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The
Hand that Gives Comfort in the Winter
The process of discovering the Goddess is very often a rediscovery. As children, we are innately full of wonder at the world and open to its possibilities, aware of the enchantment all around us. We lose this wonder in attempting to grow up, often to discover ourselves trying to re-create that enchantment when the Goddess begins to manifest in our lives. We see that the wonder and imagination of our younger selves serves us better in establishing relationship with the Goddess than adhering to linear, rigid thought routines. We try to awaken our child eyes to see the Goddess.
As I became more conscious of my spirituality as a witch, I began re-examining my childhood for "evidence" of early pagan leanings. I tried to remember if I had ever seen fairies, had episodes of precognition or was communicating with a Goddess form on some level. And as much as I wanted to find this evidence, I had to finally accept that I had been just an ordinary kid without any extraordinary powers or experiences.
And then I remembered my "imaginary playmate." When I was seven, my large extended family moved from a nice, big house to a small house in a tract development. There were eight of us crammed into a three-bedroom house for nearly six months. I remember this as a time of great confusion and anxiety. I had been attending Catholic school and was suddenly thrown into public school in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. School seemed like utter chaos to me, with bullies running the schoolyard in ways they never had at parochial school (in Catholic school the nuns were perfectly capable of keeping everybody in terror on their own). I soon became a favorite target. I shut this year of my life out of memory as much as possible. I remember it as being one of the worst of my life. I can't remember too many smiles or good times, but I remembered almost twenty years later an imaginary playmate that just popped into my head one very dark winter.
I told my family about my new playmate that evening, and of course they thought it was cute. She was a grown woman, "real old, like forty," with an orange dress, and she came from planet Saturn. Her name was Aracnee. My dad laughed when I told him and explained to me that arachne meant spider. I wrinkled my nose — I was afraid of bugs, but spiders were the scariest thing to me in the whole world.
Aracnee hung out with me during that long winter, and by spring I had stopped talking about her. When my family asked about her, I shrugged. She was gone, and I hadn't really given her much thought. Even then, although I "knew" she was my own creation, I never felt like I could call her at will. She would pop up at odd times and go just as quickly. When I was sad and lonely, I noticed she would come out and be with me, but I never called her to me or went looking for her.
Fast forward twenty years, to right after my twenty-seventh birthday. By this time I have really made a commitment to women's spirituality and have become very involved in the local Pagan community. I'm learning about magick, Wicca, various goddesses, and making a conscious effort to experience the divine in my daily life. I start reading about a Greek Goddess named Ariadne, and at a certain point in the book I suddenly feel like I've fallen through the floor, and I start to put the pieces together.
In the midst of the hardest time of my life, an "imaginary playmate" appears in my mind. Unlike similar playmates my friends had, she was not a cuddly animal or even a peer to share games with. She was a grownup, older than my mother, who would just hang out next to me and maybe chat with me. I never brought her up when I played make- believe with my friends — I didn't want somebody to play at being her. I read the information about Ariadne and felt parallels and connections to Aracnee that made me wonder, "Was she really the Goddess Ariadne? Was I really connecting to the Goddess and not just playing?"
I called home and talked to both my parents, asking them questions about the year we lived in Oak Park. ("Honey, why are you bringing this up? We were all so miserable then!" was my mother's reaction.) My dad remembered her quite well and laughed as he told me the stories. "God, I haven't thought about this in years. Let's see. She was old, she was from Saturn, she lived on the ceiling . . ."
"She did what now?"
"Lived on the ceiling. You said she lived on the ceiling but would drop down to visit you."
I had forgotten that. I would see a woman on a swing right over my head near the ceiling, and when I felt scared or nervous she would slowly descend on the swing and sit close to me. That was the only time I had seen her face, which was actually a spider's face and scared me. She said she couldn't help it, it was "too hard to be pretty all the time," but if her face scared me, she'd sit behind me and above me, and I wouldn't have to see. She took no insult at my fright, but neither did she change herself to comfort me. She just sat close but out of my line of sight, which I found enormously comforting. But the hanging from the ceiling and descending to help me I had completely forgotten, and the aspects of a spider Goddess were coming together to form a more complete picture. I was now convinced that I had been visited by a Goddess and had been conscious of her and was able to communicate with her on a psychic level.
My dad had no more information, and my mom didn't remember anything at all about her. But I sat down and wrote out or drew everything I knew about her, and all the connections seemed to fit. The only question was why she had come to me.
It was winter solstice and I attended a ritual. During the story-telling and sharing part, someone mentioned how incredibly accepting a cold winter night is, how a person can walk in the dark with their stresses and demons jumping around them, and they seem to be taken into the crystalline darkness, leaving behind only a deep peace. I walked that night in my neighborhood. It was a freezing cold night, moonless, yet the stars and the snow together kept everything luminous. I looked up and saw the stellar spiral, ribbons of stars spiraling out from the center of the sky to touch each horizon. I felt I could see the whole sky move like a wheel, that I could see the stars spinning towards me. It was a spider creating her spiraling web from the dark center of her body; it was a silver wheel; it was a spiral castle made of stars, and I thought I saw a pair of eyes at the center. My negativity, my stresses were dissipating, flooding away from me and disappearing. I felt filled with peace. I felt I was being comforted.
I felt a familiar presence. I looked around. I was alone. My attention was taken upward back to the stars. "You know who I am," the sky said.
"I do?"
"You remember me. I am the hand that gives comfort in the winter."
"Yes, I do remember."
It was one of those magical moments you wish could go on. But nothing else was said to me, I just basked in this incredible feeling of unconditional love and protection.
When I got home, my grandmother called. She and I had always been close.
When I was little, she and I were best friends. As we talked, I asked her if she remembered Aracnee. "Well, no. You see your parents told me that you had started talking to an invisible friend and they would tell me what you said, but you never mentioned her around me."
"No kidding. I wonder why not."
"Because when you were with me you felt safe," she said.
She was right. I only felt safe those days when I was with either my grandma or Aracnee. There was no reason why they should be together when their job was to protect me. I felt the same crystalline energy as outside, an energy I know to be Ariadne, the Lady of the Silver Wheel. And I knew my grandma had hit on it exactly. In my fear, confusion and loneliness I had manifested what I needed; the Goddess had heard prayers I hadn't even said and still took care of me. Since then I've learned a lot about wards and shields, about how to keep myself safe, and the value of protective spirits and allies. I have taken an initiation in my spiritual tradition that puts the Warrior Gods of my pantheon around me at all times and charges them with the task of protecting me and my home and family. But come Yule, I'll be staring at a spiral of treelights tacked to my temple ceiling and remember a peace that did surpass and then lead to understanding.
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