Danielle Dulsky - Seasons of Moon and Flame: The Wild Dreamer’s Epic Journey of Becoming

Contents

Praise for Seasons of Moon and Flame

Danielle Dulsky is the poet of this generation of Witches, weaving the magical art of storytelling and ritual into our lives with Seasons of Moon and Flame. If we listen closely, we find that her voice is running through our very blood and bones and holds the keys to our ancestral wildness.

Ora North, author of I Dont Want to Be an Empath Anymore

Bold, exquisite, empowering, and healing in its concoction and execution, Seasons of Moon and Flame is an exceptional achievement and an essential read.

Mat Auryn, author of Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation

Theres a stern spirituality about this book, the whiff of a potent potion and strong medicine cooking by the fireside. A hint of surprise. To wander through the textual landscapes conjured once again by the magisterial stroke of Danielle Dulskys pen is to recognize that the world, like the home of the crone at the edge of the forest, is brimming with magic. Good, healing, relational, intimate, emergent magic. And we do need magic today! We need a way of knowing that enchantment has never been in short supply, even here in the seemingly dour space of the modern. We need to feel this in our bones, and be touched in a touchless world. This book is a map that leads not to the exotic faraway, but to the shocking and orgasmic nearby. Travel at your own risk.

Bayo Akomolafe, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and founding curator of the Emergence Network

My community and followers know that I would never steer them wrong when it comes to content that can shift and inspire their lives. Danielle Dulsky continually creates works of the soul through her writing. The yearning to come back home, back to the roots of who you are, will envelop your bones in this book. A calling not only to remember who you are but to remember the simplicity of it all in the unraveling of the spirit, land, and flesh.

Juliet Diaz, author of Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within

As punk icon Henry Rollins once said, Knowledge without mileage is bullshit. Danielle Dulsky is the living embodiment of this truth. Seasons of Moon and Flame connects readers to a more intimate relationship with themselves, while also illuminating their uniquely important role in the dance of life. As Danielle explores throughout her book, theres such beauty in the haunting and intoxicating experience of lifes seasons. That said, perhaps its apropos that I write these words at 3:13 AM accompanied by a beautifully deafening silence embracing my own current season of late-night creative expression. Danielles guidance, experience, practices, and teachings will spark the revolutionary heart of anyone ready to live their year(s) of wild to the fullest. It certainly did mine.

Chris Grosso, author of Indie Spiritualist, Everything Mind, and Dead Set on Living

Danielle Dulsky has given us a rhapsody in celebration of the Holy Wild within and around every awakened woman (and hopefully some men). Come ready to listen to treespeak and crow poetry and encounter lusty egg-bearing grandmothers who can fill an egg-shaped hole in the heart. Youll be invited to step out of linear time into moon cycles and what Australias First People call the All-at-Once. Youll breathe the medicine smoke of sacred stories and be aroused to step outside the tame land and embody the secret wishes of your soul.

Robert Moss, bestselling author of The Secret History of Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home

Also by Danielle Dulsky

Woman Most Wild: Three Keys for Liberating the Witch Within

The Holy Wild: A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman

Copyright 2020 by Danielle Dulsky

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given or liability taken.

An early version of the text found on pages 15859 has appeared on the website The House of Twigs.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

First printing, March 2020

ISBN 978-1-60868-642-1

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-643-8

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

To the elders I have known

Contents

Throughout recorded history , no portrayal of a woman has been demonized more than that of the hag or crone. She is the projected embodiment of everything patriarchal society resists and condemns. As a result, she is one manifestation of the collective Jungian shadow of our society, in which the things we are taught to fear and avoid take form. Just like the Jungian shadow self, the hag needs to be confronted, embraced, and integrated within ourselves and our society, as she holds the crucial medicine that will heal our global soul-sickness as a species. This mission is more important now than ever before.

The condemnation of the hag surpasses that of the sinful yet youthful sexual temptress, sorceress, and nymph archetypes. This is because, as an elderly woman without any children and living alone without a husband, she has seemingly failed to fulfill the patriarchal demand that a womans role in life is to bear and raise children. She has failed to fulfill the demands to be subservient to others around her, to not want for herself, to be silent, to have her lifes worth measured by a man she is bound to, to be uneducated, to be less than. She is sometimes vilified as monstress, demoness, and sinner; at other times as child devourer, soul stealer, murderess, madwoman. But always she is called wicked. The hags priorities are not those of society around her nor of the roles they dictate for her. She flies via broom, distaff, cauldron, or sometimes a goat through the night sky against a full moon, not giving a flying fuck whether her life, appearance, or desirability is palatable to male appetites.