the crab inspector..
I have always lived on the coast. I have always known that the tides turn. After the full moon the water changes its mind. The height drops. The shore gives back what it took, or takes what it had been holding. If you do not live where you can see it, “the tide has turned” is a saying about luck or a battle or a mood. If you live where the sea comes up to the house, it is a fact you can watch.
This time it landed differently. Not as information. As the word itself.
Tide did not start as a word for water. Old English tīd is a point or portion of time. Due time. A season. A feast-day. A canonical hour. The same root gives German Zeit, time. Time and tide were once the same word, paired because they meant the same thing: the appointed moment, on all occasions, as warranted. Eventide. Noontide. Yuletide. Christmastide. High tide, in the oldest English, was a high day, a festival, not the top of the water.
The sea meaning comes later. Around the fourteenth century the word slides, by way of “the time of high water,” into the rise and fall itself. Before that, English had other words for the movement. Flōd and ebba. Flood and ebb. The tide, properly, was the time.
The water took the name of the time that ruled it.
That is why the phrase has so many uses, and why they are not metaphors piled on a sea-word. They are the old sense still working. A tide is a due time. A season that arrives whether you are ready or not. When we say the tide has turned, we are saying the appointed moment has shifted. In a fight. In a life. In the water. The sea is only the place where you can see time doing it.
The moon rules that time. After the full moon the springs ease. The daily flood still comes, and still turns to ebb. But the fortnightly mind of the water has changed. You feel it in how far up the beach the foam reaches, and in what is left in the pools when it goes. Inland you can miss it for a lifetime. On the coast it is the clock.
I was down at the water that morning, washing my face and my hands in her, and the turn was already in the sand. The word opened. Not only the sea. Every tide we still say. The season. The due time. The moment that was going to come anyway. death and taxes. The spiral I have been seeing all year in flowers and in the hands is the same movement, seen from the side. A wave is a curve that arrives, spends itself, and returns. Time does that. The sea is where it is visible.
Dion Fortune knew the same fact from the other side of the century. She published The Sea Priestess herself in 1938, and said in the introduction that the book is a romance on the surface and underneath a thesis:
all women are Isis, and Isis is all women. that is the structure.
In the book a woman tells a man who has dreamed a sea-cave that he got the sea priestess through the moon, for the moon rules the sea. They are not two separate experiences, but two consecutive parts of the same experience. And now he has got her. She is the third part that completes it. Not moon and also sea. Not a vision you file and a tide you add. One movement. The living woman is what finishes it.
Fortune wrote that the moon rules a kingdom neither material nor spiritual, a moon-kingdom of her own, and in it move tides, ebbing and flowing, slack water and high water, never ceasing, and these tides affect birth and death and all the processes of the body. That is not a metaphor she applied to the sea. That is the sea’s time, named.
and it makes me think of Pangaea, and the land before time, and how my ritual work with rocky plays into all of these insights, the rock that remembers before time, working magic with the #themundii series. This all seems too enormous to encapsulate in a simple blog post — but the message is this.
Today the Sun meets Mercury in Scorpio while Mercury is still retrograde. The inferior conjunction. The heart of the Mercury cycle, where the old message is swallowed and the next one is seeded. Venus is still retrograde in her own sign and sextiles Jupiter. The Moon is a waning crescent, past the full moon that turned the literal water. The guard is changing in the sky on the day the word went out.
The tides have turned. Literally. And the word was always about time.
— Freya’s Flame, Land of Seidr
If the turning tide is calling you inward, Seiðr sessions are open.