From Maiden to Woman

an alternative reading to Kore’s abduction

by Faranak Mirjalili

(artwork above: Laura Krusemark for Anima Mundi School)

The story of Persephone and Demeter is a classical one in myth and depth-psychology and has been many times interpreted, by myself included, as a metaphor for the patriarchal abduction of the feminine—yin—principle by the masculine—yang—culture of Zeus and his brother Hades. 

In this ancient Greek myth, the maiden Kore is abducted by her uncle Hades, the god of the underworld, after the marriage was approved by her father Zeus without the knowing of her mother Demeter. When Demeter finds out about Kore’s abduction, she rages and mourns endlessly and even stops nourishing the Olympian gods and human beings. As a result the lands and people suffer from drought and famine. Demeter refuses to be the nourishing goddess that she is, unless she is given back her daughter. The story is filled with many transformations of both human beings, the goddess herself and the community of Eleusis. And eventually, Demeter is given back her daughter and life starts blossoming with their reunion. Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and no longer the little Kore, is now the wife and consort of Hades. Because she ate 6 seeds of the pomegranate given to her by Hades, she has to seasonally return to the Underworld.

I believe that it is first and foremost a very important experience for women to go through the myth with the understanding that this indeed represents the abduction, violation, and rape of the feminine Soul principle in a time where patriarchal powers had established themselves in ancient Greek. But just like a walk in the forest is never the same experience, so is the way we can view a myth or fairytale. It changes with the time, place and gathering of people it is told in. Because the culture and pattern of consumerism and fast consumption is so ingrained in our psyche, we inevitably bring this programming into our relationship to story and myth. We might think that when we ‘know’ a story—we are done with it and we can go to the next one. But truth is, myth cannot be consumed and myth definitely is not a fast-food meal. It can nourish us, yes, but only if we come into relationship to its very being.

There is a numinous experience in working with a myth in a repetitive way and when we do, it starts to bloom and grow, much as a living entity does. It will start to surprise us in unexpected ways. Each myth is like an organism, that through engagement starts to unfurl into dimensions unknown to us before. It starts to flow within the patterns of our lives, putting its emphasis on a different note every time we work with the story. In my own experience, myth really starts to reveal itself to us when it is held within its oral tradition. Myths like to be told, they love the vocality of expression. Reading a story is very different than hearing it being told live. Writing a story is again a completely different experience from telling it to a group of people. The oral tradition has always been closely associated with magic, and there is a reason for that.

There is something very powerful about this form of repetitive and oral engagement with myth, especially when done in community and communion. It affects the whole of our surroundings in visible and invisible ways. Myths are ancient stories of the collective unconscious and move the archetypal and morphogenetic fields of the human psyche. In my own experience, I know that it comes with a certain responsibility, reverence, and understanding of the archetypal patterns in the individual. And truth be told, working with myth is not for the faint-at-heart. It is that kind of subtle magic, that we all secretly long for and fear at the same time.

UNDER KORE’S VEIL 

Kore’s Initiation” by Faranak (painted with pomegranates)

What better way than to understand Kore than to step into her shoes. This most recent cycle with Persephone gave me a new look into the experience of Kore and her abduction. I was rather caught by surprise since I held a more matriarchal, feminist view on her abduction. One of the great authors on this feminist view on this myth is Kathie Carlson. In her book ‘Life’s Daughter, Death’s Bride’, she explicitly gives women the important and very healing matriarchal reading of this myth. I personally hold this interpretation dear to my heart, as I believe it is important for women to understand in what scope they have been cut away from the feminine Soul principle during the past thousands of years of patriarchy. Nevertheless, there is something mysterious about the figure of Hades, which keeps intriguing women into an attraction that is sometimes difficult to explain. This next story gave me a better understanding of that.

My teenage cousin had been in contact with me for some time, asking me to help her with her dreams. For a while, she was being chased by a serpent that she feared and was disgusted by. Dream after dream, the snake was out to get her. With a teenager, we as Analysts don’t necessarily have work with the parental complexes and Analysis in the way we do for adults. This is especially the case when they have not come to us with a psychological problem, but mostly because their creative imagination is called or stirred up.

We all remember how it was to be a teenager. Unfortunately, our cultures do not know how to help teenagers cross this immense threshold in their lives. Something magical can come alive during these years; there is something so vivid, so alive; a fast-flowing river that is able to move mountains. This is the age of tremendous energies waking up and trying to find direction. With a little bit of enchantment and guidance, this current can find its way through their psyches and bodies.

In ancient times, this would be an initiatory age and an important threshold in a boy or girl’s life. A symbolic and ritualistic death of the girl-child would be played out, from where the newborn young woman would rise. The outward rituals that were enacted were supported by the energies and deities of the inner worlds—the connection to the Goddess that was kept alive enabled the real initiation to take place inwardly. The ritual gave it an outward expression and a gateway for the transformative energies to come through into this world.

But we have long lost these initiations, and our Western cultures have systematically stripped us from these feminine rituals and rites that kept a pulsating connection to the Goddess alive. Those that knew the wisdom and gateways to the inner worlds have been persecuted, killed and their lineages broken. Now, it is up to us each individually to reclaim and heal these relationships in our own way. And those of us that are one step ahead, can help the younger generation to find their own unique way of relating to the Mundus Imaginalis—the realm of creative imagination.

After my advice to ‘befriend the snake’ through Active Imagination, dance and drawing, the serpent started to disappear from her dreams as other, new images erupted. A few weeks later I get a call: “Faranak, there is a guy I met, he says he likes me. I might like him too…what do I do?” With a big smile on my face, I guide her very subtly into her first experience of love and desire. The serpent, here very obviously representing the awakening Kundalini force within her, eventually found its way into giving her the very first sexual initiation and relationship to the masculine! 

A few months later, when I had just told the Persephone myth in our Mythical Feminine program, she reports a very interesting dream. One important note to make is that my cousin did not know about this story, or that I was to tell this. You can clearly see and sense the power of the collective, morphogenetic fields at work when we engage with archetypal structures. This is what she dreams:

There is an old woman that has kidnapped me and has kept me in an old house. The house is connected to a restaurant that I work in as a waitress. I could run away, but the problem was that I was chained at my hands, every time I tried to escape I was pulled back. There is a bowl of magic liquid in the house that speaks to me. It tells me that I am cursed and that the only way the curse can be broken is through a flower. I then give a bowl of soup [with some of the magic liquid in it] to a man in the restaurant. The next scene is someone knocking at the door: it is a beautiful, handsome blond young man that says he has come for me. When the old woman sees the young man, the spell is broken and she is destroyed. I am freed. I wake up. 

The first important detail and connection to our myth is that she was kidnapped and held captive. But not by the male dominant figure of Hades! No, it is the old woman who has held her captive by chains. And it is through the masculine that she is actually freed, or saved from her imprisonment. A little cultural spotlight is necessary here: coming from a Persian background, the connection and symbioses with the mother are very prominent in middle-eastern cultures. To this day it is often not until the young woman has married that she can really move away from her mother’s house, either literally or symbolically. Until then—even if she is 40 years old—she is often, even unconsciously, not yet seen as a woman. This is what the old woman might represent: the old, traditional prison that has chained her invisibly—passed down through the mother lineage.

A ‘curse’ can often be interpreted as a psychological complex in Jungian psychology. We see here the maiden that is imprisoned and chained in an old-fashioned cultural complex. For her to be freed from this, she has to be given a flower. The flower connects us to an important symbol in our myth as it is through the enhancement of the beautiful (either narcissus or in some versions the poppy) flower that the ground opens and Hades is able to grab Persephone. The bowl of liquid could be an alchemical image of spirit Mercury, the substance that enables the alchemical transformation and is it is also the spirit that guides the seeker. By feeding a masculine component in herself, the man in the restaurant, a new masculine figure arises; a typical Sun hero that represents something very deep and unknown within our dreamer. What she noticed is that he was blond with blue eyes, where usually other male figures in her dream are dark-haired and eyed (our dreamer lives in Iran). When we put this is a cultural perspective, this blond and blue-eyed hero is a new masculinity arising from the depth of her unconscious: something unknown and exotic. 

Dreamdrawing by my cousin (16 yr)

Through his presence, the old woman cripples and is destroyed. It is this new masculine empowerment that will free her up from the traditional maternal complexes that have chained her, along with many generations of women before her. 

When my cousin shared this dream, it was as if Kore in her own time and place, was speaking to me—sharing her version of how she might have experienced the ‘abduction'. We have to always put in perspective the culture, time and place a story has risen in. Although there are universal and global motifs in every myth, the specific cultural ecology that it erupted in has to be understood, or else we can lose essential nourishment that come from these ancient tales.

Pomegranate still-life by Ann Korijn.

In the feminine individuation journey, it takes a lot of power and strength to become free from the unconscious mother-daughter bond especially if a daughter has a close, symbiotic connection to her mother. Ancient Greek was in many ways similar to the Middle-Eastern cultures, where the relationship to the mother can be all-consuming, even suffocating. Despite—and perhaps because of—the patriarchal overtone, there is a strong matriarchal bond between mother and daughter and so this story is within its context an important one. It is this imprisonment by the maternal chains that threatened to keep our dreamer ‘an eternal mother’s girls’ that the emerging inner masculinity could free her from. Here, we see a healthy Animus being formed in the very early years of her adult life, an invaluable gift for Psyche.

Perhaps then, if we look at the symbolism of this dream and the story of Kore, we can say that a masculine energy was entering the consciousness with immense force. It is trying to free the feminine from her unconscious ties to the Mother, and help her move into the next spiral of feminine consciousness. And it is only the force and phallic power of the knife—that is Hades—that could sever this in the time of ancient Greek. 

Islamic art showing a man offering a pomegranate to a woman

SEDUCTION AS A GATEWAY TO FREEDOM

There is not only dominance and violence in the attitude of Hades, but also a form of magic, beauty, and seduction. When Hades gives Persephone the pomegranate seeds, I’m reminded of some old Persian paintings and movies, where a man who loves a woman gives her a pomegranate as a symbol of his erotic affection for her. It is an ancient symbol of fertility, passion, and love. To me, the temptation of the pomegranate seeds can be seen as a courting into marriage life. Just like the spell of being mother-bound of my cousin’s dream could only be broken by the flower, perhaps Kore’s unconscious chains to Demeter could only be broken by the pomegranate seeds. In this way, she transforms into Persephone and is free to relate to her mother as a woman, not only as a daughter. 
This is even more highlighted in some versions of the story where she is not tricked or forced to take the pomegranates but accepts it by choice. In some very old versions of the tale, Kore goes down into the Underworld willingly and is not at all abducted.

This story shows us a ‘successful’ alchemical separatio operation in the unconscious matriarchal mother-daughter bond.  It is through the separation from her mother Demeter, that both daughter and mother can transform and come into their new function and role as ‘teachers of the mysteries’. Without that severance and the new masculinity arising, there would have been no change in consciousness and we would have not known the immensely transformative birth of the Eleusian Mysteries. It was during these mysteries that initiatory rites were enacted, and it was through the transformative story of Kore-Persephone that the Euleusian people were taught the secrets of life and death—a practice and religion that lasted somewhere between 2000 to 5000 years.

Creation: an ancient story

a poem by Gauri Raje

Suspended in the womb
of the cosmos.

In the beginning, was it a seed?
(Was it dark water? Or mucous? Saliva?)
Perhaps an echo of a thought?
The exterior has its own rhythms.

In the beginning, they say,
The cosmos shattered.
The Big Bang, they call it.
A shower of molten gold and diamonds.

I know it different.
Old mother spider sits in the shadows
still
weaving and weaving.
Embroidering life, spitting and stretching
Cleaning, maybe moisturising.
A tender maintenance.
Creation is its own becoming,

One moment beyond time
or is it within time?
She looks at the mass of beauty.
The embroidered web

filled with echoes
of actions, thoughts
and dreams.
The shadow world is heavy.

She sweeps the cobweb clean from the rafters.

And begins again.

Baubo, the vulvanic Goddess

laughter is the best medicine

by Suzanne Schreve

‘Baubo’ by Suzanne (front)

I show it to my husband. He hesitates. ‘Yes, yes, well done’. I turn it around. ‘Hmmm, delicate. Great curves’. I ask him if he has a preference. Without hesitation, definitely the last one. “The other side, the first side you showed me…..I find it scary, cavelike, as if it could suck me right in’. 

He shivers. I chuckle. 

The sculpture is my ode to Baubo, an ancient Greek Goddess also known as the Goddess of Obscenity. Due to the secrecy and oral tradition of the Eleusinian mysteries, most of her legend remains hidden, probably buried under the rubbles of long forgotten temples. I had the pleasure of meeting her through the story of Demeter and Persephone. 

A classic mother and daughter tale, the Demeter & Persephone myth tells about the transformative journey both must undertake to reunite rooted in a renewed independence. While Persephone spends her first months in the Underworld with Hades, who seized her from below, Demeter desperately looks for her daughter above. She wanders the once fertile lands now as dead as her own desire for life, and brings herself onto the brink of silent madness. She finally slumps down against the well of a small town. There, when not much more can be lost, Baubo appears. Seductively shaking her big birthing hips and wriggling her pointy breasts at Demeter, Baubo taunts her into movement. This curious little woman who has no head, but nipples for eyes and her vulva as her mouth, starts to spew dirty jokes and for the first time, Demeter smiles. She smiles, she laughs and soon both of them are in deep belly roars. The laughter lifts Demeter out of her depression and gives her new energy to pick up her search for Persephone again, which in the end, proves to be successful.

‘Baubo’ by Suzanne (back)

As I moulded the spiralling curves into the vulva sculpture’s softer side, allowing the clay to direct my hands, the image of these two parts of the story emerged. Where Baubo leads to (re)union. 

She is a dancing comedienne, a shaman whose lascivious unbridled humour magically replenishes. She comes to relieve the emotional tension that imprisons us. While looking for Persephone, Demeter falls into the abyss of depression. Depressions can be a paralyzing confrontation with our own darkness and often bear a hidden intention to unearth unconscious content for the purpose of integration. Her encounter with Baubo suggests that while carrying the loss of her daughter, for Demeter to renew her search, she needs to release the belief systems that in its current state leave her near lifeless, and her search fruitless. Those belief systems kept both her and her daughter from evolving in the first place and prompted Persephone’s abduction. 

Like most of us, I grew up in a patriarchal society rife with rules of conduct inheriting skills that suppressed rather than channeled my sexual, creative energy. Holding on to outdated belief systems and habits that did not feed my growth, but instead, depleted it, eventually ran me dry. It killed my creativity. 

Greek statue of Baubo

Although I recognized the pattern laid down before me by many generations of women and men, I could not find my way through. Angry, depressed, unmotivated, and eventually, slumped down by the well. 

I still remember that first magic moment when I felt frustration and anger willingly move into a free flow of pleasure. Just like with Demeter, it started slowly. A flickering of a smile, a hint of joy. It was out of my control, a natural process which up until then I had denied myself. It didn’t need any outside encouragement. I allowed Baubo to show me the absurdity of my situation. She was making fun of me and it lifted my burden. 

Watching videos of Iranian nurses dressed in antiviral suits defiantly breaking out in colloquial dance moves during the current Coronavirus outbreak reminds me of how Baubo’s great gift breathes air into otherwise tense situations. It also bears resemblance of a story Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ wrote in her book “Women Who Run with the Wolves’. The story takes place when General Eisenhower visited Rwanda at the time of the Second World War. The local governor envisioned a warm welcome, with all the beautiful native women lining both sides of the street of the parade. The only problem was that besides jewelry and at most a thong belt, they didn’t wear any clothes. The governor sent skirts and blouses for the women to wear at the event, and as instructed, the women dutifully showed up. But the governor, absolutely abhorred, heard that the women wore the skirts and nothing else. They had left the blouses at home, because they didn’t like the look. The governor angrily summoned the headman who in turn spoke to the headwoman. She ensured him that as the General would drive by, the women planned to cover their breasts. 

As the moment quickly encroached, not much else was to be done and the proceedings went ahead. We can only imagine General Eisenhower’s reaction as his jeep rolled on by and woman after bare-breasted woman gracefully lifted up her skirt to cover her chest and, I assume, raucous smile. 

Closer to home, many are the times I have stood in front of my five-year-old, exhausted and needing her to go to bed, when she would wriggle her bare bum at me and I could feel the pent up anger inside make way for laughter. Or when I needlessly argue with my husband and one instant of recognition can turn the tide. It is my own exhaustion with the overbearing mum or old judge in me that allows a precious moment of suspension for Baubo to come in and jiggle her titties at me. 

The shackles of our collective past weigh heavy, but the playful crudeness of Baubo’s appearance can melt the rigid sincerity with which we carry this load. 

What surprised me most is the effort I had put in to ignore her. It seems to me she is often nearby, waiting for me to notice her. I now recognize Baubo’s presence as a moment of choice, as my need to change everyday situations as well as reignite my inherent longing to stay in relation with myself and others. In her luscious Baubo style, she comes to ridicule our perceived stress of lives lived too far away from a more natural state of being. 

In these times where most of our society functions far removed from the Earth’s and our own natural rhythms, and more people suffer from its inevitable consequences, Baubo comes as a welcome symbol of transformation. Where conventional notions of established belief systems, social mores and aesthetics are shocked and laughed into dissolution by the crude life-giving, elemental dance of Baubo.

vulvanism:

‘Every truly Radical Elemental Feminist Act of Courage, or any other Volcanic Virtue  – no matter how small it may appear to the individual woman who is performing it – is Momentous and contagious. Its effect is enormous. It helps to create the vast morphogenetic field out of which true Metamorphosis can emerge’ 

by Mary Daly (1998) in “Quintessence…realizing the Archaic Future, a Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto”.

Still Birth

a contemporary journey into Ereshkigal’s cave

by Suzanne Schreve

In the early hours of winter’s night, the bleeding starts. Contemporary life will have it that I am in the car with daughter, husband and cat on our way back from a weekend break. 

I have just run out of menstrual pads.  

He races inside the supermarket to come out with thin panty liners while I sit on a four-folded towel to prevent the rental from getting stained. Back inside he goes, ‘Maxi-pads please’. 
When we arrive home thirty minutes later, the cramping starts. My husband fixes a hot water bottle which has been by my side for the last three days. 

It was slow to come on, whispering sweet nothings in my belly. 

There isn’t much pain, but the moment long-awaited. I knew a week ago counting down the days. 
Waves roll in steady and soft. Inside my breath I feel it moving in and out, the push and pull of quiet conviction. When my daughter was born five years earlier, I could not feel this depth of my womb, clouded in pain. 

But now I sink in. 
Sink way in. 

The moist warmth inside of me cradles a dead baby of seven-weeks-old. It took another three and half weeks for my womb to conclude its death, carefully assessing life with every pulse. 

And now it’s happening. 

It is just like birth and so very different. With each gentle squeeze something gushes out of me. Blood, tissue, placenta, clots. It’s a mess. Red colours the bed, the carpet, the bathroom floor. 

Drip, drip. 

I walked between worlds carrying death while longing for life. Nameless grief poured out, and God, it was painful. I felt squeezed, torn, pulled and scorned. I couldn’t bear being seen, not even by my closest friends. I have never felt so naked and vulnerable. 

Shame vilifies miscarriage.

Failure, unworthiness and malfunction cling to death. 

The upside of miscarriage, says the doctor, is that everything ‘down there’ works. That may be so, but no one tells you that if you allow the process to take you in, fully in, miscarriage can be experienced as rebirth. 

As much as she nurtures life, the womb nurtures death. 
I didn’t know it could be so incredibly beautiful. 

Consciously carrying my miscarriage brought me down into the cellars of the underworld. On the hooks with Inanna, watching Ereshkigal in agonizing labour. Cruel, and seemingly heartless. 
What did she bare, what can you bare in the underworld? 
Death is born.
Death. 
It used to hold such finality for me. 
Death, decay, debris, rotting lifeless material. 

But where can you go from death? Well, anywhere really. In the quietude of a still point, there is only endless possibility. 

Inanna’s story brings us to the dark soil of our bodies, our being. Where tomb and womb are one and the same. It is in this primal state, where choice can only surrender to trust, that the wisdom of the underworld guides us from the roots up. Where life flourishes. 

It was winter solstice when we buried our baby in between the roots of our magnolia tree. My daughter laid flowers, seeds and nuts for the journey back into light.  

by Wilhelm List

Image above: Adamah by St Mary’s Press

Made of Dirt

finding solace in soil

by Faranak Mirjalili

by Faranak

To put our hands in the soil is to return to the origin, to the primal matter —the prima materia— of life itself. Over the past month, I’ve been finding solace, peace in putting my hands in soil, in the dust of clay and to listen to the song of my hands. What is born from the dance between dirt and touch? A sense of primal calm emerges in this meeting, which is distinctly different from for example drawing and painting.

For me, it has been the shape of vulva figurines that took over my hands. In her variety, she’s taken on a choreography of her own. Being Taurus in my sun sign, I’m not really surprised at this rather Venusian upwelling that emerged from the play of my hands. 

by Laura Harris

It has been an equal joy to admire and reflect on the creations made by other women from the Reclaiming the Mythical Feminine program. There is something very magical about putting our hands into matter with the intent to create, to shape and to form. It is for a reason, that so many creation myths start with clay when they want to image the story of how God created humanity and the earth. To enact such a primal source of creativity is to connect again to our own origins, the way this love story began. Not through our minds, not even through our emotions, but through the naked and sensuous bliss of touch. 

If we look at the origin of the word soil, and the Western use of it throughout history, it is not difficult for any other culture to understand our struggle with matter. There is a deep refusal that is even embedded in how the word has been used, originating in the 13th century. 

soil verb (1)
soiled; soiling; soils

Definition of soil
1: to stain or defile morally : CORRUPT
2: to make unclean especially superficially : DIRTY
3: to blacken or taint (something, such as a person's reputation) by word or deed 
: to become soiled or dirty

From the 13th century onward, the word soil has become associated with stain and corruption, something to be refused, rejected or at least purified. It has become associated with the Christian heritage of the fall of man to the sinful, terrible earth. Our place and home, and according to myth the very substance we are made of—the dust of the ground—has been rejected to its very core. 

by Laura Krusemark

While working with clay, the soil of our Mother Earth, I felt not only how our earth as the embodiment of soil and the earthly has suffered so much rejection and abuse but also the ‘word’ itself. This glorious word soil, is only slightly different than the word soul.  

Looking back even further, we find deeper meaning and solace in the word soil, our feminine nature (that of women and of men) can find a resting place in this word that is very close to our primal nature, the origin and the throne of life itself. 

The etymology of the word soil roots us back to Latin: “solium” which literally translates as ‘seat, chair or throne’.  Indeed, soil is the seat of life itself, it is the seat of our everyday life—even if we are not conscious of it. It is the skin of our Earth we walk upon, it is the seat of the vegetables that grow our everyday nourishment, the ground for so many of our medicine, herbs and teas. All of it comes from this great seat and throne of the Goddess, which holds life together as an interconnected whole. The ancient cultures that have collapsed, like the Mayan, Greek and Roman empires, mostly fell apart from poor soil management. If we do not take care of the throne, the seat and skin of our planet, what foundations do we have to live on?

But first thing’s first: we need a proper relationship again to both the word and the being of soil. There is a specific responsibility for women to reclaim this ancient relationship, for soil has been part of women’s mysteries from the beginning of time. It has been her connection to the Divine, as for women—God was always a Goddess before it became a bearded judgemental man, sitting on the cloud of our perfected minds. 

Some of us may reclaim this relationship in gardening and growing food, in the forests or in our love for the soft, silky beach sand. Others might find this in the relationship to the matter of body or the play with clay. In whatever way we are called, the Earth, matter—Mother— is crying out to each of us uniquely.

The Soil of Inanna

by Anca Sira

In the myth of Inanna, the goddess descends into the Underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the dead. Inanna, as the Queen of Heaven and Earth has become—like many modern women today—spoiled by the comforts of civilization. She has forgotten that deep down in the Underworld there is a different world that is also part of her own nature. This cold, moist, dark place is a place where death, loss, and constraint rule over the myth of eternal progress. It is exactly here, that the Forever 21 image of our modern culture dies and collapses into the sobriety of an organic life. 

Inanna has to learn that life is not complete without loss and death. That it is the fertile ground for new life and that her participation in the death cycle actually impregnates new life. It is only in the dance between life and death, that culture is born and renewed. 

In many ways, Ereshkigal is like the wondrous earthworm, that turns the soil over and over, and creates life through the decay of old matter. Just like our modern culture has forgotten to praise all of the life underneath our feet that silently makes life fertile and abundant, Inanna has to learn that without Ereshkigal’s presence in the Underworld, she could not have become the Queen of the Earth and Heaven. She has to be humbled back into her relationship with primal dirt that sustains her. Humble comes from the Latin word humus, which takes us back again to that earthly ground that makes up the surface and skin of our beautiful Mother Earth.

Sacred Dirt

After thousands of years of patriarchy and an addiction to the perfection of light—be it the light of our minds or the light of a transcendent God—I believe and see in my work with women that time has come—even long overdue—that we really commit to finding again the sacred within matter. To recognise that the sacred is to be found in the prima materia of our world, in the difficulties and the places we might most resist, both inwardly and outwardly. A dream a friend had illustrates this very well:

“I’m walking with my friend along a street. It’s a wide statesque lane, it’s unpaved, the ground dark brown. We are sorting things out between us. First we walk on the right side and now we walk on the left. I walk a little slower when I see a beautiful huge dark brown cathedral, same colour as the soil, on my left. It has a big rosette. I know the Black Madonna is inside and I want to show my friend. She is with me again and at the foot of the steps to the cathedral is a little round tent shaped like an iglo. My friend goes inside and I follow. It’s muddy. She sits in the bigger part, I am in the front. Next to me (right) stands a wood carved Jesus. My friend takes it and holds it for a while. We are both silent. She then puts it back and puts her hands in the mud. From the mud she hauls a carved pig. The outline is not yet clear, but I can make it out enough. After this we go out and continue our path.”

In this dream, the dreamer is together with a female friend, sorting things out between each other. What then happens is that the image of the cathedral as well as the image of the Christ are echoed in its most primal form: the mud tent and the pig coming out of the mud. The sacred is as much to be found within the cathedral, as it is in a muddy, seemingly insignificant and dirty place. The illustration of the Christ being picked up, followed by the ‘drawing of the pig out of the mud’ shows that the sacred needs to be lifted and found within the heart of the soil, earth, and dirt. A pig, known to us in modern-day as the animal that is most dirty, even finds its comfort in the dirt, used to be a sacred symbol in more ancient cultures. She was sacred to many Earth goddesses and revered in matriarchal societies. The dream shows that the sacred is to be carved out of these most neglected and ordinary places.

When patriarchal cultures came and divorced the sacred from matter, we were left bereft of a deeper meaning of the ordinariness of our lives, our bodies, and this earth. These places, where once the sacred joy of life was pulsating, have become dormant and dis-eased, with the most devastating consequences for future generations ahead. It is now the time to reclaim this most ancient relationship as the Christ—the Divine within—is to be found within the dirt of life, the very dirt of which we are made.

Collective poem by Faranak, Gauri, Suzanne and Suzanna.
Collage art by Laura Krusemark.

Meetings

a visit to a well in the desert

a poem by Gauri Raje

The land above cooks in the desert heat.
All white heat, pure gold, visible.
The frail blue white ribbon of the waters
Searching for shade
Slither and slip between stardust grains
Of desert sand.

Deep underground
A palace.
Rough hewn sandstone rock
Lichen clings, bat shit, bat wings rustle
Musty dampness of echoes
Of memories 
Of life.

These ghosts receive the dribblings of life.
Water.
She must starve 
Remorselessly changing form
Surrender to the underworld.

She seeps past each of the gates
Naked energy emerging
Condensing containing
Gathered welled. Stop.
Waiting for an eternity.

There was life here once.
Grotto of music; 
Refuge of travelers.
Compassion, joy, food and merriment -
The underground has seen it all.

Who is most ancient?
When all has evaporated,
Who cradles the bones and whispers:
‘Seasons will turn.’
Rest in surrender.

Until the skies darken moisten and well over.
Bug-like raindrops over and over
The waters climb each step of the palace
Each column drowns into wetness
A confluence.

The world above to the world below.

Photos taken by Gauri Raje in the wells