[Editor’s Note: This and subsequent excerpt parts are from the anthology entitled Wounded Feminine: Grieving with Goddess, published by Girl God Books (2024).]
Shapeshifting Mythic Griefscapes Through the Divine Wisdom of the Sealwoman
Dr. Fee Mozeley
I belong nowhere and everywhere. A particular kind of grief grows from my sense of place-based estrangement. As a sixth-generation white Australian woman, I live and have always lived on stolen lands. I was born overseas but have no memory of that place. We moved a lot throughout my childhood, and as a teenager I experienced violence in the place we lived making returning difficult. And yet, anytime I am outdoors whether in forests or cities, anywhere I can see the sky and feel the Earth, I feel a sense of belonging. These deeply felt tensions are hard to reconcile. It is in these moments that I turn to women’s stories to ground my place-based sorrow.
In this chapter, I explore my Earth-felt longing and belonging through inhabiting the mythic landscapes of a Selkie folktale. There are many versions of this story told across the cold-cold lands of the north. In these frigid places, Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1992, 257) reminds us that “words freeze in the open air, and whole sentences must be broken from the speaker’s lips and thawed at the fire so people can see what has been said”. This Selkie story, retold by eco-mythologist Sharon Blackie (2016, 71–80), comes from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, home of my mother’s people. The divine feminine does not always present as a goddess figure, sometimes she is embodied through strong female characters, like the Sealwoman and her daughter, her eleven sisters, the Cailleach and the Old Woman of the World. Their stories help make sense of my longing and belonging as a woman living in Australia’s colonially informed patriarchal present. And so, I invite you to journey with me to my ancestral mythic lands:
There is an island to the far west of these lands, close to the end of the world—somewhere in your dreams you’ve seen it. Long white beaches, rocky coves, stormy seas. From the clifftops on its westernmost shores, you might sometimes catch a glimpse of the Isle of Woman way out on the horizon. When the sky is blue, and the air is still—which happens rarely enough in those parts. Here, the wind blows hard and long through the dark days of winter, and summer is precious and fleeting. Somewhere along the stormiest section of that westernmost coast is a high, inaccessible cave where they say the Old Woman of the World lives still, with her companion Trickster Crow—but no one I’ve met has ever found that cave, though many have searched, and many have drowned in the process. Maybe she’s still there, stirring the soup which contains all of the seeds and all of the herbs and the essence of all the growing and living things in the world. Maybe she’s still there, working on the most beautiful weaving in the world, with its fringe of sea-urchin quills.
The story goes on to explain that:
The island’s beaches are haunted by seals. Neither common nor grey seals; But then they’re not ordinary seals: they’re Selkies. And for one night every month, on the night of the full moon, they take on human form, slipping off their sealskins to dance on the beach in the moonlight.
The story that unfolds is a tale of patriarchal and colonial violence as a lonely fisherman steals the skin of one of the Selkie sisters trapping her in human form and on land,exiling her, from“her home beneath the waves”.
He confesses to the Sealwoman he has stolen her skin, and he pleads with her to be his wife, for seven years.
‘Seven years’, he whispered to her. ‘Give me seven years, and then I’ll give you back your skin. After that, I’ll let you decide. If you still want to leave, then I’ll let you go’. And at that moment the first light of dawn crept into the sky, and the glow of the moon began to fade. Reluctantly, then, the woman went with him, understanding that without her skin she could do nothing. She had no choice.
What follows, of course, is that when the seven years pass the man does not return her skin. Mara, the Sealwoman’s daughter, finds her mother’s skin but it disintegrates in her small hands. Skinless and alone, the Sealwoman must now journey to the cave of the Old Woman of the World to find a way back home, to the sea, where she belongs.
But the journey is not straight forward, as mythic journeys rarely are.
She headed north. She walked in the rain, with the wind so strong in her face that every step took twice as long as it ought. She clambered over rocks so slippery she fell constantly. Her boots were cold and wet and heavy, and her heart was heavier still. It was hard, and she was weak.
But still she found the Old Woman of the World’s cave and the Old Woman greeted her: “You’ve done well to make it this far, Daughter. But there’s more for you to do before you’re done”. And she told the Selkie what must be done.
And so, her journey continued… Soon the Sealwoman found the cave that the Old Woman told her she would find. And as she entered, she saw what she had been told she would see. There in the centre were the skeletons and skins of eleven dead seals. These were no ordinary seals—neither common nor grey; they were Selkies. They were her sisters…
So, she did as the Old Woman had told her. She lit a fire in the darkening cave, and she sat vigil over the skins and the bones. And as night fell, she began to sing over the bodies.
And she sang, and she sang, over and over, singing her sisters home.
Slowly, slowly, the flesh began to reform on the bones of the dead seals—all but one: the smallest, and the youngest… And then ten of the eleven seals formed a circle around the sister-child who could not live again.
The Sealwoman reached for the skin that remained and held it to her breast, inhaling the faint scent of a lost sister, watching as her other sisters crawled out of the cave on their bellies, and into the ocean, beckoning to the Selkie to follow.
But there was still more to be done. So, the Sealwoman made the long journey home to her daughter, to bid Mara farewell before returning to her home in the sea.
Having said goodbye, she pulled on her beloved sister’s skin. With one last long look at her daughter, she slipped into the sea and vanished beneath the waves.
Once a year, on the anniversary of her departure, the Selkie woman comes to the beach to tell her daughter stories and to teach her the song that she had sung in the cave. Though it had once been known as a song of mourning, all mourning may be transformed into joy, if you have endurance enough to make the journey, and courage enough, to face the Old Woman, in the darkness of her cave.
The mythic landscapes of Sealwoman’s journey are etched upon my skin. Each word is embodied, felt, lived, breathed, walked and known. There are moments when I tell this story that my voice inevitably falters; the words catch in my throat, needing to be broken off and warmed by the fire to be spoken and heard. The process of telling enables me to become the Sealwoman, so when I stand at the opening of the cave looking upon the bones of my sisters, the rage of injustice erupts, shattering the façade of a distant disembodied retelling. As I sing flesh back onto the bones of my beloveds, my heart breaks (yet again) when it is clear that my youngest sister is unable to be revived. Her loss reminds me that despite finding belonging, the pain and suffering of not belonging always leaves its mark on and in our heartscapes. There are scars left behind; one cannot become skinless without some lasting effect.
I inhabit the mythic landscapes of the Sealwoman to better understand my harshscapes and heartscapes. I walk through the harshscapes (places of intense unbelonging through being made skinless and landbound) and linger longer in the heartscapes (places of profound belonging through the Sealwoman’s belonging with her sisters and her daughter, and with the sea). The divine feminine works through the narrative to remind me that I, too, am a shapeshifter, and that I must understand and honour my place-based grief to transform its song.
The story encourages me to recall places that nourish my soul. I think about the freshwater rock pools and waterfalls of Sohra (Cherrapunjee) in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya; the Rocky Mountains near Loveland, Colorado; the ancient wet Daintree rainforest of Northern Queensland; the fecund black volcanic soils of the New South Wales Northern Rivers; and the smooth giant boulders of the Central Highlands of New South Wales. I think about my love of birds, and how I often dream I am a bird. I remember how green-forested places talk to me, whispering as the wind moves through the trees. And I recall the visceral sense of peace and belonging I feel when exposed to these elements in both warm and cool climates.
My most profound manifestation of this sense of emplaced belonging occurred when visiting my maternal grandmother’s ancestral lands in the Scottish Highlands. Glenmoriston (Gleann Moireasdan, meaning the Valley of Waterfalls in Gaelic) is situated among forested mountains with moist moss-covered rocks and trees growing out of rich black earthen soils. The River Moriston flows through stone-encased riverbeds, forming cascading waterfalls before spilling into Loch Ness. I felt the sweet water flow between my fingers as I crouched beside Nessa’s tributary. The Cailleach’s presence was palpable as I walked the forest feeling the rocky Earth beneath my feet that fell from her creel. The moss clad ground muted my footsteps while the gentle wind amplified the trees’ crackling talk and the thunderous pounding of dark peat-stained water pushing past stone, making smooth what was once rough. I whispered to myself, to the land, saying softly with each step: ‘as I walk upon tree roots, Earth and stone following ancestral trails, I remember and honour thee. I remember and honour me’.
The culmination of these elements in this place left me wondering if my belonging in Glenmoriston echoes (genetically or through some sort of soul memory) my love of these types of places elsewhere. I felt a reciprocal, relational, sense of emplaced belonging there. This feeling intensified as I walked around the stone circle in a field next to the cemetery where many of my ancestors are buried. My sense of spiritual belonging pulsed. But as I prepared to leave, I fell into a state of melancholy. My heart ached; my breath caught. I held my chest to ease the pain. It’s strange how this deep sense of emplaced belonging created something new, a sense of embodied longing that was not there before. A new grief. A grief carved out through the passing of time and distance.
I am called to return. And while I cannot physically return just yet, I can connect with my ancestral lands through inhabiting the mythic lands of my women’s stories. Their stories allow me to acknowledge my grief, and by sitting with it, and in it, new storied forms of belonging emerge. Inhabiting mythic landscapes enables ways of knowing and being beyond the limits of linear time and space. Each story grounds my grief. I no longer seek to escape it or even heal it, rather I honour my grief and learn from it. And with the divine guidance of the shapeshifting Sealwoman, I am transported to the cave of the Old Woman of the World where we sit and share stories of feminine power that patriarchy can never destroy.
References
Blackie, Sharon. 2016. If Women Rose Rooted: The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging. Tewkesbury: September Publishing.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. 1992. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books.