The Return of the Snake

Greek lekythos (oil jar) detail of a woman in the Garden of Hesperides, feeding one of the sacred snakes
who guard the golden apple trees there. Made in Paestum, Italy

The First Dragons

When the Earth, deep-coated with the slime of the late deluge, glowed again beneath the warm caresses of the shining sun, she brought forth countless species, some restored in ancient forms, some fashioned weird and new. Indeed Earth against her will produced a Serpent never known before, the huge Python, a terror to men's new-made tribes, so far it sprawled across the mountainside. The Archer god Apollo, whose shafts till then were used only against she-goats and fleeing does, destroyed the monster with a thousand arrows, his quiver almost emptied, and the wounds, black wounds, poured forth their poison.

- from "Apollo and the Python" in Ovid's Metamorphoses

These days, whenever I come upon a snake or a dragon in an old story, I see the tracery of something ancient. The key to a lost door, a track in the sand of things that points straight back to indigenous ground. Earth's ground. A red flag of sorrow stands there, from a forgotten battleground. 

When you see a dragon slain in a fairytale by a good knight, look again. When you see Medusa beheaded, Tiamat defeated, the Python of Delphi dismembered, the snakes banished from Ireland, the evil serpent guarding the apple tree in the garden of Eden, look again. That Serpent made by Earth, whom she supposedly never knew before? That "huge Python, a terror to men's new-made tribes"? She was anything but new. She was the oldest deity of all, but making her a him and making him monstrous domesticated the power of what had been told before. 

These are stories laid over older stories. They are dangerous in their power. I love stories, but I also fear them equally, because a story can destroy through centuries what a single sword or even an army cannot. We in the west have inherited a demonized snake. We have inherited a virgin-stealing dragon who ravages whole towns. Little do we realize that these are colonized stories. They are stories told by those who conquered, who wanted to kill what was most sacred or take it for their own. Because of its very power, its potency in the imaginations and hearts of the women and men who worshipped thus. You cannot truly kill the Python of Delphi, not with a real sword. But with a story you can, until no one remembers the older one, the older name Drakaina. Then, the conquest is complete. 

Proto-Attic snake pot, Athens, circa 650 BCE. Courtesy of Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories Archives

In Homer's Hymn to Apollo, the serpent is no male python, but drakaina. Demonized still, but female—nearby was a sweet flowing spring, and there with his strong bow the lord, the son of Zeus, killed the bloated, great she-dragon, a fierce monster wont to do great mischief to men upon earth, to men themselves and to their thin-shanked sheep; for she was a very bloody plague. Ancient traces slip through the lines of later histories, poetries, plays. Drakaina was the daughter of Ge, Gaia, Earth herself. The snake lived coiled deep in the ground beneath the Oracle of Delphi, Navel of the World. Back then the holy place, that Grecian omphalos, Center of the World, was called Pytho. And Pythia continued as the name of the female oracle at Delphi even after Apollo's takeover. The woman and her snake. She prophesied from her adyton in the sanctuary where two fault lines met and exhaled chthonic gases. She sat on a tripod, holding a laurel leaf and a bowl of spring water, and became entranced. Her utterances were rhythmic, an old and fearless poetry. They say her inspiration came from the breath of that very chasm; the whisperings of the Python, Drakaina daughter of Ge, daughter of Earth.

Apollo and Python, Athenian black-figure lekythos, circa 6th B.C., Musée du Louvre

It was not always a safe wind. Modern geologists believe that the grinding of the two limestone faultlines below Delphi produced methane and ethylene gases. Ethylene smells sweet, as many of the ancients described the breath of that underground oracle, and produces mild euphoria and a floating feeling. But it is dangerous too. The Pythias always made a ritual approach; tested the space with a goat-sacrifice; watched her skin shiver under the ritual libation. If it did not, the prophesying could not go forward. Who knows what strange canary-warning the goat's skin made, or why. Plutarch tells the tale of one priestess forced by priests to sit upon her tripod in the fuming adyton despite the failure of the goat to shiver, despite her protestations, despite her terror. Shortly after, she fell down dead. Earth's winds, her sacred breaths, were not to be handled lightly. Snake-tongued are the old tectonic plates, life out of death, death from life, a never-ending circle. So the first Oracle might have sung there in the dark ground, dreaming of the dead and of the distant living yet to come. Of us, at the ending, at the beginning, at the place where the snake is eating her tail.  

A speaking earth, a sacred snake, the power of prophetic women. This is not easy to kill, and yet all through the stories, threaded like a bloody red string, we find their deaths. 

Laurel leaves & berries, from an ancient stone path on the island of Ithaca (c)2016 Sylvia V. Linsteadt

Recently I've noticed talk of serpents among writers and thinkers who I very much admire. Some of what has been written troubles me, the suggested equation of the rise of Trump & similar horrors as an exiled serpent's return. Perhaps I haven't understood the whole argument or the whole story, but this sounds a little bit too close to the rise of the stinking Python who Earth bore unwillingly, who would have destroyed us all if not for Apollo and his sword. 

A slightly different way of thinking about serpents has been coiling around in my mind since last September, so I thought I'd offer it now, to add another layer to the conversation, keeping my focus narrowed on the Greco-Roman world, as it carries the root of many of our narratives & mythological tropes to this day. For I'm weary of beheaded dragons. They fill me with sorrow for what we have lost. I'm weary of the serpent in the garden. The evil virgin-eating wurm. The snake was never our enemy. The man with the sword and the rapist's eye; he was. 

We have certainly exiled the serpent as a culture; we have driven her deep into the caves, hidden her deep in her native underworld, where she has been largely forgotten. But I don't think her return is the rise of Trump, or even the more general rise of what is ugly and mean and monstrous in us. I would like to free the snake from her long-suffered monstrosity. Before, she was Earth's daughter, holy and revered. I think the rise of the snake is the rise of Earth herself, both in her terrifying aspects—drought, flood, hurricane, earthquake, disease—and in her gentler gifts, manifesting through us in our work with food, soil, seed, story, song, paint, clay, herbs, animals, and each other. It may very well be true that the serpent has returned from long exile. Certainly she has come slithering through my own psyche, demanding to be written. But I do not think it is she who will destroy our kingdom. We've done that ourselves. 

Cadmus, Harmonia and the Ismenian Dragon, Paestan red-figure krater, circa 4th B.C., Musée du Louvre

Drakaina 

It all began a year ago last June, up in the dry golden hills of Mt. Tamalpais, among oaks and bay laurels and the calls of acorn woodpeckers. There, I came very close to stepping on a young rattlesnake, curled for a nap by a warm log. That day something serpentine entered my life, and I've been following its traces ever since. At first I didn't know I was following anything at all. What I was following lived far, far down in me, coiled, subducted, but still alert. It took a journey to Greece to uncover it fully, because in the limestone bedrock of that ancient land the snake still speaks. She never quite stopped being revered. And what she has been saying since the beginning of time is of the utmost importance to us now.

Polis Cove, on the island of Ithaca (c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2016

We went in September, to the island of Kefalonia in the Ionian Sea, to visit my partner's brother and his family. I spent mornings sitting out on our tiny balcony looking into an olive grove, writing. I left milk and grappa in the lines the sunrise wrote on the gentle waters of the Ionian that lapped just beyond our front door. Sometimes I went for dawn swims. Always, for afternoon swims. The Ionian is very salty. It buoys you up without effort. Drifting, my mind learned many things. Writing, those things came out. Writing for me is a kind of awake dreaming. I discover when I write, chthonic worlds from deep inside myself and sometimes, when I least expect it and when I am not trying at all, from the earth. Snakes began to appear in my writing and in our daily journeys. So too did strange underground riverways. Serpentine places. 

We visited a cave called Drakaina on the southern edge of Kefalonia, so named, people said, because the cliffs around it seemed to have been scratched by dragon-claws. She-dragon. Later I learned that drakaina was the first and oldest name of the Python of Delphi. It was a small cave, a humble one high up a cliff where a whistle echoed forever back and forth between the limestone face of the gorge. Simon reported this to me after climbing all the way to the top; I made it only halfway up, panicked by the height and the sheer slippery cliff. This was no tourist destination and certainly not a safe ascent; when the old men at the village bakery finally understood the place we were trying to get to and directed us, they laughed and looked at my leather sandals and said something to the effect of you'd better hold onto the branches. Little did I know at the time that they meant this very literally; there was nothing else to hold on to but the springy branches of brave young oaks growing sideways out of the limestone. So while Simon actually ascended the final bit, and whistled to the rocks, and climbed through the chain-link fence to see the cave, and brought me down a piece of sage, I crouched clinging to the cliff on crumbling stone, holding a little oak tree's hand, my legs shaking uncontrollably, muttering my apologies and my reverences to that old drakaina. 

Athenian snake goddess votive offering, found in the Agora but date of manufacture unknown, pre 7th century BC

Archaeologists have found female figurines tucked away in the Drakaina cave from as far back as the Neolithic, and offerings to nymphs and to Pan up through the Classical period. But in the name Drakaina perhaps resides the cave's most ancient truth. The oldest female deities of indigenous Greece almost always have snakes by their sides. In a sense, they are snakes, for the snake is the earth speaking, the earth manifest. Life-force, endlessly creating, dying, and being born again out of the darkness. Underground the seed always carries the light of new life, even through death. The snake teaches this, whispers it, sheds her skin and lives again. So it was in the beginning, before Zeus. So it will be at the end. 

Poros Gorge, site of the Drakaina Cave, Kefalonia. (c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2016

I started writing a story those Kefalonian mornings while looking out into the olive trees. I did very little research about any of this at the time. I wanted to be a clean slate. I wanted to let the air and the stones and the sea talk as directly as possible to me and through me, without my mind overlaying them too much with what it wanted to see. What came out was a novella full of snakes and full of underworlds. I thought I'd discovered some old secret. Something hidden deep under the surface of that limestone land. That my sudden obsession with snakes was some kind of revelation. Don't we always harbor a few secret egotistical fantasies that we will be the first to have thought of something, to have seen the connections between things? And yet in the end it matters little, for it is that very process of discovering something entirely for yourself, right up from the earth, that is so moving; and to find that others have done so before you is in fact a great comfort, a delight. For when I came home and began more serious research into the iconography of the snake in the ancient Mediterranean world, I had to laugh at myself. I discovered that the important question is not was the snake important in ancient Greece but where was the snake not revered in ancient Greece? Or, in other words, when did the snake stop being at the center of religious ecstatic practices and become a monster that needed slaying instead?

The Beginning

Traces of the sacred serpent are everywhere across the pre-Indo European landscapes of Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and the Middle East. The shape of rebirth in a shed skin. The serpent eating his tail in the endless round of seasons. The buried seed, reborn. The energetics of tectonic chasms, earthlines, underworlds, subterranean waters; their rise and fall, their undulations, their fertility. In our earliest days as ancient humans and Neanderthals, we lived in caves, in their safe and cool darkness, womb-like and near. There, snakes both real and mythic still dwell, in the dark of those mysteries. Dragons too. In fairytales we are taught they guard their treasure jealously in such caves, but perhaps the treasure they have guarded all this time is not the gold and jewels of kings, and their ferocity not evil or demonic but simply necessary. Necessary so that they might survive all those eons alone, all those eons demonized and hunted; so that they might return at last from the inner reaches of our imaginings to the surface again, bearing the treasures of an underworld we turned our backs on while we were busy trying to live forever, busy trying to get to a kingdom in the sky. 

Grotto dei Vallicelli, Mount Cilento, Italy (c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2017

In Lithuania, snakes were actively revered all the way through the middle of the twentieth century, and surely still to this day to a lesser degree. "They occupied the place of honor, the sacred corner of the house, and were fed milk in addition to their regular diet. The snake protected the family, or more exactly, symbolized its life force. [...] Peasants celebrated a sacred day of snakes (kirmiu diena) around January 25, when snakes symbolically awakened and abandoned the forests for the houses. This special day marked the beginning of everything, the awakening of nature. On this day farmers shook the apple trees so that they would bear fruit, and knocked at beehives to awaken the bees." (203-204, The Living Goddesses, Marija Gimbutas). One can only infer that this was the continuation of an unbroken reverence from a very distant past; for something so pagan as snake-worship would not have actively arisen within the confines of Christianity, but rather would have remained a kind of fertile marginalia from long ago. 

Cucuteni storage jar from Neolithic Ukraine, painted with serpentine forms, circa 4500 B.C. 

The temples and pottery of earliest Neolithic Europe abound with snake imagery, and probably abounded with live snakes too, kept there by priestesses. The most obvious remnants of a pre-Olympian Grecian culture, an indigenous Aegean culture perhaps, can be found on Crete among the ruins of the Minoan civilization (named for King Minos in whose labyrinth dwelled the sacred bull, and whose daughter Ariadne danced that labyrinthine ground before ever it was a trap for fresh young bodies, its bull a demon and not a fertile god). There's no getting around the abundance of potent snake imagery in those old Cretan artifacts. Most famous among them I think is the sculpture of the"Snake-Priestess" from Knossos, her eyes wide and staring in trance, a snake in each hand. 

Cretan snake goddess/ priestess, from the palace of Knossos, Heraklion Archaeological Museum

Other Cretan sculptures and frescoes show women variously crowned, carrying or cloaked in snakes, and the beautiful golden seals which bear strange and potent visions of lost women's ceremonies often depict snakes rising in little zigzags through the air, as if indicating altered states, lifeforce, vision, or perhaps all three. But even by the time of their depiction in gold, clay and rich ocher paints alongside the exquisitely-adorned ladies of Crete, the relationship between women and snakes in Greece was doubtless already very old. As old as the hearthfire in the center of the oldest cave. It was a language spoken in symbols, a language older than words. A symbolic narrative that continued like a subterranean river through the iconography of the Classical Greek and Roman worlds, and managed to survive within the Virgin Mary herself. Carefully crafted narratives might have told one story, a new story, the story of the serpent slain and buried, sent back to the dark where it belonged, a newly demonized dark. But in the sculptures and in the paintings, a different story persisted. The snake stayed beside the woman, her companion, helper, healer, protector. He is there still. 

Ancient Cretan Seal depicting women in ceremony with a double axe, crocus flowers, two snakes floating past the sun and moon, a fruiting tree. Courtesy of Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories Archives

Around Christmas this year, my younger brother and his girlfriend got a pet snake, a miniature Australian python. They are reptile lovers and have been since they were children; I knew it was a good match when I saw them both run gleefully after a fence lizard at the same time, just to cradle it in their hands for a moment and exclaim over its beauty before letting it go. Hearing that they'd gotten a pet snake, I, deep in snake-writings and serpent-dreamings already by then, excitedly told them they should name it Pythia, tumbling out the whole tale of the Delphic Oracle. This, I think, was perhaps a bit much. Sometimes our privately researched obsessions and passions don't quite translate to others when we speak them out-loud, bright-eyed and messy-haired, fresh from the studio. In any case, they named her Lulu, a more suitable name for the gentle little creature that she is.

White-Ground Pyxis with Maenads (followers of wild Dionysus), 460-450 B.C. 

The first time I held her she went straight up my shoulder, around my neck and into my hair, which I mostly wear in a coiled bun. At this, my brother exclaimed that she liked women much more than men; she was more comfortable with us, and would always slither straight up into our hair, perhaps enjoying the safety that longer locks provided. She would have sat up there in my hair all day if I'd let her, her head just peaking out next to my ear, her tail coiled firmly out of sight. Medusa, I thought to myself. I thought too of the ancient women of Crete, the snakes twining their arms. Of Athena and her snake-cape. Before actually holding Lulu and letting her coil around on my head, I'd found the idea of actually carrying snakes like that a bit alarming. I wasn't expecting the profound and simple pleasure of her cool, slithering body tucked safely in my hair, the rippling of scale and muscle and vertebrae as she moved, sticking herself right to my neck, the calm her presence brought. I think she enjoyed it as much as I did; the warmth, the company, the kinship. We seemed to understand each other, strangely and simply, across that species-divide which sometimes feels so vast, and sometimes no wider than a single layer of skin. And I felt with a strange clear knowing that I could understand the women in the frescoes a little bit better; how, snake-haired, something in them slanted, opened, saw.

Cretan fresco of a woman with an offering, possibly pomegranate pips.
She appears to have a serpent atop her head. Courtesy of Max Dashu

The Sibyls of Campania

The Asklepion of Teggiano, now a church (c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2017

At the ancient dream temple of Teggiano, the sibyls buried their snakes in urns and put the urns right inside the walls. The walls are held up not by limestone and ash-plaster alone, but a writhing weave of snake-ghosts. So it seemed to me when I visited the temple this past April with Gail Faith Edwards, and sat upon the ancient center-stone where down below rested the bones of thousands of years and the memory of the first ones who worshipped here, who loved their snakes as friends and guides and mourned their deaths. The walls seemed to seethe with golden snakes. The floor too. Far below I felt them. Reverence still pooled there, in the stones, in the walls. The memory of worship and of love. 

Some speculate that these seeresses might have actually developed a partial immunity to snake venom via slow inoculation, and that their trances were induced by snakebites, which caused hallucinatory states in which the sibyls saw and spoke in a kind of poetic incantation, a wild verse. It's hard to know for certain, and perhaps it doesn't matter how precisely they communed with their serpents. What matters is that women had relationships with temple snakes, that snakes were seen as sacred beings whose gifts of prophetic speech and healing were revered. This is of course a very old pattern. The dream temple of Teggiano is only a piece of a much greater lineage.

A snake-urn in the wall of the Asklepion of Teggiano (c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2017

In ancient times men and women came to such places for healing. They came with something that needed mending, whether in their psyches or their bodies, or both. A priestess had them bathe in sacred water, and brought them to a special side chamber, an "incubation" room, where they slept and dreamed. Perhaps she fixed a tea of artemisias for them to drink before, to help their dream recall. In the morning they came to the priestess who sat in the center of the temple with her snake, and told her their dream. She spoke with her snake, listened to his whispering, became entranced; and sought the meaning and the medicine of that dream.

Such places were called Ascleipions, sacred to Asclepius, Greek god of medicine and bearer of that famous snake-twined staff that we still see as the symbol of the medical profession today. Cults of Asclepius were very popular across the Mediterranean world from the 5th century BC and onward, and Ascleipions proliferated, making their way as far as Teggiano and all across southern Italy, which was then known as Magna Grecia.  

Asclepius, from an ivory diptych, 5th century CE; in the Liverpool City Museum, England.

But as you know by now, you can be certain that wherever you see a snake, especially a healing snake, it's worth looking again, lifting a few layers, seeking roots. Asclepius, as it turns out, was the son of Apollo and of Coronis (sometimes known as Rhea Coronis, Rhea who is daughter of Gaia and a Titaness), who was killed for being unfaithful; Asclepius was rescued from her womb just before the funeral flames engulfed her. Not a promising start, if you ask me. But interestingly familiar. More interesting yet is Asclepius' slew of daughters, all of whom were goddesses of healing in their own right. Given the pattern of Greek narrative as it relates to powerful women and their snakes, it strikes me that these women might have been around before Asclepius. Sibyls, maybe? Women who healed with snakes in far more ancient temples? Particularly fascinating to me are the first two of his daughters, Panacea and Hygeia, whose names mean "All-Healer" and "Health." In very ancient times it is said that these two were personifications of the breasts of a Mother Goddess. Hygeia is always depicted with a snake who drinks from a bowl of water in her hands, late into the Roman period. 

Hygeia, goddess of healing, with her ever-present snake who feeds from a bowl of water in her hands.

And to this day, a wooden icon of Mary stands watch in a dreaming-corner of the old Asklepion of Teggiano, one breast out offering milk and a bronze snake hanging from her ear. She is not Panacea, not literally, but in her one can begin to sense the incredible resilience and longevity of these images and beliefs, their continuity despite centuries upon centuries of repression, oppression, and violence. 

The Virgin's Serpent

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”  

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked [...]

-The Fall, Genesis III

Well, we all know that story.

And I think we are all currently looking right into the eyes of its end. But reading these words now, reading them from the roots up—they look different to me. They show a darker, more sorrowful betrayal— of woman, of snake, of man, of wisdom, of the pleasures of all four together and independently, and our holy knowing flesh and our personal relationships with earth and soul and the divine. But also they reveal an astonishing continuity. There she is, the woman beneath the sacred tree, talking to her snake, learning from him the wisdom of life, of death, of love, of loss, of Earth's own cycling ways, the light that springs from darkness, the holiest of seeds. She is sibylline, she is listening to her snake for the prophecies of trees. 

 The Temptation of Eve, by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 19th century

There she is, doing what she always did. Before ever came God or Adam, the women were out under the trees listening to the whispering of snakes. They knew already what this new God knew. And out there with them were the men who loved them—fathers, husbands, sons, friends, lovers, brothers. For I do not mean to privilege women above men in this essay, or even to create such a dichotomy, neglecting to speak to the beautiful spectrum of gender that exists in this world; only that sometimes you have to tip the scale far back the other direction, to achieve a new equilibrium, to see clearly what has been written over, and over, and over again. As Navajo poet and activist Lyla June said in a recent interview on For The Wild, when you break a woman, you break the men who love her. Thus, you shatter a culture. So the snake and his woman were broken, long ago and every day within us, as long as we continue to tell these tales this way. 

And yet there is a certain triumph latent in this narrative, if you look not to the words but to the iconography alone. When that new and militant culture conquered the older, more peaceable, largely matrilineal cultures of Greece and appropriated the local goddesses and gods as they found them, the snake and her association with women could never be wholly destroyed. Athena, most masculine of goddesses, was often depicted in her cape of snakes, or with snakes across her breast, and the head of the Gorgon pinned there. In Athens, at the acropolis, her snake had his own sanctuary beside hers, perhaps the older of the two.

Archaic statue of Athena with her snake-rimmed aegis (cape), from the Parthenon Museum in Athens

She was a woman wreathed in snakes, just like the Cretan statues of long ago. 

"Athena with the cross-banded aegis", from the Sanctuary of Athena. Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

But it is not Eve or Athena who is still spiritually alive in southern Italy or in Greece to this very day. It is Mary, mother of God, the Madonna, who carries the memory of the sacred snake still in her arms. Or, more literally, at her feet. All across the little churches and sanctuaries of Southern Italy, the Virgin often stands with her feet on a crescent moon and a snake. It is as if the two together carry her aloft. Officially, this is because the Virgin conquered the serpent of the garden with her purity. But for the once largely illiterate and largely pagan-rooted peasant-folk of southern Europe, here was a goddess who held in her arms what had been long beloved and long revered. She was the vessel that carried beliefs from a Paleolithic past all the way into the present. The beautiful mosaic below is not just the Madonna who conquered the snake, but the Holy Mother, goddess of skies and seas, with the snake, the moon, and the rose as her sacred symbols speaking a familiar language from long, long ago. 

Madonna of Mt. Cilento, Italy (c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2017

Greek philosophy, mythology and political thought are the foundation of the intellectual western world as we know it. But what lies beneath them, at the root of things? I have found there not the deeds of heroes or of gods, not the words of great philosophers or politicians, playwrights or poets, but the blessed, life-giving snake. The voice of Earth herself. I think that this is where we must look now, if we want to welcome the serpent home again. If we want to heal what we have exiled, and listen again to its fork-tongued speech.

This talk of snakes might seem peripheral in such dire times, but I think what we have done to the snake and to female divinities in these old stories we are doing to the earth and to each other right now. I think we are living the pinnacle of this poison. And recently, an unseemly rage has been flaring through me at the thought. They took the snake from us. They took the earth. We were tricked, we were trodden, we were turned on each other, the snake became our enemy. We lost our hope, we lost our way. 

But the good news is, neither the snake nor the earth can ever truly be held or taken. Stories shed their skins. Look for the river under the river you've been taught. There is an older, darker, wilder water there. 

Persephone being abducted by Hades, who has some snakes on his side? Or possibly Zeus come to seduce her first in serpent-form? From the Cathedral of St. Andrew, Amalfi (c) Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2017

What if all the woman-napping dragons in the fairytales we've been taught are not metaphors for our own suppressed poison, our inner demons, our exiled darkness, but are in fact no more than the remnants of a narrative of domination? Suppressed, exiled, yes, but also damaged as symbols? Can we use the facets of such a story to psychoanalyze ourselves, if those facets themselves carry an older brokenness, the shards of the story that shattered the ones who came before? Wouldn't it be better to get beneath the serpent-as-evil-force, so we don't continue to perpetuate upon ourselves the same old story without meaning to? 

I love fairytales, I love myths, but they can carry as much oppression as they can wild magic. It's important to distinguish the threads, to pull them apart and find what is earthbound still. Just because psychologists wrote about it and called it a facet of your psyche doesn't mean it's always true. They are on the whole a wise lot, those psychologists, especially the Jungians. But that doesn't mean they're always right. After all, these are very powerful, very seductive stories. They are about seduction. A fall from grace. The apple, the snake, the mother. Only they got the fall all wrong. The snake, the woman, the holy tree, the dark and tunneled earth, they were already there. They watched a fall, and  grieved.  

I pray that we will return to them in story and in offering, so that they might be here with us beyond the next fall, when we will need them most. 

Bibliography & Inspirations

Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories Archives and her 5-month course Pythias, Melissae and Pharmakides: Ancient Greek and Aegean Women's Cultures

Jane Ellen Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (discovered at the end of writing this piece; a marvelous confirmation of a few things that had previously felt only intuited. She is absolutely brilliant, her work an incredible trove of wisdom.)

Robert Graves' The White Goddess and The Greek Myths (tread carefully, he can go a bit off the deep end; compare with other sources, but still a treasure-trove)

Marija Gimbutas' The Civilization of the Goddess and The Living Goddesses (incredible controversy abounds around Gimbutas' work; go read it for yourself before you judge. She is one of the most brilliant archaeologists and mythographers I have read; question why her work might be quite so triggering before rejecting and dismissing it all. Any patterns emerging here? Can you find any other scholars with comparable qualifications to make the kinds of claims she makes? 

Ovid's Metamorphoses, Homer's The Odyssey, Bulfinch's Greek and Roman Mythology (for context, for the classical approach)

Gail Faith Edward's Earth and Spirit Tour and her book Through the Wild Heart of May

The Story of SILT: Osiris, Dismemberment and the Rebirth of the Sun

For a long time, the mythology of dismemberment has fascinated me. The Vegetation Year God, cut to pieces out in the fields, scattered to bless the earth, reborn at the lip of the winter solstice, when the light begins at last to return. How potent an image of healing, of rebirth. How layered, the word re-member-- to bring broken pieces into wholeness. Of self. Of world. It seems we find ourselves teetering on such a moment, here beyond the doorway of the winter solstice, as the light begins slowly to return to the skies; as another kind of darkness gathers.

The longer I practice the craft of writing, the more I find that stories brew for a long time in me before being ready to be written. My mind catches at patterns, at threads whose meaning I don't yet fully understand, and then one day I see very clearly why they are all there, and what to make of them. During our trip to Greece, myths of dismemberment and rebirth, and above all the symbolism of the snake, gathered in my reading, in my notebook, in my mind. During our final days in London before flying home again, we visited an extraordinary exhibit at the British Museum that included a whole series of rooms and artifacts connected to the Mysteries of Osiris. I almost backed out of going when we reached the gates—it was so crowded, so touristy, and I have such an aversion to crowds. But the moment we entered the darkened rooms, and I beheld the sacred bronze ladles, the little oil lanterns, the ritual boat, all used in the Festival of Osiris... I knew it all fit, somehow. I've been deeply drawn to the world of ancient Egypt since I was a little girl, so the exhibit was something of a revelation. 

Artwork by Catherine Sieck (c) 2016

But it wasn't until I came home, and the unthinkable happened on November 8th, and I sat down with my friend Catherine Sieck on a hillside above a pond, that it all came together. On that hillside we talked about our sorrows and our fears, our hopes and our convictions, how now more than ever is the time for artwork that tells a different story than the story of hatred, violence and greed in which we find presently ourselves. 

A new story collaboration, called SILT, was the result of that conversation, and this is your last week to purchase yourself a copy before we begin printing and shipping them next Monday, January 16th! (You may already have heard the news from my newsletter; if so, forgive the following repetition. You can skip ahead if you like, and read a bit more about the symbolism and mythology of dismemberment, Vegetation gods, and rebirth, below.)

With SILT, we are retelling the Osiris myth along the riverbanks of our own future. In that most sacred of Egyptian stories, Osiris' dismemberment is a metaphor for the death and rebirth of the vegetation each year, and the renewal of life out of the Nile silt. In many ancient cultures across the world, there are myths of the Vegetation God, and his necessary sacrifice at the summer's end, to feed and gift the land with fertility for the next year. We find ourselves on the brink of some great ending, some terrible change that might also bring forth yet unknown beauty, and transformation, and revolution. 

Tomb painting depicting Isis & Osiris

SILT was written and created as an act of opposition and protest against the regime of proclaimed fear, bigotry and environmental attack that will be inaugurated into office on January 20th, 2017. Originally, we planned to time SILT so that it would arrive on your doorsteps on that very day— to offer a story of a different kind of leadership, a different kind of masculinity, a different way of relating to justice and to the earth. However, we've shifted that goal out of respect for the moon and our own cycles of creativity, so that it will now arrive on the NEW MOON, January 27th, 2017 (or very close to it). This felt like a better idea to both of us. As an act of allegiance to a different calendar altogether, it feels like its own kind of resistance—choosing to go by the moon goes against everything this coming presidency claims to stand for, and allows January 20th itself to be a day of action, of grieving, and also of serious planning.

We chose the name SILT as our rallying cry to invoke the power and fecundity of those tiny particles made of quartz and feldspar, tinier than sand and larger than clay, that rivers deposit along their banks during the flood season, renewing the green life everywhere within their reach. Silt is ephemeral and fluid, it can slip unseen between the cracks of the world, but the collective effect of a great rivertide of silt is enormous. Silt sustained the ancient civilization of Egypt for thousands of years, so long as its people remembered its name, and the power of mud.

This bundle is our response, in metaphoric and mythic language, to the place we now find ourselves, not knowing where any of it is leading, but wary of what might come. With this work, we are mucking about at the roots of things, with seeds in our hands and ferocious prayers in our teeth. This is a time to look to the old stories for guidance, to see what they have to teach us, to fortify us for what is to come.

Like I said, this is your last week to purchase a copy, which you can do right here!  The SILT bundle will include a story, a set of cut-paper illustrations, and a special gathered stone to plant as a seed and a prayer.

It is said that when the young god Dionysus was killed and dismembered, the drops of his blood on the earth became pomegranate seeds. From them the first pomegranate trees grew, those ruby-bright fruits associated with Persephone and her underworld (a whole other interconnected set of Mysteries!) which ripen in autumn across the gardens of Greece. In ancient agricultural mythology and ritual throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and far beyond it too, the yearly dismemberment of a Vegetation God was central to the rebirth of the seed, the green, and the living land in spring. Dionysus, Greek god of wine, of the growing green things of the land, of vegetative life force, of ecstatic bacchanals and fertility and altered states, is a classic example of one such deity. 

Dionysus, a Satyr and a Maenad, Attic red-figure calyx krater, 520-510 BC (Courtesy of Scholia)

Dionysus' dismemberment was enacted by the orders of a jealous Hera—jealous, say the Classical myths, hiding her deeper power and deeper truth; that she was once the Great Goddess of a pre-Indo European Greece, and such an act was not done out of jealousy, spite or meanness, but as the necessary role of the Great Mother who doles out death and life, keeper of nature's older cycles, of which the coming and going green is but one. Interestingly, it was the Titans, that oldest substratum of Greek deities, who actually dismembered him, and Rhea, daughter of the Titan goddess Gaia (Earth) herself, who made him whole and revived him again. In later stories, the famous musician Orpheus, looking very much like a manifestation of the god of wine and green, was dismembered by frenzied Maenads, the priestesses of Dionysian rites.

As Ann Wroe writes in her magnificent book Orpheus: The Song of Life, "Mythologists watched him enter as a seed falling, the ash key turning in the wind, the kernel trodden underfoot, the grain flung out from the sower's hand. He sank into the earth until he released life. His husk rotted from him there, and white hairs of new roots crept out into the dark. A pale filament uncurled, like a question; the shoot grew. Orpheus, as a primitive god of vegetation, endured the cycle of the seasons from death to life, to death, to life again" (page 129). Later, she goes on to describe his death by the "sacred double-axe" (which sounds suspiciously like the double-bladed labrys, sacred to the goddesses of old Europe)—"It cleaved him so that life and voice were 'breathed out into the winds.' Orpheus in this scene was again a vegetation god, cut down because the seasons demanded harvest, pressing and winnowing to release new life. He was broken and spread out by hoes, mattocks, rakes and bloodied hands" (223).

A Maenad holding a thyrsus (a staff made of a giant fennel stalk with a pine cone wrapped with ivy leaves and honey on top, sacred to Dionysus and carried by all his priestesses) from a Roman relief c. 120-140 AD, Courtesy of Scholia

In later tellings, these Maenads were demoted to "angry farm-wives," but it seems certain to me that once their power was very great and very sacred indeed, and that it was perhaps their rites, more than the figure of Dionysus himself, which truly protected the fertility of the land. 

Some have called Dionysus simply the Greek version of the famous Egyptian Osiris, god of both the underworld and the green life of the earth, god of the Nile's flood and fertility, who was colored green like the very mud and silt. And yet both deities are very old, likely influencing each other in their mythology and ritual, but disparate in specifics and in practice, as are other Vegetation gods across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

A festival translated as "The Mysteries of Osiris," was considered the most important religious event in the ancient Egyptian world, as it heralded the annual flooding of the Nile, and the necessary fertility that those silty waters brought. During the festival, which lasted for almost a month, the murder and rebirth of Osiris were reenacted. In the old stories, Osiris was killed by his jealous brother Set, who first nailed him into a coffin and floated him down the Nile, and later dismembered him, scattering his 14 pieces all across the desert. His sister-wife Isis went after him, taking refuge in the papyrus swamps of the Nile Delta and seeking out every last piece of his body. She recovered all of them save his genitals, which had been eaten by fishes, but even these she magically remade from sacred things, and conceived their son Horus with him while in the form of a kite.

Isis, in the form of a bird, copulates with the deceased Osiris. At either side are Horus, although he is as yet unborn, and Isis in human form. Courtesy of Olaf Tausch

Osiris was thus reborn as god of the underworld, keeper of the rebirth of the year's green, and even, in some places, associated with the daily and yearly death and rebirth of the sun itself. Isis—great goddess of Egypt, keeper of the old magic of the earth— was the precursor of the Virgin Mary, particularly as she relates to a sacred-mother son iconography. The birth of Horus at the time of the winter solstice was celebrated in a ceremony called Kykellia, "The Rite of Isis," as the rebirth of the sun, and with it, the rebirth of the wheat crop. The stories of the birth of Christ coincide with the rebirth of the sun for a reason— and both are rooted in the imagery of the dismemberment of the vegetation god at the cusp of the year-- he who goes into the underworld as seed and returns as sprout, as green, as child, under the year's new sun.

Isis nursing Horus

According to the British Museum, "the Mysteries of Osiris took place between the 12th and 30th of the month of Khoiak (mid-October to mid-November), when the Nile retreated, depositing fertile soil ready to be sown. Every year, two figures of Osiris were prepared by priests in the secrecy of the temple. One was made of soil and barley grains, and the other was made of expensive ingredients including ground semi-precious stones. These sacred figures were carried in procession to their final resting place at the end of the ritual celebrations."

The actual exhibit featured a little case where you could see all the ingredients used in these sacred figures. I lingered long over that case, and wrote down the names, the list itself an incantation: lapis, flax seed, amethyst, saffron, aspalathus, date paste, Nile water, Nile silt, haematite, calamus root, barley, incense. 

From Sir James George Frazer's problematic but informative The Golden Bough we learn more—"Plutarch tells us that Osiris was murdered on the seventeenth of the month of Athyr, and that the Egyptians accordingly observed mournful rites for four days from the seventeenth of Athyr. [...] During these four days a gilt cow swathed in a black pall was exhibited as an image of Isis. [...] On the nineteenth day of the month the people went down to the sea, the priests carrying a shrine which contained a golden casket. into this casket they poured fresh water, and thereupon the spectators raised a shout that Osiris was found. After that they took some vegetable mould, moistened it with water, mixed it with precious spices and incense, and moulded the paste into a small moon-shaped image, which was then robed and ornamented." (page 434, The Golden Bough)

In the museum exhibit, I found myself particularly caught by the imagery of these molds of Osiris, filled with sacred spices, stones and also seeds, which were planted both along the Nile delta, and in a sacred granite coffin, which was watered by priests until it sprouted. More beautiful imagery for a worship of the regenerative powers of the green life of this earth, I can hardly imagine. 

(A priest watering Osiris in the Temple of Philae, Courtesy of the British Museum)

Obviously, this is a deeply powerful and also very vast mythology-- specifically of Osiris and Isis, and more generally of ritual and mythological dismemberment. What I've written here is only the briefest of explorations, to show you some of the roots of our SILT. One thing that has struck me during my research and writing is the way the mythos of dismemberment and vegetation deities seems to have changed throughout ancient times. I suspect that what was once the sacrifice of the Vegetation God at the hands of the Great Earth Mother, in her name, morphed into the Osiris cult during a time of increased patriarchal control. After all, Isis was also the goddess of the underworld, of rebirth, and of the fertility of the land, and the one who put Osiris back together, and yet Osiris seems to have taken much of the credit, though worship of Isis was so widespread across the ancient Greco-Roman world that she was folded into later Christian iconography.

In our SILT, I've tried to remedy this imbalance by telling part of the story from the perspective of a female narrator. It is written partly as diary entries, and partly as a series of incantatory scenes from the rituals of a far-distant desert future along the banks of a Californian river. Catherine's series of cut-paper illustrations are a revelation, an iconography of the kind of hope that dwells in the body, and of "the continuity of life which outlasts all changes of form," as C.G. Jung writes of the Osiris myth. 

These words from Jung seem the perfect rallying cry as we go forth into an unknown future. Devoted to making whole again what may be broken. Devoted to the new life that comes from every ending. Devoted to the truly awe-inspiring regenerative powers of this earth, of our bodies, and of our imaginations. 

Dreaming On Dartmoor

There are stories on Dartmoor that come up singing through the stones. There is a silence underneath the wind on the tops of the granite tors that is ancient with human song. I could feel it, just underneath the skin of green. The wind and the stones and the pulse of story came in like a hallowing, and I was changed.

What I mean is, I felt seen by some Dreaming underneath the moor. Like that Dreaming wanted to be known. It was new to me, but not to the many dreaming artists who live in and near Chagford, on Dartmoor. Their work is in conversation with it; with the stone crones and the rooty doors, the elven folk and the Bronze Age queens, with the bones of primordial horses and the ghosts of the Wild Hunt, with the long dead Bear and the scream of the kestrel, who has been screaming and diving here for hundreds of thousands of years. I have never visited a place like this before. Where you can see the land Dreaming through so many of the humans who live there— in their painting, in their weaving, their story-telling, their singing, and their dancing, in their sculpting, their metalwork, their felted textiles, their clay.

I came because of Rima Staines, and because of Tatterdemalion. (You know this already, those of you who read my last post.) To meet the woman and the land with whom my stories and therefore a part of my soul had been in long conversation. In many ways our meeting was like the gathering up and dusting-off of an old friendship newly discovered again. Something you might sift from out the stones at Grimspound; a gleaming, flint-dark kind of kinship.   

Perhaps I was able to hear whispers of the moor dreaming, to feel the weight of its myriad and ancient eyes (granite, heather, moss, hawk, mouse, root, ghost, bone, tin-vein, thorn) because it was Rima and Tom (and the Boy, the truest little shouter and moor-whisperer of them all) who introduced me. Surely, this made a difference. The vast difference between meeting someone cold on the street, and being introduced by a dear friend by the warmth of the fire.  

For Rima and Tom, in their painting, their story-making, their performances, and also the daily rhythms of their lives (close to the quick, to the fire, of the soul's hearth)—they are dancing with the moor. They are letting its Dreaming through in any way they can—out their brushes, their pens, their words, their bones, their (soon-to-be) wheels. And so being brought by them across hill and dale and down among the stones and Bronze Age circles of Dartmoor was a sacred kind of introduction. 

At Grimspound, a Bronze Age fort (named thus by Viking settlers much later), I felt the stories come singing up especially strong. I saw them; glimpses of a skirt-hem, a leather shoe. Did women once come walking down those hills through the old stone gate with sheep at their heels, bells clattering, talking about the old wolf someone saw down at the river; the long labor of someone else's sister; the ripening of the sloes? Did they go down to the river valley, to the damp and forested places to gather berries in well-woven baskets? Hawthorn, blackberry, wild rosehip, sloe. Did the brown bears forage for sloes nearby, and did the women take care to never speak badly of them while in their hearing?

Did they gather yarrow from the meadows and the sides of pathways in summer, to give to their daughters in childbirth, their sons with wounds from hunting or battle?

What did they murmur to the heather when they gathered it for tea, for ale?

On the muddy paths, what pawprints did they encounter, and how did they tell the tales of them back home, around the hearth? What did they say of Badger, heading home to her sett at dawn? 

Some say these smaller circles of stones within Grimpound's wall are the foundations of granaries; others believe they were little houses. The stones are laid in such a way at the entrance—a sharp turn on your way in—that whatever was inside would have been protected from the elements, from wind and rain. Their shape and size is reminiscent of the clochán huts (the beehive shaped stone buildings) on the Irish coast used by monks and priests as religious hermitages. What was it like, to sit by the fire in here while the wind blew hard; or alternately, to duck inside for a bushel of grain? 

A little leat wound along the outskirts of the ruin, dug by Bronze Age arms to convey water to the settlement. It had a sweet voice like copper bells, all hung with bracken and heather. It is still here, these thousands of years later, like the stones ringing Grimspound, and like the stones it holds whispers, threads of human story, scraps of Dreaming come up from the underground, where the groundwater swells, where the heather roots, where the badger sleeps. Whispers that found their way right in, and rooted, so that I couldn't seem to stop thinking about story, and how it is held in a landscape, and how it arises through the people who live there. 

At night, I slept in Rima and Tom's arctic bell tent in a cow pasture, in the deep dark of that round and heavy canvas. Strange birds sometimes called in the small hours, and everything smelled green though I could hardly see until poking my head out the flaps at dawn. 

My sleep was sound, and round, and soothed by the damp ground below my bedroll and skins, by the creature-dark, by the smoke from my fire (and a lot of smoke it was at first, for this California girl used to dry kindling, and not the ever-damp of England!) At first, I didn't dream, or nothing that I could recall very well. Perhaps it takes a few days to settle in, to let the stories waft up from the underground and into your sleep. 

For suddenly, there they were, vivid and strange. Dreams that I can remember still. In one, I ran through an apocalyptic city with an old childhood friend, chased by gunfire, but everywhere underfoot there were hawthorn berries, and we were slipping on them as we fled. 

In another, I hoisted myself up bareback onto a paint mare, wrapped my hands up in her mane, and galloped like I have never galloped before, knowing that the horse would not stop until she felt like it,  not minding at all, feeling that for once I was completely unafraid. 

In another, I found a hazelnut with the distinctive chew marks of a dormouse, a little treasure on the floor of a silvery hazel grove. This dream must have come from an overheard conversation about the endangered English dormouse, and how its presence can be tracked by examining hazelnuts for a certain pattern of toothmarks—a perfect hole made in the nut, like the opening of an owl den, with a smooth inner rim and tooth-marks at a particular angle.

But also I think that dream drifted up from some longing to meet the quiet and ancient ones of this land more intimately, to follow the wise old mouse through the hazel grove, and into the place of Dreaming, where the Salmon of Knowledge swims under the hazel trees and eats the Nuts of Poetry as they fall into that Well.

The land here, from Dartmoor west and south into Cornwall, was a Celtic holdout, a place where the old ways and the old stories were safe and harbored for a little bit longer than elsewhere in England. Where the stone circles got sung and danced, where people kept their ears to their earth and listened, and perhaps whispered the things they heard back to the stones for safe-keeping, so that when the time was right, another soul, ear pressed to granite, might hear them, and keep the fire lit.

In his book of essays, The Voice That Thunders, the intensely wonderful English writer Alan Garner (turn to him if you want to know how a human being can listen to a place his whole life, and shape those listenings into words) says that even if no one speaks them anymore, and even if no one writes them down, myths are never lost. Not in the Eternal Time of stones and moors and bones and dreams. Only in linear time can they be lost, for a little while anyway.

They can always be recovered again, in some form. Not by "scavenging" them by tooth and nail, as Garner writes, but by earning their trust again. By sitting for hours, for days, for years, by the river that has carried the souls of moor-creatures for millennia (horse, vole, kestrel, ancient bear).

By wading through leaf-mold and the silence of trees to the edge of the amber river, and asking for nothing but to walk by its side....

....and while walking to dream on ancient acorn harvests and why it is that the river gleams like bronze, and all the things that it has seen.  

Trust is earned again by leaning on the stones, and waiting for the faint murmuring of their mica-voices, and the things they have been protecting there. 

By going out in misty weather to listen to the wind. By introducing your children to that wind, that mist, that granite, that river-gleam, as Rima and Tom and so many of the wonderful folk of this community seem to do. 

This is the work of a lifetime, not a single visit, and so my glimpses and my musings of the Dreams of Dartmoor are only that; threads gathered up in a traveler's pockets. A little wooden box of rememberings, like compass points: a string of hawthorn berries, a chip of granite, a sprig of heather, a shard of pottery, a pouch of dreams full of dormouse-chewed hazelnuts. More to the point though is the shape of this place, and this journey, and what it is we bring home. As I wrote in my journal after our afternoon at Grimspound, "There's something I'm trying to work out around story and myth here; how this is to be carried; why this land so cultivates mythic thinking and dreaming; what to do about it in my own life."

How, in other words, to care for the stories of my own place, this bit of coast on the edge of California, near the Golden Gate, where I am from.

How to listen for the stories in the blood, the ash-house tales just beyond the gates of memory, back in the bones where my ancestors sing.

How to hitch the oak trees of my bloodline, the oak trees of old England, old Ireland, old Russia, old Austria, old Hungary, old Germany, to the oak trees of this homeland I love with all my heart, this California of coast live oaks, black oaks, tanoaks, valley oaks, the memories of grizzly bears coming to feast beneath the trees in autumn, the thousand thousand generations of Coast Miwok and Ohlone people singing for the acorns as they fell, and eating thousands of generations of bowls of acorn porridge.

How, most importantly, to do this not just for myself, but together, here in the Bay Area, in Point Reyes, in California, on the edge of the continent, on all the lands we love; excavating our own myriad ancestries at the same time as we are out by the trees and rivers and stones, listening for theirs, and honoring the people who were here before us: that fraught and tender terrain. 

After only eight nights with my head to the sweet earth in a dark round tent in a village nestled on the great hill-rounded moor, a week driving and walking the tall, close hedgerows of Devon with Rima and Tom and the Boy, I felt as though time had closed into a circle, and that I had been there always. That I had always slept in a tent in a field and spent evenings in a round yurt by the fire with new-old friends talking of things ancient and close to the heart. That I had always felt the snug arms of the hedgerows, and the old voices of the stones, and the big winds of the moor where ravens flip and croak their velvet words. 

When I was a little girl, I dreamed that I would one day live in a stone cottage in England. I have since developed too much of a love for the land I was born to, its mountain lions and coast live oaks, its coyotes and buckeyes and bay nuts and wild irises, to uproot myself in such a way, but I believe that I have discovered the root of this dream. That I found it when I first beheld Rima's artwork. That I found it when I stood at Grimspound, and put my hands to the old granite, and wondered what stories the First People told here. If the leat or the amber River Dart still remember them.

That here is a community carrying the stories of the land as best they can, and with much beauty and care and heart (think of the incredible folkloric work of Terri Windling, of the mythic art of Alan Lee, of Brian and Wendy Froud, the magnificent story-telling and myth-carrying of Martin Shaw,  not to mention of course the truly transformative and deep-rooted painting of Rima Staines and the powerful storytelling and poetry of Tom Hirons, to name just a very few!). That here is a seed of inspiration to bring home again. 

  

And of course, it is our Tatterdemalion which did the threading, which brought me to England, to Dartmoor, to the stones. This book born out of many years'-worth of Rima's paintings, each one a conversation between her heart and the world around her in all of its storied and sad-strung glory, and what happened when I walked through their doorways into my own place here in California, and saw it all anew. (And dear friends, if you would like to be part of our novel's birth, to have your name in its back pages and a hand in its blossoming, you can do so here. We are now over three-quarters of the way there; come race with us across the final hillsides!)

To finish these musings properly, and not on a parenthesesed note, I will  leave you with the words of Alan Garner, from his essay, "The Voice in the Shadow."

By reciting a myth, the storyteller remembers a creation and, by remembering, is part of that creating. It is best understood in that dreadful solecism 'walkabout.' In walking, the Australians speak the land. Their feet make it new, now, and in its beginning, by step and breath that meet in its dance, so that land and people sing as one. It is a symbiosis of multiple times.