Spirit Alchemy | Archetypes

What Might You Need to Release?

Set yourself free

When The Medallion card appears, be aware of how the objects you hold dear may be embedded with unconscious energy or expectations. Materials hold consciousness, and it’s time to reconcile the vibration of the objects around you.

On the card, a hand reaches up through the darkness. Reaching for a golden medallion with a shiny diamond in the center.

What does that medallion symbolize?

A reward? Hope? Change?

The passing on of sacred objects is an ancient ritual within families, between lovers, and in tribes across the globe.

Materials hold consciousness. Unconscious energy or expectation.

Is there an object you have held on to for years that you are now ready to release?

What has been passed on to me? What vibration do I need to resolve?

Could my mother be that object?

When these gifts are bestowed upon us, it is important to recognize that they may bind us to an unspoken agreement or promise.

Yes, I had been bound to my mother by an unspoken agreement. No matter how badly she treated me, I stuck around—determined to fulfill my duty as a devoted daughter.

I stuck around until I could no longer stand it. In 2002, when I was 43 years old, I left my home by the ocean because the price of living next door to my mother had become too steep.

My childhood home was my mother’s medallion. That medallion was passed on to me. But that inheritance was a dark and burdensome gift.

The card suggests going deeper, to explore ancient Egyptian scarab amulets.

A symbol of birth, life, death, and resurrection. The Egyptians believed the sun died each night and, in the morning, was reborn as a beetle. The scarab/ Dung beetle took on significant regenerative powers.

Dung beetles are beetles that feed on feces. Some species of dung beetles can bury dung 250 times their own mass in one night. Many dung beetles, known as rollers, roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source or breeding chambers. Others, known as tunnelers, bury the dung wherever they find it.

Do you believe that objects contain supernatural properties? When have you experienced this to be true?

Well, a strange thing happened months after my mother’s death when my husband and I stood around with the workers who’d opened my mother’s septic tank. Part of the house sale's condition was locating and pumping out the septic tank.

The smell of waste filled the air as I made calls to finalize all the arrangements.

My mother’s shit filled the air. Reminding me of all her shit/behaviour I’d put up with all my life. I joked that it was in that septic tank if my mother’s spirit was anywhere.

Opening that tank seemed like setting an evil genie free.

When the work was finished, my husband and I got in our car and left. We stopped to pick something up for supper. After coming out of the grocery store, our car wouldn’t start.

We had the car towed to a nearby garage. The next day we needed the car towed to the vehicle’s dealership.

It turned out the main computer needed to be replaced.

We invested the $3000. And days later brought the car home.

The next day the car battery was dead. My husband charged it and thought all would be fine.

The next day the battery was dead again.

My husband kept a close eye on the car, noticed the headlights came on, and stayed on until the battery was draining.

We called the dealership and told them what was happening. They didn’t believe us. But told us to bring the car in.

The next day, we received a call from the dealership. The car battery was dead in the morning. They checked their cameras and found out that during the night the headlights came on.

They said it was a rewiring issue in the computer. They had to redo it all.

It seemed like a strange coincidence. I joked to my husband it was my mother. She had escaped from her septic tank into our car.

It seemed like her revenge for selling her house. The treasure she had dangled like a medallion to hypnotize others. She allowed so many to think the house could become theirs if they did everything she wanted them to do to please her.

Her main possession in life was her house. Valued above all else.

Her house she had worked to earn was an odd story. One of possible suspect.

She and my father had moved in to live with a sixty-four-year-old man. They agreed to care for him until his death. After his death, my parents would inherit the house.

My parents moved in July 1957. He became ill and died the following year in September 1958 of carcinoma of the Rectum. I was born three months later. My mother had cared for him until he died.

Our home had not been in our family for generations. It was something my mother had gained.

Something I needed to release. Like a house where a horrible crime had taken place. It needed to be destroyed.

And in the end, the buyers who bought it renovated the house. Making it unrecognizable. Turning it into something new. Yet it sat on that same foundation.

Part of me wondered if my mother’s spirit still lingered in that basement's dark earth and dirt.

My mother’s power was controlling and manipulating others.

She dangled that house in front of others. She exercised her power to keep people around. They wanted something she had and she let them think they could get it. I saw the games she played. I refused to be apart of it.

As a dutiful daughter, I did what I could with distance and boundaries firmly in place.

I’d put up with a lot of shit in my life from her. Shit I had finally walked away from. No longer willing to put up with it.

So, I dug deeper into the dung beetle and created a medallion as a reminder, a token.

The dung beetle rises each morning to eat all the shit I no longer need in my life.

This round medallion now sits on my writing desk where I see and touch it every day,. A reminder of all the shit I’m letting go of. Of all the shit I’ve survived and the shit I’ll no longer put up with.

Everyone needs a dung beetle of their own.

Much thanks to the Kim Krans, The Wild Unknown Archetypes deck.