Keywords: Guardian, Enchantment, Mystery, Femininity, Intuition, Destiny, Magical Gifts, Balance of Power

Known also as Nimue or Viviane in different versions of the stories, the Lady of the Lake is a powerful figure of the Arthurian legends whose role shapes the destiny of more than one man. Her actions often maintained or shifted the balance of power in the Arthurian world. Her origins blend ancient Celtic water goddess motifs with medieval romance. She serves as a guardian of the lake, of the mystic isle of Avalon, the sword Excalibur, and a mentor of knights and warriors such as Lancelot.

This card arrives as a messenger from sacred, liminal realms like Avalon and speaks of one’s natural intuition, inborn wisdom, destiny and the divine feminine. The Lady reminds you that you are guided and supported by forces beyond the visible world. This card may signify a pivotal moment where you are called to step into a significant role or embrace a higher purpose. It highlights the importance of mentorship and guidance, either as a mentor yourself or in seeking guidance from others.

The Lady of the Lake teaches the vitality and the power of femininity. She demonstrates this power when pursued by an infatuated Merlin, and she learns and uses his own spells and enchantments against him, sealing him in a tree (or cave, depending on the version).

While the Arthurian stories, events and characters may seem overwhelmingly male, there is much feminine influence and control underlying everything. It is the women of the stories; the faeries and enchantresses and queens, who shape the men and the outcomes. Almost all the men of the story, at some point or another, find themselves lusting after a particular woman and this leads either to their compromise or downfall. Nimue understood male weakness and how to use it for her own purposes. While this may sound manipulative and toxic, it illustrates the necessity – often for survival – of working around male brutality and impulse with feminine craft and cunning.

The Lady’s story underscores the necessity of using one's unique strengths to navigate challenges and maintain balance. Just as she wielded her enchantments to shift the fates of those around her, you too are encouraged to recognize and harness your own innate abilities in order to take charge of your own fate. This card calls you to honor the mystical and unseen forces at play in your life, to embrace your destiny with courage, and to trust in the protective, guiding energies of the divine feminine.

In Ariadne's Tribe, our mythos is intricately interwoven with our sacred calendar. This connects the stories of the deities with the movement of celestial objects, from the Sun and Moon to the planets and stars. When we look up in the night sky, we see those stories spread out in sparkling array above us.

The Tribe mythos is organized into micropantheons, with each small group of deities having their own story cycles that are reflected in the stars. Micropantheons have been around in the Mediterranean since at least the Bronze Age, possibly earlier, so it's likely the Minoans had multiple ways of viewing the constellations depending on which deities their personal spiritual practice revolved around.

[Continuing our series of interviews centered around Myths, Moons, and Mayhem, we sit down for a Fast Five with author Greg Kosebjorn.]

How do you get modern audiences to connect with mythology? How do you reinvent a classic but obscure comic book character? And can a video game adaptation of one of the internet's quirkier creative works capture its original appeal? These are just some of our stories for Airy Monday, our segment about magic and religion in popular culture. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Hello, and welcome to my new blog “Myth Maker: Modern Mythopoeia.”

In the next post, I’ll get to the meat of this blog, introducing you to a variety of lesser-known spirits from around the world and telling you the stories and teachings they tell to me. But I thought I’d start off by talking a little about mythopoesis as an art and a magical practice. The English word mythopoesis comes from the Greek μυθοποιία, and literally means “myth-making.” The second part of the word, “poeia,” is the root of our word “poet.”  Historically, the word was an obscure technical term, describing, as Victorian historians would tell it, that period of time when humans made myths “instead of science” to explain the world around them. However, in 1931, J. R. R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings) published a poem titled Mythopoeia, which was a direct response to his frenemy and Oxford colleague C.S. Lewis’s skepticism about the value of myth.  Lewis (at the time, although his views softened with the wisdom of age) believed that  myths are "lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver.”'  Tolkien's poem replies...