Once upon a time, this little golden deer on my altar cradled an air plant. I, being frantic and forgetful as a rule at the time of its acquisition, sadly forgot for too long to soak its roots. It died, and I was filled with such great shame that I left the plant’s desiccated remains in situ for years, as though the golden deer were a crime scene and its presence in my living room was my penance.

I had left it so long as a sort of makeshift shrine to shame that for several years after that, I still didn’t like to look at it. Despite remembering stopping in my tracks when I saw it on the way to the till at the hardware store, where I think my then-husband and I were buying a Christmas tree. Exclaiming with delight, cooing as I picked the little deer off the shelf and hugged it to my chest, I jogged to catch up with the impatient husband.

I have done so much work on the wounds of that time by now. Finally, I felt it was time to cleanse the deer and give her a new life.

My road to deity work has been similar. The facets of my psyche labeled “god,” “religion,” “faith,” long held little more than dust and shame and a sense of failure. Whether I felt that failure was my own or the divine’s would depend on which year you asked me.

I never managed to believe in the God of my childhood in the way I figured I was supposed to, but did manage to fear him profoundly all the same, and the scars there – most notably terror and disgust at the concept of eternal damnation and torment for anyone – kept me very adamantly secular for a long time. I started my practice as a secular psych witch. An archetypist only, as I specified loudly and often.

Then Venus – more the egregore or the planet personified than the Roman goddess, the ruler of my sun sign who welcomes me home every spring – blew that door off its hinges in my second year of practice. I had struggled to feel the presence (let alone the love) of God as a Catholic in my childhood, but now, there was Venus… a distinct and larger-than-life presence who would not be ignored, whispering coquettishly, “you do not like to think of gods, but if I called myself a god, I think you would still love me.”

And I would, and did, and do. Venus is compatible with my core in a way that the God of my childhood was not. I experimented with calling her a goddess, calling her my goddess, and that didn’t feel wrong but it didn’t feel quite complete either. I’ve been through a couple of years now, cycles of summer and winter, and through this winter leading into spring – reflecting on a longer and more personal story than I will put in writing here – I feel clearer now on her place in my inner cosmos.

My Venus is the planet personified. The egregore. A powerful entity to whom I am profoundly connected as a Taurean, a daughter of a sign which Venus rules. The book I’ve been reading, and rereading, has made that connection clear.

But my deity, who first came knocking when I was fifteen, made her reappearance over this winter.

That is the challenge I had with Venus. She is not absent in winter, but she is harder to access, and has sometimes left my winter self – my descending self, the part that is about difficult experiences and reckonings in the dark – feeling less holy than the springtime side that is all sweetness, victory, and abundance. That is what has felt incomplete.

When I was fifteen, I felt the same duality of dark and light within me. I had not learned to reconcile it yet, and it still felt tense and painful. When I came upon the myth of Persephone – goddess of spring and queen of the underworld – I found my first role model who integrated the power of both sides, and felt drawn to that figure in a way that I struggled to articulate.

There is enough sadness in the most famous telling of her story – an abduction, a frightening descent, a forced marriage – that identifying so strongly with her made me feel uneasy. In my maiden stage, I did not want to think of that too much, and favoured interpretations that featured a gentle, handsome Hades and a Persephone who ate the pomegranate seeds on purpose.

My maiden era is well behind me now, and I have made many descents and ascents and always lived to tell the tale. I reflected on that this winter, and I sensed a figure rapping at the window between me and the divine again.

In my mind’s eye I perceived a gentle smile, and a hand on my shoulder. A voice, shadowed, petal-soft and deep, that asked,

“Did you not feel, as a maiden, that you were being swept down into Hades in your way? All that fear – the prospect of coming of age, and all that entails, closing in before you felt ready? Did you not wish that you could stay in your safe, sunlit meadows of spring – and aren’t you grateful now that you have come to know and love things outside their borders?”

An old friend, in a new light. Something clicked. Sense was made of a broad slate of experiences.

So this spring, I cleansed the deer that held that dead plant and my shame for so long. I have filled her well with olive oil and floral essences, again and again, as a consecrated offering. I’ve prayed and reflected and written and burned incense, and now, I am ready again to declare a thing I never expected.

I have a deity. I have my form of faith, and it means something, and I’m glad of it. Venus, yes, as planetary patron; Persephone too, as patron goddess.

I consecrated the golden deer as an offering vessel for her. Deer are an animal she favours, after all; one of my favourites too, and for much of my life I have felt like one.