Everyday Darkness

claiming the mystery and the magic

[art: Minouche Graglia]

The moon has begun to wax in the night sky, the days will now become longer again. Light is returning to the world. All hail the light.

Except that darkness is what surrounds us, hold us, and creates us. We come from darkness and return to it. Seeds germinate in the depths of the dirt. Babies gestate in the cocoon of the womb. Stars are consumed by black holes and emerge as worlds. Our lives are shrouded in darkness.

We mostly do not remember who we are before we were born, the multitudes of lives we have known, the incarnations we have experienced, our traumas and our treasures composted within our souls. We do not know what lies before us—death for sure, but of when that death will come and where it will take us we know nothing. Our planet, even our sun, our very galaxy spin through vast expanses of dark matter. Most of the cosmos is dark matter and no one knows what it really is.

Every night, we descend into the darkness of sleep, the shadowed worlds of our dreams, the great unknowing that is also a great remembering, and we emerge with the sun, renewed and revitalized. But it is the darkness that has soothed us, grown us, given us a place to heal. We need the darkness to become who we really are.

The demonization of darkness, the equation of it with all that is bad and unwanted, has, of course been the demonization of women and the womb, death and the tomb, the other, the abused, the enslaved and the subjugated, the feared. But the worst violence the world has ever seen began with the Enlightement—the witch burnings, the colonial conquests, the subjugation of all of nature to reason and logic, to knowability and certainty. The lights are always on and the world is burning.

I am not scared of the dark. I am scared of the fluourescent lights blazing in the chrome board rooms of reasonable men. The men who torture their prisoners and victims, and themselves, by making sure the lights are always on.

To claim the darkness, not just on the winter solstice, but every day. To know the darkness circles our world just beyond the sun, to know that behind the brightness of the moon is the dark side of the moon we never see, to know that between the stars are expanses of blackness that hold nothing but mystery is to know that we know nothing. Nothing is certain.

The fundamentalist creed—whether expressed through religion or science—is the clarity and luminiscence of knowing. Of knowing what is good and bad, right and wrong, in and out, past and future. It is the arrogance of shining a flashlight on a small corner of a room and pretending to understand the forest that encircles the entire house.

But to leave the house and head into the forest is also to enter into the possibility of all that we do not know. What if our only creed is, “I do not know. It is a mystery.” What we discover there, when we embrace the darkness, is the vast magic of all that we really are, of all that we might become, of all that loves us.

Because even though we cannot fathom the dark, we can be held by it, can recognize it as our dark mothers, the black madonnas, the mothers so much bigger and older than any god. The dark is not an it, the dark is a mother. Wisdom, in the oldest stories, was always the dark body of a woman. Wisdom comes from within the womb, wisdom is knowing the womb and the tomb are one, that all souls are born and die and are incarnated again. Wisdom comes from claiming the long story of our souls as it circles through the darkness.

[Our Lady of Montserrat]

Yesterday was the winter solstice but just because the light is returning does not mean the darkness is gone. The darkness is everywhere and to acknowledge it and humble ourselves before its mysteries is to make ourselves available for all that we do not yet know and cannot yet imagine—for the impossible magic of creation itself.

Summon the darkness, summon the dark mothers, and they will guide our paths through the mystery to all the magic hidden in our dreams.

---

Of course the best book on darkness was written by my husband, Clark Strand: Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse. The Gospel According to the Dark, to which the book serves as an introduction, is available for free here.

My next book on Summoning the Dark Wisdom of Our Ancestral Mothers, Mothers of Magic, is now available for pre-order here. It is already getting some good press and been described as “an intervention for our times.”

---

Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of The Way of the Rose, and the book of the same name. She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of Mt. Overlook and Mt. Guardian. Find out more about her upcoming workshops at takebackthemagic.com