“Changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war.” — Rebecca Solnit

Some time ago I listened to a wonderful podcast about the Queen of Sheba, known to us now as a footnote in the larger story of wise King Solomon.

The Bible says little about her, but that she’s named as a sovereign—not merely a daughter-of or a wife-of—is significant. To a contemporary listener of King Solomon’s tale, she was the known entity. Her legitimacy conferred his.

Time corrupts these things. These days she is secondary to him, and maybe sometimes there’s some vague collective memory of her having lasciviously hairy legs.

The Qu’ran tells a separate story about her. Solomon’s on a crusade, the kind Yahweh loves: Dig out the heathens, burn them alive, the usual thing. So he sends word that he’s heard of her and her wealth, and, ooh, her heathenism. He demands that she set her “arrogance” aside and submit.

The queen consults her counsel, whom I imagine as the usual army of old men who like the sounds of their voices. They tell her the move is to break that upstart kingdom down before it becomes a larger threat.

She considers this. Then she decides not to. War, she concludes, brings misery to locals, debases nobles and spoils the land.

Instead she takes the diplomatic route. She shows up at Sol’s pad after several humiliations—he tells her envoys to fuck off, he orders her throne brought ahead of her visit and makes her play all manner of embarrassing games. Still, she comes bearing many gifts—spices never seen then or since—and talks to the guy. Then she goes home, also laden with gifts, possibly converted, possibly pregnant (per the Ethiopian Royal Chronicles).

It’s less discussed how much King Solomon gets from her, apart from an enriched pantry, good conversation and perhaps a nice night. King Solomon is a mild annoyance in the line of Israelite kings; he takes 700 wives (and 300 concubines!), seems to love and listen to them, and raises altars to other gods besides Yahweh. From the Queen of Sheba he learns that nice little characteristic of a polytheistic society: Gods are a dime a dozen, and a petty, jealous one probably isn’t worth relentlessly waging war for.

The books attributed to his authorship in the Bible are amongst my favourites—Songs of Solomon (very sexy, but read by Bible stans as a metaphor for god and his people … weird), Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs. He talks openly about love, sex and despair, without having to add much self-righteous function or meaning to what he feels.

As a teenager, I’d read Ecclesiastes out loud to myself and laugh. I read it differently these days, though. From Ecclesiastes 4:1-4, 8-12, the New International Version:

Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:

I saw the tears of the oppressed—
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors—
and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.

…

Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:

There was a man all alone;
he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
“and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
a miserable business!
Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their labor:
If either of them falls down,
one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
and has no one to help them up.
Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered,
two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

It feels boring to say I’m tired of fighting, of how even our histories humiliate women who have been wise and good leaders; even they get reduced to a lay—maybe, if they’re lucky, a “bad influence” (usually still because they were a good lay). We deserve better than this, men and women alike.

Take it from Solomon: We need each other. We are pitted against each other for a reason.

Leadership is parenting. It’s thankless, not about you or your glory, probably won’t fulfil your sense of meaning. It’s waking up every morning with the weight and well-being of many dependents and the health of an ecosystem on your shoulders.

What’s the right call?

You need titanic stores of patience. You need to see the future without getting hijacked. You need to mind the bigger picture while actioning the ten thousand minor sidequests that consume a day, including soothing the raging warlord in the next kingdom.

Your mistakes get remembered more often than your successes, but you can’t sit people down and tell them everything you did for their benefit. It’s in people’s interests to separate their identities from yours. Sometimes that means perceiving you in opposition.

Makeda, or Bilqis, paused before smiting. She didn’t consider loss or gain in personal terms; she weighed the impacts on people and on land.

If King Solomon led what would ultimately be called a golden age of ancient Israel, a kind of Arthurian moment, I imagine it’s because he learned this. Maybe from Bilqis (or Makeda) or from one of his hundreds of other wives, also royal, many pagan. It absolutely pisses Yahweh off and he vows to take Solomon’s kingdom away—not in his lifetime but in his son’s.

Yahweh always knows how to strike where it hurts.

I did not like this day. It was full-on parenting, following a whole weekend and a night I barely slept. Délos didn’t want to nap. Nothing got done and the house is a mess. A bowl broke—a pretty pink one my ex-husband made—and I spent a wasteful hour contemplating the pros and cons of introducing kintsugi into my life.

By mid-afternoon I couldn’t think straight. The patience was drained and my hair itched. It is falling out.

I lay prostrate on the couch, allowing Délos to catapult himself off me, trying to get me to do something. I put on “Puffin Rock.” I knew Demo would come home after a long day and feel dejected to discover me in this state, so I warned him in advance.

“It has been hard today,” I said.

“For me too,” he answered. “I’ll get home as soon as I can.”

He was at the door an hour later, on his knees to greet his son, who dove into his arms because he’s just so sick of me. I lay on him for awhile, let him stroke my hair while Délos tried scaling us. We talked about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which I follow in horror and sorrow almost every day.

“There are people who kill their families so they can start a new life,” Demo said, as though broaching the topic of a weird new series of cottage YouTube videos he discovered.

“Why would you kill your family to avoid a conversation?” I wondered.

“It’s a lost art,” he said glibly. We looked at each other. “I love talking to you. I’m sorry things are so shitty.”

“They are not,” I said.

Our spice cabinet is full. We have six different types of salt—a spice once so rare, even in this region, that Romans purportedly paid soldiers with it and local bread often still doesn’t contain it. (“We aren’t near saltwater,” Demo said once. “Where would we have gotten it? Venice?!”) I torture my son with my spice experiments—tahdig, learned from a beloved friend; Japanese curry (also from a friend), Sri Lankan dhal (learned on Instagram)—all of which he rejects in favour of mini hot dogs and buttered spaghetti.

We are getting better at negotiating space, avoiding tantrums and bleak depressions. The boxes are gone. Together, a unit, we are two months and counting.

Demo turned to Délos. “‘Puffin Rock’ or chompers?” he asked.

“Chompers!” Délos shrieked. Demo hoisted him upstairs by his ankles, which is now the only way he will permit himself to travel for tooth-brushing.

I listened to the sounds of them going to bed. Délos cried out for me, then stopped. I flinched but didn’t move—that muscle, letting go, ironically atrophies after a bad day.

They have a bedtime routine now. It isn’t something we discussed but something that happened, progressively, when I stopped showing up at bedtime. At first I was ashamed. Maybe Demo resents it. But when I ran a finger across his back in the bed last night, and thanked him for these nights I spend wandering around or playing Two Dots while listening to Terry Pratchett, he softly murmured, “We’re partners.”

We are learning to manage our volatile kingdom with alacrity. It contains wealth we never knew as children—patient, indulgent parents. Too much food. Six different kinds of salt. Careful conversations. We are the inheritors of Bilqis.

[S]omething in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, 2019, p. 126.

Somewhere on Threads, a person asked why The Odyssey has lived such a long life in the human imagination. It’s an epic that’s often treated like a prime Hero’s Journey. The hero leaves home, has adventures, faces a conflict he’s not ready for, fails; faces it again, triumphs, and returns home changed.

But reducing it to that misses the mark. To make the most of the stories it contains, you have to observe its mirrored, refracting faces:

• Two homecomings, those of Agamemnon and Odysseus. One gets home fast and finds death. The other takes ten years.

• Three royal wives—Helen, Clytemnestra and Penelope—who approach limited realities in different ways.

• Two big mother figures: Anticleia, the mother of Odysseus; and Penelope.

The Odyssey is a pilgrim’s progress exploded into kaleidoscopic scope. Odysseus’ adventures aren’t just padding before reaching Ithaca; they’re archetypal encounters with many aspects of the masculine and the feminine, all of which must be integrated before a final test of worth.

There is the solitary Cyclops Polyphemus, seemingly savage but secretly divine—a child of Poseidon. Odysseus doesn’t just wound him to survive; he can’t help but taunt him, revealing his name once he thinks he’s safe. This hubris enables Polyphemus to curse his voyage. Counter that with the deceptive placidity of the invisible shepherd—divine Helios, whose unattended cattle are slaughtered by Odysseus’ men, an act that seals their fates.

The Laestrygonians are huge and bloodthirsty, and the Lotus-Eating men waste away in pleasure and forgetting. Aeolus keeps the wily winds, something that’s easy enough alone but impossible in a group setting, as Odysseus discovers. The lithe and generous Phaeacians are hardworking and utopic. Poseidon, by contrast, expresses emotion through a waterborne violence you have to ride to survive.

There are the men, beloved, on the ship. Sometimes they’re pigs. They want more than is wise, and must always be managed like children. One can make a neat correlation to Penelope managing her son, who is not a warrior but wants to be.

Then there are Odysseus’ encounters with the feminine, sometimes seductive or dangerous; sometimes helpful, loving, indifferent or murderous: The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe, Calypso, Ino, ever-present Athena, and kindly young Nausicaa, whose people finally spirit the exhausted hero home.

The most compelling confrontation happens not on land but in the underworld, where Odysseus faces not only the warriors he fought with—but also his mother, and the wives and daughters of warriors, sent by Persephone.

Odysseus lets them drink the blood of his sacrifice, one by one, and hears their stories. The testimonies of these unknown women go for pages. There are litanies of gods, lovers, children and promises. I’m most touched by the moment with his mother Anticleia. From book 11 (The Odyssey, transl. Emily Wilson, 2018, 286):

“Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.”

His mother says little of her own death, except that she died missing him. She tells Odysseus of Penelope’s trials at home, of Telemachus growing up strapping and dutiful (he does a lot of counsel meetings!, she says), and of his father, who doesn’t even bother sleeping in a bed anymore. It is implied that she spent the last years of her life tending to him.

Anticleia is a mother I know: An embodied collection of aggregated cares that consumed her life, then extended well beyond it anyway. Even as a wraith she still has more to say about other people than herself.

In my darkest moments, I worry this will be my fate, too. But I think I can make the case that it wasn’t Penelope’s.

A complicated man (another less so)

Odysseus is described as polytropos, a “complicated” man. His ego, lusts, grief and deceptions drive the tale along. If it took so long to get home, it’s because he needed all these encounters to interrogate what he most desires.

Agamemnon, who goes home by the swiftest route, earns no such lessons. He lacks a voyager’s curiosity. So he’s never tempted by psychedelic lotuses or Sirens, and he never learns what’s required to persuade a goddess to turn pigs back into men. He never faces the great trolley-problem of either losing all men to Charybdis, or just some to Scylla; he’s never set despairingly backward by a poorly-managed gift of wind.

And he never gets to encounter Phaeacian xenia; their hospitality is so formidable that it robs Odysseus of the right to say he got home on his own, without help. (He falls asleep weeping in their presence. They make a magic boat, fill it with treasures, and spirit him home before he wakes.)

Instead, Agamemnon returns triumphant to his wife, brandishing a slave—the priestess Cassandra, who sees future tragedies and is never acknowledged. Cassandra’s already foretold his death, which he ignores.

Agamemnon is amongst the first to get home, bearing a physical symbol of the city he defiled. As an Apollonic priestess, Cassandra represents the divine. She is also a member of Troy’s royal family. He profanes both institutions by making her a war-spoil.

Thus, toting this symbol of feminine energy that he refuses to integrate—a royal prophet whose words he ignores—he faces Clytemnestra, the wounded feminine gone bloodthirsty. Clytemnestra will consume him whole after first lulling him into domestic bliss.

Then there is Penelope.

Wives of lust and wife of virtue

The ghost
of Agamemnon answered, “Lucky you,
cunning Odysseus: you got yourself
a wife of virtue—great Penelope.
How principled she was, that she remembered
her husband all these years! Her fame will live
forever, and the deathless gods will make
a poem to delight all those on earth
about intelligent Penelope.
Not like my wife—who murdered her own husband!
Her story will be hateful; she will bring
bad reputation to all other women,
even the good ones.”

—The Odyssey, book 24 (513).

Agamemnon’s a dick. Even in death he refuses to integrate his learnings. He envies Odysseus what is essentially a spoil to him—”a wife of virtue”—while casting a boringly familiar shade of condescension over all women, “even the good ones,” because of Clytemnestra’s treachery.

Some people never figure it out.

To reduce Penelope to virtue is to willfully ignore what we see in the text. Penelope hides behind lazy adjectives like “patient” and “virtuous,” as stubborn a screen as the one Christopher Nolan erects to divide her from her suitors. If she’s remembered better than Clytemnestra, it’s because she managed her appearance carefully—a skill women learn early, even now. And unlike Clytemnestra and Helen, for all Odysseus’ faults, she has a complicity with her husband that makes her uncommonly lucky.

I wish that for all of us, really. Which isn’t to say her partner’s faults are anodyne.

Odysseus’ name means something akin to The Hated One (a fun gift from his grandfather), and in many ways he spends his life earning it. In the sack of Troy, he persuades a Greek soldier to fling an infant child—that of dead Prince Hector—off the palace walls.1 He happily slept with Calypso for years before tiring of her. And when he gets home, he delegates the fates of the slave women—made to serve the suitors in all senses of that word—to young Telemachus.

By his son’s decree, the slaves are made to clean up the suitors’ mutilated corpses before they’re hanged with sailor’s rope.

Way to take the training wheels off, dad. But maybe this is good Bronze Age parenting on the part of a king.

Penelope gets that the rules of her world are different for men and women. She can’t afford bombastic acts that draw attention to her wiliness. Odysseus can survive a few careless ego trips; the same indulgence could get her killed.

She had to find some way to rule while not seeming to—and protect her son, a hair too young to take the throne—while confronted by a hall full of suitors laying waste to the pantry.

Telemachus sharpens his fledgling adulthood by relentlessly berating her. Like many children trying to grow up fast, he lacks perspective; he’s working from a mostly-empty man-template. And like many parents, she knows it’s unwise to spell out what only time can teach. She wastes no energy there.

Penelope’s “patience” is sharp, vigilant attention. She listens to every story a stranger brings, adding it to her mental arrangement. Clytemnestra and Helen are her cousins and her lessons: Two women seduced by ideas of breaking free. They win nothing they hoped for. Helen goes home with Menelaus. Clytemnestra is eventually murdered by her own son, Orestes.2

Clytemnestra in particular wanted to rage against the machine, and I struggle to blame her.

Iphigenia—the daughter Agamemnon kills to win his troops a favourable wind before the Trojan war—is not the first of Clytemnestra’s children that he murders. He stole his wife from her previous husband, and murdered both him and their infant right in front of her.

So Clytemnestra is understandably the kind of mad that’s probably become madness. It’s appalling that Agamemnon even believes the ruse when he returns from war and she pulls out all the stops to welcome him, adorning the palace in tapestries and allowing him to bathe before he’s slain.

She, too, ran her kingdom while her husband was absent. Presumably she did it well, and takes a lover who hates Agamemnon as much as she does. But she mistakes her tolerated rule for legitimate rule. Penelope knows not to make that error.

Then there is Helen. How can she resist the seductive quality that Aphrodite wraps around Paris? Even once she’s trapped behind new palace walls, alone with the realisation that she’s run off with a feckless coward, how can she not be seduced by the kindness of Paris’s family? King Priam and Queen Hecuba will hear no harsh words against the woman they now consider a daughter. They face the battle at their doorstep without even once looking askance at her.

Sometimes the family you inherit is better than the person in your bed. It is its own seduction. Helen will spend the rest of her days living with the knowledge that her presence sealed their deaths. Beauty is dangerous; everyone pays the price for hers.

Penelope was the plain cousin. Nobody jostled for her hand. When too many dangerous men courted young Helen, Odysseus proposed a warlord’s truce: All men present would support and defend her husband, whomever was chosen. Everyone swore by that fealty. Menelaus went home with the prize; the others returned to empty beds. And Odysseus turned to the plain girl—the one who knew to obscure whatever merits she had.

They were well-paired for a peaceful union. Penelope stands among few people in myth who understand that the best thing one can hope for is ignorance from the gods, so she manifests little even in terms of flashy talent.

She doesn’t try fighting the system. She plays it for time.

It’s a disservice to Penelope to assume she never remarries out of blind loyalty for her absent husband. When you don’t have all the information, sometimes it’s better not to act. Penelope wants her son to assume the throne. Any husband she chooses—all young men, more ambitious than amorous—is likely to kill him. And on the off-chance that Odysseus is alive, she could easily find herself on the bloodied feasting floor. No one would blame him for executing a disloyal wife.

Caution is her safest move. It takes Odysseus ten years to learn that word. So when he returns, it’s caution that stays both their hands. He only reveals his identity to her after he’s killed the suitors and the slave women. And she doesn’t believe him.

Maintaining incredible sang-froid, all things considered, she tests him instead. Okay, it’s you? Welcome home! And she asks the remaining slaves to move the marriage bed so he can rest.

Odysseus is amongst the only people who know their bed can’t be moved. He built it himself. One of the posts is the trunk of a live olive tree around which he built the entire house. To move the bed, someone—presumably a strong man who penetrated the inner sanctum—would have had to cut it. Knowing this, he becomes indignant.

That’s how Penelope recognises her man.

From book 23 (502):

So glad was she to see her own dear husband,
and her white arms would not let go his neck.
They would have wept until the rosy Dawn
began to touch the sky, but shining-eyed
Athena intervened. She held night back,
restraining golden Dawn beside Ocean,
and would not let her yoke her swift young colts,
Shining and Bright.

They spend that night talking. He lets her go first; the testimonies of many women, living and dead, have tempered him for listening to decades’ worth of pent-up frustrations and suitors tales.

Then he tells her about the war and every adventure he’s had. When dawn finally arrives, there are more scores to settle and people to kill. But they’ve been promised a long and peaceful life, and hope to hold the gods to it.

Weaving the self back into the home

Odysseus loses so many men, so many layers of himself. He does not even recognise his home when he awakens on its shores. The hubris he had at the start of the story—proclaiming to Polyphemus that it was he, Odysseus, who blinded him—is gone.

He enters his palace as a beggar and is humiliated and beaten by men who were too young to follow him to war. And in a kind of resurrection scene, the truth of who he is manifests when he bends his bow and initiates the slaughter.

But the true test of his worth lies before Penelope. She is the gatekeeper between the violence he left and steady domestic peace.

Penelope, for her part, also spends The Odyssey on a journey. It’s one I’m trying to learn from, now that I find myself in exactly the kind of domestic trap I sought to avoid: Entirely reliant on a partner and his means. Overwhelmingly charged with childcare and homemaking, roles I struggle to occupy happily or especially well.

I’ve become an accidental tradwife.

Society closes in, tightens the trap. Maybe Penelope expresses something of my own anomie as she sits on an “empty” throne, pretending not to rule, undoing her day’s work at the loom. Maybe that’s why she’s so quiet.

Raging à la Clytemnestra won’t help. Absconding with a lover like Helen won’t either.

Penelope bides. In what appears to be fallow loyalty, she keeps her own counsel and takes calculated risks: Mitigating her son’s passions. Keeping the suitors patient enough not to overrun her. Proposing the challenge of the bow, suggesting she knew Odysseus was home even before he deigned to reveal it.

When she meets her transformed partner, she is equally transformed by her hazards.

I don’t know, in the end, what Penelope would say were we to find her in Hades. I want to believe her selfhood in death wouldn’t resemble Anticleia’s, whose life was consumed by those she loved. On their great reunion night, Penelope—how she felt, what she lived—is the centre of her own tale, just as Odysseus centres himself in his.

The “virtuous wife” remained her own person after all. I want to be able to do the same. It seems that if you’re partnered, being with somebody who likes you—and whom you happen to like too, however “hateful” they may be—is a dealbreaker. May we all find such people to bolster our sails.

And when
the couple had enjoyed their lovemaking,
they shared another pleasure—telling stories.
She told him how she suffered as she watched
the crowd of suitors ruining the house,
killing so many herds of sheep and cattle
and drinking so much wine, because of her.
Odysseus told her how much he hurt
so many other people, and in turn
how much he had endured himself. She loved
to listen, and she did not fall asleep
until he told it all.

—The Odyssey, book 23 (504).

Just because I had loved Hades
doesn’t mean I was prepared
when my child found her own hell god

—Francesca Lia Block, Psyche in a Dress

I want to break the Eleusinian Mysteries down, then talk about how they coalesce in my mothering-brain. As a TL;DR, they interest me because they act out what’s in many ways the opposite of a Hero’s Journey; this is a katabasis, an underworld trip usually undertaken by feminine characters in myths and fairy tales. Yet nearly every major thinker, and also many heroes, considered this experience crucial.

The Mysteries didn’t start with Demeter and Persephone. The Homeric Hymns’ “Hymn to Demeter” functions partly to give the (much older) ritual a coherent lineage in the culture. They were performed from 1500 BC to 393 AD—a good 2000 years. Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century BC and witnessed the Mysteries of Osiris, suggested they were probably adaptations of the aforementioned.

Who attended the Mysteries and why?

Anybody could come, provided they spoke Greek and never shed another person’s blood. In Food of the Gods (1993), Terence McKenna claimed that “literally everyone who was anyone made their way to the great harvest festival.” Famous initiates include Plato, Sophocles, Plutarch, Cicero and Apuleius. In The Golden Ass, Apuleius tells us the Mysteries involve a voluntary death that paves the way for another life.

It’s not hard to compare the Mysteries to baptism, for the “born again” bit. But I’d say they’re more akin to an ayahuasca retreat.

Their purpose varied by attendee, but we can guess at the intents: Conquer your fears, experience gnosis! While initiates were sworn to secrecy, many nonetheless gushed about it like a guy who just did ‘shrooms and won’t shut up. It was absolutely psychedelic, complete with ritual fasting, sensory overload in alternation with sensory deprivation, and the ingestion of a drink called the kykeon.

Theories about the contents of the kykeon range from the simple to the chemically contrived. Robert Graves thinks psilocybin was involved; others assume it was poppy mixed with horned rye, which comes from Minoan Crete. This belies the Mysteries’ ancientness and provides some clue to their provenance.

Whatever the kykeon included, it existed and you could have illicit fun with it: In 415 BC, an Athenian noble called Alcibiades was fined for “having the Eleusinian sacrament in his home and using it for the entertainment of his friends,” Leary writes.

Structure of the Eleusinian Mysteries

The Mysteries were divided in two. The Lesser Mysteries occurred during the “month of flowers,” or Anthesterion (known to us as February). This was prep for the Greater Mysteries in Autumn.

The Lesser Mysteries opened with the sacrifice of a young pig. Initiates were expected to fast—something people still do when engaging in ritual highs—and drink from the kykeon. They were blindfolded and veiled for purification.

The Greater Mysteries initially happened every five years before becoming an annual event. They took place around mid-September (the fifteenth of the month of Boedromion). For 55 days—including the months before and after—Greek city-states declared a truce to accommodate the rituals in Athens.

Before its start, sacred objects were moved in a procession from Eleusis to Athens. What followed was a nine-day ceremony whereby initiates sacrificed their own piglets by hand, fasted, drank the kykeon, witnessed a divine union, engaged in a terror ritual (possibly akin to live burial), reenacted the pageant of Demeter and Persephone, and sang and danced along the 20-mile procession going back from Athens to Eleusis, where they were ritually mocked by figures in masks.

The whole thing concluded with a bull sacrifice, feasting, and ritual pouring of water accompanied by cries of “Hye!” (rain!) and “Kye!” (conceive!).

We can only guess at much of what happened. Was the divine union literal? It’s said that initiates had to crawl under the marriage bed while it happened. Speculations range from a sex act to the symbolic psychedelic union of barley and ergot fungus in the kykeon.

I find the Eleusinian Mysteries so slippery that, even after weeks of reading texts about them, I still struggle to grasp their shape. But here is what they awaken in me.

A bag full of stars

At some point in the Mysteries the Hierophant—the high priest—presented a kiste or box to initiates. Nobody knows what the box contained. Theories range from a pestle and mortar to something that symbolises genitals (to be fair, a pestle and mortar are also pretty genital).

I have sometimes thought that the box contained a scythe, but that’s of little importance. I want to put my thoughts in context by talking about another container—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

Carrier bag theory is the idea that humanity’s first technology was a recipient—net, sling, bottle, bag—as opposed to a weapon. Hunter-gatherers got most of their calories from what they could gather versus from the hunt, which was energy-expensive and hazardous. You didn’t hunt every day, but you could always gather. To do it effectively, you needed something to carry a child or to bring things back.

But gathering doesn’t make a great story. It’s funner to sit around the fire and hear the latest adventures from the hunt. There’s action, danger, suspense! And there is, of course, a hero.

We’ve inherited that hero and his phallic tools, from sticks to missiles to spaceships, making him and his object central to what we think both progress and storytelling are.

Le Guin takes this theory and applies it to writing, a profession as in thrall to hero’s-journey marketing as we are. In her view, “a novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” She fondly calls science fiction a “bag of stars,” containing all the cosmos and all the ways we relate to each other in this strange reality.

I love that term: Bag of stars.

But a hero isn’t content with being knick-knacked in a satchel. A hero “needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle,” Le Guin writes. “You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.”

For the two thousand years that the Eleusinian Mysteries took place, the Great Men put down their Hero’s Journeys and fell into the bottom of the bag. They let themselves be shaken around, egos dissolving. There is no narrative coherence to what they experienced there, nothing we can put a pin in.

Why did it matter so much? Why does it matter to us?

You can always go … downtown

The Eleusinian Mysteries feel like a digression from my core objective—to mythically make sense of my own pleasures and sorrows of mothering. These past weeks, I’ve come to realise that my postpartum identity crisis can’t be separated from everything else happening to all of us. It’s mixed in the bag with how our system works—what we think progress is, what we believe humanity’s relationship is to earth and the cosmos, and what we expect from each other.

All these assumptions trickle down into the domestic realm, where I face my partner: What can I expect from you? What is right? And when I face my child: How can I protect you from my own dreams? How can I protect my dreams from you? Is this a real opposition?

To be a mother is to be in an underworld. What does one do in an underworld?

Persephone shapes her underworld time into power. She—not Hades—decides when to overturn the laws of death. She is the hostess you meet on your journey and the one you must seduce with your song.

The Mysteries remind us why it was necessary to bury wild, flourishing youth under the earth. Persephone acts as the germinator. Everything dead meets the union between herself and Hades before returning above-ground: As a shoot. A flower. A trauma transmuted. An intent, corrupted or clarified.

Then there is this matter of Demeter, who ritually starves the world whenever her daughter returns to that dark place. If the terror of the Mysteries is real, I don’t think it only revolves around Persephone getting buried; we’re also asked to face the rage of a harvest goddess.

Betrayal is central to ritual. Persephone leaves her mother’s steps and locates power. However much she’s grown into that role, Demeter goes on starving the earth until she’s back, a flower-maiden again.

I have loved Demeter’s Hymn because it describes her grief so relatably. But the relentless, ritual, yearly starvation of the earth? That’s Devouring Mother stuff. That’s a mother who perfectly mirrors the hungry-ghost culture in which we now live: Insatiable, prepared to consume everything around her when the child walks away.

It’s easy to get like that when you’re persuaded that your entire meaning is distilled inside this role. That’s what we’re asked to believe. Sometimes this belief nips at my heels and sometimes it batters me over the head: This is all you’re good for now. Nobody wants you anymore.

But central to the Mysteries is the coming together of Demeter and Persephone as one entity. Usually, we think of becoming as a progression: Maiden, mother, crone. But the unifying of Demeter and Persephone tells us it’s important not to get stuck in the Demeter role, cycling through generosity and withholding year in and year out.

The Mother has to somehow tunnel back into her locus as the Maiden. She, too, must be born again.

Back into the sunshine

We live in a messy sack of stars and the underworld trip is terrifying. It differs from the Hero’s Journey because in order to change, you have to die. There’s no coming back as you were. That’s why people did the Eleusinian Mysteries: To remember that life and death are a continuum, to transcend Bios and fully feel the sensation of Zoe.

Immortality. That was Zoe. To be “as the gods.” It didn’t mean non-death. It meant remembering you are part of the infinite, in relationship to everything. Mother becomes seed becomes crone becomes seed becomes mother.

You are held, and you hold others. The enigma of feminine and masculine meet in that discovery.

We’ve been asked to believe the Hero’s Journey is universally aspirational. I still want to be the hero of my own life. But to perform the underworld journey, something different is required. You are decentred—more than that, you exit the story entirely through a death, for the purpose of finding that, far from central, you are part of a breathing and organic whole.

I thought I’ve walked underworlds before. I haven’t, not like this. Motherhood flung me unwittingly into it. It’s not elective, I can’t yell “stop,” and it feels like dying again and again.

A few stories tell us about men who traverse the underworld: Odysseus, Hercules—who prepared by undergoing the Eleusinian Mysteries—Orpheus, Gilgamesh. This convention usually serves to help get that hero “home,” which is where the Hero’s Journey ends. In Odysseus’ case this is literal. Gilgamesh is told not only to go home, but to allow himself to be domesticated—start a family, hold his children, the very things he rejected for hero-status.

I’m not sure if, in the case of a woman or girl finding herself in the dark and scary forest, the objective is the same. The goal of a mother isn’t to return home; rather, she finds herself transformed into one. Comfort, landscape, scenery.

Whatever agency she had as a “hero” on her own journey is withdrawn. That is the burial.

I don’t know what emerges on the other side. A hero? That doesn’t feel right. Psyche becomes a goddess; Persephone, queen of death and its return to life.

Zoe, then. We become the embodiment of zoe.

My last entry was confused, and it’s because I’m confused. The confusion started long before having Délos, and it’s followed me here, to Italy. Giving up Paris was supposed to be the end of this ego death, and it wasn’t. I’m still sitting in it … and while I suspected that would be the case, I’m hilariously also incensed that it’s so.

Years and years ago I started a company with a friend: Hurrah. Esports agency. Instantly international. I was good at it, but realised, too late, that my partner had a different vision of leadership than I did. I wanted to make something whose values could hold when I walked away. He wanted to build something to live in for the rest of his life.

These visions couldn’t grow together, so I left. I left hard, it was ugly, but it felt like the right thing to do. Days later, the Covid confinements landed.

My ex-business partner checked in with me every once in awhile, but I largely let go of outcomes. He did what he wanted and I let myself get weird. I got into herbalism, studied Hekatean priestesshood. I slept days and stayed up all night. I went back to editing and writing, which always feel good to me, and which you can do in a confinement setting.

Then I walked off to do this mythology masters at Dartington Arts. It felt like … you know what it felt like? Like how a pre-med student must feel when she’s taking some random survey course and it hits her: Cancer is everywhere. Or gynaecology—it’s the solution to everything. And then she knows she’s not just a generalist; she’s going to be a cancer specialist or a gynaecologist.

That’s what mythology felt like to me. And it all clicked retrospectively into my life story, you know? I’ve always loved mythology. Total nerd over the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians when we studied them in school. Stories are everything. Certain stories are holding up our system. They make it feel inevitable. They teach us what it is to be people; what to fear, what to love, and how.

But those dominant stories come at the expense of other stories. I knew that if I could express what those stories were and how they came to be, then find the stories that were gutted in their interest, I’d have a weapon. Serious machinery.

In a sense, that’s what advertising does, and what I’d been doing my whole life. Advertising takes big stories—often ancient myths—and hollows them out to slot a product inside. The result is to make you feel a hole that only that product can fit.

But this is a terrible use for stories, and I knew I couldn’t do that anymore. Because we don’t know what else stories are doing when we bend them to our own intents. Stories are spirits. They have agendas, too. And like corn, or cats, they let us think we’re using them just so they can remain with us … a little longer, longer still, so they can survive the fulfilment of those agendas.

They change us even as we’re changing them.

I have a problem.

I think I’m Hermes, but I’m all Apollo, mentally: Big-sibling energy, the cop of the younger gods. Always trying to force outcomes. Unable to get out of my own strategic head.

Hermes is a different kind of god. Remember The Birth of Hermes? He’s a toddler who looks chaotic, but all that time he has a goal: To get him and his mom out of that dank cave and into Olympus. At the end, he comes out not only with a place on Olympus but a rare gift: The ability to traverse all three worlds—upper, middle and lower.

The only other god who has that right is Hekate, goddess of witchcraft and of the crossroads. The same Hekate who hears Persephone scream, and guides Demeter to Helios. It’s both Hekate and Hermes who help Persephone leave the underworld.

There’s even an epithet for when they tag-team: Hermekate.

I’m digressing.

I feel frustrated. Since walking away from Hurrah my career has become an amorphous, unrecognisable thing. This has been worsened by the arrival of AI, which caused the loss of many of my steadier gigs, but to be honest, I was losing things anyway. Not just because I had Délos but because I’d lost the taste. I was testier with clients. I no longer believed in the value of what I was doing.

Then other things happen, you know, to messy the pot. After my masters, everybody I did that programme with goes off. They write books, make and showcase art, launch successful myth-driven influencer businesses. I walked away with a thesis that I self-published as a book, and quiet anxiety. I tried and failed to buy a Paris apartment. And weeks after that failure, I discovered I was pregnant.

I made a child. That’s not a small thing. I understood it wouldn’t give me meaning, per se; and also that I can’t make Délos my whole meaning. We need to raise our children to leave us, steady and confident. To make Délos my universe would compromise the task.

And yet all these factors seemed to push me up against the wall. As my work dwindled, I realised I couldn’t just apply for the kinds of jobs I used to take. I can’t work late, or on weekends, or travel on a dime; not while cosplaying single-mom in Paris. When Délos fell ill, I had to be there. And in any case, as I mentioned, I had muddied my career trajectory and no longer really wanted to do those things.

So, big push. A shove, really, right up against the wall. The savings dwindled. Finally I had to surrender the last thing holding my identity together, or so I thought: Paris, home for 18 years, the place where my heart lives.

But even this narrative is a little too romantic. By the time I got over my grief and decided I needed to leave, I was impatient to go. I wanted to get to the other side, to finish the underworld bit.

And now I’m here, Friuli Italy, for good. It’s been a week. And I feel exactly the same, sitting in front of my desk, as I did there back in Paris.

Now I’m reminded of something my masters professor Martin Shaw said: “You don’t just dip your toes in the underworld and say you did it. You must be immersed in its waters. It has to take something from you.”

I thought I was doing the right things. I thought I had let it take something from me. But in retrospect, no. I just dipped my toes and expected to be rewarded.

I’m Apollo, trying to be Hermes. I’m trying to force an outcome, doing things by calculation and expecting a result.

How does that work? How to be Hermes instead? I keep thinking that if I can solve the Hermes problem, I’ll fix myself. But that’s Apollo again, isn’t it?

At the start of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Hermes awakens just-born, kills a turtle and makes a lyre. Music enters the world for the first time. Then, when Apollo’s preparing to lock him up and throw away the key, he gives him the lyre, with advice that’s a little about music, but mostly about interaction: Be a good listener. Be curious, interested, empathetic. Know you can do it.

For whoever inquires of it
with skill and wisdom
and is willing to learn,
that person it teaches
through its voice
all those things
that delight the mind
when it is played easily
with gentle familiarity
for it shuns laborious drudgery.

But whoever, ignorant from the first,
questions it violently,
does so in vain,
the notes will be wrong
and stuck in the air.
But you may learn
whatever you please. (IV.480-490)

Hermes! The expert at the shit sandwich: I’m gonna give you something, then correct you, then compliment you. What finesse.

It’s no small thing that Hermes is most often credited as the god who feels empathy for both gods and mankind. In older times he acted as a kind of fertility god, ruling the principle of Hetaira: Love between traveling friends, or the affection between mistress and lover. Everything sacred to him is held loosely in the hand.

Apollo can’t have the power to traverse the three worlds. He would abuse it, even if he didn’t mean to. He’s too strategic; notably, only he and Zeus share the powers of divining the future clearly. That alone is compromising, the kind of ability that would compel him to drive outcomes. The Psychopomp—the world-traversing spirit guide—has to be Hermes.

And lest we forget, Hermes does ask him for divining power. Apollo demurs, but he gives him rulership over the bee maidens. It’s not clear prophecy at all. It’s prophecy that may be true, or not, depending on whether the bees are fed honey.

What a weird gift. But also, it’s aligned with Hermes’ nature—a god of fortune, and fortune is two-faced. He was no fortune to the tortoise he murdered, but the results yielded fortune for the world. Then he gives it to Apollo without reaping the benefits himself.

I know I can’t solve what happened to my life by trying to figure out Hermes, because that’s such an Apollo thing to do. There’s no silver bullet for the messiness of existence.

What I came to understand about Hermes, contemplating all this today, is that he isn’t a strategist per se. Even if he wants to get to Olympus at the start of the Hymns, it’s a stretch to say that the tortoise, the cattle and all his other misadventures were steps in some well-ordained PowerPoint.

Also, he specifically asks Apollo for clear-seeing the future and gets bees. It’s half of what he wants, but he never knows which half.

The thing about Hermes is that he trusts his nature, wholly. He also trusts his desire, wholly; he doesn’t question it, ever. He trusts that by acting on his nature, he’ll eventually be linked to his desire. Even if the trajectory is utter chaos.

Do I trust my nature? Sometimes. My inner Apollo might just be that capitalist guy who lives rent-free in all our heads: Get off your ass, Angela! Go make something that generates market value!

Do I trust my desires?

This is a different question. I think it’s hard to get to a place where you trust your desires. It’s harder still to stop filtering desires through a notion of service or some other value. Someone once told me that my desires have already been filtered—they’re the direct result of my life experience, and they are valid just because they are.

That’s a crazy notion in a Protestant Ethic-driven context. Desire often feels like a slippery slope to unthinkable debauchery. But what if it isn’t? What if it just means reconnecting with body wisdom, with our selves, which we’re trained to ignore from when we’re children?

I’ve been wrestling with the question of desire for years. Trying to get myself to trust it, to see it clearly and to follow it true, to allow my body to make choices in right relations, which aren’t the same as moral or socially-acceptable choices.

But there are problems with this thesis. By doing that I tacitly expect a reward. And also, there’s the matter of the bees.

Desire has its own order of operations, and it doesn’t always look like stable job, marriage, home, baby. Even less so now, for our generation. We are amongst the bees.

All this is to say: I miss feeling valued in a room where I’m witnessed. I miss feeling competent, and mattering to people who aren’t my partner and my son. I miss—and this is embarrassing to say—how people used to take notes when I spoke.

For so long, and not just since Délos, I haven’t felt like that person. I feel like I’m constantly flailing for her, looking for her, and that my efforts stink of desperation. (What if I’m never able to make a living wage ever again?)

I’m Apollo, trying to force love in a different guise.

It helps me, at least today, to write about these things. To think: Okay, the story’s not over. I am amongst the bees. Trust what I’ve learned: That I can trust my nature. I can trust myself. And desire has its own order of operations.

I will not disappear into desperate, lonely motherhood. I am still Angela. I just can’t see her outlines clearly yet, and I’m so impatient to embrace her, and maybe I just can, even without seeing her, but I’m not sure. It could just be bees.

Spring’s over and I need to get the Eleusinian Mysteries out of the way. I’ll do that in a few days. The purpose of this post is 1) To update you on my move, and 2) provide context about where I’ll be coming from, Mysteries-wise.

Paris to Friuli, One-Way

The road trip from Paris in the alarmingly big van took two days. We bounced around, Délos between us in the carseat, pointing out every truck and bus. On our last night in Paris, under the sweltering historic heatwave, I threw open the windows which were no longer impeded by furniture.

It was the Fête de la Musique and the bleats from a determined trumpet flew in with the breeze, ruffling my son’s hair. He threw his arms over the trellis and smiled.

For the first time in the five years I’ve lived in that apartment, I saw the moon. It was a good gift.

We’ve been in Italy less than a week. There’s been one nightmarish Ikea trip and one fight (resolved by ice cream). The kitchen is ready, the living room too. The bedrooms are coming together and the wardrobes need hangers. The office is a mess, and will be, until we set up the SIX Billy bookshelves we bought.

“Do you think there’s enough space?” Demo fretted—a laughable concern, given that he just moved us out of 40m2, which is smaller than our salon … but I genuinely am not sure.

My astrological chart holds Mars in Scorpio in the fourth house—the house of family and home. Where you came from, how you make one. A positioning like that points to family trauma and an unstable childhood. But it also points outward—to a tendency to break homes, break connections. To be suspicious, quick to anger with loved ones.

I’ve learned steel-tested patience in motherhood, my voice forever at a barely discernable alto even when I’m close to boiling point. But this move has the potential to activate the worst parts of me. I’m irritated by Demo’s father, who barges in anytime he wants, screaming our names, demanding urgency no matter what we happen to be doing. I’m suspicious of Demo’s sister, who is nice until she isn’t. Last winter, on two separate occasions, Demo nearly drove off the road because she called him in a volcanic rage.

My chart has a big stellium in the eleventh house, suggesting my fortune lies in community. But the fourth-house situation indicates I have a tendency to break community down. It didn’t occur to me, until maybe today, how carefully I cultivated the people around me in Paris. I can’t do that here. I’ve inherited a family and have to make do. And it’s hitting all my triggers.

You think you’ve beat a level, and all you get is another, harder level. I have to fight my own reflexes here.

Otherwise, the house is rambling, old, weird and beautiful. The garden is wild and full of bees. I’ve got a block of wood from my time in Devon that I’ve placed in the soil, hoping whatever magic I found there can root alongside me, mingling with Friulano lore. Irritation makes pearls. And as I creep around at night, long after everyone else is asleep, I feel it: The house breathing around me, catching my scent. It’s making room.

I can root here. I can try.

Horus and the Gilgamesh lady

Here I want to get at what really obsesses me about the Eleusinian Mysteries. But to do that—I’m sorry, I know this is the worst—I have to describe a dream.

Some years ago I dreamt I was in a classroom. With me were just two people: A man and a woman, standing in front of me. The man told me he was Horus, and that he’s over 10,000 years old.

“I don’t think Horus has existed that long,” I said, because even in dreams I’m pedantic.

Horus looked at me like I was stupid—like, I’m him, wouldn’t I know?

(I researched this later. Horus has indeed existed at least 10,000 years! So Dream Angela was totally wrong and shouldn’t correct people—or in this case, gods—about their own histories. A lesson for life, frankly.)

Anyway, after he introduced himself I turned to the woman. “So that’s Horus. Who are you?” I asked.

“I am the epic of Gilgamesh and all the great stories,” she replied.

“How is that?” I asked, because Dream Angela is still a jerk. “Gilgamesh is such a dudey story.”

It was her turn to look at me like I was very stupid. Then I woke up.

In A Blue Fire, James Hillman warns us that interpreting our dreams to satisfaction makes us stop performing the inner work that dreams engage us in. Once you define a symbol, you file it away and cease interaction. Mystery solved. So I wanted to spend time with this dream without pulling apart all the threads holding it together—undoing the tapestry for the dubious pleasure of a few neat yarn balls at the end.

Carl Jung had many approaches to dream interpretation. There’s one in which you meditatively plunge in, allowing your imagination to continue exploring the dream as though it’s a story still being told.

That’s what I did. I went into a forest—in Italy at the time, aptly—and did a little meditative, automatic writing. I saw the woman expand until she was no longer discernible as a figure. She became more like a tear in space/time. Then Horus leapt through her, into her, and played out the story we know from the myths: His birth to Isis, who hid him amongst women from his murderous, usurping uncle Set. His return home and war with the uncle for the kingdom of the sky. His elevation as the rightful king, father of alchemy—a gift his mother worked to get and whispered into only his ear.

After performing this exercise I was left with the conviction that the feminine and the masculine can’t be held by ideas of gender. They complete each other, within us and around us. The actor—the masculine—dives into the story—the feminine. The masculine moves through the stuff of it, forever held and supported by the feminine: His mother, women who hide him, and ultimately a sky-kingdom. The sky itself was a goddess.

But to distill the feminine and masculine into action versus containment, or atmosphere, or nurturing, isn’t right either. The feminine also takes action in distinct ways: Isis negotiating for, and gathering, the alchemical gifts from heaven; Isis impregnating herself with the enchanted member of her dead husband Osiris; Isis stealing Ra’s name to overtake his power.

We learn from Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch that women and mothers staged hunger strikes to protest imperialist capitalism, leading to witch hunts and state control over their bodies. Claire Evans’ Broad Band reminds us that connected computing came from women’s work; the sector was once so dominated by women that, in the mid-twentieth century, the computing equivalent of horsepower was the metric “kilogirls” (Evans, 2018, p. 11). Lucy Jones’ Matrescence tells us that females in various fauna kingdoms not only often destroy males upon insemination; they sometimes also destroy themselves in the interest of their children’s welfare. (Sometimes they also eat and destroy their children, like ant queens do as they build their kingdoms. This bit comes from Bernard Werber’s Les Fourmis.)

But here I am breaking the masculine and feminine down into gender again.

Shooting for the Rebus

I can’t really quantify this: The relationship between feminine and masculine, and what they truly mean. Ancient philosophies have tried—I’m thinking specifically about the principles of yin and yang, of duality—and it remains a mystery. But it’s exactly this that obsesses me about the Eleusinian Mysteries. The plunge into this mystery is what people got when they entered Eleusis.

It merits saying that the Eleusinian Mysteries didn’t start with Demeter and Persephone. Intellectuals and pilgrims had been going to Eleusis twice yearly, in spring and autumn, for this initiation from 1500 BC until roughly 393 AD, when Emperor Theodosius, a Christian, shut the party down.

So it’s a ritual and a practice that pre-dates the story it would later revolve around. Jules Cashford writes, in her 2021 paper on the Eleusinian Mysteries, that the custom goes back to the Mycenaeans and Minoans in Crete, and can be traced earlier still—to Old Europe’s Neolithic rituals. Herodotus suspected they came from Egypt, home of our very own Isis, who is often syncretised with Demeter.

In short, the ritual is old. The stories around it may have changed but the themes central to the Mystery remain the same. Men plunged underground for the type of initiation that typically happens to women in stories. There is a holy child, a giver of life, and it’s not Jesus; it’s Persephone.

There’s an alchemy it describes that can’t quite be quantified outside of direct experience. I’m reminded of how the gift of alchemy—of combining the masculine (Red King) and the feminine (White Queen)—is culmination in the Rebus, the hermaphroditic child. This is coniunctio, the perfect conjunction of opposites.

We’ll be diving into all this in a few days—a general description of the Mysteries and the themes that emerge. It’s absolutely psychedelic. And while the ritual itself is no longer performed, we can still grapple with it, and hopefully let it do something to us, as with our dreams.

Meantime, I wish you kharis.

Final note on dreams

I attended VivaTech Paris before leaving and it both annoyed me and freaked me out about AI. While I don’t believe it will ever be able to replace the importance of human interaction (conflict being an interaction too), I did conclude that I need to find playful ways of better understanding AI that doesn’t make me want to kill myself.

Being someone who assiduously records her dreams, I uploaded 8 years of dream data into Claude. This has been very handy for recognising patterns, running themes in my dreams over long arcs of time, and getting a grip on instances in my life when dream-patterns seem to change.

The output isn’t always perfect and sometimes Claude is dumb. It will miss dreams, get dates or people wrong, or graft meaning in ways I sometimes find questionable. Nonetheless this has inspired me to start keeping a dream notebook by my bed again, because I’m dreaming a lot, and differently, since this transition has begun. Claude also drew my attention to how much my dreams have changed over different periods of my life.

It’s been an interesting experiment and I’d be curious to know if you end up engaging in it too. But for a great deep-dive into the relevance of dreams—in the human story and maybe even for you—I recommend a book, not AI: Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming by Anthony Stevens. It also includes some petty Jung and Freud correspondence that is just chef’s kiss.

Now comes the hour foretold, a god gift-bringing,
A wonder sight.
Is it a star, newborn, and splendid up springing
Out of the night?
Is it a wave from the Fountain of Youth, that is upflinging
A foam of delight?
Is it a great immortal bird that is winging
Hither its flight?

It is a wave, high-crested, melodious, triumphant,
Breaking in light.
It is a star, rose-hearted and joyous,
Risen from night.
It is a flame from the world of the gods, and love runs before it,
A quenchless delight.
Let the wave break, let the star rise,
Let the flame leap.
Ours, if our hearts are wise,
To take and keep.

—Brigit’s creation song by Ella Young, told by Alice Kane; via Sean Kane’s Wisdom of the Mythtellers.

At the start of this year I drew tarot cards, one for each month.

This month’s card: The Tower.

People are as scared of The Tower as they are of The Devil or Death. The Tower depicts total, catastrophic destruction. A crown flies off the top of a structure as it’s hit by lightning, people flying out in every direction. It’s a card ruled by Mars, the Roman variant of Ares.

I’m glad I held off trying to interpret the cards then, because I had no way of knowing what The Tower would represent. I only felt dread: It’s my birthday month. Now, a few days into June, I get it.

This is the month we move to Italy to be with Délos’s dad.

So far I’ve packed four boxes. I’m throwing things out and selling others, organising things that have waited years for attention.

It’s a bit like going through the belongings of someone who died. There are things I can’t bring into this new life, because they have no place there. They don’t even really have a place here. Why did I keep my France Esports conference lanyard? Or an unused pack of nipple pasties shaped like black stars (was I, at any point in my life, planning to use those)?

I dreaded The Tower for months. But now that it’s in my face, I’m remembering all the things I happened to learn about Ares and Mars this year.

Ares is amongst the few Olympian gods who never took or hurt a woman by force; he even kills a man for violating his daughter. He’s the father of the Amazons, and the god that Aphrodite, goddess of love, chose to cheat on her tech-obsessed, robot-cohabiting husband with. (Sorry, Hephaestus.)

Aries is the zodiac sign that kicks off the astrological year. Mars energy is initiator energy: Even as it destroys, it creates, the chariot advancing ahead of the fire. This is starting to sound a lot like the message we get from menstrual myths—from adolescence on, the potential for creation and destruction live inside a woman’s body.

It’s in darkness—that absence of visibility we so fear—that things get born.

A song that makes the world

The Irish don’t actually have a creation myth. In Sean Kane’s Wisdom of the Mythtellers, Ella Young and Alice Kane take some liberties creating one. It’s one of my favourite stories.

In Tír na nÓg, the land of youth and where gods dwell, Brigit wakes from a dream. She’s heard the earth cry out, longing for beauty, and feels a strong desire to meet that need. But when she tells the other gods, they freak out.

“It’s so ugly there!” they shriek, for at this time, the earth is void and darkness—a chaos-place with big nightmare potential.

Still, Brigit persuades them to accompany her there, and when they alight, their imaginations run riot. Each god gives something to the earth according to their gifts and affinities. But when one proposes recreating Tír na nÓg on this increasingly fertile ground, Brigit stills his hand: “No!” she cries. “Everything we make here must belong to the earth alone.”

In the end, they christen the earth Tara, and it’s so beautiful that the gods decide to stay. This is the part of the story I like best. Brigit is like, “Cool! Enjoy that. I’ve got other stuff to do.”

And she leaves.

Entangled as we are in our own personal myths of motherhood, I suspect we forget that we can do that: Create something, then leave. It doesn’t take away from the integrity of the creation. It doesn’t make you a bad steward. Sometimes we are there just to trigger the initiation, to awaken that fire in others. And then we go.

Read more

Délos and I spent over a month in California—a week more by choice, another by chance. The pilot for our flight had a heart attack en route and we were sent back to San Francisco, where we waited another week to take off again. In that time, I hung out with my sister. Délos and I stalked new parks, ate ice cream, soiled our clothes. We didn’t see more people; the polite excesses offered guests were exhausted.

My mother accompanied us back to Paris to help dismantle my life. On Friday I bought us all new shoes at Souliers Sylvia, a 38-year-old shop near Abbesses. They have leather boots in the window that look like they’re from another time. And indeed!—they make shoes for the theatre and also for the Moulin Rouge.

I bought a pair of lace-up red shoes and felt magical.

While ringing up our goods, the salesman remarked on the importance of sometimes spoiling one’s own mother. Then he looked around and added, “This used to be part of the abbey, in the old days when people knew Montmartre was not Paris. It has an old soul. Ghosts are everywhere. That’s why I live here.”

“Me too,” I said. One month more.

Montmartre was once the countryside beyond Paris’ city limits. It was mined for gypsum for the foundations of its neighbouring metropolis. People joked that there’s more of Montmartre in Paris than there is Paris in Montmartre.

Artists like Van Gogh and Degas sat on the hills and watched the windmills turn. Actors, prostitutes, gay people and dancers created shanty-towns and dance halls where citadines could debauch by night.

One night those homes were razed to the ground. Paris annexed Montmartre by force … and on the smouldering remains of ramshackle neighbourhoods, they constructed the Avenue Junot. It remains one of the most beautiful and expensive places to buy a home.

Despite this violence, this rape of Montmartre, there is still more Montmartre in Paris than the opposite. The Theosophic artists raised on Montmartre’s subversive beauty created the ads and artwork that people most associate with Paris today.

At the Moulin Rouge, more champagne is drunk every weekend than anywhere else in the world. Fans of the film Amélie still stalk her steps—the café where she worked, the veggie shop where she once said even artichokes have hearts, the lawn beyond the Sacré Coeur.

The wheat was cut and scorched. All this grew in its wake. It has been our home.

Demeter’s grief-driven sidequest

Some weeks ago I related the story of Persephone. In the middle of it is a strange tale of how the Eleusinian Mysteries, the sacred rites that kept this story alive, were given to the people.

After Persephone is abducted, the goddess Hekate leads Demeter to Helios, who tells her that Hades took her. When she leaves him, Demeter wanders in grief. She grows haggard and old, unrecognisable.

The Greeks had two primary words for time: Chronos, linear time; and kairos, the “right” or divine moment. Gods experience time differently from mortals, but Demeter’s experience is painfully relatable: Grief slides you out of chronos. It ages you and compels you into exile.

It’s hard to understand how people go on existing as if nothing has changed. So you meander on the outskirts of social ease, planting stray kairos seeds. People fear a destiny that can grip you and rip you off a path; it’s no wonder we often avoid the grief-touched.

Eventually Demeter arrives in fragrant Eleusis. It’s ruled by king Keleos, and his four daughters happen upon the prematurely aged goddess. From the “Homeric Hymn to Demeter”:

She sat in the shade, under the thick growth of an olive tree,
looking like an old woman who had lived through many years and who is
deprived of giving childbirth and of the gifts of Aphrodite, lover of garlands in the hair.

The daughters wish Demeter “kharis,” a tiny, beautiful word that means “pleasure and happiness from our relationship, from now on.”

Demeter relates her origins—that she lived in Crete long ago, then was abducted by pirates. Eventually they landed in Thorikos, on the Greek mainland. That’s 500 kilometres north of the island of Crete; Eleusis is another 80 kilometres north of that harbour.

Oral history is entangled with the tales of god-wanderings, and it’s a way of remembering what happened to an entire land. Minoan Crete in the Bronze Age was massively matriarchal, led by a priestess-driven theocracy. Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, has been revered there since at least the new Stone Age. This is where Demeter comes from.

But Mycenians, bearing Indo-European thunder gods like Zeus, come battering down from the north. They mix with the society they find and upend it, weaving their own mythology into those of the conquered. Their mostly-male gods adopt many roles once held by goddesses, and the gods and goddesses that remain are recast in what we now know as Classical Greek culture. These adopted gods join their journey of conquest—the voyage Demeter describes.

That’s how we get the pantheon we inherit today. Hera, once the goddess of unions, including safe business dealings, becomes a shrewish wife. Pandora, who issues gifts of craft to humanity, becomes a poisoned gift herself, a way of telling men that women can’t be trusted. Athena, who stood for strength, strategy and the double-pronged medicinal nature of womanhood (heal or harm), becomes a classic female apologist for patriarchy.

Demeter, too, is changed by the progression of chronos. She was once a goddess of abundance in the general sense—a vast role that includes the giving of death along with life.

But you can’t tax vegetables hiding in earth. What you can tax is wheat, which must be reaped and stored in cool, dry places. In a classic case of PR repositioning, Demeter gets progressively associated with wheat, which comes to Athens via what is now Crimea. Some believe wheat is the golden fleece Jason found on his hero’s journey.

“Doso is my name,” Demeter tells the daughters of Keleos. “It was given to me by my honored mother. But that was then.” Doso means giver of gifts. This name, meant to hide her true nature, belies her origins—from a time when heritage passed through mothers.

Kallidike, the most beautiful daughter, proposes that Demeter find work with their mother Metaneira, who has birthed a son after years of effort.

So Demeter goes. When Metaneira encounters her, she says:

“Woman, I wish you kharis. I speak this way because I think you are descended not from base parents but from noble ones. You have the look of aidōs in your eyes,
and the look of kharis, just as if you were descended from kings, who uphold the themistes.

We humans endure the gifts the gods give us, even when we are grieving over what has to be. The yoke has been placed on our neck.

But now that you have come here, there will be as many things that they give to you as they give to me.

Take this little boy of mine and nourish him. He is late-born, and it was beyond my expectations that the immortals could have given him to me. I prayed many times to have him.

If you nourish him to grow till he reaches the crossing-point of life,
You will be the envy of any woman who lays eyes on you.

That is how much compensation I would give you in return for raising him.”

Demeter takes her son, Demophon, and raises him as hers. She doesn’t feed him food or breastmilk; instead she anoints him with ambrosia, the food of the gods, and breathes on him. We know something of breath-magic in our own myths; Yahweh, the Abrahamic god, breathes life into clay to make mankind.

At night when Demophon’s parents sleep, Demeter lays his tiny body onto the fire, burning his mortality off little by little.

But Metaneira catches her one evening. She attacks the goddess and cries out, which causes an enraged Demeter to reveal her godhood. She sheds her small size and old age, utterly radiant.

Demeter accuses humans of ignorance, of trusting their eyes over ritual. “I would have given him honor and unwilting time,” she cries out, “but now there is no way for him to avoid death and doom.”

Every year, she goes on, Eleusis will experience war amongst its own sons. But she counsels them to build a temple on a prominent hill, just under the acropolis, where she will teach the Eleusinians her sacred rites—the rites that will convert the story of her daughter’s abduction into a rite of transformation.

When Metaneira tells her husband all this, Keleos sets to work building the temple. Demophon, meanwhile, is given over to “inferior” nursemaids, with whom he becomes colicky and loses his rosy godlike bloom. Demeter returns to her grief.

It’s said she made that year “the most terrible one for mortals, all over the earth.” The earth offered no seeds and humans were almost entirely wiped out from hunger.

But even gods suffer when land loses lustre. They get no offerings, no burning fat, so Zeus sends the gods to give Demeter whatever she wants to sort this out. She tells them to fuck off until Persephone’s returned, and that’s what drives Zeus to see Hades.

When he descends for this visit, Hades lies reclined on his funeral couch beside Persephone, “much under duress, yearning for her mother, and suffering from the unbearable things inflicted on her by the will of the blessed ones.”

I want to mark this passage because I’d previously written about the importance of Persephone’s transformation—betrayal as ritual, all that stuff. Still, this was a trauma for her. She may have made the best of it, but she was deeply profaned, like the grains that decay before life comes again.

Hades offers Persephone a deal:

“Go, Persephone, to your mother, the one with the dark robe.
Have a kindly disposition and vigor in your breast.
Do not be too upset, excessively so.

I will not be an unseemly husband to you, in the company of the immortals.
I am the brother of Zeus the Father. If you are here,
you will be queen of everything that lives and moves about,
and you will have the greatest honor in the company of the immortals.

Those who violate justice will get punishment for all days to come
those who do not supplicate your spirit with sacrifice, performing the rituals in a
reverent way, executing perfectly the offerings that are due.”

This sounds very noble, a precursor to what Persephone could become, and it makes Persephone happy. Still she prepares to leave. It’s in this moment that Hades prepares the pomegranates for her to eat, “stealthily,” for “he did not want her to stay for all time over there, at the side of her honorable mother, the one with the dark robe.”

You know the rest. And if you don’t, read it here.

The baby and the grain

Demeter’s sidequest is weird. She wanders in grief, cosplays an aged nursemaid, and loses her shit on humanity when found doing something objectively scary. Any mother would take Metaneira’s side.

“To be laid on the fire and yet to remain alive, indeed to win mortality—that is no human fate,” ruminate Carl Jung and Carl Kerényi in Essays on a Science of Mythology (Routledge Classics, 2002, p. 137). “Does the goddess, perhaps, overstep the bounds of the humanly possible by reason of her sovereignty in that other domain of hers, which includes the fate of the grain?”

They argue that from the perspective of Demeter, grain’s passage through fire proffers a kind of immortality. It’s a better fate than humans get on paper, but in a way, we’re no different from the plant itself. In Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, Charlene Spretnak recalls that the Athenians labelled the dead “Demetreioi,” or “Demeter’s People” (Beacon Press, 1992, p. 106): “Not only did she bring all things to life, but when they died, she received them back into her bosom.”

We’re starting to learn something central to Demeter’s legacy. The Eleusinian Mysteries enact an ancient resurrection story that connects human transformation to the life cycles of earth and the cosmos.

But let’s return to Jung and Kerényi. “The Demetrian fruit is perfected for human nourishment in the fire,” they write. “Whether it is parched or baked as bread, death by fire is the fate of the grain. Nevertheless, every sort of grain is eternal.”

In other words, by bathing him in fire, “Demeter treats Demophon as though he were grain.” It is the greatest blessing she can give, thwarted by Demophon’s own mother.

Here’s something we know about the gods: They have a logic all their own and empathy is a characteristic that only Hermes is ever credited with having. It’s not a common trait, which is part of why their actions always seem so bombastic.

Demeter doesn’t see it as her role to relate to Metaneira. Demanding instead that Metaneira relate to her is perhaps a way of demanding she be better. Just as Persephone becomes Kore, “the shoot,” decaying in hell to release life back into the world, so too does she treat Demophon like earth-fruit. Interestingly, like Hades, she does this secretly, without consent.

Trauma begets trauma. But it also begets strange gifts in the chaos that follows. We get the Eleusinian Mysteries. Persephone becomes the rule-breaker of death. And Demophon, though thwarted in receiving the full gift of immortality, maintains a kind of immortality anyway—not by his own life but by his story and the rituals that follow. Like grain, he joins an eternal song through the rites of his people.

Maybe that’s the best we can hope for. Amongst the Greeks, there existed two words for the concept of life: bios (biological life) and zoḗ. The latter exemplifies eternal life, or more specifically, “god-kind life.”

Eternal life didn’t signify non-death. Rather, zoḗ signified a remembering.

To understand this, it’s key to consider how humans can attain it—through the consumption of ambrosia or various other foods and drinks of the gods: The wine of Dionysus, or god-flesh in Aztec culture (psychedelic mushrooms). Hallucinogens or disinhibitors often result in the sense that a wall has dropped. You become more open; you remember how to connect, and that you’re connected.

That is what it meant to live as god-kind.

To the eternal, we are grain. In Demeter’s hands, that’s a blessing. Grain never dies. Fire refines its next stage of life.

A brief note on alchemical journeys

In a piece to come I’ll talk more about the Eleusinian Mysteries—what they signified and how they were reenacted. Later we’ll dig into alchemy. The themes are already here, planted.

Alchemy is the ultimate example of how when you level up, what usually awaits you is another, harder level. The seven alchemical steps are various processes of literal breakdown, with the goal of refining what remains.

This sits on my mind in my transitional last month in Paris, a home I chose nearly 18 years ago, and that chose me earlier still. Lands are jealous; it was maybe childish (though very Gemini-coded) to imagine I could straddle two places with a baby in my arms.

I stand in the ashes of lives I made in a place where I felt loved, with no idea what lies ahead. I can’t remember when last I felt like this. It feels like helplessness. There’s grief too, and it surprises me when I least expect it.

Paris is in a heat wave unseen in over 1000 years. We can’t spend much time outside, so I’m potty-training Délos, who runs about naked and gleeful. His skin is smooth like a little otter. I surrendered more books to book boxes in various parks. A guy at a café gives me old newspapers for my dishes. Next week, the boxes arrive and I will fill them, probably poorly, for a version of life I don’t yet know.

Readers, I wish you kharis. Will you wish it back to me? Can I ask for that? I don’t know what else to hope for.

I promised more Demeter and Persephone stuff, plus an Eleusinian Mysteries bonus, and I’m working on it. But none of it is right yet and it isn’t where my head is.

I’m back in California for the first time in 7 years—last time I was here was pre-Covid. A lot has changed. There’s a national park over the San Francisco freeway tunnels! Glen Cove in Vallejo has a park inspired by ninja boot camp! My parents set us up in a house whose fridge keeps magically refilling with junk food and other odd commodities, like Eggo waffles and double-yolk farm eggs! I have eaten pickle-flavoured Pringles and Oreo Reese’s!

It’s Délos’s first time here and I don’t think he’s ever seen so many Filipinos in his life. He’s having a whale of a time, and part of me grieves the version of him that could be: Surrounded by cousins and the children of my childhood friends, who are delighted to have a new playmate. He eats cookie dough ice cream for breakfast and has no rhythms here—a state that is, privately to me, infuriating.

I am trying to be cool about it, like John Travolta circa Grease.

My parents are happy to be grandparenting on their turf. Délos is showered in cars, tractors and busses. A trash truck passed near the park and all the boys froze; the truck obligingly let out a “honk honk!”—something the French ones never do—and Délos giggled. I tried rolling down a hill to see if he would follow, and he just lay down on the concrete, waited for something to happen, and walked off.

At this stage in his life, Délos follows me everywhere. He seems able to root anywhere; my parents playfully ask if they can keep him here. They call him American, and he is that, too. But he is also Italian and French. If anything, he seems to be rooted in me.

For now, in any case. Once, we were all rooted in flesh.

The landscape under my skin

I’d forgotten I come from a land in its own right. The air in northern California has a baked, crispy smell when it doesn’t rain, a scent of warmed tar. Honeysuckle grows wild; as a child, I once put a honeysuckle flower in my mouth to see if it tasted as sweet as it smelled (it doesn’t, don’t do this). Anise grows along the Vallejo marina and leaves a spicy scent in the air, and fat lazy magnolias open overhead, so thick they look like they’re dripping from the branches.

Under a bridge on the marina, children from a local school have painted trolls.

I remembered how to drive. Everything here is made for driving, and it’s easy, cars weaving chill around each other on wide freeways whose lanes shrink and widen as you veer toward your destination. The Sun Valley Mall, which once felt like a crowded watering hole, is now a sad place whose foot traffic has largely been displaced by Veranda in the Willows, where kids run on astroturf while parents watch nearby. Cotton candy from a machine costs $8.

Across Vallejo, where my parents now live, my uncle is preparing his famous lamb marinade for a dinner we’ll have on Thursday. He posts marinade updates on Instagram. He hasn’t seen my parents in years, though they live 15 minutes away from each other.

There is a texture to the landscape that once was mere backdrop to my personal intrigues. I recall visiting California with my first French boyfriend, who looked up in amazement: “The sky seems bigger,” he said. The moon follows you in the car, which amazes Délos as it once amazed me.

When I drive, there are the hills I took for granted, awash in verdant colour—poppies, crocus, foxglove. I once crawled through Redwoods and climbed weeping willows and cherry trees, fingers stained with fruit and sap. Along the side of the Benicia bridge, the Mothball Fleet—a ghost fleet of old ships—has disappeared.

“Sold to third world countries,” my mother said. We once took my father’s boat and motored right up to them. They creaked and groaned in the water. It scared me; I felt sure that some phantom in a tattered uniform would come to claim us. On some nearby island, my dad buried a poo I spontaneously made as a toddler. He sealed the grave with an X like pirate treasure, giggling.

I feel at home and also lonely. People come and pay homage; my son stays up past bedtime and gets cranky. It’s hard to talk to Demo; he’s heading to work as we go to bed. The world I live in feels distant.

Once upon a time, we would’ve had to buy phone cards to speak. Now there is Whatsapp, but the distance has the same effect. It’s disorienting, cord-breaking. The love we found when I came to Italy on vacation wouldn’t have lasted if California were still my home.

This feels startlingly obvious, like a story I’ve lived. In the United States, under the wide expanse of California sky, the rest of the world feels dreamlike. Where does it go as we motor from one big box to another, crossing bridges and overpasses? Half of my friends have never left the country, not even to Mexico—a thirteen-hour drive straight down that, from where I’m sitting, feels as remote as Europe.

What remains of me in Paris? There will be no one to meet us at the airport and swing Délos around when we return. I’ve already decided to extend this trip, just a little, unable to face what wind is whistling through the life I’ll soon leave.

What remains of me here?

Only memory. I rehash high school with friends. They have families, new boyfriends. I can feel the politeness in my brief interruption of their lives; everyone obliging, but only because I don’t live here. When I leave, my presence will leave no ripple. Nobody knows what to say when we hug goodbye, though my uncle, last week, spoke frankly as he lazily inclined his face for a kiss: “See you in another ten years.”

Today at the Tunnel Tops, Délos got soaked playing in the water pumps and I changed his clothes, removed his shoes. In the stroller, he lifted his feet and leaned back, letting the wind caress his toes. This air raised me. It’s an atmosphere I fled, fearing it would hold me fast.

But no one who remained has been held fast. They grew wild in the understory, fucking through bars, buying homes and new cars, raising children and drinking wine so robust that every glass feels like a dizzying meal. Everything changed, and nothing. If I left a wound in this earth, no scar remains.

One evening we visited my aunt, who’s cultivated a garden in the backyard. Their parrots were agitated by Délos’s red vest, so we stayed outside, watching hummingbirds sample water from blown glass, their bodies like trembling jewels suspended in mid-air. Délos toddled to a small fig tree and chattered to it. He leaned in and let a big hand-sized leaf caress his face.

I thought about the fig tree that raised me in Fairfield, a former farm town that is now a spillover for the urban sprawl that now cradles my family. Below is an essay I wrote about it before Délos was born. It was written as a response to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

This isn’t quite a myth, but there are whispers of myth here. The fig tree is entangled in human affairs. When I remember my childhood, it’s the fig tree I swivel to, its skin and smell as beloved as a mother.

The common fig tree from root to crown

Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

—Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, p. 330)

Do you consider the tree at the edge of the carpark at work to be a being or an object?

—Gordon White, Ani.Mystic (Scarlet Imprint, 2022, p.12)

“How did you play as a child?” A salesman asked this last year, when I visited a shop in Paris to buy a desk chair. I didn’t know how to reply, so he went on: “Did you rock, hop, climb, spin, swing?”

Instantly: “I climbed.” He nodded and confirmed my choice of chair, a ludicrously pricey HÅG Capisco whose frame let me throw my legs all over it. “Movement reveals everything of the inner state,” he explained. “To put the mind in creation, the body must be in recreation.”

So it happens that when I sit at my desk, finding new ways to negotiate the relationship between my legs and chair, I remember the trees of my childhood: The willow behind the library who tilted toward the lake, wondering that my father would let me venture so high up its trunk (as an adult, I found my perch was hardly higher than I had been). Or the cherry tree in my babysitter’s backyard, which I shimmied to find cherries bursting from sunshine. But mainly I remember the fig tree.

My parents bought their first house when I was six. It was at least 30 years old—ancient in California terms. It had two bedrooms, wood that hid mice, and windows that shook when the train passed behind the yard.

But it also reflected an earlier dream of a self-sufficient suburbia, rare for American houses now. The property was covered in mature fruiting trees—plums, peaches, grapevines climbing rusty trellises; lemons, and mandarin oranges.

My favourite was the fig tree. It sat in the front garden within a manicured square of hedges. The hedges behind her were tall, obscuring the house; but the others were knee-high, creating a frame for the tree from the road. From the tree itself, I saw everything happening on my street, but could not be seen by my parents.

We were made for each other. A bit of dwarfed growth, low on her white trunk, created a natural step into her lap, where her branches extended around me. This curvature welcomed my body like a basket; when the tree was in full bloom and I wore my dark green overcoat, I felt invisible.

From this spot I read countless books. Sometimes I suspended myself by my hands and feet between her branches like a starfish, staying still as long as possible while observing the world beyond—most often the goings-on across the street, where a girl sometimes made out with her boyfriend outside the front door.

Those years with the fig tree span the longest I lived in one house. I couldn’t play too far away, and my friendships were abrupt affairs. I practiced songs in her lap and ate her fruit, an exotica I’d never seen: Fleshy pale green on the outside, vivid red and white inside, like peering into an organ. When my sister refused to try them, claiming the insides looked like worms, I threw a rock and made her cry. At day’s end, my limbs and hands were sticky with the milk extruded from her five-lobed leaves, which felt like hands—rough and veined with fine hairs on one side, firm and smooth on the other side.

Myths are replete with magical trees.

There is the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruit—the Malus, a curse on the apple that remains lodged in its Latin name—triggered the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.

There is the Great Cosmic Tree: “Its branches held up the sun, the moon, the stars and the constellations, and its roots reached all the way down into the abyss,” writes Elif Shafak in The Island of Missing Trees (2021, p. 329), a novel whose narrative voice is shared between an adolescent girl and a fig tree. The fig tree speaks those words, reflecting on her own personhood.

What does a fig tree remember? High on a chocolate munchie, I once placed a hand on a nearly 150-year-old Australian Moreton Bay fig tree in Santa Barbara—a mammoth of a tree, the kind people intuitively know to build around. Its seedling was a gift from a seaman to a local girl in 1876. (So many fig tree stories involve little children!)

Upon contact, my world turned red. I heard explosions, saw burning, felt rage swell from the roots. A fig tree’s roots can grow to three times the length of its branches, breaking through wood and metal. This one had branches thicker than my head; its trunk measured at least five times my body in width.

Alarmed, I pulled back my hand. “Warrior tree,” I muttered, utterly stoned.

Compared to that tree, mine was a baby. Perhaps she was only the age I am now. Unlike her Australian cousin, she was a common fig tree, Ficus carica, the most popular species for home gardeners.

Yet she, too, possesses an underlying fierceness. Her life potential extends to 200 years, and while she has no special pollination needs, she welcomes intervention from the fig wasp, whose queen enters the fruit—the tree’s ovaries—to deposit eggs. Whilst there, she sheds pollen from other figs, fertilising the moist inflorescence that will serve as her grave. Just by entering, she often loses her antenna and wings. The fig consumes her for nutrients; functionally, Ficus carica is a carnivore.

This is a quality she shares with all fig trees. Yet for such viciousness, in human tales the fig tree is something else altogether. Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their nudity, and a fig tree’s roots rescued Romulus and Remus from the Tiber River, bequeathing the name of another species, Ficus Ruminalis (Mike Shanahan, Ladders to Heaven, 2016, p. 52).

Buddha is said to have found enlightenment under a fig tree’s shade (p. 33). Amongst the ancient Egyptians, the goddess Hathor was said to live in a Ficus sycomorus, where she welcomes the right-living dead (p. 108). These stories suggest fig trees are, if not nurturing toward humans, at least interested in us. We are entangled with them—their roots, their branches. Gods live in their crowns.

I was sixteen when we left the house with the fig tree. Though too old to nestle in her lap, I tried, straddling over branches that by then pinched uncomfortably. My foot no longer fit over the small wedge, but I didn’t need it. My limbs nearly touched the earth as I sat in her crook. I wondered if my hair still smelled of her. We moved to another city an hour away.

One day I left school and simply drove, looking for something I couldn’t name. My car stopped on my old street. The houses seemed smaller. The driveway, which my father once painted forest green, had been repaved. That grand square of hedge surrounding my tree did not exist anymore; instead, I found pavement where she once stood, the better to park two more cars.

The memory of that paving feels like a wound. Years into my life in Paris, I ordered 40 bars of fig-scented soap, whose smell vividly recalled my fig tree. The soaps are gone, but the sense memory still twists my stomach, a knot in my cosmos that will never loosen.

I recall the chair salesman’s implication that our movements in childhood are how we continue to manifest our inner wellness as adults. The fig tree formatted me. The negotiations of my body against hers remain in my limbs as I fidget in my desk chair, legs over its arms as over branches; or, when climbing other trees, remembering her patience as I tested my weight on this branch or that.

Meditating on dwelling and habitat, Gordon White in Ani.Mystic cites the principle of Umwelt, “the world constituted within the specific life activity of an animal.” For a given tree, “there is the squirrel who builds her winter lair in the branches, the fox who makes a den among the roots, the ants in the leaf litter at its base, the owl who lives in his hollow, the wood-boring beetle laying her eggs. But for none of them does it exist as ‘a tree’” (2022, p. 186).

The fig tree was someone in whom I learned to dwell. I shared her with ants that eased up her branches, seeking the nectar I’d released from her leaves; and the birds on the stones surrounding us, picking at the fruit that fell before my fingers could find them. So, too, did she bear my secrets, just as she bore my weight. And when her life ended, I mourned her.

But loves formed in childhood can grow childish with time. Sometimes love becomes a languishing, spent on an altar that has already been forgotten. I went outside one night in Italy, where I now live some of the time, and touched a tree—Malus, whose fruit broke Eden. I felt nothing, no connection, and panicked. I sat in the grass, appealing to the landscape: Where do I belong, how do I live? It was the sky in the end that gave me comfort; even in its movements, the sky remains stable when your feet don’t root as others do.

A tree does not live in the sky. It stays fixed, gathering information and energy, fighting threats and allocating resources as best it can, making use of fungal networks, birds, wind patterns, human bodies. Most trees can outlive me; perhaps, by the time my own tree knew I existed, it felt like the time I sensed a ladybug who’d taken a ride on my arm, only to find, as I turned my head, that she was already leaving.

In The Island of Missing Trees, the fig tree talks of how humans disagreed over the Great Cosmic Tree’s species, which caused them to divide into warring nations. “It was a very unwise thing to do in my opinion since all trees are essential and merit attention and commendation,” the tree says. “You might even say there is a tree for every mood and every moment” (Shafak, 2021, p. 329). She follows this statement with a medley of ailments, and the trees whose company may cure them: The cherry tree, for vanity. The aspen, for dealing with trials. For love sought or lost, “come to the fig, always the fig” (p. 330).

To be chosen by a tree is to be loved. I was chosen once, when the movements of my life were rooted in place. But here is what I learned from my fig: Unlike the sky, a tree cannot follow me. One must earn their trust by showing consistency, like the earth. In my memory, the fig tree is forever in season, green hands expressing toward the sunshine. This seemed like response enough to any question I could think to ask. I was rooted then, but not by choice; she taught me how to thrive anyway.

In Italy, after that night of failed contact—of impatience, really—I return to the Malus. He is not my fig, and has lived tragedies of his own: Trimmed and cut so often, over so many years, that he grows misshapen and stunted. The apples he should be making never come, and mushrooms blossom beneath him as vines wind up his trunk.

He is dying, slowly.

I sit under the tree. I ask nothing. He asks nothing. There is no need: I breathe out, he breathes in; he expresses oxygen, I inhale. We connect in the acts of living and dying. My back against his trunk, I remember what it is to root, and who first taught me the trick of it.

“How are you doing?”

This was asked by my doctor when I went to get a diagnosis I already knew: Délos had gastro.

My kid isn’t a projectile-vomiter; he’s an Exorcist-vomiter. He sits up in the dark and releases a flood of ghostly bile. The nights were a logistical dance—set Délos aside. Undress us. Strip the sheets. Check if the voms got into the duvet, mattress, pillows. Run the machine. Get us in the shower. Get us dressed. Change the sheets. All this while Délos screams.

A gauntlet par excellence.

“I’m fine,” I said. I coughed. “I just have this cough that’s been around for months.”

“What about work?”

“It’s hard,” I said, for lack of anything better.

She nodded. “It’s hard to work when you have a kid who’s frequently sick.”

To this I said nothing. I knew that, like I knew Délos had gastro. Nothing to prescribe, it’s just got to pass. Plenty of fluids, lots of sleep, eat what you can stomach. Wait out the storm.

Poisoned blossoms, blossoming

The narcissus was a wondrous thing in its splendor. To look at it gives a sense of holy awe
to the immortal gods as well as mortal humans.
It has a hundred heads growing from the root up.
Its sweet fragrance spread over the wide skies up above.

And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the churning mass of the salty sea.
Persephone was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands
to take hold of the pretty plaything.
And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her.

—“Homeric Hymn to Demeter,” The Homeric Hymns.

Spring explodes in my face. The sunshine kisses my skin, the aggressive mating of flowers attacks all my facial orifices (The Beatles interject: “...in my ears and in my eyes!”).

It’s nature’s new year. Persephone emerges from darkness and the astrological wheel resets at Aries, the initiator. My mind turns to Demeter and Persephone, to the transgressions that make mothers weep and birth new cosmos. Betrayal as ritual.

The story of Persephone’s transformation is many things. It describes why we have seasons. It’s another rape and abduction tale, not only of the maiden but of the region—an oral memory of northern tribes arriving, wielding testosterone-driven thunder gods and spreading their norms along with their seeds: An Indo-European tale as old as time … except not, because once there were matriarchs.

Like Demeter.

But we’re being too human focused here. This tale, like the stirring of spring, is also not about us. It’s about the larger forces in constant interaction with our lives.

When Romeo and Juliet unite in death, it’s the once-split community that thrives: Two divided houses, now joined in a flowering, fertile grief. Tristan and Isolde’s union bears no fruit. Their efforts to be together, fucking over everyone else in the process, sow all sorts of drama but no offspring, no peace. When they part again but reunite in death, blossoms thrive and trees bower their graves.

Sometimes the love story isn’t about what we want. It’s about what land wants, what a culture needs, what a god is thirsty for, what is wanting to enter the world through our frenzied rutting and heated conflicts (sometimes a child but not always).

Things worth remembering as spring explodes in my face, and as swaggering, unserious men march us toward lamentable futures.

How Persephone becomes Kore

Demeter, great goddess of plenty, has a daughter called Persephone. Dark-eyed, lithe and solar, she’s best described as “such a PYT, catching all the lights,” per Justice, and one day while dancing around, picking crocuses with her companions, she plucks a narcissus.

And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her. Hades appears on his chariot. He sweeps her up and the land swallows them whole.

What a flower, the narcissus. Subject of a myth of its own, that of the vain boy Narcissus, it’s forever connected with the notion of youth being netted by its own beauty.

Narcissus never leaves the edge of the pool through which he discovers his own reflection, and becomes the flower that traps Persephone. When she gazes into it—into the timeless reflection of seemingly immortal, but desperately fragile youth—it’s land itself that embraces her, forever.

Demeter goes crazy with grief. Where is her baby? Why hasn’t she come home? No one answers, neither on Mount Olympus nor on earth. On the 10th day of her weeping, Hekate the titaness emerges from a cave and says, “I heard your child’s scream.”

Hekate, the goddess of crossroads and lost children, attended to always by great black dogs. She takes Demeter to Helios, who sees everything from his great sun-chariot in the sky.

Helios intones, “Demeter of Rhea, with the beautiful hair, out of respect I’ll tell you that Hades has taken her. Zeus made this arrangement because Hades wanted her for a wife. I have to say, though, you could do worse than have him for a son-in-law.”

This is shit consolation for a mother and I don’t know why he didn’t put a sock in that last bit. Unsurprisingly, Demeter’s grief becomes so much worse that the Homeric Hymns compares it to the Hound of Hades in terror. Her rage lambasts the land: Nothing grows, all goes bare.

Eventually this suffering trickles up to Olympus. People are starving; there are no harvests to gather, no burning fat to please the gods. So Zeus sighs and sends sympathetic Hermes to gather Persephone back from hell.

Persephone emerges, pale and blinking, flanked by Hermes and Hekate, the only two gods that can move between the worlds. Demeter embraces her daughter, then draws away: “You didn’t eat anything, did you?”

That eternal rule: Never eat of the underworld!

Except Persephone has—pomegranate seeds. It’s enough to bind her to death’s landscape, at least for a time. For one-third of the year, she returns to Hades. The land goes barren as Demeter’s grief returns, sharp and piercing. But she always comes back in the spring.

Persephone’s other name becomes Kore: “Maiden” or “shoot.” She represents the fertile element that must be buried to catalyse new life.

Gaia and the narcissus

This is a sparing telling of the Demeter and Persephone story, otherwise replete with sidequests and little details.

There are many tales about how the flower Persephone picked, the booby-trapped one, came to be there. The Homeric Hymns reports Gaia set the narcissus there, as a favour to Zeus.

Why would Mother Earth do this? Gaia is the daughter of chaos. The stuff of life has nonlinear designs of her own: Dynamic equilibrium.

Gaia’s logic is fertility-logic. She wants life to thrive. For that to happen, you need, well … fertiliser. Something vitamin-rich, a sacrifice really, to make soil more than dead earth. That’s what it is to be the Kore: The Maiden and the shoot, bursting from the death-world.

When people listened to a story like this, they heard it reverberate in three dimensions. There’s the entertaining drama between the gods. There’s the earth-story about seasons and agriculture. Lastly, there’s the spiritual element.

The deepest, darkest parts of us—what we today call the subconscious—stands in for soil, the inert awaiting a catalyst. Lived experience gives soil its minerals, laying the groundwork for what Carl Jung would call our individuation. The best way to find out who you are is not by living in harmony but by creating frictions, either on purpose or by error. Sometimes paths choose you … and land is a jealous thing.

All this enters the stuff of us. We may not understand what we encounter, but they remain with us forever.

“We think we can bury things—feelings, experiences—and they’ll just go away,” the writer Jules Cashford said once. “But what gets buried always returns to meet us in life.” So it goes with Persephone.

Expanding Persephone beyond the confines of abduction

For a long time, Persephone’s story struck me as trite.

Maybe it’s because I focused primarily on who she was: The Maiden, abducted. Swallows a few seeds, doomed now to spend a few months in the underworld. She’s perpetually blooming, but also a perpetual victim. A perfect girl for an Epstein Files culture.

This focus never allows her to grow past that, and never allows us to integrate what we see of her in other tales.

It’s only after the events described that she enters into a power so incredible there is simply no space for it in the world above, where she is confined in her identity as the Maiden, not the Shoot.

Here are four details we learn about Persephone from other stories:

In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Hades cheats on her with Minthe, who’s incredibly jealous of “dark-eyed Persephone.” Persephone transforms her into the plant we know today: Mint, and Hades gives it a sweet scent as a kind of eulogy.

Peter Kingsley’s In the Dark Places of Wisdom recounts the existence of an old Istrian cult of Apollo that reveres earlier iterations of the sun-god. In their lore, Apollo doesn’t naturally possess wisdom. Rather, at night the sun-god goes to the underworld. Persephone fills Apollo with insight while the world sleeps, and he emerges each morning resplendent in earth’s secrets. Followers of this cult isolated themselves in darkness, a living burial really, in hopes of emerging enriched. Symbolic burials were also a feature of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Lastly, and these are perhaps my favourite details: It’s Persephone, not Hades, who overturns the rules of death. She does it twice, both times for love:

• When Orpheus ventures into the underworld, he sings to Persephone in hopes of getting his late wife Eurydice back. Touched by the song, she grants him passage from the underworld and releases Eurydice from death. (Orpheus later fudges this, but that’s not her bad.)

• Aphrodite sends Psyche to retrieve beauty cream from Persephone, a task she isn’t meant to survive. Persephone is kind, does what she asks, and allows that living, breathing girl to leave the realm with the last item she needs to reunite with Eros.

So who’s really ruling the underworld here? It’s not to wife-napping Hades that lovers go.

For four months, that’s Persephone: Impassioned whisperer of soil-wisdom, decider of fates. For the other eight, she returns to her role as the flower-bearer—a job we give children at weddings.

On the great wheel that spins us

In December 2025, I drew a tarot card for each month of the coming year. I decided not to interpret the cards then, instead letting the meanings unfold as the months arrive.

This month’s card is The World.

The World is sometimes perceived as the Divine Hermaphrodite, sex organs hidden by a drape. In alchemy, the Hermaphrodite harmoniously joins all opposites—masculine and feminine, spirit and matter, shadow and light—and represents the culmination of the Magnum Opus.

By the time I got to writing this section, my son’s gastro passed. His fever held for eight days and we went to the emergency room. They checked his urine, blood and heart … no issues, “sometimes a fever just lasts long,” they said. My mother called it “lagnat laki,” or sickness from a growth spurt.

I’ve been very tired. My doctor was right: It’s hard to work, to focus on the next thing I’m supposed to become, while also trying to single-parent.

This month my partner Demo and I decided we’d move in together in North Italy. I can rest, he said, and gather my bearings. And we’ll be two parents, not one: I can, presumably, work after-hours and travel again, assuming I ever figure out the next thing I’m supposed to do.

It’s painful to be in this situation. I’ve been in Paris for 17 years. I became an adult here and built a life, good friends and nice playdates. My apartment is the first I’ve ever had that is just mine, not negotiated or shared. It’s full of me, five years of me.

I like that there are kids like Délos and families like us: Multilingual, navigating different family structures. Where Demo lives, everyone knows each other. It’s scandalous to marry someone from the other side of the mountain, never mind another country.

My autonomy is limited, the land alien. But my son thrives there; he already has that knack for expanding into places his mother can’t follow. He seems happiest when we’re all together. He can do things with his dad that scare me, and he’ll learn the names of trees and birds, and what season and moon phase to cut wood in.

All these things are good. Are they good for me … if they are good for him? Is that how this works?

I think on The World: The Divine Hermaphrodite, an enlightened state that joins all opposites. The more I look at it, the more it looks like Schrödinger’s box: A present-state where all futures are possible before they collapse into just a few possible realities. Maybe The World is merely a holding pattern, a little chaos-box before the next cosmos arrives.

“And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her.”

To transmute my grief into a state of grace, I need Persephone.

One-third of the year, she is vast. For two-thirds, she returns aboveground, the Maiden again.

Since giving birth, I feel like I’ve been whittled down. I thought it was my job to fight back.

I miss the Angela I was. It has felt important to fight for her, to try to make things work in my own space. But the world in which I used to work is changing, and opportunities have gone thin; in any case, it’s not easy to travel for a meeting anymore, do late nights, or be available on weekends, not alone with a toddler.

That Angela is, at least for now, on standby.

So over the past few years I’ve become primarily important to just two people: My partner and my son. It’s a dramatic reduction, and it feels harder to carve out an Angela that isn’t the mother and the partner. Sometimes I lose sight of the star.

I made Délos. Three days of labour, swimming in darkness, pain and blood.

Now I am his mother: His Demeter, his Aphrodite, his Hera, his Thetis, his Inanna. His Ereshkigal.

There are people, parents mostly, who share their views on my position in tones alternately cloying and cruel: “Parenting isn’t about you or what you want. You have to make sacrifices.”

Betrayal as ritual. Sometimes it’s not your mother or your community you betray. Sometimes you feel you’re betraying some kind of first principle, possibly yourself. Is that a ritual, too? I want to shout about systems history. I want to give long, heaving speeches about matrescence and the importance of supporting and reintegrating mothers. I want to recite that one statistic about how a mother’s well-being is actually the most important determinant of a child’s.

“If I had to make my childhood better,” a close friend said, “I would have wanted a happier mother.”

But wait. Breathe. I can’t think like this. Remember Persephone. Persephone, remember?

One-third of the year: Queen of the Underworld. Two-thirds: The Maiden.

Life is cyclical. Power, too.

This won’t be forever. Nothing is forever. But gods. I’m trying not to feel grief, to succumb to an idea of erasure and not renewal. I’m trying to remember that burial is part of the ritual. I’ll be a better mom. I’ll be a better partner. I just hope I’ll still, also, be Angela. Because I can’t help thinking that once I start collapsing the possible futures—releasing my home, my city, my functional autonomy in a country I chose, and that, once, chose me—it’s going to be hard to dig myself out.

La chamade

Persephone. Persephone.

All-powerful goddess of the dark places in our souls and under our feet. The one person who can overturn the rules of death. Persephone who isn’t afraid to express who she is: Someone whose heart softens at love.

She is only that entity for the smaller part of the year.

Life demands kaleidoscopic ways of being. Our meaning comes from all of them: Meaning not as a noun but as a verb. We are meaning all the time.

I don’t know if I’m at the end of a two-thirds season or merely at its start. I think I’m not supposed to know. I think I am starting to be okay with that. I’m trying.

Off to pick up my son. He’s always happy to see me. I can feel how I am everything to him at this time in his life, and it’s such a short period. But I also need to be more than just his; otherwise, like Demeter, I will not be able to let him go without scorching the earth.

In the weeks to follow I’ll be exploring other angles of the Demeter and Persephone story, as well as the Eleusinian Mysteries that centre it, and why they were so vital to the Antique thinkers we remember today.

There’s a lot to unearth. Spring’s the time to do it.

I’ve been mulling over this essay for awhile and I’m still not sure how to begin.

I’ll first say that my heart is full of grief—for the times we’re in, and over the people responsible for it. That I’ve become a mother in an epoch when we watch livestreams of children being targeted by snipers, and parents get forcibly separated from their young by government agents, makes it feel personal.

It feels all the more personal because, for the first time since I started working at roughly 15, I’m struggling to find work while raising a child who frequently gets sick.

This isn’t just about the more obvious injustices. It’s also about what’s happening to us, the way this economy is structured, and the economics of cruelty. It’s about being a mother in a time when a guy with a lot of money feels comfortable calling empathy a weakness—a statement he doesn’t much qualify in words, but qualifies plenty in action.

So we’re going to talk about a few myths, and the worldview that brought us where we are. I need to explain what I’ve come to understand are the origins of our corrosive practice of capitalism and what it does to people and the practice of mothering.

FYI, some—but not all—of this is excerpted from my masters thesis and book, Remember His Name.

The fall of man

Thinkers who do seek to … describe the course of human history on a grand scale, haven’t entirely got past the biblical notion of the Garden of Eden, the Fall and subsequent inevitability of domination.

—Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Charles Darwin famously hated how his work on natural selection got drilled down to “survival of the fittest.” He felt it too easily invited people to believe that life is a zero-sum arms race that favours the strongest and most aggressive.

That’s pretty much how things have borne out today. We live in a time of Hero’s Journeys—big swaggering men who fancy themselves Jason or Hercules, the long arcs of their lives forever extending upward, a Babel of phalluses. I love this quote from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin:

Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care.

Humans have the weakest young for the longest amount of time. We’re clearly designed for cooperation. Yet we’ve designed structures—relatively new ones—that favour independence over interdependence, “masculine” traits over “feminine” ones, binaries over kaleidoscopic diversity, even within ourselves.

What that usually means, especially for caregivers, is extreme isolation and a struggle to make ends meet.

Why are we like this? Did we choose this?

I feel this was imposed upon us. But choosing differently means learning stories about how we got to be here, on this relentless quest that pulls us out of dark forests and onto the capsizing boat of the destiny-crazed self-made Hero.

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is in many ways the textbook for understanding our cultural source code. He wrote that “man is dominated by the making of money,” and that economic acquisition has become our ultimate purpose. He’s often credited with linking hard work to godliness.

“Weber was trying to answer a very specific question: why capitalism emerged in western Europe, and not elsewhere,” explain David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The world had many wealthy merchants and proto-capitalist types, but “almost everywhere, anyone who acquired an enormous fortune would eventually cash in their chips.”

Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment … But imagine … being the very first person in one’s community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours—who would, increasingly, also become your employees. Anyone capable of acting in such a defiantly single-minded manner, Weber observed, would ‘have to be some sort of hero’. [This] is the reason why it took a Puritanical strain of Christianity, like Calvinism, to make capitalism possible.

If you feel there’s a dogmatic quality to the way we live, that’s because it has a mythic root. It’s not subtle: Pete Hegseth, the American secretary of defence, sports Crusade tattoos and believes he’s leading a literal Crusade on Iran. He took the oath of office on his personal Bible and preaches extremist Christian ideology to the military. “Wherever we can, we invoke the name of God; we invoke the name of Jesus Christ,” he recently said on a podcast.

Meanwhile, Peter Thiel, a so-called “oligarch-maker,” literally believes he has a personal responsibility to expedite biblical Armageddon.

These aren’t fringe beliefs; they are here, planted in the soil of our shared modernity.

The Abrahamic god Yahweh is the seed from which Christianity grows. Maybe this is why where we first meet him so haunts people seeking to investigate modern malaise: The Garden of Eden, birthplace of man and his downfall.

This is the Judeo-Christian creation myth from the book of Genesis. “In the beginning,” it famously begins, “Elohim1 created heaven and earth.” Over five days, he creates light, separates the waters, makes planetary bodies, earth, and living creatures. On the sixth day, he “created humans in his image … male and female.” On day seven, he rests.

Earth’s first humans, Adam and Eve, live with other creatures in Eden, a perfect garden. At its heart are The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Yahweh tells Adam (Eve is not around yet) he can eat what he likes, barring fruit from the latter tree, “because when you eat from it, you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:17).

For a time, all is well. But then a serpent appears, “more clever than all the wild animals Yahweh Elohim had made.” It obliges Eve to explain Yahweh’s directive, then corrects her information: “‘You certainly won’t die! … Elohim knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened. You’ll be like Elohim, knowing good and evil’.” So Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge, and offers some to Adam. They realise they are naked and hide.

Once Yahweh understands what’s happened, he issues punishment—first to the serpent:

“You are cursed more than all the wild or domestic animals.
You will crawl on your belly.
You will be the lowest of animals as long as you live.
I will make you and the woman hostile toward each other.
I will make your descendants
and her descendant hostile toward each other.
He will crush your head,
and you will bruise his heel.”

Then Eve:

“I will increase your pain and your labor
when you give birth to children.
Yet, you will long for your husband,
and he will rule you.”

Then Adam:

“The ground is cursed because of you.
Through hard work you will eat food that comes from it
every day of your life.
The ground will grow thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat wild plants.

By the sweat of your brow, you will produce food to eat
until you return to the ground,
because you were taken from it.
You are dust, and you will return to dust.”

After this, Yahweh banishes mankind from Eden.

This is practically a prognostication for modernity. Adam’s punishment establishes toil as a fact of life: “By the sweat of your brow, you will produce food to eat until you return to the ground.”

The punishments for Eve and the serpent, however, are strikingly similar. The latter must crawl on its belly, reduced to the lowest of creatures. Eve’s belly is also singled out, for painful labour, and she too is subordinated: “You will long for your husband, and he will rule you.” Just as the serpent must live underfoot of Eve’s progeny, suffering blows to the head, women also fall below them, for Eve mothers all future husbands.

What’s more, Yahweh’s statement, “I will make you and the woman hostile toward each other,” implies a kinship between the serpent and Eve that presumably merited unique distinction.

“Until the appearance of the written word, a writhing snake had been a graphic symbol of female sexual energy and power,” writes Leonard Shlain in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Shlain, a neuroscientist, believed the introduction of alphabets in any culture causes the left side of the brain to swell, suppressing characteristics associated with the more “feminine” right brain.

He explains the difference between left- and right-brain thinking thus: “A holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine. Although these represent opposite perceptual modes, every individual is generously endowed with all the features of both.”

Following writing’s arrival, the several hundred years required for a civilisation to adjust to left-brain swelling yields witch hunts, the banning of images, religious warfare, rigid authoritarian control that demeans women, and imperialist behaviour. In keeping with this, and because women themselves become anathema, the symbol of the snake becomes negative.

“In mythology, the killing of snakes is almost always a dog whistle for the destruction of the goddess religions,” writes Amanda Yates-Garcia in Initiated. You’ll recall that Marduk, Sumer’s sun god, takes power by killing the snake goddess Tiamat. Egypt’s Ptah defeats the serpent Apophis, nemesis of sun god Ra. In Greece, Apollo kills Python, whose powers of prophecy he appropriates. Even the Bible’s Revelation features a fight with a great serpent.

The origins of Eden

Myths have many streams and tributaries. Here we will explore a few of Eden’s.

Early Judaism drew heavily from Sumer, home to Inanna, the goddess of love, war and fertility. The priestess Enheduanna, daughter of the Akkadian king Sargon, wrote Inanna’s hymns between 2285-2250 BCE and is the first known author.

All major Mesopotamian commerce moved through her temple in Uruk. Sumerian culture saw multiple disruptions in this period, including the invention of cuneiform; literacy thus proliferated alongside the oral tradition.

Confirming Shlain’s conviction in the cultural havoc literacy wreaks, Enheduanna’s nephew, a king in a nearby city, did something unheard-of: He declared himself a god. This enabled him to appropriate temple wealth for his own ends.

In Inanna: Lady of Largest Heart, Betty De Shong Meador speculates that Enheduanna worked to elevate Inanna above other gods as “a dissident act protesting the intrusion of the king into the domain of the religion.”

In one hymn, Enheduanna describes Inanna’s combat with a mountain called Ebih. Before eventually defeating him, she seeks support from the sky god An, who usually sides with her. Surprisingly, this time he refuses. Something on Ebih’s summit has seduced him:

Trees
Fruit laden, full grown
Stand luxuriant on its slopes ...

Lion pairs
Stroll in the shade
Of stretching arch of branches

Grey-fleeced wild rams
Wide-eyed stags
Roam the hills without shepherds

Lo and behold, it’s a garden in perpetual bloom, peacefully cohabited by predators and prey!

Meador believes this garden inspired Eden, and that An’s fascination with it “anticipates Yahweh’s persuasion of Adam and Eve that his garden paradise could be theirs” in exchange for obedience. “Out of the masculine world of the authoritative father, namely An, the idea of altering or controlling nature’s process surfaces,” she writes.

The Garden of Eden tale also resembles a category of stories called menstrual myths. These “expressed not only the external rhythms and energies of life, but also the internal rhythms and energies experienced by menstrual women,” writes Miranda Gray in Red Moon. Passed orally by older women, they initiated girls into “the true nature of women” as they approached their time of transition.

Menstrual myths typically involve an initiator, something red, and death or blood, followed by rebirth. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are of this genre: The stepmother and angry fairy are initiators; the apple and spindle represent menstruation’s arrival. (Sleeping Beauty also bleeds after she is pricked.) Both women fall into a deathlike sleep. Their revival represents entry into womanhood—an embodied, ecological knowledge that must be shared for the thriving of the community.

In the case of Eden, the serpent is a classic initiator. Eve consumes a fruit. The result is literally knowledge … which she shares.

But what follows deviates from menstrual myths, where death yields rebirth. From Gray:

By taking the fruit, she takes on the cyclic nature of menstruation ... This gift, which should be seen as bringing knowledge of life, death and rebirth through a woman’s cycle, was instead ultimately perceived as a symbol of betrayal, of womankind bringing death and evil into the world ... The gift of womanhood became ‘the curse’ of womanhood.

Let’s bring this back to capitalism.

Shlain believes the rise of abstract, monolithic gods like Yahweh stemmed from the democratisation of literacy, which Sumer experienced in Enheduanna’s day. “Conceiving of a deity who has no concrete image prepares the way for the kind of abstract thinking that inevitably leads to law codes, dualistic philosophy, and objective science, the signature triad of Western culture,” he points out.

Subjugating women was merely symptomatic: “Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture.”

Today it’s important to approach Shlain’s thesis with caution. Most neuroscientists wince at the overly simplistic left-brain right-brain categorisation. But the early Israelites did produce an alphabet. A “precursor” to written Hebrew was found in the Sinai desert, where Yahweh issued Moses the 10 Commandments in the book of Exodus.

The latter was radical, Shlain writes:

The Ten Commandments applied universally to everyone. No king, pharaoh, or potentate was above the law. If human society was to be organized on a principle other than “might makes right,” all would have to submit. The codes of Draco, Solon, and Justinian, the Magna Carta, the United States Constitution, and the Miranda rights can all be traced back to what happened in the Sinai.

In Wisdom of the Mythtellers, Sean Kane agrees a breach occurred when humanity transitioned to writing. “The enclosing of a story in a text is a drastic form of domestication,” he observes. “Literacy is not a skill—it is a mentality.”

As a writing-based culture, we inherit literacy’s “domestications,” dismissing civilisations that lack features we recognise. From Graeber and Wengrow:

When people talk about “early civilizations” they are mostly referring to ... deeply stratified societies, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women.

These disruptions, literacy-based or not, played out in Enheduanna’s life and hymns. Some years after narrating Inanna’s battle with Ebih, she was ousted from her temple and exiled by Lugalanne, a warrior king who took her place. The rest is history. From Meador:

During the thousand years after Enheduanna’s death, a shift in ancient Near Eastern religion took place. Male gods became more prominent in the pantheons, sometimes actually taking over the names and powers of former goddesses. Eventually, out of Ur, Enheduanna’s city in southern Mesopotamia, came Abraham led by Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews.

Yahweh “is characterized by the exertion of his will, and nature responds to his command,” Meador writes. “The coursing of life through matter became secondary under this god’s omnipotent control; the split between nature and god was finalized.”

As a god without kin, Yahweh is unique. “A deity who was alone, not by choice but because there were no other companions for Him, was a concept without parallel in human society,” says Shlain. “The God of the Israelites did not have a wife, a son, a daughter, a father, or a mother.”

His debasement of women, and establishment of work as a fact of life, became critical to capitalist design, for which post-Reformation Christianity was a blunt tool. By Europe’s Middle Ages, “a new concept of human beings also took hold, picturing them as just raw materials, workers and breeders for the state,” observes Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.

Capitalism started as the elite response to feudal revolt. “[It] was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle,” writes Sylvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch. “The belief that capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not been dispelled.”

Central to its construction was creating underclasses whose labour became irrelevant. This is called “primitive accumulation,” coined by Adam Smith to describe when labourers work to build wealth, eventually creating a system where the less hard-working accept living wages. Karl Marx adapted the term to refer to how goods, especially land, are appropriated (usually violently) and privatised, creating a landless proletariat that is forced to exchange labour for subsistence.

While Marx saw this as transitional, Federici argues capitalism must engage in primitive accumulation again and again. She claims its development required three acts: Sexual division of labour, creating a patriarchy based on women’s subordination and exclusion from paid work, and mobilising the production of new workers.

European land privatisation began in the late 15th century, alongside colonial expansion, creating overseas slave classes that artificially benefited the wealthy. The latter advanced the belief that land seizure boosts agricultural efficiency. Instead, it created bounty for export while locals starved, which of course led to further land seizure.

Regular shipments of precious metals from American colonies begat the conception of resources as “capital,” a treatment that eventually trickled down to natural resources like wheat. Enter early Mercantilism: National and international market systems emerged, prioritising import and export of agricultural products—which merchants hoarded to sell at profit.

Coupled with the ruling class’s discovery of “the magical power of money to cut labor costs,” prices rose, and labourers could no longer pay for food they once produced, having lost land access. Wages lost two-thirds of their purchasing power, and took centuries to recover.

It was primarily women who initiated the inevitable food revolts.

During this period, the populace was still reeling from the Black Death, raising questions about how to produce more workers to solve this problem of cultivated scarcity. The mercantile class argued “a large population” was “key to the prosperity and power of a nation,” Federici writes. “By the mid-16th century the idea that the number of citizens determines a nation’s wealth had become something of a social axiom.”

Subjugating women would presumably address these issues while deviating working class rage away from elites. Women’s labour was, as a result, progressively devalued; common jobs, like ale-brewing and midwifery, saw new restrictions, giving rise to mass prostitution—then, to tamp that down, legalised rape.

Facilitated by the Protestant Revolution, which separated Christianity from Catholicism, women were branded “whores” and “witches,” ultimately leading to witch-hunting. “It was the woman now who was the servant, the slave, the succubus in body and soul, while the Devil functioned as her owner and master, pimp and husband at once,” Federici writes.

Federici is probably best known for making the argument that what mothers do is labor, and it shouldn’t be dismissed as intuition or love. This thinking, which preys on romantic ideas about mothering, obscures something insidious: “A social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity, and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, while profiting from the wageless condition of the labor involved.”

It took a lot of blood to bring us to the state where we think all of this is just … natural.

Between 1500 and 1660, some 80,000 “witches,” of which 80 percent were women, were killed. But to be fair, most “witchcraft” crimes were petty, did not lead to death, and merely illuminated women’s increasingly sorry state. Infractions usually related to requests for food, money, or other forms of community aid once considered neighbourly.

Women, again, tried resisting these shifts, but suddenly found themselves opposed by working men. “Given their economic difficulties, ‘the prudent household management on the part of a wife’ was becoming for them an indispensable condition for avoiding bankruptcy and for keeping an independent shop,” Federici writes.

This conveniently aligned with mercantile population propaganda: Women should stay home and reproduce. Contraceptives and abortifacients were labelled maleficium, or devil-driven sorcery, setting precedent for the legislation of women’s bodies.

These events haunt us still, buttressing Federici’s argument that primitive accumulation is a continuous process. In the first 10 months of Covid, women, especially of colour, lost 5.4 million jobs, one million more than men in the United States. In 2022, the US Supreme Court—now led by conservative Christians—overturned Roe v. Wade, which protected the legal right to abortion and related medical treatment. The US is the only industrialised nation without federalised maternity leave and has among the highest infant mortality rates of OECD member nations—33rd out of 38.

Like a bad hangover from mercantilism, the growth-driven economy stimulates expansion of capital and population, the “motors of exponential growth in human society,” write Meadows et al. in Limits to Growth. “Other entities, such as food production, resource use, and pollution, tend to increase exponentially—not because they multiply themselves, but because they are driven by population and capital.”

We live with this paradox even today: Governments worry about the declining birth rate while simultaneously wringing hands over how many humans are fighting over the planet’s limited resources.

Presumably, population size is mitigated by wealth and education. Capitalism theoretically distributes these features, but their impact on population is only occasional. From Meadows et al.:

The factors believed to be most directly important in lowering birth rates are not so much the size or wealth of the economy, but the extent to which economic improvement actually touches the lives of all families, and especially the lives of women. More important predictors than GNI per capita are factors such as education and employment (especially for women), family planning, low infant mortality, and relatively egalitarian distribution of income and opportunity.

So here we are, still trying to solve existential problems that sustain the very system we’re trying to keep afloat. These abstractions of godhood, resources, work and women still circulate rationalist economic culture. They are fundamentally unsustainable, yet we can’t see our way out.

Some thoughts about a newborn whale

A few days ago I read about some scientists who accidentally filmed a sperm whale giving birth. She was surrounded by 10 other whales, calmly waiting until a gush of blood suddenly appeared in the water. In the hours that followed, the scientists watched as the whales communicated in clicks, then worked together to help lift the newborn to the surface for occasional breaths.

Sperm whales live in matrilineal groups, but about half of the whales present weren’t related to the mother. Newborn calves sink without help, so everyone took a turn helping it along.

I’m reminded again of Darwin, trying to seize his theory back from the bros: “Communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish the best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” That’s what he argued natural selection reveals. The whales tell us something about what sustains.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin talks about how our entire storytelling worldview, Hero’s Journey and all, is built on this idea that the first “technology” was a stick of some kind—to defend against, to kill. But then she comes across Women’s Creation by Elizabeth Fisher: “The first cultural device was probably a recipient … a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.”

There’s no Heroics to containing, to receiving and not exclusively, relentlessly penetrating—the sky, the planet, each other. Yet a holder is probably something we always needed—to carry children as we gathered, to bring food back to the tribe, to support an injured limb, to fish, to deliver nutriment and not death.

Stories need to do that, too. Martin Shaw said a story that tells you what it’s about isn’t a myth; it’s propaganda. You can’t bludgeon; you need to feed the imagination with a bag full of stars. I’m talking offerings, not crusades. Something that prostrates you and doesn’t insult the intelligence of your people.

Something that feels like mothering—freed of primitive accumulation, the burden of carrying for capital.

In my worst postpartum moments, it ached to hear other mothers say, “You’re right, what’s expected of you is impossible. But you’re going to get through it.” The subtext: You have to get through it because the only alternative is, somebody dies.

The state we impose on new mothers is not an initiation. Postpartum is the symptom of societal dis-ease, posing as initiation. We aren’t meant to be this unpeopled, this unresourced, while so deeply vulnerable. But children, and those that care for them, look like burdens to a culture that has lost interest in its own future.

Here’s a quote that gives me hope. It comes from a huge volume I’ve just picked up called Mothering Myths: An ABC of Art, Birth and Care. In the preface, Alexis Pauline Gumbs is describing the value of a contributed work called “Democratic Motherism” by Alice Walker. She writes:

If we are going to emerge in a life-giving mode of relation to this planet and turn away from the destructive modes of constant war we now face, everyone must practice mothering. This requires an expansive redefinition of mothering, which includes forms of mothering that are happening now, unacknowledged because they are being done by people without the status of motherhood, and it also includes forms of mothering that we have never even imagined.

I just want to sit with that: What it might mean to mother radically, even if you’re not the societal definition of a mother. What it would mean to take the practice of mothering back from capitalist accumulation—to take it out of isolation—and make it a central social and environmental practice.

To mother is to be invested to the bones in what you seek to nurture. It’s a fundamentally optimistic act for the future that also, as a function of that optimism, accepts its own demise as part of the deal. This is different from a logic of stewardship or domestication, which condescend to what is cared for and can easily become invested in the idea that the long-term retention of power is more valuable than those they steward or domesticate.

Enheduanna believed that elevating certain stories could change the direction her society was taking. She wasn’t wrong; I believe that, too. I believe it because the entire house of cards we’ve cast our bets on is sustained exclusively by a few stories we’ve been told are the prime narrative, and they’re not. They bury thousands of years of effort, humanity and ways of living.

They bury the fact that most people didn’t want to live like this. The notion that western progress makes people happier, wealthier and more secure, Graeber and Wengrow note, “fails to explain … why European powers should have been obliged to spend the last 500 years or so aiming guns at people’s heads in order to force them to adopt it.”

They bury Enheduanna’s hymns as political protest, the voices of the old women who told the menstrual tales, the Pythias and sybils who spoke shattering truth to warlords, the warrior women who fought and hunted alongside men, the two-spirit (in modern terms, trans) Babaylan shamans of the Maharlikan nations, the priestesses who successfully led regions like Minoan Crete, the deliciously and bulbously fat old goddesses we for some reason keep finding in every nook and cranny of the world.

They bury the carrier-bag, the warm arms. The grief and the love. The solace, the nutriment. So we must reach forward with our own arms, uncovering, unraveling, unearthing. The better to embrace.

Without any of this, what even is there to fight for?

“The masculine mode of consciousness tires … Then the feminine, or the unconscious and nature, the chaotic, have to take back the light,” writes Marie-Louise von Franz in Alchemy. A hard swing in one direction eventually swings back. “That is a typical archetypal event.”

“Un Loup,” Pieter Potter from the Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1859.

Long, long ago, a hunter fell for a wolf.

Maybe he didn’t mean to fall. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. What I know is, he followed that wolf through darkness until she entered an illuminated clearing. There, the better to enjoy the moon, she shed her wolf-body and reclined in the luxuriant fullness of her naked woman-flesh.

The hunter stole the wolfskin. Like so many hunters before him that have stolen the skins of selkies, the luminescence of moon goddesses, the furs of countless wolf-women. He stole the skin, and in so doing, made the woman his wife.

That was many years back. I can’t tell you how long, I wasn’t there.

For ages the wolf-woman peered out the window of her new home, longing for her old life: The wind and the leaves brushing her body. The cracked bones and warm blood of smaller animals in her mouth. The feeling of moonlight on her naked flesh.

Then Wolf-Woman grew ripe. For nine months her belly grew until it was as full as the brightest, biggest moon. And she loved what grew inside her.

A daughter came, red-faced and angry, eyes shut against the membrane and blood on her face, shut against the world that welcomed her.

I sometimes hear that daughters are gentler babies than sons. I’m not sure that’s true. Daughters have their own way, and this half-wild one was fierce and unyielding. She bore the quiet life of the cabin like a ticking bomb, her energy never fully dispelled no matter how much wood she chopped and stacked, nor how many heavy pelts she carried on her back.

And a time came when the moon was full. The daughter discovered she could become a wolf.

What a joy! Under cover of night she tested new strengths, flexing muscles in a body that matched her energy. The wind caressed her dew-kissed fur. She cracked bones and tasted warm blood between her sharp strong teeth. She howled into the night, and was answered. In the mornings she could be found naked in the garden (occasionally—but rarely—back in bed), a girl again, deliciously exhausted.

Wolf-Woman watched. She worried. Her husband watched her and worried too.

One night the daughter transformed into a wolf and thought she could run fast enough to meet the moon before it slipped away. She ran and ran and did not come back, did not even look as the cabin shrunk into a pinprick behind her blue-black body.

The days and nights passed and Wolf-Woman stopped sleeping. She watched the window under moonlight, nose twitching for the scent of her daughter. Her eyes were no longer as sharp as they’d been, and she could no longer recall what her wolf form felt like: The wind and the leaves brushing her fur. The cracked bones and warm blood between her sharp, strong teeth. A howl that echoes and is answered.

One such night the hunter rose tentatively from his bed. Wolf-Woman’s ears twitched; she heard him moving in the darkness but kept her cheek pressed to the cool window. She listened to the click of metal entering metal, a trunk opening and closing. Then she felt something heavy being draped over her shoulders.

“Find her,” her husband whispered as close to her ear as he dared.

This is probably the bravest act he has ever performed in his life.

Wolf-Woman pulled her old skin around her. She eased her fingertips and feet into the paws. She feared, briefly, it would no longer fit, but the seams closed faithfully.

She fell to all fours. Scratched behind her ear, shook her tail. Brushed away some memory of a flesh she now barely remembered. She could hear the heartbeat of the man stepping uneasily into the darkness, but could see him clear as day.

The door creaked open and Wolf-Woman flew through the night.

Mosaic depicting the She-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, after they were abandoned. From Aldborough, about 300-400 AD, Leeds City Museum. Credit: Carole Raddato.

Interlude

“Being human is a habit and it can be broken.”
—John O’Donohue

Becoming a mother broke the human habit for me. Never have I felt so animal. Never have I felt closer to the gods we share this world with.

I made life from death’s edges. My child seeks my warmth and our hearts slow in time together. My skin reads his pathogens and provides antibodies in milk. I breathe him in, registering every subtle change to his scent.

There is something ferocious inside me that was only theoretical before. And I can see, clear as day, when the man I made this child with recedes into darkness, uncertain how to advance toward us.

Wolf-Woman flew.

The pads of her feet hit the forest floor with unthinkable energy. Her lungs filled with cold night air. She smelled bark, rot and fresh water, and heard small animals skitter out of her sharp sight just under the whistling of the wind.

Before night was through she’d traversed the forest she knew and found herself on the edge of mountainous terrain. Wolf-Woman sniffed. She howled and listened. She ran on.

Who knows how long she ran? I can’t say, I wasn’t there.

Maybe it was only a few more nights before she found herself in woods whose scents and stones were new to her. The flora felt different, the water tasted sweeter. The sky was black and moonless. Beyond a ridge, she saw a pack.

It’s been long that she hasn’t been amongst her kin. She appeared cautiously before the other wolves, who growled, showing the threat of their teeth. She met eyes with a great shaggy she-wolf, large as a house, and lowered her head before swivelling her gaze to her lost daughter. The daughter stood at the pack’s furthermost edges, brighter yet darker than she’d ever been, watching her mother with shining eyes full of evening light.

“Rapture,” 2001, Kiki Smith.

Wolf-Woman did not approach her right away.

As the moon waxed Wolf-Woman ran alongside the pack without penetrating it. At midday she slept on the outskirts of the group, keeping watch, knowing she was the most vulnerable. They did not trust her and she did not insist. She offered her kills to the great shaggy she-wolf, who sometimes allowed her to eat with the others, and sometimes did not.

After some time passed, her daughter approached. They nuzzled noses and it was everything Wolf-Woman could do to keep from wrapping her much larger jaws around her neck and carrying her off like a cub.

Soon, her daughter came to sleep beside her when the sun was high, nuzzling like she used to, when she was small as a hand.

Had Wolf-Woman forgotten? The child had been so difficult, so strong in character. But yes, the memory was in her skin: A small hairless half-moon curled into the crook of her, seeking warmth. She remembered the sweaty smell of her skull, and inhaled it now: That same damp sweetness, sharpened by wildness and blood. And the daughter allowed it, her breathing slow.

It didn’t need to be said when the time came to leave. Wolf-Woman offered her respects to the great shaggy she-wolf, and she and her kin turned their long dark noses south.

How they relished the run! The wind whistling through their ears, cold air in their lungs, the brush underfoot, the cracking of bones and the warm blood between their teeth! When the moon set they lay together, hearts beating in time.

When they got to the mountain that divided that strange land from their forest, they stopped. The moon was full and heavy. They sat close, yellow eyes skyward, as the first snow fell on their coats. They did not run another step that night.

Who knows what they whispered between them? I wasn’t there.

When another day passed and dusk fell again, they headed home.

“La Bestia feroce,” Giornale circostanziato, 1792.

The dispute between wolf and dog

I can’t remember where this story is from or how it arrived. I suspect I heard it from Martin Shaw.

Myths are replete with hunters stealing the clothes of an animal or mythic creature, binding it to a woman’s form and obliging her to follow him home: The masculine domesticating the feminine, herding wildness into the soft belly of the hearth.

The number of hunters who’ve stolen my wolfskin are uncountable. They aren’t always men on a knee. They’ve been careers that enslaved me to lesser talents, teachers with thin lips and red pens, and reasonable people who suggested I redirect an impulse in a more conventional direction.

Nestled in this tale is another metaphor, waiting to be cracked open. It’s the conflict between wolf and dog: The domesticated and the wild, chafing against the bit. We’re sometimes so thirsty to be untethered. But as Martin Shaw writes in Wolf Milk (2019), “The village is essential for the distillation of epiphany into wisdom.”

Wildness was invited into the hearth. There, she made a daughter. And though the daughter’s other heritage has beckoned to her, Wolf-Woman guides her home.

I’m always sad when I arrive at the end of this story, but I relish that sorrow. It represents my own wildness, howling at a register I can thankfully still hear. Life asks us to strike a dizzying balance: When do we feed the dog, when do we feed the wolf? The dog must eat so we can function in the village. But nourishing the wolf is necessary for growing clear-eyed and unbent.

There are a thousand ways that having Délos stays my hand over the trunk that contains the wolfskin. Untended, my thoughts can shape this into the ultimate trap: A child needs feeding, naps, long sleeps, fresh air. Steady rhythms and traditions to ground him in a land and a culture.

He requires careful, attentive orientation but also “rough play.” He needs steadiness when his emotions bubble inconsolably out of his too-small body, and eyes that mind he doesn’t follow the impulse to ride his tricycle over the edge of the couch.

The wolf in me chafes. I feed the dog and watch the hearth.

But there’s also wisdom, generosity and an awakeness that comes with being new in the world. For many years yet, I also have to feed the wolf and dog in my son, ensuring that neither lopes away too fast for the other to follow.

And a time will come—it’s approaching fast already, hooves punctuating the night—that the wildness will take him wholesale. His other heritage will call while he staggers unsteadily between roles: That tiny window when “you are not your job description, or a partner, or parent, you are cracked loose from any societal crustacean covering your mischievous hide” (Shaw, Wolf Milk).

He will run and not come back, looking for a birthright. What he’ll find is an ancient rite of passage, the transformation from child to some other thing. To come back whole, he’ll need a guide.

I will have to shake awake. Somehow, between balancing the dog and the wolf in my child, I’ll have to have found a way to balance mine, too, to not have been subsumed by the sharp call to become only and utterly Mother, container of agonies, nothing more.

This is the hardest part. Because to raise a child, a whole ecosystem gets thrown up around you, demanding nurturing attentions in kind: Friendships, communities … and maybe also a partner, receding into darkness. It’s important not to allow that person to drift beyond your sightline, to welcome them back into the mysteries even as you’re dying and being reborn yourself.

If the partner is a good one, they steady you, too, even if they can’t always understand. But sometimes the failure to understand, to not be able to quantify in words, gets to be too much. They race into the darkness of their own accord, refusing to gaze into the face of the wolf. Or they try, ferociously, to withhold the wolfskin right when it’s most needful.

“Lying with the Wolf,” 2001, Kiki Smith.

Stories are spirits (another Martin Shaw chestnut).

In the years since I’ve learnt it, I’ve told “Wolf-Woman” to countless people, and they inevitably extract something different: A friend recognised the adolescence of his daughters, and the bittersweet sensation of letting them go. Someone else saw how much women are asked to give up, a cursed heritage passed to a new generation that craves for more.

Whatever gets stuck in your craw is what the story is asking you to interrogate. The wolf within noses for food.

You have to be careful. Neglect the wolf too long and she’ll turn on you, like Ramsay getting eaten by his own starving kennel in Game of Thrones. But feed her too much, and neglect manifests in the part of you that has to parent. At scale, that’s bad business; it lets other wolves in through the door.

There’s a reason hunters invite the wild into the hearth. They think they know why, they have their own needs in mind, but there’s another, cosmic reason this happens. Wildness entering the hearth is chaos entering an established cosmos. When an element of chaos appears in the status quo, a chafing happens. Rules get broken and people get hurt.

Betrayal as ritual.

A new cosmos becomes possible. Rules must get rearranged, systems are razed to accommodate new forms. This isn’t just how people change; it’s how cultures change, so they can thrive on.

This is probably the most important reason why, even in the travails of raising a child, it is essential to go on feeding one’s own wolf.

When the child’s other heritage calls, you’re going to need to don the wolfskin to give chase, to perform the ritual well enough that he or she returns with you, bearing a keener sense of discernment over their discombobulating energies, their vying inner and social interests.

You cannot pick them up by the scruff of their necks and drag them back to the cabin. If the dance goes well, they will hopefully sit beside you under the heavy yellow moon while you whisper the things that no one else could possibly know.

They weren’t there.

The Mesopotamian god Ninurta (right) fighting Anzu. This scene is often associated with the battle between Marduk and Tiamat. Credit.

“She caused more harm for future generations than Apsu.”

These words hail from the Enūma Eliš (When On High), the Babylonian creation myth. They reference Tiamat, the primordial goddess.

This is about bad mothers. Tiamat is the first.

At the beginning of things, waters merged to make life: Apsu, god of freshwater and the earth’s subterranean waters; and saltwater Tiamat. From them came the first gods.

As one might expect, the first gods partied nonstop. They wreaked such havoc that Apsu burst into Tiamat’s chambers and cried, “Let’s kill them! Then we’ll finally have peace.”

“We can’t kill what we built,” she replied. “Let us lead with kindness.”

But words, once spoken, find ears, and the gods learnt of their father’s murderous frustration. Ea, god of wisdom and magic, lulled Apsu to sleep with a spell. Then he killed him, robbing him of his belt, crown and Mantle of Brilliance, becoming the freshwater god himself. He built his temples within Apsu’s remains, which now constituted the underworld.

There, with his wife Damkina, they conceived Marduk: So vast he was, beyond comprehension! He had four ears, four eyes, a mouth that breathed fire!

“My son, the Sun!” proclaimed Anu, proud grandfather, who went on to behave in the bombastic manner of many grandparents: He gifted Marduk the four winds, dust to make tornados with, and the tidal swell.

All these toys aggravated the other gods, who went running back to Tiamat: “Don’t you love us? Shouldn’t you avenge our father, who was murdered by Ea? Do something, mother!”

So Tiamat reneged on her “kindness” bit and decided to create monsters, like Gaia in the Greek myths, who made the Titans. The monsters went to war with the gods living inside Apsu’s corpse.

This culminated in a single great war, with two champions facing off: Tiamat and Marduk, the Sun. It wasn’t much of a fight. Tiamat came bearing dragons, centaurs and venomous scorpions; Marduk simply filled her with wind and then, while her belly was distended, pierced her gut and split her heart.

From the halves of her body he formed the heavens and the earth. Her liver became the moon, her thigh held up the sky. Then he stepped across the body of the Great Mother, seized the Tablet of Fate that lay within her, and placed his own seal upon it.

This done, he became the king of the gods. Later, he’d be syncretised with the god we all know best: Yahweh, God of Abraham.

The mother we call home

It’s hard for me not to take Tiamat’s story personally. It’s best to start by putting my myth hat on and focusing on the symbolic layers. This story recounts the birth of everything, the start of dynamics we all know well, and you’ll find repetitions in more familiar tales.

Like the Sumerian gods mentioned above, Yahweh of the Abrahamic religions will go on to drown most of humankind—except for one guy and his family—because we were too arrogant. Like Tiamat, Rhea of the Greeks will be judged in opposition to her husband Cronus, who ate each of their children until she managed to save just one—Zeus, who cut open his father and buried most of the Titans (siblings of his parents, born to Gaia and Uranus) under the earth. Like Tiamat, Gaia, the mother of Titans, will become earth, strapped under our feet.

Tiamat and Apsu are primordial entities. They start as fertile waters, the void, darkness, chaos. It is in the subterranean underworld of the subdued Apsu that Wisdom, embodied by Ea, makes home. All fresh waters flow from that deep cool place. And when Marduk kills Tiamat, he transforms her body into the landscape upon which we live. We are still held by Tiamat: Half her body below us, half her body above, her liver winking from the dark sky.

Then there’s the fleshier way to read this. Myths are remarkably frank about what happens when you make a baby: A father’s vitality becomes fodder for wisdom to gain a foothold.

And the mother? She is ripped apart by her progeny and made landscape, which they then rule over. And, to return to the line at the top—she caused more harm for future generations than Apsu—she will forever take the blame for everything that happens next.

The mother as the warrior

Figure of a Cihuateotl, the spirit of an Aztec woman who died in childbirth. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Femininity in these tales isn’t as tightly banded as what we’ve inherited. Primordial goddesses aren’t Snow White or the Evil Stepmother; they’re alternately fertile and kind, fierce and cruel. The state of becoming Mother doesn’t necessarily make you more nurturing; often it’s the opposite.

Amongst the Aztecs, pregnant women who died in childbirth were honoured as Cihuateteo (“Divine Women”). They were equivalent to warriors who died in battle, because it is only from the brink of death that children enter life. Alongside dead warriors, they joined the sun, Huitzilopochtli, on his journey across the sky. (In Aztec lore, day and night represented an eternal war between Huitzilopochtli and the avatars of darkness, led by his sister the moon goddess, who murdered their mother for birthing the sun.)

In Hindu belief, Kali—the fierce goddess of death, destruction and time itself—is said to be the other face of Parvati, the perfect mother. Kali doesn’t just crush skulls for fun. She is concerned with divine justice. Her existence validates the rage that so often flowers when a woman emerges from the death world holding a child.

We are not only nurturers. We are warriors. We walk pathways of blood and wear skulls for necklaces. One coin, two sides. The entities who finally subdue us are our children—the generations that pave over our bodies like so much dead earth. From the great Mother, they seize Fate and make it theirs.

All about a wound

Kali, sculpted by Agnes Arellano. She always uses her own body as the basis for moulds.

My thoughts don’t graft easily to a single story today. So many themes float around inside me because my mother’s just been here—a whirlwind, weeklong visit—and like always, she has left me with complicated feelings.

When I gave birth, I needed parenting. I wanted to lie in someone’s arms and have someone teach me how to be a mother. In an ideal world, the person who does that is your mother, or maybe a mother-in-law or grandmother.

My son and I spend most of our time in Paris, where I mainly function as a single parent. So my mother came to help when I was a few months postpartum, after Demo, my partner, returned to work in Italy.

Her first visit went fine. But the next one, a few months later, was tense. I was prickly and exhausted. It was like all my skin had peeled off and I was nothing but raw nerves. For awhile I tried taking Zoloft, but it dulled my senses in a way that scared me: I live in a busy city and co-sleep with my kid. Asleep or awake, I can’t afford to be dimmed-out.

So I got off the Zoloft, gritted my teeth and tried raw-dogging my new life. Meanwhile, my mother flitted around me.

Délos had a cough. We argued about what to do. There she was, holding my son near a huge pot of boiling water, shouting at me. She wanted to hold him over it to clear his sinuses. I kept saying, “Wait, just wait.” It didn’t feel safe, I needed to think. I read online that I could run the shower, close the bathroom door, and sit in there with him.

But my mother was already seething. “You’re wasting time,” she hissed. “Why won’t you accept my wisdom? Sometimes, when you’re not around, I administer things to him without you knowing.”

This last said triumphantly. She kept talking, the words spilling out like venom.

My mom gets like this sometimes. Something changes in her face and she unleashes monsters.

“Just stop talking!” I shouted, hands over ears.

Délos fell quiet.

“You’re crazy,” she whispered. But this, too, said triumphantly. She got what she wanted: A big emotion. My mother is always trying to get me to manifest feelings she claims I don’t have.

I took a second. I couldn’t stop looking at the pot of boiling water, and back at my son, and back at the pot.

“Please give me my son,” I said.

She did. She was shaking with rage.

I ran the shower and sat with Délos on the toilet. He seemed agitated, then he calmed. His sinuses cleared, slowly. My heart raced against his skin.

That night in bed, I didn’t sleep. I considered what to do the next day. By morning, I had designed a speech.

My mother was pretending to sleep when I got up, but she shot up almost immediately when I asked if we could speak. I sat, trying to feel calm and non-confrontational. I said, “I can’t do this if there are two authorities in this house. I know I don’t know everything. I’m trying my best but you need to be patient with me. You need to acknowledge that I am the parent. So if I don’t know about something, or if I say stop, or wait, you have to agree. You can’t keep things from me in relation to my son, or hurry to a conclusion without me.”

She listened, jaw tight. Finally she said, “I will never acknowledge you as the parent. That would be like agreeing to watch him die in your arms.”

The curse of the bad mother

I asked my mom to leave after that. She packed loudly and left without a word. My father and partner were very upset. They blew up my phone. They said I had to make it right; what I was doing was dangerous, I need somebody with me.

I tried. I texted her, said we don’t have to talk about this again, but if she comes back, she really needs to acknowledge that I’m the parent. She did not agree and she did not come back.

This event entered my bloodstream like a poison. What she said—that my son would die in my arms—felt like a curse, and I was already in a bad way. I had deadlines for work, and was about to put Délos into daycare, but there’d be a long adaptation period that required my active participation. In the meantime I couldn’t work because nobody was around.

The Bad Mother stalks me. She follows on the heels of the Good Mother: Virgin Mary, immaculate and unattainable; but the Bad Mother is always too near. I am terrified of her because no other gauntlet has ever brought me closer to feeling more dangerous, more disastrously unpredictable to myself, than motherhood.

Demo and my dad were right. It was bad for me to be alone with my son all the time.

I started showing up at a nearby baby café. Sometimes the owners or waitresses played with Délos while I sat staring blearily at nothing. I once rushed out of daycare adaptation to send something urgent to a client. The directors scolded me and I cried, explained my mother had suddenly left and I was trying to do things alone. A friend came over, took Délos from my arms, and let me sleep.

I didn’t think I was going to survive this period. Remembering it makes my skin crawl. But when I came out of it, I realised I made something.

The couple who run the baby café have become unofficial godparents to Délos, whose photo they hung in place of pride over the cash register. I developed a regular partnership with a good babysitter, and the daycare and my doctor helped me through a period when Délos struggled to gain weight.

And there were friends, primarily other busy mothers. They showed up with food and to vacuum. They let me take showers and cry. I befriended neighbours with kids the same age, and we made playdates where we sat around together to watch our children.

Human babies are the weakest of all mammals for the longest amount of time. They are the ultimate proof that we are social animals, and we need communities designed around them. To leave the responsibility of a child to one or even two people is frankly criminal. It is dangerous for everyone involved.

There were no other options. I learned my kid needs a village and started shoring it up.

Menstrual myths of initiation

Snow White at rest. An art nouveau illustration, 1899.

Fairy tales, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, share common themes with ancient oral tales called menstrual myths. They typically feature an innocent, beautiful girl. Something bad happens to her, usually involving something red: A fruit, spilled blood. Our girl enters the death state: A deep sleep. At the end of the story, she wakes a woman.

These myths, recounted from older women to younger girls, were designed to describe the creation and destruction churning in our bodies, the cycle that ties us to the moon and—should we accept the mission—helps us carry on humanity. They were later written down by men and turned into something more like chivalry myths: The girl sleeps to be awakened by a rescuer. “Becoming a woman” becomes getting married.

But this buries the lede. The climax—the pricked finger, the fatal apple—is usually triggered by a figure called The Initiator. She’s the Evil Stepmother or the Scary Witch. It is meaningful that she is older and also a woman. She gives us death so we can be reborn.

I misunderstood these stories when I first studied them. I assumed the initiator figure to be a secretly wise, benevolent figure—a priestess, guiding you to enlightenment. Maybe her methods are harsh, but she has your best interests at heart.

What I came to understand, after my mom’s visit, is that this isn’t true. This person may have no wisdom to bear, no good to offer. She may genuinely want to hurt you, even kill you. That’s what makes this an initiation: Survival is not guaranteed.

But if you do, you’ve traversed the underworld and got through to the other side. Like Inanna, renewed after her sister skins her alive, you are invested with power. You will never be the same.

Wounded mothers all the way down

A year later, my mom came back. These were the terms: She could only come see us in Italy, where my partner lives and where there’s more space and other people around. Her time alone with my son, or even with me, would be limited.

Because this is our lifelong pattern: She lulls me into a trusting place after years of effort, then explodes it into smithereens, causing me to hate myself because I fell for the lie like always. I have to be careful—to avoid being tender, because then I will feel tender, and that’s when she strikes.

My mom frequently opines that I don’t love her the way I love other relations. She often cries about it, and I find this annoying and manipulative. The relationship she wants is not something she seems equipped to handle.

But she loves my son. And if there’s a safe context for him to experience that love, I can’t steal it from him.

Anyway. She came to Italy. We were sitting in a café—run by Demo’s ex girlfriend, who observed us with friendly professional attention. This made what happened next quite awkward.

My mom began wheedling for time in Paris. “Let me go back with you,” she urged.

“No,” I said. “Not after last time.”

“But that’s over. I said sorry.”

“No, you didn’t.”

She changed tack. “What about how I felt? Is this all about you? Why don’t you apologise?”

I have had a lot of therapy. Also, I am stronger. I’ve been to the underworld and had my skin ripped off. So she couldn’t shake me like she did when she was standing near the boiling pot and I had no defences.

“Look,” I said, chill as death. “This is not one of those ‘reciprocal sorry’ situations. I really don’t care how you felt after I asked you to leave as a result of you saying my son would die in my arms.”

She winced. “I didn’t—”

“I will never forget it,” I went on. “It is such a terrible thing to say to your own child, never mind one in postpartum. So yes, in this instance, it is about me and how I feel.”

“You never cared about me!” she exploded. “From the moment you were born you had a grudge—”

“You can’t hold me responsible for how you felt when I was a child. You want to know the first thing I learned when Délos was born? I owe him everything. He owes me nothing. That is the pact. You do not make a child so someone will love you.”

She began to cry.

Demo’s ex-girlfriend looked at us, then away.

Here is what I learned about my mother when she began to cry, then speak.

My mother is a middle child amongst seven siblings who grew up in the Philippine equivalent of a favela. They were massively poor and her father was always out getting into trouble.

By the time she gave birth to her, my lola, Josefina, decided she was done raising kids. The remaining kids she had would be raised by the ones that were already there. So she never touched or addressed my mother, except to punish her.

My great-grandmother was the one person who made my mom feel loved. She smoked a lot, “married” many men, and had a big laugh. But lola hated her, so she wasn’t around much.

So my mother never felt a kind parent’s touch. When she was old enough, Josefina brokered a marriage for her to a man in America whom she had never met. She agreed, because it meant she could escape.

My mom eventually left that man. When she met my dad and had me, Josefina refused to help with childcare. “I’ve had children already,” she said. I remember that fight, and my mom crying. While my parents built their careers, immigrants in a new country, I shuttled from one babysitter to another. It was a harrowing experience for my parents: Some didn’t understand the Tagalog I spoke then, some stole, one fed me from newspapers on the floor like a puppy. But even when we were together as a family, the house was not an easy place to grow up.

I became quiet and careful. They nicknamed me Mouse.

When Josefina finally died, she and my mom weren’t speaking. At that time, my mother and I weren’t speaking either. It had happened just after I sent her home.

“I’ve never felt loved,” my mom confessed. “I don’t know how to love properly.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking and having drinks. She grasped my hand, pulled me close. She had never done those things before. I let her come to Paris.

Which brings us to her last visit, the one that ended days ago. Nothing special happened. She came awash in bounties that secretly triggered me: Too much candy, Uniqlo bra tops, a fur coat my dad once gave her, tons of Cars swag and a ride-on suitcase for Délos.

Philippine generosity meets American consumerism: Her love language. For me, in a tiny Paris apartment? A logistical issue.

She came with anxieties. She immediately set to cooking, and brought paper plates to avoid dishes. She watched Délos one night and managed to put him to sleep without using her phone. She didn’t force him to kiss her when I asked her not to. She seemed scared even to ask for a glass of water, carrying her own bottle at all times.

My mother is afraid of me. She is also fierce and volatile—dangerous to my sensibilities. She has three daughters that she struggles to relate to or see herself in, and it is a great tragedy. We have also been hard on her. We used to accuse each other of “being like mom” when we wanted to hurt each other.

“She caused more harm for future generations than Apsu.”

It’s not like she was the only one who hurt us. Our dad did his fair share, and he hurt her too. The traumas she’s lived are so numerous that she can’t even remember them all, just a general feeling of them; there’s a flightiness about her that never goes away, even when she’s trying to enjoy herself.

But she so often takes the blame for everything. Like Rhea. Like Tiamat. Like Gaia. Like Eve.

I don’t know what happened in our specific line of mothers. I suspect colonisation has something to do with it. There is a shame inherent to the sense of being Filipino, a deep, tricksy submissiveness that comes from being bent by the Spanish, then the Japanese, then America. Our lands were pillaged, the wise women broken, and mothers fracture from daughters.

From Carl Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (1991, pp. 107-108):

When, in 1938, I originally wrote this paper, I naturally did not know that twelve years later the Christian version of the mother archetype would be elevated to the rank of a dogmatic truth. The Christian “Queen of Heaven” has, obviously, shed all her Olympian qualities except for her brightness, goodness, and eternality; and even her human body, the thing most prone to gross material corruption, has put on an ethereal incorruptibility. The richly varied allegories of the Mother of God have nevertheless retained some connection with her pagan prefigurations in Isis (Io) and Semele … Semele herself seems to have been an earth-goddess, just as the Virgin Mary is the earth from which Christ is born.

…

What has become of the characteristic relation of the mother-image to the earth, darkness, the abysmal side of the bodily man with his animal passions and instinctual nature, and to “matter” in general? The declaration of the dogma comes at a time when the achievements of science and technology, combined with a rationalistic and materialistic view of the world, threaten the spiritual and psychic heritage of man with instant annihilation. Humanity is arming itself, in dread and fascinated horror, for a stupendous crime.

I’ve heard it said in some eco circles that if you want to understand a culture’s relationship to land, look at its relationship to mothers. We live in Tiamat’s divided body. We walk across the flesh of Gaia. They conceived life, and the gods and kings that followed lay, at their feet, all the blame for the monsters that arrived alongside them.

They pillaged the Mothers. They do it still. How do we know they weren’t the monsters? Only winners write the stories.

Returning love to Tiamat

Our cultural relationship to the mother has always been complicated, tinged with some aspect of “why have you inflicted this on me?” Sacrifice is expected, and not much else. She becomes a vessel into which we pour agony.

The truth is, I do owe my mother something. I broke her body, pierced her heart, and traverse her flesh like so much dead earth. Her mother, too, felt trampled, and on it goes, all the way back to Tiamat.

Last night Délos lay at my breast, half-asleep. He had a car in his fist and was running it drowsily over my naked torso: Literally, sometimes, I am landscape to him. I inhaled his hair, matted from sweat. I don’t remember being held like this by my mother.

She was never held that way.

I want to be able to hold her that way, to make her feel she doesn’t have to fill my home with paper plates, furs and cookies to be loved. I love her because I am of her. Her fragility is mine, her volatility too.

The curse disperses—not the one she gave me, but the one that’s stalked our line for generations. I’m not a bad mother. I know this because I don’t need my mother to be a good one. She made the world. Her nature is nature—that quality kings and gods seek to subdue.

Inanna, too, great-granddaughter of Tiamat, was subdued in the end. Her last battle is with a mountain … and when she wins, the gods make her walk it back. The reason? At its summit sits a perfect garden where everything blooms, all the time. Lions lie with lambs, the whole bit: A controlled, perfect environment. No space for volatility, nor for the great wild goddess of lust, love and life.

After writing that poem, Enheduanna, the author, is purged from her temple by an invading warlord. He sends her into exile until nearly the end of her life, appropriating temple funds to fuel empire.

Eventually she is allowed to come back. But a thousand years later, Abraham will emerge from that same soil, carrying Yahweh with him: A god whose one particularity, apart from jealousy, is that he required no mother to create himself or birth the world. He copy-pastes Marduk’s creation myth, but instead makes everything with words and will, not flesh, blood, collaboration and conflict. Yahweh becomes the brutal monolith against which we are asked to model ourselves.

This heritage has broken every mother’s back since. I dispel it, a little, by loving mine.

Inanna/Ishtar on an Akkadian seal. By Sailko.

Quick housekeeping: This is the first time I’m putting in a paywall. It’s just because this piece is particularly personal. I don’t really have a working model yet and would rather keep more things free than not. Still, if you can support my work or share it, thank you! And if you want to email me, hit midwifingthemother@gmail.com.

Inanna, the queen of heaven

Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, lust, and fertility, is one of my favourite deities. Her stories represent the first literature we have, inscribed by the priestess and princess Enheduanna, 2000 years before Bible stories were whispers.

The throne where we meet Inanna is carved from the huluppu tree, the same tree from which Eve plucked the fatal apple. Nestled in its branches are a snake, an Anzu-bird, and Lilith, Adam’s first wife and the alleged mother of demons.

Inanna’s arrival on the scene of humanity is a glorious inversion of Eve’s fall from grace. From Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer’s Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth:

She leaned back against the apple tree.
When she leaned against the apple tree, her vulva was wondrous to behold.
Rejoicing at her wondrous vulva, the young woman Inanna applauded herself.

What a queen, legs akimbo in the open air, applauding what we’re first taught to hide.

This is the story of Inanna’s descent.

From the great above to the great below

Inanna has a sister called Ereshkigal, who rules the underworld. Ereshkigal’s husband, the Bull of Heaven, has died, so Inanna decides to attend the funeral rites.

Before leaving, she adorns herself with the vestiges of her power:

She placed the shugurra, the crown of the steppe, on her head.
She arranged the dark locks of hair across her forehead.
She tied the small lapis beads around her neck,
Let the double strand of beads fall to her breast,
And wrapped the royal robe around her body.
She daubed her eyes with ointment called “Let him come, let him come,”
Bound the breastplate called “Come, man, come!” around her chest,
Slipped the gold ring over her wrist,
And took the lapis measuring rod and line in her hand.

With these fantastic adornments in place, she sets out. But she also leaves instructions for Ninshubar— Inanna’s highest priestess and wingwoman on all adventures. If she doesn’t return in a few days, Ninshubar knows what to do.

Adornments from Ur, including some made with lapis, 2500BC. From the Louvre. Photo mine.

The adventure begins. Inanna arrives at the doorway to darkness and knocks loudly. “Open the door, gatekeeper! Open the door, Neti! I alone would enter!”

Neti is hell’s chief gatekeeper. I can’t imagine he delights in this greeting, because his first question is “Who are you?!”

“I am Inanna, Queen of Heaven, on my way to the East.” She’s here for the funeral, see? Neti tells her to stay outside while he talks to Ereshkigal.

At Ereshkigal’s feet he gives a formidable description: “My queen, a maid as tall as heaven, as wide as the earth, as strong as the foundations of the city wall, waits outside the palace gates.” He describes the powers she carries via every adornment on her body, from her carefully arranged hair to her provocative breastplate that beckons, “Come man, come!”

Ereshkigal slaps her thigh and bites her lip. She takes a minute. Then she tells Neti to open each gate just a crack. As Inanna passes each threshold, one vestment must be shed.

“Let the holy priestess of heaven enter bowed low.”

Neti follows these instructions. The underworld contains seven gates … and each time Inanna steps through one, something is removed, beginning with the shugurra, the crown of the steppe.

“What is this?” she asks.

Neti replies, “Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

This procedure continues. She loses the lapis beads around her neck. Then from her breast, another double strand of beads. The “come man, come!” breastplate follows, her gold ring, and the lapis measuring rod and line. Finally, she is deprived even of her royal robe.

Naked and bowed low, she enters her sister’s reception hall.

Ereshkigal rose from her throne.
Inanna started toward the throne.
The Annuna, the judges of the underworld, surrounded her.
They passed judgment against her.

Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.

She struck her.

At this, Inanna becomes a corpse, “a piece of rotting meat.” Ereshkigal hangs her from a hook on the wall.

Ereshkigal ruminates over Inanna’s arrival. I like the crown’s jaunty top-hat energy. Credit: Mesopotamian Gods.

Sisterly rage and dark paths

How familiar that meeting feels. I have two sisters. I have definitely felt the “eye of death” and had the “word of wrath” flung at me, with bonus guilt.

But this stripping-away of adornment resonates most. We assume jewelry and clothes are superficial, but Inanna shows us they represent power and identity. They are protection, and each time one goes, Inanna stops and is rebuked.

In myths that centre women, there is often some variant of this underworld trip. No “hero’s journey” for us: We are stripped and often violently killed, often at the hand of another woman—the initiator. We inherit this bleak, solitary voyage in fairy tales: The dark forest, where we meet a witch or angry stepmother. Death is common; resurrection not guaranteed.

So it goes for Inanna. In her cult, feminine vestments were power and beauty. That “come man, come” breastplate? You don’t know if it’s designed to seduce or destroy. It’s very Alexander McQueen: “I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”

In a separate story, Inanna asks Gilgamesh to marry her and he shies away, a demigod so ferocious he slept with every woman in his kingdom before her wedding day. “I know what you do to your husbands,” he says. In another story, she engages in battle with a mountain and wins, proclaiming victory to the sky god while covered in blood.

To lose every aspect of that power, one by one. To appear naked and trembling before the slaughter…

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Hermes, lyre in hand, getting scolded by his mother Maia. Image from side B of an Attic red-figure belly-amphora, c. 500 BC.

Délos has learned his first magic word: “No!”

And he’s not letting that power go. It’s “no!” to diaper changes, “no!” to dinner, “no!” to the popsicle he said he wanted; “no!” when I put it back in the freezer; “no!” when I offer it again; “no!” when I fall to my knees and start crying.

Sometimes we’re sitting still and he’ll give me a look. That twinkle in the eye before dashing off. He climbs the couch and toboggans off it with a tricycle. He wriggles out of his pants and runs, laughing as the air whistles through his junk. Can I catch him before he pees, possibly on an electrical outlet?

I will remember this fondly someday but right now I’m dragging myself around, rubbing my lumbar like a long-suffering parent in a ‘90s TV show. I pick up the toys, the spilled drink he stuck his fist in, dash to soak a puddle before he slides across it.

Then there are the fights. Délos gets under my feet while I’m doing four things at once—laundry, cooking, dishes. There’s a brush stuck in my hair because I haven’t finished running it through. But he’s sticking to me, his grunting increasingly urgent. I struggle not to trip. I breathe before lifting something hot. And I feel it: Every emotion shoved into the deep well, which is getting shallower. It’s filling up and whatever’s inside is boiling-hot, bubbling dangerously close to my throat.

Délos battering-rams my body, as hard as he can. And finally I scream.

Sometimes it’s just a scream—a release valve. Délos screams too, and we scream together. Those are good times … except when he initiates this game in the rickety elevator, because people outside most certainly think we’re plummeting to our deaths.

Sometimes it’s an explosive jumble of language: “CAN YOU JUST STOP CAN’T YOU SEE THE STOVE IS ON IT’S HOT I WILL DROP THIS I CAN’T DO ANYTHING CAN YOU PLEASE JUST”

He’ll pull back, take on a ghastly quiet that feels like condemnation. A resolve sets in his eyes, something that says, “I must handle you as one would a feral animal.”

I hate this. Later I’ll wrap my arms around him and apologise. But the apology rings hollow because I know, I know, it’s going to happen again.

My friend Jonathan, who is not a guilty Millennial, laughs when I tell him how shit I feel after losing it on Délos. “There’s intimacy to anger,” he murmurs Englishly. “You don’t get to see everybody that way.” The implication being that even if losing one’s temper with a child isn’t exemplary, it’s not the death of everything.

I get it. I suspect there’s no smug silver bullet to this, because being alive is a messy, nonlinear business. I just don’t want Délos to grow up like I did. I don’t want him to hold his breath when I get home because he associates my presence with the possibility of rage. I want our house to be a place where he can fart.

But the toddler stage is not messing around. Does he love me, or—as my friend Elle once said of her own child—does he want to destroy me?

This is an apt segue into the origins of Hermes, who’s born a feckless toddler and changes the totality of reality in 24 hours. Recorded in The Homeric Hymns’ “Hymn to Hermes,” this tale has the additional advantage of being structured like a buddy movie.

Like looking askance at the sun, Hermes’ contours are best understood in interaction. Already I can see the parallels to my current parenting quandary: Every clash doesn’t just teach me about Délos. It teaches me about me. Nothing is more Hermetic.

The birth of Hermes

Statue of Hermes, by Praxiteles, 4th century BC. Credit: Thoughtco.

Maia, daughter of Atlas, is one of the seven Pleiades sisters. Like me, she’s the oldest in an all-daughter family; like mine, her eyes are coal-black. Simonides of Ceos called her “Mountain Maia of the lovely black eyes.”

Her cave on Mt. Cyllene looks uninviting from outside; within, it glistens with treasures—robes of starlight, Dionysian wine, ambrosia in rich red clusters. Here came Zeus when his wife Hera’s eyes grew heavy, forsaking Olympian comfort for this stone womb and Maia’s warm arms.

And soon Maia’s squatting alone in that darkness, astride existence and death—the lonely canyon of childbirth—until quicksilver life slides out. She lies awake long enough to swaddle her wet baby, to catch that little twinkle in his eye, before falling asleep.

Hermes, unfortunately, isn’t tired. He instead wriggles out of the cave, toddling already, and encounters a tortoise. “An omen of great luck for me,” he beams … and he murders that tortoise to make the first lyre.

Besides Maia, the tortoise is first to meet Hermes. We learn that when you encounter the luck-bringer, the luck he brings may not be yours.

Hermes reclines to test his new toy, starting the first-ever fire to accompany the world’s first musical instrument. While heaven’s ears burn, he sings his raunchy origin story in bombastic terms—between Zeus, head of Olympus; and Maia, oldest of the Pleiades. This must not have pleased Hera … but before her great eye can swivel in his direction, he’s on the move again.

Dusk cloaks the landscape. His eyes fall on Pieria, where 50 cattle graze undisturbed. Bloodline and boundary tug at him: Those beasts belong to my brother, Apollo. Few things are more painful for an older sibling than a runt’s instinct for messing with his stuff, so Hermes pursues them—600 kilometres north—covering the cows’ hooves in backward-facing shoes and hiding his own tracks with sandals of myrtle and tamarisk. As he sashays them away from safety, little butt wiggling over prairie grass, he encounters a winemaker, and promises his crops will yield epic wine provided that “you didn’t see what you just saw!”

He then kills two of the cows and roasts twelve slices of meat, an Olympian libation that includes himself. His tummy rumbles, but he doesn’t eat. Wasn’t he just hungry? Who’s to say why a kid does anything? After all these exertions, he covers his tracks and spirits home at dawn, where he breezes through the keyhole, swaddles himself and “lay there like a helpless baby,” Homer sings.

These are some terrible twos, and it’s only his first day!

Maia, awake, springs like a parent surprising an errant teenager. “Where have you been, coming home at this time of night, clothed in your own impudence!” He’ll lead “a robber’s life,” she cries, or maybe “that son of Leto” (Apollo) will tie him up and drag him off—apparently Apollo’s the paragon son for Titan mothers.

After threatening him with a dreadful fate and implying Leto got the better end of motherhood, she closes with the ol’ you’re just like your father: “Away with you! Your father made you to be a great nuisance to mortals and the deathless gods.”

This riles Hermes as only a mum can, so he ripostes like the kid he is. He takes her to task for treating him “as if I were an infant who didn’t know anything,” swearing he’ll be great “to feed myself and you forever,” and berating her for keeping them “in this gloomy cave.”

This argument is the only time we hear Maia speak. Hours post-labour, Hermes is already putting her through the wringer—sneaking out, singing sexy songs, murdering other creatures, inventing music and fire (both of which will wreak havoc for eons yet to come), criticising her way of life!

He hits all the triggers … and he must reek of smoke and fat, to boot.

Maia’s name signifies “midwife” or “mother.” According to Toni Wolff’s model of four archetypal women, the Mother figure “reacts to all that in man is in the process of becoming.”

This is in direct contrast to the Hetaira archetype. Both are relationship-driven, but whereas the Mother identity is defined by a parent-child relationship, Hetaira’s is defined by other types of companionship: The love between friends on road trips, or the affection between mistress and lover. In Hermes: Guide of Souls, Karl Kerényi gives more poetic examples: “Finding and thieving in the realm of love”—like the affair that begat our protagonist—and “unselfish love [...] snatched in the spirit of Hermes.”

Because—oh, yeah! Hermes rules the principle of Hetairic love. This is a challenge custom-fit to trigger Maia, the archetypal Mother.

Apollo enters the story as dawn breaks. Finding his cattle gone, the lord of math, reason and logic works the problem like Sherlock Holmes. He speaks to the winemaker who witnessed everything. He studies the tracks, and notes omens that tell him, clearly, the culprit is a child of Zeus.

Inevitably he heads for Mt. Cyllene, where he barges into the cave and ransacks it like a cop, discovering goods no Pleiade could procure honestly. Hermes pretends to doze, but Apollo shouts, “Tell me where my cows are!” and threatens to send him to hell.

“I was born yesterday!” Hermes exclaims. “I am not guilty, nor did I see anyone else stealing your cows, whatever cows are.” Apollo proclaims him Prince of Thieves and moves in to seize him, just like Maia said he would. But when he tries, Hermes sneezes, causing Apollo to throw him.

This slapstick moment works even better when you know that in Greek antiquity, the thrusting force of life, thymos, was attributed to the lungs. When Hermes gets his germy thymos all over Apollo—a god often described as “mortally clean”—he doesn’t just disgust him; he binds their destinies.

This is like when Roger Rabbit “accidentally” handcuffs himself to detective Eddie Valiant, who hates him (only to love him later!), in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

In which Eddie Valiant discovers Roger Rabbit could get out of the handcuffs the whole time. Buddy hijinks! Credit: Touchstone Pictures.

The brothers begin their first shared journey. Hermes skips ahead, still debating who is right, only to find that “though he was very ingenious, he found the other just as inventive.”

Meanwhile, Apollo struggles to maintain composure. He can’t help observing how game this kid is; he vibrates with curiosity and interest. When, sick of his wriggling, Apollo tries binding him, the bindings slide off and Hermes gives him a look that makes him feel silly. Apollo’s own thymos feels like a stone in his chest—brittle and rigid.

They arrive at Zeus’ knees, literally kids running to daddy. Zeus jerks forward, chuffed by the sight of his new son, but the stormy look on Apollo’s face stops this otherwise joyful union cold.

Apollo dives immediately into a dossier of wrongdoing. His litany of events is tedious—he spends 15 lines just talking about the tracks he found. “This child, this absolute thief!” he keeps sputtering, wringing his hands as though still trying to get Hermes’ thymos off.

The chattering gods, sensing this is a Serious Matter, grow quiet. Zeus rubs his chin, trying to allot this monologue the attention it deserves. Hera nods grimly, still smarting from Hermes’ first song. (The nightingales haven’t stopped singing it since.)

“But how could you have traced this massive theft back to a child?” Zeus asks.

Apollo is smug. “A witness told me everything. Also, the tracks were weird. Giant steps punctuating the plains. Like logs of wood set down horizontally.” He moves in for the kill, pointing a trembling finger at Hermes’ feet. “The guilty sandals!”

It’s too ridiculous. The room explodes into laughter at those chubby swinging feet, wreathed in tamarisk and myrtle. “Come on,” Hermes cries, wiggling his toes for effect, “I’ve just been born. I’ve never heard of cows, and this guy throws the door open without a single witness. Could I have done it? Do I look big and strong?” All this in a singsong voice, with a rascally smile, and eyebrows working like puppets on his forehead.

Dionysus, wiping his eyes, pours more wine. The peals of laughter shake the sky; even Hera doubles over, laughing so hard that tears run down her alabaster cheeks.

“One day I will pay him back for this cruel accusation, though he’s the stronger,” Hermes concludes piously. “But you, Zeus, help the younger.” It’s textbook little-sibling—he’s big, I’m small!—but he’s winking and clutching his swaddling, making a mockery out of innocence even as Apollo is trapped in the rigidity of his script, of himself.

Zeus, Apollo and Maia arguing over baby Hermes. A Caeretan Black Figure, 520 BC.

That this situation isn’t going as Apollo hoped is another manifestation of Hermes’ peculiar powers: Hermes rules the principle of the daimon, the inescapable contours of personality. In a few hours he illuminates Hera’s repetitive habit of jealousy, and Apollo’s dull valuation of facts over all else. If Apollo feels trapped, it’s because he’s doubling down on his sense of identity, on his pride, instead of just letting the damn thing go.

On paper, he is totally right. But also, he is literally litigating a baby.

Hermes has also—I hasten to remind myself—performed this service for Maia, who is trapped in the Mother archetype from the moment he toboggans out of her womb. His shenanigans snap her right into angry-mom mode, like me letting out the word vomit.

But, being a god and not just a baby, Hermes honours her by telling her what logic there is to his madness, a transparency he doesn’t offer anyone else: He’s acting out of ambition, not because he’s bonkers. (We sometimes forget that Hermes rules the sign of Virgo, best known for meticulousness.) He also calls to task the way she’s lived her life up to this point.

Why does Mountain Maia of the coal-black eyes hide in a “gloomy cave,” far from any intervention? I can think of a few reasons why. Peace and quiet, for two. A child can’t be expected to understand what’s led an adult to make the choices she’s made. But when the child invites, or even directly asks, the question—why the hell are you like this?—it’s a thorny gift.

A toddler discovers itself through the complexity of interaction. Interaction can be collaboration, but also conflict. It’s the only way to learn who you are, and to sharpen or blunt certain characteristics. Toddlers are not only unafraid of conflict; they also don’t pursue it out of malice. They simply don’t know why one would fear it. For them, it’s an interaction like any other, and that’s what they’re looking for.

Thus the parent receives a gift that isn’t poisoned, per se, but painful to swallow. Délos is constantly reintroducing me to my own triggers: The crossroads of Hermes, ruler of daimons. Do I be who I’ve always been, or change course? Why am I like this? I can renegotiate the terms of my existence, if I want, rather than sleepwalk through.

Hera, for her part, laughs when she meets Zeus’s lovechild. She almost can’t help it. In that glistening moment, she changes—briefly, anyway.

Can Apollo?

A slow-dance with memory

Zeus wouldn’t be head of the gods if he weren’t fair. “Naughty thing,” he chastises Hermes with a grin, then addresses both sons.

“Love each other. You’ve met your match and there’s nothing for it.” Casting his thunder-eye back on Hermes: “Guide your brother to the cattle. You know you’ve done him a turn.”

Apollo, stone-mouthed, spirits Hermes back down to Mt. Cyllene. “You heard father. Show me where the cows are,” he snaps. Hermes obliges, leading him to the ones he hasn’t slain. This act is insufficient to persuade Apollo of his goodwill … but then the lyre tumbles out of his swaddling, releasing a sound Apollo’s never heard before.

“What’s that?” he can’t help but ask.

“This?” Hermes lifts it with wonder, as if he’s forgotten it. He looks at his brother and smiles. “I’ll show you.” And he begins to play.

He sang of the immortal gods and the black earth,
how they came into being in the beginning,
and how they each received their allotted share of honour.
First among the gods he praised in song
Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses,
for the son of Maia belonged to her by lot. (IV.425-430)

Mnemosyne is the muse of memory, she whom bards call before launching into epic song. Memory itself owns Hermes by maternal provenance, and his song fills Apollo with a “deep and terrible longing.”

In the show Mad Men, adman Don Draper pitches Kodak by talking about nostalgia, which he says is Greek for “the pain from an old wound.” Using photos of his domestic life to trigger longing, even he is moved, though he’s typically dismissive of his family. When he wins the pitch, Draper ironically spends years trying to recapture this moment.

Nostalgia on-tap in “The Wheel,” Mad Men, courtesy of AMC.

Nostalgia casts a spell on both medium and listener. To belong to Mnemosyne “by lot” is to stir the coals of memory, such that you live it again, even while mourning its loss—an enveloping nostalgia. Hermes “cannot ever escape from memory. He is possessed by it, and he carries it as inherited knowledge of all primordial sources of being,” Kerényi writes.

This makes me especially fond of Hermes, but at this moment I’m connected to Maia, too. A mother lives memory while making it. I complain about Délos even as I watch these moments slide past, turning almost instantly into something I miss so deeply it causes physical pain.

To be a parent is to fall under Mnemosyne’s lot, like Don Draper discovers even as he squanders it.

Now we turn to Apollo and the longing he feels. Apollo has perfect-son, elder-brother energy, but he’s also rife with baggage. This is his villain origin story, as the kids say:

His mother Leto was pregnant with twins: Himself and Artemis, goddess of the hunt. When Leto’s waters broke, no country dared let her give birth on its earth—out of fear of Hera (Zeus knocked Leto up, natch), but also because they knew Apollo specifically was inside her … and that he’d be a total pill. It was thought he’d find any land he was born into beneath him, and would scorch it on-sight upon birth.

Leto—who spent ages tumbling through the air in the throes of childbirth—was only able to land someplace by swearing “the most terrible oath the blessed gods can swear,” write the Homeric poets: Her children would revere where they were born, she’d ensure it.

Ah, the promises parents make to buy a little relief.

Thus the small island of Delos, for whom my son is named, concedes to let Leto land. And as promised by his mother, Apollo does love his birthplace, causing it to flower: Delos means “that which is illuminated.”

Still, Leto laboured with Apollo for nine days, suggesting he was breach-born. His sister Artemis, born days prior, had to pull him out. Once born, Apollo seeks a temple site, which, again, nobody wants. After choosing Pytho—spitefully burying a spring who tries sending him elsewhere—he kidnaps a shipful of Cretans to serve him against their will.

There’s a pattern here: Apollo wants acceptance and love. He feels, in many ways, entitled to it. But people, even lands, shrink away from him, and he has to either chase them down or punish them (also see: Cassandra and Daphne).

The “Far-Worker” may not be so named by choice. For Apollo, born fully-grown and not a baby like his brother, love is stingily offered. All this, I suspect, rises to the surface upon hearing Hermes’ song.

In a moment of deep vulnerability, Apollo makes Hermes promise never to fuck him over again. Then he vows to make him a “blessed guide among the gods [...] right up to the end I will not deceive you.”

“I want to be gentle with you in my thoughts and words. For in your heart you know all things well,” says Hermes, who possesses that rare diplomatic art: Empathy. He opens negotiations, asking Apollo for the gift of prophecy and offering to herd his cattle. He also gives him the lyre (and thus stewardship of music), with advice:

For whoever inquires of it
with skill and wisdom
and is willing to learn,
that person it teaches
through its voice
all those things
that delight the mind
when it is played easily
with gentle familiarity
for it shuns laborious drudgery.

But whoever, ignorant from the first,
questions it violently,
does so in vain,
the notes will be wrong
and stuck in the air.
But you may learn
whatever you please. (IV.480-490)

In The Iliad, Zeus calls Hermes the one for whom “beyond all the other gods it is dearest to be man’s companion.” Here, we learn why. Hermes isn’t just talking about an instrument in the lines above; he’s giving Apollo a masterclass on getting what he wants—not by violence, but with kindness, curiosity and attention. He sweetens this counsel with encouragement, not shame, for Hermes has none.

I love this story. As I write this, I remember: That’s another ambition I have. I’m trying to keep shame out of our house. But accomplishing that isn’t just about how I treat my son; it’s about how I treat myself. So much of the compounded pressure I feel relates to how well or poorly I think I’m doing, or to something somebody said to me. What pops my top at day’s end are just the last straw, not the reason.

We are not going to have a life like other people have. I can’t hold my kid, or myself, to the standards of other families we know. If I do that, we will fail. We have to invent a secret third way.

That’s what Hermes forges with his birth: A different way to be a god, and to be human.

Apollo grants countless gifts in exchange for Hermes’ love, including the literal keys to the kingdom: Apart from the Titan Hekate, Hermes is the only entity who can traverse all three realms—heaven, earth and the underworld. He is the one who guides the dead to their resting places, lending him the epithet “Psychopomp.” This is remembered in modern times: In French, funeral homes are called pompes funèbres.

Zeus, pleased his sons have made up, gives Hermes that coveted last place in the Olympian line. To replace his wooden shoes, smith-god Hephaestus gives him winged sandals … then, delighted by Hermes’ pleasure, makes a helmet, too.

On toddlers as gods

In his first 24 hours of life, baby Hermes produces chaos so significant it disrupts the natural and divine orders. His mother, exhausted from childbirth, has barely strength enough to take him to task.

Maia only shows up in two other stories. While bathing with her sisters in a river, Hermes sneaks up and steals their clothes, then watches them panic, naked, until he reappears with a laugh and gives them back. Later, she’ll go on to nurse another of Zeus’s illegitimate kids: Arcas, son of Callisto.

All the stories we have about Maia place her in a caregiver role. In two out of three, she’s wrestling with the intransigent nature of a wildchild.

But The Birth of Hermes isn’t about her. It’s about Hermes himself. Like Maia, my story will forever be entwined with the child I made. That’s not to say my own individuality and thriving no longer matter. Actually, they matter even more. This is a strange paradox.

“If Hermes is involved, after a touch of chaos comes another cosmos,” writes Lewis Hyde in Trickster Makes This World. In the presence of a trickster, “the gods themselves must suffer from uncertainty.”

Replace “trickster” with “toddler,” maybe even “adolescent,” and the sentiment holds.

Uncertainty implies a necessary interrogation. I know my kid isn’t trying to destroy me. He is trying to be. My inability to keep apace with his brain or energy are not his fault. As with Hermes, there’s sense to what he’s doing: The world reveals itself to him, and he reveals himself to us, joyously, with the power of someone who hasn’t yet learned to use an “inside voice” or cower. Already, I know he will walk in worlds I can’t imagine or traverse myself, even in the most banal sense: He already has more passports than either of his parents do.

My job is not to begrudge him any of that. It’s a limited job, really: To nurture and arm him until such time as he walks away. At least until he needs me again, assuming he ever does (shoutout Thetis!).

But also, I’m not nothing. I can negotiate with the situation and with my son. The successful terms of that negotiation don’t have to look like how anybody else is doing this.

Like Hermes, my son reveals me to myself. At every crossroads, it isn’t only him learning something; it’s also me who has to choose who to be. Unlike Maia, who lives on as an archetype, I can’t only be a mother. I have to be many things. I want to be many things. I want Délos to be able to accommodate that: The kaleidoscopic many in all of us, including himself. Including me.

I won’t always make the best choice. That’s not the game. But I think I have to wrestle with what I discover at those crossroads, the sacred places that honour Hermes, where my son leads me time and again.

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Having a kid is fucking nuts.

I thought of a lot of ways I could start this newsletter, most of them overbearing and tiresome, but I think that’s the lede: This shit is crazy.

I don’t feel like telling a story about some day-in-the-life thing that happened to illustrate that point, because you can get that from Romp, Peanut or whatever other post-Millennial parenting website you follow. I just want to be like: Look, before I got pregnant, I understood it would be “hard,” and my “world would change in ways I can’t imagine.”

What I didn’t get is, it wasn’t like making a life shift—moving something over, accommodating it. It was an utterly bonkers disruption. Like, a kid doesn’t add new furniture or even a new room to the architecture of the world. It demolishes the preexisting architecture and then you have to rebuild, sort of vibe-code, around the resulting destruction.

If a storm hit, typically people would help you with the rebuilding. But when you have a baby, it’s more like, “Well, get on with it, then. Didn’t you ask for this?”

I don’t want to whine (much). I want to talk about myths.

My gynaecologist warned me about postpartum depression before I went into labour. She said, very carefully, that I’ll need support for the first two months because that’s when it’s most likely to hit, and be the worst.

There’s no other way she could have said that to me, but I take issue with how we talk about postpartum. People speak of it as if it’s a random occurrence that may or may not hit you, like freak weather. But then you have a child, shortly after having been an adorable pregnant person everyone smiles at, strangers tell unsolicited stories to, and people lift bags for; and suddenly, nothing seems more logical than postpartum depression.

Like, you have this child now and not only is its well-being your sole responsibility; you also have to go back into the world and exist as before, with the additional bonus of a baby. But your hormones are nuts and your body is leaking milk and blood, possibly also organs.

Few things can induce more rage and grief. But also, one day while walking to my perineal reeducation appointment, feeling a jiggle inside me that shouldn’t be jiggling, I had this realisation: The myths were extremely frank about what to expect when you’re post-expecting.

It’s the myths that saved me. And I want to give them to you.

Who I think about most: Thetis.

Thetis asking Zeus to briefly turn the tide of war against the Greeks, for Achilles’ honour. credit

Thetis is a sea nymph, the kind of creature Madeline Miller would describe as scarce powerful enough to sustain her own immortality. Terrible things are always happening to nymphs. She is best-known for being the mother of Achilles … and once you know that, it’s easy to trace her claim to fame.

In her effort to protect Achilles from a tragic future, she tries to render him immortal. In some myths she does this by placing him in fire, burning off his humanity. In others, she submerges him in the river Styx. Either way, the presence of her two fingertips over his ankle, blocking the magic in that one spot, become key to his undoing—hence the phrase “Achilles heel.”

But I want to talk about Thetis in the wider sense, because she embodies how it feels, for me, to be a mother.

Thetis is relatable because she’s trapped inside larger operating systems—in her case, prophecies—that are always dictating her fate. And within them, she’s just trying to get by, fighting as furiously as she can against the classic nymph trope.

When we first meet her in Hesiod’s Theogony, we learn she’s irresistibly hot, a curse itself. All the gods want her. But scoring Thetis comes with a price: A prophecy foretells she will bear a son greater than his father.

Zeus, head of the gods, decides he needs to nip this in the bud. She can’t give birth by another god; who knows what that will yield? So he persuades a mortal king, Peleus, to “subdue” her.

In essence, Peleus is given the playbook for how to rape and thus trap Thetis in marriage. Zeus tells him to find her on the seashore, then hold on tight as she transforms into various creatures to get away. Once she’s exhausted, he can have his prize.

Two results spring from this terrible union: The Trojan war (their wedding is the one Eris, goddess of discord, wasn’t invited to; shenanigans ensue), and Achilles.

Despite the circumstances of Achilles’ birth, Thetis loves her son like she’s never loved anything. There’s some inherent storytelling misogyny at play here, because this is all we know about Thetis: She was hot, then she became a die-hard mother, fin.

But this is a big deal, because another prophecy sits over his head: To either die obscure, but old—or young … and as the greatest warrior ever known.

Thetis does everything she can to make the former happen. She tries rendering him invulnerable when he’s an infant. When the Trojan War kicks off, and King Agamemnon’s goons start drafting, she disguises young Achilles as a girl and hides him among the daughters of the king on an island called Skyros.

Odysseus eventually weeds Achilles out and drags him to Troy with his beloved companion Patroclus, and for him the war is nonstop pissing contests with Agamemnon. Homer’s Iliad actually starts with one: At one point, the Greeks win a skirmish and take women among the bounty, but Agamemnon has to give his up because she’s the daughter of an Apollonian priest. (Apollo strikes the Greeks with plague for this.) He returns her, begrudgingly, and pettily takes Achilles’ slave instead.

Achilles is so enraged he vows never to fight again unless Ag comes back a-begging. After making that declaration, he runs to the seashore and howls for his mother’s support in a way one storyteller, Alice Oswald, compared to when your adult kids send you an urgent, angsty Whatsapp.

(He spends a lot of time sulking and crying at the seashore with mom.)

Thetis spends much of the war pulling all the strings she can to ensure Achilles’ success. This is critical: She’s not vying for his safety, per se. To compare, Paris, the feckless prince who stole Helen and kicked this war off in the human realm, is relentlessly flung to safety by Aphrodite, and thus misses most of the action.

Rather, Thetis fights for what her son wants, despite her misgivings. Within those constraints, she tries keeping him safe.

In one instance, she appeals to the blacksmith god Hephaestus to forge him divine armour—armour so fine that the shield alone depicts every banal, glorious, tragic and sublime instance of human existence from the perspective of the gods. (The pictures also moved. Fun fact about Hephaestus: Total robotics nerd. I’m serious. His house was staffed by robot servants.)

When Patroclus, Achilles’ love, dies on the battlefield, Thetis preserves his body from decay long enough for burning while Achilles avenges his death.

This is a mother who cherishes her son, and cherishes what he loves.

We know how this story ends. Achilles dies, great to be sure, but in a humiliating way: With an arrow shot through his heel by Paris, the most useless guy in the whole war, barring poor Protesilaus, who died getting off the ship.

Paris absolutely sucks. But we can talk about him another time.

I have a lot of feelings about Achilles. He was complicated. You know, it was Prince Hector of Troy who killed Patroclus, but only because Patroclus was dressed in Achilles’ armour. He thought it was the other guy and was very sorry; Hector, though favoured by war god Ares, is never anything but nice. Achilles is nonetheless so aggrieved he not only kills Hector; he drags his corpse behind a chariot for ages in front of Hector’s bereft parents and demands a ransom that totals his body weight.

But you know what? King Priam sneaks across Greek lines one night to grasp Achilles’ legs and beg for his son’s body. He gives it to him and they cry together.

Anyway. Achilles dies great, but people mostly get on with things—the war, notably—once he’s dead. The only one left to mourn him is Thetis. In some tellings, she whisks him to an island called Leuke in the Black Sea, where he can be immortal, but outside the world she exists in. In Madeline Miller’s retelling (The Song of Achilles—a beautiful book), she appeals to Patroclus’s spirit for stories of her son, long after his death.

Thetis mourning her baby. credit

Thetis is the wild, faith-defying hope inside the parent.

There’s this quote from Zadie Smith that I think about a lot:

“Sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously. Children are the infamous example. Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?”

The birth of my son activated my amygdala and upped its level to 1,000. Things that seemed banal before—like stepping outside the house—now require a level of thinking, prepping and emotional peps that overwhelms and exhausts me.

I can feel every hair on my skin when a car passes too close too fast. When he cries, the sound vibrates inside my bones and frags all my thoughts, like interference from an enemy weapon. Traversing the city of Paris—where I’ve lived 17 years, and which I’ve crossed countless times—can feel unthinkable.

Yet I know I need to free him, and support every painstaking step he takes away from me. This isn’t something that will happen when he’s 18; it’s happening now: When he tries playing ball with boys that are too old, and is rebuffed; when he scuffles at daycare; when he decides the best way down the slide is on his butt, backward (why?!).

My son isn’t mine. He’s someone who, every day, reveals himself to me. And what I learn can delight me, or scare me and break my heart. Sometimes all those things.

The first thing I realised when Délos was born was that I would owe him everything and he would owe me nothing. This hit me in the months he was barely conscious. I was landscape, food. He fed from me, needed me to do things for him, didn’t care how I felt or how much I slept.

I’m not even sure he loved me. He simply needed me. When I realised that, I realised that in general, when we love, we tacitly expect our love to be recognised. I couldn’t expect that from my child, and this understanding was brutal. It’s one of the things that changed me.

That’s why I think so much of Thetis. I live in terror of the day the horseman of the future comes to claim my now-toddler, lifting him from my arms to present him to the Fates. Because he owes me nothing, not even a happy destiny. The possibility that anything but a happy, long life could await him terrifies me.

I want the gods to pass him by, for him to be a mere breath in the universe. I hope he’ll expand in that breath and feel joy that compounds.

Every parent I know does their version of Thetis. They’re all in my ear, wringing hands over the right schools, which parks are best, how to vet a sitter. We all need to learn baby CPR and teach them how to swim. We need to put them in martial arts but also Montessori schools, so they’re creatively nurtured; but also prepare them for the rigours of serious study and a brutal world.

But Thetis wasn’t just trying to keep her son cocooned from reality. When push came to shove, she supported who he was and what he wanted, knowing where it would lead. That must have killed her every day of his short life, a breath measured against her eternal one.

In The Anger of Achilles, Robert Graves’ rendition of The Iliad, Thetis rises from the sea to stroke her son’s hand when he comes to her after that first Agamemnon spat. When he begs her to persuade Zeus to turn the war against the Greeks so Ag will beg him back, Thetis mourns:

“Poor child, why did I ever rear you? I am cursed in my motherhood! With so luckless a nativity, you deserved to stay at your post, dry-eyed and content. Yet I find you alone and in tears, though fated to a briefer span of life than any mortal. Certainly, I will visit snowy Olympus and approach Zeus of the Thunderbolt.”

She’s such a PTA mom. I used to hate those moms. Now I feel her. Now I’m a parent rep at daycare, two goddamn years running.

I don’t have the gift or curse of a prophecy to hedge against. But I am working within systems designed to shape our fates. I’ve sometimes escaped them, collaborated with them, manipulated them or fallen victim to them. I’ve felt myself clever or lucky; the pre-parent version of me would have trusted my child to approach the labyrinth of mortality in a similar way.

But now that he’s here, no matter what his fate, I’ll do anything to be in his corner. I’ll throw my fragile human body against immoveable realities. Will I be brave enough, though, to love the path he chooses?

I hope so. That’s why, in this first post, I raise my glass to Thetis.

Thetis, I think of you almost every day. You loved despite the lot you were given. You did everything you could to fight things bigger than you—the egos of kings, divine proclamations—because you wanted more for your baby.

Obscurity. Old age. A happy life.

Achilles didn’t want those things. He went all-in on glory, knowing the price was death. He was often petty and imperfect. You loved him anyway.

Achilles, the greatest of all warriors, never stopped being his mother’s boy.

Okay, now for fun stuff.

I’m not really sure I’ll keep this section but it adds levity and gives me room to share things I never get to share with anybody.

1. What I’m watching: Once Upon a Time on Netflix. I forgot what TV was like before the OTTs took over. Shows just go on forever! This is basically a soap opera composed of fairy-tale and a totally random hodgepodge of fictional characters. Like, right now we’re dealing with the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz, who’s the sister of the Evil Queen from Snow White. Wicked’s managed to get herself sneakily pregnant by Robin Hood (veh rapey tbh), who’s the Evil Queen’s true love (she’s good now), and Captain Hook is in here? And he’s very hot? And sometimes Captain Nemo comes to give him sage advice? I don’t know, man.

I think I like this show because it’s about all the random sidequests that relentlessly turn into big proper quests, and that happily-ever-after on the horizon keeps moving just an inch further away. It still manages to be hopeful. I need that right now. Also, I can watch this while playing Two Dots.

2. What I’m reading: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman. This is the second book in a trilogy that continues from the His Dark Materials trilogy, which I would recommend to anyone into an atheist Narnia. In this particular book, he’s interrogating atheism as a dogma of its own. I’m reading this as a book-club activity with the one mom friend I’ve made. She’s cool. I gotta keep her.

3. What my son’s into (besides Peppa fucking Pig): I recently took him to Transparence, an exhibit at the Petit Palais des Enfants, an Exploratorium-lite where he ran around nonstop for an hour. He chose a very soft (organic cotton!) alligator at the bookshop that he now sleeps with and calls “Tato.” He also likes this goofy popping thing, whose name is simply “Owl.”

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I’m freestyling this. But I also want to take it very seriously, because these stories—these entities, these experiences—have been living rent-free in my head for two years, and I need to give them a place to expand and infect other people.

I’m also midwifing myself during this time, and if it helps somebody else do the same, then I have meaning today.

Please share me with a parent or would-be parent you love (or hate, depending).

In Midwifing the Mother, we explore the utterly hallucinogenic experience of postpartum life through the lens of myth and alchemy. Huddle close to the alembic and join us!

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