REMEMBERING THE MAGIC OF MAMA DONNA HENES: 1945-2024 by Diane Saarinen

For those who don’t know who Donna Henes was, her official bio:

Donna Henes is an internationally renowned urban shaman, spiritual teacher, award-winning author, popular speaker and workshop leader whose joyful celebrations of celestial events have introduced ancient traditional rituals and contemporary ceremonies to millions since 1972. More at her Wikipedia page here.

Donna, known affectionately to many as Mama Donna, was so in tune with the seasons (even putting out a quarterly publication for a time called Always in Season), that when her time came to leave this sparkling, stunning incarnation of hers, she left on Autumn Equinox Eve 2024, just two days after her 79^th birthday.

Sad news to those she left behind and sad news to the planet. But as we approach Samhain, Halloween and Day of the Dead, what wonderful memories my friend Donna Henes left me with! And “what is remembered, lives.”  So live on, Mama Donna!

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Mama Donna’s is a New York City story as much as an intergalactic story. I remember as an 18 year old in the Bronx, New York reading Free Spirit magazine, a free publication in the city for those interested in what was called the New Age at the time. But in it, Donna had a column, “Celestially Auspicious Occasions” (also the title of a book she wrote) and she’d write about the solstices and equinoxes and all this wonder that a pre-Goddess-worshipping me was interested in but at the same time, wasn’t ready to attend her public circles.

Flash forward to 2003: I was in a collective of women who put out yet another version of The Beltane Papers: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality. I was in the elevator, headed to the fabulous loft Donna lived in Exotic Brooklyn. (Donna would always write out Exotic Brooklyn, New York when she wrote out her address.) I was about to interview Donna for TBP, as Donna was about to publish a new book, The Queen of Myself where she proposed there were not three phases for women: Maiden, Mother, Crone but FOUR. They were Maiden, Mother, Queen, Crone. Donna was about to turn 60 and there was no way she was ready to be a crone, she said. She was the Queen.

From that time on, I would pop over to Donna’s (our Brooklyn neighborhoods were right next to each other) for women’s circles in her apartment as well as meet in public places for rituals. I remember one morning, pre-dawn, catching a cab in Brooklyn as we were going to meet on a pier in Manhattan for Summer Solstice, which that year was very close to sunrise time. We participants all found each other in the dark and voila! Summer Solstice and the sunrise happened and all was well in the world. .

There was a little road trip to Queens for one of my favorite of her ceremonies which took place at a cemetery with floating lanterns and was tied into the Asian Mid-Autumn Autumn festival or Festival of the Moon (Donna also wrote The Moon Watchers Companion). Another interesting thing about Donna, who The New Yorker magazine would dub “the Unofficial Commissioner of Public Spirit,” is that starting in 2007 she was the Grand Spirit Marshall of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade until COVID, a position she just loved fulfilling with her Blessing Band.

An factoid-thing about Donna and her public rituals, she performed them at the exact time of the solstice or the equinox so if that meant she was going to be out at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn at 2 in the morning, she’d be there and inevitably others would join her, proof that New York is indeed “the city that never sleeps.”

In 2015, my husband and I would decide to move to the South, and for two days, we were between homes, having given the keys to our Brooklyn apartment back to the landlord and not yet in our new home in the South. We stayed in Donna’s guest room, a room in a hallway that was lined with the goodies from “Mama Donna’s Spirit Shop,” an online collection of magical potions and notions from around the world. One I remember were balls from Mexico made of copal and you would put in the intention to, say, break free from a troubling situation, break this very hard ball with a hammer, then burn the pieces till they were gone. There were her special oils with tantalizing names like the Juicy Fruits of Life. I remember sleeping in the presence of all these magical items around in Donna’s home that was filled with her high-octane energy was a little bit like the fantasy of staying in a museum or bookstore after it closed.

There are so many good memories, but where I say hers was an intergalactic story is as follows: her “Chant for Peace: Chance for Peace” was recorded with 100 participants at a public Winter solstice ceremony in 1982. It was uplinked to a satellite and has been orbiting ever since. The only peace message in space.

There’s also a little addendum to this message circulating in space…I had gotten my husband and I a pair of walkie-talkies recently to use as he was recovering from knee replacement surgery. We weren’t really using them but a few days after Donna died, a voice came out from the walkie-talkies asking, “Do you see me outside your window?” I was startled by this – and my husband asked, “is there anyone by the window?” He had heard it too. There was nobody by the window. Hence, I’m convinced that Donna was making little visits with those she knew in life and if anyone could make a walkie-talkie a conduit to the dead, it would be Donna.

For more great information about Donna’s life along with spectacular photos please see The New York Times obituary here.

BIO: Diane Saarinen has written for Sagewoman, New Witch and The Beltane Papers magazines. She is a tarotist and energy healer and can be reached at https://wisewomanwoods.com/.