The Sovereign Woman, The Virgin, and The Mother.
Between the Sovereign Woman and the Mother stands the Virgin.
In some ways, it's a looming passageway. It’s the valley of death, surrender, and letting go. It’s the hot earth mulching and the cocoon of transformation. Some say there is no physiological difference between excitement and fear and this is the ledge leaping in.
The Sovereign Woman has a sense of freedom the Mother doesn’t have but the Mother has the power to gestate, birth, and tend to the deepest desires of the Sovereign Woman whose gifts are not of this nature.
The Sovereign Woman can fear what she must leave behind to truly channel her callings into life and instead lives in resistance, hastily grasping at what she longs for, not realizing she’s being summoned to let go into her fears to attain what she really wants.
The Sovereign Woman has aspects of the Fool in the deck of tarot. Some say it’s the first card, and some say it’s the last. Her crown is cracked wide open feasting on the seeds of potential, dreams, and the infinite possibilities the divine and life have to offer. She’s the fertile Creatrix lusting with passion. She is the Archetype of not only discovering one’s independence, personal power, and boundaries but she is also the Archetype of discovering one’s passion, dreams, and purpose, in the midst of defining her values and priorities that will be her guiding light of discovery.
The lustful dreamy passion for adventure and potential can be a high that is almost addictive in nature keeping us from the follow-through of birthing anything. It’s a high and experience that can fuel the fire of one’s life force and it also has the potential to create much suffering if one isn’t willing to let go when ushered.
Her power of passionate creation is open through the crown but to sink those seeds of potential into gestation she must take the great leap of surrender to the Virgin which will carry her through to the mother who can gestate, birth, and tend those dreams into life.
The Virgin is twofold in the sense that sometimes she arises in times of great agony and death we did not call for. She is the doula of death that soothes us as we grieve what no longer is. She is the doula of death much like Kali when our world gets rocked and we are forced into letting go of something that was taken from us. She holds us through the process of grief and midwives us back to life when it’s time to get back on our feet.
The Virgin is also the Archetype that beckons us when we are on the precipice of something great, of great potential or possibility but it is up to us to leap. She will stare us in the eyes as we suffer fighting the gravitational force beckoning us as she waits for us to wake up and muster courage greater than our fear.
The initiation often is the leap.
The leap of saying yes. Full stop. No negations, no only if… It’s a leap of commitment no matter the outcome. No answers laid out before us. It’s the YES because you know there is no other choice but to leap. That your soul depends on trying and trusting. And within that leap, we leave behind what has been, with no real knowing of what the path ahead of us entails.
The Mother is the almighty Creator. She envelopes the seeds the Sovereign Woman has channeled and roots them into her womb, into gestation. There is a reckoning with our Sovereignty to surrender to the Mother. The Sovereign Woman thrives on her ability to do it all, be it all, and have it all but some seeds, the most potent of seeds, need our full being to tend into life.
There comes a point when lustful possibilities and dreams are no longer enough, and the letting go we fear is actually the letting go we long for.
IxChel is a Maya Goddess that is depicted in different images between Maiden, Mother, and Crone. She most often appears with a snake upon her head like a crown representing the wisdom and medicine she wields through the worlds. Though in the state of the Mother she takes it off as a holy offering of surrender into the great initiation. For she is sacrificing herself to the great mystery of life, to tend to the life that is coming through her.
We can resist this path with all of our strength but what we don’t realize is that what takes hold to gestate within the Mother is our path. Whether we chose it or not. It’s part of our journey, our spiritual evolution, our karma, dharma, and purpose in this life and we can fight it all that we want but if we surrender and set the crown down for the time being we will reap the benefits and deflect the suffering that is stirred by kicking and screaming in resistance. There is no turning back and this is what the Virgin teaches us. Birth and death are bound.
The Virgin teaches us to accept the messiness of the heart and the messiness of life. She teaches us to not shame the chaos that is part of the passageway. She teaches us to let the heart feel what it will. She teaches us to let go not only of the life circumstances, and external realities we are clinging to, but to let go of the wild river within ourselves and to let the waves crash.
She teaches us to let go of the rigid visions of how we want things to be, how we think things should be, and the precision of what it is we long for. She teaches us to follow the path like reading brail with our eyes closed trusting the current at which we are pulled.
We don't have to have it all together. We don't have to understand every why. We don't have to stay calm. We don't have to keep cool. We don't have to master everything. She illuminates the perfection of imperfection. Death and birth aren't pretty but they sure are beautiful and absolutely divine.
The Virgin midwives us through this passage, and we arrive raw, utterly new, and as a blank slate in the realm of everything unknown. It’s the fragile state of acclimating to what has become and is becoming before it’s integrated into being.
Almost every culture has a word that translates more or less to Motherbaby, stating that in the early stages of postpartum the mother and baby are still one. Though the child is outside the womb it does not know that it’s separate and the spirits, auras, and physical bodies of both mother and baby are not yet acclimated to survive separately. Though the woman has technically been birthed into Mother she's in limbo between who she has been and who she is becoming and the Virgin sits by the Mother's side as she acclimates in waves of grieving what was and celebrating what now is.
Wombyn are life-giving creators. The Womb is the portal where spirit becomes life. Regardless of having children or not the metaphor of the mother in that literal sense is the map of wisdom in all of our creations.
The commitment, dedication, all-encompassing sacrifice, and blessing of initiation through conception, gestation, birth, and motherhood - it's this that represents the magnitude of embodiment, embrace, and devotion the seeds of our dreams ask of us.
To the wispiness force of power, the Sovereign Woman wields. To the courage, compassion, and healing salve of love the Virgin offers, And to the patience, foresight, and roots of devotion the Mother radiates unconditionally to all.
With love,
Abby
