The Woods in October
The Woods in October
deities, elementals and spirits
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Let me introduce you to October, a month filled with mysteries, evocative changes in nature, symbolic content, and magical significance.
This is by far my favorite moment of the year. There are months that I like better and enjoy more, but this precise moment in the year holds such powerful energy, sparking awe and reverence for things mystical and uncanny that I feel this time of year right down to the marrow of my bones.
We often refer to this time of year as the veil thinning. What exactly do we mean by that? Certainly, there is a Celtic influence. In bygone years, it was common knowledge that the otherworld would bleed into our reality at certain places and times. Barrows, wells, and crossroads were especially susceptible to worlds colliding. Samhain was one such time, and I suspect all the weeks in late harvest and early winter carried the same potential.
The Otherworld of the Fae is not necessarily a pleasant place, nor are the Fae who live there. Those who wander in often are trapped or return home having missed many years of earthly time, as in Washington Irving’s tale of Rip Van Winkle. There are many tales of the perils of being carried off or stumbling into Faerieland unawares.
In mid-October, a strong sense of permeability pervades the atmosphere. I feel it constantly, but on damp, overcast days when mist hugs the woodland floor, poison toadstools rot at the base of dead trees, and owls screech in the twilight, I know the time has arrived when the veil has become so thin that passage to and fro between realms becomes possible. This is the thinning of the veil.
There’s something about the land, or perhaps the Landvættir, the "land spirits" or "land wights," the spirits of the land in Old Nordic religion, that is a restless presence.
Indeed, this is a time of significant change in nature. Agricultural fields are entirely harvested and lay fallow until plowing time. A blanket of silence and stillness settles over them. Flower gardens are blackened from frost or mold, with only a few late bloomers brightening the spotted and decaying foliage. They are like urns of flowers in a graveyard.
The tree canopy grows thin, exposing bare trunks and crooked branches that look skeletal, even though they are clothed in brightly colored leaves. This thinning of foliage means that from a distance, you can see the woodland floor, and when it is damp after a nighttime rain, dark, murky patches appear and catch my eye. For a split second, they seemed to me gnomes or land wights emerged from the earth as they turned or moved, settling in for winter.
This is nature without Persephone, the Maiden, and Demeter, the Grain Mother. Their presence has departed and descended into the underworld weeks ago at the autumn equinox. Their presence, first in spring and then in summer, tames and comforts the land, coaxing beauty and goodness from the earth.
Part of the change in October is the retreat of the life force of trees and plants, which, like Persephone, dies back and drains away into the earth. This is a powerful time for communication with the trees themselves. I recommend making an annual walk about your property or local park to bid the trees goodnight and thank them for the shade and beauty, fruit and nuts, and the shelter they provided for the animals and birds. Speak a blessing over them, and let them go to their rest well cared for and loved. Cultivating this ritual teaches us how to accompany our beloved kin, friends, and pets on their final journey across the great divide. We can never be fully prepared for those moments, but participating in the annual dying and the springtime rebirth of trees helps us understand and accept the great mysteries of coming and going in which we all participate.
As the trees fall asleep for winter, the presence and voices of earth spirits, stones and bones, roots and rivers can be heard and understood more easily. In the spring and summer, the energy and presence of the trees dominate the landscape. Their yearly flourishing brings verdant flow and sheltering nourishing energy to the forests and woodlands. The oxygen they produce benefits humans and all beings who breathe fresh air. But, later in the year, beginning now in mid-October, their presence and influence recede.
We can now more easily understand lesser-known and understood beings. Gnomes are traditionally associated with the land, meaning the duff and decomposing leaves on the forest floor, the humus, and the many meters of dirt that comprise the upper layers of the earth’s crust. They also guard the earth's treasures, including precious metals and gemstones. Gnomes are elemental spirits. Their correspondence is with Earth as one of the four classical elements (earth, water, air, fire), the earth signs of the zodiac, Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn, the suit of coins or pentacles in the Tarot, among other things.
Like the trees, the earth's elementals, or gnomes, settle down for the winter season, yet my experience has been that they do not sleep as the trees do. They remain at work, though perhaps with a more stoic demeanor. In winter, they take on a more Capricornian aspect, making it a perfect time to connect with them if you grow anything on your land or petunias in a flowerpot on your patio. Now is the time to seek their counsel on how to use the land better, what fertilizer to feed it, which nutrients it needs, and how best to cultivate and irrigate it. This is root work, foundational and deeply healing, just as it is when you work with your lower chakras, root, sacral, and solar plexus.
The Norse Land Wights are more fearsome, and I often feel them prowling and growling in the woods around my property at this time of year. I know they are memory keepers of the land and thus frequently harbor some enmity about its destruction and misuse. I suspect they will be fierce this winter as many trees were felled over the summer months along the property adjacent to the mine, where powerlines stand. Typically, the power company trims the tree line back every three years, and every five years, they remove any large trees that show indications of falling in the direction of the powerlines. However, this year, they decided to remove everything: trees, shrubs, underbrush, and grasses for 100 yards on either side of the poles. They created a gaping scar across the land for miles and miles. An unthinkable amount of trees were cut down. Fortunately, our property is in a wetland that protected many of the trees in my immediate area, and we saw only the cutting down of shrubs and bushes along our property line. Still, the destruction was horrific across the pond to the west and the road to the east. I understand the thinking; it was thought to be a cost savings, allowing them not to have to trim or clear trees for an estimated twenty years. But still, the land wights were not pleased, and that energy was palpable all through the summer.
October is a month of natural magic and earth magic as the trees quiet down and the more obscure earth elementals have a chance to be observed.
Mother Rot (read about her HERE) is still active in her important work, but a second presence haunts the woods and a third waits in the wings for the chill air and first hoar frost to arrive.
Present now among the falling leaves, tendrils of mists, and the early dusk of October is Hecate. She is the Crone and Dark aspect of Persephone and Demeter, for surely the earth mother will not leave altogether just because the season has turned to winter? No indeed. She takes on a form more aligned with the weather, the atmosphere, and the realities of Earth’s winter season.
With the beauty and ease of spring and summer stripped away and the bounty of harvest stored away in barns and pantries, what is left? Hecate knows, and she will teach you if you dare to face her initiation.
Hecate, the High Priestess, the Keeper of Crossroads, and the psychopomp escorting souls to the realms of the dead, has many lessons to teach and wisdom to pass on. These things are best learned during winter because they are the foundations of life whose veriditas will blossom and fill the senses, overwhelming them in spring and summer. Winter, with its sparseness and austerity, best reveals the hard truths we must face. The scouring frosts and winds of winter sweep away any illusion, glamour, or spell that could cloud our vision—Hecate deals in realities and finalities.
I sense her presence, especially in the moments before dawn and in the darkness the night before the first sliver of the new moon appears. She also moves in the shadows among the pines and along the edges of streams when evening sets in.
October is the month of her most vital appearance for me. At All Soul’s Day, after the wheel of the year has moved into the season of Hallowtide, she passes me wisdom about death. How we face our mortality, the loss of those we love, and what we can understand about life after death have a profound impact on how we live.
In the popular imagination and collective unconscious, there has always been an overlap of the Blessed Mother Mary and Hecate, especially Mary as the Black Madonna, Mary the Ripener of Grain, and Mary the psychopomp of the Rosary who prays for us now and at the hour of our death.
In this jumble of dark mothers, souls, and shadows, we find whispers of the feminine aspects of the divine, particularly when Sophia the Holy Wisdom is considered. The Feminine, The Sophia, is made most visible and powerful in Nature. She opens out into a thousand aspects and emanations, fractal upon fractal, showing us patterns of reality and divinity we could otherwise not see or grasp. She is her own version of incarnation, alive in every living thing around us, pointing always to the Divine Source, the God of all that is.
She lies in wait in the wings, on the cutting edge of the north wind, bringing shards of ice and howling storms. Make no mistake; she is already prowling about in the coldest hours after midnight and on the dampest and most tempestuous days of wind and rain when the daytime skies blacken, and the wind rips the red leaves off the maple trees. She is the Celtic Brigid of Imbolc and the Green Lady of the Woods at Beltane, now revealed in her most austere aspect, the hag of winter, the Cailleach. Her stories come to us from the northernmost reaches of Scotland, some from Ireland, and some from the northern part of England.
There are others of like kind to her who are known in other places as well. We find the Dark Beira in Scotland, sometimes the same as the Irish Cailleach Beara. There is also the Norse Skaði, with whom the Cailleach shares responsibility for dispensing justice, and both are gigantic in stature. The Slavic goddess Marzanna is hag-like, draped in rags, and carries a bundle of sticks. There are traditions where she is burned or drowned in effigy, symbolizing the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. You can find similar Cailleach effigy traditions in the folk customs of Ireland and Scotland.
The Cailleach is a winter weather and earth spirit. Indeed, she is often said to shape the land itself, creeping in as the days shorten and the temperatures drop. Her ancient and complex story touches on many meaningful life and death issues.
If you approach her cautiously, she, like Hecate, has many powerful lessons to teach in the darkness of winter.
At this point, you may think, “Jan, this is quite the assortment of spirits and goddesses from traditions and cultures far and wide. How in the world can I work with any of this?”
Here, we face the blessing, the curse, the beauty, and the burden of the age of information. With a few quick keyboard strokes, we can read, watch, or listen to myths, stories, sacred scriptures, cosmologies, and belief systems of cultures from around the globe and across time.
Often, we encounter myth, religion, or an entire culture that resonates so profoundly in our soul that our whole frame of reference changes. Sometimes, this causes us to reflect on and discard what we had previously thought; other times, it makes us wonder if we had a past life or if these are ancestral memories that have been awakened in our DNA.
Once you know a thing, you can't unknow it, so these deities, myths, and stories haunt us as we try to figure out what to do with them in the here and now of the twenty-first century. We know about other cultures; as humans, we sense a connection to what is alive and exerting influence in the collective unconscious. We can now understand, at least in part, the psychological underpinnings of these spirits and deities.
Nature is another way to thread through this complex maze of cultural treasures across cultures and epochs. Nature encompasses all of us, and what we see, experience, and observe in the natural and supernatural aspects shown in nature belong to everyone, and the particular names for the elements, land spirits, etc., are virtually unimportant.
Behind every diety or mythic being is a natural force or an archetype. We know them because our collective unconscious recognizes the archetypal patterns that give psychic structure to our consciousness and reality. Knowing the spiritual reality is more important than knowing a particular cultural name for that thing. Lean into what calls you and learn from it. Respect the culture it came from, but most importantly, go deeper and find its universal foundation.
Who or what is moving into your awareness this month? Stories shared are stories witnessed, solidifying them and giving them a realness not achieved when we keep them to ourselves.
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Comments and conversation are always appreciated and enjoyed, so feel free to let your voice be heard. I read them all and try to respond to each one.
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A potent time, Jan, and interesting to see how it is showing up in mine and many others' writing this week, not so much with the analysis and reverence for spirit that you've offered here, but clearly with the pull of these beings at the heart of it all. "As the trees fall asleep for winter, the presence and voices of earth spirits, stones and bones, roots and rivers can be heard and understood more easily."
Indeed they can!
Beautiful! This liminal time has always carried me closer to my connections to my Goddesses and ancestors ✨🍂