The Bone Mother Ceremonial Rattle
This rattle was born from the hide of a black fallow stag and carries within it the old remembering that nothing living ever truly ends, but only changes shape.
The rattle head is made with rawhide prepared by myself and hand painted with an eighteen-carat gold spira, the oldest prayer our ancestors knew how to carve into stone. The spiral is not decoration, it is the map of the soul’s becoming, the path of descent and the path of return. The shape of winter roots beneath the earth, of fern unfurling, of galaxies turning, of the body moving through death and back into life again. It is the mark of the underworld and the womb alike, reminding us that all true transformation asks something of us: a shedding, a descent, a willingness to be unmade before we can be remade.
Held within the rattle head are labradorite and clear quartz, chosen for their kinship with vision, with threshold work, with the subtle places where the veil wears thin. Labradorite, keeper of liminal sight and hidden roads. Clear quartz, amplifier of prayer and clarifier of intention. Together they lend their medicine to the voice of the rattle, so that when shaken it does not simply make sound, but stirs something older something beneath language, beneath thought, beneath the domesticated mind. A remembering in the bones.
Its handle is formed from the black fallow deer antler, the crown of the stag, ancient emblem of instinct, sovereignty, and rooted wild power. this antler does not just form a handle, but also a sistrum, adorned with deer bones so that the rattle carries more than one voice. It sings with hide and with skeleton. With flesh and with what remains after flesh. With the muffled heartbeat of skin stretched over hollow space, and the dry ancestral clatter of bone striking bone. It sounds like winter woodland to me, bare branches knocking in cold wind, the old dead speaking softly through the trees.
It is finsihed in black fallow deer around the rattle next, brain-tanned by my hand, so that the full body of the deer remains present in the making, hide, antler, bone, spirit. Nothing discarded. Nothing severed from the whole.
The deer spirit is so present in its offering, transformed rather than fragmented. This matters to me, that the body be honoured in its entirety. That death be met not with extraction, but with relationship. That beauty arise not from forgetting where something came from, but from remembering fully.
Finished with black fallow deer hair and malachite, this piece carries the deep green medicine of the living earth , it speaks to here the deep green fissure that runs through us all of us - the ache of connection, and the final trace of the animal’s wild coat. The hair remains as a whisper of the deer in motion, of breath in cold air, of muscle beneath skin, of the dark shape moving at the woodland edge. The malachite brings the medicine of transformation through truth; of the heart cracked open enough to change. It is the stone of shedding skins, of becoming through rupture, of the green world that devours decay and turns it back into life.
This is not merely an instrument, nor simply an object of beauty, It is a threshold tool.
A ritual companion for descent, a remembrance, and rebirth. A bone-song for those who understand that to become who we are, something in us must first die.
And when it sounds, it sounds with the voice of the old wild law still alive beneath all things.
Exchange is £225 plus P&P, or kerbside pick up for Ludlow
The Bone Mother Ceremonial Rattle
This rattle was born from the hide of a black fallow stag and carries within it the old remembering that nothing living ever truly ends, but only changes shape.
The rattle head is made with rawhide prepared by myself and hand painted with an eighteen-carat gold spira, the oldest prayer our ancestors knew how to carve into stone. The spiral is not decoration, it is the map of the soul’s becoming, the path of descent and the path of return. The shape of winter roots beneath the earth, of fern unfurling, of galaxies turning, of the body moving through death and back into life again. It is the mark of the underworld and the womb alike, reminding us that all true transformation asks something of us: a shedding, a descent, a willingness to be unmade before we can be remade.
Held within the rattle head are labradorite and clear quartz, chosen for their kinship with vision, with threshold work, with the subtle places where the veil wears thin. Labradorite, keeper of liminal sight and hidden roads. Clear quartz, amplifier of prayer and clarifier of intention. Together they lend their medicine to the voice of the rattle, so that when shaken it does not simply make sound, but stirs something older something beneath language, beneath thought, beneath the domesticated mind. A remembering in the bones.
Its handle is formed from the black fallow deer antler, the crown of the stag, ancient emblem of instinct, sovereignty, and rooted wild power. this antler does not just form a handle, but also a sistrum, adorned with deer bones so that the rattle carries more than one voice. It sings with hide and with skeleton. With flesh and with what remains after flesh. With the muffled heartbeat of skin stretched over hollow space, and the dry ancestral clatter of bone striking bone. It sounds like winter woodland to me, bare branches knocking in cold wind, the old dead speaking softly through the trees.
It is finsihed in black fallow deer around the rattle next, brain-tanned by my hand, so that the full body of the deer remains present in the making, hide, antler, bone, spirit. Nothing discarded. Nothing severed from the whole.
The deer spirit is so present in its offering, transformed rather than fragmented. This matters to me, that the body be honoured in its entirety. That death be met not with extraction, but with relationship. That beauty arise not from forgetting where something came from, but from remembering fully.
Finished with black fallow deer hair and malachite, this piece carries the deep green medicine of the living earth , it speaks to here the deep green fissure that runs through us all of us - the ache of connection, and the final trace of the animal’s wild coat. The hair remains as a whisper of the deer in motion, of breath in cold air, of muscle beneath skin, of the dark shape moving at the woodland edge. The malachite brings the medicine of transformation through truth; of the heart cracked open enough to change. It is the stone of shedding skins, of becoming through rupture, of the green world that devours decay and turns it back into life.
This is not merely an instrument, nor simply an object of beauty, It is a threshold tool.
A ritual companion for descent, a remembrance, and rebirth. A bone-song for those who understand that to become who we are, something in us must first die.
And when it sounds, it sounds with the voice of the old wild law still alive beneath all things.
Exchange is £225 plus P&P, or kerbside pick up for Ludlow
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