Snakes, Wands + Ashes

feverish dreams

Mar 02, 2023

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Like transitional seasons in life, transitional seasons in nature can feel flat, uninspiring, and depressing. It can feel as if nothing is happening. You sense no forward movement, no measurable progress, just a land of limbo, betwixt and between, without the excitement of beginnings or the satisfaction of completion.

I'm sensing that feeling now in the middle of Imbolc. The initial celebration of the Cailleach, the old winter hag transforming into the spring maiden, Brigid, who begins the greening of the land, has faded. The groundhog has retreated into his burrow, the ground remains frozen, and little seems to have changed since we welcomed the new year eight weeks ago.

Transitions in nature, like those in life, can be slow. They can also be tough to navigate because there are few apparent markers to point the way or quantify progress. As a result, disorientation is common, and despair is frequently the result.

Folklore tells us to expect a malady of disposition that can afflict you in the transitional time of late winter and early spring, cabin fever.

As the season of darkness began at the autumn equinox, the mythical descent of Persephone and the promise of quiet time to turn inward and plumb the depths of the season of darkness drew me in. Like a siren song, the Hermit's call pulled me along with promises of the mystery and magic of winter. After the powerful energies of firey Beltane, Sun-centric Leo season, and exacting Virgo, this seasonal shift was tantalizing and irresistible at the autumn equinox in September. Yet, five months later, I'm suffering from the malaise and discontent known as cabin fever. I've had enough of the darkness, and the winter mysteries no longer fascinate me as they did months ago. I've wandered through the myths of winter, but now their chapter is over, and I'm eager for the next.

The winter season has almost played out, but not quite yet, and it feels maddening. But isn't this precisely what happens when one season of life is sputtering out yet hangs on in what seems like an overstayed welcome?

Who hasn't felt this when they know they must change jobs, have long desired retirement, or secretly wished their twenty-two-year-old would finally move out, so the nest is empty and your life more spacious? What was once wonderful and happily embraced has run out of life force. The situation must burn out, become a pile of ash and then rise like a phoenix, flaming brightly with new possibilities.

The transitional stage of a fading flame and pile of ash is less than inspiring; it is underwhelming and potentially depressing.

Yet, despite the dissolution of transitional times and the challenges they present, they are some of my favorite moments in the seasonal cycle.

Studying the wisdom of the earth can be invaluable because you learn lessons you might otherwise miss. So when I am in a life transition, I look to the land and the woods to offer me their wisdom.

Let's look at this transitional season together and see what we can learn.

Depending on where you live, Imbolc may be the beginning of the greening of the land, with spring-like conditions manifesting weeks before the spring equinox in late March. Where I live, it is most definitely not. Imbolc is merely a promise, a fleeting glimpse of changing conditions. The sap beings to rise in the trees. Rising sap is a hidden process deep underground at the roots and within the trees. You would never suspect something is happening unless you know this hidden knowledge.

Hidden knowledge is something that underpins most times of transitions in nature and life. Therefore, knowing what to look for is critical.

I find many of those clues to hidden knowledge in nature and symbolic systems, and it's always amazing how many correspondences help me find meaning in challenging transitions, whether seasonal or personal.

The tapping of maple trees is always the first sign of the forces of change during Imbolc. My neighbors up the hill tap their maples and make excellent maple syrup. The lesson I alluded to earlier is that rising sap, the energy of new enthusiasm, ideas, creative energy, spiritual growth, and life force, begins at our roots and happens within us long before we show any outward signs or even consciously realize what is happening.

In alchemy, this is calcination, the operation of fire, often the first step of the alchemical process. It involves intense heat (perhaps the "fever" in cabin fever?), which drives off any water and volatile substance, leaving a heap of dry ash.

Calcinating fire represents cremation, death, and the blackness of mortification. The result of calcination is white ash which symbolizes despair, mourning, or repentance. Yet, paradoxically all of this also signifies the making of gold (perfecting the Soul), the supreme value and goal of the magnum opus, the great work.

It's hard not to notice that Ash Wednesday usually falls within Imbolc and encapsulates many of these themes.

Calcination, the White Ash, mixed media art journal, Jan Blencowe ©

There's some profound hidden knowledge lodged within these overlapping symbols. Lent (in nature the lengthening of days, coming from the Old English word lencten, meaning lengthen) holds within its spiritual meaning the themes of calcinating fire, death, blackness, mortification, and also the themes of white ash, despair, mourning, and repentance.

Jung equated fire with libido, by which he meant life force. Nature hints that the life force must wane and collapse into a heap before it can recycle itself and begin a new cycle. Everything must calcinate or burn away to an ash heap even as the active solar principle causes the days to lengthen. In reality, the process never ends. No old cycle, life, or Self ultimately ends and is obliterated before something new is birthed. This is the secret meaning of the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of the snake eating its tail. Everything remains; it just transforms.

The suit of Wands in the Tarot uses the ouroboros symbol on all its court cards except the Queen. But it's not in the court cards that we find the hidden meaning of the in-between time when a pile of ash is all we have. For that, we must go to the depictions of everyday life in the minors.

We stay in the suit of Wands (fire) because nature is libido, i.e., life force. As part of nature, we experience the changing seasons and cycles more than we often realize. Right now, at the end of winter, but before the surge of new life force at the spring equinox, we experience the ash pile.

The Tarot is a visual symbol system whose images speak volumes to our intuitive function. We look at the images and know more than we know we know!

Tarot is a dynamic and evolving system; some very clever and talented people continually expand it.

The Before Tarot by Corinne Kenner, Eon Rossi, Simona Rossi, The RWS Tarot, The After Tarot by Giula F. Massaglia

In "The Before Tarot," the artist shows us acquiring everything we are passionate about.

The traditional Ten of Wands (here, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) shows us how life force, ambition, creativity, productivity, and all the good things we acquire can become a burden. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. For example, a business we begin from scratch grows so large we are crushed by the demands of running it. That which was once a dream, a passion, an exciting endeavor takes root, develops, produces a harvest, and eventually becomes too much to manage and becomes a monstrous burden. This happens with many things in life. It is also a picture of the seasonal cycle. The ripening harvest eventually becomes too heavy and falls to the ground to rot.

Another Tarot deck, "The After Tarot," shows us the moment we find ourselves in the ash heap with a pile of wands at our feet.

Learning from the Ash heap

So what about this in-between time, the ash heap time, that I love so much regarding the seasons? What lessons can I apply to my own life, and what lesson might you use in yours?

Again the suit of Wands gives us a hint from nature. The "wands" are budding branches. At this particular time of year, buds are one of the only hidden signals of returning life.

Buds begin to swell, and some begin to change color. To perceive this, you have to go out and look for this change, and just like hidden knowledge, you have to know what you are looking for, or you will miss it altogether.

Buds are potential; they are life force wrapped tightly in a tiny package.

They are the tip of the tail in the serpent's mouth; they are the singular point of potential the Ace of Wands represents.

Ace of Wands Tarot of the Everlasting Day by Marcus Katz

When we come to the ash heap, when the wands have fallen into a pile, when the deadness of late winter sinks around us, or we encounter the end of a season of life, we need to remember that endings are beginnings. Indeed there is no real discernable difference between the ending and the beginning; they are, in essence, the exact moment of transformation.

This cabin fever moment is nothing more than the pause between the exhale and the inhale.

In my neck of the woods, nature has another ash heap lesson. Skunk cabbage is the first green thing to emerge in late winter and the very earliest spring days. Its unpleasant fragrance is that of rotting flesh that lures in flies that will unknowingly pollinate the other skunk cabbages. The scent of death is the catalyst for creating new life.

The ash heap and death are really genesis.

The joy I feel at seeing skunk cabbage emerging along he banks of rivulets and streams allows me to ignore their unpleasant stench. But joy can distract me from fully appreciating the hidden knowledge that the snake is eating its tail; death is life.

So cabin fever is just a sickness that will pass because it must. It's not a sickness unto death; it's just the ash heap that nurtures the soil.

Transitional times in nature and life are where we find hidden knowledge and the mysteries that open our eyes. When we begin to see the truth, the discomfort of sitting in the ash heap, the apparent loss of what was, and the lack of forward movement disappear.

When we realize that the end is the beginning, the match is struck, the phoenix rises, and our life force returns. We are the seasonal wheel, the snake eating its tail.