Lately I’ve been writing about pilgrimage and ritual, how journeying can transform from a simple walk intended to get from one place to another into an unintentionally therapeutic movement – in my case through feelings of familial and ecological grief and loss; how the body seems sometimes to know what the mind is not yet ready to meet or confess.
It was during a swim-walk/trespass along the Churn in Gloucestershire that I stumbled into archaeological evidence of mother goddess worship along the river. How Dobunni and later Roman pilgrims made votive offerings to mother goddesses who are often represented in statuary in triplicate and accompanied by the Genii cuculatti, scuttling hooded figures of uncertain gender who crowd in to offer protection.
Often depicted carrying bread and fruit, the mother goddesses are said to represent well-being, plenty, health and fertility. The significance of their threeness or triplism is unknown – referring perhaps to the three stages of life, the inexorability of time’s movement through past, present and future, the triple layered cosmos encompassing underworld, middle earth and the heavens. In the absence of certainty, what does seem clear is an idea of permeability and fluidity found in the ‘thin places’ of our environment, where boundaries blur between ourselves and others. A thin place like the River Churn.
Women have always understood the power of water as the source of life and have been associated with it as a site of ritual for millennia. Our local Gloucestershire Celtic and Romano-Celt Cotswold deities – Sulis, Sulis Minerva, Cuda, the Sulevaie or Deae Matres, Rosmerta, Sabrina/Haffren/Severn – were all worshipped by water, be it thermal spring, brook, river.
There is a collection of votive pins in Gloucester Museum, thought to have been dropped into a spring by pregnant women (at some expense perhaps) praying for their survival through the bloody, body splitting metamorphosis of childbirth, a thread of fear and courage that connects all mothers through time.
I love how the springs and underground rivers push up with their indomitable spirit through the kerbs along my street, how there are springs to be found all around the valley where I live, and wondered at the folk who must’ve visited them for survival and solace through the years.
Part of a series of poems around mother goddesses that will be published in my collection Red Handed (out with Broken Sleep Books, 31st May!), I wrote a quiet poem[1] about the votive pins, reimagining the ritual for the modern day and wishing to give some simple beauty to the experience of childbirth and mothering that takes place week in week out on the commonplace housing estate where we live.
I have learnt that the meaning of poems shift over time and have their very own lives, long after they are written and published in print. Connected by our mutual love of writing and winter swimming, a collaboration emerged last year with myself, the brilliant comedy writer Emma Kernahan and singer-songwriter Mara Simpson which led to a show at Stroud Book Festival – by far the funnest, most joyful and life-affirming performance I’ve done to date.
Inspired by ‘ritual,’ Mara wrote ‘Safe Passage,’ performed live and released on YouTube this week, giving the original piece a completely new, other life. ‘Safe Passage’ is about Mara’s own journey into matrescence and is deeply moving, tender, brave and so powerful. It makes me cry every time I listen to it. How wonderful it is to live in a world where we can inspire each other and respond and converse and entangle our experiences on and on like a lineage. Please listen – here it is, I recommend kicking back and letting yourself drift off on Mara’s extraordinary die-for vocals and lush instrumentation … hear an old soul sing.
I discovered the mother goddesses when I was looking for belonging in the river and found kinship and a sense of family that could somehow endure mortality. Symbolic of my own need for better health after a diagnosis of a chronic condition that’ll live with me forever, the mothers offered a nurturing, therapeutic presence which has lately transformed, expanded, opened out into something more.
I was listening last weekend to the podcast, Reseed, and a conversation between Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Alice Irene Whittaker about caring through the brutality of our current moment. A phrase Kerri used about ‘being a good ancestor’ has rung like a bell through the days since I listened to the interview, reverberating through my thoughts and echoing off my concerns around care, nurture, reparation and forgiveness in a time of conflict and crisis. The notion that we honour those who have come before while simultaneously remembering our deep love for each other in the present and those who are yet to come – the triplism of our inheritance, all that we create, all that we will pass on.
We are called to respond to the climate emergency we are faced with, to reach for our survival through the transformation that lies ahead, to raise new lives equipped with new skills and ways-of-being in the world that are dramatically different to the ways we live now, to mother ourselves and others in preparation for the epochal shift we are journeying towards. I drop my pins, millions of them – all that I have – into the spring, praying for our safe passage.
I’m looking forward to participating in a panel event this weekend at Therapeutic Landscapes, organised by the University of Worcester, and featuring a range of artists, practitioners, academics and writers working on folk cultures, new traditions, nature and community, thin places, landscapes, dreamscapes and more. Find out about it here.
Mara Simpson and company will be performing in London and the South West in the coming weeks – go see her. She’s the absolute bomb!
22.03 Green Note LONDON
23.03 Post Classical Assemby BATH
24.03 The Prince Albert STROUD
25.03 The Jam Jar BRISTOL
26.03 The Cornish Bank FALMOUTH
*
[1] First published in Emma Kernahan & JLM Morton Glos Mythos is illustrated by Bill Jones and available from Dialect Press.
The survival of what are called the 'Anglo Saxon metrical charms' hints at a distant past; many aspects of these poems are puzzling and mysterious and that they have survived at all is remarkable. The relevant one here concerns difficult birth; I have been lazy and copied an online translation.
For a Delayed Birth
The woman, who cannot sustain her baby, must go to the resting place of buried man and step three times over the grave and say these words three times:
This will help me against the hateful late-birth,
this will help me against the ponderous heavy-birth,
this will help me against the hateful lame-birth.
And when that woman who is with child, must go to rest with her husband, then she must say:
Up I am going, over the steps
with a living child, not at all with the dying,
with the full-born, not at all with the fated to die.
And when the mother should feel that her child is living, she must go to the church, and then come up to the altar, speaking then:
Christ, I said, this is revealed!
The woman, who cannot sustain her child, she must take up some portion of her own child’s burial, wrap it in black wool after, and sell it to merchants, saying then:
I will buy it, you will buy it,
this dark wool, and these sorrowing corns.
The woman, who cannot sustain her baby, take then the milk of a single colored cow in her hand and sip it with her mouth and go to the running water and spit the milk therein, and then fill that same hand with a mouthful of water and swallow it. Then speak these words:
Everywhere I have carried this well-known child kin-strong,
with this well-known child meat-strong—
then I wish to keep it for myself and go home.
Then she must go to the brook and must not look around, nor must she go from there, and then she must go into another house and another woman must grant her food and there she tastes it.
https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-metrical-charms/
See Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World [https://londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/winters-in-the-world-a-journey-through-the-anglo-saxon-year-eleanor-parker]