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: