Traditional First Harvest known as Lammas or Lughnasa in the Celt tradition is this Sunday, August 2.

To understand First Harvest as an archetypal tide, its cultural and traditional meanings and practices the world round in depth, go here.

We all feel the archetypal energy of this time magnified right now. The moon waxes or grows ripe in her gibbous phase.  On Monday, Aug 3, when she peaks full in the sun sign of Leo, Lunar Lammas arrives!

Lunar Lammas is a Women’s Mystery celebration. This means gnostic, or hidden celebration of soul and soulful mysteries of the divine feminine.

Hidden in part because the rituals and practices of honoring the ancient seasonal, harmonious shifts of earth, moon, and sun were forced underground by the now modernized Judeo-Christian, or White narrative (meaning mythology/religion, as a depth psychologist what I’d call ingrained self-story) when it conquered the old indigenous ways.  To learn more, research the witch inquisitions of the 14th and 15th centuries across Europe.  They also occurred in the States in the 17 and 1800’s.

It is an oversimplification of the history, but overall the pheasants and working class people across Europe lost their connection to Mother Nature as a Godhead, as well all of their associated myths or stories and customs during the burning times.  Nature-based beliefs revering Mother Nature, personified through an array of local fertility Goddesses and Gods, specific to the land-based stories and practices of the people, became vilified as the worship of Satan.

Research the document the Malleus Maleficarum for more information on this.

Understand that the political climate of the 14th and 15th century in Europe intentionally sought to revile both women as a gender, but especially female sexuality as “Devil-touched.”  Folk practices connecting women to the moon and lunar cycles through our menstrual rhythms became taboo.

Female sexuality, disparaged over several generations, absorbed into a collective understanding that female values were, at best, unimportant.  At worst, evil.

This is all oversimplification to be sure, but in depth psychology we understand that as women, and Mother Nature as sources of life became concurrently demonized, so too did the metaphor of the Divine Feminine.

That means so too did Soul.  The disconnect to the archetype of the Self (one’s unique access to one’s own individual Soul) is a way of understanding our overall traumagenic culture.

If Soul, or the Divine Feminine within, is vilified in the collective Psyche of humankind, it becomes translated as the various normalizations of denigration and exploitation of groups of people’s safety and basic health rights.

It is the psychospiritual core of systemic power injustices.

Dear friends, this demonization of the Soul, of the Feminine, of Self (ALL SELVES) as Sacred, both in general and metaphor, has reached its peak.

We have now before us Clear Sight, (a developmental phase, tool and grace!) should we choose it, to See and Transform this deep woundology from within.  As within, so outside us.  And so it goes.

We are together right now in a Collective Dark, or Death season. In soul alchemy, the Death season is necessary.  It prepares for rebirth.  It also requires of us to reckon with our own shadow, or personal darkness.  It’s an aspect of development, to spend time in the personal swamplands or death place.

The individual human Soul, and especially Collective Soul, has been undergoing false initiation for many generations now.  We have gotten EXCELLENT at avoiding our shadow.

Soul.  Your own unique, capital S Self. An integrating archetypal function, our inner-outer divine life force Source.  The inward transformational power only the individual can access.

In Women’s Embodiment, the goal is personal autonomy, or at one ness, with h/she her his their own whole Self.  This intuitively means sovereignty, or at-one-ness with not just your unique Soul print, but the ways in which your own Soul experience is informed by, supports and informs the collective or World Soul.

Ok, so if you know me you’ll know I’ll wax on forever about this!  Instead~know:

First Harvest.  The Lammas tide is an awesome time to re-ignite your connection to your own, unique Soul Light.  It is also time that cards, as we might say, come due.

If you do not bring Clear Sight this weekend to your Self and your personal collective, the dark will be brought to you.

What better reason could there be to celebrate and connect right now to the Ancient Earthly & Cosmos tide of First Harvest!

Lunar Lammas is traditionally known on the Mystery Path as a Wishing Moon.  To understand more, or use it for personal ritual and celebration, go here.

You can also join me, on Monday, during traditional Lunar Lammas, for a live ritual on Wild Women Wisdom’s FB page.   That’s Monday, August 3, 5:30pm EST or New York time.

I have been working with the archetype of the Chalice, or Womb as a Sacred Container, for soul alchemy this year. It is a continuation of the work my non-profit, The Delmarva Free School, and our intent and tending last medicine wheel year the archetype of the Virgin, or One who is Sovereign over Her Own Soul.

The light of Lunar Lammas moon is Time.  Time to use Clear Sight. Time to Tend.  Time to Transform.  Time to See in the Dark.

We will work with this necessary phase and Grace in Ritual.  Join me!  Bring an eye cover, an instrument if you drum or shake etc, a journal, and an offering that is significant or your own authentic connection to your true Self, or your growth this year.

If you cannot join, the Live ritual on FB will include some written suggestions of ways to enact your own personal ritual for First Harvest.

May we do no harm.  May we Love.  May we Heal.  May it be So.

Hope to see you Monday~!

 

~

image

Yemanjá, Nelson Boeira Faedrich

Brazilian artist, 1912-1994