Crone Chronicles #15(original)
Death & Rebirth

Crone Chronicles #15 - Death & Rebirth

This issue may have an imposing title, but the stories collected by editor Ann Kreilkamp are inspiring and celebratory, not morbid.

We begin with a true milestone: a call for Crones to gather in Salt Lake City for the very first Crones Counsel. If you are familiar with CC, you'll especially enjoy this look at the seed which became the Crone gathering you know and love.

Next up is an essay from noted Jungian psychologist and groundbreaking writer, Marion Woodman on the nature of the Crone archetype. (There's a couple of surprising ideas in this essay, including the concept that becoming Crone includes accepting the masculine side of the self.) A daughter's look at the strength of her aging mother comes next, sharing the page with a response from her mother (which mostly speaks to how working with anger can be part of the transformative aging process.)

The heart of this issue is Ann's interview with Sarah Davis, an adventuresome "West Coast Crone." Sarah -- embodying many of the same feisty attributes as the women profiled in the story on "Old Lesbians Organized for Change" (Crone Magazine #6, 2013) -- including fearlessness, independence, and a determination to make change happen! (The tales of Sarah's adventures give the lie to the stereotype of "old women sitting at home alone and drinking tea. If you are an adventurer, too -- or just an armchair explorer -- you'd love her story.)

Ann K's profile of her mentor Kathryn Tempest, takes us on a different kind of adventure — the spiritual reawakening of an older woman, just a few years before her death, that made her entire lifetime come into focus, and found the spiritual family she had always longed for.

Several shorter articles round out the journey of this issue: Ellen Carr faces a lump in her breast (a true descent to the Underworld) and comes forth transformed in her essay "Descent," Barbara Schermer visits Eleusis in "Demeter's Dance," and Jean Jorgensen discovers for herself the connections between life and death in "I Became a Believer."

40 inspiring pages, published at Spring Equinox, 1993.