Ritual to Celebrate the Crone: Ending Menopause

Crone. Hag. Witch. To modern pagans and wiccans, these are honorifics, not insults. A pagan woman spends her whole lifetime becoming a crone, and by Goddess, she deserves a ritual worthy of that investment!

I’ve been planning my Croning for nineteen years, which is all the more amusing considering that I’m only forty-five. Of course, this means that by the time I am ready to claim my Croneship (Cronehood? Croneliness? Cronesoming?), I will have had many decades to design the perfect ritual. I’ve also been blessed by the graciousness of several wonderful sisters who’ve let me practice on, I mean with them. (Cue evil laugh.)

To me, the life transition that makes a woman a crone is the most important and beautiful transition we get. Puberty/Maidenhood happens to us, whether we like it or not and is all intertwined with hormones and adolescence and Growing Up and challenging things like that. Just ask any adult woman you know if you could pay her to be fifteen again. There is not enough money in the world…

Motherhood/Queenhood has its own delights, but it also has Responsibility and Uncertainty and lots of other complexities that temper the delights with utter exhaustion.

It often isn’t until Cronetime that a woman’s power is unfettered and complete. I watch my sister-friends become crones and WATCH OUT! No wonder I look forward in awe to that time of life.

Let’s call it a ritual in four acts.

Act One: Ritual for the End of Menopause

Most modern witches and pagans don’t necessarily consider menopause their entrance into cronehood, but then again, our average life span is no longer fifty-six years. But regardless of your view on the relationship between menopause and croning, the end of a woman’s fertile years is a transition that deserves honoring in itself. As such, I offer the Rite of the End of Menopause, with sections borrowed from Zsuzsanna Budapest’s “Celebration of the End of Menopause” in The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.

As with any ritual I write, consider this an inspiration, a skeleton upon which to hang your own flesh. If any word, activity, song or idea doesn’t work for you, please replace it with something that does! What I write in this post is my ritual, what you enact is your ritual. I also leave it to you to perform circle casting and invocation as befits your tradition.

A Rite for the End of Menopause

Setup—Place four red and four yellow candles on the altar. Decorate with flowers in red, white and yellow. Incorporate images of maiden, mother and crone goddesses of your choosing.

Sing “We Are the Flow” and dance a spiral dance.

Ending the Flow

Priestess: Say, We gather today to honor the end of blood flowing from our friend. We ask the Great Goddess to bless our sister with good health, vitality, and gladness. Let the flow act through the younger women now, and let this woman rest. This woman is no longer physically fertile since her monthly bleeding has stopped; we now acknowledge her for her spiritual fertility, her deep wisdom and knowledge. Now she holds her blood, her power within her.

Woman of Honor: Light the four red candles. Say, I light this first candle for the bloods that are gone. The second candle I light for the creation and health the flow brought me. The third I light for the flowerings of my womanhood. The fourth I light for the labors ended in glory.

Priestess: Read “To My Last Period,” by Lucille Clifton 

Woman of Honor: Light the four yellow candles. Say,  I light this first yellow candle for the release from the red flow. This second one I light for the flowering of my skill. This third one I light for friends and support. This fourth one I light for the blessings from above!

All: Rejoice with noisemakers and joyful noise!

Activity

Get out art materials and plenty of tampons and sanitary napkins of many shapes and sizes. Use the pads and tampons to create art that celebrates the power of women.

Priestess: Say, Remember from the deepest part of your mind the times when women’s blood was a source of power. With menopause, you no longer release this power every month, but it stays within you. As each of you works, think about the things you would like to do with your power, whether or not you replenish it monthly, and if you are willing, share your plan for your power with the group.

When every women has finished, add the art to the altar.

Sing: Born of the Elements Medley from Crow Goddess

Thus begins Tara Kreauweaumonn‘s series of posts on croning. The next installment is here.
Keep an eye out for these, and other rites of passage songs and posts, here on Pagan Song.