On Death and Dying

by Monica Sjöö

"People have in all times known that the ancestors, who are the dead, who are ourselves, always guide and teach us. The people in trance states listen to the voices of the spirits whispering and roaring in subterranean waters under red ochre crevices looking like vaginas. The closest I have come to this experience was spending time on my own whilst drawing within the subterranean temple/womb/tomb on Malta, the Hypogeum where the Great Mother and Her spirits dwell. Yes, I believe that the figurines of the Goddess facilitated the entrance (through Her opening/Yoni) into the 'subterranean womb, assuring a place of regeneration'. I believe that my own paintings are similar portals to and from other worlds.

The sacred sites of the Goddess - such as the stone circles, standing stones, holy wells, mounds representing the Earth's pregnant womb - are also places of trance-states and communications with other realms or the worlds of the Faerie/ancestors/the dead. There is at all times a telepathic communication, an umbilical cord, between us and the Mother Earth. We are, after all, her children although we have forgotten. Ever since a powerful initiation to the Goddess in the land of Avebury and Silbury in 1978, I have pilgrimaged to Her sacred sites. My very first initiation to the Great Mother had been during the natural home birth of my second son in 1961. During that incredibly powerful birth I had seen in my mind's eye great radiant masses of darkness alternating with great masses of light, coming and going. Although I didn't know it then, this was the Goddess who is both Dark and Light, beyond all polarities. Did she show herself to me in Her pure energy-body? This changed my life and set me on a life-long search for the ancient women-led cultures of the Goddess. Ever since the 60s I experienced these ancient women - sisterhoods who co-exist with us now in another time-space, communicating with me, and speaking through me. I am their medium. Birth was a Sacrament in Goddess times and women gave birth in sacred enclosures by holy wells aided by The Mothers, triple wise women, who, like the Norns, wove, maintained and cut the web of life.

The ancient shaman women or Shamankas also acted as guides for the dying as they returned to the womb of the Mother; birth and death being the two sides of the same process, coming and going. Circumstances that led up to my son's death in 1985 made me fear my own work and even the Great Mother, who, after all, had taken him. I had to keep reminding myself that I was only his earthly mother while She is his greater Mother. During some years I lived in a twilight world of shadows and pain. In the meantime, my oldest son was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer and died, twenty eight years old, and like his brother on a full moon. I have come to understand through years of grief that not only was I the birthing Shaman woman bringing my sons to this realm, but I was also the Shamanka who had to witness their deaths. There is a great similarity between the birth and death process, such as traveling through the dark channel from the dark womb into the light of day, into the light of the Goddess Otherworld at death, coming and going. She is the great luminous Mother of the dead or ancestors who await us and She is the great Dark Mother of the fertile Earth that gives us life. She who is both Dark and Light.

Goddess gives birth to Nature - 1992

It has dawned on me while writing this that I didn't really believe in an afterlife in the past, even though I spoke of how the Blessed live on in the womb of the Great Mother awaiting rebirth. These were just words. It is only after my sons' deaths, lucid dreams in which they visit me, experiences when my young son went into the Otherworld - that I 'know' in my bones that there is a life eternal and that She, the Mother, always transforms. This has been a great gift. I now do not fear death and look forward to being with my sons again."

From the Introduction to "Midwifing Death: 
Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother"
 by Leslene della-Madre [Plain View Press, 2005].