Circle of Ancestors

Our Solstice Newsletter

As we move towards the Summer Solstice (and gratefully out of Mercury retrograde!) we'd like to share some updates for Circle of Ancestors.

The Polish Ancestral Healing Project (PAHP) which is fiscally sponsored by COA, now has a new website:

http://www.polishancestralhealing.org.

PAHP was founded by Atava Garcia Swiecicki and Maura Singer Williams in 2004 when they embarked upon a journey to their shared ancestral homeland of Poland.

Their work in Poland & the US draws upon their indigenous Slavic and Judaic traditions to reconnect with the spirit of the Polish land and to face and heal the wounds of their Polish ancestors. Visit the site to learn more about the work PAHP.

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Our guest blogger this month will be Venus Herbito, an Indigenous Mind graduate with ancestry from the Phillipines. She will be blogging about her own recovery work as well as how the remembrance work is going on as she travels to her homeland.

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We are celebrating the submission of our tax-exemption paperwork to the IRS! By the way, any donations made to us now will be retroactively tax-deductible once we receive our tax-exempt status.

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Heidi Guttmann is preparing to present as part of a panel at Dreaming Across Borders, the International Association for the Study of Dreams Conference in Montreal in July. She will speak about her life-changing White Tigress Dream. The lead up to this presentation is her re-publication of two posts on footbinding on our blog:

http://blissing.typepad.com/circle_of_ancestors/white_tigress/index.html

The final post will be published after the dream conference. Teresa MacColl, our guest blogger for March, will also be presenting at the conference.

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Last March, Marcela Sabin attended the The convening of Indigenous Peoples for the Healing of Mother Earth in Palenque, Mexico. This convening was “planned by and for Indigenous peoples from North America to bring together Indigenous leaders, including spiritual and traditional healers, elders, wisdom keepers, and practitioners, to address the need for immediate intervention and action, based upon original teachings, in order to ensure a healthy future for our coming generations. We recognize that our current and future actions must not be based upon the same worldview that has brought such global destruction to Mother Earth. We must reclaim and revitalize the wisdom passed on to us from our Ancestors about how to be responsible to each other and to the Natural World. "

Footbinding, Part I: A Short History

Footbinding was a fashion, a fad that went horribly, horribly wrong. It started about 1,000 years ago when a dancer with small feet performed in the Chinese imperial court atop a giant lotus sculpture. Women in the court started binding their feet to make them look smaller and create “golden lotuses”. As per usual, it spread to the masses, and not long thereafter, girls from the ages of 3 to 6 had to have their feet bound if there was any hope of them getting married when they were older.

Many times there were infections and toes would fall off or become gangrenous. As described in Aching for Beauty, by Wang Ping, the only feminist critique of footbinding by a Chinese woman that I’ve come across, the foot needed to be,

…small, slim, pointed, arched, fragrant, soft and straight…for about two or three years, little girls go through the inferno of torture: the flesh of her feet, which are tightly bound with layers of bandages day and night, is slowly putrefied, her toes crushed under the soles, and the insteps arched to the degree where the toes and heels meet. Loving mothers turn into monsters that beat their sobbing girls with sticks or brooms, forcing them to hop around to speed up the rotting flesh and make sure the bones are broken properly. When the feet are finally shrunk to the size of a baby’s—three inches long, half an inch wide in the front—they are completely deformed.  All the tears and pus, all the decay and broken bones are hidden under the elaborate adornment of the shoes, which are never taken off, not even in bed. Yet violence is traceable everywhere: the odor of dead flesh seeping through the bandages, the tiny appendages that barely support the frail body.

A mother was not allowed to loosen the bindings no matter how much the little girl cried or begged. This was proof of her love for her daughter. She had to save face for her daughter’s wedding day, when everyone would look at her feet and judge whether she would be a good wife or not by the size of her feet. Look at your hand and imagine a grown woman’s foot fitting into its palm. Not all women had 3-inch feet, 4-, 5-, and 6-inch feet were also common. Men would marry women based solely on the smallness of her feet, having never seen their faces. Sometimes they married women old enough to be their mothers, just because their tiny feet were renowned.

Books were written about the erotic pleasures of tiny feet.  Every aspect of them was eroticized—the way they smelled (apparently cheesy), the way they felt in the hand or in the mouth during intercourse, the way they made a woman teeter as she walked and how watching her evoked a sense of pity for her helplessness, how they looked like both female and male genitalia, how to insert a penis into the arch, the beautiful embroidered silk shoes shaped like lotus or lily leaves, the hoove-like animal-ness of them, etc. Footbinding had by then become something much deeper than a fad; it had become a reflection of the culture’s tastes and sensibilities in food, art, sexual practices, as well as its control of women.

[Orignally posted 3/6/06 at blissing]

Next: The women in my family.

This Year and the Tiger

Any news about the state of tigers in the world is of interest to me, and the Tiger attack at the San Francisco zoo on Christmas day last year was very moving.  While meditating on the attack I knew that Tatiana was provoked.  She is a symbol of the feminine tiger spirit reawakening.  And, she is angry.  The anger has been flowing through me as well, and I pray that I channel it constructively and that I stay healthy while doing it. 

The White Tigress has been an important teacher to me for several years now.  I will be presenting at the International Association for the Study of Dreams this July on the pivotal dream I had in 2000 that continues to inform and guide my life.  The White Tigress is a representation of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, who is the not-well-known primordial earth mother goddess of China.

Recently, Teresa sent me this very moving photo of a tiger in India.  That caption reads: A pregnant tigress was rescued by forest workers Sunday after being stoned by Indian villagers. Upon her release Tuesday, the tigress jumped into the Sundarikati River.

I will be posting more about the White Tigress, Xi Wang Mu, and my experiences with the feminine spirits of China throughout the year.

Slavic Healing & Baba Yaga

In honor of Barbara Spetz Dean, September 29th 1942- October 25, 2003

 

In 2003, I wrote my Master's Thesis entitled, "Journey to Recovering My Polish Indigenous Mind."  I was/am on a quest to recover the ancient healing traditions of my Slavic ancestors.  A big part of my writing was on Baba Yaga, the ancient witch/hag/ goddess from Eastern & Central Europe. She is most known as a fairy-tale character.  Usually she is portrayed as a mean witch who chases children and tries to eat them.  However, I suspected there must be more to her.  As an indigenous scientist, I was trained to look into fairy tales and myths to uncover the indigenous remnants of my Slavic pre-Christian culture.  I was drawn to Baba Yaga because I first saw her image as flying in a mortar & pestle.  Intuitively, I thought, she must be an herbalist. 

Here is an excerpt from my thesis:

The stories that kept drawing me in, time after time, were the stories about Baba Yaga. The ancient tales of Baba Yaga (Jezi Baba in the Polish language) are common throughout the Slavic world.[1] Baba Yaga is a fierce old crone who lives in the deepest, darkest part of the woods. She has long greasy hair and a big pointed nose. In older times she was described as a good witch, later she was personified more often as cruel and menacing.   

Baba Yaga is clearly a spirit of ancient power and wisdom. She is an herbalist, a healer, and she has the power to both give and destroy life. She is the crone, the aspect of the goddess that presides over the realm of death and rebirth. Maria Gimbutas, feminist archeologist and scholar describes Baba Yaga as the “Killer-Regeneratrix” and the “Goddess of Death and Regeneration”.[1] The ancient Slavs revered Baba Yaga, who was central to their spiritual universe. However, with the onslaught of Christianity, Baba Yaga had been “degraded to a witch.”[2] Gimbutas writes: “(Baba Yaga) is but a loathsome caricature thanks to the enormous energies spent by the missionaries and inquisitors to fight this powerful Goddess ”.[3]

(You can download my thesis from my website: ancestralapothecary.com, on the publications page.)
 

 

Back in 2003, when writing about Baba Yaga, she transformed for me from a fairy-tale character into a very real Spirit. Not only was I drawn to her, but so was my Polish-American friend Barbara Dean.  Barbara traveled with me to Poland in the Fall of 2002. Together we excavated the Polish indigenous mind. Unknown to either of us, during our travels, Barbara was already ill with advanced cancer. She was finally diagnosed with cancer in August of 2003; she died soon thereafter on October 25, 2003. I believe that Baba Yaga came to both of us to help usher Barbara Dean during her death into the Spirit World.

At the Circle of Ancestor’s presentation on October 5^th, Baba Yaga again made an appearance. She brought to this presentation, by “the Baba Yaga Express” a Polish-American woman whom I had met earlier THAT DAY at a psiber dream conference. This woman, Beverly, happened to send me an email that commented on a dream I had posted. I noticed her last name and asked if she was Polish. I told her that, coincidentally, I was preparing to do a presentation on Polish/Slavic healing ways and in Baba Yaga in particular.

Beverly responded in amazement… she was 100% Polish and her whole life had been dreaming of witches…(http://www.durso.org/beverly /Autobiography-Paper.html)... But never until that moment did she make the connection of her dreams to Baba Yaga.

Miraculously, Beverly made it to my presentation. It was a powerful moment for both of us. My intention for this presentation was to help activate the Slavic Indigenous Mind, and her appearance was a sign that my prayer had been answered.

Since Beverly and I met at a Psiberdream conference (http://asdreams.org ),  suspect that Baba Yaga’s powers may also extend into the realm of dreams. Her domains are already healing, death, rebirth, sacred (hallucinogenic) plants….. so it makes sense that dreams would be there as well. I will continue my Baba Yaga Dream Research Project and let you all know what I discover. If your ancestors are from Eastern & Central Europe and you have dreams or stories relating to Baba Yaga, please let me know: atava@circleofancestors.org.

Blessings,

Atava