Words: Anya Vasko (she/her)
CW: Rape and Sexual Assault
Prelude. Eve and Mary
How foreign it must have been for Her
Eve
To emerge not from the Womb of the World
But from the porous marrow of bone.
If there is sin
It is this.
The sin is in
The price of seeking wisdom, the bestowment of irreconcilable pain in childbirth
An act she has never known
For a Mother, she was denied.
But through the ages,
As the instinctual and the wild are found inferior to the intellectual and the rational
The ways of the Mother splinter the illusion of a people singularly devoted to a vengeful Father of soldiers.
Mary, the Mother, reveals the irrepressible Life Force
The Goddesses’ nature permeating through.
And to Eve, She beckons, saying:
‘Before Christ ever was, I am. Daughter, forget your sin and be joyful, for you are of the same nature as myself.’
I. East/Spring/Air/Beginning
It is the festival of Imbolc
An initiation of the emergence of snowdrops
On the weeping soil.
On this ground, three Maidens spin.
They sing as they dance
And call the Goddess Brighid to emerge from the
Wellspring
The source from which life flows back into Earth.
Now Brighid goes by another name.
St. Bride, She is.
A title constructed like the chapels above Her Wells
Making Her a servant of the God who punished Eve before Her.
But under this veil,
Ripples of a far older story cry out.
Potent waters of the Otherworld
Bubbled forth once.
Tending these waters were Maidens: the Voices of the Wells.
For weary travellers, they would
draw the well’s sacred lifeblood into a chalice.
A gift.
But what had been given
Was taken.
When the King tore away a Maiden’s tunic and raped Her
Against the moss-covered stone.
The Goddess Brighid recoiled in horror at the violation.
And so the Wellspring rescinded.
At this moment,
A Maiden became something to be taken
A virginity stripped
A voice silenced.
II. South/Summer/Fire/Growing
As the rites of Beltane commence in the sacred groves of the old-growth forest
Priests watch from their churches.
They order for bearers of axes to strike down the ancient wood.
But one tree is left standing.
You know Her.
In this grove, She is a Scots Pine
And Her roots grip the fecund soil as if it resides in Her womb as a child.
She is the Mother Tree.
To reclaim the Voices of the Wells
One must step into the hollow cavern at the Mother Tree’s base.
To strip the shadow of the feminine from under patriarchy,
One must first become awash in the intoxicating nature
Of Her silent womb.
Here
You can see the sticky webbing of fungi
And from it
A warrior Goddess emerging from the rooted, intertwined walls.
Medb (Maeve)
Enriched in the fluids of the land,
She is the clotted blood of peat
And the sweat of deep Earth.
You can hear the drumming of gestation as She goes forth.
Medb cries out.
Her daughter, Brighid, was denied her Wellsprings
And now Her trees too have become places of heresy.
She rises Her calls to echo
The Maidens.
For She is the Goddess of fertility
A reminder of the Mother in all things.
And it is not in her nature to be silent.
III. North/Winter/Earth/Maturing
In the Western Airs of the world
There are horizons that lie
Completely still.
And in them the Old Women of the world sit and weave.
The Mother of these spinsters is
Beira – Keeper of Wisdom.
While the land sleeps in winter
She weaves its dream.
In a time of scarcity,
She stitches the coming abundance.
Even as the Christian priests tell tales of Beira as no more than a nun who waits for death,
She persists.
She knows She speaks with
The Moral Authority of the Land
And weaves its dream.
When the pulsating current of life dances
Beneath Her dreaming eyelids
In a stupor under the spindle,
She seeks Wellwater.
Bathes Her ridged skin and
Spider silk hair.
And when She rises from the surface,
She comes forth
As Brighid.
IV. The Labyrinth
In the heart of a labyrinth
Lies a Woman.
Her eyes are bright, yet unlearned.
Her finger joints are bony and scarred from spinning needles.
Her stomach is round with the cradle of new life.
She is Brighid.
Medb.
Beira, in One.
She is Eve
Mother Mary
And the Hag.
In the labyrinth, these women are not condemned.
Not Eve, for Her curiosity.
Not Mother Mary, for Her power of creation.
Nor the Hag for Her authority and wisdom.
They are all imitations of life and the Goddess.
They are, as is all life – cyclical, not linear.
And they all have the gift of dreaming,
Weaving the world into
Being
Meaning
And pattern
