Tirza Schaefer: Romance Author & Goddess Facilitator
Nyx
I love to explore the Divine Feminine and write about Goddesses. For a list of those, click on the link: Goddesses. In order to become more balanced within ourselves and, through that, to bring greater balance and harmony to the world around us, we must find greater balance between the masculine and feminine energies within ourselves that each one of us possesses, regardless of physical gender or any other ways of self-identification.
Goddess of a Matriarchal Cult
Nyx in Greek and Nox in Latin is the Goddess of the Night. I first came across this beautiful, mysterious Goddess through a somewhat unorthodox source, the House of Night vampyre book series, aimed at teenagers and young adults. I wasn’t a young adult any longer, but I devoured the books as soon as I started on the first part.
P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast wrote them, a mother-daughter team, which I absolutely adored and Collette Baron-Reid and P.C. Cast created an oracle deck for it. It is a simple deck, meanings are formulated in a way that you have the best understanding when you know the characters of the story and the short explanations are perfect for the reading target audience as well, teenagers and young adults who have no prior knowledge of the occult and Greek mythology, as the authors do.
The book series is steeped in occult practices of a very matriarchally structured vampire society that is leaning heavily on Wicca and Greek mythology. And it works. I find the way that the authors have woven in their knowledge and love of Ancient Greek mythological figures in a beautiful, also responsible and moving way, rather than in the sensationalist one that we know all too well from Hollywood movies and American pop culture.
The time I first read this book series was when I was still very much searching for my own spiritual path and had nowhere near arrived at a point where I could say of myself that I felt I was moving in the right direction even. Instead, I started reading up a bit on Greek mythology and freshen up my school-based knowledge, all of which didn’t help me much to gain greater clarity on the power structure of the Greek pantheon, let alone understand vampire society, as it was portrayed in the House of Night series, any better through this medium. I decided on a different approach.
What followed was possibly my first consciously chosen Goddess meditation and I went deep within my own heartspace (although I didn’t really know what that meant or what I was doing in detail at that time) and met the Goddess Nyx, one of the most mysterious, yet at the same time most loving Goddesses I have ever had the privilege of meeting in a vision. It probably helped that I’d always loved the night and even as a child, had never been scared of darkness but had rather embraced, loved and danced with it.
Nyx came to me as a shadow, wearing a cloak that was made from the blackness of the night and glittered with millions of tiny stars. Her face was beautiful, although I could feel it more, rather than see it. I was intuitively aware of the shapes and curves of her features, her smile or other mimicry. It was as if I saw with invisible hands, much as blind people use their hands to reach out and familiarise themselves with someone’s features by touching.
Queen of the Dark Mysteries
That was the way my non-physical senses felt and touched Nyx, the beautiful Goddess and Queen of the Night. She is not mentioned very often in Greek mythology. In fact, sources mentioning her are few but that doesn’t mean that she is not a powerful Goddess or that her energies eluded the Ancients. It is rather, that Nyx is the Great Mystery, that which is Hidden, and lies in Darkness and is cloaked in shadows.
Nyx is that within us that is not yet discovered or at least not yet understood. That can be scary but it is also, when you forget your fear of the darkness and the unknown, the greatest opportunity for peace, rest and going deep within into the womb of the Great Mother, the universe itself and rest there, held perfectly safe in the Goddess’s loving arms.
She is present and elusive at the same time and to get an inkling of what the Ancients saw her as, we will look at the information that is at our hands, even though, there isn’t much. Nyx was connected to the beginning of creation. Together with Erebus (Darkness), she had two children, Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death). It is very much in line with my own earliest visions of her that I met a Goddess of such exceptional beauty who was so powerful that I was stunned in the most positive way and I later learned that these attributes were also ascribed to Nyx by the Ancient Greeks who also claimed that even Zeus feared her.
Nyx also had daughter, Hemera (Day) with whom she continuously takes turns in returning and leaving their home of Tartarus where also Nyx’s sons lived. Obviously, she had a very different relationship to her daughter, as the two never met but took turns, working together but keeping at a distance, a type of relationship that could remind many a mother of her relationship with a rebellious teenage daughter, without wishing to ascribe blame to any role involved here.
Nyx is also described as a mother who is wrathful when it comes to defending her children, and thus, Hypnos always flees back for protection to his mother, whenever Zeus is angry with him because only Nyx has more power than the chief of the Gods himself. And in some fragmented poems, there is a mention of Nyx being the one from whom all creation was formed, rather than from Chaos.
Wikipedia tells us:
“Nyx occupies a cave or adyton, in which she gives oracles. Cronus – who is chained within, asleep and drunk on honey – dreams and prophecies. Outside the cave, Adrasteia clashes cymbals and beats upon her tympanon, moving the entire universe in an ecstatic dance to the rhythm of Nyx's chanting. Phanes – the strange, monstrous, hermaphrodite Orphic demiurge – was the child or father of Nyx. Nyx is also the first principle in the opening chorus of Aristophanes' The Birds, which may be Orphic in inspiration. Here, she is also the mother of Eros.”
The Silence Before Creation
In this context, it makes sense to have seen a connection between Nyx and Hecate, the Goddess of Witchcraft, ascribing motherhood of Hecate to the Goddess of the Night in some places. Nyx is that darkness that was unformed matter from which then energy was moved into formation, making it vibrate at a certain level, and thus, creating density and form. Energy cannot be destroyed. It can only change its form, meaning that it will then be in formation, in a certain formation that allows it form certain matter. When you change the form of energy at will, you change matter itself. This is the alchemical principle (Thoth, Hermes) and the laws that govern divine magick and witchcraft (Hecate, Isis).
Nyx is the Great Mystery, the unformed matter, that which is hidden and has not yet come into form. The night is also stillness, silence, the unconscious, depth of our own psyche that we cannot reach when we look through the eyes of Hemera, the light of day. Nyx requires us to let go of all preconceived ideas and dive into the depth of the Night, of allowing ourselves to be carried in the womb of creation, the loving space of the Divine Mother that protects and cherishes.
When I connect with the energy of Nyx, I feel at home, held and loved unconditionally. In the presence of Nyx, you can be sure that nothing bad can ever happen to you. Nothing harmful can touch you in the least because Nyx is unconditional love and energy that will have to be brought into form. You can only reach this place in your own mind through deep sleep or hypnosis, delving into the unconscious so deeply (Hypnos) that you enter an entirely different realm, that of death (Thanatos).
Meeting Nyx is sometimes a scary journey but can also be a vastly interesting and highly adventurous one. However, it is the most beautiful and peaceful destination to arrive at. You can best meet the Goddess when you are in a state of lucid dreaming or deep meditation. In those moments, the mental intellectual filters and veils we carry with us as a lens we perpetually observe the world through, are thinnest and most threadbare and we can leave the light of day and enter the dark realms of shadows and night most easily without losing our memory of it as we would do during deep sleep and the realm of dreams.
Another way to approach this hidden realm within you is sensual deprivation. Blindfolding or headphones that stop you from hearing the sounds in your environment and similar things can be an aid.
In my novel Kisses in Darkness, the female MC visits a restaurant run by blind people. It is dark and, therefore, the ordinarily seeing guest is able to dive into and experience the world of the blind by dining in darkness. He or she is being guided and helped by the blind in the same way, blind people are oftentimes dependent on the assistance of the visually capable, especially when their impairment is more recently acquired.
Trust & Healing
In Nyx, we learn that having infinite possibilities of forming energy into matter is nothing scary but easy and our birthright. In fact, we do this every day. Nyx heals our deepest wounds and encourages us to trust ourselves and embrace our own powers so that, as her children, like Hecate, we learn to manipulate energy like a master magician, wielding power and skill in a divine union that enables us to create our reality with intent, purpose and so much love, for love is the highest and most powerful form of energy. It is that which enables us to understand alchemical principles intuitively and enables us to wield our own magick and power purposefully.