The monthly newsletters are an amalgamation of musings, a poetry offering, and announcements for all my upcoming events. These are free for all subscribers of Under a Fig Tree.
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Hello everyone. When you receive this, I will have left my bush hermitage and begun what my partner and I are calling our Great Southern Voyage! Being a day ahead of the majority of you reading/listening to this in the Northern Hemisphere, I will probably already be on the Road, somewhere between tropical Queensland and the wide open planes of Victoria, our first destination. The journey will take us about a week.
The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of boxes and Facebook market place and the emotional rollercoaster that is the consequence of leaving a place.
In times of transition, when the soil of familiarity falls away, it’s the old mythic soil that rises up to replace it. Old stories of journeys and quests sprout and form a myceleal network, a pantheon of ancestors; all those who have walked the unknown paths before us, who were faced with impossible tasks along the way, and who have quested for home, or love, or God.
In the oracular ceremony I held for the solstice in December with my friends and colleagues Chelsy Arber and Emma Meadows, so many people sent in questions about home. Essentially: Where is it?
The motif of longing for home is a recurring theme in myths and folk tales across cultures. It raises a deep human desire for belonging, safety and identity.
After the Trojan War, Odysseus embarked on a 10 year journey filled with trials to return to his home in Ithaca and his darling wife, Penelope. His longing for home speaks to the yearning for the restoration of his rightful place. In other words, to return “where he belongs”.
In the German folktale, the children Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods and long to return home. It becomes a haven and a sanctuary from the dangers of the unknown world in the woods.
And then of course there’s Dorothy, whose mantra there’s no place like home tells us that despite its imperfections, home holds a unique emotional pull that holds a value of familiarity and belonging. Her journey to meet the wizard revolves around her desire to find her way home.
In the Selkie myths of Scottish and Irish folktales, when humans steal their skins, they trap them on land. Seal-women can live on land, as women, but when they do, they long for their true home in the sea.
On the other hand, in the Danish fairytale of the Little Mermaid, she has the opposite desire. The young mermaid dreams of living on land and gaining a human soul. Fascinated by the human world, she visits the ocean’s surface on her fifteenth birthday and sees a handsome prince on a ship. She falls desperately in love with him from afar. When the prince’s ship is destroyed in a storm, she saves him and brings him to shore. But he is unconscious and never sees her.
Longing to be with the prince and live on land, the mermaid makes a deal with the sea witch. The witch grants her legs in exchange for her voice, warning that every step on land will feel like walking on sharp knives.
Is this what it must feel like when we choose to move towards our deepest, most secret longings?
If the prince falls in love with her too, her voice will be restored and the pain of walking withdrawn. However, if he marries another, the mermaid will die and dissolve into sea foam.
Mute and in constant pain, the mermaid lives in the prince’s palace. The prince grows fond of her but loves another woman who he believes is the one who saved his life from the shipwreck. The mermaid silently endures her heartbreak and unrequited love.
When the prince marries the woman he thought saved him, her sisters offer her a way out: if she kills the prince with a dagger, she can save herself and return to the sea.
In Apuleius’ version of the tale of Psyche and Eros, Psyche too is offered a dagger by her sisters when they attempt to convince her that her beloved is a monster. And she must kill him to save herself. Their true motive, however, is to ruin Psyche’s happiness out of envy and spite as they can’t bare that she has a life seemingly better than theirs. Though Psyche doesn’t kill him, she does hold up a candle to his face whilst he sleeps so she can get a look at the face that he has asked her not to look upon for a year and a day.
This betrayal is pivotal in the story, as it leads Psyche to break Eros’ trust and embark on a series of trials to win him back.
Both Psyche and the Little Mermaid are unable to harm their lovers, and instead sacrifice themselves.
Transformation
Instead of harming her beloved, the mermaid surrenders to her fate and dissolves into sea foam. However, in so doing, she is given a chance at redemption. And instead, she becomes a spirit of the air, earning a human soul by performing good deeds over the centuries to come.
A slightly different version from the Disney one some of us 90s kids were raised on!
The mermaid’s longing to become human reflects her yearning to change her nature to belong somewhere other than her original home; the longing for greener pastures.
As I wrote in last week’s piece, I think the longing for transformation, like the longing for home, is intrinsic. Our soul longs to be refreshed and renewed. It always has done. This is why there were yearly rituals of regeneration cross-culturally since the dawn of human consciousness.
There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road.
Wrote Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar.
The mermaid’s ultimate goal isn’t just love but to gain a human soul, which is denied to mermaids in Andersen’s world.1 Her final transformation into an air spirit can be seen as her journey to spiritual fulfilment. And the pain she endures symbolises the sacrifices and struggles often required for personal growth or moving towards our dreams.
Her initiatory journey and the theme of subsequent transformation is similar to Psyche’s and her impossible tasks imposed by Aphrodite. Psyche undergoes an emotional and spiritual transformation - after hey betrayal of Eros - as she completes her trials set by the Great Goddess. Her final transformation into a goddess signifies her growth and fulfilment, allowing her to be with Eros as an equal. Her journey is about proving herself worthy of divine love. Her trials lead to her elevation to immortality, symbolising the union of love (Eros) and the soul (Psyche). Her quest celebrates eternal love and divine fulfilment.
Both stories explore the transformative power of love and the trials it demands.
I think the longing that in these stories is aimed at the prince or Cupid goes beyond that. It is perhaps more like what Sufism calls the longing for the Beloved. It is a longing for union.
The further we go back in the myths, the more Eros is expansive, not confined to one god among many, but one of the very primordial creative forces. He is the vegetation god; the divine son of the Mother Goddess, known in some parts of the Mediterranean, like ancient Cyprus, as Aphrodite.
The story is a remnant of an old creation story. One in which though the Earth is symbolically feminine, the vegetation that she bares is masculine. Her “divine son”.
Psyche, or Soul, yearns to re-braid herself back into Eros, what Dylan Thomas calls the green fuse and Sufis call the Beloved.
The Little Mermaid goes on a similar quest, from the watery subconscious of the uninitiated feminine, to becoming the air, or ether itself. In Sanskrit, ether, or space, is the ultimate element.
I find change can be made easier when we lean on the old stories. They have held us as long as soul has lived.
The characters, images, themes and motifs can all mean a thousand and one things in myths and fairytales. They each wear indefinite masks. But it’s worth trying our hand at seeing where we find ourselves in the stories, and how the images inform us, as an aid in giving meaning and context to our own trials and tribulations.
So in the spirit of transformation, if you too are in a transition time, may your each step be caught by the old gods of the stories who seem to want nothing more but for us to step fully into who we came here to be.
Wishing you a blessed Imbolc/Lunasa! And a reminder that there is a ritual prompt for any of you who would like to ritualise this quarterly seasonal shift.
With love,
Gabriela
Poetry Offering
I am too busy navigating a current of emotions to know how to begin to put them into words, let alone poetry. So I won’t be sharing one of mine this month. Here are a couple by some of the greats, who get closer to articulating this state of transition than I possibly could.
The Swan, by Maria Raine Rilke. Translated by Robert Bly.
This clumsy living that moves lumbering as if in ropes through what is not done, reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks. And to die, which is the letting go of the ground we stand on and cling to every day, is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down into the water, which receives him gaily and which flows joyfully under and after him, wave after wave, while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm, is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown, more like a king, further and further on.
Everything is Waiting For You, by David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
Announcements
FEBRUARY 2 | Guest teaching on Deepen Your Roots
Last chance to get your tickets for this year-long online program! Use discount code GABRIELA10 for 10% off.
FEBRUARY 23 | The Bee Priestesses
As I mentioned last week, this is the program in which I share my findings on the Melissae bee priestesses in a scholarly and somatic setting. It is part lecture, part practice where I offer a lecture followed by a guided practice in altered states.
FEBRUARY 28 | Monthly Ritual
The first New Moon Dismemberment ceremony is coming up this month. Newcomers welcome! Please note there is an introductory video for you as a pre-requisite so you know the gist. Looking forward to seeing some of you there! As usual you can attend live or via recording.
Mentorship
I currently have 2 places left for 1-1 mentorship. This is for anyone who would like support and/or supervision within both creative endeavours, spiritual work or personal support drawing on myth, stories, shamanic and animistic techniques for inner transformation.
These personalised sessions are structured to meet once a month.
Upcoming Advice Column
A reminder that I will be beginning The Ochre Papers advice column soon. I’ve received some fascinating questions so far that have got me thinking and excited. I plan to draw them all out of a hat over the coming months. This will be free for the next few weeks and they will be placed behind a paywall. So do make the most of it now if you’d like to send in a question!
*article title excerpted from Rilke’s The Swan
Hans Christian Andersen is the first written source of the Little Mermaid fairytale
You are in the land of the Aboriginal songlines ˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜ Happy steps and flight. Remember Icarus too.