Mexican Los Muertos / Day of the Dead handmade ceramic altar ornament. Photo Credit: Seema Miah on Unsplash
There is an archetype that weaves its way through many ancient myths and folktales that has to do with piecing together what has been disassembled. Through the process of reassembling, a transformation takes place that is enlivening, leading to the feeling of wholeness.
The ancient Egyptian myth of the Goddess Isis is a classic example. Isis picks up the scattered pieces of her husband Osiris’ body after he has been killed. As she reassembles him she mourns for him which brings him back to life. She then copulates with him conceiving their son, Horus, who becomes the ruler of a new kingdom. This story sounds very similar to Wolf Woman, a folktale from the Texas/Mexico borderlands. Wolf Woman gathers wolf bones in the dry riverbeds of the desert Southwest, reassembles them and sings over them until they spring back to life and run off howling with the voice of a woman. . .a story about reclaiming dismembered parts of the Self in order to fully come into being and find one’s true voice. Similarly, a White Mountain Apache folktale tells of an Old Weaver, who picks up the loose strands of thread and weaves them into the fabric of the world, while Trickster Crow pecks at them and unravels them again. . .a story about the quiet work of reassembling, weaving together, birthing and breathing life back into a world that suffers from inevitable loss and destruction. The beloved Irish folktale of the Selkie, is a similar story where a shapeshifting seal woman’s pelt is stolen from her. She has to live several years separated from this vital part of her body until one day her child discovers her pelt, she reclaims it, slips it on and returns back to her home in the sea whole again in her own skin.
Wolf Woman aka La Huesera or Bone Woman, wonders through the arroyos or dry riverbeds, gathering wolf bones which she reassembles and sings over until its eyes open and it springs back to life running off with the howl that sounds like a woman laughing. . . a handmade linocut print inspired by an ancient folktale from the Texas/Mexico borderlands.
All of these folktales share a common element involving the sacred work of reclaiming lost parts that are reassembled back together as a whole. Moreover, they suggest the need to recognize what we have lost, and the importance of gathering together the missing elements needed to feel whole again. In these folktales grief is treated with reverence, and takes center stage, and plays a valuable transformative role in helping the heroine get to a place of wholeness again.
Francis Weller, in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, talks about how grief and joy are two different sides of the same coin. He asserts that without the courage to grieve we numb and anesthetize ourselves from fully experiencing a sense of aliveness, which also limits our capacity to experience joy. He says “There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive” and most certainly these folktales are a precious reminder of this timeless truth.
Folktales that feature winter and death reveal that darkness can offer a potential for spiritual enrichment, and is ripe with transformative potential if we choose to harness it, and fearlessly welcome it. This is a blog post inspired by Clark Strand‘s book, Waking Up to the Dark: The Dark Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse.
Unfortunately we live in a grief-phobic, death-denying world. . .our consumer-driven material culture glorifies production and winning over the vulnerability of accepting and living in the stillness and darkness of loss. In contemporary times we experience what Weller calls “grief amnesia” when culturally sanctioned rites and ceremonies for grief are few and far between. What these myths and folktales bring to light is the recognition that our ancestors thought grief work worthy of our time and energy, and important enough to be preserved in stories that would endure generations into the future.
Maria Popova, author of the renowned blog The Marginalian, talks about holding the tension between grief and joy as a kind of “dual awareness” *. I love this idea because, like Weller, Popova couples grief with joy/aliveness, and furthermore recognizes the heightened perception and awareness that comes with the capacity to hold them both together . . . an idea that is also suggested in these folktales.
The Goddess Isis has a “dual awareness” with her capacity to see the potential for wholeness even in the depths of grief while searching for the scattered missing parts of her husband’s body. Isis is often depicted with wings of a bird, and is associated with kites and falcons. Wings are often symbols of spiritual flight, suggesting a birds-eye-view allows one to see the whole while also seeing the parts. Wolf Woman is also known as La Que Sabe or The One Who Knows, and is similarly endowed with “dual awareness”. Both a creation mother and a death mother, she sits in that place of paradox between life and death, singing over the bones recognizing grief as the center point around which these two opposing forces mediate. The Weaver of the World has a “dual awareness” in the way she persists with her weaving despite Trickster Crow pecking and unraveling her work at the other end. She recognizes that creation and destruction both work in tandem, and recognizes the important role she plays in the whole. Selkie also lives in two worlds, shapeshifting between woman and seal, she lives perpetually between-and-betwixt grief and joy. Losing her pelt she births her child, and yet she must endure the grief of losing her son to live again in the sea whole again in her skin. . .once again showing a folk-heroine with “dual awareness”.
Fungi are often associated with death and decay, yet through the process of decomposing dead organisms, they recycle the nutrients back into the soil supporting the growth of new life. Photo Credit: Jesse Bauer on Unsplash
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Senior Jungian Analyst, and author of the bestseller Woman Who Run with the Wolves, speaks about this dual awareness when she talks about the archetypal “Medial Woman” whom she describes as a woman of shadow and light, one who lives in the world of the conscious and one who also is attuned to the mystical unconscious.
These four folktales show us how the tension or balance between grief and joy, life and death or “dual awareness” is a natural outcome of being deeply and intimately in relationship with the wild creatively using a cast of imaginary and mythical characters to convey these truths about nature. These myths and folktales give us permission to let grief take up as much space in our lives with the promise that fully feeling the depth of loss will lead to new life, a wild wisdom. Weller asserts it is our sacred duty to welcome grief as a holy visitor, and it certainly seems that these folktales are suggesting this too.
Like the concept of Yin and Yang, the folkloric archetype of opposing forces that create the cosmos, weaves its way into so many different landscapes and cultural traditions secretly behind a veil of different stories and visual motifs . . and here it is hidden in plain sight, in the White Mountain Apache folktale of The Old Woman Who Weaves Together the World and the Black Crow who pecks at the loose ends and unravels it again.
The archetype of reassembling disparate pieces into wholeness and the transformative role of grief in this sacred process is a shared human value that weaves its way through folktales from vastly different cultures and landscapes. Its recurrence points to what our ancestors considered worthy of remembering. Even the word re-member, suggests a reassembling, gathering back together dis-membered parts. In much the same way, the act of remembering and retelling these ancient folktales is like gathering the scattered bones of our dead. But the griefwork involves asking ourselves how they came to be scattered and buried in the first place? In what ways have we chosen to only see the parts and not the whole? How have we been complicit in losing our human-to-human and more-than-human connections rather than doing the sacred work of reassembling and reconnecting ourselves again? Grief is waiting for our answer and for our acknowledgement of the pain and hurt experienced when we assume we are separate, different, irreconcilable from each other.
In much the same way reassembling is an enlivening act in these folktales, recognizing the the intertwined root system of buried synchronicities in these folktales breathes a new sense of vitality to our cohesion as a collective humanity, and reminds us of our deep and intimate kinship with the wild.
References:
Estes, Dr Clarrissa Pinkola (1996). Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.
Popova, Maria (Oct 26. 2021). “Every Loss Reveals What We Are Made Of: Blue Bananas, Why Leaves Change Color and the Ongoing Mystery of Chlorophyll” The Marginalian.
Strand, Clark (2022). Waking Up to the Dark: The Dark Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse. Monkfish Book Publishing.
Weller, Francis (2015). The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books.
Blog post cover image photo credit: Aditi Gautam on unsplash
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In the beloved Egyptian myth of Isis, Isis searches for the scattered parts of her murdered husband’s body, resembles him, and breathes life back into him, and makes love to him, which then gives birth to Horus who becomes the next Pharaoh of Egypt. Isis shows us that taking the aerial point of view, or birds-eye-view, gives us the power to hold the tension between what is dissolving and what is emerging, to see the whole instead of only the parts, and to recognize our own agency in the potential for transformation.