Approaching Epona

Alongside my personal projects (finding a suitable illustrator for "Little Lizzy Witch", finishing the first draft of "A Magickal Scrapbook" and constantly refining the "Tarot of the Yellow Brick Road") I have been busy with several small collaborative writing projects.

One of the most exciting and challenging of these has been the Naming the Goddess Project. 

Organised by Trevor Greenfield for Moon Books (an imprint of John Hunt Publishing) the project invited authors to submit essays on various Goddesses and I was selected to write about Epona.

Epona has been a part of my life for more about 10 years now but my personal relationship with her has always been more instinctual than intellectual and so the challenge for me, with this project, was to bring more history to the article and less personal, emotional, stuff. This was hard to do especially when I think about the first time I "saw" her...

I attend a twice annual Pagan camp and part of this camps tradition is to perform a ritual to Epona, at dawn, on the Saturday. Now I am not known for my early rising and so had not really expected to be awake at 4 in the morning to take part, but as it happens I didn't need to be…

Around 4 am I was laying in my sleeping-bag, asleep but I became aware of a distant drumming and although I remained in my tent I saw in my minds eye, a rolling fog coming towards my tent, across the field, and in this fog were the images of pale coloured ponies. The drumming became louder and I realised that it was the sound of galloping hooves. Suddenly they were surrounding me and I seemed to be outside with them. A woman, made of the same grey mist as the horses, held her arms open to me in a welcoming gesture, she seemed to be waiting for me to say something but as I went to speak the vision cleared, I was back in my tent, in my sleeping bag and I could hear the ritualists finishing up outside and chatting as they moved back to their own tents to make breakfast or grab a few more hours sleep.

You can read more about Epona and other Goddess in "Naming The Goddess" coming 2014

https://www.facebook.com/NamingTheGoddess

'Naming the Goddess' is a new community book from Moon Books featuring contributions from over 75 writers. Part 1 features a series of critical essays discussing contemporary Goddess issues. Part 2 is a Spiritual Gazetteer of over 60 popular Goddesses. 'Naming the Goddess' will be published in 2014.