The Woman the World Needs

Remembering and reclaiming the Crone.

Welcome to this edition of Walking the Liminal!

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For some time now, I have felt called to write about the Crone, this archetype, this elder woman that’s so dear to my heart. But the cauldron needed more stirring and I needed to sit with her longer. What has emerged from this time in her mysteries is far more than one post can hold, thus it has become a three-part series.

One: The Woman Our Culture Fears
Two: The Woman We Have Forgotten
Three: The Woman the World Needs (This Essay)

Invitation

Art by Maartje van Dokkum

The Crone chuckles and cackles,
amused by our insistence that she has disappeared.
For she has lived through every attempt to erase her,
every endeavor to diminish her.
She throws her head back laughing at this naivety.

She has never been irrelevant.
She has never been obsolete.

She has been abiding in the pause…
between beginnings and endings,
between autumn and winter,
between dusk and the coming night.

Untethered to the dysfunction of our world,
she has been quietly tending to what is eternal.

Waiting in old forests.
Waiting within the grandmothers.
Waiting in our dreams.
Waiting in each of us.

She has never been lost.
We simply forgot how to recognize her.
Yet, this is the time for her reclamation.
Let us come together collectively.
For remembering is never a solitary act.
Our remembering is her returning.

Why Her Return Matters

In my first essay on the Crone, I described our dominant worldview as CHIP, Capitalistic, Hierarchical, Imperialistic Patriarchy. CHIP feeds an insatiable hunger, a hunger to consume, control, dominate and possess. It extracts resources till there are none, pollutes our air, water and food, monetizes our health, commodifies our bodies and subjugates difference. Diminishing the feminine creative force that lives within all of life.

When we become disconnected from our innate living wisdom, we become participants in this dysfunction. It shows up as:
A loss of true intimate relating.
A loneliness that is epidemic.
A give and take that’s transactional.
A separation from our living Earth.

Yet beneath the noise of our culture, something older still calls to us. Deep within our bones and blood lives an ancient remembering. A longing to return to balance, to relationship, and to the sacred rhythms of life.

The elders have known this.
And why the Crone returns.
Not to take power, but to restore relationship.
Bringing us back to community and to each other.
We need Crone consciousness.

Bringing us home to a way of meeting life with wisdom, reciprocity and reverence.

Where are the Grandmothers?

When a culture rejects the Crone, it rejects elderhood.

Where are the grandmothers? Where are the councils of elder women who have lived enough life to guide the community? Across many traditions, elder women have been honored as healers, storytellers, wisdom keepers, and advisors. Their years and their wisdom earned them respect rather than dismissal.

Yet ours is a culture that often hides its elders away and treats aging as something to resist. In forgetting the Crone, we have also forgotten those who:
teach us how to age with dignity,
teach us how to live with paradox,
teach us how to prepare for death.

I am currently reading, American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence. What has stood out for me in this book is the role of the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers. Under the Great Law of Peace, established roughly nine centuries ago and still practiced today, elder women hold profound responsibility within their communities. They select the chiefs, guide the moral and spiritual direction of the people, and hold the authority to remove leaders who no longer serve their community well. Their leadership is rooted not in domination, but in relationship. To their future children, the people and the land.

A similar vision is also echoed in another book that has stayed with me, The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler. A book that challenged many assumptions about our past. Drawing from archaeology and comparative history, Eisler explores evidence suggesting that many early societies were more egalitarian, partnership-based and matrilineal. Valuing cooperation and reverence for the Divine Feminine. Inviting us to imagine a richer human story rather than the one we’ve been fed. One in which the feminine and the wisdom of elders played a vital role.

Throughout history, many indigenous and traditional cultures have honored elder women in similar ways. Too often these societies were dismissed as primitive because they organized themselves differently from the cultures that conquered and colonized them.

Throughout time many older women served as herbalists, healers, and midwives. Yet, during the 1500-1700’s in Europe they were condemned as witches and executed. Roughly 60,000 people total, mostly women. Leaving a lasting wound in our relationship with feminine wisdom.

Perhaps the question is not simply: Where are the grandmothers?

Perhaps the deeper question is: Are we ready to remember the wisdom that has been with us all along?

What the Crone Returns With

Artist Julia Jeffery

The Crone understands that domination cannot heal domination. This isn’t about toppling CHIP from the top down. That simply replaces one hierarchy with another, repeating the same story.

The Crone offers something different…
Not power over,
but power with.

On the horizon lies the possibility of a new birth, a return to our inherent interconnectedness. And this primordial womb cannot be rushed. As a midwife of birth and companion of death, the Crone knows every true beginning requires an ending. Before something new can emerge, something old must be released. She invites us to loosen our grip on this endless striving, reliance on certainty, and this insatiable hunger for more. Making space for another way of being to take root.

As the Crone returns, she comes bearing gifts our world longs for:
wisdom
discernment
truth-telling
reciprocity
animism
sensuality
relational leadership
community
grief
joy
playfulness
sovereignty
She teaches us how to belong, to ourselves, to one another and to the living earth.

Blessing us, for we are each a living prayer…

As this ending and the new birthing unfolds, the Crone becomes the fertile ground beneath our feet. Like the mycelial networks beneath the forest floor, transformation begins below the surface, where relationships are restored one thread at a time. From this web of connections, the foundation of CHIP starts to weaken and to crack. What once seemed unbreakable fractures and in its decay is the fertilizer for the new upcoming growth.

Imagine a world where aging is celebrated, elder women are visible, rites of passage are honored, croning ceremonies are commonplace, young people are mentored by elders, and wisdom is valued as deeply as innovation.

The Crone guides us back into living with the cycles of life, rather than the illusion of control. She reminds us that we belong to a living world, the great spiral, whose rhythms are circular, relational and ever renewing.

How might our families, communities, and world change if we once again listened to the grandmothers?

Closing

Artist Kat Edora

The Crone walks beyond the map,
onto the pathless path.
Her wildness is born of mystery.
Her wisdom is shaped by alchemy.

Her prayer is breath.
Her temple, a forest.
Her magic is slow.
Her poetry, alive.

She dwells in the space between things,
where paradox becomes artistry.
She teaches us the power of both/and,
weaving together what was never truly separate.

The Crone is returning.
And we are remembering.
Remembering how to belong to ourselves,
remembering how to belong to one another,
remembering how to belong to the Earth.

She was never gone.

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