The Winter Crone

We enter the season of the Crone, the Hag of Winter.
Beware, this is no gentle old lady... she is wild, fierce and elemental, just like winter itself.
She is the storm rider, the shapeshifter, the ground freezer, the plant witherer, the bringer of death and the collector of souls.
She has had many names in many places...
Ceridwen, Hecate, Frau Gauden, Perchta, Nicneven, Reisarova, Frau Holda, Befana, the Hag of Beare, Babushka, Beira, Gyre-Carline, Mag Moullach, Gentle Annie, Lussi, and Saelde amongst numerous others.
With her holly staff in her hand and a carrion crow perched on her shoulder she strides across the land, beating down the vegetation, and hardening the earth with ice.
Winter is a time of death - the death of plants, the death of animals, and the death of those humans for whom the season is too harsh, so it is not surprising that the Hag of Winter is a death goddess and a collector of souls.
In this role she often leads the Wild Hunt, flying through the midnight skies accompanied by wild women and ghosts, gathering the recently dead.
In Norse Mythology these are the túnridur, the ‘hag riders’, or the gandreid ‘witch ride’.
In Norway, the goddess Reisarova leads the aaskereida (‘lightning and thunder’), a spectral host who rode black horses with eyes like embers.
In this dismal season, when the earth is bare and the trees skeletal, when everything showy is stripped away, we feel the underlying bones of creation and we see more clearly into its deepest secrets.
We approach its elemental power, and this is the true knowledge of the Crone, the coron or ‘crowned one’, the hag, ‘the sacred one’.
And this is a secret that only the wise know.
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