The women are weeping at the gate again. Come sit with them. Module 2, Lesson 3 of The Descent: Underworld Journeys just went live in the level 4 classroom — The Lament and the Liturgy: Tammuz Across the Ancient World. And the timing is not mine. We are inside the month of Tammuz right now — the fourth Babylonian month, June into July, the height of summer when the green things wither and the beloved goes down. It’s stiflingly hot here in Michigan, and the spell included in the lesson is perfect for right now, for me at least. For over two thousand years, across Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria, this was the month the women sang the laments. This lesson drops in the exact season it belongs to. Here's what's inside — and I'll warn you, this one is grief-work, not a happy ending: 🌾 The oldest lament that survives — older than the Psalms, older than Homer — sung by a woman standing at a threshold, facing the open air 🚪 Tammuz becoming Adonis, the river at Byblos running red, the women who couldn't remember anymore which torn god they were weeping for 🌱 The Gardens of Adonis — Athenian women planting seeds on rooftops deliberately to watch them die, then carrying the withered shoots to the sea 🕯️ And the thread through all of it: the mourner as threshold-keeper. Grief as the technology that holds the gate open. Hekate in every woman who ever wept at a door. There's an incense and atmosphere ritual built in — cedar, or myrrh if you have it, the scent of the mourning— and no candles this time. Only natural light. This lesson is about what travels into a room when you leave the door open. Why now, past the timing: we cross into Phase III — The Underworld Floor / Chthonia this Wednesday, July 8. The deepest room of the whole descent. And this lesson is the map for what comes after the floor. Because the torn god does not stay down. The grain that dies in the earth rises. But — and this is the whole teaching — it doesn't rise because death was defeated. It rises because the women wept it back. Without the mourner, no memory. Without memory, no return. Rebirth isn't the opposite of the descent. It's what grief makes possible on the far side of it.

We just crossed the Strawberry Moon on Monday. So this week the thicket picks itself. Strawberries! It’s the little heart-shaped berry the whole moon was named for. My little patch has already flowered, fruited and gone, but the photos are here to stay! Attached. That brief timing is the whole point. Strawberry is the plant of first ripeness. 🍓The Myth Strawberry has belonged to the love-goddesses: Aphrodite and Venus, Freyja in the North, because its heart shape and its red juice. The Roman poets knew the wild kind well. Virgil calls it humi nascentia fraga or "strawberries born of the earth”, and warns berry-pickers to watch for the "cold adder in the grass." Ovid lists mountain strawberries among the wild foods of the Golden Age. Pliny catalogued it too. A plant gathered low, right at the surface of the ground. Which is the Hekatean part. The berry hugs the soil, serpent coiled beside it, acting as the liminal point where the underworld breathes up through the dirt. That's Hekate Chthonia's territory, (remember, this is the epithet of our approaching phase of Pluto Retrograde). Venus gets the red heart of the fruit; Hekate gets the dark ground it grew from. On the year's lowest full moon, both are in the berry.❤️ 🍓The Medicine The whole plant works though, not just the berry. The fruit is rich in vitamin C, ellagic acid, and antioxidants. It's cooling, cleansing, gentle on the system. But the real herbalist's treasure is the leaf: dried and brewed as a tea, it's a mild astringent and gentle blood tonic, traditionally used to calm diarrhea, soothe sore mouths and gums as a rinse, and settle the nerves before bed. The root, harvested in fall, was dried for the same astringent gut and gum work. A cooled leaf infusion on a cloth even eases sunburn (which I’m actually using right now, after that visit to the pool, ouch 😓). It is one of the safest, gentlest plants in the garden. Allergy is the only real caution. 🍓The Magic Venus-ruled, water-element, feminine— strawberry is a plant of love, fertility, dedication, and first fruits. It reproduces by sending out runners, giving of itself until the young plants root. That's exactly its lesson: dedication to what you're trying to bring forth, even before the ground looks ready. Folk tradition says a shared strawberry, or a split double berry given to another, seals love between two people. It’s why so many people share chocolate covered strawberries on Valentine’s Day here in the States— so sappy, but actual legitimate magic.

Three from the Bianco Nero this week, pulled for all of us. Where we're coming from, where we stand, where the road bends. ENDINGS — Ten of Swords. We come out of a hard ending. No softening it, the Ten of Swords is the thing that's fully over, run all the way into the ground. But it’s a 10, the end of the suit. There are no more swords to fall. Whatever's been cutting this cycle has already done its worst, and rock bottom is still a floor. You can stand on it. PRESENT — King of Wands. Where we stand now: mature fire. The one who's been through it and came out holding the torch instead of getting burned. Vision, will, creative authority over your own life. I love the imagery of the wand/torch held firmly, with control. After the Ten of Swords, that's the point. You're not under the swords anymore. You're standing over them. BEGINNINGS — Two of Swords. The road bends toward a choice. The Two of Swords is a crossroads in swords’ clothing: blindfolded, blades crossed, a decision that has to be made before things come clear. It's the fork. Beginnings here don't look like sunrise; they look like honest not-knowing, sitting with the blindfold on until you feel which way to turn. So: out from under an ending, fire still lit, arriving at a choice you can't rush. From the ground, through the flame, to the fork. The timing tracks. Today is the Last Quarter Moon—the turn where you release what's finished and pivot. Tomorrow we step onto the Underworld Floor, Phase III. This is the map for it: the ending's behind you, the fire goes down with you, the choice waits on the floor. 👇 Which card is loudest for you right now: the ending, the fire, or the fork? Compare with your own cards or divination method! Then, tell me your thoughts below. I'll go first. En Erebos, Phos. In darkness, light. Blessings, Tirza 🌿🗝️🌙 #OracleTuesday #HekateanHealing #HekateanPath 📚 The deck: Bianco Nero Tarot by Marco Proietto & Arwen Lynch (Lo Scarabeo)

New book on the altar today: Anatomy of a Witch: A Map to the Magical Body by Laura Tempest Zakroff. I've been circling this one for a while, and it finally arrived. Here's the premise that pulled me in, right from the opening: you are your own most important magical tool. Not the deck, not the herbs, not the candles — the body. Zakroff maps the witch's power through the physical form itself, treating the body as the instrument every working actually runs through. Chapter one sets that table: before you reach for anything on the shelf, you reach for yourself. Which...if you've been floating in water with me, breathing through the Descent, learning where the reactive horse lives in your own chest...you already know in your bones. This just gives it a map. I'll be pulling from it in posts to come. Consider this the first torch lit on a new path. 🗝️ Have you read this one? Or is there a book that changed how you sit inside your own body? Tell me below — I'm building the reading pile. En Erebos, Phos. In darkness, light. Blessings, Tirza 🌿🗝️🌙 #HekateanHealing #AnatomyOfAWitch #MagicalBody 📚 The book: Laura Tempest Zakroff, Anatomy of a Witch: A Map to the Magical Body (Llewellyn, 2021)

Plato says the soul isn't a throne. It's a chariot, and something in you is always trying to bolt.🐎 In the Phaedrus, the philosophers draw one of the oldest maps of the inner life: the soul as "a winged charioteer and his team." We drive a mismatched pair. One horse is "fine and good and of noble stock." The other is "opposite in every way”. It’s the one that lunges, bolts, and drags the whole chariot off the road toward whatever it wants right now. That dark horse is the reactionary ego. Not evil. Not something to kill. Something to rein. The charioteer's job isn't to unhitch it and leave it in a field. It’s our job to hold both horses pulling the same direction long enough to see clearly and get to where we’re going faster. If that image feels familiar, it should. It's sitting right there in your tarot deck. The Chariot card shows a driver behind two sphinxes or horses, one black, one white, pulling in opposition. The whole meaning of the card is that mastery isn't force. It's holding the tension. You don't win by making the black horse disappear. You win by driving both. Here's the Hekatean turn Plato doesn't make. He gives us the charioteer and the horses. We add the crossroads and the torch. The reactive horse does its worst damage in the dark, like when you don't notice it's veered off track, away from the path you’d like to take. Shadow work is charioteering by torchlight: you go down, you look at the dark horse, you learn its name. Hekate Enodia stands with a light in the direction you should go. 🔦 Torchlight For Today: "One of these horses is fine and good and of noble stock, and the other opposite in every way. So in our case, the task of the charioteer is necessarily a difficult and unpleasant business." — Plato, Phaedrus 👇 Name your dark horse. What does the reactive part of you lunge toward every time? I'll go first. En Erebos, Phos. In darkness, light. Blessings, Tirza 🌿🗝️🌙 #WisdomWednesday #HekateanHealing #Phaedrus 📚 Further reading: Plato, Phaedrus (246a–254e, the chariot and the two horses) — Nehamas & Woodruff translations | Plato, Republic Book IV (tri-soul beneath the chariot) | Ellen Dugan, Witches Tarot (the Chariot, card VII) | Cyndi Brannen, Keeping Her Keys (Hekate and shadow work at the crossroads)