Already I had the inscrutable sense that something purposeful had guided us here. Then Kathleen led us into the chapel. There in a soulful moment I came face to face with the identical picture I’d encountered in California, the Cartoon of St. Anne.
I gazed at it with the same electric hum running through my body that I’d felt before, the same magnetic pull. I was filled with awe at happening upon a synchronicity such as this. Synchronicities, those times when an outer event resonates mysteriously and powerfully with what’s happening inside, are more numerous during great shifts and upheavals. If we pay attention, if we approach them as symbolic and revelatory, they will often illumine a way for us.
Coming upon the Cartoon of St. Anne a second time suggested many things to me, not the least of which was that this place would become deeply significant to me. Perhaps here I would begin to find my way into the space of the Great Lap.
And so it happened.
Three months later, in July, Betty and I returned to Springbank for a weekend stay. On Saturday morning, despite a muggy heat, we followed a trail through Springbank’s fifty-eight acres of woods.
After twenty minutes or so, we entered a clearing. It did not take but a second to realize that we were standing in a circle of trees.
Another synchronicity, but one that startled me far more than the picture. Here was the symbolic circle I’d happened upon on the airplane, the circle I’d sketched, imagined, dreamed about, and looked to as a guiding image of the feminine ground.
The circle was formed by pine, dogwood, magnolia, small oaks, and scrubs, the clearing inside thirty or so yards in diameter with a small fire pit dug in the center.
I walked around the circle, touching the tree trunks as the circle and the Great Lap became one and the same. Far from churches, prayer books, sermons, and theological propositions, I felt intimately embraced by nature.
The circle touched Betty in an equally strong way, and we sat within it on the ground. There were only two seeming blemishes in the entire clearing, two small unsightly stumps. They need to go, we agreed, and before we had really thought about it, we were on our way back for tools.
Much of the afternoon we spent digging up the stumps. It turned out to be harder than we had anticipated. The roots went deep. As I worked, I became aware of anger, the anger at patriarchy that wants to come like a purifying blaze. I felt it with every swing of the ax and jab of the shovel.
It wasn’t until we’d finally wrestled the stumps out of the ground, refilled the holes, and sat down to rest that we fully realized the symbolism of what we’d done. We’d ritualized digging up the dead, stunted tree—the old way, the old model, the patriarchal stump. We were getting rid of it, releasing anger, transforming it into something creative. We were reclaiming the feminine ground.
The space began to feel like ours somehow. We looked around, glad to be rid of the stumps, but something seemed to be missing.
We found a large white stone, rolled it through the woods, and placed it at one edge of the circle. We dug up soft emerald moss and planted it around the stone. Then we stood back and looked at it. We had built an altar.
Dancing by Night
That night we entered the woods again, following the trail by flashlight. At night the woods was a ceremony of sounds; crickets, tree frogs, and night birds all joined in a chorus of song, outrageously loud. I had never done anything like this in my life, and I kept thinking how strange it would appear—two grown and proper women picking their way through the woods at night in search of—what? But at the same time I was compelled, almost as if some ancient homing instinct inside had been activated and was pulling me along.
We found the circle of trees easily enough, having marked the trail earlier that afternoon. After building a fire, we sat and watched the light leap around the trees. I looked up at the ring of sky, at the moon, full and bulging, and I felt an exuberant, cage-rattling energy rise inside, something feminine, primal, free.
Like the women on the beach two years earlier, we began to dance. I moved slowly around the circle of trees, around the fire, past the altar of stone and moss, then faster until my bare feet were pounding the ground. Thump, thump, thump. The sound landed in the silence with an untamed energy that was new to me but also recognizable and right, like feet staking out their ground, announcing their existence, stomping out of exile and coming home.
Later I would be surprised at our lack of inhibition, but then it seemed the most natural, the most necessary thing in the world, this dancing. We didn’t stop to analyze what we were doing, and when an owl lifted from a low branch, beating her wings over our heads, it seemed to us like some sort of blessing.
We danced, danced, danced, while the fire sank to embers, until we were nearly breathless and I had wrung open all the cages inside and set myself free.
Is there a feeling more gleeful than opening a cage and setting something captured free? I was reminded of the time I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast owned by a retired couple. One morning as I strolled in the backyard gardens, I saw the man checking wire cages the size of shoe boxes, which were tucked discreetly among the shrubs. Most of them, I noticed, were filled with squirrels. I watched, horrified, as he carried the cages to the backyard pool, lowered them one by one into the water, and left them there until the squirrels’ frantic little bodies stopped scrambling and they drowned. Then he disposed of the bodies and reset the traps.
That evening when the man had left to go to church (that’s right, church!), I went all about the yard throwing open the cages and feeling the most delicious sense of glee as the squirrels shot out and up the trees, making riotous leaps through the branches.
I believe most women have inside us one of those figures who goes around laying discreet traps, trying to cage, restrict, and drown the spirited, natural parts of us, the parts that go leaping through life. And it is a good thing, a holy thing even, to circle around by stealth, if necessary, and set them free again.
That night in the woods I felt a little like those squirrels must have felt as they reveled among the trees with their freedom. Something lost and caged was returning to me—the unrestrained and essential woman I’d lost by becoming a daughter of patriarchy. I realized this free and dancing woman was the one I’d been asked to birth that day at the monastery when I sat on the nest of yellow leaves. Now here she was emerging.
A mist of rain began, but we danced on. Finally we plopped down laughing, satiated, prodding the fire, which was now sodden. I could never remember feeling so vibrant and alive.
That night in my dreams I was once again back in the circle of trees. Two red snakes crawled to my feet. I wanted to run at first, but I stood still, sensing they had a beneficent, sacred quality. They stared into my eyes and almost seemed to smile. I felt my heart grow warm beneath my breast, and reaching down I picked them up, one in each hand, and lifted them over my head.
When I woke, my thought was that I was finally being reunited with the snake in myself—that lost and defiled symbol of feminine instinct. (Weeks later, however, I would come upon an even deeper layer of meaning in the dream.)
Before leaving Springbank, Betty and I walked back to the circle in the woods. Standing there in the clear light of morning, I knew I’d crossed a threshold.
A woman’s initiation includes many moments of crossing a threshold. This threshold is the bridge to our feminine soul, and crossing over is the beginning of becoming. By crossing it we are moving into a new landscape of feminine consciousness, one in which we feel regenerated or expanded as women.
There are many ways to cross the threshold. One woman I know made a pilgrimage to the ruins of a prepatriarchal culture. Another met with a group of women who came together and told the truth about their lives as women. One woman told me she crossed a threshold when another woman embraced her as she wept. “It was,” she explained to me, “like I was being held by Mother Goddess herself. I have not been the same since.”
And that is really the telling th
ing. When a woman crosses a threshold, she knows that something inside her has shifted, if only slightly. She knows that she is on a different trajectory.
A GUIDING FEMININE MYTH
My experiences over the year—the trip to California, moments of descent, loss, grief, fear, the struggle to blend marriage and journey, the magnetic pull to the Divine Feminine, crossing the threshold in the woods—all left me with a strong desire to find a space where my journey could unfold in the midst of a wise, guiding presence. In September I crossed another threshold when I entered Jungian analysis with a woman analyst. It ushered me into another circle of trees.
I had just started analysis when a compelling cache of images turned up in my dreams. Large spiraling labyrinths and a bare-breasted woman with snakes wound up her arms. Being in analysis is occasionally like sleuth work; not only did I spend time amplifying the personal meaning of dream images, but I also sometimes ended up in libraries researching their deeper, more archetypal meanings.
One day at a university library, while researching labyrinths, I found myself at a little desk in the stacks surrounded by books on Minoan Crete.
Until then I’d known practically nothing about Minoan Crete. That day I discovered it was a highly evolved culture that existed in Greece up until around 1450 B.C.E., a culture in which the supreme deity was female and women and feminine values enjoyed high cultural valuing. Scholar Riane Eisler suggests Minoan Crete was the last surviving example of a prepatriarchal society.13
The labyrinth was a dominant symbol of Minoan culture, appearing repeatedly and centrally in its art, architecture, stories, and religion. The word labyrinth even originated in that culture. I also discovered a picture of two ancient statues of the bare-breasted, flounced-skirted Minoan Goddess, which now reside in the Heraklion museum in Crete. One statue pictures her holding a red snake in each hand, lifting them over her head. The other pictures her with a snake wound up each arm.
I sat a long while marveling, remembering my dreams of labyrinths, the dream of the woman with the snakes wound up her arms, but especially the dream I’d had after dancing in the circle of trees—picking up the two red snakes and lifting them over my head. How had these images gotten into my dreams?
My question was answered in Jungian analysis. As Jung showed, our dreams sometimes spring from the collective unconscious, the place that holds collective human history. The images in my dreams were coming from a place inside me that predated patriarchy. With time I would see that the dreams were suggesting that I needed to dig beneath the patriarchal layers within myself and find an earlier ground, a realm of feminine valuing.
A few days after visiting the library, I listened to an audiotape someone had given me that related several Greek myths. One was the myth of Ariadne, who, the storyteller said, was a princess from Minoan Crete. I’d come upon a myth, a sacred narrative set in the Minoan culture.
I once heard author Gertrude Nelson repeat the definition of a myth that her young son had come up with. He said, “A myth is something that is true on the inside but not true on the outside.” Like a dream, a myth can paint a true picture of a person’s psyche. Myths, however, also reveal a lot about the contents and dynamics of the group mind.
As I began to study the myth of Ariadne, I felt I was discovering a drama that gave symbolic expression to the process going on inside of me and of women in general.
But when we use a myth this way, we need to hear author Charlene Spretnak’s caution to delineate between those myths that were created within patriarchy and those that predate it.14 Myths born in patriarchy offer a limited source of data on women. What they usually tell is how women react under patriarchy.
The myth of Ariadne that exists today was created within patriarchy during the seventh century B.C.E., many hundreds of years after the Minoan culture had disintegrated. As such, it reflects how women respond within patriarchy. From my perspective, the story tells how women revolt against patriarchy, and it illumines a process we go through as we make our exit from it. But to fully grasp the significance of this later story, we need to understand the story’s earlier layers.
An earlier myth of Ariadne, which predated patriarchy, no doubt flourished during the time of the Minoan culture. We no longer have direct access to this layer of the myth, but we can surmise what the earlier Ariadne looked like. For instance, the original Ariadne was not a mortal princess, as in the later story, but the Goddess herself. The name Ariadne means “Most Holy,” and she was no doubt revered as the supreme power, the Great Mother whose totem companion was the snake.
She was also known as the Lady of the Labyrinth. As the Great Mother, Ariadne was the source of all that is, and her womb was envisioned as a labyrinth that humans threaded on their journey through life, death, and rebirth. Her role was that of sacred guide, the one who aided persons through the dark, difficult passages.
The Ariadne of the later story is the figure that emerged after patriarchal Greece got through with her. She was demoted, downsized from Goddess to a daughter-princess in her father’s kingdom. She went from Ariadne, Holy One, to Ariadne, Daddy’s princess.
But even this discrepancy between the two myths has much to teach us. For the same sort of thing has happened to and within women. We have gone through our own demotion in power and status, stripped of the image of the Divine as feminine in our own souls. Growing up in patriarchy, many of us went from embodying feminine wholeness to being good princesses of the cultural father.
My work with the myth, which would continue for a long time, focused mostly on the later story set in patriarchy. I have come to interpret it as a woman’s struggle to win her freedom from patriarchy, though I also draw on ideas from the earlier version. As I worked with the myth through that long winter, it gradually became a lens through which I viewed my experience, a “containing” story that not only elaborated and clarified my journey, but also showed me the possibilities in it.
Ariadne and the Old King
We know from the myth that Ariadne was a princess in her father’s kingdom. That doesn’t seem like a lot of information, but symbolically it tells us all we need to know. It tells us that psychologically and spiritually Ariadne was a good daughter of patriarchy, a “little princess.”
In myths the “old king” usually symbolizes the old patriarchal consciousness. As a daughter of the old king, Ariadne is presented as being identified with her roles in patriarchy, as trying to be what it wants and needs her to be. We could say that as a woman Ariadne is asleep.
It was easy to see myself in her—all those sleeping years I’d identified with patriarchy. The myth forced me to go back and consider the ways I’d been a good little princess. It caused me to finally deal with the faces of daughterhood I’d identified in myself, to probe where and how I had lived them out, to understand what had motivated them, and to begin to break their patterns, not just by giving some intellectual assent in my head, but by living out the struggle each day.
The myth does not tell us explicitly what evoked Ariadne’s awakening. Perhaps she began to feel the confines of living in her father’s palace or to wonder if there was some reality beyond the realm of her father. But most certainly something inside her started to rouse and stir, for soon she would seize her moment and make a dramatic exit.
During this time in her journey a woman begins to receive wake-up calls. She begins to peel away the illusions and come to see and feel her entrapment in patriarchy.
For me the disenchantment had started with the strange slip of tongue when I had introduced myself as Father Sue, which led to uncovering my feminine wound. There was the moment I’d stood to sing “Faith of our Fathers” in church and could not open my mouth, the tears and devastating feeling of betrayal that fell over me. And later a thousand small bombs had gone off in my chest as I read and studied, forming my feminist critique. There had been all these things and so many others.
Theseus Comes
Whatever sets off Ariadne’s disenchantment is
uncertain, but at her moment of ripening, a new figure appears in the story. The myth says a daring young hero from Athens arrived on the shores of Crete.
“Every myth is psychologically symbolic,” wrote Joseph Campbell. “Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.”15
If Ariadne’s father, the old king, is the consciousness of patriarchy operating inside her, then Theseus, who comes from a distant land across the water, suggests new ideas and attitudes. He represents Ariadne’s freeing energy or the way out of her sleep.
In the story Theseus is a daring adventurer and hero who has come to Crete to liberate Athens from the curse of the old king, King Minos. Theseus’s mission is to slay the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lives in a labyrinth beneath the palace. Because of an old debt, every seven years King Minos requires Athens to send seven youths to Crete, where they are placed in the labyrinth to feed the Minotaur. By killing the monster, Theseus will defy the old king and liberate Athens from the curse. When Ariadne sees Theseus, she falls in love and devises a way to convince him to take her away with him when he leaves Crete.
Theseus, or the liberating energy in my own life, emerged in part the day I entered the drugstore and saw Ann on her knees before the laughing men. The scene tapped my defiance. That day my intention was consolidated. Theseus also came when I mustered the will to free myself from supporting patriarchy within the church and began to align myself with liberation theologies and ideals. Theseus came when I sat in the den and explained to Sandy that our marriage would have to be undone and redone, that I would be going away. Wherever there is deliverance and release in a woman’s life from the oppression of patriarchal consciousness, there is Theseus.
Often, like Ariadne, a woman cannot recognize or contact the heroic, freeing energy in herself. Instead she projects it outward, usually onto a man. Theseus may be a figure she literally falls in love with, someone who can shatter her identification with the old consciousness and help deliver her from it. For some women, especially younger women, Theseus may be a husband, the man who rescued her from the patriarchal father. For other women Theseus may be projected onto some other man—a mentor, lover, counselor, father, someone who rescues her at some level from a patriarchal husband. Or Theseus may come when a woman takes a different job or adopts a dissident cause, or he may be projected onto a new group or a new place—anything that carries an aura of insurgence, opportunity, even destiny, that brings new thoughts and attitudes and undermines her loyalty to the “old king.” The projection—as precarious and havoc wreaking as it may sometimes be—becomes a force that acts to free her.