The cycle of material and psychic life is often encapsulated as life, death, and rebirth. This cycle is the mythological context of the solstice.
But in her formulation of the ancient triple goddess, Marija Gimbutas writes of life, death and regeneration.
Rebirth and regeneration are not quite the same, are they?
This is the starting point of this episode, which includes the fairy tale “The Handless Maiden” and reflections on the importance of a regeneration mindset as 2021 comes to an end.
The gorgeous image is Silver Hands (Handless Maiden) by Jeanie Tomanek used with permission.
Transcript of Winter Solstice and the energy of regeneration
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
The solstice, winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere, takes place next week. This got me looking for images of Newgrange, a Neolithic temple and passage tomb located in the Boyne Valley of Ireland. One of my favorite Celtic stories about the salmon of wisdom takes place in the Boyne River valley, and this area fascinates me.
Newgrange is a very large mound, ringed with stones, that contains a long underground passage leading into a chamber with 3 alcoves. The passage and chamber are aligned with the rising sun on the mornings around the Winter Solstice. This was not understood when the site was first excavated.
At the entrance and around the site are massive old stones covered with carvings of intricate designs. I flipped through pages of “Language of the Goddess” by Marija Gimbutas to see what this wise archeologist thought about the carving. She thought they represented the aspects of the triple goddess: birth, death, and regeneration. Regeneration. Not” rebirth.”
According to the dictionary, these words are synonymous. And yet they have a different energy, don’t they? Regeneration is linked with return, regrowth, and restoration. It contains the great paradox, that our bodies and the earth are living and dying at the same time. And another paradox, the co-existence of cyclical and linear time as two different and yet intertwined perspectives.
In the case of the solstice, this event is part of cyclical time because it is seasonal, a repeating cosmic pattern. The solstice is also linear in the calendar sense, marking this moment in 2021, a moment that won’t come again. I find myself thinking about the modern disregard for the cyclical as an ancient artifact of thought, about how the possibility that Newgrange was a calendar marking cyclical time was overlooked, and the effort required– I’ll speak for myself– in seeing the repeating events of earth and cosmos as more than backdrop to the historical passage of human made time.
Does this make sense? There’s a link between the disconnect from the earth and her organic processes, and the rhythm of cyclical time, and the development of a separate, linear, human history with its beginnings and endings.
We know that everything becomes something else and yet do we live with and through this understanding, in appreciation of the organic history so to speak, of every “thing?” Contemporary culture, for the most part, is focused on the new, on what comes next, and the common images of transformation often neglect respect for origins and reverence for the past form, for the fragments.
Regeneration is a word that I seldom hear, unless the context is starfish arms or lizard tails.
I have a story for you today that is helping me reflect on this theme of regeneration. It’s called “the Handless Maiden.”
Variations of “The Girl Without Hands” or “The Handless Maiden” or “The Girl With Silver Hands” or “The Armless Maiden” are found in cultures around the world. My telling today follows the fairy tale collected by the Grimm Brothers.
As always I invite you to relax and listen to the story. Let the images evoked by the story take shape in your mind’s eye. What we see and how we feel in their presence is a response deeper than the words we find to describe it, and a way that the story can work on us.
I’ll tell you about my moment in the story and return to the theme of regeneration after the story.
“The Handless Maiden”
There once was a miller who fell into poverty. He spent his days chopping down trees and gathering wood. One day he was approached by an old man who said, “Why do you torment yourself with such hard work? I will make you rich if you will sign over to me that which is standing behind your mill. I will come and claim it in three years.”
The miller thought “That is my apple tree.” Feeling quite lucky, he agreed to give the man what was standing behind his mill. “I’ll be back in three years” the old man said, and then he disappeared.
When he came home his wife said, “Miller, every chest and cupboard in our house is suddenly full. Where did all of this wealth come from?”
“I made a good bargain with an old man from the forest,” he told her. “He agreed to make me wealthy in exchange for what stood behind the mill. You know that is only the old apple tree.”
“Husband!” said the woman, terrified. “This is going to be very bad. The old man was the devil, and he had our daughter in mind. She was standing behind the mill, raking the leaves under the tree.”
Three years passed and the dreadful day arrived.
Now the miller’s daughter was very beautiful and pious. When the devil came, early in the morning, he found that she had drawn a circle around herself with chalk and washed herself clean. The devil couldn’t approach her. He was very angry. “Keep wash water away from her and do not let her clean herself” he told the miller, “so I can take her away as we’ve agreed.”
The miller was frightened and did what he was told. The next day the devil returned but the girl had wept into her hands and washed herself with her tears, and was entirely clean.
The devil still could not approach her. He ordered the miller, “Chop off her hands, so I can get to her.”
The miller was horrified and answered, “How could I chop off my dear child’s hands? No, I will not do it.”
“Then do you know what? I will take you, if you don’t do it!” the devil replied.
The miller was terribly frightened. He didn’t know what to do. At last he said, “I will do as you have ordered” and went to his daughter.
“My child” he said, “the devil will take me if I don’t chop off both your hands and I have promised him that I will do it. I beg for your forgiveness.”
“Father” she said, “do with me what you will.” She stretched forth her hands, and let him chop them off.
Now the maiden wept and wept and her tears ran down her arms and mingled with the blood that poured from her stumps. When the devil came a third time she was still entirely clean. The devil lost all power over her and went away empty-handed.
The maiden’s parents did their best to take care of her. “I am wealthy because of you” the miller told her, “and I will make sure that you have all that you need for the rest of your life.” But she did not want to remain there.
“I must leave here” she told him. “Compassionate people will give me enough to keep me alive.”
The following dawn she had her bloody stumps cleaned, wrapped in clean cloth, and tied to her back. Then she set forth with the rising sun. She wandered this way and that the entire day with no direction in mind. By afternoon she was tired and hungry. When night fell she was so exhausted that she could barely put one foot in front of the other.
Then she came upon a king’s garden. The trees were covered with fruit but a moat separated her from the garden.
She fell to her knees. Through the still dark air came a beautiful spirit in white, who made a dam in the water. After a short while, the moat dried up and the maiden was able to walk across and enter the garden.
The trees were heavy with ripe pears but she couldn’t reach them. She looked up through the leaves and a branch bent down in her direction, bearing a ripe pear. She ate it, the juice running down her chin. Then she slipped back across the dry moat and into the forest.
The gardener was there, hiding behind a tree. He saw the maiden and the spirit in white. He saw the theft of the pear and decided to keep all of this to himself.
But the next day, the king came to survey his garden and count his pears. He soon realized that one was missing and called the gardener to account for it. The gardener told him what he had witnessed the night before. The king was intrigued. A spirit in white and a beautiful young woman with no hands?
That night, the king waited in the garden with the gardener. The moon was high in the sky when he saw her. A maiden with no hands stepped out of the forest with a spirit in white. She crossed the dry moat and stepped under a tree, which bent down to offer her a pear.
The king was mesmerized. He stepped out from behind the trees to get a better look. Surely, she was human. And he was in love. He went to the maiden, told her that he would take care of her, and off they went to his palace.
The king had a beautiful pair of silver hands made for her, and not long after, they were married. The king took good care of her. The young queen became pregnant. Then king had to go off to war. He left his young bride in the care of his mother.
The queen gave birth while the king was away, and her mother-in-law wrote a letter to the king to tell him about the birth of his child. But the messenger fell asleep on the road. The devil, who still wished the maiden harm, replaced the message for one that read “The queen has been unfaithful and given birth to a monster.”
The king was shocked by this message but he wrote back, telling his mother to take good care of his wife and the child until he could return. But again, the messenger fell asleep on the road and the devil replaced the message for one that read “Kill the queen and the child.”
The mother-in-law was shocked to get this message. She was uneasy about disobeying the king but she couldn’t bring herself to put an innocent young woman and a baby to death. She went to the young queen. “Your life is in danger” she told her, “you must leave with your baby and never return.” The baby was bound to her breast and young queen was taken to the woods. Weeping, she entered the forest again.
She wandered in the forest without direction, unsure of where she would be welcome and how she would care for herself and her baby. When evening fell, the spirit in white appeared and showed her the way to a cottage. Over the door was a sign “Here all dwell free.”
People of the forest helped the queen. She lived in the cottage for seven years and learned their ways. During this time her child grew, and her hands slowly grew back.
Meanwhile, the king returned home from war and was told that his wife and baby had been killed. Distraught and full of grief, he went to his mother and asked her what happened. She was angry and confused, but she saw that his tears were real. “Don’t worry” she told him, “their lives were spared. They were sent away into the forest.”
“I must find them” said the king. “I will not return, nor will I eat or drink, until I have found my family.” The king wandered the countryside for seven years. His clothes got shabby, his beard grew and got tangled, and his hands became calloused. By the time he found the inn and the forest people, he looked like a wild man. They gave him a meal and a place to rest, and the king fell asleep.
He woke up to find a woman and child watching him. She knew him right away, but the king didn’t recognize his wife without her silver hands. She asked him why he was travelling so long and so hard. “I’m searching for my wife and child,” the king told her, “I won’t return to my kingdom without them.”
“Ah” she said when she had heard this. “I am your wife and that is your child.” He asked her about her hands and she had no answer, save time and grace.
They celebrated their reunion with the forest people. Then they returned to their kingdom, where they were married again, and lived happily ever after.
the end.
You can find a lot of interesting commentary on this story as a psychic process and initiation. There’s value in this perspective and I urge you to seek it out if the story calls to you. The moment, the detail that called to you, can help you if you follow it.
My moment however, is not about the daughter’s process, not explicitly. It’s about what sustains her, beginning with the pear tree.
Trees are important to the story. The story begins with cutting and chopping trees. The solitary apple tree. The daughter, mistaken by her father for that tree, is then cut by her father, chopped like the trees.
Wandering, maimed, and despairing, the young woman finds an orchard of pear trees. Something otherworldly in the woods helps her find entrance and she is fed. The trees in the king’s cultivated garden provide necessary sustenance and the means to a temporary waystation.
Later, as a young mother, the woman finds refuge in the wild forest and is among the people who know the trees. Here she finds help and strength. She is able to live in the cottage and raise her child, and her hands regenerate.
Her husband the king also wanders in the forest and becomes a kind of wild man. After seven years they reunite, far from the palace and the roles they once played. In the forest, they are reunited as equals.
Pears, what of the pears? Pears, like apples and figs, are sacred trees with fruits associated with the female body— its shape, fertility, sweetness, and erotic possibilities. Like the apple, the pear is also associated with longevity.
The pear has a long history of cultivation, going back to Neolithic times. Dried pears have been found in Neolithic cave sites. They were favored by the Greeks (Homer called pears “a gift of the gods”) and the Romans, who planted them all over Europe. Pears are cultivated all over the world.
Two further pieces of the mythological heritage of the pear that resonate with this story: in Japan, pear trees were planted at gates to ward off evil; in Egypt, the pear belonged to Isis, the great goddess who reassembled the dismembered body of her husband and brought him back to life, an act of regeneration.
Pears speak of love and separation. It’s in the three homophones: the word pear (a fruit), the word pair (as in two), and the word pare (as in cut). The entire fairy tale is contained in the pear tree.
Circling back to my opening reflections about regeneration, the story describes a society that lacks the mindset of regeneration, in which regeneration is prevented. The miller, the father, chops trees and hands. He sacrifices what is necessary and versatile for a narrowly defined, immediate need. He finds a short-lived solution and rushes into it despite the consequences. Consequences that he will only bear peripherally, we note.
The miller is susceptible to the get rich quick promise. He has no sense of the true value of things or who he’s dealing with, and no creativity in his response.
The miller’s daughter as father’s daughter, accepts her fate. Hands are a primary means for expression and making. Our hands form, hold, carry, caress, and they are important to self-reliant survival. The handless maiden is an image of helplessness– helplessness imposed, accepted, learned, or adopted.
The king takes care of her. But the best that he can do is silver hands, hands with the outer form but none of the function, in a material that is durable and yet ornamental. These hands fill no real need and yet everyone seems satisfied.
Thank goodness for the mother-in-law and yet she does the bare minimum, in sparing the lives of the young woman and her infant.
Notice that the young queen, now a mother, doesn’t send a letter herself. She doesn’t speak for herself or her child, and her mother-in-law decides her fate while she assumes a passive posture of helplessness.
The woods, the forest, is the place where regeneration is possible. The young woman finds refuge among people who live with the trees, in a place where anyone who comes can live free. Free from the need for money, free from the rule of others. Free to learn the skills necessary for self-reliant survival, to develop the capacity for work, to raise her child. Clearly there is support and community, generosity, help. There is interdependence, not dependence. She heals.
If you have spent any time among trees, you know something about this healing capacity. If you are familiar with any of the emerging science about trees and forests, you know that finding a healing sanctuary in the woods is more than a metaphor. The networked intelligence of a forest, our commonality, and the aware response to a human presence–all of this is part of an exciting intersection of indigenous wisdom and contemporary science unfolding right now.
Regeneration takes patience. The regeneration of the young woman’s hands takes seven years. During this seven years, the king wanders and is changed by his forest journey. This time frame may refer to seven as the mystical number, or the seven years turnover of cells in the human body, or who knows? Seven years is a pretty long time.
I suspect that the common expectation that things should happen quickly is part of the challenge of the regeneration mindset. It can become assumed helplessness. When you forget that things take time, you may give up before you discover what is possible. Regeneration takes patience. Patience and endurance.
Hmm. To “endure” is to exist over time, to have longevity. Which makes me think about that pear again.
Endurance is the quality or process of enduring. The word comes from the Latin, “to make hard.” To be durable. Solid, steadfast. To maintain. To tolerate. In medieval times, the meaning of endurance was connected to suffering. Suffering and hardship are the test and the teacher, what elicits our capacity to endure. They are the means through which we discover that ability in ourselves. The getting through it is a kind of making, a making of self, of self that can, that can endure.
Endurance involves persistence and stamina. There is a version of this story in which the daughter’s hands grow back in a split second. She bends down to get a drink from a spring and her child falls into the water. Instinctively, she reaches into the water and when she draws her baby out, she once again has hands.
Now, I appreciate the reminder of instantaneous miracles possible through an act of love. And yet, the slow unfolding of the miracle in the story that I told feels more appropriate right now, when so much that is sweet and nourishing and beautiful, like the pears in the trees, is tantalizingly, frustratingly, out of reach.
I often feel that I’ve waited a long, long time, my entire adulthood, for the emergence of a more soulful, connected, just, and joyful human culture. Maybe you feel this way too. I’ve heard people talking about 2021, how hard it’s been, how happy they are to see it end. I also feel this, the year tinged with disappointment somehow. But maybe I’m not looking closely enough at what’s returning, and maybe I don’t understand the whole picture.
In his amazing Book “Pronoia,” Rob Brezny reflects on “villians,” the people who create problems and obstruct positive change. Bad people. They may have a purpose, he says. They force us to become smarter, more creative. They are teachers. And here’s the one that leapt off the page… He writes, “Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast.”
Preventing things from happening too fast.
How you understand this time, the meanings that you make of it and the possibilities that you entertain, is a function of where you turn for information and guidance. How do you imagine this moment in history, and where do you place your faith?
I ask myself, am I ready, am I strong and resilient enough for what my vision requires? Is it possible that I, like the miller’s daughter, actually need more time with the trees to leave the cultural delusion of helplessness behind, and to discover my new hands?
The solstice is an enduring turning point in cyclical and linear time, my friend. I invite you to join me in meditating on this time as a time of regeneration, a time when important possibilities are found in reconstituting what sustains us in the present. A time when the lengthening light ushers in an appreciation for longevity in lieu of the habit of replacement. A time to find the patience and stamina to endure current challenges.
A time to imagine that what has been chopped off can grow anew. A time to imagine that what seems lost can return.
And maybe this is a time to draw more inspiration from trees. In her poem “Optimism,” Jane Hirshfield writes:
OPTIMISM
by Jane Hirshfield
“More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.”
Before we part ways, I want to give a big welcome to the new subscribers Rodica, Marguerite, Linda, Patricia, and Dr Toula. Thanks for subscribing for email announcements about the podcast and my other programs.
If you’re new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website, where you will find a variety of ways to subscribe to this podcast and information about the other work that I do with people to use stories to gain insight into life. This threshold that we’re on my friend, is a particularly good time to turn to stories. if you’re interested in what that might offer you, be sure to check out what I have on my website about Story Oracle readings.
Also, a shout out to the patrons and supporters of this podcast whose financial contributions keep it all going. In particular, thank you to Ronny for becoming a new patron on Patreon. And thank you to my long-time patrons, Carmen, Belinda, and Paula! Your support of Myth Matters makes a huge difference for me.
If you are finding something of value here in Myths Matters and can afford $5 or $10/month to sustain this podcast, I hope that you’ll join me on Patreon too.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. May the regenerative energy of this solstice inspire you, and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive
Useful links:
Marija Gimbutas and the documentary about her life and work, “Signs Out of Time”
