EP 85: Unveiling the Mother Goddess: Power Beyond Creation

Hello, my beautiful Coven!

Today’s episode is part of our Goddess series. I am loving this series …. sharing the wisdom I have gained working with Goddesses. We are diving into the archetype of the Mother Goddess, and looking at the archetypes form a modern perspective. Because the Mother is about more than the energy of birthing and nurturing.

Her power is often downplayed in our culture.

Lets learn about her together… She has deep wisdom. She looks at the world through a long view lens, thinking generationally. Effecting change through subtle and powerful moves.

Demeter – Goddess of wheat and Agriculture

I feel her story is important right now, there are lessons we can learn about modern motherhood from the story of Demeter and her daughter Kore. Its a story of loss…. it talks of the pain of letting go. Each child we hold will one day be released into an unkind world.

Lets explores all aspects of motherhood together in today’s episode, because she is full of deep wisdom, she stands with us through transitions, she plays the long game and helps shape the world.

She holds transformative power and timeless wisdom.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello. Hi. How you doing? My coven. How are you today? How are you finding everything going on in the world? I have been. Turning off the news, I've been overwhelmed. I'm not even gonna talk about it because I want this to be a space where you can relax, you can just pop in your earbuds and just focus on your spirituality and the good and beautiful things in the world.

Okay, there's enough out there. Let's just... let's just be okay. I don't really have any housekeeping for you. I've been really scattered, so I'm just glad to be recording. Life has been amazing and full of healing and things. There has been some big [00:01:00] full moons and some Venus retrograde. How was the Venus retrograde for you?

It really revealed so much for me. I think I'm still processing it. Yeah, I think I am. Anyway, I'm glad to be recording. I'm really glad I could do this episode for you. I'm gonna continue our Goddess episodes and we're gonna look at the Mother Goddess. Today we're gonna be diving into the archetypes of it.
I just wanna remind you that I come to all of this as a witch with experience. I have not studied this. I don't have a PhD. The knowledge I have is from working with these goddesses, from channeling messages from them. It's empiric knowledge, I guess they say. Anyway, it's experience. It's not PhD stuff. I can get things wrong.

I welcome your feedback on it. If you've been [00:02:00] working with these goddesses and you are experiencing a different aspect of them, have gotten to know them in a different way, I'd love to hear about that.

I wanna talk about and unpack a little bit of the ideas around femininity. I wanna look at these ancient goddesses from a modern point of view, right? 'cause that is the whole basis of how I practice as a witch. I love these ancient practices. I love these ancient goddesses. I love these. Ideas of living in synchronicity with the land and the seasons.

But I also live in 2025 where there's cell phones and television, and a lot of the archetypes that are held up for us, they've been colored by our culture and they've been colored by a culture that doesn't appreciate women and is afraid of women's power. And I say this because if we [00:03:00] look at the archetype of the witch, right?

A little old granny in the forest who makes potions and bruise and can heal you, and yet we have twisted that image of that sage grandmother into something evil that should be hung or burned. Okay? Powerful women are feared in our culture, and so these powerful goddesses are often looked at from the lens of our culture.

And their typecast. We really unpacked this in the maiden episode when we looked at how the maiden is a warrior goddess as well, and how many maiden goddesses are there to inspire, and the idea of youth and independence and learning who we are, right? She's not in a castle with a dragon protecting her.
She's a warrior, she's an adventurer, and it's the same with the mother goddess, right? [00:04:00] And I wanna unpack this too, because a lot of women are choosing not to be mothers, right? My own daughter chooses not to be a mother, but that doesn't mean that Mother Goddess energy is something that she doesn't work with, that isn't open to her.

'cause Mother Goddess energy isn't just about rearing children. Mother Goddess Energy is about forward thinking. It's about generational thinking. It's about nurturing, it's about birthing something I. Into the world, and that doesn't always have to be a child, right? A lot of entrepreneurial women who have small businesses, that they have grown into empires.

They are in Mother Energy, they have grown a company from a seed to a tree. That nurtures and feeds their employees. It's, it's such powerful energy. It's such big, [00:05:00] big energy that we often, in our culture, diminish into changing diapers into Housewifery, and I'm thinking like Stepford housewife. To help with this conversation, I thought I could share with you the goddesses that I work with.

The style of witchcraft that I practice includes building a relationship with the archetypal energies of these deities. Really working with them through ritual moon rituals, healing rituals, and it has been my experience that through the different. Phases and times of my life, different goddesses walk forward and step forward to be worked with, or I will feel drawn to a certain deity and I will start researching her and working with her.

The first mother goddess I worked a lot with and who was very, very present when my children [00:06:00] were quite young was the goddess Isis. She's an Egyptian goddess, and she really embodies that unconditional loving mother energy for me, tied to deep wisdom. I always felt like she had such a compassionate and wise.

Take on all the problems I brought to her. What I find really interesting is that the goddess Isis, when you look at her iconography and the statues of her in ancient Egypt, they're very similar to what you will see with Mother Mary. You will see Isis with a child on her lap, her son Hora, and it's very similar to the Madonna and child iconography we have.

However, I feel those two deities, their energy is not very similar, even though their iconography is. I do find that, [00:07:00] um, the Madonna or the mother Mary, many, many witches that I know work with her energy. She's very compassionate when you call her in, especially in her mothering form, she feels like a soft place to land deep, deep compassion.

It's not surprising to me that colonized people would overlay their mother goddesses with the Madonna and. With the Virgin Mary and keep their culture alive through her, and , I've often wondered if that's why she feels so very compassionate and welcoming and open. I don't work a lot with the Madonna or with Mary, so I can't speak too much on her personality other than the circles I've been in where other people have channeled her, have been very, very serene, very, very soft [00:08:00] and very, very healing.
The mother goddess I work with more at this point would be freak, and that's because I do a lot of Norse style practice. I. It aligns with my Scottish and Irish heritage, and I, I just really resonate with that Pantheon and how they hold up, um, the sacred, the sacredness of community. Okay, so moving on to other goddesses.

I don't really put Gaia. I. Into the mother goddess realm. And I find this interesting because she is the earth and therefore the the kind of mother of everything. She's this all giving, nurturing, bountiful, beautiful goddess, but I feel like she's kind of in her own kind of class. So I don't actually put her into the mother goddess category, although kind of technically she's the mother of our whole planet.

I just don't put [00:09:00] her there. I do work with her though, and maybe we'll have to do another episode about that. I work with Frig in the mother aspect. I often call her in when I'm calling a circle and I need a maiden on mother and a crone, and that's probably because I work quite tightly with Freya. I love the energy of Frig.

Again, she has that wisdom that I feel is present with Isis. Her role in the North Pantheon is wife to Odin. She is the matriarch of the Pantheon, and she actually sits in the kind of role as leader when Odin is away and she makes decisions and she rules over the people and she listens to people's complaints and she holds court, if you will.

She also feels incredibly nurturing and loving. Home is important to her. Community is important to her. Connection is important to her. She's [00:10:00] very wise. And I feel like that's one of the things that our culture misses about Mother, goddess Energy is the wisdom. We're very much tuned into the idea of nurture and, and the idea of tending and nurturing, but we forget about the wisdom, the deep knowledge and wisdom that it takes to nurture effectively because that mother energy is not just thinking about the next moment.

It's thinking about the next decade, the next century, if you're looking at goddess energy. So I want you to know my love that sometimes when we're doing deep work with goddesses who are mother goddesses, our spells and our healing and our plans may take longer to come to fruition. Because she is doing a bigger work than what you can [00:11:00] see.


Does that make sense to you? You may be planning for the next three months, but that mother goddess is setting stones down for the next three years. She moves subtly, she moves with forethoughts, and I think that's the piece that our culture misses in the idea of. How the, the divine feminine is a responsive energy.
We are, we're a reflective, responsive energy, but that doesn't mean we're less powerful. There is a deep, deep power to being quiet and thoughtful and moving slowly. Not everything has to be big fire energy. And believe me, this has taken me a long time to learn. 'cause I am a very fiery person and I'm very much a typical Aries.

I've got a lot of fire in my astrology and I've got a lot of movement and motion. So the [00:12:00] subtle aspects of mother Goddesses have been hard for me to learn. We've talked about Isis. We've talked about Frig Demeter, okay, mothers. This is a goddess who stepped forward for me at a very difficult time. So if you don't know the story of Demeter, she is the mother of a maiden name Kore, and Kore was stolen from her.
She was manipulated and tricked and trapped down in the underworld. Hades fooled her used his authority and the fact that he was older and understood more to trick a young maiden and bring her down into the underworld because she was so absolutely beautiful. Her mother Demeter was terribly angry. She demanded her daughter be returned, but Hades would not listen.

So Demeter went up to Mount Olympus and [00:13:00] she met with Zeus. She asked for her daughter to be returned and Zeus would not comply, and she demanded her daughter be returned and still Zeus would do nothing. So Demeter the goddess of grain and harvest and agriculture. As her heart broke, the sun left the earth and the crops in response withered and died.

She stopped tending the land. She stopped tending the flowers and all of the world was cold and dark and desolate. Demeter brought winter to the land. In response to the death of all of the crops and the withering of life, Zeus took action and he went to Hades, and he demanded the maiden be returned. 

Now the problem was the young girl had already eaten in the underworld. She had eaten [00:14:00] six pomegranate seeds, and so a deal was struck that the child would have to remain in the underworld for six months a year, and for the other six months she could be returned to her mother. So Demeter is the mother of the child who would become Persephone.

The goddess of the underworld, and every single time she descends into the underworld, Demeter's heart breaks again and winter comes. Now, the story in our collective often focuses on Persephone and Hades, and I think it's important that we look at the story of Demeter, especially because of the state of our world right now.

So many of us are living in divided families. There's many, many mothers in the world as a regular part of their day. Their child leaves their home and goes somewhere else. I think [00:15:00] this story has a lot to teach us about blended families, divorced homes, shared custody. I think there's also a lot of lessons.
That this story has around letting your child go to college, letting your young daughter go out into the world, releasing that which is most precious to you, out into an environment that you know is dangerous and harsh and not sweet to them. I think this is a story that is really important and we don't focus on it.
We don't focus on the love of Demeter. We don't focus on the path she has to take and the constant breaking of her heart and what it means as a mother to let go. 'cause your love doesn't change, but you still need to release at some point, every single child that you have born and raised into the world.

Any mothers out there who are separated and [00:16:00] feeling that divide with their children, whether it's emotional because your child's rejecting you, or whether it's physical because they're in another city or because you share them with someone, reach out to Demeter. She understands your grief. She understands the cyclic nature of children and their growth.

And how they come into our lives and lead our, leave our lives and then come back. Maybe you are an older mother whose children have been away for a long time and, and they've grown and you're so proud of them and they're out there have at university or starting their careers and they come home and frequently and the grief of that, sometimes , the feelings of when they're back and you're into a different rhythm than when they're gone. 

There's so much lessons, right, that we don't look at, 'cause we're so busy focusing on the idea of [00:17:00] birth and pregnancy that we forget that there's so much to motherhood beyond birthing. But while we're on that kind of like. birthing lovely line. I think I'll talk about Oshun. I can never remember the Pantheon, but oh my God, I love working with Oshun.

So she's a goddess of water and rivers and motherhood and transition. She's a goddess of healing. She is multifaceted. She's one of the major goddesses in her pantheon, so she has many faces and aspects to her. She's definitely a mother goddess and she actually presides over pregnancy birthing so many, many women turn to her as they are birthing themselves as a mother, and they're walking through the fear of birth and birthing 'cause I really believe that it is scary every single time.

[00:18:00] Every single time, no matter how many children a woman has born, it's just as scary every time. You're rebirthing yourself every single time. Oshun is a goddess you can work with in that aspect of your life. And I wanna include my sisters whose babies are a book, whose babies are a company, whose babies are their master's degree.

You're still birthing yourself. Anytime you put something major out into the world that is going to change your life and affect the world, in turn you are birthing and you are birthing yourself as a mother. Every great piece of art, you are birthing yourself as an artist. 'cause you're taking whatever has grown and incubated inside you and you're putting it [00:19:00] forth into a very scary world that may not love and accept it.

There's a huge piece of vulnerability there, and these goddesses are there to hold your hand and walk you through it. Right? For me, I think that's like the big piece is looking at the stories. And the themes of the ancient stories and the aspects of these archetypal energies and seeing how we can overlay them in our lives and what lessons they have for us and how they speak to us, and how they show us that the emotion and the energy that we're sitting in is unique to us, but it's not new.

Our ancestors and the sisters before us have faced these and they have come through them. I think we can find a lot of hope on the pathways we're on by [00:20:00] turning to the ancient stories as we can see that although our situation is unique, the theme is universal. We can see ourselves inside the stories and we can see the victories of the women before us.

And then what if you're me? Then you remember that these victories were possible by women hundreds of years ago, before they had the rights we had, before they had the agency we have today. There's many cultures where women were not exalted and still their goddesses prevailed in their stories. So that tells you that the women prevailed, the stories of the strength of women are written in these archetypes, and the mother goddess is more than a woman who gives birth.

She represents bountifulness wisdom, future thinking, the ability to affect change. Can we talk about that? I feel [00:21:00] like there is no bigger way to affect the world for change than to whisper into the ears of the next generation. It's one of the powers that women have because we are the nurturers, because we are the first voice a person hears.

We have the power to steer them towards what is right and what is good, and the direction we want the world to go in. Sometimes it's hard to see because it's the long game, right? It's the game of generational change. It's not a three year job. It's a three generation job. Yeah. Okay. I think, I think that's all I have to say.
That's what I wanna unpack about the mother goddess. I'm not gonna go into the wateriness of it all. The healing, the nurturing. I think you all know that my beautiful earbud, coven, you are all well versed in the ways of the witches. [00:22:00] I know that even those of you who are new on this path. Understand that aspect of the mother goddess.

I think the message I wanted to tell you is about her less known side. I want to reassure you that subtle power is power. I want to remind you of the wisdom the mother goddesses have and that they will share that with you 'cause they're thinking generationally, and that in this time, in this world that we're in right now.

That there's wisdom in the stories that other women have come through and rejoiced and been victorious all through time. No matter how any patriarchy tries to silence us, our stories live on, I. Because we whisper them into the ears of the next generation. The power of women is immeasurable. That's why it's feared.
Okay. Yeah. [00:23:00] Have a great rest of your day. Beautiful coven. Have a great rest of your day.