The jaws of life.
I'm in a grim mood today. There is some heavy stuff going on in my community and I have a lot of processing going on inside me. But this post is about something else.
I was at a blessing way for a pregnant friend over the weekend, and one of the older women made this comment about giving birth: She said that the ancient Greeks said of childbirth that it is like battle. That going into labor is, for women, the equivalent of men going to war.
I was really struck by this. It feels like very deep wisdom and made a few things fall into place for me.
Childbirth, like war, demands everything of you. You give your body over to the service of something else, and it may well kill you. Some proportion of the men and women who do these things will not survive. It is an act of sacrifice. It brings you to the gates of life that are also the gates of death. The future of your family or civilization may rely on its outcome - on your strength, character and determination. At the same time it is a giving over of yourself to something huge, powerful, and to the individual, unstoppable. It devours you body and soul.
I thought of how the ancient Goddesses are often Goddesses of both fertility and battle, love and death, sex and war. Ishtar, Inanna, Aphrodite, Morrigu. It's something that is hard to make rational sense of, but that rings powerfully true in an older-than-rational kind of way. Because these Goddesses are Goddesses of that thing that both fertility and battle have in common: The threshold. The jaws of life. The place where the river of blood flows between this world and the other one. This is why fertility Goddesses are terrible in aspect as well as beautiful.
A couple months ago I was watching a Joseph Campbell interview on myth and he said something else that I've been pondering ever since. He said that the reason why sex and death are always inextricably linked in mythology is because of procreation: because sex is the source of childbirth, and as soon as we have brought forth children, we have then done what life put us here biologically to do, and from that moment onward those children become the vehicle of the continuation of life, and we, the adults, then belong to death and move toward death. Therefore the entry into sex is an initiation also into death. I found myself thinking about this statement over and over again. While it's not literally true for most people, in the sense that we have much more to do in life than make children, and many of us never do that at all, I still feel like in the most primal, biological sense there is some mythic truth to that. And I guess I would add that this is true whether or not your sex leads to children, whether it's homosexual or heterosexual or whatever - it is still true that the act brings us into the jaws of life because it involves the reproductive functions of the body, the parts of us that have the power to regenerate life. Because it, once again, brings you to the threshold. And the sex experience itself is called the little death. That momentary orgasmic release opens the gates and sends us into the beyond, touching the void. That is touching the threshold, too. Of course it is. That's why sex is so dangerous, and so catalytic.
Well, I guess this all comes back around to something the Morrigan, that Goddess of battle and sex, told me many years ago:
THERE IS ONLY ONE DOOR.
.
I was at a blessing way for a pregnant friend over the weekend, and one of the older women made this comment about giving birth: She said that the ancient Greeks said of childbirth that it is like battle. That going into labor is, for women, the equivalent of men going to war.
I was really struck by this. It feels like very deep wisdom and made a few things fall into place for me.
Childbirth, like war, demands everything of you. You give your body over to the service of something else, and it may well kill you. Some proportion of the men and women who do these things will not survive. It is an act of sacrifice. It brings you to the gates of life that are also the gates of death. The future of your family or civilization may rely on its outcome - on your strength, character and determination. At the same time it is a giving over of yourself to something huge, powerful, and to the individual, unstoppable. It devours you body and soul.
I thought of how the ancient Goddesses are often Goddesses of both fertility and battle, love and death, sex and war. Ishtar, Inanna, Aphrodite, Morrigu. It's something that is hard to make rational sense of, but that rings powerfully true in an older-than-rational kind of way. Because these Goddesses are Goddesses of that thing that both fertility and battle have in common: The threshold. The jaws of life. The place where the river of blood flows between this world and the other one. This is why fertility Goddesses are terrible in aspect as well as beautiful.
A couple months ago I was watching a Joseph Campbell interview on myth and he said something else that I've been pondering ever since. He said that the reason why sex and death are always inextricably linked in mythology is because of procreation: because sex is the source of childbirth, and as soon as we have brought forth children, we have then done what life put us here biologically to do, and from that moment onward those children become the vehicle of the continuation of life, and we, the adults, then belong to death and move toward death. Therefore the entry into sex is an initiation also into death. I found myself thinking about this statement over and over again. While it's not literally true for most people, in the sense that we have much more to do in life than make children, and many of us never do that at all, I still feel like in the most primal, biological sense there is some mythic truth to that. And I guess I would add that this is true whether or not your sex leads to children, whether it's homosexual or heterosexual or whatever - it is still true that the act brings us into the jaws of life because it involves the reproductive functions of the body, the parts of us that have the power to regenerate life. Because it, once again, brings you to the threshold. And the sex experience itself is called the little death. That momentary orgasmic release opens the gates and sends us into the beyond, touching the void. That is touching the threshold, too. Of course it is. That's why sex is so dangerous, and so catalytic.
Well, I guess this all comes back around to something the Morrigan, that Goddess of battle and sex, told me many years ago:
THERE IS ONLY ONE DOOR.
.