I know it has been a while. Let me preface this by saying that everything listed here is my own Unverified Personal Gnosis (UPG) and is not intended to be a lesson to override anyone’s belief system or personal experiences with divinity. Artemis in Hellenismos has a very specific tradition and mythological setting that is linked to her. In Wicca she is often thrown in under the Mother Goddess umbrella. My experiences with her are as a wild huntress who leads us further away from the trappings that keep us from our true selves( and even that is a reductive sentence on her power and sway) . Please, read her mythologies as handed down from ancient Greece, and I encourage you to keep the fires going of your own belief system involving her.
The following is from ecstatic trance work I underwent last night in June’s beautiful full moon.
I reached up as Artemis from the cosmic tree reached down through the heavens to pull me up. The tree hung upside down from where it was rooted in her world. And I was astonished to see not just one tree, but a whole forest worth, glowing and pulsating with their fruits of many colored light.
After she pulled me up to her, I walked on ether, an invisible floor that let me gaze down through the sky to our world. The woods which Artemis lays her head to sleep, dream, eat, and play mirrors our own, with a thousand at times subtle, at times starkly loud differences. I used to roll my eyes for the first year and a half of my path at the platitude “as above, so below.” Oh, I’m such a young one. I now know I was ignoring the wisdom given to us from those who have walked the path before we even thought of setting foot on it.
As I stared up at her woods, I saw movement. A thousand rabbits darted across her forest floor as she continued to keep her hand on mine, pulling my arm above my head to keep me rooted in her reality. She was a silhouette of the night, with her furs and skins gently spinning around her as an accent to the totality of the void she had brought in her own skin to craft life out of the dark. Her eyes had the silver light of the moon spilling out of them, making them completely opaque. When she opened her mouth, her teeth were sharp, like a bear’s. And when she laughed, for the pure joy of it, more light poured out in great waves, keeping me in a flood of her power.
Beneath us, steady as she has been since she was ripped from us in an interplanetary collision, the moon was flattened into a lens, a transparent mirror, and as Artemis spoke and sang and gazed down at me, the light danced down my body, through this moon mirror, a gate if you will, and came out the other side to kiss our sacred earth. It has beneath some time that the moon made it known to me that she/they is/are a conduit through which the power of spirit enters our realm from those which embrace us in the cosmos and also where the spirits of our own world may slip into others, but this is the first time I have had such a blatant communication through vision confirming this UPG to myself.
It was a startling moment, even while I was drunk on moonlight and the presence of my wild goddess, I couldn’t help but want to look around, to flip myself onto the solid ground of that cosmic forest and run with the rabbits. But I was not here to dally. Her giggles and babbling which I could not understand clearly had a purpose.
Finally, in words I could make out, she asked that I reach out for the glow worm kissed leaves and fruit. She asked that I pick which fruits I wanted to send down - to eat and to use to plant more trees in my own world.
I had to whisper like a mantra those things that I wish to see in myself, in my own reality.
Strength. Restraint. Truth. Liberation.
These I plucked as she held me in my place form where she hung on a branch in her own woods and once plucked, the fruits trickled slowly in through the mirror of the moon. Iridescent in color, pulsing neon green, red, and violet, they cut through the ether and began the fall to solid ground.
I know the influences are obvious - this trance is undoubtedly all of my experiences to date culminating in this sort of vortex of messages and metaphors. But this one moved me in a way that I feel will shape the twist and turns of my spiritual path in a manner I have not seen before. Recently, I have made a commitment to try and document all of my spiritual realizations, all those places my questions and experiments lead me to. And some of those I will share here if the gods and spirits tell me it’s the sort of thing that isn’t restricted to just being relevant only to me, i.e. if it’s something that might be of use to others, or that it’s something I need to get out of the broom closet and into the wide world.
When I went to Caldera Fest a couple of weeks ago, something in me quickened. Energy pummeled through me from all corners. The musicians stirred the pot of this cauldron. The land and its hidden people brought me into the circle of their sacred fire during that weekend and I’ve been brewing up a storm of life and ecstatic journeying ever since. I started this path three years ago studying as a witch and then backed away for devotional work. But now the circle is arcing back in on itself. I know now that witchcraft for me is a spiritual toolbox to work with the gods and spirits and knit their truths (conflicting and plural as they are) into my life. There was a period a year and a half ago I had to back off because I was practicing the motions of ritual without really understanding the tools I was employing. A lot of chaotic energy poured in from that time when I was really not grounded enough as a person to work with those spirits in a meaningful way. Don’t open the door if you’re not going to be a gracious host I suppose was the message from that time.
But now, the fire is lit. My friends in nature are never far away (I realize now I was the one that walked away) and the gods are dancing. And I’m not afraid to step onto that dance floor which sometimes serves as a threshing ground. The old platitude that change is the only constant is one I intellectually accepted but never swallowed as truth. If you want to be transformed, to walk with through the fire and kiss the heavens, and sink into the earth, you have to be ready to be whipped by the storm.
It is all one. I know I cannot have one without the other.
I guess the only way to do this is to dive in.
