As i cultivate on my spiritual path and deepen my asceticism (and this is very common), I feel almost a diminished pull regarding having role in ‘society’. Ironically, i have spent a long time learning from many elders and wisdom keepers and studying social and metaphysical and dharma structures…
In this article i’ll share some observations on rites of passage and also some of the pitfalls we have in the Western world around ‘elderhood.’ It also feels like a timely space to introduce the plant spirit of ‘Elder’ as a medicine that meets and assists the processing of some of the paradoxes that pervade our social belonging, especially for those in female bodies in these times.
The Paradox We’re Living In
We all carry some version of the maiden, mother, crone—the arc of a life moving through its seasons. In tribal and indigenous societies, these transitions were marked. There were rites of passage: initiations, ordeals, ceremonies that told a person, unambiguously, you have crossed into something new, and your community recognises it. Elders held the space for these passages, as their authority wasn’t claimed but it was conferred and earned through having actually lived the passage themselves.
Most of us come from communities where that structure has quietly disappeared. We still feel the pull toward eldership—toward wanting wise, steady people around us, and toward becoming one ourselves—but the systems that used to grow elders on purpose are largely gone. What’s left is a strange gap: plenty of people who are old, far fewer who are actually elders, and a culture that has largely forgotten the difference. It’s time we reclaimed our power and birthright to be active and empowered in our communities. We need to support our elders and elders need to be true elders.
So What Actually Makes an Elder?
Not age. Not a title. Not, certainly, the ability to tell other people they’re doing it wrong.
There’s a particular kind of righteousness that younger or less seasoned practitioners sometimes mistake for eldership, which is a condescending, judgy certainty about what’s “spiritually correct.” From what i have observed from most of the wisest beings, who are zen and confident in understated ways, is that elderhood isn’t brandished or wielded. The over-bearing ‘elder’ is usually performing through ego, dressed in wisdom’s clothing, and true elders tend to spot it instantly because they’ve long since stopped needing to win that particular game.
Real eldership looks quieter than that. An elder’s light has, in a sense, diminished, not through failure but through decades of living, and so it has to be conserved wisely. An elder isn’t busy trying to illuminate everything in order to win points. There’s a kind of not-giving-a-shit that comes from having actually seen hard things: war, loss, the slow grind of a difficult life. When you’ve been through that, you stop mistaking the small battles for the real ones. Simple things start to matter more than being right.
Elders don’t push their weight around. There’s a subtlety to real authority, a steadiness that doesn’t need an audience. Think of the people who held things together through the isolation of the Covid years: not the loudest voices, but the quiet, assured presences who functioned like lighthouses, visible from a distance and unmoved by the weather. That’s a fair image for what an elder actually offers a community: not answers shouted from a platform, but a steady point of reference other people can navigate by.
That steadiness is also the fine-tuning that anyone genuinely trying to be a good role model needs—a subtle course-correction, moving away from the wounds so many of us carry around either symbolic absence (nobody was there) or symbolic overreach (too much of the wrong kind of presence), and toward becoming a calm, assured field that others can rest in.
The Realm of the Cailleach
Underneath all of this is a darker, less comfortable piece of the work: understanding darkness itself.
This is the realm of the Cailleach, the void, the letting go of everything, including, eventually, the false self or the need to be someone. It’s only when a person can set down that need—the performance of identity, the CV of who-I-am—that eldership becomes possible at all. Which loops back to where I started: perhaps my own lack of interest in a formal role isn’t a contradiction of this work. Perhaps wanting no role is closer to the elder’s actual position than wanting an important one ever was.
Traditional societies understood this and built rites of passage around it deliberately. These are structured encounters with darkness, loss, and letting go, held by a community so that no one had to find their way through alone. Staying steady inside that darkness, rather than fleeing it or being swallowed by it, is itself a large part of the training.
Elder in the Turning of the Year
It isn’t incidental that Elder sits where she does in the old tree calendars. In the Ogham, Elder—Ruis—is placed at the very end of the cycle, in the dark closing weeks of the year running into the winter solstice. Different sources draw the exact boundary slightly differently (the Celtic tree calendar is itself a modern reconstruction, not a single ancient text), but they agree on the meaning: completion, the end of a cycle, and the threshold into rebirth, held at the darkest point of the year. [1][2]
That placement mirrors exactly what Elder does energetically. She is one of the great liminal plants, long revered as keeper of the boundary between the living and the ancestral realms, carrier of the wise crone’s medicine. Her essence works like a profound emotional decongestant: lifting the accumulated weight of unexpressed grief, isolation and fatigue, and making room for whatever wants to be rekindled underneath it. To work with her at Samhain, when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest and the ancestors draw near, is to work in complete alignment with her nature: release, in the season of release.
Circles, Retreats, and Living This Work
All that I am speaking of has been built slowly, over years of sitting in circle, in ceremony, in training, in conversation with elders and teachers across very different traditions and continents. One marker along that road was a retreat I organised in Mexico in 2018, on the theme of pillars and gatekeepers, an exploration with a small group of exactly this territory: what it means to hold space for a moment of transition for other people, and what it costs and gives you to do it well. It’s the same thread this Elder work continues.
Elder as Medicine, Then and Now
Elder’s reputation isn’t only energetic as European folk herbalism has long turned to elderflower as a gentle ally through the cold-and-flu season, traditionally used to support the body’s own defences and ease a person through seasonal illness. [3][4] It’s a fitting resonance: a plant valued for helping the body meet what’s going around, offered here as a flower essence to help the psyche meet what’s moving through it: grief, isolation, the accumulated residue of a hard year.
Flower essence work is a gentle place to begin. It carries a subtle gnosis, a vibrational essence rather than a physically intense dose, which makes it a genuinely good entry point for anyone new to plant dietas, and a profound tool for working with the emotional and subtle bodies specifically.
Where This Is Heading
This autumn, that entry point has a name and a date: the Elder Flower Essence Plant Immersion, opening over the Samhain portal with myself and Marianne. It’s the first in what we intend as a deepening series of plant dietas: starting here, with flowers, on the gentler yin end of the work, before moving in future seasons toward Elder’s more concentrated medicine.
As the year turns further into the darker months, we’ll be unfolding more of this eldership and plant medicine work within Dharma STARS with more circles, depth and more of what it actually takes to become the elders our communities need. Consider this an open invitation to walk that threshold with us.
Elder Flower Essence Plant Immersion – An 11-day Transformative Plant Spirit Communication Immersion over the Samhain Portal:
Sources: [1] The Celtic Tree Month of Elder — The Ethical Butcher [2] The Ogham Calendar — Pagan Pens [3] Elderflower (Sambucus nigra): Benefits, Safety, Uses — Herbal Reality [4] Elderflower Materia Medica — Golden Poppy Herbal Apothecary
Empowerment to the Golden Age 