In the Beginning
By: Katie Langley
Tags: Gender, Origin Stories, Curiosity, Mythology, Misogyny

Not Wooly Mammoths; Maasai Mara, Kenya

In the beginning was an idea.

Before speech and language, eons and ages before we crafted grunting and grammar into poetry and song, we sniffed and snorfled into some kind of human consciousness, some kind of startled awe. Daily surrounded by creation, destruction and some Snuffleapagus-adorable wooly mammoths, we survived through keen attention and primal sensuality, evolving into our finest selves through an interdependence long since forgotten. The nature of our existence, the electrical current of our origins and the raw material we share with so many of our Pleistocene ancestors, is curiosity.

This is stunning, spectacular! Gifted wild wonder as inheritance, astonishment and bewilderment our natural state, we are born one and all, ordinary mystics. Curiosity transforms our fantasy to form, imagination to love potions and foolhardy dreams to reality. Our curiosity gifts us with all the things we know, and maybe even more vitally, a lust for all the things we don’t. Curiosity is our choice, and in a time of such unprecedented hostility, our best hope for reconciliation.

Sadly though, our admittance to adulthood is often contingent on censoring curiosity and suppressing surprise; we are trained to suspect the unknown and oppose discovery, especially when it falls outside the crushing cultural norms that dictate who we’re allowed to be and what we’re allowed to think.

I think this is our inheritance, too.

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in nature. ~Freya Stark

Because if you believe any of the Western origin stories as told exclusively by men, a woman was curious, which made her very very evil indeed, and the world was destroyed, cursed, ended.

Dominant culture teaches that despite her inferior status to Adam, Eve had the audacity to not only disobey (male) God and eat the forbidden fruit, but to seduce Adam to do the same. Enter sin, eternal damnation, etc. etc. This crusty old narrative has been used for millennia to prove the wickedness of women, to teach us to hate and hide our shameful bodies, to convince us we’re filthy for menstruating. Eve is why you’re a bossy bitch and not a leader and how your church leader convinces you to submit to your husband’s authority and mistrust your own. Even the diet industry has this narrative of Eve to blame, coopting the language of the forbidden fruit to keep us restricted and starving and paying billions of dollars each year to be punished for it. (Sidebar: You are not bad, or wrong, or deserving of punishment, ever ever ever for eating. Stop beating yourself up, stop apologizing, and eat the damn cake.)

When I imagine Eve however, I feel expansive and hopeful and full of great courage. I think of her as a renegade, a woman who trusted her instincts and thought for herself. Confident and capable, she used her voice and engaged with someone long considered by many cultures to be the personification of divine wisdom in serpent form. Eve chose to follow the lead of her creative power to not only become the “mother of all things”, but to craft her life precisely as she wanted. What a world we’d create with just a skosh of her moxie!

From the Greek pantheon of the gods we learn next about Pandora, the first woman created by Zeus to punish mankind for Prometheus’ disobedience, beautiful on the outside and full of evil curiosity on the inside. Gifted an urn she was forbidden to open as punishment for her curiosity, she found herself unable to resist and thus unleashed despair and destruction into the world damning us all to hell on earth. I dare you to find a single woman who hasn’t been humiliated in the classroom for asking a question, taught to pretend she was less intelligent for the sake of the boys’ feelings, or ignored when raising her hand. We take the fall, they take credit, and we swallow our fury and internalize it as normal, our gendered prerequisite.

What’s less often mentioned in the dominant narrative is that Pandora also had the discernment to wrangle hope as the rest of the miserable fates galloped off into the sunset; Pandora subverted an entire pantheon of grouchy gods through her intelligence and quick wit and saved us all. She is the great giver of life and death, the embodiment of all the grubby glory that makes us human. Pandora knows herself and so trusts herself, and I trust her, too.

Creation and destruction are one, to the eyes who can see beauty. ~Savitri Devi

Next in our travels through the male annals of mythos we meet Gaia. Considered one of the first divinities in the Greek tradition, Gaia was a primordial goddess, the embodiment of perfect form as Mother Earth birthed from Chaos and the mother of mountains, sky and sea, of heaven and hell and all the rest of us. She was power incarnate, our creator and source, but instead of devotion, the gods cruelly threatened her instead. And in the way of all mothers ever since, she harnessed her outrage and fought back.

The embodiment of life cycles and seasons, Gaia used her power to imbue us with sanctity and breathe us into sacred. She was generosity incarnate, gifting us chubby-cheeked quokkas and butterball bumblebees, otherworldly octopi and holy-moly-hilarious blobfish. In her infinite benevolence, Gaia packed more kooky life and magical mystery into our pristine little planet than we’ll ever know-or live long enough-to find out.

The original crusader against injustice, Gaia today is suffering. Desperate to save her creation from extinction, she valiantly fights to protect herself from our plundering greed and exploitive desecration. In the most urgent existential reckoning we’ll ever face, we are confronted with our responsibility to come to her rescue like she has, for all of time, come to ours. The time is now to restore our devotion to Mother Earth; her survival (and ours) depends on it.

Mother Earth, Kaikōura Beach, New Zealand

And finally, lesser-known but one of my personal favorites, we come to Hecate. Known most commonly as a ragged old crone wandering cemeteries as the goddess of ghosts and witchcraft, she is written into lore and literature as ominous, frightening, malevolent, often with three distinct animal heads. Associated with the occult and even occasionally necromancy, Hecate was one to fear, one to avoid.

Like all of our ancient mothers though, Hecate is much more than that in all of her binary-blasting complexity. Some scholars believe that before Hecate was relegated to a scary old crone wandering the underworld with her beloved hell-hounds, she was worshipped as a luminous and beautiful triune goddess, protector of the outcasts and the newly born, with sight and access into the realm of the dead. The goddess of boundaries and the guardian of crossroads, she was as capable of good as evil, and came to the rescue of those in most desperate need. Hecate refused marriage and committed to a solitary life of independence and freedom, wandering the liminal space between worlds, at home and unafraid in the dark.

I take great comfort in this powerfully complicated version of Hecate, and delight in imagining her crone-y perspective on some of our more absurd modern realities. I wonder what she’d think of the tropes we still use to degrade single, childfree women. I wonder how she’d respond to our howling fear of women comfortable in their solitude and unafraid of their own power, or the historical records of these very same women being drowned and stoned and burned and buried alive. I feel quite confident, and frankly a little big for my britches, knowing she’s got my back.