The GODDESS CIRCLE - Goddess 1: Pele - Hawaiian Goddess of Sacred Fire, Volcanoes, Destruction & Creation
Goddess Pele
Goddess Pele (pronounced Peh-lay) is a Hawaiian Goddess of Sacred Fire, Volcanoes, Destruction & Creation. She created the Hawaiian Islands and was said to dwell in the crater of the Kilauea volcano.
She is the first of six powerful Goddesses we’ll be working with every month in my **NEW Goddess Circle** for the very first session on the Aries New Moon on ‘Harness Your Inner Fire’ (see the end of this post for more details).
Known for her passion and fiery nature, she is called “she who shapes the sacred land” because she devours and reshapes the terrain with the lava she expels. Often referred to as "Madame Pele" or "Tūtū Pele" as a sign of respect, she is a well-known deity within Hawaiian mythology. Other epithets of the goddess include Pele-honua-mea ("Pele of the sacred land") and Ka wahine ʻai honua ("The earth-eating woman") (1).
She is the container of powerful Lemurian and Telluric energy and is seen as the embodiment of the island, with her body being the earth.
Pele shows us how to work creatively with intense, volatile energies and harness our inner fire.
HER MYTH
According to the legends, Pele was always a fire-starter. A headstrong young goddess, she ignored her mother’s instructions and managed to set her home, the island of Tahiti, aflame while playing with fires from the Underworld.
Powerful, passionate, sexual and capricious, she took many lovers and could succumb to outbursts that created volcanic eruptions.
In one of her many legends, she discovers the chief Lohiau dancing on the nearby island of Kauai. Once Pele returned to Kilauea she asks her sister Hi’iaka, the Cloud Goddess, to fetch Lohiau and bring him to her, vowing to look after Hi’aka’s precious garden whilst she is away. She equips her younger sister with various helpful items including a lightning skirt and tells her ‘Nothing shall block your road. Yours is the power of woman, the power of man is nothing to that’(2).
Unfortunately Hi’aka’s journey is beset with all sorts of issues, not least the fact that Lohiau is dead when she reaches him and she has to revive him. Eventually they get back to Kilauea only to find Pele, suspicious of how long her sister was taking and convinced she must have run off with her beloved Lohiau, had burned Hi’aka’s garden to the ground.
In probably her most well-known legend, Pele journeys from Tahiti to Hawaii in a canoe to try to get away from the tempestuous clashes with her sister Namaka, a sea Goddess (who, some say, was trying to get retribution for Pele taking Namaka’s husband as one of her lovers).
Pele’s fires rose up out of the trembling earth, spewing rivers of fiery lava into the ocean, driving the sea away from the coast. As the lava cooled, it added to the land mass, and the small atoll was transformed into the beautiful Big Island of Hawaii.
Pele gets killed in the clash with her sister but Pele’s spirit lived on in the volcano, shape-shifting and reappearing to the Hawaiian people at will. She is known for taking the form of a beautiful young woman who can seduce anyone, but there are also legends that paint her as an old woman or ‘hag’ who wanders the island with a little white dog.
HOW TO WORK WITH HER
Reshape Your Life
Pele’s emotions and anger could shake the Island of Hawaii to its foundations so be prepared for a bit of a life shake-up if you work with this Goddess!
She is a powerful Goddess to help empower us to re-shape our life, removing all obstacles from our paths so we can do this - the way a volcanic eruption will suddenly and dramatically lay the way for new foundations.
“She teaches us about the power we have at our core - power to move mountains with our fierce might and reshape the world as we see fit. She is connected to the element of fire and calls to us to embrace the divine flame that burns within us. [She] embodies destruction and rebirth, as she has the power to destroy the old and reshape the land into something new. When we connect to her great energy we see how we can move mountains in our own world and create the landscape we desire”.
- C.Ara Campbell, Dark Goddess Magick
Ignite A Fire In the Belly
If you’ve been feeling lethargic, lacking in life force energy, inspiration, passion or motivation then Pele is your gal to work with. She helps us to ignite our sacral chakra - which lights us up with inspiration and awakes our deepest passions - and our solar plexus chakra to blaze fiercely - rousing our motivation and anchoring a deep sense of purpose for some creation, project or cause we care deeply about.
That great Melissa McCarthy scene in Bridesmaids (where her no-nonsense character, Megan, starts pushing a dispirited Annie (played by Kirsten Wiig) about by pummelling her and shouting ‘I’m trying to get you to fight, to fight for your sh*tty life!’) is a good demonstration of Pele energy in action. If, like Annie, you’ve been knocked down by life or circumstances, Pele can help you to find that fight, that spark, that drive again, to pick yourself back up and fight back. It’s very Arian energy - Aries being ruled by Mars, planet of passion, action, anger, war, assertion and how you pursue your goals.
If your issue is not so much coming up with creative ideas or things you’re interested in, but you struggle to get going on implementing or grounding those ideas - feeling like you run out of steam after you’ve had the initial spark - chances are you may have an over-development of Vata or air energy. Vata is great for coming up with lots of creative ideas but it needs to be balanced with fire (focus, willpower and action) and earth energy (necessary for grounding projects on the physical plane).
Pele can help bring you back down to earth, grounding and anchoring you into that telluric energy, giving you the life-force energy and drive you need to become “a fervent force of dynamic creativity” (3).
Rage as motivation
The passion of anger has an urgency that can help us better our lives. Rage, anger, a sense of frustration or injustice hold the potential to be activating energies. The physicality of these emotions can literally move us, motivate us, inspire us to take action if we let them. To make necessary changes. To stand up for and assert ourselves - and also for others who can’t.
Pele can help us channel our anger creatively as a force for positive change. She can be the force that ignites us to revolt or protest against wars, injustices or for the rights of a marginalised or oppressed group, to campaign, write, share on social media, to speak out publicly or to raise awareness about something - particularly something that has been suppressed by a dominant person or group. She likes to erupt, to bring something that’s been simmering out to force cataclysmic change wherever necessary.
You can see this energy depicted in the film ‘She Said’ following Twohey and Kantor’s New York Times’ investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein's history of abuse and sexual misconduct, the allegations of which served as a catalyst that led to the global volcanic eruption of the #MeToo movement.
Sacred Anger
Pele is a Goddess who can support us to process our suppressed anger and negative energy and to honour our emotions - no matter how ‘disruptive’ or intense - as sacred.
She can help us to bring things up and out of us, so any anger that’s been stuffed down and simmering away in a big cauldron of resentment will begin to erupt up to the surface when you get in contact with Pele energy.
Connecting with deeply suppressed emotions and energies such as rage at being diminished, silenced, scorned, betrayed or abused, whilst often frightening, can be empowering to express them out in healthy ways. We are so conditioned, particularly as women, to not be encouraged to express or even allowed to have anger - it gets denied as an ugly emotion, as too unseemly, uncouth or un-feminine.
“In many cultures, women have been encouraged to see ‘niceness’ as their ultimate goal, and expressions of emotions that ruffle the surface of the ideal feminine placidity have been interpreted as hysteria and overreaction.”
- YouGoddess, E.Foley & B.Coates
This is unrealistic and unhealthy - when suppressed anger gets bottled up too long in the body it can distort, turn inward on itself and cause dis-ease/ disease in the body. Alternatively, it can end up getting triggered at completely unrelated situations and/or come exploding out in self-destructive or anti-social ways.
Emotions are just energy in motion and information for us. If we have anger within us, usually it’s signalling to us where perhaps we needed to assert ourselves, or our boundaries in some way that we may have neglected to do at a cost to us. Or, perhaps we did, but those boundaries were ignored. Cue, anger. Pele is a Goddess who doesn’t tolerate disrespect and she will help us identify, and take steps to remedy a situation, if we’ve been disrespected.
Pele’s molten lava both creates and destroys. Our fiery anger may be a signal to us that something in our lives needs to be changed, or even destroyed - and it may be an energising force for us to take the steps to do that where previously we may have been immobilised - in order to clear a path for something healthier to align with us.
(Likewise, it’s also important to see where problematic energies like jealousy - if not responded to - can be destructive to ourselves and others. Just as Pele reacted prematurely to her sister’s delayed return with her lover by burning her sister’s garden in jealousy.)
Pele can help us to connect with, and respect, all the volcanic, forceful energies within us and rather than let them corrode us gradually from within, to either process and move that energy through and out of us in healthy, constructive ways or to channel our righteous fury appropriately into creating a new, blossoming world for women and for us all.
ASTEROID PELE (2202)
As an archetype, Pele is a passionate and creative force that transforms and rebuilds the landscapes of our lives so where Asteroid Pele falls in your natal astrology chart you may find you have a desire to (or forces outside of your control may orchestrate you to) destroy, rebuild and create something new in that particular arena of your life.
As a Goddess of sacred anger, where Pele falls in your chart can also indicate where you may feel fired up about something - an issue, a cause, an injustice. This could stem from something that has happened to you personally and you may feel compelled to fight back on behalf of others as well (for example author and activist Laura Bates who was fed up with experiencing sexism and then, fired up about it, started the blog The Everyday Sexism Project which then became a book and spawned many other books on other areas of injustice women face) Or, it could be where you feel particularly moved to fight for a certain cause you feel angry or passionately about (for example environmental activism or animal rights).
It could also indicate where you have a deep and possibly life-long passion for something (for example, Pele in the 9th house could indicate a passion for travelling and learning).
RITUALS TO TAP INTO PELE ENERGY
Physical activities - such as martial arts, kick-boxing, high intensity sport, dancing, sex or other physical activities (all done in a balanced, non-compulsive/addictive way) that can channel inner impulses and energy into a healthy, physical outlet can be a way of constructively transmuting emotions physically
Express Your Rage - like the characters in that famous ‘Infamous Abyss’ scene in Zach Braff’s indie hit from the early noughties, Garden State, go find somewhere - on the top of a truck on an abandoned farm, the top of a cliff or in an abandoned woods, inside your car or even into your pillow and allow yourself to scream or cry out your rage, frustration, despair. If you don’t have anywhere private to do this, you could try listening to some angry/emo music that expresses some of the feelings or the energy you might have or journalling with your anger and letting it have a voice. You might be amazed at what it has to say and how it could be trying to communicate to you to make necessary changes or put up healthy boundaries somewhere in your life.
Channel your anger into activism - is there a cause or injustice you feel angry or passionate about? Can you channel that energy into a form of activism - protesting, campaigning, writing, blogging, creating content on social media or a podcast, writing a powerful letter to politicians/journalists or an official body etc?
Stir up that sacral chakra energy - flow and sway, move your hips, shake your body, stir up that kundalini life force energy and get it moving around your body. Put on some music and dance around your house or try a practice like Kundalini Yoga - a type of yoga that moves kundalini - life force energy - through the body and is a wonderful practice for alchemising and transmuting negative emotions trapped in the body.
Crystals to connect to Pele energy:
Volcanic crystals such as lava stone or obsidian can help you to connect with powerful grounded, boundaried energy of Pele
Carnelian to help you connect with action and passion
Garnet - an invigorating and renewing stone that enhances sexual and kundalini energy.
🌙MOON TEMPLE MEMBERSHIP GODDESS CIRCLE 🧑🤝🧑
I’m very excited to announce I will be running two six-month Goddess Circles this year as part of my new Moon Temple Membership!
The first is the ‘Light’ Goddess Circle which will run over the ‘Light half’ of the Wheel of the Year. The Light half of the year - and the Circle’s themes - are about birthing forth and fully actualising our potential.
We will begin with the New Moon in Aries and ‘Harnessing Your Inner Fire’ with Goddess Pele. There will be a live call each month on the New Moon, along with additional exclusive resources in the Membership for you to explore in your own time throughout the month each month, until closing the circle with the New Moon in Virgo.
Each of the remaining five Goddesses & the themes we’ll be working with for each month of the Circle will be revealed in blog posts and pick-a-card readings on my YouTube Channel over the next 5 weeks ahead of the first circle.
➡️ Enter your email on my list for the Moon Temple Membership HERE and you’ll be notified once doors open for the Light Goddess Circle registration (very imminently!)
The second Goddess Circle will run over the ‘Dark half’ of the Wheel beginning around Mabon and the New Moon in Libra and running until the New Moon in Pisces next year. The Dark Half of the Year and the themes of that circle will be about inner transformation, going within, seeing what lives there and alchemising it into power. If you’re more interested in this one, still register your email on the same list as above to be notified when that Circle is open for registration later this year.
*You don’t need to be in the Northern Hemisphere to participate in the Circle as each month’s themes will predominantly centre around the New Moon so it’s not necessary to be in the ‘light half of the year’ where you live. However, the times of the monthly live call will be in the evening on the Wednesday closest to the New Moon for an hour between 8 - 10pm GMT (exact time TBC). A recording will be supplied in case you can’t make the live call and there will be bonus resources available on my Membership site to work with so you can participate in the rituals in your own time.
REFERENCES
*1) H. Arlo Nimmo (2011). Pele, Volcano Goddess of Hawai'i: A History. McFarland. p. 208 quoted on Wikipedia page
*2) This account of Pele and Hi’iaka was published in 1915 by a white doctor, and sons of missionaries, Nathanial B.Emerson, from stories told to him by Hawaiians (from You Goddess! by E.Foley and B.Coates)
3) Goddesses, Gods & Guardians - Sophie Bashford
You Goddess! E.Foley & B.Coates
Dark Goddess Magick by C.Ara Campbell
Goddess Inspiration Oracle - Kris Waldherr