The banner for the Articles page is made up of scripts from around the world, from top left, down and around from lower right: rongo-rongo from Rapa Nui (Easter Island); Turkic runic inscription from the Orkhon valley, Mongolia; Maya hieroglyphics; Eteo-Cypriot (pre-Hellenic); Tibetan; nü shu women’s script, Hunan, south China; demotic cursive, Kemet / Egypt; lontara script of the Bugis, Sulawesi (eastern Indonesia); Meroitic syllabic script, Sudan; Norse runes; (center) Indus seal, India / Pakistan.

I’m most stoked about adding some 1000 articles (some longer, some stublets) from my annual courses (Researching Women, 2021); Matricultural Eyes (2022); Rematria (2024), and Womanity (2025, yet to be migrated). (Most of my recent writing went in here (other than my 2023 book and regular posts on the Suppressed Histories Archives page (follow if you’re on FB!). I decided to make this material open access worldwide, rather that keeping it behind a paywall. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this.

The courses survey archaeology and historical records, new finds, information about (and preferably by) Mother Law and matrilines, historic processes of patriarchalization, shamans, medicine women, priestesses, ceremony, goddesses, ancestor reverence; and dives into specific cultural histories (India, Anatolia, Mexico, South Africa, Wales…) Below I’ll share samples from the 2021 course, Researching Women.

Although Egypt comes in for the lion’s share of attention, Sudan has many riches, in the gold regalia of the Kushan queens, and in the temple reliefs showing them interacting with deities. Going back through time to the neolithic, these peoples of the southern Nile made female figurines thematically consistent with, but stylistically distinct from, the predynastic Napatan figures of Egypt. Even further back, the Khartoum Neolithic shows cultural influences originating in the Sahara, where rivers still ran, and where women marked their pots with parallel wavy lines created by drawing fishbones across the wet clay.

Similarly, for imperial reasons Mesopotamia has been a focus of much research, and the world has paid little attention to Jordan, which has its own history of very ancient female figurines, and murals, and little known goddess temples at Petra and Khirbet et-Tannur. There, at the edge of the Syrian desert, these goddesses were influenced by Atargatis, called “the Syrian goddess” by the Romans, and by Phrygian Kybele, out of Asia Minor. Both goddesses are depicted seated on a lion throne. But Jordan also borders Arabia, and late Iron Age inscriptions call her Allat, “the Goddess.”

Or you could read about the Four Women Doctors memorialized in Chinese history. Bao Gu in the Jin Dynasty, Yi Jiao in the Western Han, Zhang Xiao Niang Zi in the Song, and Tan Yunxian in the Ming). Bao Gu a famous alchemist in the Jin Dynasty, proficient in moxibustion, and the first [recorded!] female moxibustionist in the history of Chinese medicine.

This photo essay shows hard-to-find images of Aztec women’s ceremony, midwifery, healing from the Florentine Codex. The book was written by missionary Bernardino de Sahagún very soon after the conquest, but produced by Mexican artist scribes. The monk learned the Nahuatl language and studied the culture—with the goal of destroying it. The book is a rich source on that culture, though scenes with women are rarely reproduced. But it contains the richest depictions of birth in pre-modern times—and also divination, an important part of birth ceremonies.

Some articles look at women closer to our times. In northern South Africa, the Rain Queens of the Lovedu are a matrilineage of priestesses (inherited by the eldest daughter) famous throughout the region for their “ability to control clouds and rainfall." These Modjaji were sought out by the Zulu and other faraway peoples in times of drought. See link for more photos.

In ancient, medieval, and modern times, our ability to discern women is obscured by patriarchy, but also by invasion, colonization, even genocide. These traumas disrupt transmission of oral histories and cultural wisdom. So paintings like this one, some 150 years ago, carry precious testimony about Indigenous ceremony in the Roundhouse. Missionaries did their utmost to suppress these ancient ways, but they survived and revived.

This photo essay show’s women’s robes of the Ghost Dance, an ecstatic anti-colonial spiritual movement that spread from Nevada across the Rockies to the Great Plains. The late 1800s were a time of trauma, when the US Army killed many people, of many nations, and forced them onto reservations where conditions were dire. The hide robes were painted with, thunderbirds, stars, moon, sun, snake, cedar, and other symbols. After the photos, you can see translations of some powerful Ghost Dance songs, including a Comanche chant taken up by Robbie Robertson in his song Ghost Dance, which repeats, "We shall live again. We shall live again.”

I gotta throw in the Inuit throat-singers, often paired, singing and exchanging breath at very close quarters. Nathalie Parenteau, an artist in the Yukon, painted this joyous scene, with Inuktitut syllabics floating around the singers.

Anna Julia Cooper wrote A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, published in 1892. Mary Helen Washington described it as an “unparalleled articulation of black feminist thought”. The book opens with a brave declaration: “while the voice of the Negro (man) of the South has been but a muffled chord, “the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black woman…” She appealed for education for Black girls, and plainly called for bringing women to the fore: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

The Bolivian feminist firebrand Adela Zamudio (1854-1928) spoke unspeakable truths in poetry and prose (including in the Quechua language!). She was a teacher-activist who fought for women’s higher education, for women’s right to divorce, for secularization, for women workers’ rights, and other feminist causes. She was a co-founder of Feminiflor, a Bolivian feminist magazine that was published 1921-24 (see below). She was also a painter, though most of her paintings are lost. Zamudio wrote a long narrative poem, “Loca de hierro” (‘Iron madwoman’). All this got her called “mujer-macho.” See her poem “To be born a man” at the link.

Then there’s Gertrude Beasley, a feminist truth-teller out of working class Texas. Her searing history in My First Thirty Years (1925), and her horrific personal fate, are case studies in society’s merciless treatment of women of her era who gave voice to socially unspeakable truths. From the very first paragraph, readers can see that no punches will be pulled: “Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen.” Her recounting of male violence in the family got her banned and eventually locked up.

Kathe Kollwitz, a towering artist, German progressive, feminist, and anti-war activist. Her art depicts mothers as protectors, peasant rebellions, weaver revolts. The Nazis came after her as a “degenerate artist.” One famous piece cried out, “Never Again War.” Her face always shows integrity.

Osnat Barazani (alternately Asnat or Asenath), was the earliest recorded woman rabbi, a Kurdish Jew who lived in Mosul, Iraq, in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Her access came through a rabbi father—who had no sons, so she got an education. She married another rabbi (on a pledge he would not compel her to do housework) and after her father’s death, she ran his yeshiva with her husband. When he died, she became the sole head. People flocked to see her because of her reputation as a healer and wonderworker.

Legends of spinning women who raise megaliths —dolmens and standing stones—from France, Spain, Portugal, Guernsey, Britain, Alsace, and Germany. Folk tradition laid great emphasis on the builders' power as spinners, typically saying that a fata or goddess or lady carried the giant stones on her head while walking and spinning. The Basques named a dolmen at Mendive after the lamiñas. One of them brought the capstone from faraway Armiague balanced on her head, spinning as she went.

Rose Little Bear tells the story of how the seeress North Woman guided the Cheyenne as they fled the reservation where the US Army had confined (and starved) them: “In the party was a medicine woman who had discovered her power during the flight north. One evening the Cheyennes had been ready to stop for their meal. The woman had gone apart from the others when she heard a... voice. She stopped to listen. The voice said, ‘Don’t stop and eat. Keep on going. There are soldiers behind you.’ The woman hurried back to camp to relate this strange happening. When Little Wolf heard the story, he told the people to keep moving on. After that, when the others were preparing to camp for the night, the woman moved apart from them to listen. If she did not hear the voice, the people would stop. Many of them had come to depend on this woman, because she was guided by the powers above.

“When this rift between Little Wolf and Morning Star was threatening, Little Wolf said, ‘Let us ask this woman for a sign or guidance. We will go by her decision.’ Morning Star answered, ‘We cannot listen to this woman. We are men-leaders. My mind is made up.’” Only Little Wolf’s band was able to find a safe place to pass the winter.”

Sacred forest for women in western Papua: “This has always been a women’s-only forest.... When we enter the forest, we’re free, as there are no men around.” The rule is that the women go naked, once they arrive in boats to gather clams. “We freely share stories with the elders.... Here women confide in each other. We can never let it go.” (Video at link)

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Historical Confusion Introduced by a Racist Novel

Cooper confused the Mohicans of upstate New York, where his father was an early settler, with the Mohegans by naming his main character after the Mohegan sachem Uncas. This is one of numerous historical distortions in the book, which is set during what Americans call the French and Indian War (a colonial spillover from the Seven Years War in Europe). The settlers are the novel’s heroes, along with Native allies who sacrifice themselves for them.

The book set a genre of the noble frontiersman, partly in Native dress, who are presented as guardians of white women against menacing Others. The two daughters of Colonel Monroe are at risk of being captured by “Indians” while being transported to Fort William Henry. Despite their protectors’ best efforts, they are eventually taken captive. One of the women gets killed in a dramatic cliffside battle to rescue them. One of the rescuers is Uncas, who dies in the struggle. This is the name of a historical Mohegan chief of Connecticut, who the author plunks into his fable.

At the funerals of Cora and Uncas, Cooper anachronistically introjects the name of Tamenund, a renowned Lenape chief of the 1600s. The real Tamenund had negotiated a peace treaty with William Penn, for “as long as rivers run and stars endure.” (That treaty was not kept any more than the others, but settlers made “Tammany” into a legendary figure of their own.) The novelist puts his own words into Tamenund’s mouth:

“The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again...”

White Mythology of the “Vanishing Race”

This genocidal mythology of the “vanishing race” was extremely popular in settler society, not just in novels but in newspapers, cartoons, even statues. The “Last of the Mohicans” is killed off, and there are to be no more, as Europeans overrun the continent. They proclaimed this process to be inevitable, under varying rationales: Manifest Destiny, or Progress, or the old Puritan interpretation of epidemic deaths of Native people as “Divine Providence.”

Over and over, the theme is repeated: the Original Peoples are “disappearing,” “a vanishing race.” Sometimes the tone is mournful, but always with an air of inevitability. Some expressions are more triumphant, like James Earle Fraser’s bronze sculpture End of the Trail, showing a defeated warrior slumped over his wounded horse. This theme went viral, with countless prints sold, along with belt buckles and every kind of media. The message is, “We won.”

The Myth of the Vanishing Indian: “This trope posited that Native Americans were doomed to extinction. According to historian Paul Jentz, white Americans felt the deaths of Indigenous individuals ‘could be mourned’ while simultaneously believing that ‘Indians must die away into the “untrodden West” as white civilization took its racially superior place on the continent.’ In reality, Native Americans were not ‘vanishing.’ They were being displaced by war and coercion and dispossessed of their ancestral lands through illegal seizures and illegitimate treaty negotiations.” [Much more on this here.]

These ideas contributed to Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans becoming “one of the most popular English-language novels since its publication; it is frequently assigned reading in American literature courses. It has been adapted numerous times and in many languages for the stage, films, and cartoons...”

Cooper’s choice of Uncas as a “noble savage” figure, as a “good Indian,” may have had something to do with the historic Mohegan chief having allied with the English colonists against the Narragansetts and Wampanoag. He was regarded as safe. The “good Indians” were the ones who sided with the settlers, counterposed against demonized “renegade Indians” who resisted conquest. This became a lasting narrative, propagated in dime novels, comic books, and movies. The popular TV series The Lone Ranger, the proverbial “hero in the white hat,” was based on the Texas Rangers.

“As a law enforcement agency, the Rangers were unofficially founded in 1823 for the purpose of a ‘punitive expedition against a band of Indians,’ according to the Texas State Historical Association. They continued to drive indigenous people from their homelands during the Cherokee War in 1839, as well as the Council House Fight and Battle of Plum Creek against the Comanches in 1840.

“In the mid-1800s, the Rangers captured runaway enslaved Black people seeking freedom in Mexico through the Callahan Expedition, according to the Texas State Historical Association. In 1918, the Rangers slaughtered Tejanos [Mexicans who preceded Anglo settlement] during the Porvenir massacre…” [Texas Tribune] By this time, Mexicans had become their primary targets.

Theme of the White Maiden in Distress

Going back to Cooper’s book, his over-story is the white maiden-in-distress. This theme proliferated over countless dime novels, serialized newspaper stories, and movies. Some versions even duplicated Cooper’s theme of the cliffside battle for the abducted maidens, now transposed to the “Wild West.”

The patent racism of these mythologies is clear enough, and they were avidly consumed in the earliest forms of U.S. mass media. Note: the “Native man as threat to white woman” trope contradicts considerable testimony from the “captivity narratives,” particularly in the East, that Native men did not rape settler women they took captive. Contemporary white writers express surprise at this, clearly expecting otherwise. Some even testify that the women refused “rescue,” preferring to remain among Native communities. Scholars have been discussing this pattern for decades, for example:

”In Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, the scholar of early American literature Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola notes that conservative estimates of the number of captives “run into the tens of thousands, and a more realistic figure well may be higher.”⁷ Indeed, [Mary] Rowlandson’s narrative is remarkable precisely because she came back. As Lepore elaborates, a surprisingly high number of captives (many of whom were abducted when children) ‘later resisted rescue and refused to return to live with their English families.’ The troubling yet compelling undercurrent of such narratives is driven not only by the obvious violence but also by the disturbing possibility that those taken (or even more worryingly, those who willingly left) might not want to come back.

“It was not a remote possibility, either. According to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, the percentage of captives who embraced their abduction was far larger than that of unwilling captives, and from the earliest days of colonization, some settlers even chose to live among the Indians.”

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Instrumentalizing the “White Woman in Danger”

That’s an entire subject, but I want to turn to a different point: what function the “white-woman-captive” theme served. Its colonial use in settler culture is clear: demonizing the “Indian” Other, while using rape in the age-old pretext for war, then conquest, then land seizure. It also served as cover for the primary pattern of rape as a weapon of conquest—in this case white men’s systematic rape of Indigenous women. This started with Columbus, who trafficked Native girls into slavery, and set the pattern for the next five centuries.

Colonizer society has been unwilling to address, or even recognize these rapes (with associated atrocities, like white men cutting off sexual parts and wearing them on their hats, or hanging them from saddlebags). However, many Native women have written and spoken out on rape as an integral part of settler colonialism. (See for example Cherry Smiley, Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined, from Spinifex Press)

This pattern of white men raping Indigenous women is not limited to the past but is ongoing, in stochastic attacks on highways and streets. Historic violence continues through the vectors of impoverishment, trauma, prostitution / trafficking and substance abuse. It notoriously clusters around skid row urban districts, and the “man camps” of loggers, miners, oil-drillers, as described by activists advocating for Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Not only are Native women at the highest risk for rape (and murder) than any other group, but studies have shown they are more likely to be raped by white men. This pattern contrasts with evidence that most rapes are intra-ethnic—by men of the same group:

”Native American women across the country are being murdered and sexually assaulted on reservations and nearby towns at far higher rates than other American women. Their assailants are often white and other non-Native American men outside the jurisdiction of tribal law enforcement.

“In some U.S. counties composed primarily of Native American lands, murder rates of Native American women are up to 10 times higher than the national average for all races, according to a study for the U.S. Department of Justice by sociologists at the University of Delaware and University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

”More than half of Native American women have been sexually assaulted, including over a third who have been raped during their lifetime — a rate of rape nearly 2.5 times higher than for white women, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.

“Unlike women of every other racial group, Native American women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by people who are not Native American. A study by the University of Delaware and the University of North Carolina found that more than two-thirds of sexual assaults against indigenous women are committed by white and other non-Native American people.

“Yet non-native men who assault Native American women on reservations can’t be arrested or prosecuted by tribal authorities under a 1978 Supreme Court decision.” [“Murdered and missing Native American women challenge police and courts”]

This ruling simply sealed an already de facto reality in which white society and officials consistently refused to recognize the sovereignty of Native nations, their authority to deal with crimes on their land, no matter what the treaties said. In practical terms, white men have enjoyed total impunity for rape and any other crimes against Native people ever since the US military confined them to reservations. Meanwhile, white officialdom imprisons Natives out of all proportion to their numbers.

Erasing the Danger of White Men to Women

So that’s part of my point, but the other part is this: the “white woman in danger from racialized Other,” be he Native or Black or Mexican, serves as a symbolic misdirection away from the immense structural violence within white patriarchal society itself. This is true of both colonial European societies, and of societies in Europe. (Not that these are the only patriarchies; but they are the ones propagating this particular racialized myth.)

Rape within the family, resulting in runaways who then get trafficked into prostitution, sometimes after an intermediate stage of abusive foster homes, from which girls run away and wind up on the streets, to be entrapped by pimps who enslave them. Rape by neighbors, date rape, stranger rape, child marriage, battery, femicide. Rape by doctors, priests, ministers, coaches, employers, the #MeToo rapes of the casting couch. Rape by police, and now by ICE agents in the concentration camps. It’s taken decades of feminist work to get public recognition for how far-reaching patriarchal violence is. Family annihilators who kill their wife and children, batterers who kill the children as another way to inflict pain on their wife, or on a woman who finally left them. Such men regularly appear in news reports, and are just as regularly forgotten.

More recently, feminists have pointed to what the press minimizes: the colossal misogyny underlying mass shooters, who commonly single out females as their targets). We’ve learned, first in the Pelicot case, and now a proliferation of reports, of digital networks of men who rape their wives, or let other men do so, recorded on video for the secret brotherhood. The elite Trump-Epstein rape networks, and their embroilment with intelligence agencies, bankers, political figures, continue to escape accountability.

Symbolically and mythically, the spectre of the Black, or Native, or immigrant Other as violent threat, has served to cover over the endemic and pandemic levels of violence against women by white men, the dominant class, the entitled patriots who think the land belongs to them by right. Some, after objecting to coverage of conquest and genocide on my Suppressed Histories Archives page, have actually declared, We’ve conquered them, fair and square, get over it, or some version thereof. Often in tandem with false claims that All people have practiced slavery since the beginning of time.

In making this point about misdirection and scapegoating, I am not saying that minoritized men never commit rape or femicide. They do (although overwhelmingly against women of their own community). However, there is also a history of wrongful convictions and extrajudicial lynchings of black men, in which the charge of rape was used as a blunt instrument of white supremacy.

Now we’re seeing how whipping up frenzies about immigrant criminals, “bad hombres,” is being cynically used by white ethno-nationalists in both the US and in Europe as cover for installing fascist methods of repression by oligarchs who are themselves criminals, rapists, traffickers, and thieves on a vast scale. All this rhetoric about “protecting” women, and no actual protection—actually the reverse, since the vast majority of rapists enjoy virtual impunity. But that’s how protection rackets work, and patriarchy is a protection racket.

We’ve seen the instrumentalization of imperiled-white-women to excuse driving First Nations off their lands and the genocidal policies through which European settlers colonized North America. I gave only one example of how allegorical figures of white women were used to symbolize that colonization, presented as a “civilizing” mission. I could do an entire photo essay on that iconography (often featuring Athena, who also figures in French images of colonizing Algeria). Not a few flesh-and-blood white women participated in the “civilizing” project, as missionaries, school-teachers, and social workers. But:

White Women Who Protested “Indian Removal”

There do exist little-known exceptions to this pattern. The most remarkable that I’ve found is an 1830 women’s petition addressed to the Senate and House of Representatives, to stop committing genocide. Well aware that they’re likely to be perceived as out of line, the women begin with self-abasing obeisance to male authority, so that their appeal might be heard: “Even in private life we may not presume to direct the general conduct” or actions of their husbands and brothers. “Yet all admit that there are times when duty and affection call on us to advise and persuade” the men, hoping that “the voice of female sympathy” might be heard.

“When, therefore, injury and oppression threaten to crush a hapless people within our [sic] borders, we, the feeblest of the feeble, appeal with confidence… and implore [Congress] to succor the weak and unfortunate. —In despite of the undoubted natural right, which the Indians have, to the land of their forefathers, and in the face of solemn treaties, pledging the faith of the nation for their secure possession of these lands, it is intended, we are told, to force them from their native soil, and to compel them to seek new homes in a distant and dreary wilderness…

“To you then …we solemnly and earnestly appeal to save this remnant of a much-injured people from annihilation, to shield our country from the curses denounced on the cruel and ungrateful, and shelter the American character from lasting dishonor.”

Fifty years later, in 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. In 1879 she heard the Ponca chief Standing Bear speak, protesting the U.S. Army forcibly removing his people from their homeland to a newly- created Great Sioux Reservation. (Standing Bear famously fought a series of court battles, up the the Supreme Court, to gain legal recognition as a “person” denied by the U.S. government.)

Hunt Jackson was greatly moved and began to research government abuses of Native rights. What she found out, from government records, horrified her. She wrote one friend, “I shall be found with ‘Indians’ engraved on my brain when I am dead.—A fire has been kindled within me which will never go out.” She compiled the histories of injustices against seven Nations: Lenape, Cheyenne, Nez Perce, Lakota, Ponca, Winnebago, and Cherokee. She details the treaties and how the government repeatedly violated them; how the military forced these peoples out of their countries and relocated them to arid lands where farming was difficult or impossible.

”Jackson uses evidence from Official Reports of the War Department or the Department of Interior to show that the United States did not hide the atrocities they committed, nor did they see them as such. In addition to using evidence that the United States provided of their mistreatment of Native Americans, Jackson also took great care to ensure that she included information on how each of the people viewed themselves and how they felt about the way they were treated. …Her book brought to light the injustices enacted upon the Native Americans as it chronicled the ruthlessness of white settlers in their greed for land, wealth, and power.

“Jackson concludes, "It makes little difference, however, where one opens the record of the history of the Indians; every page and every year has its dark stain." She calls on all branches of government, no matter how difficult the process or how long over due, to right their wrongs. Jackson outlines four changes, the cessation of cheating, robbing, and breaking promises, along with the end of refusing to protect Native American property rights under American law…

“Jackson sent a copy of her book to every member of Congress, at her own expense. She hoped to awaken the conscience of the American people, and their representatives, to the flagrant wrongs that had been done to the American Indians, and persuade them “to redeem the name of the United States from the stain of a century of dishonor.” [Source for quoted text] It’s striking that she uses the same word, “dishonor,” as the 1830 petitioners did.

The response to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book was negative, often dismissing it as “sentimental.” So said Theodore Roosevelt in his book The Winning of the West. (The title shows his own romanticization of the European conquest.) She did not give up, but continued writing magazine articles, letters to editors, and to her own network. Her activism helped passage of a bill in March 1887 to relieve injustices against the Ponca people. Mostly, though, her impact was more in a ripple effect. She was paddling against a very strong current of racism, til the end of her life.

“In her youth, she was primarily educated by her revered Mohegan Elders, from whom she learned the spirituality and history of the Mohegan People. Nonner Fidelia Fielding (Flying Bird), Mohegan Medicine Woman Emma Baker, and other important women of her time identified Gladys from an early age as someone whom they would teach traditional ways and who would carry on this knowledge.” [Source: the Mohegan Tribe] Other influential nanus in this line were Mercy Mathews, Lucy Occum, and the great-grandmother Martha Uncas.

As a child, Gladys met Frank Speck, then an anthropology student, and later a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He had sought out her great aunt and teacher Fidelia Fielding to record her telling stories in the endangered Mohegan language. She and her cousin (or sister-in-law?) Emma Fielding were the last fluent speakers (though Mohegans are now revitalizing their language). Through her contact with Speck, Gladys was able to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania in 1919, where she studied with him and other scholars. She also learned about her Lenni Lenape ancestry from the Delaware medicine man Witaponoxwe.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon “brought an Indigenous worldview to her ethno-botanical research among the Delaware, Nanticoke, Cayuga, and Wampanoag tribes of the East Coast. She published significant works on tribal knowledge and on the use of local natural resources to create traditional herbal medicines. This photo [below] was taken in 1922, when Tantaquidgeon and Nanticoke leaders successfully lobbied at the Delaware State Capitol for a school where Native American children could receive a modern education and learn traditional values.” [Source]

Founding culturally-informed educational institutions was a strong priority to counteract the ongoing history of missionary-run schools and the suppression of Native languages and spiritual ways (even in supposedly secular schools). Below: photo of Gladys Tantaquidgeon with her Nanticoke friend Jane Harmon (Smithsonian / National Museum of the American Indian)

“This belt was worn by three Mohegan women: Martha Uncas (1769-1859), Flying Bird (Jeets Bodernosh-shor/Fidelia Fielding (1827-1908), and Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon (1899-2005). The longevity of these three women allowed the Tribe to pass on and preserve ancient Mohegan stories. Flying Bird was the last fluent speaker of Connecticut’s 1st language, Mohegan-Pequot, which is now undergoing restoration and being taught to Mohegan Tribal youth.” [The Mohegan Tribe]

Mohegan Tribe on this medicine belt: “Today, we honor the great Mohegan matriarch Martha Uncas during National Women’s History Month. Martha lived during a difficult era for the Mohegan Tribe, as the Tribe’s population had been severely depleted. Martha fought for the survival of her Tribe, teaching her most important cultural lessons to her two chosen protégés – her granddaughter Fidelia Fielding and her grandniece who later became Medicine Woman, Emma Baker. Pictured here is Martha’s belt which was passed down to Fidelia Fielding and then to our late Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon.”

Here’s a modern iteration of the central symbol on the belt:

Gladys Tantaquidgeon “published significant works on tribal knowledge and on the use of local natural resources to create traditional herbal medicines.” She also traveled around and networked with other Nations. During the Depression, she worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, living on Lakota reservations from 1935 to 1937. “She witnessed the devastating effect that financial, health, and food inequality had on the Sioux and their lifeways; treatment that often mirrored the experiences of her Mohegan ancestors.” [Mohegan Tribe]

“Gladys Tantaquidgeon grew up steeped in the traditions of her Mohegan tribe. In a remarkable life that spanned three centuries, she was credited with the preservation of the Mohegan tribal language and customs in Connecticut. Nationally, she was known as an expert in the restoration of cultural practices and was sought after by western tribes to aid in preservation efforts.

“In 1934, she was hired by the United States government to work on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Later she worked to promote Indian art for the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board in the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming. Her duties involved the organization of Indian cooperatives and research and preservation of ancient Indian artistic techniques.

“After concluding her government service in 1947, she returned to Uncasville, Connecticut, where she joined her father, John, and brother, Harold, as the full-time curator of the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum, which she had co-founded in 1931. The museum, which housed native artifacts, was dedicated to education, based on Tantaquidgeon’s belief that ‘you can’t hate someone you know a lot about.’

”It is the oldest Native American owned and operated Indian museum in the U.S. Tantaquidgeon continued to work at the museum until 1998 [when she turned 99!], and further served the Mohegans on their Tribal Council. In addition, she worked as the librarian at the Niantic Women’s Prison during the 1940s, where she tapped into her previous work helping struggling women on reservations.

“Drawing knowledge from multiple sources, Tantaquidgeon was also the author of several books on Indian medicine practices and folklore, including Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians. [She also wrote a book on The Delaware Big House Ceremony.] Among her many honors are the University of Connecticut’s “Tiffany Jewel” and the National Organization of Women’s Harriet Tubman Award. In addition, Tantaquidgeon received honorary doctorates from the University of Connecticut and Yale University.” [Source]

"During the 1970s, Tantaquidgeon served as a member of the Mohegan Tribal Council. In 1994, she provided critical research that helped the tribe receive federal recognition. She was widely recognized for her dedication to indigenous knowledge, traditional practices and social justice efforts and was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Connecticut in 1987 and Yale University in 1994.”

But there’s still more to this story, both in what came before, and what has followed. The Mohegan Nation tells more about culture-preservation through festivals:

“One of the tragedies for many Indian tribes is that years of repression have caused these traditions to be lost. Still, one of the most unifying traditions for the Mohegan people survives today. The Wigwam, or Green Corn Festival, is all at once a celebration of thanks, a symbol of Tribal survival and the chance to feel connected to other Tribal members, past and present.

“Before the arrival of the Europeans, Mohegans held several celebrations throughout the year to give thanks to the Creator for the earth’s many gifts. The annual Corn Thanksgiving was most important. Tribespeople thanked Mundu, the Creator and Great Mystery for the gift of corn, a source of both spiritual and physical sustenance.

“The name “Wigwam” comes from the word Wigwomun, meaning “welcome” or “come in the house.” In many ways, the Wigwam was a community open house and homecoming. Both corn and home play central roles in the celebration.

“In early times, the Festival was held on the site of the current Mohegan Church, at a “fair tree.” But the tradition started to fade in the 1800s with increasing pressure for the Tribe to christianize and assimilate. Medicine Woman Emma Baker revived the Festival just as Tribal lands started to break up in 1860. She incorporated it with the activities of the Mohegan Church Ladies’ Sewing Society, making it a source of Tribal solidarity. Inspired by the chance to retain their identity at a dark moment, the Tribe became determined that this should happen.

Corn: “Corn gains increased significance when it is parched and ground as yokeag. Mohegans have beaten corn with a mortar and pestle since the earliest times. The act of grinding yokeag ties Mohegans to their ancestors and each other, particularly through women. Grinding yokeag is a part of the Wigwam Festival and it might be served a number of ways, including on ice cream. But corn is also served as the traditional succotash, a combination of corn and beans, two of the “Three Sisters” of traditional Mohegan agriculture (with squash being the third).

The Arbor: “Emma Baker’s Wigwam Festival included building a brush arbor. It took eight to ten men to cut and set the poles and then weave birch saplings along the top and sides, forming a large enclosure. One entrance was at the east end, and one at the west, which led to the cook house. Tables were set up for meals and to showcase items made by Tribespeople. The first table was the candy table, followed by the table of baked goods. In the middle was the “fancy table” featuring everything from baskets and carving to beadwork and aprons. Locally grown food was served at mealtime: clam chowder, oyster stew, succotash and yokeag.

“Like many traditions, the Wigwam Festival celebrates tradition even as it evolves. For many years in the 20th century, the Festival helped raise funds for the Mohegan Church and for Mohegan activities. In 2003, in an effort to scale back and return to its roots, the celebration returned to Fort Shantok after many years at a local high school. Today, it is held at Fort Shantok at the end of summer, with the corn harvest, during the third weekend in August. This gives us an opportunity to get together and share some aspects of our culture with our friends and neighbors in the community. In keeping with tradition, it includes crafts and food items for sale, plus traditional dance and storytelling.”

The great niece of Gladys Tantaquidgeon has continued in her long line of medicine women: “Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, Medicine Woman and Tribal Historian... has taken a very active role in the cultural and historical concerns of the Mohegan Tribe since her childhood in Uncasville, Connecticut, and was appointed Mohegan Medicine Woman in April 2008. Her great-aunt, Medicine Woman Dr. Gladys Tantaquidgeon, trained her in Tribal oral traditions, traditional lifeways and spiritual beliefs.”

Melissa has written and spoken about her heritage, her eminent ancestors, and The Lasting of the Mohegans the title of her book (reframing a famous racist novel). This video on Mohegan history is very well worth a listen.

The Mohegans chose a woman to become their 18th sachem:

Chief Mutáwi Mutáhash (Many Hearts) Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba became the 18th Chief of the Mohegan Tribe on August 15, 2010, and is the first female Chief in the Tribe’s modern history. The position is a lifetime appointment made by the Tribe’s Council of Elders.”

Another post from the Mohegan tribe says: “She follows in the footsteps of many strong female role models in the Mohegan Tribe, including her mother, Loretta Roberge, who was a member of the Tribal Council that achieved Federal Recognition for the Tribe and held the position of Tribal Nonner (an elder female of respect), as well as her great-grandfather, Chief Matagha (Burrill Fielding).

“Before becoming Chief, she served as Chairwoman of the Tribal Council and served in Tribal Government as Executive Director of Health and Human Services. Preceding her work for the Mohegan Tribe, Lynn had a career as a registered nurse. She earned a Doctor of Nursing Practice at Yale University and was named a Jonas Scholar. She was awarded an honorary Doctoral Degree in Humane Letters from the University of Connecticut, an honorary Doctoral Degree in Law from the University of North Carolina, Pembroke, an honorary Doctoral Degree in Science from Eastern Connecticut State University, and an honorary Doctoral Degree in Humane Letters from the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, CT.

“In 2022, she made history once again when she was appointed by then-President Biden as the first woman to serve as Treasurer of the United States, as well as the first Native American to hold this role. She proudly represented Mohegans and Indigenous communities nationwide through 2024. She also formerly served as the United South and Eastern Tribes Board of Directors Secretary and the Chairwoman of the Tribal Self-Governance Advisory Committee of the Federal Indian Health Service.”

Emma Fielding Baker

But now let’s back up and look at the ancestral women of this lineage.

“Today, we honor the great Mohegan matriarch Martha Uncas during National Women’s History Month. Martha lived during a difficult era for the Mohegan Tribe, as the Tribe’s population had been severely depleted. Martha fought for the survival of her Tribe, teaching her most important cultural lessons to her two chosen protégés – her granddaughter Fidelia Fielding and her grandniece who later became Medicine Woman, Emma Baker.” It was her sacred belt that was later passed on to Gladys Tantaquidgeon by Fidelia Fielding.

Some sources name Fidelia Hoscott Fielding as the last speaker and preserver of the Mohegan-Pequot language. She would converse with her grandmother, Martha Uncas, in their language, in which Fidelia’s real name was Dji’ts Bud dnaca, “Flying Bird.” She kept the traditional lifestyle, farming and foraging for food and herbs. She taught the old ways to Gladys, including stories about the Makiawisug, or Little People. (In fact, that was Glady’s childhood nickname.)

“In about 1900, Frank Speck, an anthropology student at Columbia University, sought out Fielding in his effort to salvage what remained of a dying language. After her death, he translated four of her diaries and they are now preserved in the archives of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.” [Source]

Emma Fielding Baker was another of Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s teachers. Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, in her book The Lasting of the Mohegans: Part I, The Story of the Wolf People has authoritative information about her family and her lineage of female leaders. She writes of Emma Baker:

“Emma lived from 1828 to 1916 and dominated the Mohegan cultural and political scene of the mid-19th to early 20th century. She served as Tribal Chair, Sunday School Superintendant of Mohegan Church, and Coordinator of the Church Ladies Sewing Society (which sponsored the Tribe’s annual Wigwam Festival). Non-Indians described her as “a very intelligent member of the Tribe” who “knew Latin.”

“She was married to a Mohegan man named Henry Baker and they had six children. Gladys described Emma as follows: ‘She influenced my life at that time in connection with “the ceremonial.” She was one of my grandfather [Eliphalet] Fielding’s sisters; [therefore] she was technically my aunt. [But] she was one of the women whom I used to refer to [respectfully] as “grandmother.’”

I haven’t yet laid hands on a copy of The Lasting of the Mohicans, so rely on wiki for more details: “Emma Tyler Fielding Baker (1828-1916) was a member of the Mohegan Pequot [nation] and was posthumously awarded the title of Mohegan medicine woman in 1992. Medicine women were culture-bearers and required to have an in-depth knowledge of tribal customs and possess good leadership qualities. She was also a tribal historian and ceremonial leader of the Mohegan Tribe.

"Baker was born in the village of Mohegan (now Fort Shantok, Montville, Conn. on December 5, 1828, to Francis Fielding and Rachel Commenwas Hoscott and was one of ten children. As an adult, Baker helped preserve tribal historical records and oral traditions, thus becoming known as a culture-bearer. Baker married a Mohegan man named Henry Greenwood Baker on November 30, 1854, who became the father of her eight children.

"Leadership within the tribe. In 1860, Baker served as the president of the Church Ladies Sewing Society which was considered to be an auxiliary of the Mohegan Church. This group of women worked to preserve Mohegan culture and, as part of their matriarchal role within the tribe, considered new chiefs and decided land claims. This group met regularly at the Mohegan Church in Montville, Connecticut.

"One of Baker's actions as president was to restore an ancient Mohegan Green Corn Festival nicknamed the ‘Wigwam Festival’ (‘wigwam’ meaning "welcome"). This Festival continues into the present as a celebration of Mohegan culture and is annually held during the third weekend in August. Because the Mohegan Green Corn Festival was to be held on the grounds of the Mohegan Congregational Church (whose land was tribally owned), this provided solidarity for the tribe in the following years when the reservation land was eventually broken up. Baker also served as a Sunday School teacher at the Mohegan Church.

"Baker was elected president of the Mohegan Indian League in 1896. She represented the Mohegan Nation before the all-white, all-male Connecticut legislature as part of an endeavor to protect Mohegan land and sacred sites. She also chaired the Mohegan tribal council. and documented the desecration of the Norwich Royal Mohegan Burial Ground. …

"Baker was a ‘nanu’ (mentor or respected elder woman) to her niece Gladys Tantaquidgeon, by instructing her in spirituality and herbal medicine which Baker had learned from Martha Uncas, her grand-aunt. Baker died on January 20, 1916, and is buried at Shantok Burial Grounds in Uncasville, Conn."

On Jan. 10th, 1999, the statue of medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon was unveiled at Mohegan Sun’s Spring Entrance. The wood statue was beautifually hand-carved by Rhode Island artist, Armand L. LaMontagne. It now stands in the Tantaquidgeon Museum.” [Mohegan Tribe page]

What an impressive lineage of women.

Coda: while editing some old pages from my courses, I found more information not included here, on the second half of this page. Including this:

n choosing Gladys as their protégé, to learn tribal herbalism and other traditional lifeways, her elders considered her appreciation for the Makiawisug, Little People of the woodlands. When her great aunt Fidelia Fielding saw that she did not laugh at those time-honored creatures, she gave Gladys a ceremonial belt, acknowledging her role as Mohegan culture-keeper.

It was Fidelia who left me that very old belt that I wear with my Indian dress. It had belonged to her grandmother, Martha Uncas. Martha taught her the Mohegan language. Fidelia Fielding was the last speaker of our Mohegan-Pequot dialect. She and her grandmother Martha Uncas lived together. They were said to have the Indian tongue used more than English.

The most interesting part of [Fidelia’s] life that I recall, was that she knew about the Little People who live in the woods, the Makiawisug. I recall that on one occasion there was a family dinner and meeting in the old parsonage, a half a mile down the road from here. At one point, she told one of the relatives that she was stepping outside for a minute to talk to the Little People, “someone in the tree”...Some of the younger members regarded her as “quite different” (and they laughed but I did not). She used to visit my parents because they didn’t ridicule her. Others didn’t sympathize with her contact with the Little People. - Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Part II: Mythic forms of Old Woman, medicine women, and the patriarchal demonization of witches who resist male domination. The Old Goddess in folk art and lore, and patriarchal culture-war against her ways.

Part III: Historic women elders who act as ceremonial leaders, medicine women, midwives, teachers, and storytellers; movers and shakers, bold resistance leaders, survivors, and rematriating culture-keepers.

The videos below are for paid subscribers only, but anyone can see them by subscribing on my course platform. $20 gets you unlimited views, with extra readings on Old Woman in megalithic lore of Ireland, Portugal, and Korea. (The last two to be added in future; I have some articles to work up.)

I have an entire chapter on the Cailleach (with bits on the Norse Dísir and La Vielle Qui Court le Temps) in my book Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion. Lots more open access material on Old Woman in my video The Distaff and Female Power.

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Those stories were first sung by the aodoi (court poets who praised and played to aristocratic patrons) from Mycenaean times into the Archaic era. After centuries, their verse were put into writing, circa 725-650 bce. These stories changed and diversified in later cultural narratives (some of which said that Helen never went to Troy, but had been in Egypt the whole time, and that it was only a phantom that people in Troy saw; others claimed that Paris had abducted her). Ancient arguments raged over what the real story was (and opinions still vary). I’ll add that there’s no contemporary evidence of “Homer,” much less original texts dating to that era.1 We’re looking at a multilayered cultural record, in what scholars call textual and iconographic stratification.

In the Greek Epic Cycle, Helen left Menelaus (thanks to Aphrodite making her fall in love with Paris) and eloped to Troy. The entire Trojan War was based on a men’s pact to uphold Menalaus’ right to have Helen, will she nil she, and to force her to come back. That’s the stated reason for the invasion, and after beseiging Troy for ten years, and then ravaging it, that’s what they did. The epics say so (though they are silent on how Menelaus treated his recaptured wife), and so do the Greek ceramic paintings, as we’ll see.

Let’s start with the oldest written record. Much of the story about Helen is not told in the Iliad or the Odyssey, but in other poems in the Epic Cycle, and in Spartan tradition, where Helen was originally a goddess. (See below.)

In the Iliad, “Homer” is short on sympathy for Helen, or for any of the women abused by the warlords. The poet spends many passages blaming and shaming Helen, often by making her do so herself. Classicists Maureen Fant and Mary Lefkowitz long ago named this literary phenomenon of putting “men’s words in women’s mouths.” It’s a definite thing, in fact the predominant pattern in “great literature.” What follows is excerpted from my book (this time I made it accessible to all subscribers, though with citations stripped for readability).

Blaming and Shaming Helen

The Iliad makes Helen blame herself for Troy’s destruction, even as she praises its destroyer Agamemnon as “a good king.” He is the brother- in-law “to my abhorred and miserable self.” Translations of this passage vary, depending on how they render the word kynōpis, which literally means “dog-faced,” or “dog-eyed.” This expression signified “shame-faced,” in the way that “dogs avert their eyes if humans stare them in the face.”

Lattimore has Helen say, “slut that I am.” Ian Johnston renders it, “I am such a whore.” These translations of kynōpis are not literal, and have been rightly disputed for that reason, but the insulting misogynist tenor of the word cannot be. Contextually, it is entangled with the sexual double standard, an epithet commonly used for adulterous wives, within an intense gender hierarchy. It upheld a classic, indeed the Classic, sexual double standard.

“YOU BITCH”: Variants of “dog” convey shame and opprobrium in the Homeric epics. The word is occasionally used to shame men in non-sexual contexts. Akhilles insults Agamemnon as kynōpa during a barrage of insults; Diomedes calls Hektor “dog”; and Menelaus calls the Trojans “cowardly bitches” (using the feminine for extra offensiveness, just as is still done in English today).2 But culturally, shame for women was synonymous with sexual stigma. Helen’s act of sexual self-determination is the reason why she was villainized and blamed for the suffering of the Trojan War.

Homer has Helen self-deprecatingly call herself kynós (“bitch”) in another passage: “O Brother of me that am a bitch, a contriver of mischief (kynos kakomykhnoi) and abhorred of all...” She expresses the wish that she had never been born, and reiterates her desire for death, which she repeats through the Iliad. She is made to model the self-hatred prescribed for women who step over the lines of the sexual double standard.

Later accounts show Helen being treated as chattel after the war. After Paris is killed, two of his brothers contend for Helen, and she ends up being given to Deiphobos because of his prowess in battle. Euripides treats this marriage as forcible, saying that Helen felt “bitterly enslaved.” Several times she tried to escape, but Deiphobos would drag her back. The play also shows Hekuba harshly rebuking Helen, and urging Menelaos to kill his abject wife.

Greek literature also uses the “dog” slur against the Trojan queen Hekuba. Nikandros claims that after seeing Troy in ruins, Hekuba turns into a dog and runs into the sea. According to Lykophron, she curses the Greeks, and as they stone her, she turns into a dog. She then goes to Hades where she becomes the hound of Hekate.

The Epic Cycle is not a single story, but a body of traditions, in which many conflicting versions circulate. Some writers, including Stesikhoros, Herodotus, and Euripides, denied that Helen ever went to Troy. They show her living in Egypt throughout the war. In one version, Zeus fashions an image of Helen out of clouds, creating an illusion that she is with Paris in Troy. Or, Apollo saves Helen from Orestes, and takes her up to Mount Olympus (thus returning her to her original divine status). Pausanias gives two versions. One pairs Helen with Akhilles after his death. In another, queen Polyxo of Rhodes blames Helen for her son’s death in the Trojan War. She sends women disguised as Furies to seize her and hang her from a tree: “and for this reason the Rhodians have a sanctuary of Helen of the Tree.” (This story smells like a patriarchal revision that recasts a Rhodian tree goddess into a Homeric frame.)

In much of Greek literature, people hate Helen, blame the war on her, and want to kill her. Stesikhoros recounts that both the Greeks and Trojans tried to stone her to death. Euripides has the Trojan women shun Helen after the war, and she faces the death penalty once she is brought back to Greece. Aiskhylos laments the pointlessness of the war, “all for a woman manned by many,” (another way of calling her “whore”) and condemned the fugitive wife for the invasion of Troy: “O mad Helen, who did yourself alone destroy these many lives, these lives exceeding many, beneath the walls of Troy?” [Agamemnon 1455]

That censure only hardened in later centuries. Pausanias alleged that Herophile “foretold in her oracles that Helen would grow up at Sparta to be the bane of Asia and Europe, and that Ilium would be taken by the Greeks on her account. ”A character at a fictional symposium declares: “I don’t think that any of you recognize, friends, that the greatest wars occurred because of women: the Trojan War because of Helen, the plague because of Chryseis, the mênis [wrath] of Akhilles because of Briseis.” …

The given reason for the war is that Helen is “a woman related to spearmen,” aristocratic warlords whose jealous rage precipitates their invasion of Troy. Casey Dué highlights the fact that “Helen was herself a prize, awarded by Aphrodite in the judgment of Paris. In the Iliad, Helen continues to be treated as booty. Paris proposes a duel with Menelaos, in which ‘Helen and all her possessions’ ... would go to the winner.”

The Iliad does not come close to showing war from women’s point of view. The cultural narrative reveals “not who Helen was, but who men have wanted her to be.” Culture-makers wanted a scapegoat to blame for the deeds of men, and they demonized Helen of Troy, over and over. Virgil made it worse.

The epics use the metaphor of ripping away a woman’s veil to signify mass rape in war: “In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the phrase ‘loose the kredemna [veil] of Troy’ refers to the destruction of that city and acts as a euphemism for rape.” Nor is literature the whole story: from the late Archaic period on, Greek vase painting shows men chasing and abducting women. [End book excerpt]

Even in marriage scenes, the man grabs the bride by her arm and pulls her along behind him. A vase painted by Makron “depicts Paris leading Helen away on one side by the wrist, and on the other Menelaus leading Helen back in the opposite direction.” Her agency is shown as utterly irrelevant.

But another strand of legends about the Trojan War shows female resistance. Trojan women captives burn the Greek ships as they sail along the coast of southern Italy. In Lykophron, Sertaia sets fire to the warships near Sybaris, for which the raiders chained her to a rock to die. Strabo says that Trojan women set fire to their captors’ ships at the river Neaithos near Kroton, forcing them to settle there. In Apollodoros, it is Priam’s sisters, Aithylla, Astyokha and Medesikasta, who, “dreading slavery in Greece, set fire to the vessels.”

One more piece: Helen the goddess

Originally Helen of Sparta was a divinity. In the Kypria, she was the daughter of Nemesis and Zeus, born from an egg. (Which originated from a rape: Zeus pursued the titanis Nemesis, the daughter of Nyx (Night); she changed to different shapes as she fled; but he shapeshifted to match her, and caught her in the form of a goose. Nemesis laid an egg which was given into the custody of Leda, who raised her. In later accounts, she was half-divine, born of the mortal princess Leda, who Zeus had impregnated in the form of a swan—so again, Helen comes from an egg.

Some sources derive Helen’s name from Proto-Indo-European *Sweléna, “sunlight,” and she has been compared to the Vedic Daughters of the Sun. Others render this root as svaranā, meaning ‘shining one’, and relate it to Greek elene “that can mean a torch or light.” The Iliad alludes to her effulgence: “And Helen the radiance of women answered Priam.”

Many heroine shrines were dedicated to Helen. Foremost among them was the one in Sparta, where she remained a goddess. Her heroōn stood in the middle of the city, with many stone stelae honoring Helen. A 6th century relief depicts Helen with her egg; another shows her with a radiant sun-crown, flanked by her brothers the Dioskouri. She seems to have over-shadowed her husband at the Menelaion, where they were jointly worshipped. People offered to Helen votive figurines of warriors, female musicians, dancers and riders; ivory combs, cosmetics, mirrors, perfume. (This section too is excerpted from my book, in which I go on into more about theories about kingship coming through Helen (even though she had brothers—and so did her daughter Hermione).

But what does the Odyssey say about Helen? It gives a more ambivalent account: first she first aids Odysseus when he sneaks into Troy disguised as a slave, and gives him intelligence on the city’s defenses. She is shown speaking retrospectively of regret that she came to Troy, leaving her husband, who she now longed for. She is a loyal wife, after all! and so can be vindicated. The poet shows Helen wracked by remorse:

Then the other Trojan women wailed aloud, but my soul was glad, for already my heart was turned to go back to my home, and I groaned for the blindness that Aphrodite gave me, when she led me thither from my dear native land, forsaking my child and my bridal chamber, and my husband, a man who lacked nothing, whether in wisdom or in comeliness.” [Od 4.259-64]

Nevertheless, when the Trojan Horse was filled with warriors, waiting to bring “death and ruin,” the Helen of the Odyssey tries to thwart them, to make them betray their concealment inside the Horse. Menalaus says to her, “you circled our hollow hiding-place, striking the surface, calling out the names of the Danann [Greek] captains, in the very voices of each of the Argives’ wives.” Fooled by her witchery, the men were on the verge of replying, but Odysseus restrained and shushed them.

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The defamation escalated as time went on. Hesiod wrote in the Ehoiai that “Helen shamed the marriage-bed of blond Menelaos.” A scholion on Euripides reads, “Tyndareos begot a notorious race of daughters, infamous throughout Hellas for blame” [Schol. Eur. Or. 249] Stesikhoros claimed that Tyndareus had angered Aphrodite by failing to sacrifice to her with the other gods, so she “made his daughters two times and three times married, and husband-leavers.” (Multiple marriages were considered disgraceful for women, but the infidelities and even rapes committed by men were unremarkable, in fact ordinary.)

The Roman Aeneid is worse. Its hero sees Helen hiding in a sanctuary as Greek warriors sack the city. Aeneas blames her for the disaster they had inflicted on his city:

Afraid of Trojans angered at the fall of Troy,
Greek vengeance, and the fury of a husband she deserted,
she, the mutual curse of Troy and her own country,
had concealed herself and crouched, a hated thing, by the altars.
Fire blazed in my spirit: anger rose to avenge my fallen land,
and to exact the punishment for her wickedness.

Aeneas anticipates being praised “for extinguishing wickedness and exacting well-earned punishment,” expressing delight at the prospect of taking revenge on Helen. But his mother Venus comes to Aeneas and rebukes his anger, and his failure to attend to his wife and child, endangered by the Greek army swarming across the city, and to his old father. She tells him Helen is not to blame, but “the ruthlessness of the gods, of the gods, brought down this power, and toppled Troy from its heights.” Because of her, Helen is spared.

How the painters visualized Helen’s capture

Let’s turn to the iconographic record, which shows how Classical artists saw Helen. They’re nearly unanimous in viewing her as an unwilling captive of Menelaus when the Greeks take Troy.

The painters show Helen moving away from Menelaus as he brandishes a sword at her—or is drawing it on her at close range. He is angry, she is afraid. She is clearly not going with him voluntarily. She is running from him, looking over her shoulder.

Even while showing Helen’s attempt to flee, some Classical painters bring in motifs of marriage (women arranging a veil over Helen’s head as if for a bride) or of love (Eros flying overhead to connect her with Menelaus), who the littérateurs regard as her rightful lord. But this is about more than the bond of marriage, or even husbandly jealousy. Menelaus is king of Sparta not through inheritance, but only through his marriage to Helen, as scholars have remarked. Without her, where is his claim to remain king?

In depictions of Helen’s capture, and of women running away from rapists, her gesture of supplication takes two main forms. In the first, the woman raises her arms upwards as if asking the world around them for help. In the other, she reaches out toward her attacker, imploring him to stop, to have mercy on her.

The oldest known depictions of the woman’s gesture of supplication toward an attacking warrior appear on the Mykonos Pithos. Its modeled panels show the most ancient scenes of the Trojan War, dating around 675 bce. They include the first depiction of the Trojan Horse, and the Greek warriors sacking Troy after breaching its city walls, in a frenzy of killing, looting, and raping.

In one panel a Greek fighter grabs a Trojan woman by the hair while pointing his broadsword at her bowed head. She turns her body away to protect her child, tightly wrapped in her arms.

Four other panels show the same theme: invaders killing boys (the girls were taken as booty, raped, enslaved, and trafficked). Two panels show women trying to save their sons by reaching out to touch the raider’s face. This could be taken as a simple gesture of supplication, but it probably suggests more: the woman desperately bargaining her body for her child’s life.

The Mykonos Pithos depicts Helen, too. Menelaus brandishes his sword a foot from her face, as he seizes her by the wrist. She has thrown her veil over her face, separating them, a barrier signaling that he is as a stranger to her.

This was not Helen’s first capture. As a girl she had suffered being abducted by the rapacioius Athenian hero Theseus. Many writers told how the middle-aged Theseus seized and carried off Helen while she was dancing with other Spartan girls at the temple of Ortheia on the banks of the Eurotas river. The girl was only seven years old according to Hellanikos of Lesbos, or ten in Diodorus Siculus, or twelve in Apollodoros. (My book has much more to say about the notorious rapist Theseus, whose violence against women was condemned and enumerated at length by Athenaeus of Naukratis.) Helen’s brothers rescue her from the fortress where Theseus had sequestrated her, and while doing so took two other women captive, including Theseus’ mother Aithra. (She remained enslaved for the rest of her life; her son never bothered to rescue her.)

Later, in Sparta, a group of suitors contend with each other over who gets to take Helen to wife. To prevent bloodshed between them, Odysseus proposes a plan to the Spartan king Tyndareus (who is only nominally her father in the mythic record). Before he announces his choice of Helen’s husband, all the suitors must swear an oath to respect his decision, and not only that, but to defend that marriage against any challenge or abduction. This is the mythic rationale for the Trojan War—though Mycenaean warlords needed no such excuses for their raids on rich cities like Troy / Ilios / Wilusa.

The scenes of abduction and abduction in war overlap with the symbolic gesture of marriage, in which the groom grasps the maiden’s lower arm and pulls her behind him.

The sexual politics embedded in these stories, the way they were told, and are still being told (even more so, what is left unsaid) matters more than the artistic choices of Homer, of later Greek and Roman writers, or modern interpretation. I have no plans to see Nolan’s movie, which I hear de-emphasizes and flattens the female roles. (To his defenders, I remind that Circe and Calypso were goddesses, not women, so they don’t exactly count; we’ve seen that Helen herself was originally a goddess in Sparta.) But I want to say something about Nolan’s depiction of Helen with scars on one side of her face.

Some women have criticized this depiction as demeaning to Helen, making her a victim. But the stories themselves show her as a victim. In most tellings, Menelaus takes her by force; a few have Paris abducting her, rather than her going willingly, as she does in the Epic Cycle. The ceramic painters show the wronged husband angrily confronting his absconded wife, who is afraid and tries to run away from him. Some actually show him drawing a sword on her.

So it is not unreasonable to consider that the enraged husband might have struck Helen, once he had her in his power again, after a ten-year-long war encamped in the Troad. That he could well have beaten her, or as the paintings suggest, cut her face with his sword. The convention of Hellenic ceramic painters was never to show the violent act itself, but what came before: the abduction, never the rape. In this light, the husband raising his sword against Helen as he retakes possession of her, signals what would happen next.

A feminist analysis cannot have a horror of acknowledging victimization, as if shame belongs to the victim and not the victimizer. That is the patriarchal model. At least feminists were united in understanding that until the late 1990s, when academics began beating the drum of “agency, agency, agency” that amounted to denying that patriarchy victimizes women en masse. That’s what patriarchy does. There is nothing degrading about recognizing that men systematically inflict violence on women, with society approving, colluding, or covering it up.

The scars on Movie-Helen’s face look like they were inflicted with a blade—her husband’s sword. Not his fist. That seems a likely outcome in her recapture in these old Hellenic mythic stories, and more so in the paintings. Most tellers had scant sympathy for Helen, but admired “godlike Menelaus,” their eponym for him repeated in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The poets did not concerned themselves about what the man they glorified might have done to the woman who left him for another man, humiliating him before his world, no more than they cared about the rapes their heroes inflicted on female captives.

But after three millennia of glorifying the “heroes,” we should consider this hidden side of the stories. It’s long past time to turn the lens around and focus on what happens to women, in war, in captivity, and in marriage.

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“Bitch” has roared back as a preferred insult, even by fauxgressive misogynists who use it for Trump and other malefactors. They do not care that the epithet “bitch” is the last word some women ever heard, while being beaten and murdered.

Get the book to read more about Myths of Conquest, as well as the oracular women and the mighty Titanides, pre-Olympian goddesses of the natural world. Available only from Veleda Press.

(It’s not on Fake Amazon, where Mr. Oligarch takes four times as much as the authors and publishers.)

In other words, Phase I is almost finished. Phase II will involve integrating all this existing material into the database of migrated photo essays from the Suppressed Histories FB page (come visit if you’re on FB), along with articles from my blog, substack, and archived courses.

Once all that content is loaded into the database, Phase III will be tagging all that content by subject and place, and generate links into navigation pages. They will finally make what is in the site visible and open for exploration.

WOMEN'S HISTORY AND HERITAGES IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Archaeology. Indigenous orature. Written records. Rock paintings. Female Icons. Sculpture. Painted Ceramics. Photos. Ceremony, dance, drum, incantation, dreamers, prophets, priestesses, healers, midwives, physicians. Elders, wisewomen, storytellers, poets, musicians, medicine women, female chiefs, regalia.

Mothers (and social motherhood), providers, foragers, farmers, builders, tent-makers, weavers, tanners, potters, basketmakers. Temples, natural sanctuaries, megaliths, statues, reliefs, scrolls, codices, painted hides, incised calabashes, sacred signs.

Analysis of patriarchalization as a historical process, and its entanglement with war, slavery, class hierarchy, empire, and colonization. Attention to mother law / matricultures, cooperative, egalitarian and non-state societies, spiritual philosophies grounded in Nature and relationality.

The workings of male domination, misogynist ideology, class systems, slave-trafficking, racialized caste, settler colonialism, racism, genocide, femicide, witch hunting, religious and ethnic persecution.

Resistance movements, women warriors, amazons, female rebels, witches, heretics, freethinkers, scientists, philosophers, writers, artists, martial artists, activists for justice, rematriation and Indigenous sovereignty, Earth and Water protectors, global women’s movements ... There's more but I better stop there.

I can’t wait to see the work of 57 years sorted and grouped by subject. What was ephemeral, scattered, down social media timelines, will be published in a new format, organized. The bulk of iceberg, under the waterline, will become visible.

Ayala learned to sew and began working as a seamstress in Santa Ana, near the Guatemalan border. (The city was a hub of the Unionist movement, which aimed to integrate Central American countries into a federation .) Still quite a young woman, Ayala began making prophecies received from “mysterious voices” and dreams. Some of her predictions were published in the newspapers in Santa Ana, which called her “la sibila santaneca.” In 1914, she foretold the fall of the Kaiser and the United States mobilization into World War I. This gained her fame among the people, but mockery from the elite, which continued after her death.

Tania Primavera, born (much later) in Santa Ana, Ayala’s home town, gives a bit more about her psychic side, calling her: “A seamstress, a tarot card reader and palm reader, a single mother, an indigenous woman, a…woman.” Prudencia’s birth on a stormy night, April 28, 1885, evokes Maya traditions that ascribe “lightning in the blood” to powerful people: “According to her memoirs, her mother, Aurelia Ayala, was riding along the clandestine trails between Guatemala City and Sonsonate while pregnant. Suddenly, lightning struck near Aurelia, killing three peasants. She gave birth to her daughter in a thatched hut in Sonzacate, in the department of Sonsonate.”

Primavera also describes the severe class hierarchy of El Salvador, with wealthy people, some owning coffee plantations, lording it over a mostly Indigenous population: “Thousands of workers labored on the coffee farms, their laborers extending to the outskirts of the city. They were barefoot, wearing their white cotton shirts and straw hats.”

Prudencia Ayala was a passionate fighter for the rights of women and the laboring class. She faced down severe prejudices: against women, against Indigenous people, against people of African ancestry (she had both), against poor people. Being an unmarried mother was highly stigmatized as well, but she let none of that deter her. She said she was “proud to be a humble Salvadoran Indian.”

In 1913 Ayala began to publish articles advocating feminism, anti-imperialism (for example, opposing the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua), and a unified Central American state. In 1919 Ayala was jailed for a political column criticizing the mayor of Atiquizaya. She was soon imprisoned again, for many months, in Guatemala on charges of being involved in planning a coup d’état. In 1921 she published a book Escrible. Adventures of a trip to Guatemala, describing her time there during the last months of the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Other books of hers are Inmortal, Amores de Loca (“Immortal, Loves of a Madwoman,” 1925) and Fumada Mota (“Pot-Smoked”!, 1928).

Ayala called Inmortal, Amores de Loca “a free book, orphaned in support. The fortune or misfortune is to be the child or work of the humblest woman that the Nation of Central America has produced.” (In other words, she received no funding, no backing from the literati.) Her Indigenous feminist defiance is seen as madness (thus the title), as her writing of Nature and spirit was also. But she was making perfect sense “All beings endowed with the use of reason, because of what they feel and think, have rights to claim and defend reciprocally between the two sexes that make up the complement of the home, of societies and of the State.”

Although women were barred from voting and government, they marched in the streets in 1922. “On Christmas Day, in the middle of a presidential campaign, a group of women of all ages and social classes marched in San Salvador in support of the opposition candidate. Above all, they called for the end of the dynastic governments headed by the Meléndez-Quiñones family. As a response to the parade, President Jorge Meléndez — the third member of the family to consecutively hold the presidency — unleashed the armed forces and paramilitary groups against the demonstrators, killing several women and injuring many more.”

Tania Primavera’s account fills out the feminist impulse in this march: “María Solano de Guillén, inspired by women's movements worldwide and advised by the New York Women's League, founded the "Society of the Confraternity of Ladies of the Republic of El Salvador" on April 19, 1922. On December 25, 1922, they marched in blue in support of Tomás Medina's presidential candidacy, marching for the first time through the main streets of the capital and demanding women's suffrage, a right previously reserved exclusively for men. The government's response was to have the National Guard fire upon them; people died. The women's demonstration was dispersed with gunfire and machete blows in front of the entrance to El Calvario Church. It is said that Prudencia was able to join this march and escape death.”

In the late 1920s, Ayala founded the feminist newspaper Redencion Femenina (“Female Redemption” (which can be translated “Salvation,” or even more so, “Liberation)”). She stood up tall for women’s right to vote and workers’s rights. By this time she was living in Guatemala.

On April 24, 1930, Prudencia Ayala sent a letter to Salvadoran resident Dr. Pío Romero Bosque, in which she declared: “Not wanting the female sex to remain outside the restricted law of citizen rights, I launch my candidacy for President of the Republic, inspired by the justice of a mixed government that identifies the sovereignty of the nation in both sexes, in the civic and social policy that instructs the citizen.”

She ran for the presidency of El Salvador, where women didn’t even have the vote. She wrote a 14-point platform: female suffrage, union rights; reform of government corruption; education and recognition of “illegitimate” children as full citizens (primarily affecting the poor). She advocated limiting alcohol distribution and consumption (a pressing women’s issue because men’s drinking often led them to beat women and children, and impoverished the family, as they literally pissed away their income). Ayala also called for freedom of religion, the dignity of indígenas, and Central American unity. She emphasized that the rights of women were crucial:

“Thinking seriously about the inferior status in which the female sex is placed, I have launched my candidacy as President of the Republic, to show civic activities as within the moral and mental capacities of women, equal to the male sex; without worrying about the barriers I will have to overcome in order to achieve triumphant female redemption in the rights of citizenship.”

Also:

“This cry is of high political significance before the colossus of the North: the civic-social social preparation of the Indian-Latin-American woman, who must unite in the political order of citizen activism against all humiliation, against all corruption ... This is not to take away the rights of man, but to constitute national sovereignty in the two sexes that make up the human family.”

“She called on women to take part in the campaign, speaking at numerous conferences and giving interviews. Ironically, however, most women seemed to support Araujo, from the Labor Party. Perhaps by departing from dominant women-as-mother views, the challenge to the status quo was too great even for the female electorate. But the press did pay attention. Some journalists acknowledged the justice of her demands, although coverage of her campaign mostly had a sensationalist tone — some nicknamed her “Prudencia, la loca.”

This slur was far from a one-off. “Ayala’s poor and indigenous background greatly challenged societal norms. In fact, during her campaign she was repeatedly ridiculed, masculinized, her indigenous features exaggerated in comic strips, and shamed for abandoning her rightful place in the home.”

Another source says, ““Prudencia Ayala challenged the sexist and racist system of her time, and was supported by other women and men who believed in equality. In the press, she was treated as “crazy,” a witch (something often linked to Afro-descendant women), ugly, lost, delusional, ignorant, a tomboy, dysfunctional, promiscuous--among an endless list of adjectives.” Or cartoons.

The ridicule only accelerated during Ayala’s presidential campaign, with “very offensive caricatures showing her as “the ugly one”, “the tomboy”, “the crazy one,” “la Prudencia” (not a flattering phrasing). But she had supporters, as shown by a headline in the newspaper El Espectador, on Tuesday, July 15, 1930: “University students cheered Prudencia Ayala today,” applaudng as she passed by the University building. She stopped to talk with them about women’s rights.

Ayala wrote in Redención Feminina: “Women have governed in Europe under the monarchical system. What is so strange about them governing in the Republics of the Indo-Latin-Hispanic American Continent under the democratic system?...It is reasonable, since men and women form the course of the world: both form the home, both form society, both must form the concept of citizenship and build democratic laws against slavery, both must form the government.”

Ayala cited Article 51 in the Salvadoran Constitution in support of women’s citizenship and therefore right to vote: “All Salvadorans over 18 years of age, married people, and those who have obtained some literary title are citizens.” She clearly qualified under those terms, but the Minister of the Interior denied this, claiming that “All” (todos) was understood to be “men” and did not include women. (This dodge both invoked and denied the masculine default in Spanish, which decrees use of the masculine gender for all plurals in which any males are present, even if women heavily outnumber them. So “todos” was and is understood to encompass both sexes; while todas applies only to all-female groups. The Minister pretended that the usual grammar did not apply, purely in order to deny women the vote.)

The Supreme Court of El Salvador ruled Prudencia Ayala’s candidacy illegitimate and unconstitutional. Thus, men denied women the right to participate in politics. “After months campaigning in legal limbo, she finally dropped her candidacy and recognized her defeat, bitterly declaring, “By not being qualified as citizen, I am left without nationality, appearing in the world of men as an inhabitant of planet Earth.”

But she also declared that the battle for women was not over, in her “Open Letter to Salvadorans,” 1930: “I depart with a satisfied heart that I have entered into combat to obtain the triumph of civic rights. I depart grateful to politicians who have recognized the justice that I’ve demanded under the law. The country demands the practice of justice, the fulfillment of the law in its most complete civic social meaning among both men and women, to balance the moral values ​​of the civilized nation. “

Ayala’s initiative broke the ground, and eventually led to the eventual recognition of women’s right to vote in 1950. Even before that, but after Ayala’s death, feminists re-initiated her campaign for the women’s vote in 1939, and succeeded eleven years later.

Prudencia Ayala died on July 11, 1936. Newspapers commemorated her (though some mocked her): “El Salvador loses a woman. . . Prudencia Ayala has died. . . A crazy intellectual died yesterday. . . Who will pick up the struggle of Prudencia Ayala?. . . The death of Ms. Ayala has left many politicians and intellectuals in suspense. . . For the Salvadoran people, Prudencia Ayala went down in history as a legend for Salvadoran women.”

As Karina Amaya wrote, “Prudencia Ayala’s voice was more than political. It was prophetic. She warned: ‘Politics without spirit is empty and spirit without courage never changes the world.’ Nearly a century later her words cut deep as we face corruption, inequality, and the rise of fascism in many parts of the world, including the United States. Her story is not only history. It is prophecy still unfolding.”

Recovering more history and context

Much of Prudencia Ayala’s life is undocumented. “Her historical records were only salvaged decades later, in 1996, when one of her sons discovered her photo at a museum and handed over a trunk full of her hidden writings and belongings.” She died soon after turning 51, of unknown causes. Certainly the military coup in Dec. 1931 had a terrible effect on Ayala. She was unsafe in her home country, and the president of Guatemala denied her entry.

General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, took power for the next 12 years. The month after his coup, an Indigenous peasant uprising broke out on January 22, 1932. He suppressed their demand for better working and living conditions with violence, in what history knows as “La Matanza” (The Massacre). Tania Primavera once again fills out the picture:

“From the outbreak of the insurrection, the same day the Izalco volcano erupted, as if foreshadowing this event, many died by firing squad, persecuted, and humiliated without trial. The boots of the guards combed the rural roads in search of peasants to execute. In this context, women were among the survivors. Although they supported the cause, the repression targeted primarily men aged 12 and older; there are still no exact figures, but the number of deaths is estimated to be between 10,000 and 30,000. [The elite supported the crushing of the peasant movement.] … But terror and silence reigned in the fields, in the coffee plantations, among the barefoot, among the few men who remained…

‘It was the women who preserved the Nahuat language within the home, and the traditional dress, the refajo, gradually fell out of use. People with indigenous surnames also changed them to avoid being associated with the insurrection. Anyone who looked indigenous, had an indigenous surname, was a laborer or worker, or was young, was considered a threat to the nation, a communist, or a rebel, and had to be executed. A profound silence reigned for decades among rural populations, especially in the western part of the country.

“Prudencia lived through all of that. Apparently, she continued living here. There is an advertisement from 1935 in the MUPI archives, where she is promoted as Sibila, a fortune teller, working at the Hotel Regis in Santa Tecla.”

This indicates that she was impoverished and struggling to earn a living. The danger she was in must have taken a terrible toll on her health. She died on July 11, 1936. Many decades later, she was reburied with honors in the Cemetery of Illustrious People in San Salvador.

Corte video en español sobre la vida de esta mujer potente y visionaria. Worth a look for the photos of Salvadoran women even if you don’t understand Spanish

Remembrance, commemorations

I found Prudencia Ayala being vividly called back into memory by women who inherit her cultural, political and spiritual legacies. “Restoring women to cultural memory” is a phrase I’ve used for decades. And look, that’s what this group Alharaca does in their performance of “They Call Me Black,” subtitled “Recovering memory of Afro-descended women of Central America.”

The statue below is titled “Prudencia Ayala y la niña, una mirada al futuro” (Prudencia Ayala and the girl, a look to the future). A team of artists carved it from a block of wood for the Mupi (Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, Museum of Words and Images) in San Salvador, El Salvador.

What about that cane? Several representations show Ayala with a cane, implying some disability. But maybe not: Tania Primavera calls “carrying a cane in her hand, a symbol of intellectualism and rebellion” as Ayala spoke before Congress.

The celebration of Ayala’s leadership even extends to expressions in Mexican idiom. An artist who goes by Señorita Violencia created a T-shirt depicting her with a halo like la Virgen de Guadalupe, calling her Santa Prudencia Ayala, Patrona de las Feministas. She created a series of shirts depicting “saints” of various stripes, including Amy Winehouse.

Here’s another she did of Frida Kahlo, with the legend “Where you can’t love, don’t stay.” (But that is far enough off track.)

More latinoamericanas fought for women’s suffrage:

One of the first was Matilde Hidalgo de Procel “who in 1924 caught Ecuador’s institutions by surprise when registering to vote. Like Ayala, she claimed the 1906 constitution referred to gender-neutral ciudadanos, which only required being over 21 years old and literate to be able to vote. The local council, not knowing how to reply, elevated the consultation to a national Council of State, which unanimously agreed that there were no legal impediments. Later that year, Hidalgo and a few other women voted in the legislative elections. Hidalgo helped make Ecuador the first country in Latin America to enfranchise women.”

“Hidalgo represents a more common profile among early feminists in the region. Born into a middle-class liberal family, she circumvented all kinds of barriers to receive a formal education and became the first female physician in Ecuador. Other prominent feminists in the region were also the first women in their respective professional fields.

“Paulina Luisi, founder of the National Council of Women in 1916 and the leader of the Uruguayan women’s movement, was also the first female doctor in her country. Brazil’s Bertha Lutz, who was instrumental in securing voting rights for women in 1932, was a prominent zoologist and scientist. Both Luisi and Lutz had in common being from European immigrant families. And they also shared the international stage in the Pan-American context, where many women came together in a transnational feminist movement.

”When it finally came, change was slow, as other formal and informal limitations remained in place. Countries like Brazil, Peru and Guatemala kept literacy requirements for voting — which disproportionately affected indigenous and Afro-descendant women from rural areas.

“In other words, women with a similar background to Prudencia Ayala were the last citizens allowed to vote in Latin America. Only when Brazil ended the restriction for illiterate people to vote in 1985 — 54 years after the Ayala campaign in El Salvador — did formal constraints on women’s suffrage end in the region.” [Read more in this excellent 2020 article by Isabel Castillo: “She Dared to Run: The Unlikely Story of Prudencia Ayala.”]

The Greek dancers and mourning women follow a North African pattern, specifically the Libyan style of amply-butted women in long skirts. (The skirts often are tailed, probably based on that shape of cut cattle hides, leaving corners of leg skin. See image at upper right, just below.)

The Late Geometric paintings of Greece often show African facial profiles and coiffures. Sometimes the women’s hair is close-cropped (both images on left), or in long locs that rise up and away from the head (upper right), or in short twists (lower right). The rendering of the prominent lower jaw strongly resembles that of African rock paintings, not only in the Sahara but in the Kalahari and Zimbabwe. It bears no resemblance to Archaic or Classical Greek styles.

That’s not to say there were no continuities in the Hellenic tradition. The ceramic paintings reflect the ceremonial hand-in-hand dance that was pervasive in the most ancient Greek culture, all the way back to the Mycenaeans and Crete, and forward in time until Christian patriarchs strove to quash dance, percussion, and music. The hand-in-hand lines of dancers recall Ariadne of Knosso and the winding geranos (crane) dances she was said to have taught Theseus, which he passed on at Delos. Also, the motif of female mourners raising their hands above their heads goes back to Mycenaean times, painted on multiple larnakes (ossuaries). (Egyptian paintings also depict women mourners, but the gestures are different, hands raised before the face.)

So we can look at those patterns of representation, and ask, How did that African influence reach Greece? Attica in particular, where these ceramic paintings are concentrated. No one knows. I can speculate that after the Mycenaean collapse of the late bronze age, which took out the previous polities and economies of every country but Egypt, trade and travel resumed very slowly, maybe in patterns not known before. But I don’t have an explanation. I’m just seeing artistic patterns that are unlike any others in the hemisphere.

But then I came acroos another line of evidence in the oral tradition, which was eventually precipitated into the written record by poets, playwrights, and historians in stories about the Danaides. These old mythic legends have antecedents, pre-stories, that look to Africa (albeit through a European lens, but one in awe of Egyptian antiquity and knowledge). They begin with an ancestral cow-woman Iō (who may vaguely draw on Isis). Here’s an excerpt from my book showing how the Iō lineage lays the ground for the Danaides myth:

Iō becomes the apical ancestor for the genealogies of Perseus, Herakles, and the House of Atreus, all central actors in Greek legend. Her story begins in Argos, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and a major center of Mycenaean power. Zeus comes after Iō, who refuses his advances. In his desire to please Zeus, and fearful of the god’s threat to extinguish his lineage, her father throws her out of the house and bars the doors. This forces Iō out into the fields, where Zeus rapes her. Hera is enraged, but not against her unfaithful husband. According to a depressingly common script that has her constantly retaliating against the women that Zeus rapes, Hera turns Iō into a white heifer, and sets a gadfly to drive her wandering over the Earth. [This patriarchal take overpasses the fact that Hera herself is a cow-woman, often referred to by the eponym Boōpis, “cow-eyed,” and with ceremonies around cattle at her temple in Argos.]

Iō leaves Argos, crosses the Bosphorus, travels around the Black Sea and through the Caucasus, then down through Anatolia and the Levant. She arrives in Egypt, where Zeus finally gets around to restoring her to human form. The Book of Jeremiah seems to allude to this story: “Egypt is a beautiful heifer, but a gadfly is coming against her from the north.”

In Egypt, Iō gives birth to Epaphos (equated with the bull-god Apis). He marries Memphis, daughter of the Nile, and becomes king of Egypt. (None of this relates to actual Egyptian history; it is purely a Greek construct.) Memphis in turn gives birth to Libya, who becomes a great ancestor of nations. By Poseidon Libya bears Belus, the father of Aegyptos and Danaos, whose daughters are the Danaides.

Libya also generates an Asian line through her son Agenor, king of Phoenicia, and his wife Telephassa. Their children are Europa, Phoenix (thus Phoenicia), Kilix (Kilikia in southern Asia Minor), and Kadmos, who founds Thebai in Boiotia, Greece. A third branch of Libya’s descendants are in Crete, where Europa of Tyre bears three sons: Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthos. The children of Minos and the titanis Pasiphae are Ariadne, priestess of the labyrinth, and her sister Phaedra—both tragic women in myth. [As was Iō!]

Hidden in this tangle of relationships is an understory of linkages to Africa. Libya is the ancestor of the Greek Danaides (“women of Danaos, of the Danaoi”) and also of the Phoenicians and Cretans. (The Phoenician connection to “Libya” is not far-fetched, given their Tunisia colonies. Also, Semitic languages belong to the Afro-Asiatic family, with its broad center of gravity in Africa: Egyptian, Amazigh / Berber, Tigrinya, Amharic, Chadic, and Omotic).

The Greek narrative recognizes African influences on Levantine and Aegean cultures, although it does interpose Argive Iō as the ultimate ancestral fount. Stories about the Danaides suggest an orally-transmitted memory of North African immigration to Greece.

In the 15-page book excerpt below, I lay out the legend of the Danaides, their ancestry, the theme of women resisting forced marriage within a dynastic context, and their attempt to seek refuge in a foreign land. Another strand of the myth has to do with Indo-European origins of the Dan- names for rivers and goddesses across a vast span of Eurasia, from Ireland to India, and their connection to mythic peoples (the Danavas, Tuatha Dé Danann). The Iliad attests to the Danaoi as a name for Hellenes (who are also called Akhaoi and Argeoi). Even older are Egyptian ethnonyms for Greeks, as Denyen or Tanayu, all the way back to 1437 bce. So several lines of meaning exist, but they overlap. So the river-names in Europe resonate with the water-connections of the Danaides (and in another myth, Danaë) and of the Danavas in India.

Then the chapter turns to the Libyan Connection in archaeological evidence of the painted ceramics of the Late Geometric, with more illustrations of ceramic paintings and of African rock art, and commentary on them. The excerpt below is for paid subscribers only (yes, finally some honey for you, thank you!) but you can also get the book and see much more. I also show some of this material in my video about the book.

See many more Saharan rock paintings in a wide array of styles in my video:

Read more

The book excerpts include these and other titles (I suggest going over to the link to browse so you can see the images and descriptions):

Veleda, the prophetic female voice (NW Europe)

Etruscan Women

Searching for Diana

Rome’s Foundational Rapes and the Patrician Order

Patria Potestas: structural male privilege

Women’s Mysteries in Rome

The First Mass Hunt: Early Roman Persecutions

From the Gnosic Goddess to the Fallen Sophia

The Imperial Church: In This Sign Conquer (series)

War on Pagans

Herbs, Knots and Contraception

Kings Against Witches

Names of the Witch

Seiõstaffs of the Völur

Diabolism

Crusades: Invasions Under the Cross

The Blood Libel

The Old Goddess

The Tregenda of Goddess, Witches, and Spirits

The Serpent in the Mound

The Grand Inquisitor of Toulouse

Women, Power and Danger

Xorguiñas y Celestinas

The Politics of Witchcraft Studies

Diabolism and Domination

Wisewomen: folk healers, diviners, and “unauthoritized knowledge”

Priestly sexual predators in the confessional

Colonial Hunts: South America

Old Ways in the Shadow of the Witch Hunts

Banishing the Spirits

Propaganda War against Balkan Folk Healers

Toxic legacies

Click here for a full listing of Contents of the series.

I will be publishing more open access chapters here on Substack.

Although my work is global in scope, I’ve devoted decades to figuring out What Happened in Europe: how patriarchal domination spread, how men drove women out of key public roles (priestess, oracle, healer, diviner), culminating in the witch hunts. The demonization of goddesses and female spiritual leadership was pivotal to this intensification of patriarchal controls. It was closely bound up with diabolism, which defined deities of Others (including ethnic / rural Europeans) as “devil-worship,” in a symbolic system that often depicted devils as black.

This history is closely entangled with other systems of domination, and ultimately with imperial and colonial domination of other parts of the world. In fact, European colonizers drew heavily on the diabolist ideologies that began with Christian priests and were elaborated through torture-trials of the witch hunts. The myth of the black rapist begins here. So does the blood libel against Jews and witches, and the mythology of cannibalism in Brazil and the Caribbean (which drew heavily on those earlier myths).

This trope is still being repeated by JD Vance, only eight months ago: ““What did the Christian settlers find when they came to the new world? They found a lot of civilizations that were murdering babies in weird religious rituals.” The persistence of these toxic legacies is still driving harm in present-day politics, which is why I feel urgency to explain their historical roots and the way they’ve repeatedly been deployed. They underlie the profound cultural misogyny that treats women as targets, to the point that most people don’t even notice the injustices being perpetrated against us. (And it’s important to say “us,” and not “them,” as if we should reflexively distance ourselves from what is done to women as a group.)

Religious and state authoritarianism have occurred in other places, but the European forms have done the most far-reaching damage, and so it is essential to understand them. Looking in the reparative and rematriating direction, it is also important to recover memory of authentic European ancestral culture that was nearly stamped out over the course of conquest, empire, feudalism, and capitalism within Europe itself, at the expense of non-dominant ethnicities. Because Europe once had much in common with the rest of the world.

More banners remain to be created for the Caribbean and the Arctic. The content on these regional navigation pages will overlap with that in the Subjects / Patterns page, which takes a global view.

We’ve fixed many of the broken links on the new Suppressed Histories Archves page, but have some more to go. You can explore it here. However, links to the image tiles on the main page haven’t been corrected yet. (We redid the site in a DEV sandbox, so have to retag links for the old, extremely creaky site that I first set up in 2000. Like a century ago in internet time, so much has the tech interface changed since then.

The Videos pages are working, but since they’re embeds, they take a while to load. Give it time. There are three pages, the first of my videos, the second with other content from the Net, and the third, interviews.

In phase 2, we’ll begin to make visible content that my tech wizard Glenn has migrated over from the Suppressed Histories Archives Facebook page (visit and follow!), from my old blog and some of my online courses (I’m turning some of the content to public access). A bunch of formatting has to be done on those pages in the database to get them readable and explorable.

Phase 3 will be tagging all the content, grouping it by subjects and places, and pouring it into the navigation pages (see previous post for a taste of those). It’s a lot of work, but I’m gratified that it is finally moving forward after years on the shelf because I could not solve the many tech issues. My thanks to Glenn Meador for taking them on, and for donating many hours of skilled labor, entirely out of support for this work in global women’s history.

Suppressed Histories Archives:
Finding the Women, Global Vision

Banners for navigation pages on Healers and Matricultures

The reconfigured site is now up now, but I need to repair many article links that broke in the process migrating over the new design. (Quality typography, finally! updated sidebar, yay!) There’s a new Videos tab, which will soon show more open-access vids on the Suppressed Histories youtube channel.

Here’s a taste of some of the nav banners, out of the 75 I’ve created so far.
More to come as we tag and organize the content.

Right now the banners appear in alphabetical order, which might change. Another grouping of articles address systems of domination:

But then there is the resistance:

I’d better stop here, or I’ll wind up adding all the banners. Take a look at them on the Subjects/Patterns page. It’s a mega-navigation page, like the Places/Peoples page, which gives a view of women’s history by world regions.

The Suppressed Histories Archives is open access, and as you might imagine, it’s a lot of work. If you’d like to support that, consider becoming a paid subscriber to this substack. I’m publishing book excerpts here because it is much easier than formatting pages in html / CSS. Most of them are free / public access, but more are coming for you patient paid subscribers.

Even a critic of this one shares them: “Achilles was a hero in his proper season. It was all about personal glory. He was a product of a world working as it should.” It’s not that the writer is unaware of the historical context. He knows about the devastation wrought by the raiders that Egyptian sources describe as the “Peoples of the Sea”:

“The Fall of Troy VIIa show definitive signs of violent destruction, intense fire, bronze arrowheads, and unburied skeletal remains in the streets dating to roughly 1190 BC. This period is the start of a Dark Ages known as The Bronze Age Collapse. And Troy was hardly the only city being sacked. It was happening all over the Mediterranean World.”

The behavior of these raiders, and their ethos of murder, theft, rape and destruction, is on full display in the Homeric epics. The by-name used for Odysseus was “raider of cities.” The framing device for this mayhem is glory won in battle: kleos, more literally “renown.” It is what people say about a man. (it never accrues to women, who are chattel) long after his death. This is not “world working as it should”—but the prestige of this behavior has been kept alive in patriarchal societies across three millennia, and is now being reenacted with CGI special effects.

The Epic Cycle, to which the Iliad and Odyssey belong, is the oldest surviving record of European literature, rooted in the much older oral tradition of the Mycenaean bards. The aodoi sang their verse, accompanied by lyre and drone, in a style ages removed from modern movies. It was incantation by firelight, using formulaic eponyms for gods and heroes as a way to hold to the metre. It sounded something like this.

[What follows is excerpted from my book Women in Greek Mythography:]

The aoidoi (“singers”) were patronized by landed aristocrats, and preserved a developed body of orature. As late as the 6th century, Pindar’s Odes show syncophantic bards praising their lordly patrons, exalting the “manly deeds” of victorious warriors. The aoidoi celebrated exploits of the Trojan War heroes, preserving legends of battles and heroes; priests calling for maiden-sacrifice; armies rowing in triremes to storm and loot citadels, to rape and enslave women, passing captives from one man to another. (The poets refrain from mentioning the rapes, which are never described directly. They all happen offstage—which is the origin of the word “obscene,” something too shocking to be performed onstage. These stories loom large in ancient Greek culture, and they are saturated with an intensely patriarchal sexual politics.

In the Epic Cycle, the Trojan War begins and ends with the ritual sacrifice of women. Iphigeneia’s father slaughters her so that his navy can depart Aulis for the Troad; and Polyxena is slain at the grave of Akhilles, after his lavish funeral. Great attention is paid to the disposition of female captives: “And as special awards Agamemnon got Cassandra, Neoptolemos got Andromakhē, and [Odysseus] got Hecuba.”

In stately rhythm, the Iliad recounts the final days of the nine-year Trojan War. The bulk of it recites deeds of battle, blow by bloody blow, death by death by death. Interspersed are the genealogies of the fighters, their boasting and their vaunting over the fallen, as they strip them of their armor. Warriors make long speeches in the midst of combat, as if they had all the time in the world to declaim their ancestors’ deeds. Hunting metaphors abound, comparing men to lions and boars. Achilles comes upon the children of Priam at a fountainhouse; the girl escapes, for now, so he rapes her little brother.

All this leaves a reasonable woman unimpressed by claims that the Iliad is somehow a critique of war. The epic continually praises men who are “powerful indeed in slaying men in battle”; who go “into battle where men win glory,” on and on, through 24 volumes. The obsession with “everlasting glory” has deep Indo-European roots; Sanskrit preserves a linguistically parallel phrase. …

Slave Raiders

It is the patterns of war and enslavement that are historically important, not the tantrums of Akhilles nor the strategems of Odysseus, nor the “great” war deeds of invaders at the center of the Iliad and the Epic Cycle. Contemporary records of this conquest survive in Linear B tablets, which mention captive Trojans, Lemnian women, and a man from Imbrios. “The frequent incidence specifically of women from these areas, entered as foreign workers, leads to further deductions: evidently there were Mycenaean raids on Anatolia and the offshore islands.”

Hellenic raiders also took women from Miletos, Knidos and Khios; Linear B texts from Pylos refer to lawiaiai, “female captives” or “women taken as booty.” They catalog “Twenty-one women from Knidos with their twelve girls and ten boys, captives; women of Miletus; and To-ro-ya, woman of Troy.” Sarah Pomeroy observed that Mycenaean tablets confirm the picture painted in the Iliad, “listing large numbers of women and children...” Mycenaeans really did invade Asia Minor and seize captives, just as the Homeric epics describe. They took some back to Greece as slaves, and trafficked others along the way, in exchange for goods.

This slaving is also described in the Odyssey. The hero’s father purchased his nursemaid, Eurykleia, for twenty oxen; but in the invasion of Troy, where captives abounded, their price was far lower. An enslaved woman used as second prize at Patroklos’ funeral games was only valued at four oxen. (Which were not brought by ship from Greece; the oxen too were stolen.) Odysseus, like all other bronze age warlords, held dozens of bondmaids in his household.

After the Trojan War, Odysseus sails away to raid other countries: Thrace, Egypt, and Libya. “When I had set sail thence the wind took me first to Ismarus, which is the [Thracian] city of the Cicones. There I sacked the town and put the people to the sword. We took their wives for sexual pleasure, service, and booty which we divided equitably amongst us, so that none might have reason to complain.” (This is their concept of “honor,” among the thieves and rapists that they were.)

According to the “Cretan Lie” of Odysseus, he and his men sailed south to Africa to repeat their atrocities, and “set about wasting the fair fields of the men of Egypt; and they carried off the women and little children, and slew the men; and the cry came quickly to the city.”

Epic poetry celebrates such men as admirable heroes. The Iliad titles its top warrior Akhilles “sacker of cities.” (Perseus and Herakles are praised in the same terms.) The hero of the Odyssey is repeatedly named as “the raider of cities.” Enslavement of women is the pattern in bronze age slavery. Near the end of the Odyssey, the returned hero executes the female slaves of his household who consorted with (will she nil she) the suitors who pursued their mistress Penelope.

[End of book excerpt; but paid subscribers, look below for more.]

Carla Ionescu has written an incisive critique of the distortions introduced by modern retellings of these stories:

“For many people, this becomes the Odyssey. This becomes Mycenae. This becomes Odysseus. This becomes Penelope. That’s why I don’t think historians can simply shrug and say, “Well, it’s just another interpretation.”

“No. It isn’t just another interpretation. For millions of people, it becomes the interpretation. And that’s a responsibility.”

This is important. Present day culture is awash in these misrepresentations, which are all most people will ever know. It’s not just this one movie. It’s in pop culture, highly sexualized digital avatars, and novels, even some purportedly “feminist” ones that follow modern romantic scripts. There are a lot of these, not just about Greek mythology, for example The Mists of Avalon, which supposedly reclaims the pagan priestess Morgaine le Fey, but still manages to villanize her, while picturing her as wracked by self-doubt.

I think of Circe by Madeline Miller, based on the Odyssey and other sources, but going well beyond them. She paints a disparaging picture of the titanis (pre-Olympian goddess), who is daughter of the sun Helios and the water-goddess Perse, also a titanis—but the novel degrades her to a low-status concubine. The author casts Circe as despised for her witchcraft (disregarding the pattern of turning goddesses into witches, as was done to Medea also) and outcast for it by the other titanes, who look down on her.

She invents a rape of Circe—a goddess!—by mortal sailors who come to her island, in order to explain how she came to turn men into pigs and dogs. I’m sure Miller saw this as a feminist defense of Circe, without perceiving it as a diminution of her power—a constant theme in the novel. The titanis Circe belongs to the elder divinities, yet is subjected to exile by the latecomer Zeus. The author uses a late story by Ovid in which Circe attacks Scylla out of jealousy over a lover. In another story about Circe’s love affair with Telemachus, son of Odysseus, Miller has the goddess gives up her immortality in order to live and die with her mortal husband. (Arwen does the same for Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings: the old patriarchal script of female self-sacrifice.)

This “feminist” retelling intensifies the ancient patriarchal distortions already overlaid on Circe, by adding on retrograde themes from modern romance culture. I have no doubt that the author saw her version as a revindication of a reviled figure, as reviewer Claire Messud termed it: a "highly psychologized, redemptive and ultimately exculpatory account" of Circe's familiar tale.^” ["December's Book Club Pick: Turning Circe Into a Good Witch". The New York Times. May 28, 2018]

But this approach is still mired in deprecations of female power that go back a long way—the transformation of Circe from potent titanis to sorceress—with more recent diminutions piled on top.

I see the Iliad and the Odyssey from a women-centered viewpoint, not that of the aristocratic women who loyally went along with the program, revered the murderous rapist heroes, or pretended to care about them. No, I’m with the unheard and silenced women whose reactions were buried under the reverence paid these foundational texts of Western Civ. Women who knew the truth underneath those glorifications of conquest and mass rape, which turned even the royal women of Troy into sex slaves. Who understood how the queen of Ithaca was defenceless against predatory aristocratic men trying to force her, presumed a widow, into marriage so they could expropriate her wealth. In which the conquering hero makes a triumphant return to defeat and kill them, but after that, cruelly punishes the bondmaids who had either been raped by those men, or had survival sex with them. He forced those women to clean up the bloody mess, and then ignobly strung them up to be horribly strangled, all together, by a long ship’s cable.

So I’m with the bondmaids, the raided villagers whose men were slaughtered, the women seized as captives, to be serially raped and passed around the encampment outside Troy. I think a shift in perspective is long overdue in understanding these historical patterns, and the epic celebrations of patriarchal / colonial violence.

We could use a glimpse too of a different way of life as suggested toward the end of the Odyssey, when the shipwrecked hero washes up on Phaiakia, and encounters the princess Nausikaa. She takes him to her parents, and instructs him to pass by her father and supplicate her mother, queen Arete. It is she who has the authority to aid the shipwrecked traveler. Maybe Phaiakia was Corfu, or according to others, a mythic memory of Crete, but it stands in contrast to the rest of the story. True, Kalypso and Kirkē were also sovereign female figurines in the story, but they were goddesses, titanides, not mortal women.

The sexual politics of the Epic cycle are discussed in my book Women in Greek Mythography, with an entire chapter analyzing Myths of Conquest, the omnipresent theme of gods and heroes who are rapists. But it also looks in more depth at female potency as expressed through the titanides, goddesses, mythic women, and oracles.

Paid subscribers, see below for an excerpt on the deceit of Agamemnon, who lies to make his wife to bring their daughter to Aulis, only to see her sacrificed. The priests slit her throat and let her lifeblood stream onto an altar, so that the Greek navy can sail off to invade Troy. Then, “The Prize of My Spear: Rapists at War” looks at the Iliad from the viewpoint of the captive women.

Read more

Masterpiece by the late, great Oneida singer Joanne Shenandoah, from her album “Matriarch,” out of her Haudenosaunee tradition.

This song is uplifting, both music and lyrics (Spanish in description at link):

Open, little flower of the four winds of the Yari [people]
Fragrant and curative scent
Seven-pointed stars of the Runa
Ay, let’s dance until daybreak
To hear the voice of those who have gone before

It’s your waters that give life to my people
Ay, they burst sadly out of my eyes
Because in my country they no longer sing to the water
The [waters] spring from your eyes, Earth Mother,
And make verdant my waterfall of the cougar

Full of gladness, Death dances at my side
Intoxicating chuma paints the Yari people
Four brave jaguars arrive at the party
The bright blue of the white flower rises in the sky
Red Road—only god knows if I’ll return.

If you don’t know the a capella Native women’s group Ulali, you are in for a treat. Their anthem “Mother” is one of the most powerful songs you will ever hear. The original founding trio (1987) was Pura Fé (Tuscarora/Taino), Soni (Mayan, Apache, Yaqui), and Jennifer Kreisberg (Tuscarora), and new members have come in over the years. Look them up!

"Mahk Jchi" (Heartbeat Drum Song) is their most famous song, in the Tutelo and Saponi languages of the Carolinas. Their music has been the underscore for many films.

Award-winning musician from Mali, backed with the classic kora instrument

This calming and soothing chant begins slow and soft and gradually mounts to exaltation. Gayatri is a form of the wisdom goddess Sarasvati and is associated with the solar goddess Savitri. One of many translations of the mantra: “We meditate upon the supreme divine glory of the radiant Sun, the source of all life. May this divine light illumine and guide our minds in the right direction."

”O loving Mother, pouring out your smile like a rain of honey, wipe out the darkness in my heart and stay inside there… I meditate on you constantly in my heart, O Mother, embodiement of eternal bliss, compassion, of beauty, namaste… O great Goddess, may your name be on my tongue, your voice in my ears, tears of bliss in my eyes, and your divine form within my heart, Compassionate one.” Bhajan of Mata Amritanandamayi.

Joyous, rocking reggae from the southwest Pacific Islands will lift your spirits.

Back in 1968, this song made me fall in love with Miriam Makeba forever.

I’ve loved this Vietnamese song ever since first hearing it in 1972.

The late great Irish singer Máire Ní Bhraonáin (Moya Brennan) of Clannad

Beautiful song from Northeast Asia…

Another great artist from Mali who does powerful music videos on the Land.

A rolling chant to Yemaya and Oya from the Candomblé tradition in Brazil.

The great Mercedes Sosa, singing about memories of the cholitas dancing at the carnival, raising whirlwinds as they turn, their colorful skirts like flowers.

Nawal, a Sufi musician from the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. Aman means “peace, security, protection, mercy” in Arabic, and is borrowed over into Turkish and other languages.

Get your wildness on with Trøllabundin ("spellbound" or "enchanted") a song by Faroese artist Eivør Pálsdóttir, a taste of Norse heathenry. The Faroes islands are located between Norway and Iceland, but part of Denmark.

Sapari Tamo

We rise, humbly hearted Rise, won’t be divided Rise, with spirit to guide us Rise!
In hope, in prayer, we find ourselves here In hope, in prayer, we’re right here.
We rise, all of the children Rise, elders with wisdom Rise, ancestors surround us
Rise! In hope, in prayer, we find ourselves here In hope, in prayer, we’re right here.
We rise, up from the wreckage Rise, with tears and with courage
Rise, fighting for life We rise!

Cornelia’s father was a progressive Parsi Christian minister who also valued education. Of her Parsi upbringing, she later wrote, “When the girl-child grows to womanhood, she binds her head with a white fillet (Mathabana), explained by
the generation of my aunts as a sign of subjection to man (tho’ in truth, I believe, merely a useful expedient for affixing the sari to the head !).” Seeing her intellectual gifts, Rev. Sorabji Karsedji pushed for Bombay University to admit her to Deccan College at a time when women were barred from admission, making her the first female student there.

Cornelia Sorabji became the first woman to graduate from Bombay University, with a degree in law with honors in 1888. But the patriarchal powers that be refused her scholarship to study in England: “To my surprise I topped the Presidency in the
final Degree Examination, and automatically obtained the Government of India Scholarship for a course at an English University — a handsome scholarship,
including traveling and other expenses. In spite, however, of the University Constitution declaring that women were as men. I was not allowed to hold my scholarship. The test had been the same, and all conditions were fulfilled; but the Authorities said, ‘No!’ —It was in fact impertinent of any woman to produce circumstances which were not in the mind of the Authorities as a possibility when they dangled a gilded prize before eyes that should have been male eyes alone!” [The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, 19-20]

Sorabji was able to secure a teaching job at a men’s college in Gujarat when it unexpectedly lost its principal. “A professorship at eighteen, in a Male College, was solitary and (inwardly) terrifying ; but the students and the professors — Parsees, Hindus, Moslems — were kind.” She began reaching out to the National Indian Association, asking for funds to continue her education abroad. She garnered support and donations from many people, including Florence Nightingale, that enabled her to travel to Britain and study at Somerville College in 1892. Thus an Indian woman became the first woman to study law at Oxford.

But that same year, the London examiner blocked her from sitting for the Bachelor of Civil Laws exams: “He did not want me in at all, and made the fuss about the exam, which eventually gave me my decree. And, when I was on for viva, he bullied my life out.” Other men, both officials and students, were hostile to her presence. She appealed, prevailed, and completed her exam with distinction. But the experience of getting certified was for her “a frightful disappointment.”

After her graduation in 1894, Cornelia returned to India. She had the credentials to practice law, but faced a legal ban on women acting as barristers in court, and hostility from men in the judiciary. The Chief Justice of Mumbai urged solicitors against hiring women. The Allahabad High Court denied her right to appear before it. As she wrote, “There was nothing for it but to continue being a ‘rover,’ working from the end of a need to be met, not from that of an equal tide with men to the reward of legal work. And with this intention I set myself to collecting the opinions of experienced judges, lawyers, and administrators all over India.” [Memoire, 102]

Facing stiff opposition in western India, Sorabji took another tack, undoubtedly leveraging her ties with the colonial Raj. In 1904 she convinced Britain’s India Office to appoint her as ‘Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards’ in the East, in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and Assam. This position enabled her to advocate for widows, orphans, and girls being married out at young ages, over many years.

One of Sorabji’s first cases was a poor woman whose husband was murdered by a man who owed him money, and accused her. She was able to gain her acquittal. Sorabji’s main work was advocating for purdahnashin, women who “sit behind the curtain.” These were women who lived in seclusion in the zenana, women’s quarters that segregated them from men and from public spaces. Denied access to the outside world, they were often being defrauded of inheritances they were legally entitled to, which male relatives or others appropriated from them. What rights they did have, they didn’t know, or had no means to claim them. They were unable to prevent their daughters from being married off at very young ages.

Sorabji saw the injustice of imposing purdah on women, which severely limited or foreclosed their ability to move in public spaces, or even from the women’s quarters of their homes. The harshest restraints were placed on upper class women, whose confinement was taken to symbolize their purity and family honor. Sorabji wrote a book about how men violated the rights of purdanashin, taking away their inheritances and property, and fought for them in and out of court.

“Pardah or purdah (from Hindi-Urdu پردہ, पर्दा, meaning “curtain”) is a religious and social practice of sex segregation prevalent among some Muslim, Zoroastrian [i.e. Parsi in India], and Hindu communities in South Asia. ... The practice generally takes two forms: social segregation of the sexes and the requirement that women cover their bodies, as well as traditionally the faces.

“Practices that restricted women’s mobility and behavior existed among religious groups in India and Zoroastrian Iran since ancient times [don’t leave out ancient Greece! and up through medievla Byzantine empire, where female confinement and invisibility was upheld as the patriarchal ideal] and intensified with the arrival of Islam. By the 19th century, purdah became customary among Hindu elites. Purdah was not strictly observed by lower-class women. [Nor could it be, since they had to work; but some sought it as a marker of class upward mobility]

“Physical segregation within buildings is achieved with judicious use of walls, curtains, and screens. A woman’s withdrawal into purdah usually restricts her personal, social and economic activities outside her home. [And places her in a state of dependency on men.]

“Married Hindu women in parts of Northern India observe purdah, with some women wearing a ghoonghat in the presence of older male relations on their husbands’ side [see appendix below]; Muslim women observe purdah through the wearing of a burqa.”

Prevented from speaking in court, a structural barrier that would not be removed for another 28 years after her graduation. Cornelia took up the fight to advocate for these women through other means. She directly counseled purdahnashin women pro bono. “This demanded arduous travel to shield them from feuds, frauds, exploitative child marriages, and even murder plots against herself. Relatives threatened her; men balked at testifying near women.” [Attagirls] (But let us be realistic; Sorabji’s memoirs also tell of women in the zenana who plotted to harm each other, and prevail over each other.) Many men who robbed the secluded women were administrators, not relatives, as Cornelia learned as a girl, from a woman who came to her mother for help:

”She began talking, rapidly, crying often, my Mother comforting her. The story she told, as I learnt later in detail, was this. She had owned, as a widow, a considerable estate in Kathiawar. As she was secluded, and could not manage her property, she left everything in the hands of her man-of-business. He was the son and grandson of a long line of such officers and, as he had grown up in the service of the family, she was able to transact business with him freely, without breach of custom — with him, but with no other. Her part was to give verbal instructions and to sign blank papers to enable him to carry out these instructions. She could not write, but was taught to make the hieroglyphic which represented her name. All monies, and the disbursement of monies, were in his hands.

“There came a day when she instructed her man-of-business to build her a house in British India. She had once been on pilgrimage to Nasik and had taken a fancy to a place en route. “ I will live here, part of the year,” said she. “ Ha ! ji ! — certainly,” was his answer. “ But the necessary blank papers must be signed, in order that I may make the requisite arrangements.” “ That, of course “ — and she signed the papers.

“When she came to see my Mother, she had just discovered, thirty years after the house had been occupied, that she was penniless. The man-of-business had filled in over her signature a deed of gift to himself of all her stridhan, the woman’s property of which she could dispose absolutely at will: and she had for those thirty years been paying him a nominal rent for the occupation of her own house. The accounts were all in order. He had safeguarded himself legally, and was in secure possession beyond her capacity to dislodge.” [Memories, 17]

Enabling economic self-determination for secluded women, sometimes through education (such as getting them the right to train as nurses) was a key goal, and so was removing the isolation, stigma, and social death of widows. She wrote: “A few are now beginning to find that life has some use for a woman unmarried, even for her. They are learning to earn their own living and to bless the world with honest labour. She is buying back the curse, this widow who works, in a way which must surely conserve for the nation much of that selflessness which we claimed in the suttee [ritual immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres*], and certainly much more apparent usefulness. As doctor, teacher, nurse, and in humbler walks of life, which of us who know modern India have known and not blessed the Hindu widow?”

As Sorabji wrote to British officials to whom she appealed for help, even when male lawyers were available, “Purdahnashins had no possible means of access to or contact with them, the result being needless hardship and injustice.” Some replied that they knew of worse cases, “instances where the seclusion of women had prevented important evidence from being put before the Court, e.g. in property cases where the rights of women were in question. Purdahnashins of the highest status, in strictest seclusion, are excused attendance as witnesses in Court. Their evidence is taken at their homes by a “more examinations” Commission. Judges and Lawyers both expressed a doubt on occasions as to the identity of the witness thus examined. The men might not see her for themselves.

”Again, how did they know that the witness spoke freely ? They could not tell who were shut in with her behind the purdah : or what fears and coercions assailed her. They might not even hear her voice — a third person being the medium of both question and answer. When the witness attended Court, there was the like difficulty ; she came in a palanquin accompanied by a male (claiming to be a relation) who acted as “ carrier “ during her examination, speaking to her through a slit in the doors of the palanquin and broadcasting her answers to the Court. She recounted one case in which the person inside the palanquin turned out to be an old man. [Memories, 102-3]

Another time, she came for an official interview of a purdahnashin in Calcutta. The men were shocked to find that the Commissioner was a woman. She told him it was better thus: “I can go into the Zenana and examine the lady face to face.” Oh no, she must not do that: “Zenanas are very shut-up places. You will get ill. [A revelatory comment.] Sit here, outside the purdah, on that red-plush chair we have put
ready for the Commissioner.” But she insisted, and after a hushed conference, they relented. But the lady was not in the zenana; Sorabji had been given the address of the opposing party in the lawsuit, who expected to be able to falsify testimony.

Because of her effective advocacy for the purdahnashin, for child brides and for widows, Sorabji was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Gold Medal in 1909. Not until 1922 was the ban on women in the legal profession overturned. At last Cornelia Sorabji was able to open a practice in Kolkata, but the courts still resisted the legal change and blocked her from appearing in person, forcing her to submit her arguments in written form, in absentia. So she turned to public advocacy, through speeches and radio appearances, books and articles, urging changes in the plight of women.

In her memoir, Sorabji described the strict confinement of women under purdah: “Their quarters were apart, with a courtyard attached into which they seldom entered. The outer walls were sometimes spiked like the walls of any gaol: and at the foot of the stairs an armed guard stood, back to the “ Inside “, facing the door which led to the outer courts. From this sanctuary they went not forth, except on pilgrimage, or (less often than in Bengal) to visit their father’s house.

”I once asked a Thakur [aristocratic landholder] if I might take his Thakuranis out by night in a closed carriage to show them, through the slits of the wooden blinds, the lovely gardens and buildings of the estate.” But they demurred: “Did our grandmothers drive out to see the world?” and would not even agree to come out into their enclosed courtyard to play a game. Another girl had never seen a garden, or growing things, so she brought her a potted rose.

She once intervened with a thakur who had taken the considerable income due to a lady. He calmly admitted that he had appropriated her bequest: “So my grandfather intended : but father and son, we’ve found other uses for it.” (Which including paying for training of his racing hounds.) He scoffed at her objection: “That’s not the worst thing I’ve done. Has D come to you with her troubles (he named an old aunt)? She had lovely jewels ; I’ve taken them all. They are worth more than the villages, and would, unlike the villages, never have been mine in the end. Would you like to see them ? They are with me, unsold.” He spoke with the ease and charm of Him-who- must-be-obeyed, the complete Autocrat, sure of the impotence of others.

“ Oh ! Thakur Sahib, do put this right “ I begged ; “I’ll have to go to the A.C.G. Sahib if you do not ; and I do want to prove that the head of the State can manage his own domestic difficulties.” But he was confident in his own impunity:

“ You could sue me in my Durbar Court,” said he, considering. “ I’d like to hear you plead. I’ll tell the Court Registrar to issue a Sanad at once. You can choose your own day for a hearing, after your departure from the State : and you’ll come all the way to appear before me, to find — that the case is postponed by the Durbar — no reason given. . . . You will be entertained at the Guest House. I’ll be delighted to see you, and shall beg you to fix another date. . . . We can carry on like this, till the old lady dies. Then her income will be mine, even according to your ideas of legality. Yet you will have done your duty by her in coming here so often for the case : so she will be happy, and you will be happy. We shall all be happy and satisfied.” [Memoire, 89-91]

The Imprisoned Queen

The case of the Imprisoned Rani (queen) was even worse. Briefly, she had been married through trickery to a mentally disabled prince, and fell afoul of co-wives who had borne only daughters. They killed the first two sons that she bore in confinement. Although she was highly educated, she had no way of reaching her family.

Sorabji made a long journey to the fort where the Pat Rani was confined: “using a mixture of bluff and authority, I made my way into the fortress past the guard, and found the lady with her son, a boy of nine years of age ; that they were in abject poverty, living on the terrace of the topmost story of the fort ; their furniture two string beds and a chair ; their provisions a little rice, and pulse and grain; no milk, no vegetables. The villagers just outside the fortress had been forbidden to supply her with anything.

”She never, of course, left the fortress, but a half-witted Brahmin brought her monthly, from a distant village, her meagre stores, and drew water for her from the well in the courtyard. To eke out the stores, the Pat Rani herself ate only one slight meal a day. She cooked and kept the little terrace as clean as she could, sewed garments for the boy made out of her saris, and read over and over again all old newspapers which she could find at the fort. (‘I should have gone mad if I let myself think,’ she said.)”

”Every room in that fortress was the home of malodorous bats. The terrace, in reality a flat roof verandahed off where they slept, was at least airy, and the Pat Rani showed her intelligence in retiring to it when deprived of the servants whom the British
official had seen accompanying her into her retreat. The next deprivation was that of her maintenance allowance. For two and a half years she had had not a penny, and only the dry stores which the half-wit brought her. [Whatever his mental capacities, and maybe he is wrongly characterized here, that man had heart, since no one else was helping this woman.]

”Her supreme anxiety was for her son. He was still the only son — though girls came thick and fast in the Junior Rani’s Zenana at the Capital. And the nights were her terror. She decided not to sleep at all, and kept her vow, walking up and down armed with an old sword, while the child slept. ‘ Luckily the door which gave on to the staircase was iron-studded. She kept this barred and bolted always : and in the afternoons, the boy fed, her house-hold work done, she repaired the sleepless night,
while the child played beside her, and as it were guarded himself. For he knew he must wake her if a soul — whosoever — approached. She was wonderful in her fearlessness.” [110-11]

However, the Rani was also stubbornly attached to her rank, which nearly thwarted her escape. Sorabji got Raj officials to approve her rescue from the fortress, and sent servants to her with food, and she returned to the fortress with two empty palanquins, bearers, and armed men to bring her and the boy to the guardianship of her mother. This took considerable daring and strategy on her part: “The second journey was thrilling. I was warned that the Amarpur people had got wind of my programme and had planned to dacoit us [ambush and rob] on the homeward journey and carry off the boy. Two armed Tehsil peons had been provided by the British Administration for our protection, but we lost them, diverted by some trick of the Amarpur folk.

”I determined to try and outwit the dacoits. … I myself, with the other servants, the extra palanquin and a rabble of thirty bearers, went a short cut across country,
arriving at the fortress only eight hours before we must again take the road. Would that space of time be long enough to dig the lady and her son out of their prison? It was indeed a ghastly day. She broke down, and was hysterical, presenting difficulty after difficulty. She could not travel except under the Gold Umbrella of Royalty in a heavy ancient Raj palanquin found in a go-down near the Guard-house. The poles of this relic were rotten, and the bearers refused to carry it.” Sorabji had to negotiate with the Rani over what she could bring, time and speed being of the essence.

“Quick then, past both moats, through the outer gateway. Here my headman met us, breathless, and took me aside to give his news. We were to be dacoited at seven o’clock that evening on the regular route, the way he had come. I had to make an instant decision. We must take the cross-country road in the opposite direction and start at once, for any moment our change of plan might be discovered.

”It was extra important now not to risk the heavy worm-eaten “relic.” So since hysterics could avail my Pat Rani nothing outside the gates, I turned the entire guard inside the fortress and shut the gates on them.” She got the Rani and her son transferred to the light palanquin, and they set off. “Every nerve was a-stretch throughout that devious journey : the fields of tall corn, on a pitch-dark
night, which might conceal anything, a squad of dacoits for all we knew ; the open spaces, where we ourselves were only too visible ; rough ground where the bearers had to be encouraged every five minutes — and then the early dawn when things look gloomiest, and the long hot day that followed, though this was happily in safer territory.” On the second night they reached the rail line, and Sorabji safely delivered the Rani to her mother’s house.

“Cornelia Sorabji is thought to have helped over 600 clients fight legal battles over the course of her career, no mean feat given the obstacles stacked against her by a deeply oppressive and conservative patriarchy and by a legal system that sought to impose alien Western values on India. A keen short story writer, her experiences are recounted in the book Between The Twilights (1908) and her two memoirs.” [The Independent]

"By 1929, Cornelia had become a full-time social reformer, touring India and the USA to advocate against child marriages, for women's education, and to eradicate sati— widow-burning— banned in 1829 but persisting until it was finally criminalised in 1987.” [Lily Craven]

Cornela Sorabji never married. She had to navigate patriarchal and imperial worlds in which she was an outsider, as a woman, a Parsi from a Christian family, daughter of a Toda woman who was adopted by British colonials and renamed Francina Ford. Her sisters Susie Sorabji and Alice Pennell, also had careers, Susie as an educator and Alice a medical doctor, as their mother had wished.

In 1929 Cornelia Sorabji retired and moved to London, where she lived until her death in 1954. Malini Mehra writes, "... An unconventional & determined woman. Her unusual family & religious background is important to understand her in the context of India & the Raj at the time. She was a prolific writer - incl autobiographies - her writing should be brought back into print."

Sources:

Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, London, 1934

Lily Craven, of the Attagirls

”Purdah”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdah

*Appendix I: widow-immolation

Sati (anglicized to “suttee”) was named after a goddess married to Shiva, who her father failed to invite to a yajña ceremony. Sati protested this dishonoring of her husband by throwing herself into the ritual fire. Hers was not a widow suicide, but made Sati a paragon of wifely self-sacrifice. This custom was already being reported by the Greek geographer Strabo in the first century. (Evidence exists of a similar custom of widow sacrifice among Greeks, Thracians, and Vikings, and as far back as the early Indo-European kurgan burials.)

“Becoming Sati,” as it was called by orthodox Hindus, was legally banned in 1829, but this did not end ritual suicides of widows. They faced immense social pressure, were ostracized as “inauspicious,” barred from weddings and festivals, and even forced out of their homes.

Girls were socialized to expect this fate from an early age, as Sorabji recounts: “There was in one of my Estates a widow who had awaited death for fifty years and more. “Look at my finger,” said she, showing me the shrivelled-up little finger of her right hand. “ Ever since I was three years old I was taught to be Suttee. We stirred boiling rice with a bare finger, to learn how to bear fire when our time should come. But, when my Lord died, there was a law which said that I must not be Suttee, So I have waited. . . .” [Memories, 185] Much later, this woman’s profligate son wanted her dead so he could take her inheritance. He had her taken down to the Burning Ghat, still living, and burned. Sorabji wrote that his mother was resigned to this fate.

Many widows had no alternative but to live in ashrams under extreme ascetic conditions. This prospect of what has been called “a living death” caused many women to “choose” undergoing Sati immolation long after it was formally outlawed. One such woman was the 18-year-old widow Roop Kanwar, whose ritual suicide in 1987 caused an outcry (and many defenders). Although her husband was only 24, girl marriage to older men meant that large numbers of women would become widows at an early age. Remarriage was regarded as a kind of treason and nearly impossible.

”The outrage over her death forced the Indian government to introduce a tough new law – Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987 – again banning the practice and, for the first time, also its glorification. It mandated death or life term for those committing sati or abetting it. But over the years, everyone accused of involvement in Kanwar’s death and the glorification that followed has been cleared by courts.”

Appendix II: Rukhmabai, marriage resister

“About the time of which I write, Rukhmabai’s Case had stirred the Zenana to its depths all over the Bombay Presidency. Rukhmabai was a young Maratha non-secluded girl married in her childhood, according to Hindu custom. She was brought up in the home of her own parents and educated in her vernacular and (moderately) in English.

”When her husband claimed her, she refused to consummate the marriage: and being told the consequences, elected to take them. She went to prison. “Was the World coming to an end ? “ said the Zenana. Not a quiver of sympathy from “the Inside “ greeted her courage. The newspapers of the day wrangled over her, varying in direct ratio to their Hindu orthodoxy.

“Rukhmabai never read the papers, and cared nothing. She had found herself. That was all there was to it — an unusual and fine character, silent and almost stolid. She did not want to marry anyone else, or indeed to marry at all. She wanted to study; to be a doctor : realization of the implications of a marriage in childhood, such as hers, had burst upon her with her husband’s demand. She would resist, and maybe resistance would save others.

“India was not ‘news’ in the English Press of the day, but Rukhmabai ‘s story aroused great interest in England ; and the wife of a well-known Liberal politician, herself a pioneer in the English Women’s movement towards emancipation, arranged for Rukh- mabai to come over the waters to her, after release from prison, for a training in the profession of her desires.

“In due course Rukhmabai returned as a doctor to India, and has served her country with ability and dignity. Throughout her active professional life, she remained unemotional, and untouched by the hysteria of politics or ‘Women’s rights’ nor — and this seems to me her greatest achievement — has she suffered for this at the hands of the Progressive hysterical women of later days.”

Here she seems to be reacting against the militant Suffragettes, and this reveals a conservative side to Sorabji, in line with her opposition to the Swadesh / self-rule movement and her alignment with British officialdom in India.

Appendix III: the ghoongat (Hindu veiling) excerpted from Wikipedia:

"The Hindu variation on purdah is the ghoonghat, meaning “cover, veil, hide,” usually part of the sari drawn over the face. “A ghoonghat (ghunghat, ghunghta, ghomta, orhni, odani, laaj, chunari, jhund, kundh) is a headcovering or headscarf, worn by some married Hindu and Jain women to cover their heads, and often their faces. Generally aanchal or pallu, the loose end of a sari is pulled over the head and face to act as a ghoonghat. A dupatta (long scarf) is also commonly used as a ghoongat.

“Since the ancient period of India, certain veiling practices (what became known as ghoonghat) has been partially practiced among a section of women. However, it is notable that some section of society from the 1st century B.C. advocated the use of the veil for married women. There is no proof that a large section of society observed strict veiling until the medieval period. Today, facial veiling by Hindu women as part of everyday attire is now mostly limited to the Hindi Belt region of India, particularly Haryana, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar and some parts of Sindh and Punjab.”

On veiling of wives in ancient India: “Early Sanskrit literature has a wide vocabulary of terms for the veils used by women, such as avagunthana meaning cloak-veil, uttariya meaning shoulder-veil, and sirovas-tra meaning head-veil.

“In the post-Gupta period, Śūdraka, the author of Mṛcchakatika mentions that some females wore a veil (avagunthana). However, Sudraka notes it was not used by women every day and at every time. It was worn on special occasions like marriage or while going out. Śūdraka notes that a married woman was expected to put on a veil while moving in public. This may indicate that it was not necessary for unmarried females to put on a veil.

“In the Sanskrit play Mṛcchakatika, courtesan Vasantasena’s mother sends Vasantasena with her maid and asks her to go in the carriage bedecked with ornaments and an avagunthana veil after receiving ornaments for her daughter from a wealthy suitor to keep her as his mistress. This instruction is taken to signify that a courtesan who has accepted a suitor, had to use a veil in public similar to married women. [In contrast to Assyrian custom, that punished unmarried and lower-class women for wearing a veil.] At the end of the play when Vasanthasena is legally wedded, she receives the title “Vadhūśabda” meaning “title of a bride” simultaneously with the veil “vasantasenām avagunthya” meaning “a token of honorable marriage”. In the same literature, the courtesans’ maid servant Madanika marries her lover Sarvilaka, a thief who changes his ways. Her new husband told her that she has achieved what is difficult to acquire: “Vadhūśabda avagunthanam” meaning “the title and veil of a bride”.

“In the Pratimānātaka, a play by Bhāsa (3 - 4 CE) describes in context of the Avagunthana cloak-veil that “ladies may be seen without any blame [for the parties concerned] in a religious session, in marriage festivities, during a calamity and in a forest”. The same sentiment is more generically expressed in Nāgānanda and Priyadarśikā by Harsha, where maidens were not expected to wear a veil until after marriage. Later, the veil was referred to by the same term, avagunthana, in Śiśupālavadha and the Dashakumaracharita. According to commentator Sankara, the ladies of Sthanvisvara used to go about covering their faces with a veil.

“In the Mahayana Buddhist sutra called Lalitavistara Sūtra, a young bride Yasodharā objected to observing the veil (oguntheti/oguṇthikā) in front of respected elders. This was taken to be a sign of immodesty, as people criticized her and gossiped. When she became aware of this, Yasodharā came before the assembled court and defended herself in a long statement: ‘Those whose thoughts have no cover, no shame or decorum or any virtue, those who gossip, may cover themselves with a thousand garments, yet they walk the earth naked. But those who veil their minds, control their senses, and have no thought for any other except their husband, why should they veil their faces?’ Yasodharā’s parents-in-law were delighted with their daughter-in-law’s proud statement and gave her two white garments covered with jewels.

“The Lalitavistara Sūtra reflects changing times around the 3rd century CE and Buddhists’ attempt to counter this growing practice, as there is no mention of this entire incident in early Buddhist Theravada literature.

“In Valmiki’s Ramayana dated between the 5th century BCE to the 3rd century CE, Prince Rama asks his wife Sita to unveil herself so that the gathered citizens of Ayodhya can take a look at them before they go in exile to the forest; there is no mention of Sita veiling herself again after this incident. At the end of the epic, hearing the news of Ravana’s death, his queens giving up to lamentations rush outside without their Avagunthana, in which chief queen Mandodari surrounding his corpse says ‘Why do you not get angry, beholding me, having put off my veil, walk out on foot by the city gate? Do you behold your wives who have thrown off their veils. Why are you not angry seeing them all come out of the city?’

“In Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, written between the 3rd and 4th century CE, when the heroine arrives at King Duhsanta’s palace, seeking to take up her wifely status, the king first remarks “Kā svid avagunthanavati” meaning “who is this veiled one?” and immediately forbears to look at her, with the words “Anirvarnaniyam parakalatram” meaning “The wife of another is not to be inspected.” This largely indicates that Avagunthana was a sign of a respectable married woman, and was a married woman’s raiment.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

[Headcoverings marked married women in medieval Europe, from England to Russia to Italy].

“In Kathāsaritsāgara written in the 11th century AD, a heroine in the story Ratnaprabhā protests: “I consider that the strict seclusion of women is a folly produced by jealousy. It is of no use whatsoever. Women of good character are guarded only by their own virtue and nothing else.”

“Rational opposition against veiling and seclusion from strong-willed women resulted in the system declining in popularity for several centuries. However, some sections of society [which?] from the 1st century B.C. advocated the use of the veil for married women. There is no proof that a large section of society observed strict veiling until the medieval period.

“Under the Islamic Mughal Empire, various aspects of veiling and seclusion for women was adopted, such as the concept of Purdah and Zenana, partly as an additional protection for women. [This requireds more explanation; patriarchy is a protection racket, and it may well be that more warfare contributed to the spread of female seclusion.] Purdah became common in the 15th and 16th century, as both Vidyāpati and Chaitanya mention it. Sikhism was highly critical of purdah; Guru Amar Das condemned it and rejected seclusion and veiling of women, which saw decline of purdah among most classes during this period.

“In ghoonghat practice, facial veiling observed by married women is known as Laaj (Sanskrit: लज्जा, Lajja - modesty, honor, shame). In veiling practice, it literally means “To keep (one’s) modesty, shame and honor”. [Sic! shame and honor are diametrically opposed. Notably, words for female modesty in patriarchal cultures literally mean “shame,” for example pudica in Latin.] The earliest attested word Laaj in context of veiling is found in Valmiki’s Ramayana as lajjaavaguNThanaan describing Mandodari. However, it is unclear whether or not it refers to facial veiling.

“During a marriage ceremony, the bride wears a veil given by her parents. Later, during the ceremony the bride’s mother-in-law covers her face with ghoonghat. The bride therefore simultaneously wears the veil given by her parents and that from her in-laws, symbolizing her passing from the protection [or control] of one household to another.

“Muh Dikhai (Devanagari: मुँह दिखाई, ‘first gaze’) is a post-wedding ceremony, where the bride is formally introduced to the groom’s relatives and extended family. The ceremony takes place once the bride arrives in her new home. Each family member lifts her veil, looks at the bride and gives her a welcoming gift. She receives Shagun from her mother-in-law, which is typically jewelry, clothing and silverware. After this ceremony, the bride observes full veiling for the next few months or until her parents-in-law advise her to unveil.”

I started out with one global slideshow (1973), then four continental ones, and finally had enough images to create visual talks by country (or region, like Central Asia or the Great Plains). Some regions are tougher to track because the history of conquest, colonization, and genocide has disrupted or broken the transmission of orature and other forms of cultural knowledge.

Finding the Women is always difficult to begin with, given the patriarchal habits of omission and distortion. So this is always a work-in-progress, and provisional, since there are always additions and corrections as more of the cultural record comes to light—especially Indigenous testimony, and above all, that of women.

I created slideshows on every world region, but what follows here only reflects the digitized shows since 2003. (And just the regional ones; for the global-spectrum visual talks, see previous post.)

(You can see a clip from Predynastic Egypt on my youtube channel:)

(A show on Egyptian women’s history will go here, once I’ve put it together.)

Egypt in Late Antiquity Under Hellenic and Roman domination, that is. (Lots on Isis!)

Women of Kush: Ancient Sudan, from the neolithic to early medieval realms. You can see the entire show open access on my youtube channel.

Libyan Women, from very ancient rock art forward across the millennia

Ancient Sahara: women in a great rock art tradition. See the entire presentation open access here. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Congo, South Africa and others forthcoming.

Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. More rock art, spiritual leaders, female chiefs, rain queens, and matrilineages. The video will be open access via the Suppressed Histories Archives website, hopefully later this year.

Some of the richest archaeology in North America comes from the mound-building cultures, including female figurines, woman-pipes, and Spider Grandmother gorgets.

Mexico is extremely rich, and large. Future visual talks will look at the Plateau (Teotihuacan and Aztecs); the Maya regions of Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán; and the southern region from Oaxaca to Michoacán.

I’m working on visual talks on Ecuador (another country rich in female iconography), Colombia, Brazil, and other South American countries. Some will roll out as webcasts in my Womanity course, which resumes in September, along with Ancient China.

Anatolia: Asia Minor has a very long archaeological record (beyond Çatal Höyük!) all the way up to Artemis Ephesia and other pillar-goddesses. Stream on demand here.

Ancient Iran, some of the most-obscured archaeological treasures for women. The women’ dance ca 4000 bce, and snake goddesses in Kerman. Stream on demand here.

Ancient Syria, also with a very ancient neolithic history, and a wealth of goddess iconography. Stream on demand here.

I haven’t had time to edit the latest video recording of this visual talk, which I’ve been presenting since the 90s. The iconography goes far beyond the allusions in the Bible.

This one was an ad hoc webcast I put together while teaching from a chapter in my book Magna Mater, Paulianity, and the Imperial Church. Not this chapter, an earlier one on Judah under Roman occupation.

The Names of Devi focuses on goddesses in India (historical looks at the Indus Valley civilization, Gangetic Plain, and South India to come). Stream on demand here.

Wu, Nu Shen, and Xi Wang Mu surveys female spiritual ecstatics, priestesses, and goddesses in ancient China. Stream on demand here. Loads more presentations on North Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia will come along eventually.

I don’t have a full-length treatment of the neolithic Balkans in digital form yet, but this 30-minute taste is open access on my youtube channel.

Ancient Crete (and Thera). This deep dive is coming later this year, a two-part series because there is so much material, including a wealth of ceremonial scenes on seals.

Women in Greek Patriarchy. Several more videos look at Hellenic priestesses and goddesses, but I don’t have title slides for them yet.

A video about the female statue-menhirs of the megalithic era (all too-little-known) will be coming soon on my video course platform maxdashu.freshlearn.com .

Italy before the Romans goes far back in time, and includes Sicily and Sardinia as well as Venetia and Dauna in Apula. But Etruria is a separate show:

Etruscan Women. Somehow I lost the recording, so will have to offer a webcast again.

Scandinavia, ancient to medieval. Video not yet available, must be edited first.

The Goddess Veiled is stream on demand here

Fatas and the Faerie Faith, another video that will be on my course platform. Most of these are webcast recordings that need to be edited.

Sheela-na-gigs and Apocryphal Saints (alias goddesses in disguise) needs to be re-recorded, and split into two presentations.

Above, an open access taste of my course Witches and Pagans (stream on demand)

Another stream on demand course is on Witchen Herbal Lore

Witch Hunts is being overhauled (due to sheer length) and divided into parts: one on Medieval Persecutions, another on the Witch Hunts Terror. And then the Diabolism video (which needs to be re-recorded, but if you look down my substack posts, I’ve done two articles on this defamatory construct of “devil-worship”.) Important for howing links between the persecution of pagan religion and witches within Europe, anti-Semitic persecution, and racist depictions of cultures in the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific.

Above, another video course. This one highlights how positive images of the witch (as diviner, healer, spirit-flyer) survived in popular culture, despite heavy demonization over the long centuries of witch hunts.

Coming in future are visual talks on Ethiopia, Nigeria, Colombia/Venezuela, Ecuador, several presentations on Mexico (there’s so much to cover), Ancient India, Ancient China, and Central Asia. And later, Indonesia, Pueblo Country, the Great Lakes, Centroamérica, Pasifika, the African Diaspora, Gaul, and many more.

I’ll end with this short video I did eight years ago on the regional shows:

All images and videos ©2026 Max Dashu

The photo below shows the overflow: many of these slide boxes contain Part II of various shows (most presentations had more than the 140 slides that fit in the trays); or they contain new slides waiting to be integrated into the carousels, or into future presentations; or duplicates, or unused slides. Beyond that are many file cabinets containing hard copy images, maps, and articles, photocopies, notes. And of course the digital archives, which have grown by leaps and bounds in the past 25 years.

In the 21st century, all these visual talks had to be converted into digital form. Those shown above date to before 2002. After that, another hundred followed, as powerpoints and videos of webinars. Those shown below are only titles for international-spectrum shows on particular topics. There’s a much larger number of regional presentations, not included here, though maybe I’ll post them another time).

Deasophy: Goddess Wisdom

The Cosmic Weaver

The Goddess Veiled

Sacred Signs

Sacred Dance

Breasts!

Sacra Vulva

Lesbian Heritages

Healers in Mexico to the Caribbean to South America

Rebel Shamans: Women Confront Empire

This last one doesn’t exist yet as a visual presentation yet, but the subject is very important. Old-school academia insisted that patriarchy was baked into human nature, and had always existed. For a long time, many feminist scholars bowed to this idea, and treated matriarchy as a “utopian golden age fantasy.” (For example, Sherry Ortner argued against it in Women, Culture, and Society (1974), but later recanted; however, an extreme allergy to “matriarchy” persists, in part from ignorance of Indigenous history.) Anyhow, patriarchalization is a historical process, a series of cultural buildups, layered and entangled with other systems of domination. I’m not suggesting some new evolutionary schema with “stages of development,” because there is no single pattern of patriarchalization. Certainly patterns of male domination can be identified: the core principle being colonization of female bodies for sexual control, reproduction, and labor, upheld by violence, law, and custom. But that doesn’t happen in the same way in all places, and the chronology of these devolutions varies wildly. Human history is far more complicated than that. I talk about these issues in an
audio post on Historical Processes of Patriarchalization that is available to paid subscribers here (though the written prelude is visible to all).

Speaking of paid subscribers, my thanks to all of you who have signed up for that so far. I intend to provide more special content for you. including soon, my three part video on The Potency of Old Women. You can also see it stream on demand through my online course platform, along with some written content I’m in the process of rolling out. The first part on the Cailleach is already up, and more is coming on Old Woman in megalithic traditions in western Europe and Kore.

And there will be much, much more coming. This is medicine we need to fight patriarchy and fascism…

All images and videos ©2026 Max Dashu

Doing guest lectures was not a livelihood, so I worked various jobs that gave me the flexibility to be able to travel occasionally (especially in March, Women’s History Month, when most of the college bookings happened.) I painted houses, interior and exterior (a real adventure on third storey ladders in the windy SF Bay area), did house-cleaning and janitorial work, attendant care for disabled women and elders. I did graphic design for several years, worked on gardening crews, clerked at the front desk of an inner city school in East Oakland, then worked part time as an activity leader for elders confined in a locked facility. Waged labor, no benefits—but more time to research, photograph images, and make slideshows. To do the real work while still keeping a roof over my head.

There’s no comprehensive record of my ephemeral work in the oral tradition, teaching with images over more than a half century, other than my bulging file folders of event flyers, travel itineraries, and booking correspondence. I thought some of you might be interested in how this project grew, from handlettered flyers for feminist community events to typeset brochures sent out to college women’s centers and Women’s Studies depts, and eventually to series at universities and community centers, to keynotes and international conferences.

First brochure, 1973-74, for the Matriarchives slideshow, in Berkeley CA.

Series at a Women’s Coffeehouse in Oakland, Probably 1976 (I kept the flyers but neglected to mark dates on them). Four regional slideshows at this point.

The first global-spectrum show was Women of Power, probably also 1976. (That phrase was revolutionary at the time, but later became a cliche; at which point I renamed it Women in Power. In 2008, I produced it as a dvd, Women’s Power in Global Perspective.

Going through the many folders of events, I found this handlettered flyer for two slideshows (still regional, not yet specific countries) on Women of South America and Women of North Asia, in Eugene, OR. (The discolorations are from pasting-up with rubber cement, which marks the date as pre-1980; I’d guess 1977 or so.) We’d have to go around to put up flyers on whatever bulletin boards we could find; that and word-of-mouth was the only publicity, until Plexus and other women’s papers began to have calendar sections. Email and websites were far in the future, to say nothing of mobile phones and social media.

In 1976 I renamed the project the Suppressed Histories Archives. Matriarchies were still a focal point of my research, but it was important to address systems of domination as well. I created the brochure above in 1981, after learning graphic design and how to spec type. There were no home computers yet; typography had to be sent out to a service and then pasted up.

I was honored to be asked, thanks to Maya Chumu, to present on Indigenous women’s history for this exhibit opening in San Francisco. The lesbian feminists in my community were involved in activism against US intervention in Nicaragua (then under Somoza regime) and El Salvador (death squads trained in Georgia at the School of the Americas). Most of us came of age in the movement against the Vietnam War, and our anti-militarism rolled over into what was being done to Central America (and in Chile, where a US-sponsored coup overthrew Allende in 1973. We were engaged in a wide range of justice issues, something that got erased in later hostile depictions of “70s feminism,” as we were founding shelters and rape crisis centers and women in the trades organizations. You can see this internationalism and anti-imperialism in the women’s monthlies, if you go back and look at Off Our Backs, Big Mama Rag, Sojourner, and others.

One of these feminist undertakings was Household Workers Rights, founded by Joyce Maupin, who worked on other women’s labor causes. My partner Nava worked in and for HWR, and I participated in this benefit, along with the Freedom Song Network.

I continued to create visual talks on women in different parts of the world, this one circa 1980 at La Peña, a community events space founded by Chilean exiles in 1975, where I did many events over the years.

This one reflected the research I was doing on women in medieval Europe. I had begun writing Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion in 1978, but did not complete it until 2016. In between lay a tremendous amount of reading.

No date on this one, but it would have been in the late 1980s, when I spoke at U of O in Eugene, Willamette U in Salem, Portland State U, Reed College, and Lewis and Clarke College.

I presented this series at UC-Berkeley in 1984, thanks to Rosario Guerrero, director of the Women’s Center there.

Another undated flyer, I’d estimate early 80s from the price and the calligraphed flyer, at the fabled Old Wives Tales bookstore in San Francisco. It became one of the anchors for a lesbian neighborhood that ran from 16th St to 24th Syert, where Artemis Café occupied the corner. On 18th St the San Francisco Women’s Building floresced, another axis of feminist intersectional activism, with support groups for refugee women, Latina workers, AIM events, lesbian poetry readings and concerts—and I also did slideshows there. (Contributed bilingual articles on women’s history too, and some of the images that went into the Maestrapeace mural on the building’s exterior.)

One of the series of visual talks I did at the SF Women’s Building, I estimate late 1980s.

A brochure I designed in the late 80s to promote my visual talks to Women’s Studies and Women’s Centers. It was always important to emphasize the international scope, because a stereotype had already developed that women’s history was Euro/American—queens, maybe Hildegarde von Bingen, Susan B. Anthony. I also wanted to get beyond “great women” narratives (not that those stories don’t matter, because they did get buried) to look at broader patterns of free women, clan elders, medicine women, female builders, farmers, inventors of what I’d later call MotherTech.

It was clear that the silences created by patriarchy and racism converged to conceal what are in reality the most advanced human societies—not the militarized states or the most high-tech, but the egalitarian cultures that prioritize peace over aggression, sharing over accumulation. The cultures that most respected women had simply been left out of the history books and their summations of “great civilizations.” Worse than that, I found that these dominant narratives impugned Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, the Pacific, and Australia, and when the greatness of a civilization could not be denied, as with Egypt, they tried to whiten it.

The real history of Egypt accords with its location in Northeast Africa, and its cultural ties to Sudan and points south, as well as to the Saharan peoples. Kemetic culture was my oldest historical passion, since grade school.

By 1996 I had changed this title to Women in Power, shifting the goalposts. This presentation mixed famous women with the anonymized culture-makers and weavers of community. The rumbling of postmodernist backlash already made itself felt around this event at San Francisco State; the organizers were told “Women are not a group,” and they had to fight for funding from the Student Assocation. The event went through, but that resistance to feminist history was a sign of things to come.

I did a series of events at the Pagan store Ancient Ways, and also presented for decades at the Pantheacon, the largest Pagan conference in North America.

This flyer was promoting a visual talk on a subject that is still deeply controversial, charged as it is with sexual politics, as well as with the racist scripts of diabolism. But these legacies, these persecutory behaviors (above all toward women) must be faced. They will always resurface, as they have again, if they are not understood and the destructive behaviors repudiated.

In the late 90s, I was really gratified when a group of Iranian students at UC-Berkeley reached out to invite me to present on Iranian history. The audience turned out to be mostly men—not my usual!—but they were enthusiastic, as I am on this subject.

While working on my first dvd, Women’s Power in Global Perspective, I noticed a pattern in the section on female revolutionaries and leaders of Indigenous resistance movements. They were overwhelmingly medicine women, prophetesses or diviners—women regarded as having special spiritual gifts. So I started putting together a new presentation, initially with only about 35 slides. In several years, it ballooned out to the point that the Rebel Shamans talk became almost too long.

Most of my Women’s History Month tours were to New England and the Chicago area, although I traveled to universities in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. I’d get an anchor booking at a university (which gave lodging but not necessarily airfare) and then stack up other events at feminist venues like The Women’s Well near Boston. The Unitarian church in Andover hosted my talk many times, and let me sell prints of my art. I also did some in Santa Fe:

I find that women are most drawn to the history of witches, which has been one of my most-requested topics.

The last brochure I created was in 2000, the same year I began crafting the Suppressed Histories Archives website. I didn’t know it then, but my university bookings were about to dry up abruptly, in the turning from Women’s Studies to Gender Studies. Women’s history was not considered a sexy subject. The new reasons for looking away from it were different, but nonetheless they looked away. As if a few decades of remedial attempts to correct the historical record could somehow be enough, with urgings that it’s time to move on to more pressing subjects.

The last university booking I would have for many years was at the University of Dayton, thanks to a Women’s Studies scholar I knew. But I continued doing my work in the grassroots venues, which had never stopped. One was the National Women’s Music Festival, which did not balk at radical content like this:

I presented at the National Women’s Music festival once before, when it was still in Bloomington, Indiana. And also at Robin Tyler’s West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival near Yosemite, for which I designed the brochure in its early years.

I’ve lost track of how many visual talks I did at La Peña. This one on First Nations women in North America, in conjunction with Puerto Rican and African-American drummers and singers.

The megalithic era in Europe has a very strong representation of women in the statue menhirs. At first I found only a few, but gradually discovered more, and more, and more, after much digging. This presentation brings these carved monoliths out of sequestration in studies mostly known to academic specialists (which is true of many archaeological finds significant for women).

Female Rebels and Mavericks became one of the most popular topics. Women are drawn to rebellion, and long to see women who defy all the punishments rained down upon insurgent females.

Talking about male domination is one of the most forbidden subjects. That’s too bad, I’m still gonna do it. It needs to be described and understood in order to dismantle it. (And this is why we need our language, our own namings and analysis.) I put together this global view of how patriarchy is structured to colonize the female body, and the restraints and penalties it imposes on girls and women. That men react with hostility to this subject is a given, but it makes many women uncomfortable too, and some will rush to reassure the men that they’re on their side:

Yes, this was written by a woman, in a local Berkeley/Oakland weekly, where I had sent a calendar notice about the event. Apparently it felt hip to ridicule the suffering of women down through the ages.

Another co-production with Rumba Mesclao, on Treasure of African Women, as a benefit for A Woman’s Place bookstore, one of the first feminist bookstores, founded in 1970. In its original location, it also housed the Oakland Women’s Press Collective, which published the work of lesbian poets Judy Grahn, .Pat Parker, Willyce Kim, Martha Shelley, along with titles such as Lesbians Speak Out, and groundbreaking testimonies from women raped as children. (I guess it’s inevitable that a survey of my work continually leads back around to the radical and lesbian feminist movements.)

The event above was a benefit for the Northern California Women’s Herbal Symposium (I presented there several times too), with the wonderfully funny and smart Sherry Glaser (see excerpts from her Oh My Goddess here, and do not miss the second half, she’s brilliant).

Above, the Womanist / Feminista conference at HerChurch in San Francisco.

So then? I finally started being able to travel outside the US, and to present in Europe. I attended the Matriarchal Studies conference in Luxembourg (though I didn’t get to speak there), and from that was invited to present at a symposium in Rila, Bulgaria.

Mary Condren, whose scholarship on Irish women’s history in The Serpent and the Goddess filled me with awe, arranged for me to speak at Trinity College Dublin and other events hosted by her organization WomanSpirit.

Presenting DeaSophie at the Frauenmuseum in Wiesbaden, 2012

Sacred Dance and Women’s Ceremony, for the MatriArchiv (they thought of this name too) in St. Gallen, Switzerland

Several series were hosted by Armonie in Bologna, Italy, along with other presentations in Florence, Rome, and Torino.

And the 2019 Women’s Book Fair at la Casa Internazionale delle Donne in Rome, where I got to meet Vandana Shiva (and an astonishing number of photographers and members of the Italian press!) This was my last event of a weeks-long tour, and you can see by my swollen eyes how tired I was.

And Australia!

Speaking on patriarchy, once again.

I got to speak in Brisbane, Bundaberg, Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne (several times) and learned loads about the country. It’s a privilege to travel, and I love it, meeting so many interesting women. I nearly always stay with my hosts, and one of the unexpected benefits was their libraries: in Vienna, German books on Anatolian archaeology; in Rome, on the Sardinians and Mediterranean art, in St-Gallen, on Swiss megaliths and animal masks. Although I was late to get a cell phone (my wife finally bought me one) it became indispensible, not only because of travel logistics, but because it had a camera. So I’d spend hours looking through these books, photographing from them, and writing down the captions.

Same goes for the museums. The Etruscan museum in Rome blew me away: breastpots from the Villanovan period, and tall ceremonial stands in sculptured terracotta. The Egyptian museum in Torino. The British Museum, omigoddess.

Serendipity sometimes intervened. On one trip to the UK, I had a layover between an event in London and one in Lancashire. (This was rare; these were working trips, not vacations.) So I decided to go visit the megalithic circle Long Meg and Her Daughters in Cumbria, and found a bed and breakfast nearby. Sort of: turns out the site was not so easy to get to: no buses. But I lucked out; the couple that ran the place offered to take me there. Even better, the next day they were going to their granddaughter’s soccer game in Carlisle, and offered to take me to the Tully House Museum, which I of course had never heard of. Turns out it’s one of the best collections of Romano-British art in the country, with lots of goddess statues and Matres stelae. I was in heaven, and took loads of pictures.

Well, there’s more, but that’s enough. I’ll just end with this: after a long hiatus from university lectures, I was invited to give the 23rd Annual Patricia Reif Lecture at Claremont Colleges, and presented a visual talk on Restoring Women to Cultural Memory.

All images and videos ©2026 Max Dashu

“She was the first law the land ever knew. Not written in ink. Not enforced by courts. But carried in the body of a mother.

“As the United States of AMERICA approaches a milestone in its history, we are invited whether we accept it or not to pause… and to reconsider the story we have been told about who we are. Because beneath that story, there is another.

“At the core of the Haudenosaunee worldview is a principle that challenges everything many have come to accept: that women, mothers, hold central authority in governance, in land, and in the maintenance of balance itself.

“This is not symbolic. It is structural. It is law. And it is what I call Mother Law.

“Now, when European settlers first encountered Indigenous nations, they did not find disorder. They found systems, complex, functioning, enduring systems of governance that differed profoundly from their own.

“Benjamin Franklin himself observed this. At the Albany Congress of 1754, he pointed to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a model of unity, a system in which multiple nations retained their autonomy, while participating in a shared council. A confederacy. A balance of interdependence and unity.

“Sound familiar? Because while history has rarely acknowledged it, these principles echo in what would later become The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. [The adoption of Iroquoian principles has been widely documented in books and articles.]

”But there is something deeper, something even more foundational that was not carried forward. Within the Haudenosaunee system, authority was not held solely by men. Clan Mothers, women, held the power to appoint and remove chiefs. They ensured that leadership remained accountable not just to the people, but to future generations.

“Think about that. Accountability not to power…but to continuity. Not to dominance…but to balance. This is a governance rooted in relationship. And it stood in stark contrast to the hierarchical, male-dominated systems that would eventually take hold across this land.

“Even European artists saw something of this truth. In early maps and engravings, America was not depicted as a king, or a conqueror. She was a woman. An Indigenous woman. Reflecting land, life, and natural authority. But over time…that image changed. It was altered. Recast. Europeanized. And in that transformation, something essential was erased.

‘As the United States now celebrates what is called its 250th birthday, we must ask: What exactly is being celebrated? Because the story most often told is one that has been repeated so many times it feels unquestionable. But repetition does not make something true.CBeneath that construction is a deeper reality one in which foundational truths have been displaced.

”Nowhere is this more visible than in the legal system itself. In 1823, the Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh formalized what is known as the Doctrine of Discovery. This doctrine declared that ultimate ownership of land belonged not to the Indigenous nations who lived on it but to the European powers who “discovered” it.

“Let us sit with that for a moment. A legal system…built on the idea that discovery equals ownership. From that point forward, Indigenous nations were reduced to rights of occupancy, not ownership. A system fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous understandings of land as living, relational, and inseparable from identity.

‘And it did not stop there. Cases like United States v. Kagama in 1886, and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock in 1903, extended what is known as plenary power—granting Congress near-total authority over Indigenous nations. Treaties could be broken. Governance structures altered. Sovereignty overridden. All within a legal framework that claims legitimacy.

“And yet, if law is based on precedence… on what came first… Then Mother Law flips the script. Because in the Haudenosaunee understanding of creation, it was not conquest that established law. It was a mother. A pregnant woman who brought life and earth into existence and in doing so, brought forth the first law of this land.

“So, we must ask: What takes precedence a doctrine of discovery from 1823… or relationships that extend back thousands of years?

“Because today, we are still living the consequences of that contradiction. Indigenous nations are still required, in many cases, to buy back their own land. The Oneida Indian Nation, here in New York, has had to reacquire portions of its ancestral homeland through open-market purchases. Land that was stolen from them.

”This is not history. This is ongoing. And yet, even within all this the truth has not disappeared. It has only been buried. The principles of the “Indian Mother” is still here. Still present beneath the surface. Still waiting.

”We are now in a time of reorientation. A time that calls us to return not backward but inward… Toward systems that prioritize balance, relationship, and interdependence. Because maternal order is not allegorical. It is foundation. It is the structure through which life continues. And for those US citizens whose ancestors came here seeking freedom there is something important to understand:

“Recognizing these truths is not a loss of liberty. It is an expansion of it. A return to a deeper understanding of what freedom means one rooted in responsibility, reciprocity, and respect.

”So, when I speak of “the return of the mother to the house,” I’m not speaking in symbols. I’m speaking about the re-emergence of a living system of law. One that values balance over dominance. Accountability over control. And life over extraction.

”Because this is not just about the past. It is about the future. It is about governance. It is about the land. It is about how we will continue or not continue on this planet.

“Because Mother is not only the origin. She is present. She is active. She is necessary. She is the balance. She is the authority.

”And she is the path toward peace and the preservation of life itself.”

The painting above is by Bradon Lazore of the Onandaga Nation, Snipe Clan. He has recast the Statue of Freedom atop the US Capitol building (a stereotyped figure in Greek robes but with feathers on her head, still visible in the painting) with a majestic Haudenosaunee matron who is holding up two wampum belts: the Hiawatha Belt of the Great Law of Peace, and the Women’s Nomination Belt.

The Six Nations of the Iroquois call themselves collectively Haudenosaunee, Longhouse People, and individually Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. Originally Five Nations, they added the Tuscarora, a related people who came as refugees after settlers forced them out of North Carolina, in the 1700s.

These wampum belts are not “art,” but agreements, treaties, social contracts. The Two Row Wampum Belt was the first treaty the Haudenosaunee made with Euro-settlers, an agreement that both peoples would continue on their independent paths. Like other treaties, the colonists and their United States failed to honor this compact, and seized all but a scrap of the Iroquoian lands.

In this video Louise Bear Herne (author of the article above) and Michelle Shenandoah speak on Mother Law and the history and significance of the wampum belts:

A second video explains how the Doctrine of Discovery, first proclaimed in a papal bull of 1493, became the basis for colonization of the Americas, the foundation of “Manifest Destiny” conquest, and eventually, explicitly, for all property law in the United States. Not just in the early 1800s, but as recently as Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s 2005 ruling against the sovereigny of the Oneida Nation.

The next session looks at how the Doctrine of Discovery appropriated First Nations lands:

I was asked to do the next session that addresses how the patriarchalization and internal colonization of Europe led to authoritarian ideologies that Euro settler-states used to colonize the Americas (and much of the rest of the world).

Donna and I went around to university libraries in LA, searching for historic images of women, and taking slides of them, to be filmed later. (I intended to inscribe it with Indigenous place names, but that was a challenging undertaking I didn’t have the resources for.) We printed photos of the ancient figurines, and I got as far as cutting them out, preparing to attach them to the map for filming. That never happened, but Donna gave me copies of the over 300 slides we had shot. (Good thing, too, because her studio later burned down.) They became seedlings of the Suppressed Histories Archives, and shaped my teaching global women’s history through images.

I kept the map for 52 years, through all my moves. Yesterday it came full circle. I spent all day populating the map with digital images for every region for which I have found photos of these statuettes. They are ceramic, stone, bone, and ivory (not just from elephants, but also hippos, walruses or other sea mammals). They are small (the largest one is from Nok in central Nigeria (about 18 inches), and possibly the heavyYemenite figure parked at the lower corner of Arabia.

You’ll note that the forests of North America and North Asia are blank, along with Tibet, most of China and SE Asia, and Australia. There might be many reasons for this: no ceramic tradition, or images in unfired clay would dissolve over the ages; that some images were made of perishable organic material such as cloth or reeds would not survive in moist climates. Some cultures honored female ancestors in other forms: breastpots, effigy vessels, or rock paintings and petroglyphs, as in Australia. In some places, especially Africa and the Pacific Islands, people made wooden statues larger than these.

I used the Mercator map (remember, it was 1974!), which distorts the shapes of continents and makes the Northern Hemisphere appear much larger than it is. Northeast Asia is cut off, and Pasifika is mostly off-screen. (I put in a Tongan ivory—she would be much farther west in reality—to represent.) Back in the 70s, I didn’t have her, or the small icons from Senegal and Zimbabwe, or El Salvador and Honduras, or Greenland, or even Ukraine and Bulgaria.

But as we went through hundreds of books and took slides from them, we found the Jomon figurines from Japan, those from Iraq, Egypt, Indus Valley, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. That was where my slidehows started. I how realize I have to go back and look at the digital archives for Spain, and for the Caribbean. I just found an ancient elk antler figurine from the Coast Salish yesterday. So this map is not the final form; it’s always a work in progress.

Nor can a single map reflect the large concentrations of female icons in some regions: in Southwest Asia, the Indus and its foothills, the Nile Valley, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Japan, and paleolithic Eurasia. They can’t fit into the available space. Still, an overview of ancient female iconography is necessary, a historical geography that fills glaring gaps in what we are taught, and never shown.

In 2008 I designed the poster Female Icons, Ancestral Mothers, which has gone around the world, and is now in its third printing. Women need to know how international these images are. Shown, from left top: Italy, Sudan, Egypt, Russia, Ecuador, Siberia, France, Morocco, Alaska, Japan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Mexico, China, Zimbabwe, Manchuria, Iraq, Iran, Peru, Turkey, Brazil, Utah, Hungary, Chad, India, Greenland, Mexico, Honduras, Argentina, Britain, Israel, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Illinois, Kurdistan, Sulawesi, Louisiana, Brazil, Kenya, Sudan.

More detailed description of each image here, with site names, dates, and other info, along with a few more photos.

My article “They Are Not Venus Figurines” critiques the trivializing and pornifying lens through which the figures have been viewed ever since 1864, when a French marquis called a paleolithic icon found on his estate a "Vénus impudique.” He saw her as “immodest” in contrast to the Roman archetype of Venus Pudica.

This sexualizing lens has predominated ever since, and many (mostly male) academics have insisted that the ancient figurines were pornography, or possibly toys (contradictory claims, neither of which explain why so many of them were placed in burials, or covered with red ochre). But they could not represent anything significant, and definitely nothing sacral! Even though some have been found in shrines, and their placement in burials is suggestive of regenerative power. (I go into these interpretativ issues, and the Eurocentrism of the “Venus” naming, in the article linked above.)

Anyway, these female figures are a recurring pattern across countless cultures, along with others that I visually document in my poster series. It includes Sacra Vulva, Vulva Stones (petroglyphs which are more universal than the figurines, and often extremely ancient), and Breastpots. I envision making another poster on Mother Pots, known to academia as “female effigy vessels.” Like these:

And then the Breastpots, an extremely widespread theme, as you can see below. Most are sculpted into the clay, though some are painted, going around the body of the pots. Others are breast tripods, or are shaped in the form of a woman’s body:

I hope to have the About section, and some of the other page redesigns, ready by July.

All images and videos ©2026 Max Dashu

The strong pattern of female shamans in eastern Asia has been erased from the history that most people are taught. Yet female shamans predominated in ancient China, Japan, and Korea, and have persisted into modern times in eastern Siberia, Korea, Manchuria, Okinawa, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Here I’ll survey the wu (female shamans) in China’s earliest written records, its ancient art and ritual culture, classical literature, historical records, legends, and temple practices.

Old sources show the Wu performing invocation, divination, dream interpretation, healing, exorcism, driving off evil spirits, and performing ecstatic rain dances. Dramatic descriptions recount the powers of the wu in their ecstasies: “they could become invisible, they slashed themselves with knives and swords, cut their tongues, swallowed swords, and spat fire, were carried off on a cloud that shone as if with lighning. The female wu danced whirling dances, spoke the language of spirits, and around them objects rose it the air and knocked together.” [Eliade, 454, citing DeGroot, The Religious System of China, VI, 1212]

The character for wu depicts shamans dancing around a pillar, or the long sleeves of a shaman’s robe swirling as she dances. Some archaic Da Chuan forms show hands making an offering which is received from above. Possibly the oldest glyph from which the wu character arose represents a quadant of the directions (sifang), and was also influenced by a glyph meaning “dance,” showing a person with outstretched arms in long sleeves. Dallas McCurley interprets it as representing a whirling dance that transported shamans to altered states of consciousness. [McCurley, 136]

In oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (above), hands make offerings that are received by hands from above; two figures dance around a central pillar, or a shaman’s arms in a long-sleeved dance robe. The two characters at the right (above) read wu / mo “shaman”; the first is archaic and, at far right, the classic character wu.

Ancient oracle bone inscriptions use wu most frequently in relation to spirit sacrifices and for calls to “bring the wu.” One Shang oracle bone was inscribed, “divination, the wu proclaims...” Another mentions a group of nine wu who did a ritual dance before sacrifices. [Boileau, 350, 355-6] Other inscriptions refer to the female shamans Yang, Fang, and Fan performing rain-making ceremonies. The political prominence of these early wu is underlined by Edward Schafer, who points to “traditions of Shang ‘ministers’ called ‘the shaman(ess) so-and-so’.” [Schafer 1951: 132, 162]

The oldest Chinese dictionary, Shuowen Jiezi, equates wu with zhu, a ritual invocator, and with ling, “spiritual, divine.” It underlines the female signification of wu: “wu is a zhu (invoker or priest), a woman who is able to render [herself] invisible, and with dance to invoke gods to come down. The character symbolizes the appearance of a person dancing with two sleeves.” [Erickson, 52. Another translation of this passage runs, “An Invoker. A woman who can serve the invisible, and by posturing bring down the spirits. Depicts a person with two sleeves posturing.” (Schafer 1951: 152-3)]

The Shouwen also refers to “an inspired shaman serving the spirits with jade.” Another word with the sound wu (but written with a different character) means “to dance.” The relationship of these two words has been much discussed, since dance looms large in descriptions of the wu. The character wu also appears in many compound words, combined with other radicals signifying “woman,” old woman,” “male,” “spirit” and “immortal.” The wu radical also acts as meaning-signifier in the characters for xi, “male shaman,” for “yarrow” (whose stalks are used in divination with the I Jing), and in the most archaic form of the character yi, “doctor” (in which the “shaman” radical was later replaced by “wine,” indicating a shift away from ritual to medicaments).

The title Wu also figures in legendary place-names. “Snake Wu mountain” appears in the ancient Shanhai Jing as the home of the goddess Xi Wangmu. This book also says that wu live on Mount Divine-power, “where the hundred drugs are to be found.” Another passage describes the wu as possessing the herb of immortality. [Birrell 2000:174, 141] Real place-names survive too: the celebrated Mount Wu, dwelling of the Divine Woman, and the famous Wu Gorge of the Yangtze.

Written histories about the archaic Xia-Yin times focus on the powers of shamanic kings like Yao, Shun, and Yü. “It was said that Shun was the first person to journey to the sky, and he was taught by the daughter of his predecessor, Yao.” [Eva Wong, Online] Reading through these masculinizing lines, it can be deduced that a woman was the first to attain shamanic flight. This female precedence is clearly stated elsewhere: “The emperor Yao’s daughters, Nü Ying and O Huang, revealed to Shun the art of flying ‘like a bird’.” [Eliade, 448 & n. 84. From a gloss in Sima Tian in E. Chavannes, tr., Les Memoires Historiques de Se-ma-Ts’ien, I, 74]

The Lie Nü Chuan explains further that the daughters of Yao came to his aid during his ordeals— imposed by cruel parents—in a deep well and in a high granary. As Granet summarized it: “Shun knew what awaited him in the granary and the well: he asked advice from his wives, the daughters of Yao. If he descended to the ground without accident, it was because they taught him the Art (Gong) of the Bird; if he came out of the earth, it was that they had taught him the Art of the Dragon. We even know that Shun succeeded in these magical feats by dressing in the robes of Bird Work (Gong) or those of the Dragon.” [Granet, 127]

That word gong is the same as in qigong and kungfu; it “designates magic, all its techniques, feminine works, musical art” (emphasis in original). Granet adds that this account of women teaching shamanic arts is only found in the Lie Nü Chuan: “it is no longer found in modern editions.” (They edited it out.) He also cites the commentary on Sima Tian saying that the daughters of Yao taught their husband Shun the Art of the Bird. Still another source says that in his ordeal of the well, the two sisters advised him, “Take off your clothes and put on the Dragon work; [that is how] you will get out of it.” [Granet, 346-47, n. 693]

Most Chinese literature dwells on the exploits of Shun and ignores the two spiritually-skilled sisters who married him. But they were remembered in much later times in southern Hunan, where they had a temple, and peaks were named after them. By the 9th century they had become syncretized with the ancient river goddess known as the Lady of the Xiang. [Schafer 1973: 86-87, 50, 176]

Although she does not seem to have been called wu, the best-known female ritualist of Shang times deserves a mention. Fu Hao personally inscribed oracle bones and presided over divinations and other rituals. Her personal seal shows a woman making ritual offerings to spirits. Tortoise shells inscribed with the characters “prepared by Fu Hao” prove her status as an important diviner.

Married to the king, Fu Hao was also his best general. Her tomb is the richest Shang find ever discovered. It was filled with a massive collection of bronze offering vessels, half of them inscribed with her name, including the colossal Si Mu Wu ding. Hundreds of jade vessels and thousands of other treasures were found in her grave. [http://history.cultural-china.com/en/48History10355.html] Among them were “small bronze mirrors and knives” not found in other burials, and little jades with possible ritual functions. Sarah Nelson remarks, “While no evidence points to [the king] Wu Ding performing ecstatic rituals, perhaps Lady Hao was the shaman.” [Nelson, 160]

Jade objects were important in ritual. The Zhouli says, “Blue Jade Bi to worship the heaven, Yellow Jade Cong to worship the earth.” (Cong is pronounced tsoong.) Commentators say that the circular bi and the squared cylindrical cong symbolized Heaven and Earth. The cong has an extremely long history, going back to the neolithic Liangzhu culture (circa 3300 BCE), and replicas persist into the Song dynasty.

But while great emphasis is placed on the emperor and his ceremonial acts as Son of Heaven, little attention has been given to the ancient queens who are mentioned as keepers of the cong: “several sorts of cong mentioned in Zhou Li were used in rituals involving the women of the royal house.” [Willets, 58] More remains to be revealed about these ancient Earth jades, with their masks and graded layers in patterns that often recall the later Kun trigram of Earth.

The cong is said to be a shaman’s tool that ‘encapsulates the principal elements of the shamanistic cosmology.’ [Nelson, 137, quoting Chang 1994a: 66]

Eva Wong highlights the wu women as healers. “We are told that, in the healing ceremony, the shamaness grasped a green snake in her right hand and a red snake in her left hand and climbed into the mountains to gather the herbs that would restore life and health to a sick or dying person.” (See lacquer painting above.) Wong explains the central importance of dancing and singing in the rainmaking ceremony: “The Chinese word for spirit (ling) consists of three radicals: one meaning rain, another (showing three mouths) chanting, and the third, shaman.” [Wong, Online] This word ling is used for shamans in the Nine Songs of Chu.

The Liji (“Book of Rites”) referred to the ceremonial dances called yue; they combined music and movement with regalia: “shields, axes, feathers, and oxtails.” The Lushi chunqiu described the harmonizing and unifying power that arose from these rites. As Dallas McCurley explains, “throughout the cosmos, everything both resonated and responded to other resonations... that if one strikes a bell of a particular note, all other bells of that same note, regardless of octave, will resonate.” [McCurley, 142] The Chinese used sounding stones (qin) and chimes in ceremonies. “When I knock on the musical stones, the hundred animals all dance.” [Karlgren 1946: 258, in Nelson, 114]

Many scholars see Chinese arts of the wu as underlying what developed into Taoism. [Schipper, 6] The Taoist word for ecstasy, kuei-ju, “coming in of a spirit,” was derived from ecstatic union: “For it was said of a sorceress in trance and speaking in the name of a shen: ‘this body is that of the sorceress, but the spirit is that of the god.” (The word shen, “spirit,” is ungendered in Chinese.)

The wu prepared herself to receive divinity by purifying herself with perfumed water, putting on ceremonial robes, and making offerings. Then, “with a flower in her hand, she mimed her journey by a dance accompanied by music and songs, to the sound of drums and flutes, until she fell exhausted. This was the moment of the presence of the god who answered through her mouth.” [H. Maspero, in Eliade, 453]

One of the oldest, comprehensive descriptions of the wu appears in the Guoyü, a book of the 3rd century BCE :

Anciently, men and spirits did not intermingle. At that time there were certain persons who were so perspicacious, single-minded, and reverential that their understanding enabled them to make meaningful collation of what lies above and below, and their insight to illumine what is distant and profound. Therefore the spirits would descend upon them. The possessors of such powers were, if men, called [xi] (shamans), and, if women, wu (shamanesses). It is they who supervised the positions of the spirits at the ceremonies, sacrificed to them, and otherwise handled religious matters. As a consequence, the spheres of the divine and the profane were kept distinct. The spirits sent down blessings on the people, and accepted from them their offerings. There were no natural calamities. [Bodde, 390-1]

Later, says this old classic, the divine and profane became intermixed, causing misfortune, so that the communication between Heaven and Earth had to be cut. This lost connection to the divine world is an extremely widespread theme. [See Anne Solomon (1997) on the San in South Africa, where the primeval connection is lost between animals and humans, not heaven and earth. The same is told in the Americas.]

The above translation of the Guoyü neatly reverses the primary gendering of wu as female, using English words that imply that the word “shaman” is masculine and only secondarily applies to women (“shamaness,” “shamanka.”) But in Chinese, the more ancient character wu is incorporated as a signifier into the word xi, demonstrating that the explicitly masculine term is derived from the feminine, and not vice versa.

However, not long after the Guoyü was written, we find the authors of the Zhouli regendering the concept, as “male wu” and “female wu.” Later writers often used the binom nan-wu, “male wu,” because wu by itself still implied a female person, or the collective wu-xi. Other sources continued to reflect a female gendering of wu: “the old songs and rituals found in the Li Sao and the Spring and Autumn Annals ... contain descriptions of male shamans impersonating women.” [Laughlin and Wong, 1999 p. 152] Another old source, the I Jing, says of hexagram 58, “Dui is marshy-fertile, a youngest daughter, a shaman.” [Schafer 1951: 155]

The Tigress Wu

The theme of tiger-shapeshifters is ancient in China. In the I Jing, a line from Hexagram 49, Ge, reads “The great man tiger-changes.” (The word rén actually means “person,” not “man.”) This theme is found across south and east Asia. As early as 2400 BCE, Indus Valley seals depict tiger-women, and in one case, a horned woman shaman dancing with tigers.

Yü bronzes of the early Shang dynasty were cast in the form of a tigress clasping children in her paws—clan ancestress or a shamanic initiator?—and tigers flank the head of a child being born on the colossal Si Mu Wu / Houmuwu fangding. The taotie sign represents tigers on innumerable Shang and Zhou offering vessels—and on ritual masks. [See Dashu 2010, online]

Tiger traits have long been associated with Xi Wangmu, goddess of the West—a direction associated with the tiger in the Chinese Concordance. The second chapter of the Shanhai Jing says that Xi Wangmu has tigers’ teeth and a leopard’s tail, and her wild hair is crowned with a head- ornament (see above). Then comes a significant description of the divine woman-tigress: that she “excels at whistling.” [Remi, 100] Other translators render this line as “is fond of roaring” or “is good at screaming.” The discrepancy comes from the fact that the character in question, xiào, does not translate easily.

Xiào is associated with “a clear, prolonged sound” that issues from the throats of sages, shamans, and immortals. (It may have resembled Tuvan throat singing.) Xiào was compared to the cry of a phoenix, a long sigh, and a zither. Its melodic sound conveyed much more than mere words, and had the power to rouse winds and call spirits. Taoist scriptures also refer to the xiào, and in the Songs of Chu it appears “as a shamanistic ritual for calling back the soul of the deceased.” [Sun Ji, 1996. Thanks to Yun of China History Forum for this citation.]

Xi Wangmu is seated on Snake Wu mountain in the 12th chapter of the Shanhai Jing. Three azure birds bring fruits to her; they belong to her host of helping spirits and emissaries, along with the three-legged raven, the nine-tailed fox, and the elixir-pounding hare. Chapter 16 tells of “the mountain of Wangmu” in the western wilderness. On the great mountain Kunlun is a spirit with a human face and a tiger’s body and tail. Once more, Xi Wangmu has a tiger teeth and tail; here she is described as living in a mountain cave that “contains a thousand things.” [Remi, 575-78]

Mathieu Remi observes of Xi Wangmu’s tigress form, “There are good reasons for thinking that here we have a description of a shaman in trance.” He points to Chinese scholars who compare her staff to the staff of sorcerers. [Remi, 100, 481] Suzanne Cahill draws the same conclusion, calling attention to modern parallels: “The stool, headdress, and staff—still part of the shaman’s paraphernalia in Taiwan today—reflect her shamanistic side.” [Cahill, 19] The staff also appears in the hands of women dancing or running in ceremonial scenes on Warring States bronzes (more below).

The tiger was not the only animal that figured in Chinese myth and shamanic culture. The cries of animals were compared with particular musical sounds and instruments. Lizards were said to have invented drums by pounding on their own bellies, and various literary references indicate that lizard skins were used as drumheads. The phoenix, seen as a creature of wind, was said to have originated wind instruments. The pheasant was thought to be able to perceive thunder that humans could not hear. A poem in the Xia xiao zheng declares, “When it thunders, the pheasant will flap its wings and cry, the thunder is passed on.” [, 14] These lines have been linked “with pheasant dances (possibly performed by females) to provoke thunder.” [Sterckx, 9-14]

Wu represented in ancient art: ceramics, jade, and bronze

Archaeology also provides rich evidence of female shamanism in ancient China. We’ve already touched on the oracle bones. In the late Zhou period, many black-clay figurines show dynamically dancing women. Panels on bronzes show women officiating in ceremonies during the Warring States era. In the Han, as Susan Erickson has shown, jade plaques, tomb bricks, and bronzes depict female dancers whirling their long sleeves, often in ceremonial, funerary and even cosmological contexts.

The women are carved in powerful movement, usually with one sleeve flowing above the head. One piece shows them as “dancers who leap upon a series of low drums...” [Erickson, 45-47]

A painted silk was found in a tomb at Jinqueshan, Shandong “in which the dancer participates in a ritual involving the journey of the soul after death.” A female sleeve dancer is shown with her arms raised, surrounded by musicians. In the panel above, the deceased woman is seated inside a house and approached by others holding offerings. Beyond, in the sky, are the sun- raven and moon-frog in their orbs, just as in the famous painted woman’s shroud at Mawangdui. Both compositions have the heavens above and reptilian beings in the lower panel. At Mawandui, the serpentine goddess Nü Wa flies at the center of the upper panel, flanked by the solar and lunar beings and geese; beneath her are dragons, deer, and other spirits. [Erickson, 48-9]

Erickson astutely remarks that the funerary and cosmological contexts mean that the sleeve dancer of Jinqueshan “is not just the skilled and beautiful performer” shown in some Han art: “rather, she enacts her role in a space between the bright celestial regions, where the sun and moon are eternal, and the darkness of the underworld. She is part of the vertical axis by which the soul travels to the heavens.” [50]

She backs this interpretation up with wu ceremonial scenes on bronze vessels created before the Han dynasty. A bowl in the Shanghai museum (above) shows women with preparing offerings inside a stepped temple. Outside, two women approach holding vessels or other objects, and two other women perform the sleeve dance among trees as another woman plays a drum resting on two birds. Above the dancers, another woman plays gongs suspended from the ceiling of a building. Except for her, all wear a feathered ritual headdress.

One of these drum stands, with two phoenixes standing on two tigers, was found in a tomb at Zuoyang, Hubei, dating to the same time period as the bowl, about 475-221 BCE. Several others have been found in ancient Chu. [Nelson, 163] (Above)

I’ve made a study of bronzes with scenes of wu, especially hu vessels from the Warring States period, after 400 bce. They depict women dancing, running with staffs, beating drums and also gongs suspended from the roof beams, blowing on trumpets, and making offerings with ritual bronzes inside stepped and pillared temples. They often wear horned headdresses, and a few of them wear swords strapped to their sides. Some show large birds amidst the women, possibly phoenixes, or other animals.

A bronze lian from Liulige, Henan, shows wing-sleeve dancers with a drummer, a trumpeter, and a procession of figures carrying offerings or wands toward several large footed bronzes. To the left is a forest with animals, including an animal- headed hunter and a phantasmic two- bodied creature with a human face. Kiyohiko Munakata has suggested that this scene may represent “the theme of the ‘summons of the soul,’ as part of a funeral ritual.” The song “Summons of the Soul” recalls how long-sleeved dancers “throw themselves into the Whirling Chu” as they entice the soul of the dead to return to its “old abode.” [Erickson, 50, 53]

Erickson concludes that the jade plaque figures from tombs “can best be understood as an attempt to capture the posture of the shamaness as described in poetry of the Han and pre-Han periods.” Their iconic postures reflect their spirtual power:

The dancer as invoker who communicated with spirits was the vehicle through which the soul could find safe passage to immortality. The jade plaque figures found in Western Han-period tombs may be reminders of the ritual dance performed for the deceased, and they continued to offer protection and guidance for the soul. [Erickson, 53]

A special category of siwu were in charge of funerals and performed sacrifices to the dead. One text says these wu performed an exorcism involving the dead person’s clothing to avert evil. But other sources describe them staying outdoors during the funeral, which was conducted by the zhu priest, and show lords avoiding contact with them. The Zuozhuan tells how duke Xiang came to honor duke Kang of the kingdom of Chu. A female wu protectively sprinkled him with a peach branch and reeds, then the duke was forced to bring grave-clothes with his own hands. This funerary contamination causes him to be “deeply troubled.” [Boileau, 362]

Persecution and shrinkage

In the Zhou dynasty, (northern) Chinese society was already patriarchal and hierarchical. Women were losing ground in the official religion of the aristocracy, if not among the people. Male zhu invocators now carried out a large share of the ceremonies, and other male officials performed some priestly duties. This hierarchy of officials is how the rulers “maintained their control of religious order, if necessary, against every kind of ecstatic or anarchic religious manifestation.” [David Keightly, in Boileau, 357]

References to the wu grow increasingly negative as China becomes increasingly militarized and imperial.. Independent ecstatics, especially the women, were seen as uncontrolled and therefore a threat to the intensifying social hierarchy. The larger context was an intensification of patriarchy:

Archaeologist Ying Wang writes that aristocratic women’s burials at Jin show a demotion over the course of the Zhou period. She says that “in Phase I (tenth century B.C.E.), the wives’ status might have been relatively higher,” but in Phase II (around the mid-800s) a new ritual system began to cut down women’s ritual activity: “Beginning in this period, the wives’ status was lowered because of the ritual reforms imposed by the Zhou court.” Wang observes that the number of bronze ritual vessels in female graves decreased. Her data suggests that women were facing ritual limitations that men did not, and were “ritually ranked lower than men.” [Wang, 196]

In the Confucian Zhouli (Book of Rites), the gendered terminology changes, abandoning wu and xi for “female wu” and “male wu.” The men are now placed first, describing them as presiding in sacrifices to the deities of mountains and rivers: “in winter, they make offerings (or shoot arrows) in the great temple hall... in the spring, they are in charge of protecting the country from disease.” [Boileau, 359] As for the women, they’re still around, but their scope is circumscribed.

Female shamans shall be in charge of seasonal purification and anointing with aromatics, and in times of drought shall dance the Yü. [Schafer 1951: 157]

Also, “in great calamities of the state, they pray, sing and wail.” [Boileau, 359] They “cause the spirits to descend at funerary services, and most enigmatically, the directors of wu led them ‘in enacting the long-standing practices of the wu...” [Nelson, 153, citing Falkenhausen 1995: 294] What those practices were, no one knows, not in their full measure.

The male wu along with zhu invocators precede the king in condolence ceremonies, while the female wu precede the queen. “The only [courtly] activities in which the wu take part alone are healing according to their own special techniques and the dance for drought.” [Boileau, 359] The courtly sources show that the wu are still present, but male priests have begun to manage and even to displace them. This happened as the state began to assert control over the shamans.

In the Zhou period, the Ministry of Spring began to regulate the wu, placing them within strict official hierarchies: “various kinds of shamans, including the wu, were incorporated into divisions of this elaborate bureaucratic office and made answerable to ascending levels of managing officials.” These official shamans '“answered to and “embodied the authority of a centralizing state.” [McCurley, 138] The Biaoji in the Liji directly tells us that for the Shang people, spirits were honored, and “more important than ceremony,” but in Zhou times, “they honored the ceremonies, and kept the spirits at a distance.” [Nelson, 143]

Confucian hostility toward the wu led to increased constriction of their sphere and outright repression of their sacred rites, during and after the Han dynasty. Edward Schafer comments: “... the Chou ruling class was particularly hostile to women in government, and regarded the ancient fertility rites as impure. This anti-female tendency was even more marked in the state of Lu, where Confucius approved of the official rain-ceremony in which only men alone participated. There was, within ancient China, a heterogeneity of culture areas, with female shamans favored in some, males in others.” In the Tai culture, for example, the shamans were female, but among the Yao they were male. For a long time, Chinese texts often referred to shamans collectively as wu-xi, meaning both females and males.

Confucians regarded the ceremonies of some states such as Cheng as scandalous because women danced and mixed with men. [Schafer 1951: 158. He suggests that the word xi (“male shaman”) may have originated in the Chu dialect, since it appears in the Chu yü.] Confucians frequently accused those they opposed with improperly consorting with women. They were even more outraged about female shamans who held public offices, denouncing the ceremonies led by wu as “depraved cults.” “That the female Wu were still numerous in the 2^nd century we know from ... Wang Fu, who bitterly complained of the large number of women in his time who took up the profession.” [Seaman, 231; quoting Needham 1956:127] In the same vein was the complaint by Wang Chung, who describes the wu as oracles of the ancestors:

Among men the dead speak through living persons whom they throw in a trance, and the wu, thrumming their black chords, call down souls of the dead, which then speak through the mouths of the wu. But whatever these people say is always falsehood. [Eliade, 454]

The process of eliminating female shamans was long and irregular. Every now and again they regained ground: “Under Han Kao Tsu they were extensively employed (Shih chi 28.7 a-b), but under Wu Ti they were severely persecuted, although they had powerful connections within the ranks of the aristocracy... The second emperor of later Zhao, Shih hu (A.D. 334-349) employed a host of female astrologers (nü tai-shih), and the foster mother of his Heir Apparent ‘first attained her advancement through shamanistic arts’.” (Zhin shu 106.2 a-b)” [Schafer 1951: 157, n. 80]

Female shamans played central roles among the ancient Tuobas from central Asia, who founded the Northern Wei dynasty in 386 CE. They restored female shamans to Chinese state ceremonies—at least for a while. These women presided over a great sky sacrifice, held in the fourth month, and other rites with drumming. [Beldick, 25] But as the ruling group was confucianized, the exclusions resumed with more severity.

In 472 the Tuoba emperor Wen “forbade Wu mediums to participate in the sacrifices of the state religion.” Soon his successor emperor Gao Ze prohibited the wu and xi from soothsaying with help from spirits, whether the heavenly shen or the terrestrial gui. [Wei shu, 7.I.1.21, in Seaman, 232; Schafer, 157, n. 80, gives also 108a.2a-b] As the wu were driven out of their ancient religious role at the state level, and were persecuted for their ceremonies among the people, they gradually began to converge with emerging Taoism, which itself had a “shamanistic substratum.” [Schipper, 55]

Edward Schafer has tracked the demotion of the wu better than any source I’ve found:

In later centuries, the shamaness was gradually removed from the official hierarchy, and forced to practise her divine arts among the people, like the European witch. Yet she retained a small place in the government at least until the Sui Dynasty. The Office of the Grand Diviner (Tai-bu shu) of that period employed various kinds of augurs, and sixteen male shamans (nan-xi) and eight female shamans (nü- wu). [Schafer 1951: 157. Note: the use of “shamaness” does not correspond to the original Tungusic usage, in which shaman is ungendered, nor to the Chinese context.]

Later, in the Tang dynasty, this office lists only ‘fifteen shamanistic masters’ (wu-shih). Schafer noted that the title wu was used in these courtly registers, but now seems to be applied to men: “The number ‘fifteen’ suggests that the eight shamanesses of Sui had been removed—the fifteen shamans of Tang, plus a director, would constitute the sixteen xi [male shamans] of Sui.” However, the title wu, “with its usual feminine connotations,” continued to be used for women, and was combined with other words such as shih (“master”) in reference to known female shamans. [Schafer 1951: 157, n. 80, quoting from the Tang shu 48.3a, 4b-5a]

Chinee conceptions of the wu retained a strong female stamp: “Such was the force of tradition in respect to the basic femininity of the shaman, that male shamans in the Far East often impersonated women.... The shamans of Central and Southern China, called tuan-kung and nan-wu [“male-wu”], are men disguised as women... The male shamans (shih-wu) of Kuangtung in the eighteenth century impersonated beautiful girls (Li T’iao-yüan, op. cit., 1.5). Doré observes that the possessed boys of Amoy, with whom he was familiar, were occupied by female spirits...” [Schafer 1951: 159] In modern parlance these would be gay or trans shamans.

[I’m skipping over a section on sun-exposure of the wu and disabled people in rainmaking ceremonies, for reasons of length, but you can read the full article here.

We begin to see outright persecution of the wu—not just demotion—during the Han dynasty, when the wu were actually witch-hunted. Accusations of wu-gu (poisonous sorcery) flew in court circles. Empress Chen Jiao was tried for employing Yue shamans in court intrigues. She was convicted and lost her position; undoubtedly status and family influence prevented her execution. But hundreds of suspects, many real wu certainly among them, were beheaded and their heads set out on pikes. [Loewe 1970:169]

As Eva Wong explains, Yue was a southern region famous for shamans, like Chu, and regarded as “barbarian” by northern Han people. The court persecution was thus tinged with ethnic overtones and highlights the persistence of shamanic culture in aboriginal areas. A more severe witch hunt broke out in 91 BCE, after a failed coup involving the crown prince, with more charges of wu-gu (sorcery). The state was said to have executed tens of thousands over a period of nine months. [deGroot 1910 5: 836]

Kings were eager to use the wu for their wars and political machinations, as described in the Yi Zhoushu Fi (Fengbao) which calls the wu “vermin.” The Liutao (Shangxian) calls on the king to stop “magical tricks, poison of the wu (sorcery), evil ways and curses... ” [Boileau, 374-5] Working with the aristocracy was risky business—though it must have been dangerous to refuse them.

A wu appears in a story from the Zuozhuan as an interpreter of dreams and omens for a princely family. In 581 BCE, the lord of Jin killed two men of the Zhao family. He then had a terrifying dream in which a powerful demon accused him of wrongly killing his descendants. The demon pursued him and in the process destroyed two doors of his palace, when the duke woke up. Alarmed, he summoned the wu of Sangtian. She was able to tell him the entire dream. The duke asked what it all meant. She answered, “You will not taste the new wheat.” He became ill. A physician told him it was untreatable; nevertheless he rewarded him richly. The duke lived long enough to see the harvest, and ordered a meal to be prepared from it.

He summoned the wu of Sangtian, triumphantly showed her the new wheat, then put her to death. But before tasting the wheat, a nature call sent the lord to the privy. He fell into it and died. [Boileau, 366-7]

This story can be interpreted as a curse by the wu—or as a vindication of her prophetic power and spiritual rightness.

Female shamans in Chinese literature

We’ve looked at references to the wu in the Shang dynasty oracle bones, the Guoyü, Zhouli, and Shuowen. Other mentions are scattered through ancient books. The Ze Chuan refers to a Wu of the Mulberry Field, who performed a ritual dance in a mulberry grove. Two ancient bronzes show women doing ceremony with long-sleeve dancing amidst mulberry trees. [One from Liulige in Henan, the other on a hu lid in Tokyo Imperial Museum]