Ixchel and The Water Pots of August by Juliet Waldron

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So many gods and goddesses lost throughout the long stretch of human history! 

Many gods of our European past were lost during the violence of Roman colonization, or absorbed, their ancient lineage lost when these divinities were given Roman names. After the Romans, came the new religion, Christianity, and the old gods and goddesses were this time baptized as "saints," which either cloaked their origins in a doctrinally acceptable story, or simply twisted the story until it fit--often uneasily--with the new religion's teachings. 

When European colonizers reached the Americas, the same thing happened to the divinities of these "newly discovered" lands. Some of those stories are lost forever, but a few kept their names. Among these surviving rarities is IxChel, a Meso-American goddess, who could be maiden/mother/crone depending on the season of the year, the age the devotee, or the phase of the moon. 

IxChel was a goddess whose survival partially rests on the written record left by priests who observed what remained of her original religion after the Spanish conquest. From what we can glean, she was a lunar goddess, and, like so many others around the ancient world, the animals which are associated with her worship, are the rabbit (fertility) and the serpent (bringer of rain.) Below is a modern rendering of the goddess from Sacred Source's catalog. To synch with our modern preoccupation with youth, this IxChel appears as a young woman, although in the few remaining Mayan texts, her "rain" hieroglyph depicts her as Crone.

https://sacredsource.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoogCd36tvDfkvTP9t_CCNoPGWpntD6DE7UZFj9UNwT0lpuIFBYC

Like the Moon, however, Ixchel waxes and wanes; she changes. She, like so many European Great Goddesses, is a triple goddess. She was a special patroness of women, whose reproductive cycles are governed by the moon. Young women prayed to her maiden self for  beauty, or for a husband. To the married women, she was Mother Ixchel, to whom you prayed for sons to please a warrior husband or for continued fertility and good health. Women of all ages prayed to Ixchel as Life Giver, asking this fruitful deity for the blessing of good harvests, as well as for good fortune and for safe delivery during the travail of childbirth. She knew the secrets of all herbs, and was known as a skillful healer.

In Meso-America, where droughts could (and historically did) bring famine and collapse to powerful city states, IxChel's sacred serpent governed the powerful hurricane rains, whose appearance was necessary to "fill the water pots"  (the cenotes which dot the permeable limestone of the Yucatan) with the precious liquid which nourished the maize, beans and squash upon which the communities depended. "Water is Life" was as real then as it is now.

As the Moon, Ixchel governed the night. She opened the womb and then cared for the child growing inside. Her pale face radiated blessings upon her sister-children here on earth; the stars were her offspring.  In some of the surviving stories, she dies and is reborn again, a miracle that, in so many religions, only male gods perform. As a goddess of vegetation, she is a kind of Persephone figure, entering the underworld and then being reborn again.

Ixchel is also said to be first weaver, the woman who taught her human children this civilizing skill. The spindle she holds and the thread she spins governs both life and death. Like the Fates of ancient Europe, she creates the fabric of our lives, and ends them when she wishes, breaking the threads. As a destroying goddess, she is called "Keeper of Bones" and crossed bones often appear in her iconography.

Cozumel, as it is known today, was once Isla Muheres, the Island of Women, sacred to Ixchel, the home of her temples. Mayan women were supposed to make pilgrimage there at least once in their lives. If you today are a fortunate traveler, you might still go and visit Ixchel there today. Offer her copal incense, cocoa beans, or small clay female statuettes, as her devotees once did on that lovely island so long ago.

Goddess Knowledge Cards,

Pomegranate

Art by Susan Eleanor Boulet

 Here she is with an avatar--her powerful jaguar self, a creature who hunts on land and in the water--for she is a shape-shifter too. Though she was married to the Sun, she, like the cat, was a law unto herself, coming and going as she chose. Not even the Sun God could own her.

~~Juliet Waldron

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Legend of Sleepy Hollow--Redux

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How I loved The Legend of Sleepy Hollow when I was a kid! Of course, my initial introduction was to the Walt Disney version, which most of my cohort saw in movie theaters. Who can forget poor, terrified Icabod Crane on his broken down mount, fleeing from the "headless horseman" as the Specter thundered after him in that pell-mell race to the bridge beyond which it was said that the apparition could not pass! Maybe I missed the point, but if memory serves, my sympathies lay with the skinny school-teacher, who'd dared to court the local heiress.  Or maybe, Disney spun the story that way. Darned if I know at this late date, 70 years later. 

 

In yellow and green, Major General Philip Schuyler's drawing room;

The fireplace before which Alexander Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler

As an adult, about 30 years back, while doing research for several novels set in the Hudson Valley at the time of the Revolution, I had occasion to finally read Washington Irving's original story. Unsurprisingly, the Disney version which I remembered was not exactly what Irving (1783-1850), one who grew up in that storied valley, originally penned.  Irving was a famous wit of his day, a writer in post-Revolutionary America, whose fame today rests on two short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Irving certainly knew these little valleys, filled back then with descendants of the Dutch original settlers. In a few of these rural backwaters, the inhabitants still spoke Dutch and practiced their ancestral folkways. Old Dutchmen still gazed with disapproval at their "feckless" and "acquisitive" British neighbors, just as the Amish do "the English" today, right here in my neck of Pennsylvania.

In the elaborate language of Irving's day, when people often readstories aloud beside the fire, we learn that Icabod Crane, the lanky, threadbare schoolmaster, is Connecticut born and raised, which makes him an outsider in this rural valley. In those days, the people of Connecticut. unlike their next-door neighbors, the New York Dutch, had been founded by dour fundamentalist Calvinists, who arrived in that "savage-filled wilderness" with strong beliefs and many superstitions. Their Sundays were filled with morning to evening Church services, at which attendance was definitely not optional. 

The Blue Laws, "no business conducted on Sunday," were strictly enforced. Sunday dinner was cooked on Saturday and served cold. You couldn't even move a chair across the dining room to accommodate a new guest without violating their version of scriptural law. They firmly believed in witches and The Devilish Supernatural. It is mentioned in the story that Icabod often read his copy of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft, "in which he most fervently and potently believed."

The New York Dutch had their superstitions as well and Icabod just naturally loved these scary stories, too.  The old women in whatever house the schoolmaster was lodged each week--most of his pay for teaching the children of the town was room and board--were only too happy to share their own local goblin-filled tales with him. At one of these firesides he was introduced to the "Galloping Hessian," a hooded figure on a black horse who haunted a stretch of road which ran along a creek and passed the local churchyard. This spectre was reputed to be, as you probably know, a cavalry-man from the Revolutionary times whose head had been "carried away by a cannon ball," for which he was doomed to perpetually search.

Major General Philip Schuyler's Home Today

(Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton's childhood Home)

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Penniless Icabod, who dreams of marrying the heiress, Katrina Van Tassel, dreams not only of her, but of her wealth as well. His plans, should she marry him, are to eventually sell the family land and invest "in great tracts of wild land," to pack his bride and all that he can into a Conestoga wagon and head west, "to Kentucky, Tennessee or the Lord Knows Where." Portrayed here is the New York Dutch view of Connecticut Yankee--shrewd and acquisitive! 

This, information, to my mind, removes some of Disney's whitewashing of Icabod as the hapless victim of -- as he is drawn -- Big Brute Brom Bones. Now, Brom doesn't have book learning, but he "had more mischief than ill-will in his composition; and...there was a strong dash of waggish humor at the bottom." The original of Brom was certainly not "Bluto," but your standard, garden-variety Alpha Male. He'd expected to win Katrina sooner or later, as she was the finest marital prize available in their valley.  in his mind, Icabod, was an unexpected, ridiculous interloper, to be disposed of as soon as possible. This he proceeds--after some earlier, clumsy attempts--to to do, by cleverly playing on the schoolteacher's biggest weakness, his well-known belief in the supernatural. 

We may also surmise, as we read the original tale, that Katrina herself decided to move things along by pretending to be charmed by Icabod. Brom, after all, is described as enjoying his bachelor life a great deal, out with his "boon companions," riding around on fast horses half the night and generally not showing a willingness to get serious and settle down. 

Not to overly bash Disney, whose goal was to entertain kids, I'll stop there, but reading Irving's original story, written for adults to enjoy as well as children, was a real treat.  

~~Juliet Waldron

 

Bon Voyage To Meee by Vanessa C. Hawkins

 

 

 Vanessa Hawkins Author Page

    So curretly I am en route to Toronto Ontario, so I fear there will be but a small blog post this month. I flew via Flair Airlines without a hitch, and am typing this up as I sit in the very front of the Robert Q bus. What a flight, I must say! I was glad to have a bit of liquid courage on the plane because the landing was rocky at best. The wildfires in Canada mean the skies are clouded in smog, which I suppose corresponds to mega turbulance. However, I am lucky to find myself here and on the way to plan and map out another book!

It was a lovely view in New Brunswick today at least. Though, if you have ever flown flair you may know how cheap it is. This comes at a price however, as every little thing has an extra charge. For example, carry on baggage. Now... I am but a humble writer. I'm no Stephen King nor Dean Koontz. I can't afford all the extras can I?

Well... not on a novelists salary! So, I planned ahead! I wore all my clothes on the plane, packed a fanny pack, and made sure even my boots had pockets!

I wasn't kidding! Good for one pair of underpants! 

Now that means as soon as I arrived I had to change. Holy heck its hot here! New Brunswick was crisp 10 degrees maybe, but by the time I arrived at TO I was due for a wardrobe change. I'm only here a few short days, but I am hoping to take in some sights while I'm here. I'm also going to be meeting up with my co-author for the Ballroom Riot series, Tara Woodworth! 

I'll have more to report next month when I return from my first trip since the pandemic! So stayed tuned then and keep writing! 

                

Before Flight and after flight... I felt much cooler after changing! 

Bon Voyage to Meeeeeeeeee

On Finishing Manuscripts by Vanessa C. Hawkins

 

 

 Vanessa Hawkins Author Page

Exhausted and overcome by Christmas and another completed manuscript, I have naught the energy to write much more this month. So I shall give you fine readers this: a poem on finishing manuscripts. Enjoy! 

Twas the night before New Years, 

And all in the house,

A mother was writing

and trying to rouse

her creations! 

Of romance! and fear! and conclusions, 

but kiddos indulged with sugar lllusions

won't sleep. And now it is half past the hour, 

and mother, up late, is starting to sour,

and so as the hen scratch digs wounds on the page, 

she worries her ire is starting to rage, 

but despite all her kids and her spouse and chores, 

she finishes early, the manuscript soars!

from 'in progress' to 'finished'

my, what a delight, 

but now everyone's sleeping

she's up past midnight.

 So the New Year is gone, 

and the fireworks done, 

and now all she has left 

is to edit...

No fun. 

Hope everyone had a Happy New Year! :) 

Fiat Lux - Carry the Light

 

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Fiat Lux was the motto of my ("high school," to Americans) Queen's College in Bridgetown, Barbados. I remembered this recently when, while attempting to dust, I pulled out an old copy of The Oxford Book of Verse from the bookshelf and saw the motto on the cover. It was a school prize, for "good work in Form VI b" of which I'd been rather proud. I was a lonely ex-pat in those days and something of a "swot." Studying was how I filled my time as a "stranger in a strange land," while others were spending their free time with family and friends. 

What is the definition of that "light"? I used to believe--this being a school gift, after all--that this "light" was knowledge, and while that's certainly a way of looking at this motto, I'm beginning to see that the "light" mentioned here is perhaps a much simpler concept. Maybe it's just as simple as one word--Hope.

Reading an article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert, I was struck by this sentence: "Despair is unproductive. It's also a sin." Those two short sentences got me pondering, especially as I am someone who finds themselves often stuck in "the slough of despond," expecially after looking at the news. 

Spalding Gray in his "Swimming to Cambodia" speaks of "the cloud of Evil" which continually circles the world, waiting for an opening in which to manifest This image struck me powerfully. When people give up, believing that reality is "hopeless" or "impossible" to change, that attitude simply throws the door open for the Darkness, destroying people, communities, societies--even planets.  

What's is the opposite of despair, then? Hope, of course. In the words of the familiar little song:

 "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine..."

"Hope is being able to see that there is light, despite all the darkness."  

~Bishop Desmond Tutu

Maybe that particular light is the one we all carry, the ability to care for others, to share what we have. It can be as simple as a phone call to an aging relative or looking in on a elderly neighbor, or volunteering at a shelter, planting a tree or a garden.

"There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for." ~JRR Tolkien 

Sam Gamgee says these words to his comrade Frodo, whose heart is overflowing with terror and despair as he faces the completion of an apparently impossible task that will probably end his life--but may save to world.

Tolkien's fantasy is the old battle of Good & Evil, the central, familiar theme of all world religions.

"In a time of destruction, create something." ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Despair can be cast off through action, perhaps something as simple as cleaning, decluttering, writing a blog or a letter to the editor. Even if you feel defeated before you start and believe you aren't going to be able to make anything in your future better, you did take an action that can improve your immediate surroundings, or, at least, your state of mind. 

If it's just seems too pointless to clean or cook or write another letter to your  newspapers/political leaders, sit down and write a gratitude list. At first I scoffed at this practice, but consider. Perhaps you can find three things you are thankful for. 

If you are in a house, under a roof, more or less warm and with internet access and time to read this--well there's three luxuries right there. On a more basic level, most of us also have friends or family, even if they are far away. Most of mine, especially since Covid, are far away and inaccessible for various reasons, except through the 'net. You might talk to a friend, neighbor, to your cat/dog/bird. Write a poem. Greet the sun, admire the clouds or the birds/squirrels at your feeder, the local Canada Geese who have never learned to migrate.

Or, as I'm speaking here to readers and writers, talk to yourself! Begin to tell yourself a story, which is what I have done ever since I was little and feeling sad and alone.  

  Happy New Year!  

 ~~Juliet Waldron

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