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Among the Grail legends is the story of the Fisher King. The Fisher King lives in the Grail Castle and has been wounded in the “thigh” (my guess is that this is a euphemism – move that wound over a few inches…) and, as a result, his kingdom is a wasteland, barren and full of sorrow. Only when someone comes and asks “Who does the Grail serve?” will the King be healed and the land restored to abundance. This story is said to express not just one man’s wound, but a cosmic male wound that leads to despair and global destruction.
When we consider all that the location of the wound means – regeneration of life, feeling, separation from the Creator and so much more – we see how it is, indeed, representative of the wound that all men suffer when they are told not to cry and not to feel, when we give them toy guns and teach them to make war instead of dolls to love and nurture. It is clear how this wound does lead to despair and global destruction.
But, if that is the male cosmic wound, what is the cosmic wound for women? Where are the female versions of the Fisher King in folklore and literature?
The story of The Handless Maiden comes immediately to mind and has been paired with the Fisher King by others. In a version of this story beautifully retold by Clara Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, a young woman is sold to the devil by her father. However, when the devil comes to collect her, he cannot get her because she has purified herself and stands in a chalk circle she has drawn. Even when she does not bathe so she may become impure, her tears run onto her hands, purifying her and she is still out of the devil’s reach. The devil insists that the father cut off her hands so that her tears will not run onto her hands and purify her. The father does as he is told but the devil is still rebuffed. When the defeated devil leaves, the father offers the handless maiden a home, but she, instead, walks off into the woods where she eventually meets a king who marries her and after a number of adventures, her hands grow back and they live happily ever after.
Many, many analyses of this story exist by people with more expertise than I have and some relate it to a cosmic wound. Like all meaningful stories, it has many levels and many possible interpretations and these interpretations are valid. However, I have another interpretation. As mysterious and meaningful as this story is, it does not feel to me that being handless is the female cosmic wound from which all other wounds come. It does seem like another, female, version of the Fisher King, in the sense that hands are the way we create and feel. Losing one’s hands is certainly a grievous injury and women do suffer from being severed from their creativity forces and emotions. But, to me, that is not the deepest wound I feel. Women have found ways to be creative and regenerate life, and are not considered to be unfeminine if they express caring and compassion. Also, the handless maiden’s regrowth of her hands is almost incidental to the story. It happens after she has already found happiness.
To me, the cosmic female wound goes beyond this. It seems so profound that it is unnamed and cannot be visualized as a metaphor. When women became wounded, the world did not just become a place of barrenness and despair, but so out of alignment with the paradise it was meant to be that the wound became almost unknowable.
While The Handless Maiden’s loss of her hands may not be the cosmic wound in my interpretation, I think the story does hold the key. The maiden’s fortunes begin to turn around when she walks away from her father. Until this point, she has passively accepted all that others have done to her. She has allowed herself to be sold and to have her hands cut off. She rejects her father’s offer of a home and walks away into the woods. It is at that point that her healing begins as she makes her own fortune. She is free.
To me, the cosmic woman’s wound is the loss of freedom: freedom to be who we are, freedom to do what we wish, freedom to live where and as we wish, freedom to marry or not and whom to marry, freedom to bear children or not, freedom to earn our living as we wish, freedom to dress as we wish, freedom to live in society or away from it as a hermit. I sometimes wonder if any woman on Earth really knows what true freedom is. Perhaps we have not identified it in terms like “the cosmic wound” because we don’t know what it is like to not be wounded.
Stories do exist that talk about women’s loss of freedom, especially those of mermaids or selkies/silkies who are forced to marry and live on land until they find some object, a pelt or bridle, that was stolen from them, leap back into the water and return to their lives of freedom in the sea. Water frequently does represent our deepest selves, especially as women, and being forced to live away from the water, or that place where we have the freedom to be ourselves, does indeed cause profound despair.
These are the stories that cause my heart and soul to ache. When I think about what other women have expressed to me as their deepest wounds, this loss of freedom is what I hear. I think of my grandmother who told me a story about her mother. Her mother would say “Oh, Gladys, you’ll do wonders” when my grandmother would tell her mother her hopes and dreams. Her mother was not encouraging her, but was rather saying “Don’t dream too high for you are sure to be disappointed. You cannot do all that you wish.” Eighty years after she was told that, the bitterness was still in my grandmother’s voice at the retelling.
Women can also be a great source of healing and freedom for other women, however. The other stories my grandmother told me were of her mother’s not remarrying for decades after my grandmother’s father died and my great-grandmother, instead, making her own way in life as a seamstress. Also, my grandmother told of how her mother supported her wish to go to college by moving near the college so my grandmother could attend. In these stories, she showed my grandmother a freedom that my grandmother, and my other female relatives, in turn, taught me.
Perhaps it is the task of this generation of women, and men, to name the wound and begin healing it before it is too late, before the Wasteland caused by all our wounds spreads to all of Earth. What would our world be like if women had never lost their freedom that so many ancient civilizations seem to have offered women? What would a world be like in which women, and men, were truly free to be the best, most caring and compassionate, creative, happy and joyful beings they can be? May our wounds be our guide to healing ourselves, each other, and the Earth.
Today I made a mandala garden. My son outgrew his swingset, so we got rid of it and I had a nice empty 10 x 13 enclosed space with a gigantic hemlock tree in one corner. I cleared it out and started putting stuff in it – a lawn chair for reading, two metal café chairs, a bust of a Greek Goddess, a Chinese pillar, a little cement rabbit, a plastic owl, and two angels on sticks. This was on one side of the space. On the other was a little sculpture of tree branches and composting leaves. I just randomly placed things from the house and other garden areas around the space. Later, when the weather improves, I’ll decide what plants to put in. When I finished, I realized I had made a mandala from my garden. The space isn’t round, but it is full of things of symbolic value placed in the four directions and elsewhere in ways that spoke of my relationship to them.
Mostly the term “mandala garden” means a round garden with a specific design. Other mandala gardens are very formal and meant to be symbolic and meant for meditative practice. When I draw mandalas, I make a circle and then just start creating with lines, shapes and color and figure out what it all means later. I have created my mandala garden the same way. No one will mistake it for a formal garden or even one that is well-planned.
I plan to continue to create my mandala garden over time – adding things that are meaningful, taking away what is no longer reflective of me, moving things as their importance in my life or relationship to one another changes. When the weather is warm enough for me to sit in my mandala garden for any length of time, I will do that and contemplate what I have put in and why I placed it where I did. Just as with my drawn mandalas, I will no doubt learn something about myself, where I’ve been, and where I’m going. I’ll gain some new metaphors for my life. However, unlike with the drawn mandalas, where I can only look at them from above, with my garden mandala, I can participate from the perspective of being inside it (though, interestingly, my lawn chair, the symbol of my Self since that is where I will be sitting, is off to one corner, though under the big mama tree).
You can make a mandala garden anywhere – in a large new space, in a corner of an existing garden, even in a container if you want. You can make one or as many as you want and remake them often. You could even make this your Spring Equinox celebration if you are choosing to celebrate alone (or even if you are with friends!).
And now for a crafty interlude…
Spring is just starting to come to my part of the world here in New England and so it is time to celebrate Brigid. Brigid (pronounced “Breed”) was the great Goddess of the Celts. Her name means “Bright One” and she ruled gold-crafting, poetry, creativity, and healing and she was associated with spring. She shares many characteristics with St. Bridget who is still honored in churches bearing her name all over the world. Brigid was venerated by nineteen priestesses, then St. Bridget by nineteen nuns, who have tended a perpetual sacred fire for millennia. The fire was doused for a time, but is now lit and tended again.
One of the traditions of Brigid and St. Bridget is fashioning a “St. Bridget’s Cross,” traditionally made on St. Bridget’s Feast Day of February 1st but always a wonderful way to welcome in the spring. This description of how to make a St. Bridget’s cross is much better than anything I could come up with, so I will just link it here.
Perhaps as you make your cross you will want to sing this song that was traditionally sung to St. Bridget. You’ll have to make up your own melody. “Brigid, excellent woman, sudden flame, may the bright, fiery sun take us to the lasting kingdom.”
Sources:
Monaghan, Patricia. The New Books of Goddesses and Heroines. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2000.
Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1983.
Sometimes the spirit of women ancestors is as close as the songs our grandmothers taught us. Last night I went to a performance of traditional Balkan music, including a women’s a capella choral group. The group offered songs sung for centuries by Bulgarian women in the towns and villages as they worked, celebrated marriages, accompanied dances and went about their daily lives.
The music is both enlivening and haunting, evoking images of life from centuries ago through music that seems, at times, otherworldly because of its use of a “drone” (where some women sing a steady undertone, like a bagpipe), its sometimes dissonant harmonies, and its unusual rhythms and scales. Even the vocal technique is unusual to our ears, but perfectly suited for being heard miles away, across mountains or farms. Whatever the musical theory behind it, to hear twenty women singing loudly and joyfully in complex and magnificent harmony is a spiritual experience. To know that women are coming together again to bring this music of extraordinary ordinary women to us is empowering and hopeful.
This music has undergone somewhat of a renaissance in recent years and a number of performing groups have sprung up in the US and elsewhere. They can be seen at folk festivals and concerts like the one I attended and many have CDs available. One European group is called The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices. A US group whose website has some audio clips is Kitka. For a longer list of US groups, go the Mary Sherhart’s site.
The culture of that region is extremely ancient, with folk art echoing the symbols and stories of women from millennia ago. While the music has most likely evolved over the centuries, it is still is exciting to think that perhaps captured within those harmonies and lyrics are the voices of ancient women telling us about their lives.
Laughter can sometimes seem like flashes of sunlight off a river, a pane of glass, a crystal in a stone – all around me, but uncatchable, not for me. When my days are too full and my mind is taut and my spirit weary, laughter can seem like a luxury that I do not have time for. When I am sad or grieving, laughter can seem to be mocking me.
Women are so often the victims of others’ laughter from the youngest age that laughter can seem like a weapon, something whose sightline we eventually escape when we are old enough to fend off the ridicule and shame with hard work and our self respect. Our sense of responsibility for taking care of those in our family and friend circles, whether that means daily caregiving or preserving the Earth for all future generations, can make our days so heavy that the light of laughter cannot penetrate. As recently as ten years ago, I used to be known for my infectious laughter, but each day it has become rarer and rarer.
But, in my memories of how I used to laugh, I remember that laughter is not a glimmer, but the sun’s fire itself. It illuminates, warms, brings life. Real laughter does not make fun of others or ourselves or present a picture of life that is gloomier than what we see. Real laughter is silly and comes from what happens to us everyday and shows us ourselves and others with love. Laughing at ourselves takes away the burden to be more than human. Real laughter is a sacred gift that is as important to our spiritual journey as meditation or prayer or celebrations.
I remember that:
Real laughter is revolutionary. Laughter breaks apart our illusions about the world and ourselves, the attitudes, assumptions, and fears. When we laugh, our minds open to the world as if it were new and we can see what we did not before.
Real laughter heals. No matter what is wrong, it can be put in its place by laughter. Laughter reminds us that we have laughed before and we will laugh again, even in our saddest moments. Laughter takes us out of our moment of despair into an expanded world.
Real laughter binds us to one another by creating a moment that belongs to only you and the person with whom you are laughing; it creates an entire way of looking at the world that only you and the other person share. Laughter signals that you understand one another and that the world is a good place to be. Women’s laughter is intimate.
It is time that we reclaimed that kind of laughter, that we invite it into our lives, our speeches, our articles, our poetry, our stories, our celebrations, and our homes. When we laugh together, we are invincible as we face either for our own challenges or help others.
Today I pledge to:
At least consider taking myself less seriously next time I am faced with a tough situation.
Try to quote Monty Python at least twice a day.
When I think about the sacred in my home and life, always remember laughter.
Laugh really hard when my son tells me something funny that happened to him, even if I don’t get it.
Make at least one close friend in emotional pain laugh this week.
Go to the library and take out a funny book to read (has Fannie Flagg written anything new this year?)
What about you?
If you would like to read a blog post I wrote for Her Circle Ezine’s Inner Circle blog about Mary Moody Emerson, an initiator of American Transcendentalism and a woman who found her own way despite the constrictions of Victorian life, click on the link below!
If you would like to read a post I wrote for the Her Circle Ezine Inner Circle blog about the dancer Isadora Duncan and what she has to say to women of our own times, click on the link below!
