Becoming an elder is a transition that deserves a rite of passage. How lucky we are as pagans to be part of a spiritual path that honors the third age of life. A woman embodies the Maiden Goddess in her youth, the Mother Goddess during her years of childbearing (whether she has physical children or not). Then, when that stage is over, she embraces the Crone Goddess, through a croning rite of passage. She and her community declare her a Wise Woman. We created The Croning Song for use in our own croning rituals and hope you will use it in yours.
Similarly, men pass through the stages in which they embody the Young God, sometimes the Warrior, the Father God and the Elder God. The ceremony to honor the masculine divine in this last phase is often called a saging ritual, when the man is honored as a sage and elder. Our upcoming 4th album will include a song written for saging rites: The Elder God is Wise.
Blog posts related to cronings and sagings
It’s finally spring! Not the time of year you’d expect to be thinking about the Crone, right? Well, I have some perspective on the Crone Journey that seems to fit with spring energy. A few weeks ago I drew a card from my gems and minerals deck, The Illustrated Crystallary...
I heard recently that we experience not one but many comings of age. I can’t find the author interview where I heard this, but I was inspired to think about my life at this stage as a coming of age. I have just retired from a career that has been...
A Companion Ritual for Croning Witches are healers. That got us into a heap trouble during the middle ages, but otherwise it has mostly been to our benefit. However, even with all our healing magic, we haven’t figured out how to completely stave off the aging process (though we did...
Another Ritual to Celebrate the Crone In my last post about Croning, I explained the importance of demarking this important life transition with ritual. (Go back and read that to catch up. Done? Great, welcome back.) This week, I offer a ritual to help welcome the aging pagan or witch...
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...
