Serving the Goddess of Love with Ferocity and Compassion
As the wheel turns toward Samhain, we begin to embrace the dark. It is a time of rest and introspection. A time of releasing and letting go. A time of death and rebirth. This is the time of year when the Goddess Cerridwyn most calls to me. This is my retelling of the Tale of Cerridwyn.
Every time I make soup for Cerridwyn, the recipe is different. I used to have a recipe that I riffed off of, swapping out ingredients and adding or subtracting things. This most recent time, I had to completely abandon all hopes of using a recipe.
I’m a bit late with this post (over two months late), as my year-and-a-day of priestesshood was back in the beginning of January, but I still wanted to write something to commemorate the occasion. I can’t believe it has been over a year since I took my oath to Aphrodite. It’s been a wild and wonderful ride, and I’ve learned some important lessons along the way. Here are some of my reflections on my first year as a priestess:
Let me be clear: The type of surrender I am talking about is not the surrender of defeat (though it sometimes may feel like it). It is not giving up. It is not ceding victory. It is not yielding to the authority of others. It is not relinquishing your power. It is not sacrificing your values or morals. It is not martyrdom. The Divine Surrender I speak of is a surrender to bliss. It’s yielding to the natural flow of the universe. It’s a forfeit of the ego. It is a loss of inhibitions. It’s letting go of the edge of the pool to see how deep you can swim. It is faith in the Gods. And, first and foremost, it is trust in yourself.
I believe that everyone has projective and receptive abilities. For some, one will be much stronger than the other, and that’s okay. It just means you will have to work a little harder to develop the other skill. I also don’t believe that being projective and being receptive are mutually exclusive.
The winter that I started working with Cerridwyn, I also started to work with the energy of the Phoenix, the Firebird. I had some pretty extraordinary things happen once I started working with the Firebird, and they are some of the stories of how I know my Paganism is real.
While my closest relationship with a divinity is with Aphrodite, I also have a close working relationship with Cerridwyn. Cerridwyn is the Welsh goddess of transformation and change. She is the keeper of the cauldron of knowledge, and she is frequently viewed as a “dark” goddess.
Priestess of Aphrodite 