Death
Owls of the Death Goddess
November is here and so are the great horned owls
In Ancient European Goddess cosmology, it was the Owl Goddess who came for you when you died. On Her wings or nestled in Her womb belly, She escorted you back to Source. At the transitional moment of what we call death, one returned to Her, the Mother of All, the nurturing Goddess, the Creatrix, to be renewed, transformed, recycled. But first, deep rest in her eternal womb space, her bloody cauldron.
Once these were not frightening facts.
They were reassuring. Everyone understood that we all die and when we die we are reconstructed within the womb of the Owl Goddess, the one who can eat death. It was not something to fear or avoid, but to be in awe of.
The Owl Goddess is awesome.
There was intimacy with all the cycles of life. Death is one of them. In these neolithic cultures it was an interactive event, with forces that guarded over and protected it, escorted you through it.
One learned how to die well. In rituals with giant cauldrons of fire, burning in the womb of an owl shaped Goddess, death was rehearsed, participated with. One could meet the Owl Goddess beforehand, practice well the art of dying.
The art of dying is the art of surrender, the art of transformation, of breaking oneself down into parts to be reassembled — releasing ego and identity — becoming food for other life forms, offering experience back as sustenance to the All.
For me the belief in the Owl Goddess who will come and take me into her womb when I die and help transmute me and my lifetime into its next iteration is a nurturing and reassuring thought.
Ghosts of the Forests
Owls are ghosts of the forests. Their flight is remarkably silent. They roam at night catching prey with precision hearing and intuition.
They nest in trees at the edge of the forests for a good view of their prey. Great horned owls can be ferocious, even breaking the neck of a woodchuck for dinner. But skunks, rabbits, voles and mice are good too.
In his book, Animal Speak, Ted Andrews writes, “The owl is a symbol of the feminine, the moon and the night. . . . The owl is a bird of magic and darkness, of prophecy and wisdom.”
Because people tend to keep secrets “in the dark” and the owl is a bird of the dark, owls can extract secrets. People with owl medicine can do the same.
November with the Great Horned Owls
Everyday, after my work is complete I walk for one to two hours. As the year progresses from summer into fall, and the light begins to leave, my walks become meetings with darkness. In November I need to leave my home no later than 4 pm if I want to get a good walk in, but I tend to push it too far and end up out on the trails in my local park, surrounded by darkness.
Last year on my late and dark walks I encountered more owls than I ever had before. I heard up to 18 in the interval of one walk. Mostly it was great horned owls I was hearing. I wondered if something had happened that drove them to the ecosystem I live in from another. It seemed like a lot of owls to inhabit the space they were in. I wondered if the wildfires had driven them south and west.
I went out for my walk yesterday for the first time after daylight savings this year and I heard them once again. It’s November and the owls are back. Today I learned that in late October into November they begin their courtship rituals and the males begin to set up territories. They do this by hooting loudly. The courtship rituals involve hooting by both male and female but apparently this is for a short span of time, which means I am mostly hearing male owls.
Since much of the hooting is located in the same trees as last year, I believe some of the owls I am hearing are the same ones as last year.
Interesting how they become active in the darkness and how my November walks become full of owls and their hooting since late October, early November is the time of year many of us begin to feel the presence of the ancestors more strongly, and think about death perhaps more than we do other times of the year.
Owls as Teachers
To me the association between owls and death has always been a perfect fit. I listen to what owls have to tell me about this transition called death and receive teachings from them that are otherwise unavailable in the modern world. As I walk in the cool foggy darkness listening to their hooting, I am open to the conversation.
In The Language of the Goddess, archaeologist Marija Gimbutas explains that there are no vultures in Northern Europe, thus the owl was gifted with the associations that vultures have in the south: the one who eats death and composts life. The one who cleans up death. The one who not only recycles your body but regenerates your soul.
In the archaeological remains of Northern Europe we find a preponderance of owl associations with death and the Goddess, including burial urns in the shape of owls. Gimbutas goes on to explain:
“Beautiful examples of owl-shaped burial urns dating from c. 3000 B.C. come from the Baden culture in Hungary, from Poliochni on the island of Lemnos, and from Troy. They have wings, the characteristic owl beak connecting arched brows, and sometimes a human vulva or a snakelike umbilical cord, symbols of regeneration. The tradition of urn burial and the shape of the urn persisted in east-central Europe even after Indo-Europeanization, apparently carried on by the substratum population.”
The stylized owl face and owl symbols are found inside tombs, on menhirs and on passage graves in neolithic sites in Bulgaria, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and France. It is She who leads and guides one in the passage through death. It is She who nurtures and supports the process of death, the transition back into life.
Gimbutas continues:
“The symbols associated with the Owl Goddess — snake as umbilical cord, vulva, triangle, hatched or zig-zag band, net, labyrinth, bi-line, tri-line, hook, axe — shows them to be life source, energy, or life stimulating symbols. Their association with the Owl Goddess of Death serves to emphasize regeneration as an essential component of her personality. The agony of death which we take so much for granted is nowhere perceptible in this symbolism.”
Because death is not an ending. It is part of a cycle. Many of us have forgotten this. Death is a birth.
We can call on the Owl Goddess to help us remember to call upon life-stimulating symbols and energies at times when we encounter loss, death of a loved one, or our own impending death.
She will come and teach us about the cycles of life, and the never ending spirals of regeneration through time.
© Theresa C. Dintino 2022
Works cited:
Andrews, Ted. Animal Speak. Llewellyn, 1994.
Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco, Harper & Row. 1989.
