Söndagskrönika
Embracing the Dark Feminine: Life, Sex, and Death in the Springtime
Ola Grabowski @thesecretlifeofski
Every year as the damp, defrosting earth loses its hardened crust, a flurry of spring flowers ripple up into bright clouds of soft petals before quickly crumpling back into the soil for dormancy. Most of these blooms exist only over the course of a few short weeks, floral counterparts to the many insects whose adult lives are short-lived flashes of ecstasy and egg-laying to make way for the next generation. Some of them don’t even have functional mouthparts or digestive systems and do not eat as adults (such as luna moths, atlas moths and others within the Lepidoptera order). These annual rhythms of life, sex and death that unfurl underfoot and overhead as we finally begin to peel off layer upon layer of outerwear serve as reminders of some of the most central rules on this plane of existence.
Tides rise and fall, seasons flutter into one another. Your youngest nieces and nephews go off to school, your dog loses the puppy shine in its eyes, you fall out of touch with the friends you once had and in turn make new ones. Our world is characterized most perhaps by its ephemerality, a fancy word simply meaning that things are temporary. Everything will one day change, will come to an end in one form or another. The passage of time continues for all of us, constantly coiling over itself in sprawling cycles. Death in all forms will come, but death and rebirth are two sides of the same coin. There is beauty in this, and I have been working towards finding the wonder in these darker aspects of our existence in order to appreciate and see the full beauty of the light. Looking towards nature itself has been a daily practice for this, as our natural environments often do not align with our human ideas of beauty.
Most animals interact with each other in ways that would be seen as absolutely horrifying
when viewed through the lens of contemporary human ethics. Mushrooms billowing from tree
trunks are often signs of late stage fungal diseases culling trees. Sun-bleached deer bones poke
out from forest floors and gauzy butterflies perch on the rotting flesh of roadkill, eating their fill.
Yet there can be so much joy found in these things, in the balancing rhythms of decomposition
and one life bringing sustenance to another. The awakening of spring brings all of these
elements together tangibly. Before the advent of the current Gregorian calendar, countless
peoples celebrated spring as the beginning of a new year rather than early January. Many
cultures still celebrate the beginning of a new annual period in spring, from the Persian Nowruz
on the spring equinox to the Chinese Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival as it is
typically celebrated when high winter begins to wane.
In Polish and Slavic regional folk practice, straw dolls typically called some variation of “Marzanna” (also Dziewanna, Śmiercicha and beyond) are festooned with flowers and dressed in womens clothing. They are paraded around and then tossed into local bodies of water, a drowning to call in the changing of the season. Oftentimes the Marzanna is also lit aflame or torn apart by onlookers before getting drowned. Nowadays this practice is linked to the vernal equinox in late March, although it is probably a mixing of different folk practices that also occurred in June with the transition from spring to summer.1 The Marzanna is sometimes seen as a keeper of keys, holding the golden key to seasonal change.2 References from the Middle Ages note that drowning the Marzanna may also have been a practice of people displaying the renunciation of pagan deities upon Christianization.1In some locations the practice was even further Catholicized, changing over time into a drowning of “Judas.”3 There is scholarship around the straw Marzanna doll’s connection to a female Slavic deity known as Marzana (or Morena, Mora) which was tied to death, darkness, and the general ills of winter.4
Both fire and water here act as destructive yet purifying agents. Water is capable of great destruction through torrential floods and stormy seas alike. Yet water is also linked to fertility and renewal, being a necessary factor in bringing about new harvests. Fire is likewise a creative force exemplifying the nourishing rays of the sun. The flames of fire can cause havoc and death while at the same time returning nutrients to the soil and fertilizing ecosystems. This creation through destruction is echoed in the burning of large bonfires to this day during Northern European celebrations of Valborg (Walpurgis night) on the last day of April, as well as Midsummer (St. John’s Eve) in late June. Destruction and purification intertwine with fertility, and life and death shine as one.
Although the drowning of the Marzanna is still actively conducted in some Slavic towns, in recent decades the practice has also been taken on by schoolteachers as a lesson for children on folklore and seasonal changes. I myself remember fashioning a makeshift Marzanna doll with my childhood classmates in the dim fluorescent hallways of Polish Saturday school on the Northwest side of Chicago. Ruminating on this practice of drowning the Marzanna, I fell down a rabbit hole of overlapping connections among different cultures’ representations of dark feminine deities. Of the feminine harbingers of death, life, sex, transition, and the unending spiral of time.
Kali Ma, the dark mother, is a Hindu goddess and manifestation of the Divine Feminine Shakti who appears in many forms, embodying time, space and the essence of change.5 She is like a black hole, the void that is an all-powerful creative force but also capable of great destruction.6 This is a “pregnant nothingness,” the infinity formed by all things in the universe collapsing in on themselves.7,8 Kali Ma is a destroyer of evil and protector of her children. She is equally the gentle, compassionate love and unconditional kindness of a mother but also the divine rage and power of a mother. She is the complexity, strength, joy, and fury of a woman, the dark feminine energy that exists within all of us. Kali Ma dwells inside human bodies as Kundalini energy, a dormant serpent twisting around the root chakra that can be carefully awakened.9
A string of human skulls (or severed heads) hangs around Kali Ma’s neck, reminding us of our own mortality in order to help bestow moksha, or liberate us.8 This liberation is from saṃsāra, the cyclical worlds of death and rebirth that we continually return to learn from. One of Kali Ma’s forms, Shashan Kali, dwells most often in cemeteries and cremation grounds, flitting among ghosts and the dead.10In some locations, such as Faridpur District and town in Bangladesh, mud statues of Kali Ma are also given water burials via immersion in Ma Ganga, Kali Ma’s river sister, as the spirits of some of the statues die annually.10
Kali Ma’s form as Chinnamastā is depicted on the cremation ground as well, although often either alongside two other deities having sex or sometimes copulating with a deity while decapitating herself.5, 10, 11In this way, “the relation between cemeteries and sex is a symbol of the living creation. Chinnamastā represents the truth that ‘life, sex and death are part of an interdependent, unified system…life feeds on death, is nourished by death, and necessitates death and the ultimate destiny of sex is to perpetuate more life, which in turn will decay and die in order to feed more life.’”10, 11
There is a great thread snaking across these concepts that I can’t stop pulling on as spring warmth begins to coat the air. The dark feminine is found not only in Kali Ma and the burning of the Marzanna but also across endless times and cultures. Hecate, the ancient Greek goddess connected with witchcraft and death is also seen as the keeper of keys, a darkly powerful entity who is associated with transitional spaces like crossroads.12, 13 The old Celtic dark crone of winter was known as “Cailleach… the Great Goddess in her Destroyer aspect.”5 Mother Mary’s shadowy face shines from gilded frames in churches worldwide as the Black Madonna. Dark, fertile soils and inky blue oceans shimmer together to form our own Mother Earth. The foundations of proto-Indo-European language and story branch into a vast tapestry of underworld mycelium, reaching out probingly with their delicate fungal hyphae to remind us of fundamental principles.
Spring is a time of addressing the dark feminine, a celebration of fertility and rebirth alongside the death of winter, a literal and figurative burning and drowning of the past to give way to new beginnings. Finding beauty in this external darkness of the world reflects the need to embrace the darkness within ourselves as well. To find those parts of us that bring out the most shame, to face what makes us unbearably angry. To look at the things that disgust us most about other people and the world and realize how they mirror our own thoughts and actions back at us. To think about the worst parts of our lives in a different light, to feel and acknowledge their pain but also their lessons.
We must experience everything. Not just the good. But degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole…makes us people of substance… Then we can know the world. And when we know the world, the world is ours.
-Swiney, Parisian Madame from Yorgos Lanthimos’ film Poor Things
It is with this acceptance of the darkness that we can move forward in our own lives. Acknowledgement can help transform destructive shame, fear, and anger into strengthened self-compassion, balanced empathy for others, and meaningful action. So this spring, I call on everyone to ponder their own dark feminine. To look within in order to find power and joy, just as you find joy in the brief glory of the spring ephemeral flowers dotting the ground.
Appell och LPPES är politiskt och religiöst obundna, ställningstaganden i artiklar är skribenternas egna och ej föreningens.
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2. Łuczyński, M. (2008). Kognitywna definicja Marzanny: Próba rekonstrukcji fragmentu tradycyjnego mitologicznego obrazu Świata Słowian. Studia mythologica Slavica (Tiskana izd), (11), 173-196.
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8. Nikam, S. V. (2023). A Semiotic Perspective on the Representation of the Hindu Goddess Kali. The Material Merge, 1(1), 45-50.
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11. Kinsley, D. R. (1998). Tantric visions of the divine feminine: The ten Mahāvidyās. Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
12. Boedeker, D. (1983). Hecate: a transfunctional goddess in the Theogony? Transactions of the American Philological Association, 113, 79-93.
13. Henrichs, A. (2015). Hecate. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Classics.