the moon. Hecate is the wildness of the night, which you cannot predict. Like Dionysos, she is said to come from Thrace. As Artemis, she took the bloodiest sacrifices then Greeks offered, besides those to Dionysos, up to and including human blood. When we stand under the waning moon, we feel again the fear of being prey. The dark eyes of our predator watch from the shadows. You can placate Her; you can put up three-headed statues at the crossroads. Perhaps, like Hades who is also Pluto, Riches, once she tests you she will give you wealth. Perhaps. In the Crone, we must face not only the fact of death but also the fear of night, the fear of being hunted, the fear of magick worked against us. Hecate, the old wise woman with white hair, sits by the fire and answers our questions, sometimes only with silence. When the dogs howl, she smiles.

Cerridwen and the Cauldron
Cerridwen is the Welsh crone, "the bent white one." Her name shows she's a moon-goddess. This Crone keeps the cauldron of inspiration and transformation. What exactly is this cauldron? In Celtic myths, several cauldrons appear, as John and Caitlin Matthews note in Encyclopaedia of Celtic Wisdom. These include the Dagda's food-cauldron that leaves no one unsatisfied, Diwrnach's cauldron that will not serve cowards, Cerridwen's cauldron of knowledge and inspiration and Bran's cauldron from which warriors are reborn - a cauldron that in Greek myth belongs to Medea, a priestess of Hecate. The cauldron thus combines many levels: physical sustenance, an emotional test, intellectual knowledge and spiritual rebirth. Into the cauldron the Crone throws many things, to mix and stew and come out changed. As the Matthews note, the Celts, from a land of bogs, their houses built in some places on stilts, might well have had a creation myth in which they sprang from a cauldron. This cauldron is a traditional accouterment of crones, and in it brews knowledge and rebirth. Meditation on rebirth is appropriate at the last harvest, the beginning of winter. At the time of death we most fervently hope to be reborn. Cerridwen, the Great Sow, is also the White Lady, ruling death as well as inspiration. It makes sense too that she is a mistress of rebirth; through her, Gwion Bach becomes Taliesen.

Cerridwen has three children, including the dark and ugly boy Afagddu. Worried Afagddu can't make his way on looks, she sets a cauldron of knowledge to brew for him for a year and a day and gets young Gwion Bach to guard it. But toward the end of the year, three drops spurt out and fall on Gwion's finger, burning him, and he sticks it in his mouth. Those three drops hold all the brew's potency; the rest is poison. As soon as he sucks his finger, Gwion foresees all and runs away.

Cerridwen sees what's happened and gives chase. Gwion changes to a hare, Cerridwen to a greyhound; he to a fish in the river, she to an otter-bitch. He turns to a bird, and she to a hawk stooping above him. Seeing a pile of winnowed wheat, he transforms to a grain in the heap, but she becomes a black hen and swallows him. Each change to a pair of totem animals in this cycle represents a season. Nine months after Cerridwen swallows Gwion, she bears him as a child. He's so beautiful she can't kill him, so she sends him in a leather bag out to sea. The heretofore luckless Elphin catches the bag in a weir while seeking salmon. Disappointed, he takes the child home with him, naming the boy Taliesen (radiant brow). On the ride, Taliesen consoles him with verse, describing his provenance and Cerridwen, "a smiling black old hag, when irritated/Dreadful her claim when pursued," as R.J. Stewart quotes in Celtic Gods, Celtic Goddesses. This smiling hag is the Mistress of Awen, the flowing energy of the Druids, and Taliesen's later poems sing of her lyrically. But to receive divine inspiration, Taliesen has to endure death and rebirth, lying nine months in the belly of the Goddess. By her cauldron and womb he is transformed.

If Hecate is a traveler, connected with the wild night, Cerridwen for all her moon-face is a hearth-goddess, stirring a heady brew. It's easy in the Taliesen myth to see her as villainess, but Taliesen himself sang her praises. As goddess of the hearth, she is both the wise grandmother stoking the brands and the fire itself. For wisdom, for rebirth, you must feel this fire, stew in her cauldron a while. Cerridwen beckons you through the smoke.

The Crone and Samhain
The Crone most closely connected with Samhain is the Scottish Carline wife, the "Old Woman." On Samhain eve, Scots farmers made a Carline wife from the last stalk of harvested wheat and displayed Her at each household in the neighborhood to protect from evil spirits. She is the ruler of winter and its storms, the keeper of the fires at home and in the smithy, the protectress of the forest and its animals. Not just the Carline but also all Crones, ruling the winter of life and death's harbingers, are present at Samhain.

Now is the time of last harvest, when winter settles in. The vegetable life around us dies, and we must hunker down to survive the cold. The death around us recalls our own future deaths, and all the smaller deaths we die beforehand - the deaths brought by depression and fear, the deaths required for wisdom. To understand, to have compassion, we must suffer, at least in another's place. The cardboard Crone rattles on the lintel, and in her I hail the dark goddesses. In their hands lies death, but only from death comes rebirth.