Where Is Baubo Now?

 

The seasonal rituals of ancient Goddess religions, based on the cycles of death and rebirth in Nature, offer a very different perspective from current patriarchal religious and scientific traditions. The ancient myths offer us stories of eternally returning, of renewable creative experience, personally and collectively.

On my first day in Athens I took the bus to Elefsina, a town about 18 kilometres northwest of the city. The bus moved slowly with the traffic along the ancient Sacred Way where people once walked in procession to celebrate the Eleusinian Mysteries. No one really knows what happened in the initiation rituals based on Persephone’s descent and return from the Underworld, but the rites were celebrated for thousands of years and were thought to keep the world in balance.

Today the Sacred Way is surrounded by urban development, and Elefsina is a major industrial area. Yet I could still imagine the sacred procession winding from Athens to Eleusis: initiates swinging leafy branches, singing, chanting, and shouting obscenities in commemoration of Baubo, the mysterious Greek Goddess who was bawdy, fun-loving and sexually liberated. Baubo – a ‘daughter’ of the ancient Mother Goddess, Cybele – was celebrated for consoling Demeter with ribald jesting when the goddess was mourning the loss of Persephone.

The modern and ancient exist side by side in Greece – a caleidoscope of images and impressions spanning millennia. It is easy to assume that modern life represents the pinnacle of civilisation, yet where is Baubo now?

Baubo has been degraded into over-sexualised images of women and girls. The obscenities that were once shouted in sacred play are now directed at women as aggression, hostility and violence. We have lost Baubo and so many of the myths and rituals that can connect us to ourselves, each other, and the world.

At the core of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the myth of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone. The maiden Persephone was picking flowers when she was seized by Hades and taken to the Underworld. Demeter searched but could not find her daughter. In her distress, she stopped tending the Earth. Crops failed, bringing famine and suffering. Zeus intervened and sent Hermes to retrieve Persephone from the Underworld. Mother and daughter were reunited, and the land flourished again. Each year the cycle repeated, Persephone descending and returning, symbolising the changing seasons and the eternal return.

It seems likely that the Eleusinian Mysteries involved initiates in symbolic enactment of Persephone’s journey. Symbolic enactment invites engagement and suggests a possibility of transformation. It can also be confusing and frustrating.  Symbols are not static – the meaning of a symbol changes from person to person and across time and place. Enactment ensures that the experience is alive in the moment, and ritual enactment ensures a safe place to engage the mysteries.

There remains a mystery about what exactly took place at the Demeter Sanctuary at Eleusis, but it seems likely that the ancients incorporated symbol and enactment in an initiation process. Initiation always involves a crossing – from one stage to the next, from one identity to another. We like to think we can choose our crossings, but life has a way of choosing for us, and we are devastated by loss, shocked by betrayal, left anxious and fearful of change. The Eleusinian Mysteries offered the ancients a map for the journey.

Imagine yourself as an initiate. You may become Demeter, grieving unbearable loss and withdrawing from the world. Or perhaps you are Persephone, your life abruptly changed by forces outside your control. As you walk the path of initiation, guided by story and by those who have gone before, you encounter the Underworld of your own psyche and you are transformed.

Symbolic enactment takes us into and beyond our fears. We cross thresholds and return with sovereignty over ourselves. Persephone returns to the upper world, and she is also Queen of the Underworld.

In the modern world, we engage symbols through expressing our creativity, working with dreams, and attending depth psychotherapy. Just imagine how it would be to wake one morning knowing that today you will walk in procession from the city to a sanctuary by the sea, chanting and singing, shouting obscenities to Baubo, who laughs loudly and shouts right back. Imagine that today you will make offerings to Goddess and be guided through a ritual enactment of one of the great teaching stories, descending and returning transformed. Imagine…

I caught that bus to Elefsina to walk the marble paths of Demeter’s sanctuary. The seasonal rituals of ancient goddess religions, based on the cycles of death and rebirth in Nature, offer a very different perspective from current patriarchal religious and scientific traditions. The ancient myths offer us stories of eternally returning, of renewable creative experience, personally and collectively. I caught that bus to Elefsina to visit one of the places where the stories were born.

- Dr Kaalii Cargill was on Goddess pilgrimage in Greece in 2015. Her PhD research explored ancient women’s mysteries. 

 

Top Image by Francis Davis Millet

  The Thesmophoria (Ancient Greek: Θεσμοφόρια) was an ancient Greek religious festival, held in honor of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. 

Bottom of page image: Baubo

A Universal Force

Love is so very much more than an experienced emotion. It is a universal force of being. It cannot be destroyed. At times it might seem to us that this happens, when we feel that other forces overwhelm us. But even then - especially then - love transforms itself, finds new forms to replace those forms which, sometimes for reasons which are difficult for us to understand at the time, it no longer needs. No, love cannot be destroyed. But it can be transformed. And in that process of transformation it burns even brighter.

Painting by Gustave Moreau

Beyond the Blue Seas

“Beyond the blue seas, and beyond the high mountains” is the stirring description which carries us to the world of Vasilissa the Beautiful and the witch Baba Yaga: perhaps the Russian equivalent of our “once upon a time” phrase. Vasilissa the Beautiful follows much the same themes as our own Cinderella: a story involving a cruel stepmother and stepsisters whose exploitive coldness must be contended with, a pure and beautiful young woman who arouses the stepmother’s jealousy, and the hag Baba Yaga.

As with so many of these stories, Vasilissa’s tale endures because when we read it we sense deeper stirrings of themes to which we feel powerfully drawn. Is Baba Yaga merely a one-dimensional forest witch… or does she perhaps offer us lessons for our own lives? True to tradition, Baba Yaga is grotesquely ugly, with straggling hair as white as death and whose face seems more to be a leathery mask of wrinkles. She has at her command the powers of magical flight. The fence which borders her house is made from human bones, and upon each fence post rests a human skull with brightly-glowing eyes.

The setting has all the spine-chilling attributes of a storybook evil witch, but can we really consider Baba Yaga herself to be ‘evil’? In the story she actually provides Vasilissa with the means to overcome the wicked stepmother and stepdaughters by giving her one of those fiery-eyed skulls. When Vasilissa carries the skull back to her own home, the glowing eyes burn up the tyrannical stepmother together with her daughters, and she is freed to claim back her own life.

So Baba Yaga is perhaps neither strictly ‘good’ nor ‘evil’ in any clear-cut sense, any more than a tornado which destroys a community with its ferocious power can be considered as having done ‘evil’. A torrential downpour of rain might relieve a long period of drought, but the rain is not ‘good’ in any moral sense. The forces of nature simply are. 

Unlike the stepmother, Baba Yaga feels no jealousy towards Vasilissa’s great beauty. She cannot. To Baba Yaga, her own hideous appearance is simply a part of who she is, just as Vasilissa’s beauty reflects her pure soul. We would say that Baba Yaga owns her own ugliness. But what of Vasilissa? Her encounter with Baba Yaga has worked its own changes upon her as well. Baba Yaga has long left behind any need to feel ‘beautiful’. She is who she is. Baba Yaga’s true power has been to liberate herself from herself.

In her turn, in putting up with such cruel treatment in her own home for so long, Vasilissa, by being too submissive and servile, has in a sense kept herself captive. Baba Yaga’s gift to Vasilissa has been to awaken her to her own strength. Vasilissa returns empowered. In a sense the fiery-eyed skull is a mere prop, a showy trick which distracts from what has really taken place. It is the transformed Vasilissa who does the real vanquishing, and it is the transformed Vasilissa who now is free to claim her own life back.

Illustration by Forest Rogers

A Gentle Guide

As we travel through the landscape of our lives we must be willing “to go” where the Divine Energy takes us. Often, we must be pried out of familiar surroundings, security, comfort zones, and ego identities. The universe will move us: as old skins cannot contain new wine, and we find we are no longer able to live the old life we once found so secure. Once we arrive, temporarily to rest, with introspection we can then look back and say "Ah... now I see the workings of Wisdom in that journey." 

Sophia - Wisdom - always allows us time to get settled into the new skins, the new view, the new unknown. Her Spirit is a gentle guide, quietly leading, prodding, and moving us to a new heightened sense of awareness and a new view of our souls and the internal work that needs to be done.

Ink painting by Gao Xingjian

The Transforming Void

Our world is full of distractions. When we feel too crowded-in, we talk in terms of ‘taking a break’, or we might even express a wish to ‘get away from it all’. We might think of such places as being away from the crowd, as offering us a longed-for solitude. But it is perhaps the case that, were we truly to find ourselves in such extreme isolation, we would long for social company, for the daily round of meeting and chatting which we had become conditioned to and which we then would miss. The security of an ‘away-from-it-all’ holiday lies in knowing that it is limited in time, and that we soon-enough will ‘get back to it all’.

But what about those who ‘get away from it all’ and then choose not to return? A previous post on my blog tells the story of Mary of Egypt, a 6th-century hermit who lived in total seclusion in the Jordanian Desert, not for months, nor even for years, but for almost five long decades. Mary was a seeker, a soul on a quest for an encounter with the Spirit, and in this sense her solitary existence was also a pilgrimage: a journey into herself across an inner void perhaps more vast than the great and unforgiving void of the barren wastelands which surrounded her. 

A woman knows this void well. In a world whose social structures, whose very belief systems, are places built upon foundations of male power, women own this inner void as part of their natural estate. From the line of succession of a monarch to that monarch’s eldest son, from a deity who is thought of as being essentially masculine to that deity’s son, from religious beliefs whose texts quite literally spell out that men are a superior creation to women, from places of worship where women must occupy a segregated space that sometimes is actually hidden from the sight of the male congregation: all conspire to drive a woman into her own inner void and claim it as her own. For often-enough it is this emptiness which is the only place that is truly left to her.

But emptiness is power, for a void is never truly ‘empty’. Perhaps we do not need to actually live in a desert or in some other isolated place to experience this sense of pilgrimage, of self-exile. If what is within us, and sometimes what surrounds us, can at times seem like a void which might lead us to bleak despair, then that is perhaps the very moment to remember that it is the seeming emptiness of a void which can be full of the potential for transformation, and that what we experience as a void in our lives is not only not empty, but actually full of promise. The difference is only in our point of view, in how we choose to see the situation.

Who knows what miraculous mandalas Mary might have glimpsed in the red Jordanian sands? When Mary crossed the Jordan to live her life of self-imposed exile she took with her just three loaves of bread. The loaves quickly dried out and became inedible but Mary still managed to survive, for bread lasts but a little while, and yet the sustaining spirit endures.

Photo credit: India Flint

We Are Made For These Times

One night in my dream I heard a clear voice. The voice was so vivid that the phrase remained with me when I awoke. It had said to me: ‘You are made for these times’.

Belief sometimes comes before understanding. I knew that the words struck a chord with me, for they voiced what I do indeed believe: that I truly am meant to be here now, in this time. But why in such a difficult time? Both in my personal life and in unfolding world events there has been much to cope with. We prefer to make decisions based upon sound judgement and known circumstances, but so often we can find ourselves in a situation where we know so little about what might happen as a result of our decision, but we have to make that decision anyway. 

We make our decision, and we do our best to adapt to the changed circumstances. Adaptation is an existential process, certainly if it is in a phase of not knowing where it all might lead to. What are we trying to adapt to? And how do we grow and bear fruit? To find this out is a challenge which we all face in this day and age. But since adaptation is something that simply 'happens', it is not always possible to play a steering part in this process.

We cannot simply decide when and in which direction we adapt. What we instead can do is to let our soul-light shine and radiate outwards - not only by trying to be 'good' and acting out those ideals we think are positive, but by allowing the intrinsic nature of our inner being to be, unfettered by judgement or opinions. As the world is going through change and transformation we also are undergoing transformation on an individual scale. Even those of us who might not even think of ourselves as being particularly intuitive must now be feeling that something big is happening around us, that we are being driven towards… well, towards what, exactly?

There are many things happening right now which suddenly seem to be moving directly against what we might have hoped for: a more peaceful, more enlightened world – which also is a world in which women and men respect each other on equal terms, and children can be children, and not under-age workers or child soldiers. Now, because of these things, it can be so easy to feel overwhelmed by events, to feel that we are powerless against such a tidal flow of negative forces. We are not.

Our personal power is something which can never be taken from us. It is our personal power that gives us the ability to transform. To realize this is to empower ourselves, and this is when our individual transformation becomes a light to those around us, and in turn to those around them, and the power of this ripple effect expands outwards and transforms the greater world. Yes, these times are difficult, but that is exactly why we are here now. This is the time and this is the place, wherever that place may be, to make our stand and let our soul-light shine, for the darker the shadows, the more fiercely this soul-light will burn. We, all of us, ‘are made for these times’.

I wish you, my dear reader, all the trust and soul-power to shine brightly throughout the coming year.

Painting by Greg Spalenka

Flight and Pursuit

Desperate situations call for desperate measures. A true free spirit, the wood nymph Daphne is never happier than when she is roaming the forests. The dappled sunlight of the forest glades are more than home to her: they are her preferred company, and she vows that she would sooner keep herself chaste than exchange the familiar company of the surrounding trees for a partner in life.

All might have continued to go well for Daphne, were it not for the fateful day when the glorious god Apollo happens to catch sight of her as she dances in a sunlit glade. At once smitten by her beauty and charm, the god approaches Daphne and attempts to seduce her. Now, Apollo is used to having his way, whether with mortal or with nymph. But for the first time ever he finds his advances rejected. In a moment’s distraction Daphne seizes her chance to flee the god’s amorous advances and runs away as fast as she can, hoping that her familiarity with the forest trails might offer her an advantage in her flight.

But Daphne’s knowledge of the secret paths through her beloved forest is proving no advantage when matched against a god’s bruised ego. Wounded pride mixed with ardour for the fleeing nymph only fuels the pace of Apollo’s pursuit. At the last moment of her flight, when the god is so close behind her that she can feel his hot breath on her back, Daphne calls out in panic to her father, the river god Peneios. 

The great river stirs angrily, and white-topped waves slap its banks in a frenzy of fury as Peneios sees the plight which his daughter is in. Unable to leave his watery domain, the river god makes a last-resort move to save his daughter. Just as Apollo reaches out to seize the nymph, his all-too-eager hands grasp, not soft and yielding female flesh, but bark and branches and dark green leaves. Peneios with his powers has changed his daughter into a laurel tree: one more tree among all of its fellows in the wood nymph’s beloved forest.

A handful of laurel leaves are Apollo’s only gain. How to save face? How to restore a god’s bruised ego? By declaring a defeat to be a victory and founding a tradition. Apollo decrees that from that moment on, a crown of laurel leaves will become the worthy symbol of a victor. And the god promptly begins the tradition by weaving for himself a crown from the leaves that just moments before had been the living flesh of the beautiful nymph.

How often has it happened that reality has been turned on its head, and those who have been bettered have, through one means or another, insisted that they have in fact triumphed? Saving face in such a way is familiar enough to us from our own current news events. But in the story of Daphne and Apollo we can perceive a deeper meaning. Sometimes circumstances force us to change, and to change dramatically, and we become something other than that which we were before. It might not always be a change which we have wished for ourselves, but it has been a change made necessary for our survival, in whatever form that might take.

But Daphne’s fate also gives us reason to hope. The nymph’s essential nature was that of her own beloved forest, and her essence did not change. Instead it became absorbed into what she truly loved the most. Even in dramatic change, even undergoing apparent complete metamorphosis, our true essence survives in some form, and endures beyond even the great change at life’s end.

Art: Daphne and Apollo by John William Waterhouse

The Seven Devils of Mary Magdalene

In the short second verse of chapter 8 of Luke’s gospel Mary Magdalene is identified in two ways: she is among the followers of Jesus, and she is the woman out of whom ‘seven devils’ had been cast. What are we to make of this strange verse? The usual conclusion is that Mary was a little insane, perhaps even suffering from fits of hysteria. Interpreted more literally, Jesus is presumed to have ‘cured’ Mary by performing some sort of an exorcism on her. Within the context of what Luke briefly tells us, both of these interpretations seem plausible enough. But to what extent can we be sure that this is what this puzzling verse actually means?

Was Mary perhaps epileptic? Such conditions were then commonly attributed to some form of possession, in which case we are asked to imagine that Jesus presumably alleviated her symptoms. Seen through the eyes of the time, those devils had been ‘cast out’ of her. In the light of our present knowledge of such conditions, this explanation is entirely plausible – but is this really what took place?

Many texts were written and in circulation before Christianity emerged in the recognizable form that we know today. For every book in the Bible there were many others, and before the Bible came into being, all of these texts were on an equal footing with each other. We do not know who wrote these texts, any more than we can be sure who wrote Luke’s gospel and the other three gospels. But if we wish to look for answers to these puzzling passages in scripture, we often enough can find these answers in the books that the early Church Fathers decided to exclude from the books that would come to be included in scripture.

The Gospel of Mary – the only known such text which has been attributed to a woman – contains a remarkable passage in which, following the Ascension, Mary relates to the other disciples certain inner mysteries which Jesus had passed on to her. This passage clearly tells us that Mary was close to Jesus – so close that he entrusted her with mystic knowledge not given to his other disciples. We now would describe her as being indoctrinated by Jesus into the inner mysteries. Whether Jesus did this as a great mystic, as an enlightened being, or as the son of the Divine is a matter for personal belief, and in itself does not affect the nature of this special knowledge given to Mary. But what is this special knowledge?

In this text, we are told that under Jesus’ instruction Mary ascended through various levels or ‘powers’. She describes encountering the power which has “…seven forms. The first form is darkness; the second is desire; the third is ignorance; the fourth is zeal for death; the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh; the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh; the seventh is the wisdom of the wrathful person. These are the seven powers of Wrath.” Jesus’ action towards Mary can now be seen for what it truly is: not some trivial and all-too-literal exorcism, but an indoctrination into the inner mysteries, which Mary in her turn masters.

We know that the writer of Luke drew upon older texts for some of his material, and the ‘seven devils’ episode would seem to be a scrambled version of these older mysteries whose true meaning was lost on that writer, remembering that the Gospel of Mary would itself have been copied from older texts. So the Gospel of Mary offers us a Mary who is indeed a wise and profound teacher, and even the closest to Jesus and the most deserving of his disciples.

We already have come a long way from the Mary of Luke’s gospel out of whom ‘seven devils’ were cast. We can now see her as the Mary who, uniquely among the disciples, managed to master these inner mysteries, not so much of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the inner Self: which in the end is perhaps the same thing. Today, July 22nd, is traditionally the day of Mary Magdalene, and what better way to celebrate this day than to shed these outdated misconceptions about her and to see her for who she truly must have been: an enlightened soul who truly was 'the disciple whom Jesus loved’.

Bass relief beneath the altar, Church of St Mary Magdalene, Rennes-le-Château, France

Flight and Pursuit

Desperate situations call for desperate measures. A true free spirit, the wood nymph Daphne is never happier than when she is roaming the forests. The dappled sunlight of the forest glades are more than home to her: they are her preferred company, and she vows that she would sooner keep herself chaste than exchange the familiar company of the surrounding trees for a partner in life.

All might have continued to go well for Daphne, were it not for the fateful day when the glorious god Apollo happens to catch sight of her as she dances in a sunlit glade. At once smitten by her beauty and charm, the god approaches Daphne and attempts to seduce her. Now, Apollo is used to having his way, whether with mortal or with nymph. But for the first time ever he finds his advances rejected. In a moment’s distraction Daphne seizes her chance to flee the god’s amorous advances and runs away as fast as she can, hoping that her familiarity with the forest trails might offer her an advantage in her flight.

But Daphne’s knowledge of the secret paths through her beloved forest is proving no advantage when matched against a god’s bruised ego. Wounded pride mixed with ardour for the fleeing nymph only fuels the pace of Apollo’s pursuit. At the last moment of her flight, when the god is so close behind her that she can feel his hot breath on her back, Daphne calls out in panic to her father, the river god Peneios. 

The great river stirs angrily, and white-topped waves slap its banks in a frenzy of fury as Peneios sees the plight which his daughter is in. Unable to leave his watery domain, the river god makes a last-resort move to save his daughter. Just as Apollo reaches out to seize the nymph, his all-too-eager hands grasp, not soft and yielding female flesh, but bark and branches and dark green leaves. Peneios with his powers has changed his daughter into a laurel tree: one more tree among all of its fellows in the wood nymph’s beloved forest.

A handful of laurel leaves are Apollo’s only gain. How to save face? How to restore a god’s bruised ego? By declaring a defeat to be a victory and founding a tradition. Apollo decrees that from that moment on, a crown of laurel leaves will become the worthy symbol of a victor. And the god promptly begins the tradition by weaving for himself a crown from the leaves that just moments before had been the living flesh of the beautiful nymph.

How often has it happened that reality has been turned on its head, and those who have been bettered have, through one means or another, insisted that they have in fact triumphed? Saving face in such a way is familiar enough to us from our own current news events. But in the story of Daphne and Apollo we can perceive a deeper meaning. Sometimes circumstances force us to change, and to change dramatically, and we become something other than that which we were before. It might not always be a change which we have wished for ourselves, but it has been a change made necessary for our survival, in whatever form that might take.

But Daphne’s fate also gives us reason to hope. The nymph’s essential nature was that of her own beloved forest, and her essence did not change. Instead it became absorbed into what she truly loved the most. Even in dramatic change, even undergoing apparent complete metamorphosis, our true essence survives in some form, and endures beyond even the great change at life’s end.

Apollo and Daphne by John Willam Waterhouse