How to know

Why do we resist knowledge? It is a question that is on my mind lately. Why does it take pain and suffering or loss to learn some lessons? There are answers. Ones that go to the heart of what it is to be human and ones I continue to struggle to accept.  At the moment I am experiencing a palpable paradigm shift in relation to The Handless Maiden story, one that is potentially far reaching for me. I am now really invested in it as an initiation story.
I have resisted this interpretation, making my project about everything but that. Clarissa Pinkola Estes book (Women Who Run With The Wolves) puts this idea at the centre of her interpretation, but she only hints at her reasons for describing it as such, saying that 'something of the ‘old religions’ still lingered in the tale especially in the girl’s initial defence against the devil. Wandering around Greece, visiting ancient sites and reading about goddesses it is like a looking at new photo taken from an old negative. Now I see in THM a very important story about how to be a part the reinstatement of a lost way of being.  

My view of Mount Olympus

  Everywhere in the story are hints pointing to our prehistoric mentality towards the sacred. What was worshiped - and how - framed all human relationships and our understanding of our place in the world. It seems apparent that, at one point in our history (and for thousands of years) we worshiped a goddess. She was made from the stuff all around us: the earth, our bodies, the sun and moon, the food we ate, the animals we lived with. She was able to encompass our fear, anger and violence as well as our transcendence and she was all around us, immanent. Then, with an invasion, came the gods of the sky who lived far away, who created us, but did not live among us. Our lives and the places we live became secondary to someone who transcended our quotidian experience and could only be reached through spirit and not through the senses. The shift also from worshipping the great mother and her son/lover to worshipping the father in the sky has had consequences: separation from nature, disconnection from our bodies, questing capitalism, empire, and the so-called war of the sexes. What was lost in that violent exchange of paradigm is still so essential and necessary that for thousands of years we have attempted to reinstate it. I see in The Handless Maiden hidden instructions for reinvigorating those old ways of being and, like it or not, there is some painful work involved. When THM’s father takes a silver-lipped axe and cuts off her hands he is unwittingly reinstating an old religious rite, the axe belonging to ancient goddess cults and the silver of the moon marking an initiation into “the way it is” on planet earth.   Now, I am ambivalent about religion, so I am not here advocating a new-old religion based on the story. I am interested in the need that the religion or and its deity expressed: needs like that for connection and an understanding of our place in the world as these beings that live and die, love and kill. However, as a 21st century, city dwelling, pain-averse intellectual, the reinstatement of the parts of me and of life that have been removed, hidden or misnamed feels like a loss and I suppose that is why the story seems so harsh (why do women or the feminine have to deal with so much abuse?) and why it has taken so long for me to accept the initiatory through-line. It is asking me to embrace my losses, past present and future, as a part of the life-death-life cycle that we are a part of, the cycle that the moon worshippers understood because they saw reflected throughout their lives especially in the seasonal planting and cutting that was agriculture. It is asking us to accept that, in order for the world to be in balance we must experience things that modernity promised would be a thing of the past. The reward is an experience of sacred belonging.  This is a strange time. It feels odd to be sitting in the sun trying to mentally prepare for the rest of the project. I am consciously deciding to engage with the story in a way that I expect will be difficult for me. Writing this has been difficult. So many cuts trying to figure out what I needed to say, and it was a need. This is how I feel about the whole project. I need to do this, but I can't quite articulate what it is I need. I wanted to tell you about some dreams that seem to be guiding me through this part of the process, but I can't at the moment they won't sit still long enough to "be" about something. Dealing with what is not yet formed about this needs some sort of midwifery. I'll keep you posted on how I manage that.