Cycles of Womanhood

The Enchantress

All women are cyclical beings, ever changing and dancing to a rhythm that connects our heartbeats, to the magnetic pull of the moon and the pulse of the Earth itself.

Whether our bodies follow a menstrual or luna cycle, we each follow a roughly four-week path which takes us through the energies of four feminine archetype… maiden/spring, mother/summer, enchantress/autumn and crone/winter. Understanding these archetypes, these four aspects of ourselves, offers us the opportunity to reconnect with our intuitive nature, and draw the map to our internal landscape. It enables us to listen to the messages our cycle is trying give us, allowing us to heal and empower ourselves.

In this series of articles, I am acting as your guide to the four archetypes which correspond to the four moon phases… maiden/first quarter, mother/full moon, enchantress/third quarter and the crone/dark moon. Our individual experience will always be unique and determined by our own past and present, with each phase lasting approximately 7 days.

As the shadows lengthen across the Earth and the sun’s rays lose their heat, the wheel continues to turn and we find ourselves standing together in the doorway to the darker half of the year. Just as Persephone journeyed to shadowlands of the underworld for half of each year, so too are we invited to travel away from the bright hustle and bustle of life.

Summer has come to an end, we’ve seen friends and family, we’ve had adventures and celebrated, and now the beginnings of tiredness creep in. We start wishing for a ‘day off’ from needing to be social. We crave a little time to ourselves to focus on our needs, and the to do lists we’ve been putting off so we can help others. The softness we’ve been exuding starts to thin as the hint of frustration begins to build.

If you think of autumn as the twilight of a day, it becomes easy to view it as the time to get ready to rest… you tidy up the house, prepare for tomorrow as best you can before you put it to one side and put your feet up a little. Maybe you offer yourself an hour with a book, or you watch something to lose yourself in for a while. The early evening is usually the time we offer to ourselves, before night claims us. Our enchantress phase is the twilight of our cycle. The…