The Storytellers Goddess Part 27

But not so long ago, people began to find little figures of Astarte deep in the ground in the place where Sal's city stood so long ago.

"Who could this be?" they asked themselves. And slowly they pieced together the story of the Great Star Mother.

"She's still here," they say to each other.

"She's still here after all this time."

Lamia (LA-mce-uh) Snake Woman (North Africa) Introduction Lamia is ancient as the Snake Herself in the desert-oasis land of Libya, once the name of all of northern Africa except for Egypt. Most probably She was wors.h.i.+ped by Libyan-Berber peoples, a light-skinned, nomadic group of Africans whose descendants still herd camels, goats, and sheep in the Sahara and the mountainous areas of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

a.s.sociated historically with the ancient G.o.ddess-wors.h.i.+ping Amazons of Herodotus's history, the Berbers today are connected with North Africa's Tuareg people. The position of the Tuareg woman is unique in the Islamic world. Veilless, she is able to demand monogamy and divorce. She marries relatively late, and enjoys an unguarded s.e.xual life prior to marriage. Guardian of tradition, she writes tribal script, keeps alive legend, myth, and song, and is expert user of herbal cures. Succession is through her line, rather than her husband's.

The ancient Greeks were greatly influenced by the Libyans. They borrowed Lamia for stories of their own making, stories that not so much stripped the G.o.ddess of Her power, but eroded the people's relations.h.i.+p with Her so that it no longer challenged them to probe Her endlessly renewing mystery. Medusa is the Greek name for Lamia; the Serpent G.o.ddess is known too as Neith, Athene, Anatha, Buto, and, in ancient Babylonia, Lamashtu. Called Mother of G.o.ds, Daughter of Heaven, and Great Lady, Her name was used in the European Middle Ages as a general term for witch or demon in the shape of woman.

I collect and write the stories in this book in the context of a patriarchy under increasing pressure to change. The stories are also branded with my reaction to my fundamentalist Christian background and my intense interest in feminism, spirituality, and mythology itself.

Historically, tellers of the story of the Snake G.o.ddess Lamia were similarly affected by cultural pressures, personal histories, and particular audiences. The story of Lamia in this collection is my version of how their versions perhaps developed.

All powerful archetypes undergo tremendous change as current cultural forces shape them. We may glimpse the power the G.o.ddess once held just by observing the breadth and depth of changes wrought on Her mythologies. Changes in the story of the Snake Woman G.o.ddess are particularly exemplary. The snake, once unquestionably revered, underwent a stunning reversal of status. From reverence to revulsion, from mystery to mockery She fell. Only forces of disrespect, misuse, and cruelty could have been at work in the lives of people who began to view the snake's transforming power as evil rather than awesome.

Pictures and readings about the snake can invoke Lamia. This G.o.ddess in my life is the agony and beauty of changing slowly and absolutely.

How the People of Today Have Two Stories EVER SINCE THE beginning, fear of Lamia, the Snake Woman, has coiled in the bellies of all who sense Her majesty and mystery. She may be tensed and swaying, upright in readiness. She may unhinge Her jaws and swallow a fat and complex life into Her own thin, simple length. We watch Her, and our fingernails dig into the soft flesh of our palms. And when She lies white as death, with eyes blind and darting tongue still, our own eyes turn deep into the unanswered, and we are afraid. We look in wonder when She climbs without arms or legs from Her dull and brittle coat into the new one soft and vividly colored. We are relieved. She is alive. We are full of hope. She returns again. But we feel afraid. Yes, with Lamia, Snake Woman of the deepest dance we know, we are a little afraid. It has always been so!

It was so at the beginning of the First People. They were the people of the limitless dunes at the edge of the stunning blue sea, the people of the cliffs bordering on the dry rivers. They were the people who observed and copied their Snake Woman to receive the gift of the oasis.

There in the land where the wind blows in yellow pillars and the heat is cruel, the First People in the desolate morning formed a great circle with Snake Woman at their center. They held hands and danced to the drums that copied the slow beat of Lamia's heart. The First People's dance was measured and even, and Snake Woman, head and neck hidden by a cloth, sang and swayed at the center.

"Who are you, Lamia?" the First People called to Her, wondering and afraid, pitching their voices low, sedate, and simple like the body of the Snake at the center.

"Copy Me and you shall see," answered Lamia over and over again.

The First People paced out Her rhythm again and again, smoldering, undulating, bodies and voices turning in exhausted circles, slinking toward the afternoon.

"Who are we, Lamia?" the people sang.

"Copy Me and you shall see," answered Snake Woman.

The people trickled out their sound and their sweat. Their feet and their hair turned hot and limp. And when the sun stood finally at the bottom of the sky, the desert blossomed. The dunes were dahlia red, the sand floor mustard yellow. The hills turned coral and violet, and the stepping people spoke by turns.

"She is the Deep and the Wet One."

"She is the Necklace of Life under the sand."

"We are the jewel keepers."

"We are the builders of the vats."

When the dark came, then, the sky blazed with stars, the drums grew silent, and Lamia's people dreamed of plumbing the underground water for the figs, palms, oranges, pomegranates, and almonds of the oasis.

Lamia's First People drew from the basin of Her rocks Her water gift.

From those precious wells came the moisture to grow the barley, the wheat, the millet, the onions, and the tomatoes beside the skeletons of riverbeds and streams. The size of the oasis grew by trees, and in grat.i.tude and wisdom Her First People continued to copy Her rhythm.

The First People of Lamia copied Her deadness. They unhinged their jaws to mimic Her swallowing of life. They lay without moving or moaning.

"You are like the ghibli winds," they sang to Her.

"You leave nothing living, not even the fetus in the mother's womb."

The People copied Lamia new and large and young again.

"You are like the winds of the north," they crooned.

"Your waters draw shrubs from the Earth for our sheep to feed on. You make us fertile, You make us virile, You fill our children with strength."

"It has always been so," went the hymn.

"It has always been so!"

One day it happened that a s.h.i.+p blew from the north over the sea. The s.h.i.+p, bound for trading with the People of Lamia, carried on it a sailor who entertained his brothers with stories he wove from the boredom and novelty of his adventures. The teller's quick words sometimes reminded his listeners of a child who works to comfort himself in the midst of fear.

Orestes, the teller, was a small man with a scurrying gait. His hands busied themselves with carving or smoking or mending, and he asked his listeners often, "Do you know what I mean?" They answered as often that they did; their a.s.surances encouraged him to continue and told this nervous, sweet-eyed man that all was well a little while longer.

The words of Orestes were fantastic, enchanting, and tragic. His tales could drive away hunger, shorten the night, and take the pain out of a las.h.i.+ng. Orestes said that's just why he told stories. Stories and mead, he said, could both numb the agony. He told of slaves yoked neck to neck, herded bare of foot over sharp rocks, the dead and ill cut away at night and left to make mountains of skulls at the crossings of the roads. Paradise, said Orestes, was a cave dripped over by a veil of tears. Like crystals, you could look through them and reach endlessly for what could have been but never will be. Orestes told of the caves of the Pythoness, the oracle at Delphi, who sees the future of kings in a cup of blood poured out of the moon and keeps Her children in soft-sh.e.l.led eggs under Her heart. He told of s.h.i.+ps that could fly and nectars shared by truced armies at banquets before the slaughters of betrayal began.

And privately, to his sad-eyed companion, the farmer boy with the tremulous, constant smile, the teller spoke of his mother, slave of the inner house, who nestled him sometimes and beat him at others, and whose food turned to poison if he tried to eat too much of it.

Sometimes there were whippings that left him for dead, "but all you can do," said Orestes, "is survive. Do you know what I mean?" The boy would smile and lean down against the outstretched leg of his friend and hold Orestes's ankle for a while in his rough young hand.

The day the s.h.i.+p docked on the northern coast of Africa, Orestes gave his two gold coins to his blond companion for safekeeping.

"You keep these so's I won't drink too much," he said. The boy concealed them with a nicker of understanding in his pale eyes, and the two sailors went ash.o.r.e to the traders' settlement at the edge of the land of the People of Lamia.

The keeper of the inn there was a muscular man with blue veins twining his forearms when he lifted pots of stew in his kitchen. He liked the stories of Orestes and so let him sweep and wash the cooking pots in exchange for his supper and a jug of mead. Orestes appreciated more than the food. He admired the innkeeper, and he borrowed the big man's tireless strength for the hero of new stories that he spun by the side of the fire for the evenings' boisterous customers.

Orestes, however, didn't take his bed at the inn. The air was too close there, he said. So he carried his jug and his blanket and slept with his companion under the dome of the sky. For the sky here in this strange land was king; and in its giant starry blackness pulsed a peace that thickened and melted around the two sailors as they drank and finally slept.

On a blinding blue day that followed a night of stories and mead, Orestes and his friend discovered the oasis. Throbbing from the night's liquor, the man and boy walked in the searing heat until they came upon that place of green and water. Here, in this infernal land was shade and rest. And possibly more mead, thought Orestes, to mend this morning's sickness.

But the sailors found themselves calmed and frightened at the same time. For the People of Lamia had begun Her dance. Women and men alternating, holding hands in a circle. Slowly moving about the Snake at the center.

The sailors stared. Head and neck covered by a cloth, this center Snake raised Herself upright, coiling and swaying. With these people weaving steady and certain around Her, the Snake was still again. The sky pounded with the drum from the heart of the circle. In and out the people moved, close now, back, close again, sweat in curls down their faces and sides. Slowly, out and in, facing this Snake, pacing a pattern on the sand, the circle slithered and twisted, and the feet measured their rhythm into a sound that grew steady and smooth as the rain on a rock.

Orestes felt his head reel. The Snake at the center became like Woman to him, alive now and beautiful, then dead and unreachable. The dancers were the snakes now, twisting and ancient, lethargic as water, turning endlessly around this lunging, quiet beauty at the center Who held not just men, but women also, to Her bottomless flow of movement.

Orestes and the boy could not understand the language of the People of Lamia. They could not know that Her People gained Her strength by imitating Her, that they knew Her answers by taking Her shape. Orestes and the boy understood little of this slowness; their own people's dances were speedy and wild.

Something terrified stirred in Orestes, and he began to shake. In the midst of the heat, his teeth chattered. The boy looked at the dancers and at the face of his friend. It was crumpled as a child's, and the boy, not smiling now, led Orestes by one chilled hand away from the oasis and back across the land to the sea. The boy made a fire and wrapped Orestes in two blankets. Then he held the man's hands.

"What happened?" asked the boy. Orestes didn't know. He could only say how strange it was, women dancing with men that way, and the Snake so pulsing at the center.

"It was like a dream, do you know what I mean?" said Orestes.