Our Lady of the Dark Country

<Mother of the World, by Nicholas Roerich 1937>

What follows is the full introduction to a brand new book of mine called Our Lady of the Dark Country, a collection of my short stories, poems and a novella about powerful women, about the deep feminine, about Earth's magic. I am deeply happy to set it before you in this slow, dark, nourishing root of the year like an egg set in a quiet pool, for you to take in deep as starlight in this winter season. Something is shifting deep below the surface of things; the ancient ways of snake and woman are rising. This is a women-made book. My friend and the amazing designer at Heyday, Ashley Ingram, laid the book out for me as a freelance project. The artwork of Catherine Sieck and Nomi McLeod is featured within. And the cover painting is by none other than Rima Staines, a wild madonna-sibyl that she painted for our collaboration on the latest Dark Mountain volume. 

This book is an opening and a rooting. May it serve you well. 

*For US orders-- buy a copy here, or at any online bookseller, or request through your local shop! *

*For UK orders-- buy a copy from the Hedgespoken shop here! *

Introduction to Our Lady of the Dark Country

Women of America, of Europe, women of my blood and mothers of my ancestors, women of all the lands of this Earth: the words in this book are needles. Thread them where they need to go: through your body, through your life, into the ground as roots. They have come from a true place in me, from the place where forgotten stories have been buried, and I give them to you in these pages gladly.

We have come to an epistemic crossroads, a crisis of the “real.” I will not be able to win an argument with an archaeologist, an academic, a business man, or possibly even an old friend, by trying to state facts about the indigenous feminine traditions of Europe, about the Neolithic, about the work of Marija Gimbutas, about war, about peace, about menstruation, about sexuality, about freedom, about truth, about the heart, about the reality of magic, because facts have become a slippery thing and it seems that these days what matters is who fears what, and who gains what, and not What Is True. A fact is not What Is True. A fact is only an arrow that points toward who has the power and what story they want to tell.

A dozen times a week, sometimes a day, I want to write angry essays, immaculate in articulation and bombproof in argument, essays that are swords, cutting through two thousand years of tyrannical, imperialistic, misogynistic, life-denying narratives—the ones that are presently calling climate change a “pagan” notion, the ones that allow big oil and big gun lobbies to persist even in the face of the deadliest public mass shootings in history and a planet on the brink of devastating environmental chaos, the ones that enable the exploitation of just about everything and everybody remotely exploitable and objectifiable—but if I write angry essays like I am beginning to do here I will be dismissed by many as an angry feminist. Hysterical. It’s just her womb talking.

Well, actually, it is, and I’m proud to say it. I’m bleeding today. My womb is shedding like a snake. It is windy outside and just started to rain, loud and sweet on the roof. It is dusk. There’s a cake of quince, saffron and almond flour baking in the oven, and wood pigeons roosting in the bay trees, and I am indeed an angry woman writing but it is time, women of my blood, women of America, women of this Earth, that we were not ashamed. That we no longer believed anybody who told us our bodies and the wisdom of our bodies was not true. It is time we were proud and not embarrassed to say “I am bleeding today.” It used to be that a woman bleeding was sought for what she knew, for what she thought, because she was closest to something bigger. A moon, a tide. It is time we started at the very snake-center of our bodies and saw again the birthright of our strength, our power, and of a knowing that is older and vaster by far than the life-destroying cultural story we are currently living in.

You don’t have to know all the details about what happened, and who did what, and why—the series of Bronze Age invasions from the Russian steppe, the rise of the Roman Empire and a fanatical Christian state, the Inquisition and witch burning times, the colonization of the “New World” and onward—and how all of it is still embedded in the legacies we enact today, to feel what is beneath, in the dark country of our bodies, out of sight. All you have to do is begin at the center of yourself and listen. Earth’s language and the language of the living world will speak directly to you there, and tell you What Is True, from that wellspring which has long been associated with the womb (if you have a female body), and the center of yourself and your lifeforce (if you have a male body).

I want to pause here and make it clear that this book, though deeply feminine, is not only for women but for men too, and everyone between, around, above, below and sideways from those gender designations. I want to make sure you know I am not disparaging the male gender here as such, but only an aggressive manifestation of it—called patriarchy. There is little good in hate, and especially something so silly as the hate of an entire gender. Over-simplification, as my good husband often says, is rarely useful. And I have been blessed in my life with strong, caring examples of masculinity. I am married to a wonderful, respectful man. I was raised by a wonderful father, with a wonderful brother, kind and protective uncles, two loving grandfathers, and am now blessed to have a generous and good-hearted father-in-law and two brothers-in-law I am proud to call my family. Some of my most cherished teachers have been men, and some of my loveliest friends.

The violent objectification inherent in extreme patriarchy affects men as much as it does women. Differently, but terribly too. As I heard Lyla June Johnston (the Diné and Tsétsêhéstâhese poet, musician and activist) say in an interview last spring, the witch hunts damaged the men of Europe as much as the women. The witch hunts broke them too, for there is no faster way to destroy a man’s spirit (besides enslaving him or sending him to the trenches of a senseless war) than to take away and kill the women he loves—mother, wife, daughter, sister—and leave him with the horrific belief that it was his fault, that he didn’t do enough, that he could have done more. That he failed them. So while this book may appeal more to those who identify as “women,” it is not only for women. I write these words for all, in celebration of what the feminine might look like untrammeled and in balance with the masculine—in the past, in the present, and in the future.

I believe we are walking around with the witch trials still burning in our blood, and it is time to turn and look. There are lies still branded in our culture and the story of what it means to be a woman in the West, put there by the ancestral memory of breast ripper and hot rod and iron maiden and shackle and pyre, put there by forced marriage and forced silence, corset and shame. No manner of rhetoric would save you if the men of the Inquisition wanted you dead, even when you confessed to a mythology made entirely by them. Satan and the Devil do not belong to witches or to women, but to the life-denying story that says: to be born of a woman’s body is to be soiled. This is our original sin, they say. You must spend your whole life atoning, paving your path to elsewhere, away from Earth. To be a woman who practiced the old indigenous ways of Europe, who knew her power and the power of earthfast stone and holy spring, bird and knot and hare and womb, a woman who was a priest in her own right, a doctor, a seer—this was to be a direct threat to male Christian power. Some women were carried to “trial” in baskets, so their feet wouldn’t touch the ground, because the men feared that they would get power from the Earth that way.

But the worst part of it all is that the Inquisition worked so well it not only killed hundreds of thousands of women, but actually erased the truth of the witch and her (or his) indigenous roots from the old land of Europe. Erased them right out of the field of history. It is only very recently that this narrative is being amended. The story of the witch replaced the reality of the witch and we are left in its ashes still, alternately scoffing at the notion that a witch was ever a real person, or caricaturing her as a terrible old woman with warts who deserved to be killed by a young hero because she put babies in her oven and ate them.

Imagine if we spoke of the Holocaust with a snicker—“well, I mean, Jewish people weren’t real, it was just a mistaken hysteria, and that’s over now, don’t be silly.” And then we dressed up like them for Halloween to scare each other, and to laugh. Don’t be fantastical, witches were never real anyway, and if you want to talk about it, about women’s oldest knowing and a time when we were not objects under the hands of more powerful men, well, that’s some weird goddess shit, go ahead, suit yourself, but you will immediately be written off and shoved into a women’s studies department or the occult shelf. Meanwhile the rest will go on calling the real thing History and not men’s studies, starting with the earliest so-called “real” civilization, Mesopotamia, and the old Epic of Gilgamesh in which a man clearcuts a forest and builds a city, or the Enuma Elish, in which the newer gods kill the older gods, including the dragon-creatrix Tiamat, using her body to make the world. This is how you do it, this is how you build a civilization, see? they tell us. But if you read between the lines and into the more marginalized texts (the ones called “Women’s Studies,” for example) you might begin to suspect that to be built upon the carcass of dragon might be a metaphor for the overhaul of an older mythology by a violent, patriarchal one—the conquest of a peaceable, fecund, matrilineal agrarian culture that had been flourishing for the previous five thousand years or so without trouble or resource depletion.

Don’t get me wrong. I spend a lot of time in the bookstore in the Women’s Studies section. I make a beeline straight for the mythology shelf and the science fiction and fantasy wing. Deeply intelligent, important things are being written and published and placed in these sections, and I feel most at home among them. Here be dragons. But I think there’s something inherently troubling about the way this genrefication of both fiction and historical studies creates a hierarchy that looks a whole lot like the hierarchies of the Roman Empire, the Christian state, the US government, the workplace, and in many cases the home, whatever we say about feminism.

The eminent Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas provides a fascinating, and to me very frustrating, case study. After enjoying great esteem among her male colleagues for many years of work on Bronze Age Proto-Indo-European culture in the 1950’s and 60’s, she began to point out that there were an awful lot of female-shaped figurines in the ancient substratum of sites across southern, eastern, and central Europe long before said Indo-Europeans arrived. She went on to suggest, based on decades of study not only of ancient Neolithic cultures but also the folklore of eastern Europe, that they might have had religious value, possibly as representatives of goddesses in a matrilineal clan culture. She noticed what she thought were many small temples and a remarkable lack of weaponry or ornate burial mounds with kings in them, having dug most of the sites herself and read the reports for the rest in one of the eleven languages she was fluent in and her male colleagues were not. As if this wasn’t apparently bad enough (using the word “goddess” and “matriarchy” seems to immediately make the academic community uncomfortable) women who weren’t academics got excited about her work in the 1970’s because they felt she was uncovering at last a feminine heritage that was empowering, a new narrative that honored women’s bodies, women’s ways, and returned to them a millennia-long tradition of goddess worship across the ancient western world.

As far as many of Gimbutas’ colleagues were concerned, this was the equivalent of digging her own scholarly grave and burying her academic reputation alive, although her work was no less thorough, thoughtful, or well-researched than before. But she had begun to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach, weaving in her knowledge of folklore and linguistics to interpret the figurines she was uncovering, and probably a bit of imagination and intuition too. A more feminine way, maybe, but still founded upon thirty years of study and thought.

I’d be curious to know if the reaction would have been the same had she noted a remarkable number of male figurines, and suggested the worship of predominantly male gods. I have little doubt that there would have been no academic outcry. But a goddess is a very different thing than a god. Today, her work is much beloved among feminists and goddess followers, but generally dismissed by the academic community, and while we can laugh it off as a big loss to them, I think it’s actually quite chilling. An essay by a man who’d clearly not read all of Gimbutas’ work and certainly hadn’t thought very much about it is the only one included in the best contemporary volume on Old European culture. In his piece he dismisses all of Gimbutas’ conclusions with a writerly sneer and says not much of anything else besides that they might have been sex objects, pornographic in some way, maybe dolls or maybe just female bodies but, come on people—you can feel his sarcasm between the lines—let’s not be ridiculous here, let’s not be fanciful, sacred? Religious? Wide-hipped female figurines with possible snake heads, how could they be sacred or religiously important in any significant way? Let’s not get worked up about this, that’s just what the women want them to be and they can’t be right because, well—

And here we come at last to the terrible crux of the problem, and my diatribe. They cannot be goddesses with central significance to the cultures they were found buried within because—because—

It’s subconscious at this point, deeply so. You can see the trend. Why should we be so outrageously embarrassed when a woman suggests matrilineal goddess-worship that we won’t even consider it a real possibility?

Because it upsets the entire narrative of academia, of “progress,” of what we think we mean when we say “civilization.”

Because it takes us straight back to the woman beneath the apple tree speaking to the snake in the garden. Whatever she knew, whatever the snake was telling her, they’ve been trying to silence for at least the last two thousand years. And we’ve been trying to silence her in ourselves.

But I think something is changing now. I see it in the news, and it I feel it in the air, and in the center of myself, and in the ground.

Women and men of heart, Earth’s snakes are speaking. It is time we listen for the truth they tell us through the centers of ourselves. Women and men of heart, we make a spiral around this planet. It is time to tell the old stories that have damaged us differently. To go beneath what we’ve been told and into the dark country, into the Earth, where the other side of those stories is hidden, the truth that was carried all along in the roots of the trees despite thousands of years of war.

In this book I offer stories of that place, from the dark country that was never truly conquered or secondary, no matter what they told us. The place that was always the beginning, the center, the root. The place the snakes and dragons went when they had been called monster, and evil, and finally just a fantasy, one too many times.

The rain is falling harder now. The bishop pines roar with wind. Soon the owls will be calling. The house smells of quince and almond cake.

Come in. There are doorways, very near, that the dragons will walk through if we listen, and thread, and have the courage to stand up in our bodies and call them home.

SYLVIA V. LINSTEADT

The Bishop Pinewood

Inverness, California

November 2017 

The Autumnhouse

A field vole (c) Barrie H. Kelly

Vole, who lives at the root of an old fallen pine, knows the way in.

Her doorway is humble and easy to miss, but if you leave marigolds, or the last gold leaves of the buckeye, or the first acorn, at the root of a snag, she will most likely appear, plump with the last of summer's seeds, black-eyed, and kind. She will show you that the doorway is just here, through the hole in the rootplace of the tree which she uses regularly but which is also suddenly a smooth-carved, rounded door made of pine, with a bronze knob made of the bronze of ancient women who long ago tempered it among the embers of your blood, and now Vole is a plump, kind-eyed woman in a great tawny-furred shawl, opening that door for you, holding out a hand of welcome, gesturing you through. 

Inside, you are in a root, hollowed and smoothed and snug, a house that smells of ancient resins and fresh humus, nuts roasting, woodsmoke. There are windows, odd and random, glimpses of the afternoon's long gold light, the slantwise shade of rich sky blue, a buckeye heavy with shining nuts. The fire is new in the round-bellied hearth. Hazelnuts roast on top, and an earthenware bowl within, bubbling scents of corn and bean and sage and a hundred savory roots, a thousand. Only a Vole-woman knows how many. In the center of the round root room is a cushion woven thick of green and brown and yellow wool, and beside it a table made of a polished branch where all manner of wooden birds are perched. The woman settles back onto that cushion, taking a thin, sharp knife and a bit of wood from her belt. She begins to whittle and carve, singing high whistled vole songs that are almost too strange for your ears to follow. 

Varied thrush are coming, coming, coming through the night. Varied thrush are winging, winging, winging with the light. She chants as she carves. Pleiades are rising, varied thrush are flying, Scorpion has gone, Scorpion has gone. As she carves and sings, the root is no longer a snug house but a deep rush of sky and star and feathers. It is the inside of a thrush-breast, speckled as night, pulsing with a compass magnet and a map so old the stars sing to it like the singing vole. There the earth calls south, south. The stars have changed to gloaming. There is a place the thrush knows and flies toward, right into the window of the autumn house, guided by a thousand thousand ancestors. For the briefest moment the thrush flies right into your hands—a big songbird, orange and bluegray in painted swathes, with a song of two tones in one note that opens you up sidelong and brings the acorns swelling everywhere in the trees, and every ghost in your blood released to feast at last among them, welcomed home. 

The  Enclosed Garden, by Meinrad Craighead

Vole-woman stops singing. The house is only a root again, warm and safe. The hazelnuts have roasted. She places the wooden thrush she's carved in a window that peeks out onto a different forest where the stags are wild-antlered, big-chested, weaving after the long-necked and prancing does. Then she hands you a nut, hot and crisp and oily, the papery husk of it flaking into your hands. As you eat it, there is a sound around you like the rustle of falling leaves—buckeye, bigleaf maple, curls of madrone bark, old pine needles. It's a skin, vaguely shaped like you but also like a snake. Vole-woman scoops it up in a deft hand and throws it into the fire as you eat more nuts and listen to the thrushes as they arrive, singing autumn in to roost.