Hail to the Maidens!

While unpacking, I found this battered photograph of the Crow Women, and memories flooded back. In the picture we stand in front of the lake, smiles turned toward the camera as the sun sets. We are ready to set out to serve as Amazons. We are younger in the photo–women in the prime of life, dressed in bright sarongs, our faces streaked with paint, feathers in our hair. It is the evening when the girls of our community who are ready to cross into womanhood will begin their all-night ritual: the menarche rite of passage. The Moonrite.

An old photograph of the Crow Women prepared for a Menarche Moonrite

We step from the picture into my memory, a band of women marching along the dirt road, singing that the earth is a woman and she will rise. It’s a song we learned from Libana’s album Fire Within. We sing loud, the chant rolling out from us in waves. The scent of night flows around us and the fire is indeed within us, and people gasp and step out of the path of our fierce joy.

As we approach the camp where the girls sit with their mothers, we become silent. Stealthily, we approach until we surround them. The crone who has gathered them nods, and with whoops and shouts we leap into the lantern light. “We are the Amazons,” we cry. “We claim these girls!” Each of us throws a sheer red scarf over the head of a girl and pulls her away from her mother and away to the next phase of the moonrite.

We lead the young women to where the people are gathered. The assembled people have been waiting a long time for a turn to meet a priestess at the drawing down of the moon, to ask a question or offer thanks. “Make way for the maidens!” we shout, and the crowd parts.

There is a guardian at the gate, a tall man in dun clothing. “Hail to the maidens!” he calls, his voice heavy with emotion. He folds his gangly form to the ground, prostrating himself in the dusty grass. He lies there, face to the ground, stretched out, very still. We are quiet. The moment stretches on and the girls shift on their feet, their scarlet veils rippling in the light of the rising moon. Finally, the guardian rises. I find that I have tears in my eyes. I don’t know whether the girls are moved by the respect this man has shown them, but I am, I am.

One by one, the veiled girls are taken forward into the forest. The girl I guard is last, and when her warm and hesitant body leaves my side, I turn and pass back through the gate. Others will guide her through her all-night passage toward dawn and womanhood. My part is complete until the year turns round about and my band and I take another year’s crop of girls from their mothers.

The wheel turns again, and some years later, my own passage as a woman carries me away from the role of wild Amazon. I become a leader of another part of this rite of passage, deeper in the night. Girls come to our fire, glowing with the menarche ceremonies they have passed through. We sing a song I wrote for them:

Woman, woman: you’re a woman now
Woman, woman: you’re a woman now
Walk your own path
Woman, woman

We are your circle
We honor you
Stand as the maiden
Hold now her divinity
from You’re a Woman Now by Alane Brown, recorded by the Crow Women on Crow Magic

You can hear “You’re a Woman Now” on Youtube

The memory of when we strode through the pagan community as Amazons still shines in my soul as one of my life’s greatest treasures. “Hail to the Maidens!” I hope their night of finding the sacred Maiden Goddess within themselves helped them to make their passage into womanhood with greater ease. The Moonrite was a gift the community gave to the girls, yes, but it was a gift to us, too.

Those times are long past now. The women in the photo are still my sisters, but their faces are lined now. We grow fat and wise. Others, in the strength of womanhood, band together in the golden sunlight, painting their faces and preparing to steal girls from their mothers, smiling at the camera with feathers in their hair.

For more information about the Crow Women pagan choir, and access to all the blog posts by Alane and the other 9 crowsingers who have written for Pagan Song, you can visit the Crow Women author page here on Pagan Song.

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