The Lady on the White Horse

A friend told me the other day that I have ‘a Goddess thing going on’.

My initial reaction was this: ‘?’

But she has a point. I do choose to anthropomorphise my belief in Source, and more often than not, it takes the form of a female deity of some sort. This is partly because I am a woman and feel a natural affinity with powerful feminine symbols, and partly because it seems to help me redress the imbalances between masculine and feminine that are rife in my psyche and also in society at large.

This week (because I think I might pop a Goddess on the blog every week) I would like to talk about  Rhiannon a little. I first encountered her in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. He does like his mythologies, Neil. It’s probably why I, and others, have such an enduring fascination with everything he writes. She just appeared as a Lady in Grey, on a white horse. The inference was that she had something to do with taking souls over to the other side, but I never researched her further. Until, today, she popped out of my card deck.

Rhiannon, The Lady on the White Horse

She is a celtic horse goddess and is considered to be both a goddess of abundance and manifestation, and of death, or rather, of taking souls to the other side. Sometimes they come back, if they are shamans. Mostly, they don’t. But, and this is what I love about the ancient understanding of the cycles of life, when Rhiannon carries your soul, it is a nurturing experience, one that you long for.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to truly believe this? I do, until the belief is tested by the death of a friend, as happened last week. Then, not so much.

My special interest in Rhiannon this week is in her role as manifestor of dreams. There are things I would dearly like to see happen. Things I have only just found the courage to admit to wanting. But. I have spent most of my life with my knuckles white on the steering wheel, trying to wrench the world into the shape I think it should be. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to be in flow, and manifest appropriately, at the appropriate time.

I call on the Lady on The White Horse.

Does she resonate with you? I love to know which Goddesses people are attracted to. Yes, Mary counts.

*Just a side note on the topic of manifestation: I stumbled on some goals I had written for 2009 and then promptly forgotten in the back of one of my many notebooks. I achieved all of them (many of which seemed insane at the time I wrote them) except for two. Those two, if I am honest, were not in line with my core values and so they were never going to happen. Interesting, no?