The Morrigan in Celtic Mythology

Sometimes, she arrives in our lives, riding the back of trauma and trouble and heartbreak, like a kind of visitation or apparition, as though the Dark Woman has come to take you on a prolonged shamanic journey into your depths.

If we don’t understand her when she comes, if we aren’t aware of her power, if we don’t acknowledge her gifts, then when we

She was a goddess of torment and understood the eloquence of violence.

And sitting cross-legged in the throne is Herne. He wears a long tunic of rotten pelts, home to whole dynasties of moth and maggot. In this aspect he has an empty deer skull for a head, but he can take any aspect that he wants: a huntsman with his bow, or a warrior with holly leaves for flesh. He is Cernunnos, the Horned God of beasts and trees and

Then the darkness parted, and he came. Huge he was, white and gray, burned onto the depths like an afterimage of the sun. His silent wings rippled, rills of current flowing off their tips. His eyes were thin and slitted like a cat’s, his mouth a bloodless slash. I stared. When I had stepped into the water, I had told myself that this would be only

In many cultures, there are goddesses who are the spinners and weavers of fate.

As agents of fate, the Valkyries also have obvious links with the Norns, and Snorri even says that the “youngest” Norn, Skuld, rides with the Valkyries to choose the slain. In a strange battle poem called The Web of Spears, dating to either the tenth or eleventh centuries, a troupe of twelve horse-borne Valkyries are seen dismounting to enter a cot

Many people have reported receiving comfort and guidance from Mary or from mother figures of other religious traditions, such as Kuan Yin (or Guan Yin), the bodhisattva of compassion. Most, if not all, traditions have images of the Divine Mother, and believers within these traditions often have experiences in which they feel loved and cared for by