Sacred Rage and what The Maiden, Mother and Crone come to teach us.

Our collective and individual feminine rage seems to have become a hot topic, once again, so hot that it’s even becoming commodified… aaaah the endless joys of patriarchal capitalism, anyhoo I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole here, what I would like to do is to sit with some threads I’ve been pulling at for quite some time and try to weave them all together into something as much for myself as it is intended for any woman that may read this. 

My entire inner landscape runs on the archetypal; the mythic is my framework for understanding the world and my place in it, everything I am, do, and experience is filtered through the lens of the mythopoetic, it’s just the way my lady brain works and I love that my brain works this way because it creates the fertile soil in which my imagination, intuition and oracular gifts take root, I share this little tidbit about my inner being and frame of reference to give you some insight into how I deal with the world around and within me, so that the rest of this piece might make more sense. 

For about 5 years now, I have had an interesting relationship, or perhaps that’s not the right word, a complex journey might be more apt with the experience of collective feminine rage and the potential of Sacred Rage, this wasn’t a new concept to me, it is a frequency that I had been working with for many years, but what shifted for me over the last 5 years was the way I was being initiated into working with and experiencing collective feminine rage and how what I had thought was the path of transmuting that field into Sacred Rage was actually only The Maiden journey, and that journey was still largely entwined in subtle layers and manifestations of the collective feminine pain body.

The lesson was what unfolds when we move away from the cycles of the pain body and begin to reawaken the collective feminine wisdom body; when our collective rage is no longer moved by the Maiden alone, but the Mother and eventually the Crone steps in to alchemise it too. As these threads began to weave themselves into my field, I realised, as I so often do, that what I thought I knew and understood was only the tip of the iceberg… or in this case, maybe an ember of the conflagration is a better idiom. 

What I am attempting to clarify and integrate is the 3 frequential fields or keys of medicine that the core feminine archetypes (Maiden, Mother, Crone) hold to help us on the journey of moving from states of drowning or burning up in collective feminine rage to the transmuting medicine and power of Sacred Rage, so I am going to attempt to unpack what I have worked with and learned so far. 

*In this piece, I use the terms wounded maiden, wounded mother and wounded crone to represent the wounded aspects of the collective feminine pain body and the archetypes of our collective feminine wounds and the terms The Maiden, The Mother and The Crone to represent the archetypal aspects of the Collective Feminine Wisdom Body and the medicine that holds.

The Maiden offers us Movement

Working with the energy and medicine of The Maiden offers us the first key to working with collective feminine rage - the key of movement, the ability to allow the experiences, narratives, and accumulations of our individual and collective anger to move is essential, if we don’t tap into this ability then the rage we hold stagnates and goes unacknowledged, repressed and turns on us, instead of it becoming a driving force for good and for positive and protective change it becomes internalised creating a driving force for deepening states of internalised patriarchy and self destructive beliefs and behaviours. We can see this playing out so clearly in the way women and girls are taught to loathe and mistreat their bodies and the endless harm we inflict on ourselves individually and collectively in the pursuit of pedophilic beauty standards and emaciated female forms, we can see this play out in the expression of the sister wound keeping us isolated and in states of competition and comparison, in the mother wound keeping us in states of martyrdom and fear and in the witch wound keeping us in states of judgment, exclusion and abandonment of our sacred selves. 

Firstly, we need to be aware of how we are working with the medicine of each of the archetypes because both the wounded maiden and The Maiden offer us the key of movement, but the outcome of working within their respective fields is very different. 

The wounded maiden says, move through it, release it, clear it, do whatever you have to do to get it out of your body, out of your field, push through to the catharsis. I have been here, I have been the one who taught this exact narrative - dance it out, scream it out, get primal with it and roar it out of your body, do whatever you need to do to get it out - as I said, I've been there, and it works, it gets things moving, it allows for release, but not really though, because it is just that, moving,  and constant movement doesn’t allow for integration, it doesn’t alchemise, it just moves, it reinforces the endless patriarchal narrative of forward motion, it reinforces the internalised patriarchal systems of surface level optimisation and performative practices and especially in the bodies and psyche of women it creates an illusion of healing - when in truth our rage is not something to be optimised nor is it something to heal from it is an informational field, a complex web of the experiences of organic living beings under the conditions of an anti-life system. This is not something to be carried by an individual or accepted as a personal responsibility, but as a shared opportunity to access in order to drive change.

When we are too quick to rush to movement and release, we miss the opportunity that tapping into the field of our collective rage holds. It also creates the illusion that the field of collective rage is not a consistent stream flowing through time, and turns it into something sitting in your body / your field; it makes the collective into an individual issue. So you can deal with it, you can move it out and be done with it, again, this is not quite the case, and it often results in women feeling like no matter what they do, no matter how much they do the practices of releasing, clearing, moving… the feelings, the deep-seated rage always seems to return. Then we are right back in the internalised patriarchy that tells you if you just work harder, if you just do it better, you can beat this, when the truth is, it’s not a competition, there is no transaction to be made here, and like all aspects of organic life, your relationship with collective rage is going to be cyclical. There’s no running from or catharting your way out of that. 

For years I relied on and taught the art of movement, it was a central theme in what at the time I saw as my own healing journey and I wanted to share that with others, what I didn’t see at the time was how much of that path was actually anchored in the wounded maiden or the collective feminine pain body as a whole and my own internalised patriarchy - it was only when the movement I so deeply relied slowly became less available, less accessible, less possible that I had to sit with the source of the medicine I had been working with and sharing and in that process I realised where that medicine had been rooted in the pain body and the wounded maiden. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point of being able to hold my own inner structures of collective rage differently and to renegotiate my relationship with the medicine of movement; inviting in the power that The Maiden holds in this regard has been key. 

So, how can The Maiden hold this medicine differently? 

She holds a different frequential field when she teaches us to move the collective rage; she is opening our energy body into ever deepening states of flow, she is not teaching us how to move the rage through and out of our bodies, she is teaching us how to move with the rage, how to get out of the way and clear the blocks that create stagnation and toxic build up, not to empty the well of toxic stagnant water but how to open the channels into the well so that the water can flow and clear - allowing the collective rage to flow through us as a part of our being, we become the river, we become the movement, we become the power of that collective energy, we both source from and resource into that field, the relationship becomes reciprocal - this shifts the experience of collective feminine rage from the individual’s responsibility to clear and release back into the field and power of the collective, it shifts us from the isolation driven pain body experience of collective feminine rage into the collective wisdom body experience of tapping into Sacred Rage. 

When we drop into this state, our experience of collective feminine rage becomes a place in which to reflect our own personal experiences into the collective waters that we are allowing to flow through us - not as something to be rid of or move away from, but as something to harness, alchemise and turn into a resource. 

The shift here is a subtle but important one - frustratingly, the most powerful shifts always seem to be subtle. By becoming aware of the field we are working within, we can become more aware of what we are receiving and returning to that field.

Both the wounded maiden and The Maiden offer us Movement - the one is movement away from, to get rid of, the other is to become the movement, to embody the flow, and in that way become resourced by what is moving through you. The one is the wounded maiden in isolation, the other is Sister Sanctuary in action, receiving and reciprocating the medicine of The Maiden. This is where The Mother steps in because the Sacred Feminine knows that nothing is ever done in isolation, the key always lies in our interdependence and collaboration - we cannot turn our collective feminine rage into Sacred Rage without the support of the collective, without the sanctuary of our Sisters, the holding and guidance of The Mothers and the wisdom of The Crones.

The Mother offers the Container

The Mother steps in to offer us the medicine of holding - to teach us how to become the container - the river needs her banks, and the medicine carried within the field of The Mother is those banks. She comes to teach us how to contain the rage so that we can reclaim it, nurture it, and eventually rebirth its stories to turn the poison into potions, but long before we get there we must first learn how to sit with the burning in our bellies, how to hold the rage without drowning or being engulfed in the flames - and yes I am using both water and fire to illustrate my points in this piece because we were both burned and drowned as witches hence the memory of both live within our female bodies and lineages.  

Once more, we need to be very aware of whether we are in the field of the wounded mother or the medicine of The Mother. Both will create the banks within us, both will hold the essence of collective feminine rage, and both come to show us how to embody the container, yet one brings that containment from the frequency of the martyr. When our collective rage is held in the field of the wounded mother, it becomes a cage; we become trapped within it rather than becoming the container that is able to hold and transmute. Whereas when our collective rage is held in the frequency of Mother Medicine, we access the skills of transmutation through the understanding that all life is birthed through the Feminine. 

What that means is that ALL LIFE IS BIRTHED THROUGH THE FEMININE, including the sources and causes of our collective feminine rage, yep, how is that for a doozy, the Feminine is the force and source of all creation - if you feel a little lost on this concept, read “The Feminine Holds the Frequency” and then come back here. 

So, as the source and force of all creation, the feminine is also the source and force of the conditions that have allowed for the introduction of and anti-life or archontic patriarchal infection to form a strangle hold on the living body of The Mother, which is the underlying cause of our collective feminine rage, this is a mindfuck, yep, because it requires a depth of maturity and sovereign responsibility that only the most fully integrated Mother Medicine could even begin to provide - the ability to truly understand that every aspect of our lives whether individual or collective is birthed through us not done too us is a big one to sit with especially when we are intrenched in the wounded feminine/masculine and the dysfunctional structures of patriarchal consensus reality that often rely on victim blaming, gaslighting and martyrdom when it comes to the ways in which we hold, carry and nurture the wounds inflicted by the experience of existing in a female body within a patriarchal social construct. 

This is where the true value of holding our collective feminine rage within the nurturing container of Mother Medicine becomes a key aspect of moving from the cycles of that rage repeating on us to being able to alchemise that rage, to nurture and lovingly transform it into Sacred Rage that can then be channeled and utilised to birth the change, the antidote to the harm that lies at the root of that collective rage. 

It is the difference between the patriarchal narrative of “the body holds the score” and the matriarchal understanding that the body is not in competition with some idealised state, nor is it keeping score; the body holds our stories, our myths and memories, and we are the ones who choose how those stories are told - we birth our stories and it is up to each of us to feed those stories love, forgiveness, strength and adapibilty. When we step back into relationship with The Mother, she brings the medicine of holding those stories, distilling the lessons, and alchemising the pain and poison into potions and from that place of being the vessel, the river banks, the container we can step back into the medicine of The Maiden and let that medicine flow through becoming the movement, not from a desire to escape the discomfort or be rid of it but from a place of power, knowing that we are the birthers of all life and what is moved through us is transmuted and transformed. 

And this is where the Crone steps in….

The Crone offers the medicine of Discernment 

Where The Maiden leans towards movement and The Mother towards containment, the Crone brings us Discernment - She knows when to move, and when to hold and how to discern exactly what is needed to move from one state to the other. She reawakens the curiosity of The Maiden, but with a deeper wisdom and ability to interpret the information gleaned from that curiosity, she deepens the nurturing of The Mother, but with greater understanding for the need to nurture the self first, to heal and hold the self first lest we continue the cycles of harm accumulated through the martyrdom of the Feminine. 

Again, we are called into awareness of the wounded crone and the potential field which she holds us in, she calls us into judgment offered under the guise of discernment, but the frequency it holds is very different; judgment contracts and is rooted in our collective and individual suffering and projections of harm, lack and fear whereas discernment expands and is rooted in our collective ability to create, transmute, transform and heal. The one state reinforces the wounds of our collective feminine rage, the other offers an antidote and the wisdom to discern and formulate the medicine from the wound, to distil the Sacred Rage and direct that clarity with discernment at the roots of patriarchal systems that perpetuate harm. 

Discernment feels gentle. It doesn’t arise from a place or position of superiority or inferiority; it does not trigger ego or defences, it simply informs. There is no intellectual superiority or need to belittle or undermine the object/subject/state of the discernment. When we are held in the medicine of The Crone, we feel more spacious, not less. This discernment does not stem from a place of lack or fear but rather from a place of creation and curation. Discernment encourages us to question our beliefs and creates clear boundaries and self-containment.

When the wounded crone draws us into judgment, we feel the constrictive nature of that state. It arises from a perceived or unconscious need to protect or defend ourselves or our beliefs. It is inherently rooted in deficiency and lack, therefore, reactive or threatening. Judgment does not create or curate; it doesn’t hold the curiosity of The Maiden or the nurturing of The Mother. Rather, it culls, it reinforces hopelessness and confines us to the narratives of consensus reality, keeping us cycling in the harm that causes our collective feminine rage.

How the 3 threads weave together

The wounded weave

When we are in the field of the collective feminine pain body, the wounded maiden, mother and crone, the maiden brings movement from the desire to escape, to be rid of the experience and feelings of our collective feminine rage, the experience of that rage is seen through the somatic lens of Reich and his contemporaries as something to be released and forced out of the body, to be cleared by any means necessary - so yes she brings us movement but it is movement away from, it is movement from a wounded perspective that says you can out run this, you can be rid of this if you just try harder; the wounded maiden can get trapped in the philosophy of catharsis the perspective that we can access our Sacred Rage by expressing what was suppressed, that you have to move the energy, get it out, push through and this can work for isolated trauma events, but collective feminine rage is not an isolated trauma it is lifetimes of trauma, it is ancestral trauma, it is individual and collective, it spans the gamut of constant daily micro aggressions and undercurrents of threat to the very real life threatening situations patriarchy has inflicted on us and our ancestors for the last 10 000 years - so pushing through is not the answer here, at least not for those in a female body. 

The wounded maiden then hands off to the wounded mother who tries to hold, to contain, because this is her lot in life, she must hold the rage, hold the trauma, be the container, become trapped under the weight of it all and sacrifice herself to this fate; she must be the martyr and when she suffers the consequences of that martyrdom, trapped is cycles of collective rage and fear, the wounded crone steps in judging her, shaming her for what she has not been able to contain, for all the ways she is not enough, and the cycle begins again. The waves of rage become ever stronger, gathering power, but that power remains unharnessed, un-transmuted. In this wounded cycle, the only way we can see to try and process it is by returning to the escapist movement of the wounded maiden - meaning that we never reach that place where our collective feminine rage can be alchemised into Sacred Rage. 

The Medicine Weave

When we are in the field of the collective feminine wisdom body The Maiden brings the medicine of movement, she brings life force and curiosity into the constrictive structures and traps of our collective feminine rage, she shows us how to move with the rage, not how to be rid of it but how to channel it, there The Mother steps in and becomes the river banks for that channel, she forms the structure and creates the spaces where the rage needs to well up or be dammed up and held so that it can be worked with, so that we can harness the poison and distill it into potions, the spaces in which we can take our time to nurture the wounds and draw out the lessons, and this is where The Crone steps in, she brings her wisdom, she brings discernment, she shows us where and how to hold those wells so that they can receive fresh flow and movement form The Maiden and be held and nurtured by The Mother, she teaches and helps us remember our ancient and forgotten spells that coax out the medicine from the wound, together the three archetypes weave a web of healing, they spin the threads of collective feminine rage into the web of Sacred Rage and from that they draw the power to change and re-birth the Beauty Way in service and reverence to all organic life, the cycles are then remembered as sacred, we remember that all life is born from and through us, we reclaim our power, not drowned or engulfed by the waves or flames of collective feminine rage but riding them dirceting and guiding them, clearing away the sources and forces of harm not only for ourselves but for the collective. 

The work is to become aware of how the medicine or wounds of the 3 core feminine archetypes are either serving or hindering you, to become aware of how they can be your greatest inner allies in the power of their medicine or when in their wounded aspect hold you in cycles of internalised patriarchy and collective harm.

If these concepts resonated and you feel something in you being drawn to this work, I invite you to explore From Pain Body to Wisdom Body, a 9-week guided or self-guided journey of questioning and uncovering how we are birthing and dreaming the world into being from our wounded collective feminine pain body and how we can reawaken the collective to the Feminine Wisdom Body to re-dream and birth the Beauty Way.

Or book a connection call if you would like to explore these concepts or have any questions about how I may help to guide you on your own journey of reawakening your Collective Feminine Wisdom Body and transmuting collective feminine rage into Sacred Rage.

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Isa