Beauty Has Been Sleeping

The Medicine Woman and the 13^th Archetype

Each of the 13 Warrioresses is aligned with a zodiac sign, but many of you will not be familiar with the zodiac sign for Medicine Woman, which is Ophiuchus (a-few-chus).

Who is Ophiuchus?

Ophiuchus is known mythologically as the snake handler and the well-known astrologer, Demetra George, talks about the snake as a primary symbol of feminine transformative power. Demetra discusses a constellation group that she believes is ushering us through this transition between World Ages, from the personal to the collective, and this constellation group has two snake constellations that run alongside them: Hydra, the sea serpent; and Serpens, the snake handler, who is also known as Ophiuchus. Although Ophiuchus has long been in the path of the apparent sun along with the other 12 Zodiac signs, she, like the 13^th Fairy Goddess Mother, has been cast out, rejected, and denied. Yet, every year she spends more and more time in the apparent path of the sun, heralding that she will be seen.

Each Warrioress is aligned with a fairy tale, and our 13^th Warrioress, Medicine Woman, draws hers from the bones of Sleeping Beauty, or as it is called in the Amazonian Arts, Beauty has been Sleeping. For as Medicine Woman shares in her Pathway, she has been asleep for thousands of years, for she had chosen to forget the atrocities she was witness to. Her awakening heralds the return of what some of my teachers call the Beauty Way: living in wholesome and sacred relationship with the earth and all her inhabitants once again.

My Sleeping Beauty Story

In the spirit of the Warrioress, which requires absolute vulnerability, I would like to share a little of my own personal connection to the archetype of Medicine Woman. For I, like Sleeping Beauty, fell asleep to what I knew in my bones about the all-pervading patriarchy. In the physical this has played out as severe dysmenorrhea since menarche: an experience of the collective banshee scream within my womb. Thus, when I pricked my finger on the spindle metaphorically at my own first blood, I too fell asleep, and the pain represented the unconsciousness into which I sank. Yet the dark 13^th Fairy Goddess Mother is really just my own deeper knowing, and down in this underworld of a long a lasting slumber, my soul has been able to loosen its grip on the physical body and excursion into other realms to bring back the wisdom that is needed to begin healing.

Notice the number of this beauty-filled card in the Inner Child tarot deck by Mark & Isha Lerner:

No. 13, which is the Death card in traditional tarot. For in mythology or fairy tale, a long and lasting sleep represents a death and rebirth: a time of transformation before a new awakening. And in the Amazonian Arts story, Beauty is Awakening. Not from the kiss of a knight on horseback, but rather from the Goddess Isis on the Black Unicorn with her kiss of consciousness.

In the Zodiac wheel, Medicine Woman sits in the centre of the other 12 Warrioresses and has a thread from each of their wombs connected to her own. She represents the shift to the next dimension of consciousness that humanity is now experiencing. Medicine Woman has herself undergone great suffering and knows in her own womb the trauma that the other 12 sisters collectively hold. 

Medicine Woman Asks of Us

• What am I ready to let die that no longer serves?
• What am I longing to awaken to and remember in my life?
• Do I hear the call to a new story...