Amber Honey, Faery Queen of Southern Summers & Queer Initiation for Lughnasa

For years I've been going through my hedgecrossing life without documenting very much of it. Poetry for the most part has been the most effective way I feel to capture that ineffable, ever shifting quality I experience when I'm in the world of Faery, but it's definitely not the best way to communicate to others on what I've found there.  And for the most part, what I see and do there are not necessarily of use to anyone else. The nature of Faery is something that is eternal yet the shape of things there are the very lesson of impermanence. Plus, the fae folk's reputation of playing tricks and being downright shoddy to mortals with their games of smoke and mirrors doesn't help in this matter. What you may have seen or been told by a faery being could be enigmatic at best or a downright lie at the worst.

And although it may sound like a magical rollercoaster of wonder and terror, I definitely feel that it's not too different from the human realm. We are constantly on a day to day basis changing the stakes and the definitions of our world through arbitrary laws and measures that are just as transformative and altering as magic. Our language encodes the perceived universe around us to such a degree that we often don't really see the "objective" world as it is anymore. Take for instance our binary gender structures. By calling a person with a vagina a "female" I have already slotted her, even by the so called scientific definition, into a world that is way beyond the mere image of human being who has a vagina. "Female" draws up connotations of birth, mother, breasts, food, weak - even before we get into the social construction of "Woman" the word "female" has already alluded to it - conjured it even, if I might be so bold.

With that thought in mind, it's easy to see that we really are not that different from the world of Faery, with the exception of that at least in the world of Faery, we are aware that change is the only constant, where as in the world of humans we try everything we can to keep up the appearances of law and order.

As I was bathing tonight, hoping to soak in that new moon energy and let go of all of this torturous anger and rage that has been bottling up out of my dysphoria as of late, I realized that I had conjured up a door way to an entity I had met previously in passing - the Fae Queen of Summer. Before she had appeared to me as the blood stained wife of the Fae King whose ashes and parchment seeded the Queer Fae Kin I spoke of in my previous post. This time, as I let myself simmer in a hot bath filled with dead sea salt treated with argan, rose, and black opium oil, I found myself sailing away down the river into a domain in which she truly ruled, and was not simply passing by.

Here, I was led up into a pine cone shaped wooden zephyr which billowed in the air, creaking as the breeze moved it, with pennants flying about in a rainbow of colors. Kou, the fae kin of Earth, with his sword in hand, led me up a flight of bottomless stairs which ran all the way around the zephyr, leading in a spiral to its height.  The night hung black and profound around us, as though its potential was liable to burst into starry radiance at any moment.  What happened next is a jumble, a series of impressions rather than any one experience which can adequately be pinned down. But I witnessed the Fae Queen sit before me and when she spread her arms out the earth rumbled and the air was filled with a sickening sweetness. Below us, the plates of the crust merged and subdued, creating new land, new scapes, and with but a gesture, her indigo skin began to glow as she bristled and hummed like a fluttering humming bird. The very same birds flew around her in a vignette. They drew nectar from her hair as she sang her animal song.

Kou's sword shone blue in the night and when he swung it to cut down vine and flowering branches for the queen, it made the sound  of feathers flapping in flight.

In order to honor this Faery Queen who walks in South Eastern Tennessee this time of year, I have compiled a few notes about her that I gleaned from this hedgecrossing.

• Her name came to me as I fell back into my body near the end of the trance: Amber Honey. The image of Artemis of Ephesus comes to mind when picturing her. 
  

• She prominently wears a violet third eye. Her flower is the lilac and hibiscus. 

•  I think of her as mother, but more of the word mother at it applies when describing vinegar's mother batch. She is more concerned with gathering the fruit and spreading it. She does not focus on motherly care or parental sort of actions. But rather, she is the great egg which bursts and fertilizes all which it yoke splashes on. Honey gushing from the comb, fruit bursting with over ripeness are her images. 

• To evoke and conjure: black opium, dead sea salt mixed with argan oil, rose oil. All of this is compounded during the new moon. The absent moon is her face. She comes to cover us in the night with her rapturous orgiastic culling of the vine.

• Iconography: travels in a pine cone shaped zephyr, She is black skinned woman with red hair wrapped in a braid about her head. She has star colored freckles and from her mouth runs the blood of the wolf's first kill. Or is it the the raspberry gone to bust? 

• Her husband was a human who was transformed into a fae being. He was only concerned with the ruling of the earth by edicts and decrees She let him be winnowed by the great winds to help birth the Queer Fae Kin.  I am her child - a seed that fell into fertile soil during her reign. 

• During the evening her skin turns indigo and glows with the pale fire of Polaris in spiral designs of the universe. 

• The excess pits and seeds she gathers she takes to  the deep in her great zephyr and there she tosses flowers and fruits into the black sea. The sea swallows her offering, and a tender hand reaches up. Summer and Ocean kiss. And then they are parted for another year. 

With Lughnasa coming up, I think I am going to take this time to think of initiation rituals as an enby witch with Queen Amber as my initiatory deity. Without her I would have never have met the Fae kin who have become so much a part of my everyday magical experience and her very presence seems to be the essence of chaotic creation in motion. And what is more queer than that?