What follows is the third and final part of Mother Animal, Chapter 6: On Marian Birthgiving— the grand finale where Mary, at long last, gives birth. It is on this ground that, to me, the material gets the most volatile— the most controversial, the most incendiary, and therefore the most challenging to write about.

After all, this is where we enter the more serious debates that raged in the first four centuries of Christianity about Jesus’s incarnation, about his status as both human and divine, and therefore what this meant about Mary—whether or not she kept her virginity in tact after giving birth, what the implications were of her so-called “painless” virgin labor, and of course the whole concept of the redemption of Eve’s “curse.”

Given that there are countless treatises on these topics, and excellent books to help walk you through them if you can manage it (I go into a semi-fury every few pages), I’m going to stick with the story here as much as I can, with the birth details of Mary’s pregnancy and labor, and what we might carry away with us from them.

Even so, I get what feels like an ancestral prickling under my skin while writing these words. A semi-terror of saying something wrong, even though it seems virtually impossible not to say something wrong. Still, my motherline women from 16th century Yorkshire hover around me— women who were caught in the midst of the violence of the Reformation, where worshipping at Marian chapels could get you killed—telling me I’d better just steer clear of this subject altogether, it’s not worth making a fuss about, nor is all this talk of birthing babies and obstetric herbs and the things midwives know. This is the kind of sh*t you get burnt at the stake for, I feel them saying through the quiver in my chest, through the desire I have to run from my desk.

I don’t want to say something wrong. It is imperative that I don’t. Those sentences repeat and repeat in my head. They nearly make me tongue-tied even here, in private, with my keyboard and my screen. I know what it is to be tongue-tied on this subject in front of men in person too. The way an automatic silencing system seems to partly take over my brain, a survival mechanism— play dumb about your female ideas of God. It’s not safe. You will be belittled. You will not be believed.

The truth is, it wasn’t safe at all, not for a very long time. And it still isn’t in so many ways, both here in the west and beyond. I only have to think of the latest decree passed roughly two weeks ago in Afghanistan by the Taliban, declaring women’s voices unlawful in public, to lose my breath again. This is beyond Christianity. This is beyond the Abrahamic religions. Beyond monotheism. This is ancient ground, but it is also present-tense, this moment, abortion-is-now-banned-in-14-states-across-the-US ground. And one of its most potent, blood-drenched crossroads is the body of the parturient woman. The act of childbirth. It’s power utterly beyond the bounds and bonds of dominant patriarchy, and that power’s silencing.

Just a month ago, a sculpture of the Virgin Mary in labor called “Crowning,” created by artist Esther Strauss for an exhibition about women in art at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz, Austria, was beheaded only three weeks after its installation. It seems that the frank facts of Jesus’s birth from the human body of a woman, her face vivid with the intensity of birthgiving, her legs spread, is still as confronting to some now as it was two thousand years ago. Jesus’s death on the cross was as human as any death, and has been graphically depicted for as long as his birth has been sanitized, contested and, apparently, worth beheading statues over.

Never it, seems to me, has the way a woman gave birth caused so much controversy, or so much pain. I wish for us to be free of that controversy and that pain. I wish for Mary to be, too.

So, let’s see her through her labor.

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+ O N + M A R I A N + B I R T H G I V I N G +

Mother Animal, Chapter 6

Part Two - ‘Her Body’s Wonderful Possession’

VISITATION OF THE VIRGIN

"At the beginning she still moved easily, 
though in climbing sometimes she was already 
aware of her body's wonderful possession —
and then she stood, breathing, on the high 

hills of Judea. But not the land;
it was her own fullness spread around her. 
Walking she felt it ... one can never exceed
the immenseness that she now experienced. 

And it pressed her, to lay her hand 
on the other body that was further along. 
And the women swayed toward each other 

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"Hail, for thus my soul now sees:
You ready and so ripe.

You, Lady, are the great, high door
that soon shall open wide.

You, most beloved ear to my song
Now I feel: my word is lost
in you as in a wood.

So I came and I fulfilled
A thousand and one dreams
God looked at me; bedazzled me…

But Thou
Thou art the Tree."

- from "Annunciation: The Angel Speaks," by Rainer Maria Rilke , translation © by Grace Andreacchi  

To go anywhere near the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy and the birth of Jesus is to walk myself right out into very deep waters.

For one thing, there is so much to get “wrong” from a theological perspective. One step into the debate-grounds of the last 2,000 years about Mary’s virginity— its reality, its significance, its dogma— and I find I can’t breathe. People have been arguing about this for millennia. Violently, ferociously, mercilessly. Grappling with such scriptural specificity and fervor, as well as the theological minutia of many centuries, by turns enrages, offends and downright bamboozles me. I need paintings, I need folk stories, I need hymns. It all starts to make more sense to me then.

For another thing— the waters that Mary and Jesus point toward are living and they are profound. I don’t understand much of this with my mind. But, increasingly, I find myself at the shore of these waters in my heart and in my soul And I believe in these waters—living, amniotic, cosmic, unending, comprised of a shattering love, the kind that turns the heart of stone to a heart of flesh, the kind that opens the heart’s eyes.

So, I humbly offer this piece to you— this storytelling, this weaving of poetic imagining, interpretation and musing— as a contemplative upwelling. As an opening. This is not your go-to essay for theological unpicking or biblical specificity.1 I’m terribly intimidated by such things; maybe it’s an ancestral exhaustion from my Puritan motherline. But I am devoted to the bones of the stories here; to their essences, and to what I feel in my heart.

(NOTE- PLEASE SCROLL DOWN TO THE END FOR RECORDING)

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So last week, in part one of Chapter 5, we left off with the pregnant mare I met on Dartmoor, who carried in her eyes Rhiannon mother of Pryderi, the lad born the same hour as an otherworld foal. We left off with the way myth cycles like the Mabinogion encode traces of a belief that in my opinion is at least as old as the neolithic mound of Silbury.

We explored the idea that pregnant women, animal mothers and the earth all share a powerful knowledge and kinship of the oldest kind, and perhaps can even shapeshift amongst themselves at will. We entertained the thought that mounds (hills, cairns, tombs) of earth are navels of the world. That they are omphalos-points, and therefore oracular, like famous Delphi whose first prophetess was Gaia herself, and after her the Python. I would argue that in this way, the earth is an oracle. The animal ancestor is an oracle. And the pregnant woman is an oracle too. She is twinned, two in one.

I wonder why we talk about menstruation as the time of female visionary states, but not pregnancy? Why do we never imagine oracles as those who are doubled suddenly, carrying two hearts, two minds, two souls, instead of one? Carrying the pattern of life as it literally unfurls itself? All my friends who I’ve known through their pregnancies have been absolutely oracular and uncanny throughout. Dreaming things and speaking things aloud and coming up with ideas that made my hair stand on end.

So, here in the second half of this chapter, we will continue exploring a few more stories that carry traces of these patterns. Two more from the Welsh mythscapes of the Mabinogion, one from the Scottish borderlands, and a quick look at Rapunzel threaded through.

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Before we enter back into the waters of Mother Animal, Chapter 5 (she’s just below, with a recording, scroll down!) I have some exciting announcements.

It seems, suddenly, to be a season of new births.

A swarm of bees arrived by miracle in my garden hive last week. I’ve been waiting for them for several years now. I didn’t know how lonely my heart had been without them.

The green mound beyond my bedroom windows is deepening toward summer and when I go up to talk to the oldest stones there, birds appear, and show me the story of where I am with fresh eyes.

And, in the midst of all this blossoming, it is my great pleasure and joy to announce that I have a new website!

A website that has been created with love and artistry and such thoughtful attention to detail by the wonderful duo at the Art of Euphoria, Linda Pappa and David Mourato, my dear friends in Crete. As a fresh home for my work and my writing, it too feels like something of a miracle. Go have a look around, and you’ll see what I mean!

I’m so thrilled.

In celebration of this fresh website, Nao Sims and I are launching our new collaboration— The Erato Sanctuary: House of Story and Sacred Dance.

And for our inaugural Erato class, guess what our theme is….

With Nao’s guidance, we will dance our way deeper into some of the themes I’ve been exploring here since January, and even write our own fairytale retellings!

This online workshop will be offered in exactly a month today, on June 23rd, 2024, from 10:00 am- 1:00pm PST.

Stay tuned for announcements from The Erato Sanctuary about our upcoming two day immersion in October…

We are bringing “Swan Stories” to England!

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                                                                        i. 
                                                                berry juice

A month ago we were in the caves of Paleolithic Europe, walking three-score steps deeper into the symbolism of fairytale red, white and black. Into moon-knowledge and bison-knowledge and bear-knowledge traced in earliest ochre, knowledges that spelled a continuity between earth’s fecundity and the miraculous cycling of the female body from maidenhood to elderhood.

Wonderfully, while doing the research for this month’s chapter (which was originally the second half of “An Annunciation in Ochre,” but proved too long and needed its own moon cycle to complete), I came across an astonishing parallel to the imagery carved on the cave walls of Paleolithic France—halfway across the world, in Anishnabe indigenous territory in present-day northeastern Minnesota, until quite recently it was tradition that all young women went to sacred caves during their first menarche, and “created petroglyphs [in vulva shape] with their own menstrual blood or mixed their blood with berry juice (the blood of Earth) for painting on rocks.”1

One such cave, called Bear Creek Rock Shelter, “abounds with petroglyphs. […] At the entrance to the shelter is an explicitly delineated bison, with another two further inside. […] The walls where they narrow are covered with repeated vulvaforms. […] On the rear wall of the shelter [are] three incised images that are unmistakable bear paws. […] If one sat on the shelf of the rear wall facing the entrance, by extending one’s arms, one could place each of one’s hands into two of the bear paws.”2

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                                                                          3.
                                                       An Annunciation In Ochre

- from The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood, by Louise Erdrich

Last month, we observed how in the fairytale tradition, a woman’s longing for a child can conjure babies out of apples, hazelnuts, juniper trees, hens, frogs, snakes and flowers. How the whole living world is leaning in and listening, participating in conception.

In these stories, terrestrial, celestial and chthonic forces seem to have their ears tuned for that call for new life, and a woman’s speech - “If only I…” - carries an old resonance that can be heard across species.

At the end of last month’s chapter, we explored the recurring symbolism of the red, the black and the white— if I only I could have a daughter with lips as red as the apple peel, and skin as pale as its pome, and hair as black as earth— and how they encode a kind of maiden-mother-crone trinity, a “wisdom to do with the blood of women— red stain on white cloth—and its life-giving magic. Wisdom about the black earth our blood comes from and is supported by, and will return to” (from Conceiving Fairytale Apples). A wisdom, I’ve been musing in the intervening weeks, that is as old as the ochre handprints pressed on the walls of the Paleolithic.

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Welcome dear readers to the next installment of Mother Animal, my growing anthology of pregnancy, childbirth & postpartum motifs in folklore & myth. If you missed the introduction, you can read it here, where I share my reasons for creating this anthology, and some thoughts about mother-animal instinct and cosmogonies and shapeshifting and more.

Installments will for the most part progress chronologically, not through historical time but through the stages of experience of pregnancy, from conception to nursing.

Given the great (gravid) gorgeous scale of such an undertaking, I will be making my way through the material I uncover fairly intuitively, and of course not comprehensively. Following a thread, like that fairytale ball of wool given by a very old woman which is meant to be trusted wherever it rolls. Or perhaps even more aptly, following the zōon, the wandering animal womb that Plato made infamous to the ancient world, and whose influence extended straight up to Freud’s hysteria diagnoses in the mid-20th century.

We are so still living in the shadow of this kind of narrative coercion. Let’s set the zōon free, the womb and its nature no longer a story told by millennia of male discourse, but by the language of interior experience that embraces that we are all mammals, and that this is a glory, this is a sacrament, this is one of the most beautiful stories we can tell— how the mammal body knows, and loves, and cares, and shelters, both baby and soul.

It’s time for this not to be an embarrassment, a thing to silence or confine— like the confining of the upper class female pregnant body during the entirety of her pregnancy (called her “confinement”) in every 19th century English novel I’ve ever read, in order that the animal changes of her figure, round as a fruit and swelling with milk, or with sometimes incredible sexual appetite, or with morning sickness, with deep emotional swings and extra-psychic dreams and instincts, might be hidden from the public gaze. Hidden from our collective story about what it means to be human. About what is appropriate to talk about, celebrate, create from, and what is not.

I see this changing everywhere around me right now, and hallelujah. So, here’s to more! Here’s to our arrival back in the body, in the Mother’s body, unconfined, and singing of it.

A lovely friend in Devon recently slipped me a copy of some of the recorded stories of the Irish writer, philosopher and mythic visionary John Moriarty to listen to during the dark winter, but it’s back here in California that I’ve really been holding them close. (Thank you Judy xo).

Just the other night, my jaw hit the floor with this line:

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                                                            Introduction

Once there was a queen who longed for a child while walking in an apple orchard and later gave birth to a red apple that hid a beautiful girl inside.

Once there was a woman who prayed for a child under a juniper tree while peeling an apple and then conceived .

Once there was a midwife who became a weasel who helped untie the knots of a difficult labor and brought the baby out.

Once there was a pregnant woman who craved parsley so much that she made a deal with a witch in order to eat some from her garden.

Once there was a highborn lady who ran wild the entire nine months of her pregnancy, refusing to come indoors, and then gave birth to her child amongst the sows.

Once there was a mother whose son was born the same evening, the same hour, the same minute as an otherworld foal.

Once there was a virgin who gave birth to the son of God in a cave surrounded by donkeys, goats and sheep.

Once there was a cave in the Fontainebleau forest whose natural indentations resembled a vulva. Water ran there when it rained. Thirty thousand years ago an artist came with carving tools and made the story clearer.

Here was the beginning of the world: the vulva in the heart of the cave, and from it the first horses.

Welcome to Mother Animal: A (Growing) Anthology, a book project I will be sharing chapter by chapter with you on my Substack throughout 2024. Inspired by such anthologies as Angela Carter’s 1995 The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book, the idea for this project arose over the last year alongside my doctoral research.

I was driving around Somerset last April, listening to an audiobook about pregnancy and childbirth—long a topic of interest for me, far back to my girlhood when I was always reading novels about young midwives— when it first struck me. I couldn’t think of a single myth that treated the topics of pregnancy or childbirth with anywhere near the kind of airtime given to epic battles, sieges, man-to-man combats, long voyages, raiding parties, or elaborate hunts. And then, to my surprise, when I went looking I couldn’t find a single comprehensive study, and hardly any papers, that examined motifs of pregnancy and childbirth in the broader mythic or folkloric record.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m at the edge of my seat as much as anyone is about what will happen to Helen and Cassandra and Achilles and Paris and Agamemnon (not a fan) on both sides during the siege of Troy in the Iliad, and I’m riveted by long otherworld hunts for mythic boars and bulls and bears, and many-years journeys of piety and humbling in order to get back into the Grail castle and ask the right question. My heart soars and grieves and loves along with all of them.

But when I thought about the five very close female friends of mine who had all become mothers in the last years, and the detailed, passionate, harrowing, hallucinatory, unfathomably powerful birth stories I had heard from each of them, as well as the musings, reflections, cravings and visionary capacities that I witnessed in every single one of them before they gave birth, and then the unbelievably tenderizing, shattering, reconstituting, terrifying, raw, foundational transformations of the first months postpartum that they shared with me— I thought to myself: there’s no way that the women of ancient, traditional or indigenous cultures didn’t (or don’t still) have epics of their own about the incomparable journey of giving birth.

The stories I’ve heard my friends tell are the most incredible, intense, riveting tales I’ve ever been told. And there is a profoundly oral quality to a birth story. While I’ve read them recounted in Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery and other such places, there’s something about a woman’s birth story that almost requires orality, that requires bodily presence to be told most fully, and to be received.

So surely, I reasoned, if there have been so many stories crafted and told that have inspired heroism in men, there should be equally as many stories that have inspired courage and strength in women in childbirth. Surely this would have been part of the long-ago repertoire of a midwife, and of the elder matrons in a woman’s life. And surely, in a culture that centered life and birth, not death, it wouldn’t have only been women who would have wanted to hear the tales of courageous childbirths where the laboring mother flew to the stars and back, to the underworld and back between contractions to retrieve her child? Surely, everyone would have been riveted, because it’s how we all got here.

We say men returning from the hunt to the fire were the first storytellers, with their tales of mammoths and near-death encounters, but what if women in childbirth were too? What if they both told their stories around that primordial fire, and were received with equal awe and reverence?

So, my intention with this anthology is to pursue this question—where are the traces of these stories to do with childbirth in the mythic and folkloric record? Are they embedded in cosmological creation myths? Are they metaphorically embedded in female epics like Inanna’s descent, Ariadne’s giving birth in the underworld?

And most of all, what might the motifs of conception, pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum that we do find countless flashes of in extant folktales, fairytales and myths tell us about the deep collective understanding of this wombic process, the creation story of us all?

Mother Animal will be their gathering place, a field for the great matriarchal herds of elk to come grazing. It will be primarily a collection, a reference point, a book you can flip through to get a sense of the breadth of imagery and motif. Of course it won’t be comprehensive (that would take a decade at least!) but I hope it will be enriching.

In many ways I’m embarking on this adventure because this is the book I long to have in my hands if I become a mother myself. A kind of soulful preparatory text to go alongside all the more practical volumes. This is the book I wish to give to my friends who also want to become mothers, or who are sisters to mothers, or friends to mothers, to my friends who are already mothers, and to anyone who might want to engage with concepts of pregnancy and birth in new, enlivening, empowering ways.

I hope also that this book can offer a different kind of blueprint about the creative process itself, one rooted in metaphors that arise up through the body, or from the earth into the body, instead of Muses that descend at the beck and call of male poets down through the head.

This is a collection whose spirit is open to all, both in gender, in interest and in birth experience. And it’s important to emphasize that the title and subject matter, with its celebration of the mammalian power of birth, doesn’t mean that I subscribe to any one kind of birth. My friends, my mother, my grandmothers, have had every kind of pregnancy and birth imaginable, from totally wild and free with no interventions, to C-sections and all other necessary allopathic procedures. I have literally no judgements here of any of these stories, they are entirely equal to me in courage and beauty. I have only an enormous celebration, awe and desire to honor these experiences so fundamental to our collective human psyche by offering a resource for the soul and the heart, a reclamation of pregnant folk memory and mythic knowing hidden in plain sight in our stories for millennia.

I hope that this collection feels like a gathering in, a celebration, an enormous armful of riches—as the oldest sense of the word anthology carries, from the ancient Greek ἀνθολογία: “a collection of flowers,” from ἄνθος, flower—a garland of prophylactic herbs to wear around your head, your neck, your belly.

Finally, I want to dedicate this work in this season not only to my own mother and her mother and my motherline back through generations, and not only to my beloved friends who are mothers, but also to the women in Gaza who are having to give birth and mother their children in unthinkable circumstances right now. Women who are having to give birth in a warzone, in terror, with not only none of the life-saving supports of modern medicine that are sometimes needed, but also none of the herbal support, midwife support, safe, warm, surrounded-by-women you trust in a protected-den support that are crucial for the physiological processes of birth to take place safely and humanely.

Yesterday I read the story in the Middle East Eye of a 28-year old Palestinian woman named Fedaa Issa who was six months pregnant at the time of the first Israeli notice for her and her family to evacuate their home. She began to bleed heavily twenty minutes into their flight, forcing them to take refuge at a friend’s house. A week later the house was surrounded by shelling, and so she was forced to leave again. Eventually she made it to Kamal Adwan hospital in the south.

“I walked through the wounded and bleeding. They had no doctors to treat them. Pregnant women were giving birth, screaming in labour, with no midwives or anesthetics available for C-sections. These women were giving birth in hellish scenes, with dead bodies scattered all around them,” Issa told the Middle East Eye. These hellish scenes prompted her and her family to flee further south again, crossing through military checkpoints where Issa was forbidden to sit down though she was visibly pregnant and had started to bleed again, and was also robbed of everything she carried. Miraculously, she and her family made it to relative safety after that, and she gave birth on December 2nd, almost a month early, by cesarian section with only partial anesthesia.

This is for you Fedaa Issa, in all of your mother animal dignity. For all the mothers and babies in Gaza who have not survived their labors. For the mothers who are giving birth even as I type. May your children thrive in a world that knows peace and liberation once more. I honor your courage and your love, which are the courage and love of the Mother of us all.

LABOR PAINS
by Fadwa Tuqan

The wind blows the pollen in the night
through ruins of fields and homes.
Earth shivers with love,
with the pain of giving birth,
but the conqueror wants us to believe
stories of submission and surrender.
O Arab Aurora!
Tell the usurper of our land
that childbirth is a force unknown to him,
the pain of a mother's body,
that the scarred land
inaugurates life
at the moment of dawn
when the rose of blood
blooms on the wound.

-translated by Kamal Boullata 

                                                                         
                                                                         1.
                                                                 The Zōon

According to a classical Greek gynecological claim popularized by Hippocrates—whose shadow reached well into the 20^th century in Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, and even shows traces in contemporary obstetrics units— we women have animals moving around in us. Womb-animals, to be precise. Favorite animal comparisons have included octopuses, toads, hedgehogs and weasels. These animal uteruses — these zöon —supposedly influenced the way women felt, thought and by extension imagined, created and lived.

Wombs hosted inner demons, according to Roman ritual exorcists of the early Christian era (exclusively male) who claimed they could banish them. While it was understood even at the time that there was scientific basis for this belief, and it was debunked by doctors in Alexandria not long after the era of Plato, it still stuck, and has continued to exert its influence in all manner of misogynies and oppressions over the ensuing two millennia.

But such a belief, such an accusation—to be the sex who harbors so-called demonic animals under her skin—is only oppressive within a culture system that values the human over the animal, culture over nature, intellect over bodily knowledge, male over female.

A quick survey of indigenous literatures and mythologies the world over, and in fact the remnants of such thought-systems still hidden within folktales, fairytales and myths in the European west, will swiftly complicate these hierarchies, and offer up instead such classics as “The Woman Who Married A Bear,” an Alaskan Tlingit tribal story brought to western attention by Gary Snyder in his Myths and Texts and later The Practice of the Wild, in which a woman does as the title says. She falls in love with a bear, grows fur, has bear cub babies, and eventually goes back to her human settlement not as a demonic figure but as a kind of founding mother, culture heroine, and bridge between peoples— human people and bear people.

This mythic and folkloric motif of women either marrying animal husbands or birthing animal children, or displaying animal characteristics after giving birth, namely by cannibalizing their children (as wild animal mothers sometimes do when they’ve experienced trauma during or shortly after giving birth) is in fact widespread in the European fairytale and mythic tradition as well— from Pasiphaë wife of king Minos of Crete who according to classical Greek myths fell in love with a white bull, mated with him, and gave birth to a monstrous child, the Minotaur, to Rhiannon wife of king Pwyll of Dyved in the medieval Welsh Mabinogion who bears prominent links to horse goddesses, and on the eve of her labor has her child stolen, is betrayed by her midwives and accused of cannibalizing him.

And while very often in these stories this animal nature or animal instinct in the female protagonist is demonized, it points to an underlying reality that cannot be easily escaped or erased, however much we’ve tried— that sexual intercourse, pregnancy and childbirth are inherently mammalian. They are experiences governed, scientifically speaking, by basic hormonal and physiological processes shared to a great degree by most female mammals, and certainly by all female humans.

But what would it look like if this story of the uterus as zöon, and the woman as harboring this animal other—not just while pregnant but in fact all the time she’s walking around with a reproductive system, or the memory of one in her bones and ligaments even if she doesn’t have one anymore—were to be taken as an empowerment and not an oppression? What does it mean to reclaim both animal interior, animal instinct, and the workings of a female biology not as inferior or defective but as distinctly noble and equal, and possessing of its own unique and precious language?

As Cristina Mazzoni writes in her Maternal Impressions: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Literature and Theory, “Knowledge of pregnancy represents, metonymically, knowledge of one’s body, as literary texts repeatedly imply: a problematic knowledge that can only be communicated to those who have experienced it themselves. Not husbands, then […] but other mothers, often embodied by an older, more experienced woman who, like Rapunzel’s enchantress, helps the protagonist decipher the nature of her otherwise incomprehensible sensations. Bodily knowledge, pregnant knowledge is in these texts preverbal, semiotic, based on an internal touch” (81).

May this collection offer something like that older-woman storytelling in Rapunzel. I’m looking to her to guide me as I go along my foraging journey for all of you. May this internal touching, this gathering in of women under apple trees and women swallowing juniper berries and women birthing among white sows and women suckling wolf cubs, offer a songline of pregnant knowledge. Pregnant knowledge is, after all, animal knowledge. It’s old, evolutionary, mammalian instinctive body-spoken knowledge. It’s universal to humankind. It’s as primordial as the carving on the cave wall of Fontainebleau. More so, even.

And if ever there was a time when we needed both animal knowledge and pregnant knowledge, knowledge of the ground of life and the laws of earth, now, I daresay, would be that time.

So let’s follow those hedgehogs and octopuses, those beautiful weasels and frogs, out into the wild, and in….

To Be Continued in monthly installments, the next on February 18th 2024 with a closer look at the Paleolithic and Mesolithic, both stories in stone and ochre, and traces of animal mothers, animal children & cross-species nursing in the oral tradition.

Note that all future issues of MOTHER ANIMAL will be for paid subscribers only, so if you would like to be part of this journey and to support this work, you can do so for the cost of just one fancy pot of tea per month!

Subscribe now

News & events—

Places are going fast in my Swan Stories Workshop on Vancouver Island this March 2nd & 3rd, taught with dancer Nao Sims. I’m so excited to be leading an in-person immersion again! See here for more.

In addition Nao’s next dance series, which is dedicated to the Six Swans fairytale, starts tomorrow (both in person and on zoom)! If you want to hop in, now’s your chance :) I’ll be teaching a writing workshop as part of it on February 17th. Email Nao at naoisobel@gmail.com to register.

Finally, if you want to sink in more to the world of our collaboration, Nao and I have recorded a conversation which is now live on my podcast, Kalliope’s Sanctum.

Listen here :