Cancer Season And Water Wisdom

Speaker 0:07

Hello friends, and welcome to episode eight of Darkness and Light. I'm your host, Wendy Rule, and this is a podcast about myth, Magic, and nature. As this episode lands, our Lady Moon is waning. It's just a few days after the Capricorn Full Moon, and Sthe sun is journeying through the sign of Cancer, so it's Cancer season, and this is what we'll be focusing on for this episode: the watery gifts of Cancer, and how these relate to the Cosmos, to the void, and to the Great Cosmic Mother. And we have a very special guest for this episode. Renowned Pagan priestess Selena Fox will be joining me a little later on to share her thoughts on these cosmic themes of the Great Mother. One of the ways that we can connect with this energy of Cancer's watery realm is to think about the qualities of actual water; how it flows, how it seeks the low ground, pulled by gravity dripping through stone, carving out canyons - and its fluidity, how it can be pulled by the Moon. And the Moon is the ruling planet of the sign of Cancer. In astrology, the Sun and Moon are regarded as planets. Of course we know they're not, but symbolically, that Moon as the ruling energy of Cancer, as the ruling planet, reminds us of the tides, the ebb and flow always in motion, never still. Water in a constant state of flux, of change. Water dissolves boundaries, blurs edges. It calls us to reflect, to look deep into ourselves. Symbolically, water is connected with our emotions. It's like those waves of the ocean. Emotions can come and wash over us unexpectedly. Sometimes it can feel like they're dragging us under, or sometimes it can feel like we're buoyed up, joyously floating on those waves. When we feel big emotions of joy or sorrow, we often cry. Actual water falling from our eyes as tears. And that ability of water to dissolve edges and boundaries, to merge two separate things until they become one - that's like the energy of Love, dissolving an aspect of self so that we can open up with empathy and deeply feel another person's inner world. We can't fully love unless there's a certain blurring of those edges between self and other, not losing ourselves and dissolving completely into the other, but allowing a degree of merging, of dissolving into the heart of another. Water is compassion, empathy, feeling what another may feel. And with empathy comes kindness. We imagine what it would be like to be in that person's situation. And we feel for them, we feel with them.

Cardinal Water

Speaker 4:59

Of the three Water signs, which are Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, the way that Cancer expresses its wateryness, is in the Cardinal modality. It's Cardinal Water, water that wants to begin things. And when I think about this, water that begins things, of course, I think of the womb, where each of us began, floating, weightless in the womb of our mother. And that energy of the mother is central to Cancer, but it moves beyond our human mothers. It's more than that. This is the energy of the Great Cosmic Mother, the energy that begins all. This is the energy of the Creatrix who births the Cosmos.

Boundaries And The Protective Container

Speaker 5:46

This cancerian energy is protective like a mother, like the shell of an egg, or a crab, its symbol with its protective shell. Water requires a container, the banks of a river, the shore of the sea, the veins through which our blood flows. So this energy of Cancer is both the water within those containers, but also the container itself. On my altar and on many Witches' altars, we have a chalice to represent the energies of Water. Maybe it has water within it, but even an empty chalice will suggest that energy of Water. It's actually the container, the boundary that we're being reminded of there. That if we pour water directly onto our altars, it dissipates, it evaporates, it dries up, but within a container we can access it. The container protects, and that's the energy of Cancer. That's the energy of the womb and of the infinite Cosmos within which w e all exist.

Floating Into The Cosmic Womb

Speaker 7:32

I want to share a story about a recent awakening to this energy. Well, I guess it was a couple of years ago, and I was in Melbourne, I was on tour, and for some reason, maybe just touring, which is hard, things felt hard, and I felt like I really needed nurturing. Nurturing from something beyond what an individual person could give me. So I treated myself to one of those floatation tank things, those kind of sensory deprivation floatation tanks. And I hadn't been in one before. And oh, I absolutely loved it. Maybe my Scorpio self, which loves darkness, and I also like enclosed places, and I love to float in water and all of these things together. I lay down naked within this salty water, which just holds you up. It's effortless. You don't have to try, you're just floating. There was some ambient music playing, and I just allowed myself to drift off, not fall asleep, just kind of trance out. And I imagined myself as a child in the womb, and tapped into that energy of beginning of Cardinal Water. But it wasn't so much the womb of my actual mother, my birth mother. It was the womb of Goddess that transcends the personal, even kind of transcends gender in a way. I'll talk a bit more about that in a minute. Anyway, there I was floating and really deeply relaxing. And I thought, okay, I'm floating in a womb and I've got an umbilical cord attached to Mother Earth, Earth as my mother. But then I realized, well, Earth is floating within Cosmos, that there's a Cosmic Mother bigger than Earth herself. And I thought it's kind of like, you know, those Russian dolls that stack within each other. I felt like that, it's me within the womb of mother, within the womb of Earth, within the womb, then of Cosmos, of the epic and endless and infinite void. And the fact that I could find no edge to this, that my imagination could extend out to the furthest reaches of space, and find no end, and keep extending and expanding, and yet feel this protective energy, this umbilical cord connected to this Great Cosmic Mother, this 'woman made of stars', the Creatrix, and it felt so deeply soothing. I felt really nurtured. I could find a kind of personality in this infinite energy, this energy of deep nurturing and of the protective energy of the mother. And that energy does transcend gender. All of us as humans, no matter which gender we are or identify as, we have both access to this deep, nurturing energy of the Cosmos, and we also have that within us. And as I was floating in this beautiful darkness, feeling weightless, I felt like I was beyond time and space. I knew I only had like an hour in the tank, but it felt beyond any kind of restriction. I felt like I had merged with the Cosmos, dissolved into it. And now as I think back, and I guess it felt like an epiphany of sorts, because my conscious mind, you know, I've done so much reading over the last wow, decades and decades and decades about the energy of the Goddess and how She turns up in many different cultures and different interpretations of her, psychological, mythological. But this was experiential. This was beyond thought or mind or concept. This was me floating in the Great Cosmic Void. And it dissolved somehow all the fears of the things that I was stressing about, which I can't even remember now, you know, that had brought me to needing that deep soothing. They just dissolved away for that time, anyway. They became inconsequential within this vastness. And I realized that my connection with Goddess, with Creatrix, with Universe, with Cosmos, and you might think of that in an entirely different way. For you, this infinite energy might be God, or might be Spirit, or might just be Universe, or might be Nothingness, or might be Love. But for me, it was helpful and still is helpful to conceive of this as goddess.

Nuit, Isis And The Sky Mother

Speaker 13:38

In Egyptian culture, in ancient Egyptian culture, there is a goddess who represents the star-filled sky, and her name is Nut or Nuit, and you might have seen images of her in Egyptian iconography. She arches over the Earth, hands on the Earth, feet on the Earth, and then her body a great big dome of sky. She is that sky. So her body arches over the Earth and holds the Cosmos within her, and she is the embodiment of the Cosmic Womb. She's not just the sky, she's the great fertile darkness from which light emerges and to which it returns. In Egyptian myth, Nut swallows the Sun at sunset and then births the Sun again at dawn. So she's both darkness and light, and hence associated with death and rebirth. So she's a symbol of the fertile, creative void from which new life begins. It's interesting too that one of the daughters of Nuit is the great goddess Isis. And there are many representations in ancient Egyptian art of Isis as the Divine Mother. She's the Divine Mother of her child Horus. And you'll see her seated on a throne with the baby Horace sitting on her lap and often suckling at her breast. And it's these images that are thought to be precursors to the image of Mother Mary with the divine child at her breast, sitting on her lap. And it's interesting that Mary is often associated with the sea. And we can think of the ocean as a representation of that great void, of the cosmic womb. On Earth, this is where life actually began billions of years ago in Earth's vast oceans. So this link of the cosmic sky, of the Great Mother and the ocean all come together in this sign of cancer.

The Great Cosmic Mother

Speaker 16:33

The Great Cosmic Mother is not our human mother. This energy is bigger than a single person, bigger than all people. This is not the human mother with all of our limitations. Sometimes in pop astrology, Cancer gets reduced to just mothering or nurturing. This energy is far greater than this. It's the beginning of things. And we use this metaphor of mother as the beginning of all things, as the Creatrix, because we all began in a womb, a womb of an actual human woman. And so pregnancy becomes a mirror for a much larger force. These ancient cosmic goddesses weren't merely mothers of children, they were mothers of stars and of gods and of rivers, mothers of worlds, mothers of time itself. Here's a lovely quote from the great mythologist Joseph Campbell from the book The Power of Myth, which I was rereading again for the umpteenth time last week. I came across this quote, and I thought it's so appropriate for this episode. "She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites. So it isn't male and isn't female. It neither is nor is not, but everything is within her, so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see is a production of the goddess." And this Great Cosmic Mother is not just the creator of worlds, the creator of life, she also holds death within her. She's the beginning and the end. She's both the womb and the term. And in earliest human culture, graves have been found where people are buried in fetal position, returned to the womb of earth. So the Great Cosmic Mother both creates and destroys, she nourishes and she devours. She's the energy of the void before birth and the void after death.

The Void As Mystery And Fear

Speaker 19:27

This great mystery that can never be known. We can speculate, we can philosophize, we can dream, we can imagine, we can trance into the great before and after, but we don't really know. Where was I before I was I? And what will I be when I'm no longer me? We just don't know. And that can make this void energy feel kind of scary, too. This unknowing that we can't find a definitive answer to what the cosmos is, to how it began, to how it will end, what our role is within it. This primordial darkness, this void, this fertile darkness outside of time. It is all and it is nothing. It is the infinite potential of creative source. I remember once in Greece, I was swimming in the Aegean, and a friend I'd met had taken me out snorkeling, and he was an old guy, and he used to be a snorkeling instructor and all that. But wow, I went out way deeper than was kind of my comfort zone. And so there was this great sense of abyss, deep, bottomless sea with shafts of light, and it really did feel like there was no beginning and no end. And it was a little scary, you know, like you could lose sight of above and below. I'll share another quote from a book that I recently read by a beautiful author called Annie Dillard. And this book is called 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'. It came out in the 70s. It's absolutely gorgeous. Listen to this little quote her idea about the void. "What do we think of the created universe spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness? Those sickening reaches of time in either direction." And yeah, sometimes it can just feel too enormous. But I guess that's also where those boundaries of cancer come in. To find where we create our own boundaries to hold that nurturing creative water within us, within our worlds, our families, our communities, our homes. Safe.

Interview with Selena Fox

Speaker 2 22:53

I'd love to share with you now my interview with the wonderful Selena Fox, who is truly a wise woman. Earlier this year, Selena and I were both presenting at the same conference, the Spring Mysteries Conference over in Seattle. And so we've met many times before, but we took the opportunity to have a little chat about this energy of the Void and of the Great Cosmic Mother. So it's my absolute pleasure and honor to share the wisdom of Selena Fox with you.

Wendy 23:38

I am here with the wonderful Selena Fox, who is a priestess, an elder and wisdom keeper of Pagan knowledge. We are at Spring Mysteries Festival in Seattle, and so you're going to hear a bit of festival noise in the background, but we're doing our best, and we are talking about the energy of the Void and the Great Cosmic Mother. So welcome, Selena. An absolute honor to have you here. On Darkness and Light. What does the Void mean to you?

Selena 24:17

Void is about potential. Some might consider it emptiness, but it's not a static emptiness. It is like a grand cauldron where things planned and unplanned might come to be. I think one of the biggest great voids that I'm aware of is what some would call deep space. And humankind is continuing to explore the cosmic dimension of our lives. And I think that deep space has much to teach us, not only about how humans can navigate in that realm, but metaphorically how we can embrace Void, embrace the Great Mother and the cauldron that is her womb to allow things to emerge of our doing and collaborations with the sacred that we're aligned with.

Wendy 25:32

I love your insight there of Void as cauldron of potential because we are in a culture that doesn't give much time for nothingness. It's a go-go go culture. So out of that nothingness is what emerges the everything.

Selena 25:53

You're right. And we're at a festival that is drawing on some of the ancient wisdom from the Eleusenian mysteries.

Wendy 26:03

Exactly.

Selena 26:03

Which is part of a larger part of what would be called Ancient Greek Mystery Traditions. And I do see that some of the adages from the ancient past, the pagan Greek past in particular, all things in balance, know yourself. And I think the Void is something that can be seen through the lens of those two sayings. To know yourself is to recognize you're not only the conscious identity that you have accepted, that you've been programmed with, but we're connected and interconnected with a great oneness. And there are parts of the depths of our consciousness. That's part of our identity too. In looking at all things in balance, we need to be aware of not only doing, giving, acting, but resting, reflecting, and receiving.

Wendy 27:25

Do you connect with Void , or Cosmos, as Goddess? Do you feel a particular persona to that energy of Void, or is it The Everything to you in your personal practice?

Selena 27:40

My own practice is multifaceted. So there's ways of connecting with spirituality that are beyond gender, but I'm also very much aligned with helping to rebirth Goddess Spirituality traditions and to really look at some ancient ways of looking at creation and looking at the interconnected dimensions of life of all things. And in that way, I at times will call on the Great Mother, the Great Goddess, the Goddess of many names in many dimensions. And I consider my own practice not to be Earth-centered. I honor planet Earth. It's our home. I consider that great oneness can be viewed as the Great Goddess. And from her, all things come, all things return, and the goddess of deep space of the cosmos. I think it's important to balance our awareness with our daily lives, with connecting with the biosphere that's planet Earth our home. But in addition to that, to weave into our spiritual practice and understanding, an identification with how planet Earth, our home, is not only part of our solar system, but part of the Milky Way galaxy. And beyond that, part of this Great Cosmos. So, yes, you can look at the Great Cosmos as a kind of creative force, as the Goddess, or a God Goddess, Great Mystery. I think what's most important as we journey, whatever our spiritual path, our religion, and / or philosophy, that we recognize the importance of continuing our practice, of deepening our practice, and recognizing we are part of a huge community that's diverse, not only practicing now humankind around the planet, but we have our ties to antiquity and the future. So in working with Void, it's important to also go beyond time as well as beyond space.

Wendy 30:38

I often refer to spirit as The Everything, The Everything, you know, and to me when I look at a night sky, that's the vibe that I'm getting. This is The Everything, and we're part of that night sky, not just looking at it, but within it, where the stars and the spaces between the stars, presence and non-presence, time and non-time, it transcends everything.

Selena 31:06

I agree, and I prefer to capitalize the word Nature and have Nature also include that greater Cosmos of which we're part. One of my favorite practices. At Dark Moon time, go to a place ideally away from urban and suburban and even some rural lighting and get as dark a sky as you can on a clear night. Have a comfortable blanket or cushion or lawn chair where you can lay back and look at the sky above. To not only honor the land where you are doing this practice, but to honor the connection with the space that is above. Being able to recognize the vast cosmos of which we are all part.

Wendy 32:09

I love to do that too. I live in New Mexico, so we get those gorgeous night skies. I live in rural New Mexico. What that does for me is opens, reminds me of a sense of wonder, of the mystery.

Selena 32:24

And it's a way of working with your own consciousness where you are comfortable with uncertainty, as well as recognizing that there is a certainty even when there's uncertainty. And I really see gazing in a dark sky place at the cosmos, at a Dark Moon, New Moon night is a way of embracing the uncertainty of what all might be in that larger realm that humankind has no knowledge of, not just us as individuals, but our species. But at the same time, recognizing that you are part of a much larger Universe.

Wendy 33:20

Thank you so much, Selena. It has been an absolute honor to have you on Darkness and Light, to share your wisdom, which is profound. Yeah, I'm just very, very grateful. Blessed be.

Selena 33:33

Blessed be.

Wendy 33:39

Well, thank you so much, Selena. I will put notes in the show notes with links to all the amazing things that she is doing in the world right now, continually shining her light, and she really does have a bit of that energy of the protective great mother. She's deeply protective of the pagan community, both in America and worldwide, and of Mother Earth. So yeah, I'd really recommend following some of those links and finding out a bit more about this amazing wise woman.

Creativity Needs Fallow Time

Speaker 34:39

In our creative lives, it can be very helpful to remember this energy of The Void as a starting point. And when I'm talking about our creative lives, that's all creativity. That's singing and dancing and painting, but also making a home or a business or a relationship or a garden. We're all creative beings. I'll be talking about this much more in the next episode. But for now, I'd like us to remember that that energy of Void, of nothingness, is deeply necessary for the creative process. In our modern culture, there's a great fear around emptiness and nothingness, this focus on productivity. But Nature reminds us that we need fallow times, that we need our Winters and our Dark Moons. We need times of nothingness. And it can seem as though nothing is happening in those times. But in fact, this is when Magic is happening, when a seed is stirring below ground. When we're incubating that creative force. And sometimes we don't know what it will emerge as. And we have to trust. Trust in the flow of time. Trust in the need for nothingness. And it can feel like a creative drought. Which is scary. But if we're brave enough to sit with this nothingness and give ourselves time to incubate the next thing that wants to emerge out of us, then the rewards are astonishing. Afterwards we might realize, oh yeah, that was happening all along. It seemed like nothing was happening during that year when I couldn't writre or didn't want to paint or felt down in the Underworld. But in fact, out of that came this amazing thing. So allowing time for that emptiness, to be that child floating in the worm, knowing that the time for birth will come. It requires great patience and great trust. And I think Selena's suggestion of just actually being out there under the Cosmos looking at the stars can remind us that vastness where time and space become epic can remind us of the bigger story. And that we don't need to rush or push. We need to patiently hold space for that time of gestation, of incubation. And then we'll know when it's time to push. Then we'll know when it's time to birth our ideas. And that's a whole other task. That's a whole other commitment that we need to make to say "enough of this nothingness now. Now I'm ready for the something to emerge out of this nothingness. But first, The Void. First the trust and in the epic and endless energies of the Great Cosmic Mother.

Guided Journey Into The Void

Speaker 2 39:09

So before we do our Tarot for this episode, rather than our usual meditation, How about I play just a couple of minutes of my track 'Void' from my 'Darkness and Light album. And I'll play the version that also has words, sung and spoken, just for a couple of minutes. So let's settle back, close our eyes, and journey into the Void.

Tarot Time

Speaker 2 41:28

Ok, let's shuffle these tarot cards and see what this energy of The Void wants to remind us. What are we meant to know right now? What does this energy of Cancer of the Great Cosmic Mother want to remind us? What is it that needs nurturing within our lives? How can we honor this deep stillness, this nothingness, this patience? Alright, I'll shuffle a little bit more. Okay. Let's see what presents itself. Okay, this is an interesting one. It's the Eight of Wands. And in this Smith Rider Waite deck, we see eight wands moving from left to right, flying through the air. And they are still suspended in the air, but they are pointing toward the ground, suggesting that they've been released, but they are yet to find that ground where they will settle. So it's about process. It is about patience. And the landscape where these wands are flying over, it's very fertile. There's a green hill that looks like a kind of building on top of the hill in the distance. Kind of looks like settled farmland. There's a river winding through it. So often we see like desert scapes in this deck. But this is very clearly fertile land, ready to receive these eight wands of possibility. To me, it suggests that things are happening, that there is a manifestation going on here, that we're reaching, moving toward a conclusion, but we still don't quite know what that is. I always get a sense of great hope when I see this card. That the work has been done, that the arrows have, or the wands in this case, have been set flying. That that initial job of sending it out there has been done. But we can't then go in and try to change the direction of where they're going to land. We have to trust. In a way, I think that's a lot like spell work. Whenever we do a conscious spell, which to me is a focusing of attention and energy toward a particular goal, and we can use objects and tools to help us align with the energy that we're wishing to manifest in our lives, whatever that might be. We might burn a particular oil or herb or have an object on our altar to represent that, but ultimately all of that is helping us to focus our energy on this goal, and then we send that off into the universe. Often we'll end spells with, 'and so mote it be', basically saying, 'and so it is'. So we send that off into the Universe, but we also need to trust that we don't know exactly what form that love spell or prosperity spell or spell for health might take. We don't know where it's going to land, but this card reminds us while it's going to land in fertile ground, wait and see what will grow from this. I think that works really nicely with our energy of the void.

Waning Moon Release

Speaker 2 45:25

So in some ways, with this waning Moon, and it also happens to be Mercury retrograde at the moment, and when the planet Mercury is retrograde, it naturally calls us to turn inward too, like a waning Moon in a way. So this episode in this waning retrograde energy is calling us to turn inward. It's like a descent. And in a way, it's setting the ground for whatever will follow after the Cancer Dark Moon, which is on July 14th. The Cancer Dark Moon is the depths of that womb energy. That is the seed underground. So we're gearing up to that. We have a couple of weeks to prepare for that Cancer Dark Moon energy that will be deeply calling us into that incubating state, into the energy of gestation. So, yeah, in the meantime, like all waning Moons, good to release what no longer serves us, to let go of anything that's holding us back. I think in this context, it's releasing the need for constant action and productivity. It's allowing time for the nothing, for the void. And then we can see what emerges out of that. I'll see you back here in a couple of weeks when we will be celebrating the energy of Leo season and the gift of creativity. So I think this is a nice precursor to that. I wish you a wonderful waning Moon time and a blessed Cancer Dark Moon. And I'll see you back here in a couple of weeks. Until then, blessed be.