The experience of childbirth can be a tangible experience foof embodying Goddess in her most powerful form as Lifegiver. As Rebirther and Renewer. And also, as Destroyer, for even in births with the happiest of process and outcome, the woman who was before conception will never quite be again.
Barbara Tedlock’s work with indigenous peoples asserts that across cultures, childbirth is known as an initiation. A rite of passage.Understanding fully the powerful nature of birth often empowers women and helps relieve the anxiety and feelings of helplessness so many of us feel at a time when we are already vulnerable. That is one of the great paradoxes of the birthing woman: that she is simultaneously at her most powerful and her most vulnerable.
Labor is what is known as a liminal time. The word liminal has its roots in an old word for ‘threshold’ and refers to a ‘time between’ or a transition phase, often involving a waiting period and a time of transformation. Birth is all of these. Pregnancy and the postnatal period too can be regarded as a time of liminality. During this whole period the woman is ‘between times’ where her old life has gone and her new one, with the new child, has not yet fully begun. Liminal times are periods of great awakening and creativity, yet also of vulnerability. Yet childbirth is an intensely spiritual time and a failure to honor it as such can lead to a deep dissonance within a woman’s psyche. How different would it be if the birthing woman were told that in that moment she was partaking in the Creatrix nature of Goddess? Not just a vessel to birth the Divine like Mary, but embodying Her?
Yet if the woman is in some way embodying the Creatrix during birth, it is of course because she is bringing forth more than simply her own possible spiritual growth – for the baby is the Creation, the new life experiencing its first separation from the womb and mother. Although this experience occurs before we can lay down conscious memory, for the baby too, birth is an initiation. Is this not a mind-blowing event? That we see birth as anything other than a miracle is surely a result of having been told for the last two millennia that the Creator is wholly male.
Fundamental Judeo-Christian tradition has often described labor pains as being Eve’s curse (though this is not in fact what Genesis actually says) and her punishment, visited on all her descendants. There are reports both ancient and modern of women in these traditions being denied pain relief in labor. Given that intense pain can be in and of itself traumatic, this practice has caused a great deal of harm, and can block any sense of birth being spiritually transformative.
Natural birth proponents need to be careful here too; there has long been an association between pain and spiritual initiation, but this can all too often be used to make birthing women feel they have to endure even the most excruciating labors without relief. This In spite of the fact that indigenous midwives tend to make good use of potent herbs for pain relief. What seems to instigate theasis – the sense of becoming Goddess – is the narrative around the birth and the recognition of the woman of the innate spirituality of birth. While some pain is perhaps inevitable during childbirth, traumatic suffering is not.
Childbirth can be a powerfully transformative time for women; conversely, it can be a traumatic one. By recognising its potency as a liminal space and a crucible for the Life/Death/Life nature of the Goddess, we can reclaim it for the ultimate rite of passage that it is. One in which the woman births not only her baby but a new self; one in which she becomes not only mother but the Mother. Goddess Herself.
Tedlock, Barbara PhD. The Woman in the Shaman’s Body (2005) Random House Publishing Group