Maiden, Mother, Crone p. 1
Folklore Fridays
Hi friends, I’m starting something new-ish in the Purple Vale: sharing a folklore Friday post once a month, where I devote time and words to some aspect of this vast and intricate spiderweb of topics.
Since I already love to write a mix of the everyday (writing updates, seasonal changes, etc) and posts featuring more purple prose (this vale isn’t called purple for nothing), this is another way for me to intentionally indulge in the second and explore the vast landscape of folklore with you.
Enough explaining myself; this isn’t why you’re here. If you look around the edges of our meeting space, nestled between ancient mountains and ringed by trees, you will see figures in the shadows. It’s time to invite them to join us. Who knows: maybe we will follow them instead, into the darkness of the woods, over carpets of moss.
Let’s tug on the web, and see what crawls out.
Maiden, Mother, Crone. Ancient aspects of womanhood and the divine, appearing around the world. Associated with the moon and her phases. The cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
I am a girl dancing barefoot in the grass, laughing with her sister, lost in a world of make believe.
I am a girl casting aside the magic of my earliest days. Streams once the home of tiny, frolicking mermaids are now forgotten, overgrown and boggy. The voices of cicadas and toads and owls are replaced by the voices of men behind pulpits, prescribing how to live, think, and be. The joys of moving carelessly are replaced with quiet, anxious footsteps.
I am a teenager, confused and lonely, trying to understand my place in the world, hearing all the ways my body is bad and learning to hate her without impunity.
There is much about the history of the maiden, mother, crone that I don’t know. I can’t offer an anthropologist’s lecture or a historian’s thesis. I don’t remember when the phrase first crossed my line of vision, but she’s been there all along.
I was familiar with the concept of trinity.1 Having grown up in a high-control religion where patriarchy was king, the father, son, and Holy Ghost were a comforting presence to me, an anchor amidst difficulties I had no name for. What I didn’t understand for many years was how repressed and distrusted the feminine is in these spaces. If the divine creates in their image, wouldn’t the feminine be on full display as well? Wouldn’t the divine be far more complex than one half of a rigid binary? Wouldn’t a god so creative transcend such tiny, man-made spaces?
Those around me acknowledged this was true, yet no one seemed to understand what this actually meant. I certainly didn't. And I participated in thinking and acting as if the opposite were true, to the detriment of myself and those with whom I interacted.
When I read Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, I came across the Wild Woman:
“For women this searching and finding is based on the mysterious passion that women have for what is wild, what is innately themselves. We have been calling the object of this yearning Wild Woman ... but even when women do not know her by name, even when they do not know where she resides, they strain toward her: they love her with all their hearts. They long for her, and that longing is both motivation and locomotion. It is this yearning that causes us to search for Wild Woman and find her. It is not as hard as one might first imagine, for Wild Woman is searching for us too. We are her young.”
— Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
When I read that I thought, the Wild Woman is the Holy Spirit. They are the same, or almost. The Wild Woman is older–she existed before white men took a religion and interwove it with colonialism, racism, and other harmful -isms. I find her to be closer to the substance while the Holy Ghost I knew was a shadow, overlaid with thin, sticky layers cast by grasping hands trying to contain a vastness.
There are many people and books that have shaped my search for Wild Woman, many ways in which she greets or embodies the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Among other things, I see this triunity as ways to connect with my past, present, and future selves. Through them, I see ways in which I am– everyone is–connected to the divine.
And while ‘connecting with your child self’ may be a recent catch phrase, I see how the Maiden helps me approach past versions of myself with compassion, curiosity, and the strength to defend her from voices who wanted to keep her small, silent and compliant.
There are things I mourn from my childhood and early adult years, ways in which my budding sense of self was buried or drowned, shamed into silence. There are skills which I am just now beginning to cultivate. From a developmental standpoint, many of these lost skills are things which should have been learned in the early years. But rather than develop as an individual, I was just trying to survive.
But though I may be playing catch up, I don’t have to give up play.
The Maiden belongs to herself. She is not without wisdom, and her innocence does not necessarily equal ignorance. Just as I grieve the losses of the past, its gifts remain open to me, too.
Dress up. Read the books I like. Get lost in a cluster of mushrooms, a forest of moss, the song of water. Tell the voices that demand smallness, silence, and compliance to fuck off. Take my younger self gently by the shoulders and say: it wasn’t your fault. You are seen. You are loved. You belong. There is so much magic in the world.
The Wild Woman is there, calling you to all you have been and all you will be.
I love the idea of the Maiden/Mother/Crone as related to the idea of the Trinity!
This was an incredible read. I was hanging on every dew-dripping word.