The Bone Path:

Samhain, Saturn & the Descent into Winter

The Samhain cross-quarter festival marks the entry to the Winter Queen’s realm, where the veils between dimensions are thinnest, and the unseen presses into its misty edges. This is not the aesthetic of pumpkins and ghosts that the Spiritual bypassers would have us swallow, but the call of our dying. The Winter phase is a merging with the soil and the animate within us, as the bony hands of our ancestors reach out to guide us in.

Honouring the Crone at the Crossroads

Samhain is her doorway. The Winter months are her canvas.

The Compost Season: Death, Stillness, and Sacred Unmaking

Right now, the Great Bone Mother — the archetypal Crone in all her fierce wisdom gathers her hounds and draws herself tall. This is her realm. She is the ancient one who gathers all the bones, leaving not one untended, not one forgotten, because hers is to remember. She is the memory keeper, the guardian of the story, and midwife to all who pass the in-between space. She lives in the briny marrow of our bones, in our dreams, and in our retreat.

She has been known and named throughout all time. Depicted as a merging between the animal kingdom, the green kingdom and the human form, for she speaks the Mother Tongue that unites them all.

Walking with Saturn and the Bone Mother through the Veil

As Winter closes around us, Saturn, representative of the edge of the known world, joins us in the death process. This work in the death deacon, the final degrees of Pisces, demands that we get clear about endings. That we name the stories, habits, identities or hopes that have reached their end, and are ready to be laid to rest?

Don’t think for a moment that this is about clean slates or swift transformations, because this is the compost rarefying itself, and time (and trust) is most certainly needed. The Water Element and winter are upon us — and with them come stillness, silence, and the invisible yet potent realm of the Remakers. It is a time of gestation, not germination. A time of fallow, darkness and the transformation that only a true death can bring.

Over on The Way of Nature, we are journeying deeply with the Bone Mother these days — exploring her many faces, her mythology, her starlore and her fierce, fierce love.

If you feel her call from this threshold space, you are welcome to step closer towards her cauldron, where her wisdom wants to take you deep into the language of the bones - Water.

Over these threshold days, we are invited to inquire into what in us is ready to fall away? And what needs forgetting so that we might remember?

Blessings on your threshold walk,
May the Bone Mother hold the lantern high.
yx