The (conditioned) threat of feminine power
Dissonance between within and without
I just returned from the midwife and what she told me was absolutely shocking to me:
Pregnant women are at their most vulnerable and statistically most prone to domestic violence, abuse and assault in general.
She repeatedly asked me on the phone before and in person during the appointment - which I only attended to receive the form for maternity pay, I’m doing a semi wild pregnancy and am comfortably prepping for free birth number 2 - if I feel safe at home and within my relationship and if I am experiencing or ever have experienced domestic abuse. Which I fortunately never have. I actually would give birth right away in the hallway of my partner’s mom’s house if need be. Surrounded by all her’s and her second son’s friends, especially the male ones! This is how safe I feel.
Just yesterday we had a male doctor stay over night, who has decades of experience and came a long way from performing cesarians to advising me with the basics of childbirth to be aware of and celebrating me for trusting in my body. Last week my partner’s brother and his friend Kieran, a regular at the house and play-mate of our son, released a song that literally starts its first line with the placenta. That’s the vibe I currently live in:
So why does the midwife’s statement about the heightened danger of violence against women during pregnancy concern me?
Within my line of work and research about motherlines, ancient matrifocal cultures, matrilineal myths (hello Avalon!) and passion for co-creating a society grounded in mutual respect, interdependence and sovereignty (as a relationship between autonomous people, their environment, e.g. land and within themselves) - I am reminded of how traumatised, fear-based, pain-led and power-over-conditioned we as a collective in the West still are.
Think about it, pregnancy is:
The moment women are at their height of creation power, life force, contribution to humanity by literally growing, nurturing and holding a child.
The moment ancient civilisation would have honoured, revered, yes even equated women with divinities.
The moment in which indigenous communities up to this day care for and support women, within capacity of village, for her to be nourished and strong so that the child she is carrying can blossom and be birthed healthily.
This is the moment women nowadays have to hide, are being told to not share their pregnancies until week 12 otherwise they risk embarrassment and disappointment in case of a miscarriage. But should they notify their health care providers too late they get scolded for not telling them sooner as complications could occur or they might even be shamed for the possibility of harming the baby by not accepting scans and test. Social services are also close around the corner in case of any sign of irresponsibility. You can’t really do it right. Hence why we learned to pass our responsibility over to health care providers in the first place, out of fear of the legal consequences, when actually the external interventions cause more insecurity, more fear and more risk for mother and baby in the long run, not to mention emotional trauma.
But that I was aware of and is not the main reason for this post.
What is maddening to see and sad in my eyes, is the deep rooted issue that men still carry around with them.
Also a result caused by the external, not the men’s fault per se. Because if they feel the need to enact their dominance and physical power at this stage of a woman’s journey in which she is actually longing for the man to express his emotional, mental and physical strength in forms of support for her and their child, it goes to show how traumatised and in conflict the statistical “normal” man is!
Why would he need to do that, I wondered. And immediately the puzzle piece fell into place within all my previous learnings and conclusions (including my main work of training space holders):
Because “he” still fears a woman’s power. (The man from the statistics, not the warm and considerate human beings I am blessed to surround myself with).
We remember, a pregnant woman is closest to the divine as any other human could ever be. This is considered powerful, magical, mystical, out of our usual human control. It is to be honoured, revered, exalted.
Not anymore though. Now it is seen as weak, a disease, hence why the need for hospitalisation and other people who “deliver the baby”. Not to mention the insecurity of women considering her changing body and “sex-appeal” plus the worry about the baby: “Am I too thick? Am I too thin?” just carries on, internalised shame all the way through to postpartum and the hanging breasts that should be adored for feeding a child but instead are seen as undesirable.
On the external the creation power and life force is diminished, suppressed, the narrative got infiltrated. Tales of fear are being installed, risk management takes over natural unfoldings and millennia of female oppression and witch hunts (especially considering midwifes, healers and women in regarded positions within their community), have made us believe we are less than and far from the divine.
However internally it seems the power of women never got erased. It still simmers within us all, causing our worldview to crumble and therefore causing discord in our psyche. It is as if all this new “civilised” narrative got just layered on top of a deeper, primordial (ac)knowledge(ment).
And because of these contradicting streams of consciousness the statistical man still satisfies his urge to dominate women.
It seems he feels threatened. Or at least questioned in his power position. And instead of soothing his pain or confronting his trauma (because who ever told him this, certainly not school or his equally traumatised environment) his immature brain takes over his adult body.
In other words, the infant’s brain requires the mature function of the adult’s brain to regulate it. For someone who has an addiction, mental disorder, or ongoing behavioral issue, it means their mid-frontal cortex has not developed maturely. In some sense they have an immature brain because they have not developed the capacity to self-regulate in the same way that a normally functioning adult would.
Gabor Maté on Daniel J. Siegel’s work The Whole-Brain Child
What happened next was a sense of awe for the timing of things, a strong fiery fuel of passion and the renewed purpose of sharing *our* heart work - in words for both women and men. Hence why I will quote a few of my favourite visionary writers below - and thanks to a course with Dr. Gabor Maté, it all bridges so perfectly from literature to society to personal psychology.
I always held ceremonies for everyone, since day one of sharing cacao and creating rituals with divination, storytelling, elemental and archetypal inner work. In fact it was two male friends of mine who encouraged me to hold regular new and full moon ceremonies with them to practice my offerings and share my voice.
I totally believe in women’s and men’s circles for finding refuge, a sense of belonging and recognition of experience embedded in social conditioning. But I always highlighted the importance of not getting stuck in your bubble and contributing to a split between the genders (especially with new gender identities forming). We need to return after the retreat for mutual understanding and interdependent work in service of supporting and healing relationships!
We as women need the men. As do the men need us women. It is about empowering each other not further engage you-vs-me dynamics and right-or-wrong drama.
The midwife’s concern reminded me about how crucial it is - now more than ever - to keep digging deeper than the surface perspectives, spreading awareness of mother cultures and ancient ancestry, of spirituality of the land and interdependence. Not to intimidate men or take away from their importance but to remember collectively that the mothers love both their sons and daughters. That when we honour women we naturally honour men. We come from the same womb, the same source, the same world.
I don’t share about goddess traditions to negate men, I share about them to help women remember their strength and ability, help them to speak up for themselves, to reclaim their self-worth. But never to put down men, always for them to give this gift of love back to their friends, brothers, lovers, husbands and sons!
And I am so passionate about professionally held spaces because they have the power to address deep unconscious wounds and facilitate the awareness of one’s own healing abilities. Which after hearing about the disturbing statistic of violence against pregnant women is exactly what is needed in this time now. Helping people move through their trauma and hidden pain. As well as reminding people of being discerning when engaging in relationships that could be based on one’s own feeling of insecurity and dependency.
Fittingly, whilst I was sitting in the waiting room of the Glastonbury surgery where my midwife would welcome me 15 minutes later, I started reading Modron: Meeting the Celtic Mother Goddess by .
I was 10 pages in and all I kept thinking about is the possibility that the Celtic tales, the Welsh Mabinogi, and the European stories of the divine *son* of the divine mother all highlighted the child as a male heir who grows up to become a honourable knight, a king or all-knowledgable bard to shift the weight from the mother with all her children to the focus of the son, the man, the patriarchal culture, the dominance society (term coined by Riane Eisler).
Modron (translates to the divine mother) after all had two children, a son and a daughter, that much we know but further talked about is only Mabon (translates to the divine son) - we recognise this pattern in Mary and Jesus. The daughter simply lives to be the most beautiful woman alive. Rings a bell? Women being valued solely for their beauty, that’s the only power we hold in patriarchal standards, at least that’s how we have been raised. It reminds me of the tale of sorceress Cerridwen, also a mother of two: an ugly son who she wants to drink her brew to give him the gift of Awen and her beautiful daughter. Of the daughter we don’t hear further but the son, despite not receiving the three drops of Awen (they go to another boy who is reborn as Taliesin and becomes a famous bard) forges his own way as a successful warrior, one of Arthur’s men.
In her years of research between the connections of myths, folk tales and Old European, pre-patriarchal, matrilineal times,
poses the theory that stories got changed to support the new patriarchal ways and shift power from women to men and institutions, as she specifically exemplifies on my favourite mythic thread of oracular water women, in particular: Calypso. Known as the love-sick needy nymph who entraps Odysseus she originally was a seer, a healer, a prophetess of sacred springs. A powerful woman who soon got put in her place but not fully forgotten as her influence was too strong. So instead of erasing it, it got rewritten.We see this repeating itself time and time again, with Roman conquerers layering their deity’s names on pagan deities and Christian missionaries transforming them into saints - the most popular example is the goddess associated with exactly this time of year, the Imbolg season: Brigid, Bride, Bríd and her alter ego Saint Brigid of Kildare.
Talking about sons and Brigid, I want to bring forth my personal thoughts on the story of the Cailleach and Brigid, two sides of the same coin made into enemies. This is far from researched but I wonder if the old, powerful goddess of death and rebirth got made into the bad ugly witch who locks up the more beautiful young one (anyone get snow white vibes here, too?) in a mountain fortress until she is freed by the Cailleach’s son who fell in love with Brigid. Together they escape and take over the reign for the light (and more desirable) half of the year. I much prefer the tale of the Cailleach drinking from the fountain of youth and becoming Brigid herself, this to me feels more powerful and has strong ties to the sovereignty goddesses we find in Arthurian legends. More about her story in my Wild Woman: Activator of Sovereignty Archetype post on Valentine’s Day - not that this was a planned date, it just coincided with the Vedic astrological zodiac change into Aquarius, a rebel archetype itself.
In her rebirth story, the Cailleach transforms into an owl to fly to the Emerald Isle or Tir Na Nog (the Irish Otherworld and realm of the Tuatha De Danann, tribe of Brigid herself) and drinks from the well of eternal youth to emerge as maiden with the coming of summer. We know of many animal shapeshifting figures, usually women seem to possess this gift naturally whereas for men it was often a curse they had to overcome with the help of women. Morgan Le Fey shapeshifts into a raven, Brigid into a swan (she is also associated with the snake amongst other animals). When the Romans came they called Brigid Minerva before Christians would make her into a saint.
Sylvia in her fantastic course When Women Were The Land points out that Greek goddess Athena was shown in her oldest depictions with an owl and a snake wrapped around her arm, likely weaving much older origins of shapeshifting women and oracular women, be they bird women, ecstatic dancing women, snake women or else. For the latter I recommend Janis Fry’s book The Cult of the Yew, chapter 3: “The Dragon Serpent Tree Gods”.
Anyways, Athena being the Greek predecessor of Minerva brings us full circle back to the Cailleach and Brigid. We have the owl, the snake and the connections. Hence why I want to point out that the rivalry described in some stories of the old and the young women might be further contributing to the internal split in oneself. Making it nearly impossible to integrate contradicting aspects of Self, leading to hyper-identification with either the bad or the good girl and of course fuelling the external competitive sister wound most of us have to address today. The great and dangerous, powerful creator goddess (after all, the Cailleach shapes landscapes and influences the weather) had to battle Brigid. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was all too convenient for the new narrative to favour a more compliant maiden goddess, who is easily integrated in patriarchy with a focus on beauty and fertility. Of course Brigid has many more powerful abilities, she is called upon as midwife and support in the motherhood journey, and also known as a triple aspected goddess of healing, smithcraft and prophetic poetry. Such as Modron in her connection to the Matronae who in a way encompasses both the death aspect of the Caillach and the birth aspect of Brigid and also has been christianised into a Saint as BanDea clearly draws the connections to St. Madryn and the Madron Well, a healing spring in Cornwall.
I am now 60 pages into the book I started at the midwife’s appointment and really enjoy the connections Kelle BanDea weaves of various Great Mother figures so effortlessly. It supports my own theory of Modron’s connection to Morgan le Fey, I even went as far as considering her a literary daughter of Modron, a new version, which became powerful in her own right but also shamed exactly because of that. More about her specifically in an upcoming archetype post.
In my personal field of study the manipulation in narrative is evident in the distortion we see in the Arthurian Legends and the change of characters from women who appoint kings to victims of abduction in need for rescuing knights. The character change from thought-after healing women to sorceresses and sexual enchantresses causing intrigues and drama in an otherwise oh-so-well-managed men’s world. We soon find a theme of women either being written into helpless damsels in distress or evil seductresses - from Guinevere and Morgan Le Fey to Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene to Eve and Lilith to Calypso and Circe and so on. Along with the shift from water deities and goddess figures to otherworldly faery women.
It’s the little, seemingly confusing things, that don’t make sense when meeting the myths but when looked at further present themselves as transition points from matrilineage to patrilineage. As
so eloquently puts it:I think the key to understanding the subtextual references is to have a good grounding in Celtic culture and British history. Taking the stories of the women of the Mabinogi at face value does not do them any justice, as most references to their divinity have been stripped away — unless you know what to look for. Believed to be wrought from the remnants of ancient stories that survived the course of time down the stream of the oral tradition, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi were written down sometime between the 11th and 12th centuries possibly by clerics, or otherwise by lay scholars interested in preserving Welsh culture in the face of losing their autonomy during the Anglo-Norman conquest. As they did so, these scribes may well have redacted things from the oral tradition which seemed strange or foreign to them. For example, the prohibitions Arianrhod sets against her son may not be the act of cruelty we witness in the narrative so much as a distant memory of a time when matrilineal inheritance was the norm, and it was the right of the mother to name, and arm, and agree to the marriage of her son.
Too, the greater autonomy of women from Pagan Celtic times may well have seemed fantastical to the redactors of the Four Branches who in turn rendered these queens and noblewomen as being outside of the natural order, and therefore must have come from the Otherworld. Alternatively, these figures may have their origins in older Celtic myths, which abounded with stories of land and fertility Goddesses, and Goddess of sovereignty.
Quoted from an Interview in 2013: https://eternalhauntedsummer.com/issues/summer-solstice-2013/jhenah-telyndru/ I recommend Telyndru’s recent work The Ninefold Way of Avalon (2023) for further understanding and brilliant insights into the Avalonian Tradition.
No matter how hard they tried, the motif of sovereign and wise women was not weeded out completely. As I share in my archetypal exploration series about Perceval (The Hero: A Fool at Heart) and in the upcoming post about Ragnelle as the Wild Woman and Activator of Sovereignty, the women are still regarded as keeper of powerful hollows (the grail, the sword) and wisdom. They challenge, initiate and scold the knight should he fail to succeed in his aventiure, his adventurous quest.
Let’s reach a bit further outside literary themes and quote
on his recent essay about how narrative shapes culture:The cracks spreading in the facade of reality will continue to widen. […] The reason for that is the “timeline engineering” I mentioned in the comment, the manipulation of past and future, and the turbulence that this battle for narrative control has introduced into the normally laminar flow of objective reality. It will take a while for things to settle down into a new consensus. The new consensus will be the dramaturgical scaffold for the next unfolding of human consciousness.
Find his Substack post here.
The power of stories is undeniable. And it is up to us to shape and share them. Too long have we believed what the conquerers told us.
What’s your story and are you willing to shape it?
I ask this with potent intent. As I know how hard it can be to let go of an identity that we were loyal to for most of our life.
Are you willing to step out of the victim role to empower yourself?
Are you willing to detach from the saviour character to live your vulnerable truth?
Are you willing to show compassion for your internal perpetrator?
If so, let your past addiction to drama (which is a very common state for all of us and not a judgement! We are all addicted to unhealthy ways of suffering otherwise we would not live how we live now) inform your present identity and open to ways much older. To then shape-shift into something new, something you crave to see more of in this world.
What will it be?
I end this essay pregnant with a baby and a belly full of hope.
With a smile,
Laura
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Thanks for the mention Laura! Ive got a brief post on here about those missing daughters you might be interested in.
https://kellebandea.substack.com/p/where-did-all-the-daughters-go
Fascinating and powerful as always Laura, thank you. I loved your take on the Cailleach and Brigid rivalry, and so much more besides xx