Birthing the Dark Feminine: AN Exploration into the wilderness of a woman’s heart.
The Spotify playlist was called “Priestess” and the mood of it was if Persephone embraced Queen of the Underworld. Press play.
What about Persephone? Maybe that’s what she should’ve done. Instead of the damsel-in-distress story, what if the story is her just facing the dark and saying, “Fuck, bring it!”
What if no rescue efforts were needed from Demeter, Hecate, and Orpheus? What if she descended, taken into initiation so she could sit in the belly of the shadow, in the black rot of night, in its void, recessed in the dark side of the moon, so she could become this other thing, integrating the innocent bride with the dark mistress. Activating the sacred feminine. Bringing innocence into the dark, and the dark into rebirth.
What if she was meant to die, descend into the underworld so she could awaken the dark queen, fully embodying above and below — the crowning seal for activating the sacred feminine.
What if that is our hero’s journey and our initiation into womanhood?
The playlist switched to Bishopp Briggs “The Way I do.”
I started moving to it, stretching. The stretches moved into a new type of stretch, the deep movements looking like the poses of women in Mughal paintings, something always slightly alien in it, these intentional forms that twist the body into poised unnatural forms. Suddenly here was my body, holding the same form, and it felt so good, like a deep warm breaking in of bone to time. Arms and legs bent into a churning windmill of right angles. The stretch becomes a dance, and the dance becomes a ritual, moving in rhythmic circles patterning the flow of waxing and waning moon as it rises and descends across the sky. And we move, that girl in time from those Mughal paintings, and me — us. I wonder if she felt it too.
I get up and start slowly moving through the room in dance, feeling the reunion of all the selves and all our pasts to this one point in time where it all converges… and I become We.
And we dance, all our selves, all our histories, all our expressions. The dance moved between stretches that flowed into tribal, part yoga, part break, part Indian, part the dark wild’s expression of itself, its rich deep adoration for its own dark beauty. In the convergence, it became more. It became a prayer. A devotion. A wedding. A return.
This is the only prayer I know.
This is the only prayer that only I know.
This is my prayer, in the tongue of my embodiment. A language only I know.
It felt like there was a release. That on a body-soul level, something that had died was released. Something that had died, but was held onto for so long in our bones, enscripted as a spell, the voodoo of religion. So many inherited ideas, the religions, the cultures, the patterns, the gossip. So many prisoners of time and memory are trapped in bodies that refuse to let them die, resurrecting death at every invocation, every possession.
Something that died.
A many somethings that had died.
Over time, these cemeteries we carried burdened the soul-body. It was carrying death without an awareness or knowing, something we didn’t have the faculty of sensing. The ghosts we felt around us were echoes of those cemeteries shifting from memory to matter. So many ghosts haunted us, so many of them with eyes pleading to be freed.
Maybe that’s what was released tonight. And through the thick cloud of release, She emerges. Pushing through beyond the realms of all the death our bodies are finally releasing — Welcome the Dark Wild.
The Dark Goddess
The Mischief
The Witch
Queen of the Ethers
The collective expression of every priestess and healer that ever walked the plains of humanity’s imagination.
She was free, free from the weight of all those cemeteries, all those memories, all those centuries, all those wars, all those enslavers.
This Bitch…
This Bitch is Free.
Persephone embraced the Dark Queen of the Underworld, this other self.
And the Queen is changed by innocence, seeing the dark rot, the rich depth of expression as Innocence, Dark Innocence.
What’s this Bitch gonna do?
She reminds the girl self, the once-maiden innocent to the ways of the dark wilderness,
“Remember all the times in the past two years when we gave you a peek into
multi-realities, and you were hooked. You said, ‘I accept it. Change what needs to
change.”
Bishop Briggs “River” comes on.
The attitude of the song is the attitude and movement of this dark feminine presence. Wild. Unpredictable. A brewing storm. Lightning in her eyes. Broken shackles and chains chime as she steps forward. A wild cosmic huntress, and broken worlds her prey. Here comes the Destroyer of Worlds.
She whispers, half laughing, half mocking,
“Remember when you got injured and were so miserable not being able to move. Remember when everything felt both dead from life, but full of life in death. That pain. That pain got you to show up to a practice. To move your body. To stay in flow. Each hour you put into the practice of focused-intentional movement, every hour was another chisel strike at the cemetery. You were freeing me, us.”
She brings many. There are so many of us here, versions of me across cultures, eras, all in one embodied soul-self waiting for integration, for the emergence of the Dark Wild Queen.
This Bitch is an intense Dark Magic.
She doesn’t walk, she sways in dance.
She doesn’t give a fuck who’s looking.
She’s hypnotic.
We’re in.
This Bitch is in charge.
The old self returns — over-thinking, plotting scenarios and rushing to catch all the possible reactions. The old self looks to the Dark Bitch with a question of what-do-we-do?
She’s there, timeless. In flow. Her dance in a trance to the song of her own presence, flowing and swaying, calm, steady to her own flow, and unphased by the outer world. That world is dying, we remember. And she’s dancing on its ashes.
“What do we do?” we ask of all our projected worries.
“We don’t,” she says. “It isn’t now. And when it is, I’ll do whatever I fucking feel like doing.”
She has no conflict between the self today and the self tomorrow — she doesn’t treat it like a relay race between passing selves. She trusts herself. She trusts the decisions all versions of her across time will make. There is no inner conflict.
Another deep breath becomes another integration. She becomes me. I became her. We become us. We become I.
“But first the cemeteries have to die.”
She tells me, we tell each other, this is why they banned us. Our dances, our songs, our movement, our rituals, our integration. Our devotion.
We — rising with the Dark Goddess — we terrified them. That’s why we were subjugated to religion, a code to trap, the foundation of the prison.
We are why they feared witches. We are what birthed witches.
We are an old dark magic. We are the awakened feminine.
They tried to ban us.
They feared our dance.
They feared our union of body and spirit.
They feared our integration with the dark wild.
They feared our language.
They feared our song.
We had to be destroyed — by the priests, the prophets and all the slaves of Distortion, the Great Deceiver. Enslaving humanity to the ideas of submission, ideas of control, ideas of separation, ideas of enslavement, ideas of death. Its shrine is the altar of cemeteries we carry deep in our bones.
For the next few years, we need to shift drivers. The Dark Bitch is in charge.
If you can’t make a decision, she’s going to make it with zero fucks for your discomfort.
Part of myself is thinking how did I get here. And I remind myself I agreed to it. I welcomed the change consciously, looking into the mirror in soul-contract and saying I agree. Let what needs to die, die. Let what needs to come in, come in.
And there was that other time of initiation, where no amount of pretending got you through it. Where you had to break down to you most vulnerable. You had to lie there and concede surrender, to let go of control and accept the death of your ego. You were the bird that broke the egg, old but new to another world.
You admitted you agreed to do this, long before. You agreed to it.
You fucking overachiever.
We’re all the same person. You. Us.
We’re just integrating.
We’re coming home, belonging to ourselves.
“At least you’ll have some fun now.” she winked.
And this is why they hunted women.
This is why they changed our stories. They spread confusion. They tried to destroy us.
Me Too, bitches.
My body keeps moving in a slow dance, a deep stretch. The integration births the Divine Feminine and she doesn’t stop flowing…like a river.
The old self knows this has to be shared, but all the fears come up around the one question that has killed more of humanity’s best ideas: “What will people say?”
“Fucking do it anyway.”
That’s the strategy. Fucking do it….while you’re dancing, while your hips swing, while every curve of your body catches the current in the river that courses through the constellation of your being.
Flow.
Move. Dance.
Come into yourself.
This is how you breathe,
Like a river.