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The Goddess They Left Out of Her Own Story

I was expecting to trace the Triple Goddess back to something ancient. Pre-colonial, maybe.

Instead, what I found was a man named Robert Graves and a book titled The White Goddess, which he published in 1948.

The Triple Goddess, the framework so many of us learned as ancient truth, the Maiden, the Mother, the Crone, comes largely from him. From a poet writing in the twentieth century, working from his own vision of what he believed the feminine to be.

There is real medicine in that framework, and I have used it myself. But I couldn’t stop wondering: If this is a modern invention and not an ancient inheritance, what did it leave out?

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Where the Fourth Keeps Disappearing

Once I saw what was left out of the Triple Goddess, I noticed it everywhere else, too.

There are four seasons, not three. Spring, summer, fall, winter. But Graves left fall out of his depiction entirely, and with it went the whole season of shedding, the turn where summer ends and the inner world opens up.

There are four main phases of the moon, not three. Waxing, full, waning, new. Somewhere along the way, the new moon got dropped from the story, the void where the light goes dark and the real wisdom lives.

There are four phases of a woman’s monthly cycle too. Follicular, ovulation, luteal, menstrual. Not three.

And there are four elements on this earth. Earth, water, fire, air. Aether being of the cosmos.

The “three phases of the life cycle,” before, during, and after the ability to physically reproduce, both reduces the Goddess, the woman, to nothing more than her viability to have children and leaves out perimenopause. And this isn’t a small omission.

Perimenopause is the phase where a woman is closest to Wild Woman energy.

Once I noticed the pattern across the seasons, the moon, and the female cycle, I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. Something specific was left out in every version of the story.

This led me to another thread. I was raised Catholic. I know the church’s weavings well, and it’s taken me a long time to shed those beliefs from my field. So when four keeps showing up, and three keeps getting written down, I have to ask the obvious question. The Catholic Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are a trinity, too. I don’t believe that’s unrelated.

It makes me wonder if the Triple Goddess was never really about her nature at all, written by a man, lost in translation of what the Goddess really is. Was she shaped instead to mirror the same three-part structure the church already had? So she would be palatable to the men writing her down?

Sure, there may not be hard evidence in either direction, but we feel it in our bodies. Don’t you? Women are awakening to all they were told not to be. Once we see the pattern, it is hard to unsee.

The Most Unmoored You’ve Ever Felt Is Your Freedom

This is the part I know the most intimately, because I have felt it in my own body.

Perimenopause doesn’t get talked about the way it should. Mostly it gets treated as something to manage alone and move past.

But if you’re in it right now, you already know what I am talking about. The way you can feel unrecognizable to yourself some days. The way your body burns with a fire that activates the blood running through your veins. The moods that arrive without warning and without apology.

That unmoored feeling isn’t a malfunction. It isn’t you falling apart or losing yourself.

It’s Wild Woman energy. Fully awake, for maybe the first time in your life.

The most unmoored you have ever felt may also be the most awake you have ever been.

The Goddess Who Could Never Be Enthroned

Three goddesses were allowed to stay in the story, and one was not.

The ones who stayed are the ones who could be either enthroned or pushed aside as unimportant within a grander patriarchal vision. Radiant, beautiful, adored, crowned. Worshipped from a distance, held up as spectacle. The feminine as performance, acceptable enough for the court.

The Wild Woman could never be enthroned. She lives outside the city walls, howling, ungovernable, belonging to the pack and the wilderness rather than the palace. She cannot be watched, so she cannot be adored in the way the others were. She was exiled instead.

I keep thinking about how closely this mirrors the astrology of this exact moment. The lunar nodes shifting into Leo and Aquarius. Leo is now in the south node; the south node is the shadow we’re called to release. It’s what we’re moving away from as a collective. Leo is the throne, the performance, the goddess who receives adoration from below. Aquarius is now in the north node; the north node is the expansion we’re called toward. Aquarius is the exile, the visionary, the weird, the outsider, the one cast out for refusing to be the “normal” that’s acceptable.

So when I ask why the Wild Woman was left out of the Goddess canon, I am really asking the same question the sky is asking right now. A nodal shift into Aquarius-Leo is the collective quietly withdrawing its allegiance from the enthroned goddess, and walking out past the walls to find the one it banished.

She has been out there this whole time, and we’re finally returning to her.

Sopdet Rising, Isis Gathering

The Lion’s Gate, as most of us learned it, is Leo season, solar, masculine radiance, manifesting your wealth and freedom, etc. This is all great. If this resonates and works for you, keep doing it. But I want to pull back the curtain on where that framing actually comes from, because this moment in time each year isn’t so much about Leo or the lion.

There’s something deeper going on here than what modern astrology is guiding us to. What is actually happening in the sky this time of year is Sirius returning to the dawn. The ancient Egyptians called her Sopdet, the living star, and they didn’t center her return on a lion at all. They merged it with Isis.

It sits at a fixed point in the sky, and the sun actually meets her there in early July, while it is still moving through Cancer. The mother’s sign. That union happens hidden, buried inside the sun’s own glare, invisible to anyone watching from the ground. It is only later, once the sun has moved on into Leo, that Sirius reappears low on the horizon before dawn, visible again after her long disappearance.

So even the sky enacts the pattern. The real union happens in the dark, in the mother’s house, gestating where no one can see it. Only the visible part, the reemergence, gets handed to the lion.

What is actually happening in the sky this time of year, the part the Egyptians centered their whole year on, was never about a lion at all. It was Sopdet, the living star, and her return was tied to Isis.

The myth held that Isis’s tears for her beloved, Osiris, caused the Nile to rise, so the star’s return was tied to themes of grief transmuted into life, death and rebirth, and the mother-goddess restoring the world.

Isis is the goddess who did not look away from what was broken. When Osiris was scattered, she went out and gathered every piece of him, by name, refusing to let any part stay lost. Her return each year with Sirius was called Wepet Renpet, the Opening of the Year, and it was never a wish list, manifestation time. It was the memory of a woman who descended into the wreckage and came back whole, carrying her grief as alchemy.

The Divine Feminine Oracle by Meggan Watterson

I believe this season has been rewritten too, much like the Wild Woman was left out of the Goddess symbolism. The lion, the throne, the roar, all of it is the enthroned goddess again, dressed up in new astrology. Isis was removed from the story, the same way the Wild Woman was removed from the Triple Goddess.

So beginning this year, I’m not calling it the Lion’s Gate anymore. I am calling it what it actually was to the people who first watched that star return. Sopdet rising. Isis gathering. The Opening of the Year, marked by the woman willing to gather what was scattered of her beloved and return it to wholeness.

A Journal for Your Own Descent and Return

This year I created a journal for myself. Four phases, meant to be walked the same way Isis walked her own gathering.

Download the journal

The first phase is the Underworld. Sirius vanishes from the sky for seventy days before she returns, and there is no renewal without that honest darkness first. So ask yourself where your own Wild Woman has been living in the underworld. Where have you been invisible, dormant, or quietly enduring something you have told yourself is just how it is?

The second phase is the Search. This is the Isis work, gathering every scattered piece by name. What parts of your own wildness have you been afraid to look at directly? What is already yours, buried and underestimated, waiting to be named back into wholeness?

The third phase is the Flood. The Nile came back each year, flooding in a reliable cycle, and abundance works the same way. If your Wild Woman returned the way the flood returns, steady and life-giving rather than sudden, what would that actually look like month to month? What needs to be washed clean before that growth can take root?

The fourth phase is Wepet Renpet, the Opening of the Year. This isn’t a manifestation, but a reflection to empower who you are now. What are you closing the book on? What is the one true intention you are opening this return of Sirius with? What would it look like to act like the flood is already coming, instead of waiting to feel whole before you move.

Light a candle if that calls to you. Write the first phase and sit with it before you let yourself reach for solutions. The sequence is the medicine. Descent, then return, the same order Isis walked it in.

Gathering the Pieces of What’s Next

I return, at the close, to why I sat down to write this.

This thread did not start as a Substack post. It started while I was journaling about the world for my next series, the one waiting for me after The Raven Dreams trilogy closes. I was journaling ideas about the series when the Triple Goddess came through, and I immediately wondered, Where is the Wild Woman? So, I added her in.

I don’t have that next series mapped out yet, but I know that Wild Woman calls to come alive within it. I know that Isis does too, the one who gathers, who refuses to look away, who returns every year whether anyone is watching or not.

The Raven Dreams trilogy is still the work in front of me, and I am not stepping away from it. But underneath it, something else is forming.

I think that’s fitting. Isis gathered what was scattered of her beloved. I am doing something like that here too, gathering the pieces of a beloved within my heart that yearns to be expressed.

P.S. This is one woman, speaking her truth, and researching her book. It doesn’t have to be your truth if it doesn’t feel good for you. You get to write your story your way. So take what resonates, and leave the rest <3

PS.S. , , and I dug into Wild Woman’s exile on the Aquarian Cauldron — listen here.