Creating The Webbd Wheel: Balance
In which we acknowledge the sacred balance of life and death ...
The framework sustaining all life on Earth is balance. It’s remarkable how passionately we fight with that fact. Rather than harnessing our considerable ingenuity to support that balance, we insist on trying to escape it. We have thus far been unable to escape it, but our activities have led to a tilting balance which endangers every living thing on the planet and our current way of life as human beings. If we tilt it far enough, our complex system of life will unravel catastrophically and the planet will reset itself, perhaps taking eons to once again support a complex web of healthy life.
Death always begets life, and life always ends eventually in death. It’s inescapable.
During my lifetime we have become an increasingly black and white culture. We’re extreme in our ideology, our politics, our diets, our religious frameworks, our loyalties, our loves, our hates. The desire for ever-increasing speed and production leaves us no time to think critically, rest, be rather than do or have, or observe and assimilate shades of grey. The result is social breakdown and an unhappy, unhealthy, ignorant population prone to violence and ripe for oppression and predation.
In post #48 of The Hanged Man, Mary, Seed-Bearer, kills the rabbit Surrender as part of her initiation. This is not wanton cruelty or gratuitous violence. Baba Yaga, who is not a gentle teacher, is demonstrating to Mary the responsibility of her role in the turning wheel of life. If she intends to be Seed-Bearer and facilitate new life, she must also come to terms with death.
All life is rooted in death. All our food is rooted in death. Spring and birth are rooted in death. Denying this reality does nothing to change it; our denial only makes us weak, fearful, and ineffective.
I am not advocating for torture, genocide, war, biocide, destruction of animal populations such as coyotes, or any of the other horrors we perpetrate upon one another and other species as human beings. What I am saying is death itself – the act of ceasing to live – is an essential and sacred part of life.
Vegetarians kill a carrot when they harvest and eat it as surely as a cow is slaughtered to provide burger. Furthermore, Big Ag, when monocropping, destroys uncountable living things from essential microbes in the soil to plants to insects to birds to mammals (biocide). Products like fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides aren’t doing humans any favors health-wise, either.
I believe women hold the key to reclaiming life and death balance, because we are the vessels of life. Let us not forget, however, that most of us are also vessels of no-life, or death. We shed the lining of our uterus along with a reproductive gamete far more often than we give birth. Life is not a guaranteed miracle, but death is always present. Many traditional aspects of female divinity from around the world reflect this duality of life-death-life-death, including Baba Yaga herself, as we shall see.
Death nourishes and sustains life, gives it a rich placenta in which to grow, produce offspring, and die, perpetuating the cycle. Thus, the symbolism of Surrender’s blood nourishing Mary’s seeds.
Mary makes a choice in this post to fully embrace her role as Seed-Bearer in all its deep magic, not just the pretty part. Her choice echoes Pandora’s story. Before Pandora opened her clay vessel, the world of men was hedonistic, nothing but gratification and pleasure. Unsustainable, in other words, without the fertile edge of chaos, without the necessity to struggle and the impetus to grow, adapt, and develop tools and resilience. Without death, disease, illness.
The goat-footed piper, the male Seed-Bearer, is also a life-death-life-death figure. He will in time become the harvest god, sacrifice his life at the end of harvest, and be reborn in the spring at the beginning of the next growing cycle. It is his piping that urges Surrender toward Mary’s knife. These two figures together, male and female in balance, drive the cycles and seasons which cradle animal and plant procreation and harvest.
The wheel turns. Now life, now death.
(This essay was published with post #48 of The Hanged Man.)