We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth.

- Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess

Here is a wild idea, a needle to mend a hole inside, a thread to reweave our collective memory. I believe that Baba Yaga—the old woman who lives in a bone house with chicken feet, who travels through the night in a mortar and pestle—is at least as old as the Neolithic. She is a thread stretching back through time, from here to the spindles and temple fires of Old Europe (the civilization so-named by Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas*). I believe there are threads hidden in plain sight in fairy-tale and myth that unwind back through time, that reveal the dark, beautiful streams of a European heritage older than patriarchy, older than thunder-gods and warlords, as old as the red ochre lionesses and holy vulvas of the Ice Age caves.

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In this second Witchlines unit, we will attempt to unravel the weave of patriarchy from three old stories, and examine what we are left with—a luminous spool of gold extending back through the ages..

Together we will explore the Hellenic Greek myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, a Russian Baba Yaga tale known as The Frog Princess, and the Scandinavian fairy tale The White Bear King Valemon. We will be, in a sense, excavating these fairy tales, becoming archaeologists of symbol, theme and memory.

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This is possibly a foolhardy undertaking. Surely nothing like this can ever be proved. But it can be felt, observed, explored, intuited. I believe that these threads are still stitched deep through our dreams as well as the stories that we’ve inherited as Western fairytale and myth. They reach back through time, beyond the colonization of the "New World," beyond the burning of witches across the European continent, beyond the Roman legions who spread their law through the wild tribes of mountain, valley and island, deeper than classical Greece and the so-called intellectual foundations of the Western world, beyond the millennium of migration, violence and language change brought by Indo-European speakers from the steppes—beyond the creation stories that say two brothers who stole a sacred cow created the universe, or that the bodies of women were made from the bones or thighs or skulls of men. Still deeper the threads twine, right back to the vessels of Old Europe, right back to the hearthstones of women and men who, for all their human flaws, knew to worship first above all things the regenerative forces of the earth, and who had done so since the first lions were painted on the walls of caves.

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These are the witchlines. We are weavers, following the threads back through time so that they can be respun in our psyches, our bodies and our world. So that we can reweave our collective memory, and spin a wiser future.

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* see main website page for more information about Gimbutas and her work

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