Raven Goddess: Bound By Wings and Winds that Know No Borders

Carving the block of linoleum. In the background is Morrigan or Morana, and in foreground is Dhumavati, the “crow-faced one” riding her raven. However, all three are somewhat interchangeable as the folklore surrounding these three raven goddesses reveals.

There is a place where you can see the winged daughters of the north, south, east and west circling the same sky. . . bound by black feathers and winds that know no borders. The Celtic Goddess Morrigan, the Goddess Slavic Morana, and the Hindu Goddess Dhumavati all live in companionship with ravens - the dark winged trickster whose black feather binds them. These dark goddesses are the midwives of endings and beginnings, their black feathers stitching together life and death, winged and earthbound, mortal and divine, seen and unseen. They are also nest-builders: they cradle, hatch and awaken. In times of upheaval and estrangement, when our ties have become unraveled, these raven sisters gift us with their timeless aerial vantage point between and betwixt worlds and cultures. They whisper of deep ancestral threads of connection that weave a much older, unyielding, closely woven cloak of kinship that holds us all together in its fold, beneath the frayed unraveling edges of the fabric of the world we are living within today. Let’s meet at the gathering place of these raven sisters, the threshold keepers, where the dark cave of present-day forgetting cracks open to the wide sky of ancient remembering. . .

The Celtic Goddess Morrigan, the shapeshifting seer, and witch of war, holds within her the full spectrum of existence: war and peace, ruin and rebirth, ecstasy and dread. In Old Irish her name is Morrígan. In Middle Irish Mór, means “great.” The second part, rígan, means “queen.” Great Queen. Shadowed Sovereign, Keeper of thresholds, she is the Divine Contradiction: healer and harbinger, protector and phantom, a presence that mends with one hand and shatters with the other. Magic hums in her breath; prophecy flickers in her gaze. Ever-shifting, ever-elusive, she walks the world in many guises. At times she is a radiant maiden, at others a battle-worn queen. She becomes the old crone who watches from the shadows, or the raven who circles overhead, silent and knowing. Some say the Morrígan is the soul-thread from which the banshee was later woven—that aged woman, hair long and white as winter frost, eyes deep with sorrow and fate, who keens at the threshold of death.

In the old stories, ravens and crows circle closely around the dying, while also associated with figures of crones, hags, and witches—those oft-misunderstood bearers of ancient knowledge. Even the word “crone” in English carries paradox: born from “crown” and “carrion,” it speaks of regal wisdom laced with the scent of mortality. Once, it was a title of honor, bestowed upon elder women who held the woven threads of life and death in their hands.

The Raven Goddess Morana is also called by many names—Morana, Morena, Marzanna, Mara, Morė—her name whispered across Slavic lands in a dozen tongues, yet all speaking of the same ancient force. The goddess of winter’s stillness, of death not as an end, but as a necessary sleep. Morana, the dark queen of frost and forgetting, is more than a bringer of death—she is the silent breath between endings and beginnings, the dreamtime of the earth as it slumbers beneath ice and snow, the dark womb of becoming before spring. In the old rites, woven into the bones of the seasons, Morana’s descent marks the closing of the year’s breath. She is the hush that follows decay, the frost-laced veil drawn over fields once golden. Yet even as she falls, she makes way—for from her fading rises another: Kostroma, or Vesna, or Lada, the radiant goddesses of Spring. Where Morana’s ashes touch the soil, something stirs. Life, tentative and trembling, begins again. Her story is not one of despair, but of turning. A wheel. A breath. A sacred transformation.

Further south the Goddess Dhumavati comes riding upon the back of a raven through the silence of dissolution. She is also known as the Crow-Faced One. She is one of the ten great Tantric goddesses—yet unlike the others, she appears as an old widow, weathered and fierce, stripped of illusion. Hers is the form most fear to face: the crone, the void, the moment the cosmos exhales into nothingness. She arrives at the time of pralaya, when all that once was unravels, and all that will be has not yet stirred. She is the space between worlds—the eternal pause before creation’s next breath. Though often cloaked in the language of inauspiciousness, Dhumavati holds a thousand names, and in them, a thousand truths. She is not only the bringer of misfortune but the bestower of boons, a tender-hearted goddess who, through absence, reveals abundance. Her ugliness is a mirror—one that demands we look past the surface and into the marrow of what is real. In her presence, dualities dissolve—auspicious and inauspicious, beauty and decay, gain and loss—all are threads in her tapestry. Dhumavati does not demand worship; she invites recognition.

Then there is the story of the White* Crow or White Raven Ka Phuak in Thai and Lao Buddhist folklore who graces murals with her pale, watchful eyes - a divine mother whose nest once cradled five eggs. These would not hatch into mere birds, but into Pańcabuddhabyākarana—the Five Buddhas-to-be. When a storm scattered her precious eggs across the world, they were taken in by unlikely foster mothers: a hen, a serpent, a cow, a lioness, and a turtle. Each raised their child in love, unaware of the divine destiny fluttering beneath feathers or scales. After twelve years passed, the five young divine beings found themselves reunited beneath the canopy of a single tree. There, they remembered their origin: not in the nests that raised them, but in the wings of Ka Phuak who bore them into the world. And so they honored her, not just as mother, but as sacred singular source. Scattered feathers, one sacred mother bird. Once again we see loss, separation and reintegration in the tale of a Raven Goddess and the discovery of the feathered thread that binds these five divine beings. Though originally a humble folk tale, the myth of Ka Phuak, gradually ascended through the layers of cultural reverence—first to a non-canonical Pali Jātaka, and finally into the sacred rhythms of national Buddhist belief.

What modern spell is broken when we unearth the lore and lure of this ancient sisterhood of raven goddesses from distant landscapes who circle the same sky? What inheritance are we gifted when we soar with them and take the aerial vantage point that sees the whole and knows no borders? What power do we reclaim when we witness in the wings of story an ancient honoring of black-plumed sky-weavers who dwell in the threshold and harness the liminal? Morrigan, Morana, Dhumavati, Ka Phuak . . .to speak their names is to reawaken the thread of memory that winds through blood, bone, wing, and word. With each raven's cry we hear, the air begins to hum with an old power, drawing forgotten things back into their place. . .

Through tale and thread old truths begin
To weave what’s scattered back into kin.

*Note - although in many cultures black is normally associated with death, in many cultures of Southeast Asia white is associated with death, funerals and mourning.

More blog posts