Witchlines: Wedding The Troll-Hag

Here is a second Witchlines tale inspired by The White Bear King Valemon, looking at things from the point of view of the troll-hag who takes Valemon captive. 

Wedding the Troll-Hag

Do you think me ugly? Do you fear my stony gaze, my teeth sharp as knives, my spiderweb hair, my blood-red lips? 

It’s true: I would have him—that handsome bear-king, Valemon. I would pull him into my bone-crushing embrace, bind him to my earthen breast, merge his wild beauty with my own wild monstrousness. I would draw him down deep into my body, to sleep with me as one.

I love the smell of decay. I love munching on bones, and reducing flesh to ashes and dust. I love to bring all life back to its beginning. I simply can’t help it, you see, for it is in my nature to do as Nature does.

Some see the rot, the darkness, the unknown, and they call it ugly, they call it frightening.

I have a hard, stony body, it’s so, hairy with root tendrils and mycelia. I am black and cold and unyielding. Yet if that is all you see you do not see true.

I would have Valemon—yes!—and I will, in time, for there is no avoiding Death. Yet I don’t take without giving first; and after I take I give yet again.

Don’t you see? That young woman would never have found him without me, would never have become a bear-wife, married to the wild; nor would she have lost him either. I drew them together, I pulled them asunder, and then led them both towards me. While I held him close, I ripped her clothes, tore her lily-white skin, half-starved her, and put some dirt under her fingernails. I steered her towards each fateful old crone—flesh of my flesh, knowing of my knowing—and I tested her, with each breath she breathed, each step she stepped, each word she spoke.

Is she kind? I asked. Is she courageous? Is she clever and resourceful? And most importantly of all: Does she love him as much as life itself?

You may think my methods harsh, my ways all too earthy. But if you want soft, you must be prepared to take the hard; if you want light, you’ll have to walk into the darkness. Show me that you can be unyielding, and only then will I yield. 

I am not so cruel as to take all. I am always willing to be generous, for I know that Life must have Valemon and his bear-bride before Death claims them. They have wild gifts that they must bring back to the tamed world; gifts gleaned from contact with my own chthonic realm. I will give them that.

Look again. Am I still hideous? Or do you see a glimmer of beauty in my eye, like the morning sun cresting the horizon? 

If you haven’t seen true yet, then let me reveal all: I am Life just as much as I am Death, for one cannot be without the other. I am the marriage of light and the darkness, night and day, fertile black soil and bleached white bones, plump juicy fruit and the sweet stench of decay. I am mother and lover to the bear-king, and to his bear-bride; and they are just as much me as any other earth-born being.

Know this: the wild must be free to wed itself to the human, and the human must be free to wed itself to the wild. The bear-husband must have his bear-wife, so that wild and human merge, furred, clawed, and kindly wild, else there is no wholeness or beauty.

And in the end, I’ll still have him, for everything is wed to me.

White Bear King Valemon, by Theodor Kittelsen
(Source: Wikimedia)

Furies: A Poem

Two Furies, from a 19th century book reproducing an image frrom an ancient vase
(Source: Wikimedia Commons) 

lighting lightless eyes with fury 

that motion through emotion – anger – arrives 

teller of troubling truths, revealer of wrongs 

we’ve been told, we women, not to feel it 

certainly not to show it 

so unladylike, so inappropriate 

but we do feel it 

who can blame us? 

we are human, after all 

wilfully wronged and restrained

forced into shapes not our own 

taught no other way 

we push our anger down, hold it in 

feel it thickening in our throats 

until our voices flee 

this is what they want

rage flares within 

burns our hearts to black 

and we cannibalise ourselves 

until all that remains are empty 

silent shells 

they delight at this 

what they do not understand

– and what we are remembering – is that 

black is our colour, darkness our home 

and red blood flows through our chthonic bodies 

its own bright unlight 

we endure because life endures 

(despite hollowness and enforced silence)

by virtue of the dark 

its womblike circumference 

its still sanctuary   

and because of that pure, beautiful blackness 

they do not see 

when our shells ossify, become armour 

that protects us as we sprout 

wide shadowy wings that fly us to freedom

then we open our throats and speak truth 

singing serpent-tongued and winged

as we always were 

for it is our furies that show us the way

* * *

I’ve been thinking of anger recently, of how it is an emotion that has at times driven my writing. I seem to have so very much to say when rage is flaring in me, and it provides me with an energy I would not otherwise have.

A few years ago I read about a Canadian study by Dr. Cheryl van Daalen-Smith, called ‘Whispers and Roars: A Feminist Analysis of The Anesthetization of Girls’ Anger’, which made quite an impression on me at the time. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find the full article again (though it is mentioned here and here), so I cannot quote from it, but it dealt with the idea of anger as a positive and useful emotion, and explored the ways in which girls are taught to suppress it, resulting in loss of feeling and authentic self-knowing.

We tend to characterise emotions as either good or bad—happiness = good, sadness = bad—yet I think the truth is that emotions themselves are neutral. It is part of being human to experience the whole gamut, from the brightest of joys to the deepest of griefs. I, for one, think that a life lived feeling only the so-called ‘good’ emotions would be a very boring life indeed. Though emotions such as anger, fear or frustration may be unpleasant to feel, they are necessary, bringers of wisdom, growth and creative fire.

Anger, in particular, is a very useful emotion, as it alerts us to when an injustice is being done to ourselves or others. It tells us when something is wrong, and, when handled well, gives us a chance to put things right. Of course, anger can be a problem when it is expressed through behaviours such as aggression or violence; but what the study made clear to me is that it is as damaging, sometimes more so, when it is not expressed. Girls are often taught from a young age that showing anger—making a scene, disturbing the peace, rocking the boat, disagreeing (particularly with a male)—is wrong, unfeminine. Above all, we are expected to be ‘nice’, and this has the terrible side-effect of silencing us, often when we most need to speak. 

Thus, instead of being shown how to express anger in healthy ways, to speak up about the wrongs done to us and to protect ourselves from harm, girls—and the women they become—tend to suppress their anger, to force it back inside, where it festers away and causes an untold number of health issues, both psychological and physical. In being taught not to acknowledge and express anger we are also being taught to distrust our own feelings, disconnecting us from those feelings, from our bodies, and our intuitions. With anger turned inwardly, we become angry with ourselves, rather than angry about the external things/people/situations that really deserve our outrage.

It goes without saying that reading the aforementioned study made me angry—for myself and for all women and girls. Anger is indeed a negative emotion when it is anaesthetised, when it is stripped of its power—just as women are stripped of our own power in a patriarchal world—but when channeled in the right way, anger becomes positive, and positively powered. 

Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in Women Who Run With the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman (1992):

In her instinctual psyche, a woman has the power, when provoked, to be angry in a mindful way—and that is powerful. Anger is one of her innate ways to begin to reach out to create and preserve the balances that she holds dear, all that she truly loves. It is both her right, and at certain times and in certain circumstances, a moral duty.

For women, this means there is a time to reveal your incisors, your powerful ability to defend territory, to say “This far and no farther, the buck stops here, and hold onto your hat, I’ve got something to say, this is definitely going to change.” (p. 363)

Expressing anger is something that I still struggle with, but being able to write it out is a way of releasing it from my body, so that it does not remain to build up inside and do harm. Hence, thinking of these things, I wrote the above poem.

On my journey as a writer I have discovered that I love to play with words, to double up and twist their meanings. Thus, in this context, the word ‘furies’ refers not just to the many angers that women feel, but also to the Furies (called the Erinyes in Greek), who were ancient chthonic deities of vengeance in Greek mythology. They are often described as being frightening in appearance, sometimes old hags, with black bodies, wings, and snakes wreathing their heads. The wings (whether of bird or bat) and the snakes call to mind the imagery of the Great Goddess, so often associated with birds and serpents. And of course, their black bodies and connection with the underworld, brought to mind the Dark Feminine too. Thus, the Furies in this poem represent far more than just themselves.

So, I share ‘Furies’ here, as an expression of my anger—and there are far too many things to be angry about these days—but also as a transformation of that anger, into a written creation that I hope will inspire others. It is all right to feel anger, all right to have flashing eyes and bared teeth, when needed, and to invoke the power of the Furies. Wrongs need to be righted, and if we women can learn how to harness our anger, then together we can be part of the process of change.

* * *

Addendum: Just yesterday I came across this utterly brilliant post by Trista Hendren, ‘Re-stor(y)ing Sanity’, on The Girl God blog. It is about girls/women, the anaesthetisation of rage, and Medusa—another snake-wreathed female ‘monster’. I thought it such a beautiful synchronicity that I had to tell you about it. Do go and have a read.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862), detail
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Endarkenment

Today is the equinox, the time when the hours of light and dark are in balance; and, in the southern hemisphere, it is the mid-point of the light half of the year (or the beginning of it, depending on how you look at the Wheel of the Year). The light was born again at the winter solstice, and ever so slowly began to increase, and from now until the summer solstice, the hours of daylight will gradually begin to exceed the hours of darkness. And yet, because each season holds within it its opposite—in this case the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere, which is the mid-point/beginning of the dark half of the year there—I have been thinking about, yearning for, the Darkness.

William Morris - Night Angel Holding a Waning Moon, 1857/1869

When I decided to write a piece in praise of the Darkness, I began to ponder what I would call it. What, I asked myself, is the antonym of ‘enlightenment’? My first thought was ‘benightedness’—and I was right. But I only had to look at the definition of the word to know that ‘benightedness’ was not what I wanted to write about.

In the West in particular, we have a fear and dislike of the Dark, which has led to darkness being seen as negative, even evil, and associated with death, in contrast to the eternally positive light, which is associated with goodness and life.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines enlightened as: ‘having or showing a rational, modern, and well-informed outlook’, and ‘spiritually aware’. Some synonyms are: knowledgeable, wise, civilised, cultured, advanced, sophisticated, open-minded, and so on.

Compare this with benighted: ‘in a state of pitiable or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance’, and ‘overtaken by darkness’. Some synonyms are: uneducated, illiterate, uninformed, backward, simple, primitive, uncivilised, barbaric, savage, crude … the list goes on.

And here, it seems, is the problem. Darkness is so thoroughly negative in connotation that we tend to gravitate towards the light at any cost, losing the wisdom of the Dark in the process. 

Simeon Solomon - Night, 1890

Yet consider this: While the leaves of plants are ‘photophilic’, loving light, and therefore moving towards it, the roots are ‘photophobic’, disliking light, and moving away from it, down into the dark earth. The roots (arguably more so than the leaves) are what make the plant’s life possible, anchoring it in the ground, and drawing up water and nutrients, and those roots live and thrive in the dark. Moreover, the seed from which the plant grew in the first place began in the dark, germinating because of the fertile, moist darkness surrounding it, pushing out its dark-loving root, as well as its light-loving leaves.

As Glenys Livingstone writes, ‘It is in the compost, the de-composition, in the darkness, that new life is nurtured, fertility is found. It is in the acceptance of death that wisdom is gained, and life is lived more fully’. (1)

The truth is that everything begins in the Dark. It is what we emerge/d from, and what we will eventually return to—Life circling towards Death and back to Life again. Black absorbs all light, because the Darkness contains everything, including the Light; and it is in the Dark that the Light shines brightest. 

Darkness can be seen in more positive ways. Jay Griffiths, writing of the Christian/Western perception of forests being benighted places, says that in contrast, the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest of northwest Congo sing

their great song of praise to the forests: “If Darkness is, Darkness is Good.” Knowledge is mothered by darkness in the Amazon; knowledge from the “plant teachers” [is] learned at night, while the soñadores, the dreamers, find their wisdoms in the dark. In the forests, you see the tenderness of darkness, how it folds things into itself, nature nurturans, for all good things are cradled in darkness first: seeds and babies, sleep’s dreams and the heart’s love, compost and starlight. (2)

Why are we so afraid of the Dark? Because we are afraid of what we do not know? Of what we cannot see? Of what we might find there?

I suppose our fear is a natural response. And yet, we do ourselves a disservice when we ignore, devalue or mis-define the Dark (and when we do not face our fears).

Livingstone writes: ‘In Greece, perhaps as early as the Paleolithic era, the Divine Female was known as Nyx, Black Mother Night … She was the full Emptiness, the empty Fullness … Her Darkness was understood as a “depth of love”, not a source of evil as later humans named Her.’ (3)

Gustave Moreau - Night, 1880

I completely identify with this idea of Darkness as Love, for the Darkness can be a very nurturing, enclosing and safe place, particularly if I imagine myself being held in the velvety black womb of the Earth. Rebecca Solnit elaborates on this idea:

Darkness is amorous, the darkness of passion, of your own unknowns rising to the surface, the darkness of interiors.

In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you are doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they are born. (4)

So Darkness is fertile, the place of love and creation of all kinds, and this should help us to see it in more positive ways. Yet the fact that it is dangerous, as well as linked with the Dark Feminine, is another reason why the Dark is feared and labeled evil. For the Darkness is the Old One/Crone/Hag, the Destroyer–Creator—and the reality that She requires us to face, that of old age and death (that is, change and transformation), is a reality which, in the West, we try very hard to avoid. It is true, this aspect of Goddess is indeed fearsome and confronting. She is 

primarily in relationship with All-That-is … The Crone/Old One is that movement back into the Great Sentience out of which All arises, thus she sees into the elements behind form. She is often depicted with wide open eyes; often associated with the gaze of owl or snake—and knowledge of the Dark. (5)

Yet, though the Crone is formidable and fierce, Livingstone points out that Her fierceness strengthens women, helping us to recognise our own power, and to bravely seek knowledge of our Selves. Perhaps this is another reason why the Dark is feared, for the Dark gives women the power of self-knowledge, and the patriarchal forces of this world are afraid of women’s power. 

All the more reason for all of us—women and men—to learn how to embrace the Dark, in the knowledge that there is no Light without it, just as there is no Life without Death. We simply do not have the option to accept one thing and refuse the other. While to be ‘enlightened’ may mean to be ‘spiritually aware’, no one can truly achieve that awareness unless they have embraced ‘endarkenment’ too (the descent to the Underworld, the place of Soul, and the integration of the Shadow, amongst other tasks). As Bill Plotkin says, ‘Our spiritual growth is meant to go in both directions, toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven—the underworld and the upperworld—through the trunks of our middleworld lives.’ (6)

Tree Sketch (Emergence), 2012

So, what word could we use to call ourselves lovers of the Darkness? 

While ‘photo’ (from Greek) relates to light, ‘scoto’ relates to darkness. So we could say of roots that they are scotophilic, dark-loving, rather than photophobic. I have also discovered the words ‘nyctophilia’ and ‘lygophilia’. Though none of these options are particularly memorable or attractive. Perhaps in the end we just have to remember that Darkness is Love, is Wisdom, is the womb and birthplace of everything. We should embrace it. After all, it is only when we are be-nighted that we get to see the stars.

I will leave the last word to Ursula Le Guin:

“And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live … Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there … in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.” (7)

References:
1. Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, iUniverse: Lincoln, NE, 2005, p. 100
2. Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Penguin: London, 2006, p. 76
3. Livingstone, p. 82
4. Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, Granta: London, 2013, p. 185
5. Livingstone, p. 100
6. Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and the Psyche, New World Library: Novato, California, 2003, p. 34
7. From Ursula Le Guin’s Dancing at the Edge of the World, quoted in Griffiths, p. 76