As I noted previously, when I started this blog it was to write about the warrior path from all the angles I approach it, the spiritual, the ancient literary and historical as well as the actual training and the pop cultural. But by the time I really started working on it, I had backed off of writing about spirituality and my historical studies for various reasons I won’t get into right now. I felt more comfortable writing about my training, about self-defense and about how Sarah Connor is a mega inspiration. I threw myself into The Sarah Connor Charm School at the same time I privately got back to work on a lot of very spiritual matters that I didn’t write about.
Of course, it all connects for me, when I go out shooting I feel An Morrígan, the Goddess I am oathed to, with me, as I do when I lift, when I run, when I work…all the time. But I don’t really mention it much. The pop cultural ties into the ancient literature for me as well and both tie into my training and my spirituality. Story has power, no matter the source. Sometimes, as I’ve written about, the power is very negative…and sometimes even negative stories end up having power. I need to get into that more here, I think. In fact, I have some ideas.
I think that a part of my problem in writing a lot of this is that I find very few others making the connections that I make. Oh, there are some…some of you reading this, in fact. But I learned several years ago that my outlook is different than a lot of other Pagans. I realized this when I was working on an article for a women’s spirituality magazine and I was told it wasn’t “Goddess focused” enough. It was to me! But the editor couldn’t see it. She saw that I included factual information about violence against women and she couldn’t see the spirituality behind it, even with all the woo I thought I was putting in. I suck at writing woo, apparently.
And now, as I take up a writing project about the warrior path for Pagan women, I realize that I’m not in the same space as most who claim similar interests. Part of it is that I do not believe that there were all these huge numbers of women warriors in the past, especially not in Celtic cultures which I am focused on. Oh, I believe they existed, but the evidence isn’t there to support it so I can’t SAY they existed…which is what so many want to hear. Or others want to say that lack of evidence proves they didn’t. This, of course, is where story comes to play for me. What do all these stories mean?
And then there are those who, always mind boggling to me, want to be some sort of pacifist warriors. “Warriors don’t really fight, you know. It doesn’t mean that.” Um, it doesn’t? These same people, mostly women but hardly all women, also usually try to transform An Morrígan into some sort of loving Soccer Mom, who protects the weak rather than demands effort from the strong. Sorry, it doesn’t wash with either the lore about Her or my own experiences. I can’t say whether other people’s experiences are valid, but based on all that is know about Her, I can question it. Especially with the bizarre “retellings” of Her stories which are so far from what is in the lore as to, well, break ones brain to read.
When An Morrígan claimed me I had to question a lot about what I believed about myself and my God/desses…and the world. It’s still often a long, hard haul. But it’s there. Everything I do in life is either part of it or, still, fighting against it. Everything.
Where my training and my studies have taken me in the past few years, since splitting from working with people who I now realize were toxic to me and through the death of my parents, is sometimes mind shattering. While I’ve been transforming for years, there have been leaps forced by the events in my life and healing I needed to do. And I do believe it has led me to the right place to get back to work on the writing project which will sum this all up.
So things might crop up here of a more spiritual nature or of more ancient “pop culture” of story telling over the coming months. We’ll see how the mix goes here, perhaps. And perhaps someday some of you will be interested in this thing that has started to eat my life. Maybe.
Great post. Story does have power and that is something that Western culture has yet to learn.
I like how you discuss the fact that you can't something didn't exist. There may simply not be a record of it. I find it ludicrous to believe that a man first rode a horse for war. Why not say a woman rode a horse for fun? There is no evidence, so, based on what I know of the horse-human relationship and Indigenous cultures, I believe the latter. Or the argument about the domestication of horses based on bit wear. You don't need a bit to ride a horse, so that's only a measure of a time when someone probably rode a horse, but horses were probably ridden way before then.
Hah…it's funny that you bring up that women may have ridden first, because I have longed believed this. Even if you look at very "traditional" gender-specific work, that would mean that in the early horse herding cultures which first herded them for milk and meat, it was probably women (and children) who did much of the tending of the milk herds. I always imagined that that bringing the herd in, some young, probably tired or injured, woman looked at her favorite milk mare's broad back, so different than other milk animals, and decided to hitch a ride. Just pulled herself up, on what would have been quite a small animals, never mind any control, the mare would have known where she was going along with the herd. That's my Just So Story, as the anthropologists put it.