EP 81 : The Maiden Goddess Archetype

As an Inspiration to Artists and an Adventurer

Hello my beautiful ear bud coven …. I find that when I am teaching that I get many questions about Goddess energy and working with Goddesses. So I thought that we could do a bit of a series this season on Goddesses. Today’s episode is the 1st in a series, I’m diving into the archetype of the Maiden Goddess.

I’m going to challenge some of the ideas we hold about maiden energy, because although it is an expression of innocence, maiden energy is powerful. We don’t often think about maidens as fierce, or powerful. But as we look at this energy and the Goddesses that stand in the role of maiden, we will discover that the maiden has the power to inspire, a unique bravery and the energy of expansion.

Our cultural perception often limits the maiden goddess’s potential, simplifying her to a tender figure needing protection. However, these goddesses symbolize boundless energy, offering solace in personal transformation. When we practice witchcraft and work directly with these Goddesses, we can find that they will help us step into empowerment and support us as we navigate life’s transitions. I encourage you to reach out to these strong, adventurous energies in your practices. The maiden goddesses offer courage and inspiration, empowering you to face challenges and embrace personal growth.

There just was no way I was going to be able to describe these great little knots to you. They are such a labour of love and I am certain that so much magic can be infused into them. The knots are typically made out of grass or straw.

A note on Archeology ….

Anthropological discoveries have started to spotlight the historical strength of women. You all know I am going to say that I feel like this in because we now have women archeologists. They are breaking down old ideas and telling the story of the shield maiden. Female warriors once thought to be buried with men’s weapons, have now been proven to be warriors themselves.

Its Maiden Goddess Energy !

here are a few links to the archeology information I was referring to. Where the weapons women were buried with were assumed to belong to their male family members and not them. It still 100% blows my mind how much of our “historical research” is coloured by the viewpoint of the scholars doing the research.

https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/20/viking-warrior-women-an-archaeodeath-response-part-4/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/woman-warrior-hungary-sex-gender-roles-archaeology

episode transcript

Hello, my coven. How are you doing? How are you today, my beautiful one? I'm good. I've got my cup of tea. Luna Belle is curled up here. I'm just hanging and she's right beside me. And I am so excited to talk to you. I've had so much going on, lots of whirl-windy stuff, getting the season going, thinking about where the [00:01:00] podcast is going to go, and I've got a wee bit of housekeeping for you.

First off, I'm going to have a new course coming out and I'm working on it. I'm really brainstorming about it. It's going to be about connecting to our spirit guides. I want to run every month, but I don't think I can. I think I need to assess kind of like my energy level. So my aim is to have it ready for you for spring equinox.
Now, I was just looking at the moons and everything, and I wanted this in spring equinox, but there was a huge eclipse coming in March, so I don't know what I'm going to do with the timing and the eclipses and everything, but just know I'm building something right now for you where we can meet together and work together, and I want to run it regularly.

Anyway, that's in the works. I'm working with some new beautiful people this year. I'm so [00:02:00] excited for some of the interviews I've got. Some of them are recorded. Some of them aren't. They're in the works, but I'm super excited for them. So stay tuned for all of that. We've got the YouTube going on, dropping our monthly readings there.

Your " Year a Head " spread has been out for a bit, so be sure to go have a look at that. I wanted to talk to you about some of the stuff going on. So the other day, I was just walking to my car after work. As I do, because you all know I still have a muggle job, right? So I was just walking to my car, and there were two crows.
Like, sitting on my car, just perched there, pretty significantly perched. And I'm in the lower mainland, we have crows, they're a bird we see, it's not uncommon. It was the way they were perched there that was kind of like, hmm. And usually when I see crows, it's in [00:03:00] like a whole murder of them doing crow things.

Like you'll see some up in the trees, or you'll see some on the grass, or whatever. This was two, just two. So I kind of stopped as I approached my car and just kind of looked at them and gave them like a, Hello crows! And my intuition started firing as these little crows just kind of looked at me and just considered that I was considering them.

And I knew it was a message for me, a confirmation message. You see, I just had recently, like this week, done a particular spell with a particular goddess, asking for something particular. I really feel she sent these crows as a way to say that my message was received. Things are in the works. And the goodness is coming.
So, I said thank you. I took the message as a message. And you know what? I'll even post it in the show notes. Uh, they hung out long enough that I took out my phone and took a [00:04:00] picture of them. And, uh, then they flew away when I was, I, for real, like three steps from my car door. And I wanted to share this with you because I feel like it's important to know how often we are getting messages and when we work with goddesses, how much they send back to us.

And when we are open and paying attention. We are always getting messages and receiving from spirit. So that car ride home, driving along, thinking about life, blah blah blah. And I decided that I wanted to do a little focus this year on goddesses on the podcast because when I'm teaching, I teach a lot about goddesses when I'm doing development circles, it comes up a lot and I work with quite a few of them, the patron goddesses I work with, and then other goddesses that are my acquaintances.

Yeah, I wanted to do like a bit of a focus on goddesses this season, and where I'm going to [00:05:00] start is looking at. The energy, like the archetypal energy of the Maid, Mother, and Crone, and we're just going to break those on down and dive into them and talk about them. For any of the new Witchlings in the Coven, the Triple Goddess is Kind of a, I don't know if you want to call it a Neopagan idea, or if it's a purely Wiccan idea.

I was introduced to it through my Wiccan training way back in the day, and it is quite prevalent in all Neopagan pantheons, I feel. We have the idea of the goddess having three faces. Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The three stages of life. The waxing, full, and waning moon. We see this symbol a lot. with the three moons on jewelry, pendants, and that's what it represents, the three [00:06:00] goddesses, maiden, mother, and crone.

Today we're going to focus mainly on the maiden goddess, the goddess of youth. These are often goddesses of fertility. Many of the love goddesses fall in here. The ones that come quickly to mind for me, probably because I work with them, would be coven. From the Celtic pantheon the fire goddess who is known as great inspiration I've read that there were three different Brigid's.

One was fire, one was water like a mother goddess, and one was a crone goddess in the Celtic pantheon, but they've kind of been erased. So now we have this idea of Brigid, the maiden fire goddess, patron saint of artists and inspiration. who is also associated with wells and water. And it seems like the crone aspect in this pantheon kind of became erased or maybe shifted into a different character.

So coven, fire goddess, inspiring goddess of the red hair. A lot of people celebrate coven at Imbolc. As the sun returns and the fire returns to our year, we celebrate coven and there's a lot of ceremonies around knots and um, making dolls and things. I will, before I put the show notes together, I will make sure I go on the internet.

And anything I ramble about, I will get you real information to put in the show notes, because babies, you know, I'm just having tea with you, right? Like, I haven't really prepared anything, and most of the podcast just tumbles out of my mind. So I can see these knots and the coven Celtic knots, but I can't quite describe them.

So I will do the research after we're done recording, and I'll make sure it's in the show notes for you. One of the other goddesses I quite like, who [00:08:00] is a maiden goddess, is Artemis of the Hunt. She's often called a virgin goddess, which would put her in maiden because she's not a mother. And it's interesting to me, and this is what I really want to talk about, is how we, in our culture, have created this idea of a youthful female to be this soft, sweet, beautiful love goddess, and we forget that many of the hunter goddesses are maiden goddesses.

The idea of a shield maiden, of the Valkyries, those are all maidens, right? And our culture, our predominantly patriarchal culture and our misogynistic culture has diminished, not only the goddess figure itself, but has diminished the maiden to this kind of Disney princess that needs to be [00:09:00] rescued when in actuality the maiden goddesses are very formidable.

They're very strong and they encompass that place in a woman's life where she's adventuring. There's a lot of freedom associated with them because we don't have the blessing and burdens of children yet tying us to our families. So, there's this real adventuring spirit to a lot of the maiden goddesses.

They're not all soft and lovey love all the time. These are warrior goddesses. These are hunter goddesses. This is who our maidens are. They're goddesses we can call on when we need courage. When we need to step into our adventure spirit, even coven, like she is a goddess of inspiration. It takes a lot of bravery to be an artist.

It takes a lot of bravery to pursue artistic endeavors and put whatever is in [00:10:00] your mind and your soul and your heart out in the world as a tangible thing. So, These maiden goddesses, I want to challenge the idea that they are sweet, young things that need to be protected. These are brave, inspiring goddesses.
They're someone you can call to when you are in that place in your life where you are trying to step into empowerment, when you're trying to step into decision making, discerning, and really taking control of situations of your life, whether that's your career, whether that's in your relationships. These are goddesses you can call on for that kind of bravery.

And just one little more nugget. Around the idea of the shield maidens and the beautiful huntresses that the goddess Athena can represent. I had learned [00:11:00] recently, and again, I'll link it in the show notes, that Anthropologists who were studying grave sites would see women with weapons and shields and different things.

So this would have been like Celtic women or tribal women or like whatever. I didn't pay attention, but I'll get the sources for you and I'll put in the show notes. They would find these women and they would believe and they would state and put in our history books and our Textbooks that women were buried with their husband's weapons So like we were given this false idea Around the roles that young women had because the people Because the anthropologists studying things were looking at the world through their own lens of misogyny.

And it  isn't until we started using resonance imaging and x raying skeletal remains and seeing that these female bodies buried with weapons had wounds. mortal wounds of war, and that's what killed them, that they were warriors, they were battling. The weapons they were buried with were their own. They weren't the men of their family's weapons.

The women buried with weapons were buried with their own weapons. Because the idea of being a strong Warrior woman was a common thing in our traditional societies. Women had a much more equal role than we do today in our society. So when you are working with goddesses and you're looking for someone to call on for bravery, for strength, call to the maiden goddesses.

[00:13:00] They really have that adventuring spirit to them. They have some of that naivety of youth that makes them fearless. And you can channel and work with that fearless energy when you need it. Another maiden goddess I want to talk about is Persephone. She's very near and close to my heart. I really love the lessons and the stories of Persephone.

So if you know the story, then you know that she was stolen away from her mother. She was tricked. She was tricked and stolen away by Hades, the god of the underworld. And she was stolen when she was still a child and she was tricked into coming to the underworld where he fed her. Persephone's mother, Demetra, was heart sick.

At the kidnapping of her daughter, she was [00:14:00] angry. She was upset as any mother would be, who's been separated and taken from her children. So to meet her, went and spoke to Zeus and demanded that Haiti's release her daughter who had been stolen and Zeus, hmm, didn't really care. So Dimitri, who is a goddess of agriculture, created winter.

She let everything die in her mourning for her daughter and the injustice that was dealt to her. She let everything die and that is why we have winter. Once all the people were suffering enough, Zeus intervened and went to talk to Hades to get Persephone released. Now, Persephone had eaten six pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld.

Which meant she was now a part of the Underworld. So she could not actually just be [00:15:00] herself anymore. But a deal was struck and Persephone lives in the regular world with her mother for six months and then descends into the Underworld for six months. And what's really, really interesting about The whole dynamic of Hades and Persephone is I've seen it in so many memes and in so many places all over the internet as this like great love story that like they can be apart and then come back together and they can overcome their separation and blah de blah blah blah.

When really, the basis of the story is that she was tricked and kidnapped by an adult when she was a maiden. Persephone resonates with me personally. Her energy resonates with me because, out of this misfortune, Out of this trickery and things happening to her, she took back the power and she [00:16:00] became a goddess of the underworld in her own right.

When she was stolen down into the underworld by Hades, She wasn't known as Persephone, she had a different name, Kor, which actually translates to Maiden. She became Persephone when she transformed herself into the goddess of the underworld. When she was able to harness the power of life and death because she was put in the situation where she needed to and I love that and I feel like women today can hold on to that and relate to that, the idea that sometimes things happen to us, sometimes circumstances happen that happen to us.

We wouldn't have chosen, but that does not mean that we lay down. It means we rise up. It means we take the circumstance that we find ourselves in and we become the queen of the underworld. We learn the secrets. We learn what we need to learn from every situation we're in and we grow in power. And I love, love that message of Persephone.

And I don't work a lot with her directly, um, I don't work a lot within the Greek pantheon directly, and that's probably why I don't work with her, but I really resonate with that lesson and that message of hers, and the whole idea of taking whatever has happened And growing all powerful from it. Cause I really feel that's the big message behind the maiden goddesses, behind the energy of youth.

We have this time in our lives when we're Like growing and expanding so quickly, like they say that when you are in your late teens to early 20s, there's more brain development and growth than any other stage other than toddler. So there's this huge energy of self discovery and growth when we work with maiden goddesses.

So when you're going through a time of big change and big transition, Especially like personal inner inside us transition, right? Like we'll, we'll talk about the, the mother goddesses and that whole rebirthing yourself. And that's a thing, but that is more, but that's like connected to a relationship with another soul, right?

Like the rebirthing process we go through in motherhood is so. unique and beautiful and different than the expansive growth that we find in maiden goddesses. [00:19:00] The maiden goddess growth is about inner transformation. It's about who am I? What mark am I making? on the world. How do I want to express myself in it?

So they're really great goddesses to work with as a creative person because they're in that same kind of vibe. And that kind of leads me to Think of the muses, right? The Greek muses are maiden. They come to us and they channel through us when we're being really creative. And they are really, really fun energies to play with.

Now let's talk love goddesses. Because they often are considered maiden goddesses, even though many of them in their lore and their stories are mothers themselves, they still get put into this category. I think it's just because love and beauty is associated [00:20:00] with youth, so they are often considered Maiden goddesses and when I work with all three goddesses like Maid, Mother, and Crone in the Norse pantheon I do put Freyja, the goddess of war and love and leader of the Valkyries I put her in the position of the maiden and she seems fine with that and then Freyja of course would be in the mother position.
And then I use one of the Norns as my crone when I do magic. Along with the goddesses of beauty and love, I would also put spring goddesses in the maiden category, right? Because that expansion, that growth that's associated with the springtime would also be maiden goddess thing. So you could put Ostera in this category as well.

Cause she is a goddess of the spring and I'm never going to be able to give you a [00:21:00] fully exhaustive list because there are so, so many goddesses out there and there's so many different pantheons and so many stories and lore to all of this. I think what I really wanted to just talk with you about and, and get you thinking about is that.

Some of the ideas we have around maiden goddesses are more limiting than what they truly are, like there's such a huge amount of powerful energy in the maiden goddess. She's not just a frightened wee maid. She is a powerful uh, Amazing, expansive energy and it's something that you can tap into with your spell work, with your energy work, your meditation work, whatever work you're doing, my beautiful Coven.
These energies are there for you so that you can really elevate your craft and elevate what you're doing. Yeah, I [00:22:00] think, I think that's it. So I'm going to do my best to put. Real information in the show notes because you know when we're here It's just me and you a cup of tea and your earbuds So a lot of the stuff that comes tumbling out of my mind I have to go fact check later and put them in the show notes for you Thank you so much for spending this time with me.

I so appreciate you my dear Coven And please keep sharing the podcast, I, I see how we're growing, we're expanding, I feel like, I really feel like the pod has taken on its own kind of energy lately, that it's got this momentum going and I'm really excited about it, because you know, it is a little independent podcast, just me and a microphone and you, so thank you for every like, for every follow, for every comment and every review.

I do want to invite you to [00:23:00] submit your questions to me. I should have put this at the beginning. I totally forgot my love. I do have a Ask a Witch episode in the works. I may even get a beautiful witchy friend to come and answer some questions too. So DM them. Get on the Instagram. Witching half hour or so, drop me a message with your question.

What do you want to ask? What do you need to answer to? What's rolling around in your beautiful face? What's keeping you up at night that you want to know? I'll answer it best I can. Okay, my beautiful coven, thank you so much, and I will see you very soon.