Clarissa Pincola Estes - Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype (46 page)

CHAPTER 11

Heat: Retrieving a Sacred Sexuality

The Dirty Goddesses

There is a being who lives in the wild underground of women’s natures. This creature is our sensory nature, and like any integral creature it has its own natural and nutritive cycles. This being is inquiring, relational, bounding with energy sometimes, quiescent at other times. It is responsive to stimulus involving the senses: music, movement, food, drink, peace, quiet, beauty, darkness.
¹

It is this aspect of a woman that has heat. Not a heat as in “Let’s have sex, baby, baby.” But like a fire underground that bums high, then low, in cycles. From the energy released there, a woman acts as she sees fit. A woman’s heat is not a state of sexual arousal but a state of intense sensory awareness that includes, but is not limited to, her sexuality.

Much could be written about uses and abuses of women’s sensory nature and how she and others either stoke the fire against its natural rhythms or try to douse it in its entirety. But let us instead focus on an aspect that is fervent, definitely wild, and giving off a heat that keeps us warmed with good feeling. In modem women this sensory expression has been given short shrift and, in many places and times, has been banned altogether.

There is an aspect of women’s sexuality that in ancient times was called the sacred obscene, not in the way we use the word obscene today, but meaning sexually wise in a witty sort of way. There were once Goddess cults t
hat were in some part devoted to
irreverent female sexuality. The rites were not derogatory, but were concerned with portraying parts of the unconscious that remain, yet today, mysterious and largely uncharted.

The very idea of sexuality as sacred, and more specifically, obscenity as an aspect of sacred sexuality, is vital to the wildish nature. There were Goddesses of obscenity in the ancient women's cultures—so-called for their innocent yet wily lewdness. However, language, in English at least, makes it very difficult to understand the “obscene Goddesses” in any way other than a vulgar one. Here is what the word
obscene
and other related words mean. From these meanings, I think you can see why this aspect of old Goddess worship was pushed underground.

I would like you to consider these three dictionary definitions and develop your own conclusions:

All this denigration, yet there are remnants of stories throughout world culture that have survived various purges. These inform us that the obscene is not vulgar at all, but rather seems more like some fantastic nature creature that you dearly wish would visit you and be one of your best friends.

Some years back, when I began telling “dirty Goddess stories,” women smiled and then laughed to hear about the exploits of women, both real and mythological, who had used sexuality, sensuality, in order to make a point, to lighten sadness, to cause laughter, and in that way to set something aright that had gone awry in the psyche. I was also taken by how women approached the threshold of laughter with regard to these matters. First they had to set aside all their training that said it wasn’t ladylike to laugh such a laugh.

I saw how ladylikeness in the wrong situation actually throttled a woman rather than allowing her to breathe. To laugh you have to be able to exhale and take another breath in quick succession. We know from kinesiology, and various other body therapies such as Hakomi, that to take a breath causes one to feel one’s emotions, that when we wish not to feel, we hold our breath instead.

In laughter, a woman breathes fully, and when she does, she may
begin to feel unsanctioned feelings. And what could these feelings be? Well, they turn out not to be feelings so much as relief and remedies for feelings, often causing the release of stopped-up tears or the reclamation of forgotten memories, or the bursting of chains on the sensual personality.

It became clear to me that the importance of these old Goddesses of obscenity was demonstrated by their ability to loosen what was too tight, to lift gloom, to bring the body into a kind of
humor
that belongs not to the intellect but to the body itself, to keep these passages clear. It is the body that laughs at coyote stories, Uncle Trungpa
²
stories, Mae West lines, and so forth. The mischief and humor of the obscene Goddesses can cause a vital form of medicine to spread throughout the endocrine and neurological systems of the body.

The following three stories embody the obscene in the way we are using the word here, to mean a kind of sexual/sensual enchantment that causes good emotional feeling. Two are ancient, and one is modem. They are about the dirty Goddesses. I call them so for they have wandered underground for a long time. In the positive sense, they belong to the fertile earth, the mud, the muck of the psyche—the creative substance from which all art originates. In fact, the dirty Goddesses represent that aspect of Wild Woman that is both sexual and sacred.

Baubo: The Belly Goddess

There is a powerful saying:
Ella habla por en
medio
en las ¡nemas,
“She speaks from between her legs.” Little “between-the- legs” stories are found all over the world. One is the story of Baubo, a Goddess from ancient Greece, the so-called “Goddess of obscenity.” She has older names, such as
lambe
, and it appears the

Greeks borrowed her from far older cultures. There
have been
archetypal wild Goddesses of sacred sexuality and
Life/Death/
life fertility since the beginning of memory.

There is only one popular reference to Baubo in writings existent from ancient times, giving the direct impression that her cult was destroyed, and buried under the stampede of various conquests. I have a strong sense that somewhere, perhaps under ail those sylvan hills and forest lakes in Europe and the East there are temples to her, complete with artifacts, and bone icons
.
³

So, it is not by accide
nt that few have heard of Baubo
but remember, one shard of archetype can cany the image of the whole. And we have the shard, for we have a story in which Baubo appears. She is one of the most lovely and picaresque of all the highnesses who lived on Olympus. This is my
cantadora
, storytelling version based on the old wildish remnant of Baubo still glinting in post-matriarchal Greek mythos and the Homeric hymns
.
⁴

=====

The earth mother,
Demeter, had a beautiful daughter called Persephone who was playing out in the meadow one day.
Per
sephone came upon one particularly lovely bloom, and reached out her fingertips to cup its lovely face. Suddenly the ground began to shake and a giant zigzag ripped across the land Up from deep within the earth charged Hades, the God of the Underworld. He stood tall and mighty in a black chariot driven by four horses the color of ghost.

Hades seized Persephone into his chariot, her veils and sandals flying. Down, down, down into the earth he reined his horses. Persephone’s screams grew more and more faint as the rift in the earth healed over as though nothing had ever happened.

The voice of the maiden crying out echoed through the stones of the mountains, bubbled up in a watery ay from underneath the sea. Demeter heard the stones cry out. She heard the watery crying. And then, over all the land came an eerie silence, and the smell of crushed flowers.

And tearing her wreath from her immortal hair, and unfurling

down from each shoulder her dark veils. Demeter flew out over the land
like a great bird, searching for, calling for her daughter.

That night an old crone at the edge of a cave remarked to her sisters that she had heard three cries that day; one, a youthful voice crying out in terror; and another calling plaintively; and a third, that of a mother weeping.

Persephone was nowhere to be found, and so began Demeter’s crazed and months-long search for her beloved child. Demeter raged, she wept, she screamed, she asked after, searched every land formation underneath, inside, and atop, begged mercy, begged death, but no matter what, she could not find her heart- child.

So, she who had made everything grow ir perpetuity, cursed all the fertile fields of the world, screaming in her grief, “Die! Die! Die!” Because of Demete
r’s curse, no child could be born
, no wheat could rise for bread, no flowers for feasts, no boughs for the dead. Everything lay withered and sucked at parched earth or dry breasts.

Demeter herself no longer bathed. Her robes were mud drenched, her hair hung in dreadlocks. Even though the pain in her heart was staggering, she would not surrender. After many askings, pleadings, and episodes, all leading to nothing, she finally slumped down at the side of a well in a village where she was unknown. And as she leaned her aching body against the cool stone of the well, along came a woman, or rather a sort of woman. And this woman danced up to Demeter wiggling her hips in a way suggesting sexual intercourse, and shaking her breasts in her little dance. And when Demeter saw her, she could not help but smile just a little.

The dancing female was very magical indeed, for she had no head whatsoever, and her nipples were her eyes and her vulva was her mouth. It was through this lovely mouth that she began to regale Demeter with some nice juicy jokes. Demeter began to smile, and then chuckled, and then gave a full belly laugh. And together the two women laughed, the little belly Goddess Baubo and the powerful Mother Earth Goddess, Demeter.

And it was just this laughing that drew Demeter out of her depression and gave her the energy to continue her search for her

daughter, which, with the help of Baubo, and the crone Hekate, and the sun Helios, was ultimately successful. Persephone was restored to her mother. The world, the land, and the bellies of women thrived again.

I have always loved this little Baubo more than any other Goddess in Greek mythology, perhaps better than any figure, period. She is no doubt drawn from the Neolithic belly Goddesses who are mysterious figures with no heads, and sometimes no feet and no arms. It is paltry to say they are “fertility figures,” for they are far more than that. They are the talismans of women-talk—you know, the kind women would never, never, ever say in front of a man unless it was an unusual circumstance. That kind of talk.

These little figures represent sensibilities and expressions unique in all the world; the breasts, and what is felt within those sensitive creatures, the lips of the vulva, wherein a woman feels sensations that others might imagine but only she knows. And the belly laugh being one of the best medicines a woman can possess.

I have always thought the kaffeeklatsch was a remnant of ancient women’s ritual of being together, a ritual, like the old one, of belly talk, women talking from the guts, telling the troth, laughing themselves silly, feeling enlivened, going home again, everything better.

Sometimes it is hard to get men to go away so women can be alone with each other. I just know that in ancient times women encouraged men to go away on “the fishing trip.” This is a rose used by women since time immemorial to make men leave for a while so a woman can either be by herself or be with other women. Women desire to live in a solely female atmosphere from time to time, whether in solitude by themselves or with others. This is a natural feminine cycle.

Male energy is nice. It is more than nice; it is sumptuous, it is grand. But sometimes it is like too much Godiva chocolates. We yearn for some clean cold rice for a few days and a clear hot broth to clear the palate. We must do this from time to time.

Additionally, the little belly Goddess Baubo raises the

interesting idea that a little obscenity can help to break a depression. And it is true that certain kinds of laughter, which come from all those stories women tell each other, those women stones that are off-color to the point of being completely tasteless ... those stories stir libido. They rekindle the fire of a woman’s interest in life again. The belly Goddess and the belly laugh are what we are after.

So in your self-healing trove, put small “dirt stories,” Baubo kinds of stones. This diminutive form of story is powerful medicine. The funny, “dirty” story can not only lift depression but can cut the black heart right out of rage, leaving a happier woman than before. Try it, you’ll see.

Now I cannot say a great deal about the next two aspects of the Baubo story, for they are meant to be discussed in small groups and among women only, but I can say this much: Baubo has another aspect; she sees through her nipples. It is a mystery to men, but when I suggest such to women, they nod their heads enthusiastically and say, “I know just what you mean!”

To see through the nipples is certainly a sensory attribute. The nipples are psychic organs, responsive to temperature, fear, anger, noise. They are a sensing organ as much as the eyes in the head.

And as for “speaking from the vulva,” it is, symbolically, speaking from the
primae materia,
the most basic, most honest level of truth—the vital
os.
What else is there to say but that Baubo speaks from the mother lode, the deep mine, literally the depths. In the story of Demeter searching for her daughter, no one knows what words Baubo actually spoke to Demeter. But we can have some ideas.

Coyote Dick

I t
hink
the jokes that Baubo told to Demeter were women’s jokes about those beautifully shaped transmitters and receivers: genitalia. If so, perhaps Baubo told Demeter a story like this one, which I heard some years back from an old trailer park manager down in Nogales. His name was Old Red and he claimed Native blood.

He was not wearing his teeth, and hadn’t shaved in a couple of

days. His nice old wife, Willowdean, had a pretty, but battered, face. Her nose, she told me, had once been broken in a bar fight. They owned three Cadillacs, none of which ran. She had a Chihuahua dog that she kept in a playpen in the kitchen. He was the kind of man who wore his hat while sitting on the toilet.

I was researching stories and had pulled my little Napanee trailer onto their grounds. “So do you know any stories about these parts?” I began, meaning the land and environs.

Old Red looked at his wife real sly with a rubbery smile and provoked her by sneering. “I’m gonna tell her about Coyote Dick.”
⁵

“Red, don’t tell her that story. Red, don’t you tell her.”

“I’m gonna tell her about Coyote Dick anyway,” asserted Old Red.

Willowdean put her head in her hands and spoke to the table, “Don’t tell her that story Red, I mean it.”

“I’m telling her right now, Willowdean.”

Willowdean sat sideways in her chair, her hand across her eyes like she had just gone blind.

This is what Old Red told me. He said he heard this story “from a Navajo who heard it from a Mexican who heard it from a Hopi.”

Once upon a time
there was Coyote Dick, and he was both the smartest and the dumbest creature you could ever hope to meet. He was always hungry for something, and always playing tricks on people to get what he wanted, and any other time he was always sleeping.

Well, one day while Coyote Dick was sleeping, his penis got really bored and decided to leave Coyote and have an adventure on its own. So the penis disattached itself from Coyote Dick and ran down the road. Actually, it hopped down the road, having just one leg and all.

So it hopped and it hopped, and it was having a good time and it hopped off the road and out into the woods, where—Oh no!—it hopped right into a grove of stinging nettles. “Ouch!” it cried.
“Ow,
ow, ow!” it screeched. “Help! Help!”

The sound of all this crying woke Coyote Dick, and when he reached down to start his heart with the accustomed crank, it was gone! Coyote Dick ran down the road holding himself between the legs, and finally came upon his penis in the worst trouble you can imagine. Gently, Coyote Dick lifted his adventurous penis out of the nettles, patted him and soothed him down, and put him back where he belonged.

Old Red laughed like a maniac, coughing fit, eyes bulging and all. “And that is the story of ol’ Coyote Dick.”

Willowdean admonished
him, “You forgot to tell her th
e ending.”

“What ending? I already told her the ending,” grumped Old Red.

“You forgot to tell her the real ending of the story, you old tank of gas.”

“Well, if you remember it so well, you tell her.” The doorbell rang and he rose up from his creaky chair.

Willowdean
looked at me straight and her eyes sparkled. “The
end of the
story
is the moral.” At that moment, Baubo took hold of Willowdean, for
she
began to giggle, then
guffaw,
and finally belly laugh so long, and with
tears
even, that it took her two minutes
to
say
the
se
last two sentences, what with repeating each
word two or
three
times between
gasps.

“The moral is that those nettles, even once Coyote Dick got out of them, made his cock itch like crazy forever after. And that’s
why men
are always sliding
up to Women,
and
wanting to rub
up against them with that ‘I’m so itchy’ look in their eyes. You know, that universal cock has been itching ever since that first time it
ever ran
away.”

I don’t know what it was about it that struck me, but we sat there in her kitchen, shrieking and pounding the table
till we had practically lost all muscle control. Afterward, the sensation reminded me of just having eaten a big bite of good horseradish.

This truly is the kind of story I think Baubo told. Her repertoire includes anything that makes women laugh like that, unrestrained,

not caring about showing your tonsils, letting your belly hang out, letting your breasts shake. There is something about a sexual laugh that is different from a laugh about more tame things. A “sexual” laugh seems to reach both far and deep into the psyche, shaking all manner of things loose, playing upon our bones, and making a delightful feeling course through the body. It is a form of wildish pleasure that belongs in every woman’s psychic repertoire.