Invoking Night

Moonrise on Mount Majura

"O Ratri (Goddess of Night) return us to the Dawn, liberated and whole

So Dawn may return us to Day and Day back to you..."

-Hymn to Ratri Athrava Veda (approx 1000 BCE or earlier)

Night is an endangered domain in our times! Goddess Ratri, the Goddess of Night, has all but disappeared in our material and spiritual invocations. We celebrate light, light-divinities and lighted gadgets that rob us of sleep. And darkness and Night become dispensable.

The invocation of Ratri is the recognition of the essence of our beings—the darkness in the Earth, the dark waters from which we are birthed, the dark that reveals the cosmos across the night skies and the darkness of our sensations which cannot be known by the mind and its paradigms of word and story.

Ratri protects, endangers, dissolves duality, brings rest and refuge in equal measure. In this constellation lies “svapna”, our deep sleep which brings the wisdom of dreams from realms beyond our mental consciousness. Through this movement of Ratri we are returned to wholeness. The fragmentation of Day through the separation of lighted lenses of duality is healed back into the wholeness of being beyond divisions.

Ratri is the return to the womb we are generously gifted with every day of our lives. We are invited into our elemental homes where the Goddess takes charge of our consciousness and renders it whole, gifts us wisdom and teaching and then returns us to her sister, Ushas or Goddess of Dawn.

Ratri is the ancestress of the Divine Feminine Goddess. As the darkness of the unknowable heart of Reality, Ratri’s domain of Night is the everyday portal of Divine mystery. This is not an option but a necessity to awaken in us the intelligence about navigating Reality’s unknowability.

Ratri is where body-led consciousness blooms and reveals to us the expansive and infinite possibilities beyond the mind-led consciousness of the Day. By restoring us to our source and our wholeness, Ratri humanises us, connects us to the entirety of Nature and life and gifts us the intelligence of how that interconnectedness is essential to living as part of Nature’s divinity.

One of the women in my Indidivual program shared with me how our invocation of Ratri inspired her to spend a candle-lit evening with her family. They had a candle-lit meal and spent the evening free of electric lights in simple conversation and togetherness. She said that it transformed her sleep and her energy the next day.

Today more than ever Ratri’s domain is needed. When we face Reality that eludes our mind-dominated movements to make sense, organise and return us to our humanity, what is needed is the ancient intelligence that can meet mystery and embody its dance.

Ratri is the teacher and awakener of our ancient consciousness that is not enslaved to time. And this liberation is vital to our movement in these times of Reality’s inexorable challenge to us to finally face the uknowable.