Morana Comes....

Morana is coming – the Goddess of winter and of death. Winter seems to have arrived here and has been signaled for the last two weeks of gloomy shortened days. Now, it is freezing and we already had some snow (that stuff of the past – remember?). The signs of Her arrival are all around.

A few years ago, I started to meditate and assume the god form of Morana and I entered a state of consciousness in which I learned a lot about winter and of death. Death is a transition from one state to another and I pity the billionaires who fear Her so much and try to find ways to avoid it. What they do not understand is that the other side of death is rebirth. We live in a polar world and you cannot have rebirth without death just as you cannot have light with darkness.

Here is an excerpt from Chasing the Goddess.…

“She is a tad scary. So, a cautious approach seemed appropriate. I began with a qabalistic cross and then settled in to find that state of mind that I needed to reach. I couldn’t help calling out her name in my mind and immediately I heard a reply.

“Come to my bosom!”

The words echoed in my mind, and I was abruptly in a winter scene. It’s an iced lake in between snowy forests and mountains. Cold and windy. The wind is as sharp and as cold as ice. In the center of the ice lake stands a tall white woman. Above her circle large dark crows in ominous fashion. Her hair is the grayish white of a once lush mane of darkness now turned to pure white except at the root, where I can see gray. Her face is pale, and the skin is tightened over the bone structure of her skull. For me, she is still beautiful and would have been extraordinarily beautiful as a young woman. There are hints of wrinkles at her eyes, but the taunt white skin doesn’t allow for many wrinkles. Suddenly, I am there looking into her eyes of pure ice. Yet, I instinctively hug her like I would my grandmother. She is, after all, the grandmother. As I rest my head on her bosom, no longer the fullness it once may have been, I start to get a whole series of other impressions.

I see rocks covered with a thick lush moss of the darkest green hue. Water rushes between the rocks and there is no plant life save for that lush green moss. It is a cold, cold, place and the sandstone rock feels like ice. She is ancient. Older than age. She has existed throughout time as we know it. She has experienced everything there is to experience and is wise beyond wisdom. I gain a sense that as she is the doors of death, of transition, every living thing gives up its experiences as it passes through to be preserved within her own nature. She isn’t so much death as the doorway to rebirth. A gate through which we must pass endlessly, through which all life must pass each time it reaches its cycle end. And in passing through, we leave our experiences behind with her to emerge on the other side again innocent and refreshed, ready to rise anew. She is the gate of the endless circuit of life – all life. She is the World Tarot and a point on the endless circle of life and death. I’m not afraid. I thought I would be but I’m not. I’m awed and tears run down my face.  

I sense that there is no sentimentality within her. Sentimentality has no place here. None. This, death and rebirth, is a natural process. It is the law. The way it is and has to be. I begin to see her in her various guises and forms – mostly hideous representations like Baba Yaga and even the Mare or nightmare – the rotting witch that sits on your chest in sleep paralysis. Fear of death and fear of unbeing seem at play here and in a sense, she is the agent of life’s unbeing, so it seems rather apt. She strips away your being in the transition to death and the other side. She is liminal and at a boundary. She is the boundary! A trickster and shape shifter like Veles. She looks over the transition of all life whether human, plant or animal. She is everything that has been. Ancient, coldly beautiful and lacking any emotion or sentimentality.

Suddenly, it’s gone again. She is gone and yet I think I knocked on her door. I got a glimpse of something that cannot quite be communicated for I know not how to do that properly with just words. The goddess I saw was the ‘Snow Queen,’ yet I didn’t feel that she was evil or for that matter, good. She just is, has been and will be.”

Over the three Moons of last winter, I became acquainted with various aspects of Morana – who I see as one aspect of the Goddess Mokosh – the Earth Goddess. Like the ancient Slavs before me, I learned to respect Her but I do not fear Her. I grasped that She is a transition – a necessity in fact – and if we are to sprout and grow into the light in the Springtime, then She is needed.