How the Heavenly Goose, Sacred Metaphor for Mother’s Voice, Tumbled into Mass Graves and Brothels
Weightless, She floats upon a cloud of feathers, soaring above an abyss between worlds: The past and future.Aphrodite riding Her goose is a transitional image, perhaps marking a pinch point in time that She, as Goddess of Love, transcends. Behind Her: The primordial void and a past steeped in Bird Animism, Swan Shamanism and the hybrid, shape-shifting symbolism of the prehistoric Bird Goddess. Before Her: A future where the goose, an archetype of the Divine, plummets, wings broken, into mass graves and brothels.
I’m floating on feathers, drifting to realms where the subconscious permeates everything. I’m buried alive, wrapped in swan wings, waiting, watching, eyes focused on a slither of sky shining through a vent in the rubble, or is it a slit in the feathers? Although my view through this ‘pinhole’ is soft at the edges, I watch a swirl of creatures eddying heavenwards: Aphrodite floating to celestial dimensions upon a goose cloud; Eros hatching from the world-egg; Icarus flying too high; fragments of soul exiting the soil, spinning up to the river in the sky.
Venturing into the starless unknown is not an empty gesture. Exposing the ‘bare bones’ of buried trauma is about digging up the hurt, the hidden, the silencing, the obliterated AND archeological treasure. There are stories sitting in the ground, waiting to be found.
Lurching from consciousness, to the subconscious, fearing nothingness, I’m dampening dread by singing “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” [1]. I’m concentrating on something, anything, to remove myself from this dream, trance, reality, so, in the spirit of storytelling, I’m summoning Mother Goose with birdsong, hoping she’ll read “Tales of Mother Goose” [2] and “Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes” [3]. Sharing stories is an act of love and I’m hoping there is love in the wing I curl up on.
“Are you comfortable?” honks a female Baritone.
“Then I shall begin.”
In the gloom I glimpse a sassy, hybrid, bird-woman creature, eyeing me over her spectacles. This is not Mother Goose. I suspect I’ve summoned an ancient deity. She’s all long neck, bristly fingers, snapping beak and ‘dare me’ eyes, seeing through everything. I know she is female because her hips curve like an egg, oozing fertility. I think she is a Bird Goddess, embodiment of love, ecstasy and rage, a parthenogenetic creature spanning the imagination from the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age and beyond.
[Click to view Bird Goddess images: Thessaly; the Vinča culture: the Minoan civilisation; the Indus Valley and Tyre, Lebanon.]
“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose” [4],
Bird Goddess is reciting a 17th century English folk poem, questioning state power. [From 1604-1914 a series of Enclosure Acts (UK) restricted ‘country folks’ access to common land. Unable to graze animals or forage, the choice was ‘move or starve.’]
Second millennium Golden Egg mythology was monetized. In the 1902 English pantomime, Mother Goose faces eviction because she cannot pay her rent. “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs” [5] became a cautionary tale for embryonic capitalists, warning against murdering the goose, their source of wealth.
“[In the ancient world] geese were [ ] associated with heroines and she-gods: Penelope, Aphrodite, Athena, Kore/Persephone, Artemis/Hecate, Nemesis and later Isis.” – Hall, Edith. The Lyceum Goose Mystery, The Editorial. [6]
The Goose was also associated with Goddess Gula; Geb, the ‘celestial goose’ and layer of the primordial egg (Geb is“goose” in hieroglyphs); and winged Isis, sometimes called “the Egg from the Goose”.
The Bird Goddess has landed, taloned feet gripping the rubble, ‘V-shaped’ hip tattoos echoing the triangular formation migrating geese fly in, affirming the woman and bird connection, as time keepers and mysterious creatures of cycles, rhythmically connected to bodily, seasonal and celestial motion.
Plumping her feathers She’s explaining how the patriarch savaged female energy by diabolizing the bird. I mention how, just the title of Miriam Robbins Dexter’s essay,The Monstrous Goddess: The Degeneration of Ancient Bird and Snake Goddesses into Historic Age Witches and Monsters, the journal of Archaeomytholgy, volume 7, [7] illustrates this so well. The pivot point was the Bronze Age.
“Aphrodite and her goose’s symbolic separation into distinct entities, as opposed to the ‘therianthropic, prehistoric Bird Goddess’, holistically expressing the ‘interdependency of life,’ is part of the story of the systematic colonization, exploitation and ownership of all sentient beings, including women (and the goose); the Goddess; the very Earth Herself and even the concept of ‘Love’. It’s about dividing and conquering (even in symbolism) to gain power.”
“By reducing the role of the Goddess of Love, the ecstatic source of existence, to Goddess of ‘sexual love’ and ‘sexual arousal,’ Her role serves patriarchy well. ‘Sexual love’ personified by passivity and femaleness, within a patriarchal framework using rape mythology to subjugate women, means women are vulnerable. One example: Praxiteles’ ‘nude’ sculpture, Aphrodite of Knidos, became a sex object and was repeatedly assaulted by men breaking into the Temple. Abuse and domination were seeping into the definition of ‘Love.’”
Although the goose is considered the turbulent aspect of the Holy Spirit, there are numerous references demonizing birds in the bible.
“Matthew identifies the birds of the air as “the wicked one” (Matthew 13:4,19). Mark connects them with “Satan” (Mark 4:4,15), and Luke links them to “the devil” (Luke 8:5,12)” – What the Bible says about Bird as Symbol of the Devil, Topical Studies, Bible Tools.[8]
Shakespeare coined the phrase ‘wild goose chase’ in his romantic play, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ performed in 1595, at theGlobe Theatre , London – ironic because it was located amongst the brothels, where the “Winchester Geese” lived and worked.
“Listener, the story of the “Winchester Geese” is one of abuse, ownership and religious hypocrisy,” sighs the Bird Goddess, caressing the serpent coils looping through her diadem.
It’s a long and drawn out sigh, expressing a sadness, that may have been coiling, in her long and drawn out throat, for thousands of years. Egg-shaped, goose tears, loaded with sadness, pool on the floor, hatching healing.
“For 800 years (12th century onwards) the Bishops of Winchester ruled Southwark in London. They taxed and licensed the “Winchester Geese” – female sex workers working in the area [9]. Good enough for those hustlers to profit from, but not good enough for a cross in the soil, these vulnerable ‘sinners’, some pregnant, some with syphilis, all denied a Christian burial, were tossed into a mass grave, uncovered during excavations, now called Cross Bones Graveyard [10], formerly named the Single Woman’s Burial Ground [11].”
We can express our protest, of such despicable abuses, by communally screeching, in a great, guttural ‘bird screech,’ loud enough to find our way back to the sky.
We must scream until we dislodge the forgotten Divine buried within ourselves and reclaim our rights to flying high.
“Descension. Ascension. The velocity of wings creates the whisper to awaken….” – Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice [12]
Author’s note: I connected with this story because I worked near Cross Bones and only heard about the “Winchester Geese” when they were mentioned by Suppressed History Archives [13]. When friends told me spiritual clearing has taken place at Cross Bones I got goosebumps. Of course property developers are eyeing the land. I hope it remains a ‘wild place,’ in memory of the Forgotten Female, the system’s victims.
References and further reading
[1] Sing a Song of Sixpence. Mother Goose. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42900/sing-a-song-of-sixpence
[2] Tales of Mother Goose. Perrault. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tales-of-Mother-Goose
[3] Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes: and how she came to tell them (Mother Goose’s Rhymes). Scheffler, Alex. 1.Sep. 2006. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mother-Gooses-Nursery-Rhymes-came/dp/0333961366
[4] “Stealing the Common from the Goose”. Walljasper, Jay. 18. Jan. 2013. On the Commons. https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/%E2%80%9Cstealing-common-goose%E2%80%9D/index.html
[5] The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden_Eggs
[6] Hall, Edith, The Lyceum Goose Mystery, The Editorial. 4 March 2017, https://edithorial.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lyceum-goose-mystery.html#:~:text=Geese%20were%20certainly%20important%20in,Hecate%2C%20Nemesis%20and%20later%20Isis
[7] The Monstrous Goddess: The Degeneration of Ancient Bird and Snake Goddesses into Historic Age Witches and Monsters. 2011. Robbins Dexter, Miriam. The journal of Archaeomytholgy, volume 7.
[8] What the Bible says about Bird as Symbol of the Devil. Topical Studies, Bible Tools. https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/topical.show/RTD/cgg/ID/3599/Bird-as-Symbol-of-Devil.htm#:~:text=Matthew%20identifies%20the%20birds%20of,see%20Deuteronomy%2028:26
[9] The Buried History of the Winchester Geese: Part One. Talbot, Lucy. 25. Nov. 2020. Winchester Heritage Open Days. https://www.winchesterheritageopendays.org/hampshire-histbites-episodes/2020/11/20/the-buried-history-of-the-winchester-geese-part-one
[10] Cross Bones Graveyard. Johnson, Ben. Historic UK. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/Cross-Bones-Graveyard/
[11] Cross Bones. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bones
[12] Williams, Terry Tempest. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/18345824-when-women-were-birds-fifty-four-variations-on-voice
[13] Suppressed History Archives. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064415032446