I Got the Knight On My Side

There it was on my playlist as I ran, Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive - a song I learned to play on piano at 15 in rebellion, mostly - truth was that song was extremely difficult to learn to play. I suppose that was a foreshadowing - the journey of the tarot, runes, and my own spiritual practice would be the same - something I wanted to learn and weave in life through rebellion of my own soul fire in a modern world that dismissed these things as superstition until the Quantum Theorists finally caught up.

During my Shamanic Sound Healing training in Belgium back in April every room at Chateau Frandeux was Arthurian legend themed, and I stayed in the wing of the Knights - my room specifically was Sir Gawain. My room looked out at the ancient Celtic Terrip - where I would leave honey offerings in the four directions being taught an ancient Celtic song while I left the honey. It was on that trip looking out the window early one morning I saw frost - it has been many years since I've seen frost - the delight of morning dew kissed by the softness of the ice realms. While there, I noted there wasn't a room named for either Morgan Le Fey and Mordred - there were no room for them in the Inn.

I hadn't contemplated that until now with months separating me from the land there along with many more courses initiating and completing in other traditions until that Bon Jovi song today. I marvel at how Spirit braids threads into the tapestry of my life. But the absence of acknowledgement of shadow is deeply troubling. What is Arthur's Round Table without its shadows? Without Morgan to mirror Merlin, without Mordred to test Arthur, Camelot becomes a half-told tale. With that I turn to the tarot - Knights cannot ride endlessly without the pale rider catching up. Death is always the final Knight, the one who carries us from rebellion into revelation. As the Fool is the culmination of all four Pages, as the Empress embodies all four Queens, the Emperor holds all four Kings, Death fuses all four Knights - mastery of the elements in the art of war - Death wields both mercy and mercilessness alike, the double-edged weapon that clears the road ahead.

While an Undergrad, I took an English Literature course I loved - in it, I wrote a compare-and-contrast essay of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight alongside Beowulf. So when I saw the gold foil lettering on my door in Belgium - Gawain - I laughed. "So here we meet again, old friend. At least I received an A on that essay."

Gawain, fiery and flawed, the Knight of Wands made flesh. His trial by the Green Knight was no different than my own trials with shadow — to face pride, mortality, and the edge of death itself. If Death is the culmination of all four Knights, then Gawain was the whisper that led me to that truth. He was not perfection, but the necessary bridge — the reminder that the Knight’s path is not about winning glory, but about meeting shadow with courage, and still choosing to ride on. Where Gawain faltered, I chose. I said yes to my blueprint, yes to the blade, yes to the fire of my own soul. That is the difference: his tale was about the humbling of pride, mine is about the unleashing of purpose.

If Morgan le Fay engineered Gawain’s trial, mine was set by the Morrígan. The 5 of Swords was my battlefield (https://feathers-in-the-snow.ghost.io/the-gambler-part-2-the-prisoners-dilemma/) — a quest not to win a hollow victory, but to refuse the trap altogether to reclaim sovereignty in a time, in a place, and in a space that says the divine feminine shall not have these things.

And perhaps that is the call to others walking this path: to look back at their own trials and ask, “Who engineered my quest?” For some, it may have been Lilith, for others Hekate, Kali, Inanna, Oshun, or Durga — those dark feminine deities who do not coddle, but carve. Each one setting the ordeal not to keep us in shadow, but to remind us that we were never in shadow to begin with. We were always the light, even when the world called us darkness. The trial was never punishment — it was initiation into sovereignty.

This is the place the divine feminine is called to reach — whether in the United States or beyond. The place where shadow trials are seen for what they are: not cages, not curses, but initiations. The place where women and all who carry the feminine current reclaim the sovereignty that was always theirs, knowing they were never the darkness others named them, but the light itself — fierce, unyielding, and free.

And yet, even in this place of sovereignty, the game remains. For what is a Knight without the strategist who knows how to move it? Merlin has always been that presence — the ultimate Knight on the chessboard. The one who bends the rules of straight lines, who leaps walls, who sees farther than kings. If the divine feminine is to claim her sovereignty, Merlin is the reminder that the Knight does not march like a pawn, but pivots, jumps, and rewrites the board itself. He is not the ruler at the Round Table, but the piece that makes escape possible. The architect of freedom, whispering the move that breaks the prison open.

In the end, the Knight the divine feminine waits for is no external masculine rider on a horse at all. It is her own inner Merlin — her strategist, her seer, her trickster who bends the board and leaps the walls. The Knight on her side has always been the one within.

I leave you with Ezra Pound's The Game of Chess

Red knights, brown bishops, bright queens,
Striking the board, falling in strong ‘L's of
colour.
Reaching and striking in angles,
holding lines in one colour.
This board is alive with light;
these pieces are living in form,
Their moves break and reform the pattern:
luminous green from the rooks,
Clashing with ‘X's of queens,
looped with the knight-leaps.

‘Y' pawns, cleaving, embanking!
Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! King down in the
vortex,
Clash, leaping of bands, straight strips of hard
colour,
Blocked lights working in. Escapes. Renewal of
contest.