“The spiral bracelets move. They creep down my shoulders and neck. The sun blazes orange and red on the horizon. I feel a tickling in my ears. I hear a faint whispering. Their tongues are licking the skin, the wax of my outer ears.”[1]
Notes
This short extract comes from towards the end of my novel The Falling Woman. I was writing this book between 1982 and 1992.
At the time, I was thinking of the Cretan snake bracelets which I had seen in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in the late 1970s and mid 1980s. The extract is about a woman sitting inside a rock hollow in the Australian desert. It’s a story of two women who venture into the desert for a holiday, but it is also about how one of these women named Stella/Estella/Estelle is trying to figure out her own way of being in the world. They face the usual complications of travel to remote areas – punctured tyres, engine troubles, getting bogged in sand – but Stella also has to face her own mortality and the vagaries of epilepsy.
The Trojan princess, Cassandra makes an appearance in the reference to the licking of the ears by snakes. Contemporary women face the same obstacle as Cassandra did. She was raped by Ajax and dragged away from the altar of Athena. For resisting rape, Cassandra was punished by the god Apollo. Previously, she was able to prophesy the future, but after this she was condemned to be disbelieved. Just as women these days are still disbelieved when they report rape.
I have recently been rereading Whence the Goddess: A Source Book by Miriam Robbins Dexter. It is a treasure trove of information about the mythic history of goddesses from many parts of the northern hemisphere. She points out that although Athena is often regarded as the ally of patriarchy, in earlier times the snake is her companion.[2]
And in her discussion of snake predecessors Miriam translates from the Aeneid[3] the description of Allecto, one of The Furies, that her,
heart [loves] sad wars,
rages, plots, and noxious crimes …
she changes herself into so many forms,
such fierce shapes,
so many black serpents
sprout up
These are the serpents of resistance to the impositions of patriarchy. The Furies rail against the killing of women, the invasion of women’s scared spaces and of women’s ability to give birth, spill her own blood and thrive.
As Marija Gimbutas showed in her book, The Language of the Goddess,[4] the snake is a symbol of women from the earliest periods of prehistory that predated the arrival of Indo-European societies and as Judy Foster also shows in her book Invisible Women of Prehistory,[5] the snake not only appears in Minoan and Indo-European derived societies but also in many parts of Africa and Australia.
In this time of war and conflagration, we need more than ever a movement toward a society which respects the power of women and forsakes the violence of patriarchy.
© Susan Hawthorne, 2023
[1] Hawthorne, Susan. 1992. The Falling Woman. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, p. 255.
[2] Robbins Dexter, Miriam. 1990. Whence the Goddess: A Source Book. New York: Pergamon Press. p. 119.
[3] Vergil. Aeneid, Book VII, lines 324-329. Cited in Robbins Dexter, p. 180.
[4] Gimbutas, Marija, 1989. The Language of the Goddess. New York: Harper & Row.
[5] Foster, Judy with Marlene Derlet. 2013. Invisible Women of Prehistory: three million years of peace, six thousand years of war. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.