|
My Crone Ceremony
by SkySinger
I like to be called Skysinger, my magickal name as well as an online alias and a pen name. I am a Crone -- had a crone ceremony for myself in the summer of 1995, a year and a day after my
last menstrual period. (I had to keep track of periods for several years because you don't know in advance when one is going to be the last.)
I belong to a Women's spirituality group called Raham, and they were all at the ceremony (all 7 of them), along with my older daughter and a couple of online friends. We used my entire
house. We went into my quilt studio and pretended we were in utero. Then we passed through a bridge of people (London Bridge style) and were born into my guest bedroom, where I have the furniture I had
as a child. There we played "dress ups" and costumed ourselves until someone invited us upstairs into the secrets of womanhood and menstruation. There we stood around and told stories about our
first periods and so on.
Then we went to the "motherhood" stage of life. Since not all of those present were mothers, we went around the group and told what we were proud of about ourselves and our
achievements. Women so seldom take the opportunity to brag openly, and are rarely affirmed in stating their pride in themselves. Then we went to the crone part. There was only one other Crone present, so
I asked the others to pretend they were crones. I was given a gift and I slipped out of my "mother" robe which I'd been wearing and into my purple "crone robe" which I'd made for
myself. The whole thing took about 4 hours, but it didn't seem that long. It wasn't like we were sitting still in church all that time-- we were moving around and talking and interacting. It was great
fun.
Raham is a Hebrew word for "Womb" and each of us, in the ten years we've been meeting has grown and given birth to herself. Most of us have moved from Christianity to some other
tradition. We do rituals each month, and whoever is leading the ritual does it her own way. So we have Buddhist, Wiccan, Native American, and generic rituals. After ten years we trust each other more
than dogma, and most of us believe that the Divine Mystery is so great that we can only relate to It/Her/Him through metaphor. And whatever story, myth, or orientation works at any given time is fine
with us.
|
