Earth literacy is magic ✶ Sylvia Linsteadt

You mentioned peaceful braiding which Virginia also highlighted again and I think that's something that really seems to characterize your work and also the feminine like the braid and the weave and the tapestry and so often when it comes to how we engage with history or mythology it's done in such a like a materialist way that doesn't take into account like the embodied realities of what the past and ancestrality and history actually is and there's something so powerful about this embodied approach that you're taking to your research and then the use of these words like quest or unearthing or excavating and it's this kind of embodied archaeology of like what is what does this past what does it mean to us what does it mean to who I am and to the and to the world that I want to create now and there's such a massive disconnect from that reality the reality of these things in our in our usual methods of inquiry in our usual modes of learning and kind of research based on often a a hierarchy of sort based on based on a particular worldview which is the dominant one which is creating a lot of these issues that we have and as well to see it as a method of healing and like how is our study of the past the method of healing the present as well in the cultural way and which I which I love so maybe it would be a good opportunity now for you to sketch out a little bit this alternate origin story of a neolithic or pre-neolithic European history um like you use the word and you're writing like traces but like what are the traces that we can see and um and which are the ones that we're needing to reimagine as well um because I know that in often cases when particularly when it comes to practice like practices have been lost they weren't condemned and weren't protected so often there's this relationship of like trace but also the reimagining and how they interrelate and so yeah I would love you to share about that yeah yeah that was all very beautifully said and I so I guess what I would say is you know the place where I first really encountered this sense of an alternate origin story was when I found the work of Maria Gambutas the Lithuanian archaeologist um who's who was beginning to publish mainly in the 1950s and so she started out was interesting about her story is that she started out studying the bronze age and the bronze age um kurgan as it sometimes is called and as she called it at the time culture which was definitely a patriarchal warrior culture and she was very well respected in her field for this work that she did she was seen as a leading scholar she like you know she fled Lithuania during world war two with her doctorate doctoral phd manuscript under her arm came to the U.S. was an early professor or early like hired at Harvard early professor at UCLA very respected and she'd been studying these different burial mounds particularly across eastern Europe from the bronze age for a long time but what she noticed both from reading extensively across different site reports so different archaeological site reports that detail everything found at a site and also having been to different archaeological digs in those areas what she started to piece together was that there was like a substratum beneath the bronze age kurgan culture of a completely different pattern and this was a neolithic pattern that like the earth was like filled with small female figurines and beautiful elaborate pottery with iconography on it that was very very different than what came later burial patterns that were also very different that suggested not so in the later bronze age cultures you would see these the kurgans were these burial mounds that privileged a leading man who seemed to be in the you know regalia of a warrior or a king so there was like a celebration of war and violence and kingship and hierarchy and he had a lot of nice stuff with him other people didn't maybe sometimes he's buried with wives or slaves or horses etc and this earlier neolithic pattern and what I love about this is like this is a pattern in the earth that you can see from burial remains in these earlier neolithic cultures and particularly she was particularly studying them in eastern and southern Europe that was kind of her like area of best expertise it was really hard to tell what kind of hierarchies were going on if any it seemed to be that like older women had slightly more status objects in their graves so grandmother aged potentially for that time period like women in their 50s but still the regalia that they had wasn't like extremely luscious compared to everyone else so based on all of this evidence this idea sprang for her from the evidence as opposed to her applying a kind of utopian ideal upon what she was seeing which is I think something she's later been accused of but she like in it like a tracker like an animal tracker actually she just studied and studied and studied the traces until she was like wow I think there's a pattern this is a pattern not just in the present day Ukraine not just these are different places not just in Bulgaria but like wow we're really seeing it through Greece in Anatolia up through the Balkans and then in different ways heading further up into Europe in this time period and so she then turned her work toward these histories because it was so rich and really hadn't been studied much and the minute she did that and it's really interesting to observe this kind of in the like in the story of her publishing as well the first time she published about this was in a book called the gods and goddesses of old Europe I forget the date of this and I think shortly after she changed the title of the book to the goddesses and gods of old Europe and even just that change I mean this is so kind of shocking it's like so obvious and kind of embarrassing that this is all it would take but that one switch made kind of the academic world male dominated especially at that time totally like start to ridicule her and just belittle things about what she was saying and undercut even though before this her work had been very respected and so at the same time this was happening that she was finding this work of this kind of alternate deeper origin story going on the second wave of feminism was also kind of stirring and so many women turned to Maria as like almost a mother goddess of this older cosmology which didn't do great things for her academic reputation though it did beautiful things for many many women and artists and all sorts so you know what I find fascinating is that the evidence is really so deep in the ground for something anyway that's not patriarchal like there's there's different ways to interpret exactly specifically what she was finding but the overall pattern is so different and so oriented toward regeneration regenerative forces in the earth interdependence between all genders of people and all beings and then this is also something that we can trace back to the paleolithic in different ways but I won't go into that right now I'll just leave it there. Thank you Sylvia. You mentioned about the artist the second wave feminism and the artist that conspired and I was wanting to do a little call out to Judy Chicago's Dinner Party which maybe some people have seen which is such a beautiful rendering of this revival of like recognition of the ancient female lines and it's in New York and there's also an exhibition of hers currently in London it's a beautiful celebration of this of this alternate history and something that's so interesting when it comes to history and like recognized history what what goes into the history but what is validated and seen as fact and truth within our current context and why she was seen as threatening or or or didn't fit that didn't fit that paradigm I find the interesting thing is where else we find history where else we find these ancestral traces and one is obviously story and myth and fairy tale fairy tale is probably in the European context like one of the most direct ways because it was that oral storytelling of mothers to children rooted in archetypal relations and ident constructions of identity and and pro times and moments transitionary moments in life often and and so I wonder like I know this has been a piece of your research as well and I would love to explore a little bit around this field and how we can read through the lines of dominant interpretations to see how fairy tales encode these indigenous mother lines of memory yes yeah I was thinking about this a little bit earlier today and just you know the way that what you said about just before I answer that directly what you said about fairy tales you know being passed from mother to child or grandmother to children I don't remember where I read this it might have been P.L. Travers who was a wonderful mythologist she wrote Mary Poppins actually saying that it's like fairy tales got almost the the deep myths of Europe got protected within fairy tales and within the nursery so to speak because oh they're just children's stories so nobody ever could quite erase them you know because they were just at a certain point this happened I also think it's impossible to erase them because they're so native to us all humans as storytelling creatures but in terms of European fairy tales there's a root right back and even I think in some ways were the first guides for me in thinking this way and and the one that first comes to mind is called the White Bear King Valamon White Bear King okay but it's a Norwegian fairy tale another version of it is East of the Sun West of the Moon which maybe many people will be more familiar with that story name and so in this story just very briefly there's a basically a princess who the third daughter who marries a bear I'll be very brief about it I don't want to take too much time describing the whole story but she she has this longing in this dream that none of the other daughters of the king have for this golden wreath that she dreams of and all the jewelers in the kingdom can't recreate this wreath that she longs for and so one day she's out in the forest wandering around and there's this bear holding the wreath and you know he says the only way you can have this wreath is if you marry me so she agrees she goes off into the woods with him into his palace at night he becomes a man and this is kind of the like sanitized European later European pattern in this story anyway eventually she disobeys something that he's told her not to do which is to look at him when he's sleeping because she can never see who he is at night when he's a man by day he's a bear she looks he's taken from her he has to like go off to the troll queen who's cursed him etc etc she goes on this long journey to be reunited with him so this story has absolutely deep roots in very very ancient woman who married a bear story patterns and there's a really great book actually that just came out and all the different threads back through Sami stories in far northern Europe Finnish traditions down through central Europe down into Greece there's many different ancient bear mother mythologies memories mother bear figurines from very early old Europe like 6000 BC in Bulgaria like all over the place and this woman who married a bear story it actually I mean it it spans the earth in certain ways but it is also deeply rooted in paleolithic European ground and it survives all the way within that Norwegian fairy tale whenever that was collected in the late 1800s and so that's one that springs to mind another that comes to mind is a little bit stranger darker fairy tale the juniper tree which the brothers Graham collected I don't know if you know this fairy tale but it's kind of a favorite of mine even though it's full of like strange cannibalism and a stepmother killing her stepson but the there's something about it that I haven't I haven't all the way unpacked it yet actually but it's like it draws me in over and over again with this woman longing for a child who keeps going out under this juniper tree in her garden and like almost in this longing that she keeps speaking to the juniper tree she finally kind of miraculously conceives a child and then she's like eating the juniper berries it's very strange in that fairy tale way she's eating the juniper berries and dies in childbirth but gives birth to this son who is later well so she's buried beneath the juniper tree her bones are beneath it so that image alone I'm like all right juniper tree mother's bones beneath the juniper tree juniper tree has such old magic across Europe and deep into the paleolithic actually like there's evidence that the torches that were carried down into the caves the beautiful painted caves you know the paleolithic were had fuses made of juniper wood there's something about the way it burned or juniper something a juniper fuse and so there's something about this like deeply medicinal magical shamanic juniper plant tree the mother's bones beneath it and then later when all this like really hard stuff happens in the fairy tale the little girl who's actually not that mother's daughter but the stepmother's daughter she goes repeatedly to that tree asking for help from kind of the good the original mother and the bones the juniper and this bird who is her brother who's been killed transformed all kind of conspire to bring healing and rebirth and like a happy ending so anyway this story just like it's haunting it's like haunted with the memory of something else of a mother's bones under a tree of ancestral worship almost of a mother but it's so piecemeal there that it's kind of like an archaeological site itself but you can feel it moving the bird the tree the bones anyway that one's like kind of in process for me when I think about it so those are two that I would share thank you Sylvia I am I adore listening to you tell those fairy tales and how sensorial fairy tales are I've forgotten that about ingestion and and and taste and smells and the physical experience of something in the process of change and transformation and I was also reflecting a little bit when you were speaking it was something around relationship with land it was about how many histories can coexist alongside each other like this braid and I think one of the great shames is the sense also of this pre-patriarchal patriarchal and we're forgetting the existence of that thread and that braid that is existing now very in a little way to today and in ancient history but also less ancient history there has been a recognition and a celebration of this matrilineal way of being and I feel like one of the great shames is this erasure of this history and of this of this reality that has coexisted and coexists and it's a and the excavation how it starts and it traces back but in the process of finding and and giving again a name to this pre-patriarchal old European memory how we can then celebrate its continued reality and its continued existence from through time from that point and about reorienting ourselves around this idea of multiplicity on that front and many truths coexisting and I think it also helps us to recognize that it's a direct connection and and how we can then celebrate that then and then when it comes back to land and place I kind of I wanted you to touch on your personal which you mentioned at the beginning your personal relationship with with land and ecology and ecological study as well as nature connection animal tracking and bird language which you mentioned and how these broaden out your experience of land and place and time memory history and what role they have in this interrelationship in a time when they're yeah thank you well and also just um I just really appreciate that reminder of the beautiful coexistence of all of these stories at once like this great soup of them and it just I just wanted to speak to the fact that for example in textile traditions often you see motifs that have just remained almost exactly the same from like a Minoan like Cretan vessel down to Cretan women's weaving in the 1970s that's like 4,000 years of just an image remaining having you know a value still like the tree of life is one of them with a tree and a bird in it actually as it happened so in terms of the animal tracking and nature connection in certain ways I would say it's kind of my center point in my life and also in terms of how I understand everything that I do and write because I feel like without it I'm just kind of a disembodied floating brain and there's so many different things I could say about this I'm trying to figure out like what is the most important thing to share there's actually one story that's coming to mind in terms of kind of this journey for me in my life and so when I was 16 and 17 but the first time when I was 16 my high school this was like very progressive offered wilderness rites of passage but they called them vision quests at the time which was somewhat appropriative but so a wilderness fast where we went out for three days and three nights in Death Valley in the desert and fasted which is you know an initiation practice that happens across Indigenous North America but also there's a history of it in Europe as well and one of the guides had this water bottle that had this beautiful cordage woven all around it and I was asking him on the long drive down to Death Valley like wow what is that like beautiful cord and he said it was woven from spun from nettle stinging nettle and I am at that point this was like one of my first introductions into like deep land time was in high school at age 15 and 16 but I had grown up on fairy tales and grown up with this love of fantasy novels as well fantasy but specifically like that felt historical and it felt historically rooted actually in Europe because I think I was hungry for that ancestral story and hungry for the magic that I felt in fairy tales and in fantasy like that where women could speak to animals where women shape-shifted into animals where you know the sister this is from the six swans fairy tale and this is where the nettle comes in a sister can weave her brother's shirts of nettle and turn them back from swans into men and it was at this around this age due to this like deep land time that I was like so lucky to get at that age that I started to see that the magic that I was longing for from those seemingly fantasy novels and fairy tales that I thought couldn't put like a woman can't really talk to an animal right like she can't I started to realize that actually deep earth literacy is the magic like it is the magic and so anyways I'm in the van with this guide and he tells me it's stinging nettle and I'm like what this was like one of the most mind-blowing moments of my life at that point I did not I had no concept that people spun things from stinging nettle that like I couldn't believe it I was like but this is the six swans fairy tale don't you realize and he didn't know what I was talking about but it was like this moment where these two worlds came together for me and I saw how deeply deeply listening and learning like not just listening but actually studying the patterns of animal feet and what marks they make on the land and all the different subtle differences and bird sounds and bird language are the kind of the magic key that opened the story of the actual ecology around you to you and it's it's a long study like I studied for many years in my 20s and I'm by no means an amazing expert but went through certification and just was like really devoted to it for a while because it felt to me that if I did not wherever I was as a writer so in California I did this the most but I did my best when I was living in Crete and I'm learning here if I'm not rooted to those stories of the more than human as David Abrams has called it the more than human world the living world all around me I'm not telling full embodied rooted stories like I don't want to hear more humans talking about humans like this kind of narrative monologue that we have with just our own species treating everything else as an object and not a subject in its own right you know belonging within the great play of our of our novels of our short stories of everything this is what got us here and so I just yeah felt very strongly from about age 18 maybe like when all of this was unfolding in me that like if I don't know what's going on ecologically around me I'm not telling the whole story and of course I can never tell the whole story right but like I have a duty to listen humbly as best I can and do my best with it right so and the other thing I just want to say about tracking is that I have never felt more mentally well like we're just like mentally healthy as when I was in my deepest animal tracking training it just made everything else go quiet as I'm saying this I'm like I need to like go back into that kind of big training again because to be so focused on minutiae in on a sand dune trying to tell like okay is this a coyote yes this is a coyote track was were they leaning a little bit more into this toe because they heard something and were looking that way for a moment or like how can I tell how long ago this track was here etc like that level of focus that uses like a lot of brain power but also kind of the full-bodied the full body as an instrument of receptivity and integration and knowledge like it felt like