The Dead Circle the Living
Woven Together in a Matrix of Mothers
[art by Autumn Skye]
Lineages are a patriarchal lie meant to establish ownership. Women must take the name of their husbands, children their father, and slaves their masters. Each man bequeaths his power to his designated heir. The Buddha will offer mind-to-mind transmission from one enlightened male monk to another. The Gospel of Matthew will trace a clear line from King David to Jesus with one man begetting his specialness to yet another man.
Where are the mothers, the wet nurses, the wives and daughters? Where are the aunties and the hags and the crones? Is it enough to talk about matriarchal lineages instead of patriarchal lineages? Or are lineages themselves the problem? What if we leave lines behind and explore the power of circles?
Put your name in the center of a piece of paper with one line leading to your mother and another to your father. Add their mothers and fathers. And the mothers and fathers of those mothers and fathers. You don’t even have to know or use their names. Just write mother and father, or M and F. I promise you that in only a few generations your paper will not look like a lineage but a tangled mess of a spider’s web. A matrix going in all directions at once.
Anyone who has spent any time research their ancestry knows how muddled everything can get. Do I follow this father or that mother? What happens when I add in siblings and stepparents, cousins and their kids? What about neighbors and friends, pets and animals and the entire more than human world? Stranger still, what if I move beyond biology altogether and begin to consider my karmic inheritance? What of my mothers and fathers and siblings and cousins and lovers and friends from lives I do not even remember? What are the dimensions of this matrix? How deep does it go? How wide?
All around me are the dead to whom I belong.
We are not the dangling end point of a lineage. We sit at the center of a matrix that goes in all directions at once—behind us, beneath us, circling us with love and protection.
Lineages are designed to make us feel either special or not special, close to power or exiled from it. I can trace my lineage back to this count, that king, that famous person, a castle, a seat of authority of some kind or another. See! I am special after all.
But so often we feel, nevertheless, inadequate and isolated. We cloak our fears and anxieties with a mantle of that specialness. I am of this lineage. I am of that lineage. I can trace my authority back and back and back. But do we belong to our lives and our land? Do we feel woven into a matrix of belonging in which not one soul is more or less special than another, in which not one soul is left out? What if we sought not special authority but rooted belonging?
What if we could feel all our ancestors circling us and holding us in love? Not just our biological relatives but the entire matrix of souls who have always loved us?
Making this feel lived and real is my work in this life. In order to return to the way of the mothers we must leave those violent straight lines of the father behind. The straight lines of expressways cutting through the mountains. The straight lines of skyscrapers disrupting the birds. The straight lines of property and inheritance and priests of all kinds and hierarchical power of all kinds where someone is on top and someone is crushed at the bottom. Let us claim instead the entangled circles of root systems woven into mycelial networks, the circle of the seasons, of the moon, of the tides, of our own round planet’s elliptical orbit around the circle of the sun.
When we begin to work with the dead, all the dead, we begin to belong to this earth again.
Lineages are a lie. The Mother holds you, all the mothers you have ever known from every lifetime hold you, all the dead who have ever been recognize you and hold you. You are special because every soul is special. You belong because nothing is left out of that web of intimacy. Everyone belongs in the land of the dead and every soul is special.
I will be offering a workshop in March on the Mothers of Magic and Mystery that looks at both our personal experience of our own mothers and grandmothers as well as journeying through deep time to see how patriarchy has sought to sever our connections to that web of belonging and what it means for how we live and imagine ourselves and relate to each other. Together we’ll move through the “witch wound” to a world renewed. What if we could descend into the land of the dead and find our mothers again, all of our forgotten mothers from our past lives, who have loved us and love us still? These ancient mothers and grandmothers are waiting to hold us, guide us, heal us, and welcome us home. You can find out more here.
[art: Sharon McErlane]
This is the free version of my newsletter. I also offer a paid version with actual excerpts from my upcoming book The Body of My Mother: Beyond the Witch Wound to A World Renewed. You can find out more about all my workshops on working with the dead here. My book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is coming out from Running Press in September 2023. Preorders available.
Love, love, love this message. For the first time feels what belonging really means.
I was thinking the other day about how I have a huge book that traces my family back to an indentured servant on the Mayflower, Edward Doty. Woohoo! Doesn't that make me special? Except, Edward was a scraper. The man who paid his passage in return for 7 years labor in the new world once tied together the wrists and ankles of Edward and the other indentured man and told them they wouldn't be untied until they worked out their differences. (Edward had pulled a knife on the other man.) It is said they were tied for 2 days until they got their act together. We know much about him and his descendants because, after he completed his service, he filed several lawsuits over the years. So he was apparently a difficult person. And the funny thing about it is, there is a whole, active Edward Doty Society, like they are all proud that he came over on the Mayflower and we are descendants of this disagreeable man. BUT, hey! Mayflower. Aren't we something? LOL! The more years I think about it, the more laughable it is that these thousands, maybe millions, of descendants are so proud to have that lineage. Hmm, I like Perdita's way of looking at it better!