Baubo, the vulvanic Goddess
laughter is the best medicine
Vulvanism:
‘Every truly Radical Elemental Feminist Act of Courage, or any other Volcanic Virtue – no matter how small it may appear to the individual woman who is performing it – is Momentous and contagious. Its effect is enormous. It helps to create the vast morphogenetic field out of which true Metamorphosis can emerge’
by Mary Daly (1998) in “Quintessence…realizing the Archaic Future, a Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto”.
Viva La Vulva
I show it to my husband. He hesitates. ‘Yes, yes, well done’. I turn it around. ‘Hmmm, delicate. Great curves’. I ask him if he has a preference. Without hesitation, definitely the last one. “The other side, the first side you showed me…..I find it scary, cavelike, as if it could suck me right in’. He shivers.
Vulva sculpture (front) by author
Vulva sculpture (back) by author
It’s not even most men, but most people who favour a delicate representation of the vulva, or rather, none at all. While phallic images abound marketing culture and statues have been flaunting their penises in our public parks for centuries, the vulva remains eerily obscured from the public image. While this is mostly the case today, it wasn’t always like this.
Baubo as the great female trickster
The sculpture above is my ode to Baubo, an ancient Greek Goddess also known as the Goddess of Obscenity. Due to the secrecy and oral tradition of the Eleusinian mysteries, most of her legend remains hidden, buried under the rubbles of long forgotten temples. I had the pleasure of meeting her through the story of Demeter and Persephone.
A classic mother and daughter tale, the Demeter & Persephone myth tells about the transformative journey both must undertake to reunite rooted in a renewed independence. While Persephone spends her first months in the Underworld with Hades, who seized her from below, Demeter desperately looks for her daughter above. She wanders the once fertile lands now as dead as her own desire for life, and brings herself onto the brink of silent madness. She finally slumps down against the well of a small town. There, when not much more can be lost, Baubo appears. Seductively shaking her big birthing hips and wriggling her pointy breasts at Demeter, Baubo taunts her into movement. This curious little woman who has no head, but nipples for eyes and a vulva as mouth, starts to spew dirty jokes and for the first time, Demeter smiles. She smiles, she laughs and soon both of them are in deep belly roars. The laughter lifts Demeter out of her depression and gives her new energy to pick up her search for Persephone again.
As I moulded the spiralling curves into the vulva sculpture’s softer side, allowing the clay to direct my hands, the image of these two parts of the story emerged. Where Baubo leads to (re)union. A union that leaves the traditional view of male and female behind, and includes all genders, because Baubo is all about breaking taboos and our demons.
Baubo is a dancing comedienne, a shaman whose lascivious unbridled humour magically replenishes. She comes to relieve the emotional tension that imprisons us. While looking for Persephone, Demeter falls into the abyss of depression. Depressions can be a paralyzing confrontation with our own darkness and often bear a hidden intention to unearth unconscious content for the purpose of integration. Her encounter with Baubo suggests that while carrying the loss of her daughter, for Demeter to renew her search, she needs to release the belief systems that in its current state leave her near lifeless, and her search fruitless. Those belief systems kept both her and her daughter from evolving in the first place and prompted Persephone’s abduction.
Reclaiming sensuality as vibrant vulvanic life force
Like most of us, I grew up in a patriarchal society rife with rules of conduct inheriting skills that suppressed rather than channeled my sexual, creative energy. Holding on to outdated belief systems and habits that did not feed my growth, but instead, depleted it, eventually ran me dry. It killed my creativity.
The vulva as creative source, symbol of renewal and fertility, weaves the inner and outer worlds. She unifies the principles of cosmos and matter as the gate through which body and soul must pass in order to birth life on earth. In a poetic text of Sumerian Goddess Inanna dated around 4000 BC, her moist vulva takes centre stage calling out for her lover’s penis (the ox) to fertilize her and with her, the lands of the people.
Who will plow my high field?
Who will plow my wet ground?
As for me, the young woman,
who will plow my vulva?
Who will station the ox there?I, Dumuzi the King will plow your vulva.
Then plow my vulva, man of my heart!
The power of the vulva is still known and practiced by Hindu culture through the worship of Shakti and the yoni, archetypal symbols of fertility, renewal and divine creation. This feminine image is dynamic and active, cosmic and physical. To worship the yoni is to achieve liberation, but the prerequisite to be allowed to perform a yoni puja is to first rid oneself of worldly ideas about the yoni.
While the tantric tradition worships yoni and lingam and branches out into other Asian cultures such as Buddhism, in Old Europe and the Middle East, the vulva fell out of favour as Goddess worship declined. It left the penis standing, rising along as central esoteric image to the dawn of monotheistic religion. When the vulva as power and creative symbol became repressed and replaced by the penis, her power took a dark turn. In Roman times, she became known as the vagina dentata - toothed vagina - which implicated that sexual intercourse with a woman might injure a man. The vagina dentata is also known in other cultures, often belonging to a crazed woman out for revenge. The Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann describes the myth of the vagina dentata belonging to the archetype of the Terrible Mother whose teeth need to be broken by the hero in order to turn her back into a woman. Jung postulates that anything repressed turns dark, which is the basis for the concept of the Shadow. The thread of repression of the Goddess and her vulva can easily be traced in our Western history. How it connects to disempowerment of the feminine, of women (read more about this here), of sexuality and creativity, and in the same breath, the desacralization of nature and rise of a mechanized, controlled society. While the Great Mother has a terrible aspect, which can easily be seen and felt in her physical manifestation of natural disasters, how we go about healing might not be the same as our idea of freeing. Patricia Berry writes in ‘Echo’s Subtle Body’ that there is no way out of a myth, only deeper into it. If we move deeper into the myth of the vagina dentata we continually meet displaced or angered women. Perhaps it is the Maori myth of Hine-nui-te-po, Goddess of night and death, that sheds most light on the origins of woman’s chagrin. Hine-nui-te-po receives the spirits of humans when they die and shepherds their soul into the next stage of their story. Her vaginal obsidian teeth are famous for biting trickster God Maui who tried to grant mankind immortality by reversing the birthing process, neither Maui’s right nor domain of jurisdiction. While this gives us plenty of information already, to really know Hine-nui-te-po, is to know how she became the Goddess of Night. When she was young and still known as Hine-ti-tama, her father Tane Mahuta took her virginity. It left her feeling so ashamed, she decided to hide in internal darkness to escape from her father and thus became Goddess of the Night.
Mythical rape in depth psychology is often explained as a cutting off from a strangular mother-complex by the masculine in order to become more independent, as is ascribed to the story of Persephone. Good to note that that view was initially born from a man’s mind and when looking at mythological rape across cultures, it also shows a collective movement away from the feminine by a force that acts as power over earth bound spirituality, over the way of the natural in which sexuality is ecstatic creativity. In Western society, (bodily) shame clouds sexuality, and it has for countless generations. Where there is shame, there is anger, and where there is anger, there is a wound. It is tending to the wound that heals.
Although I recognized the pattern laid down before me by many generations of women and men, I could not find my way through it. I was angry, depressed, unmotivated, and eventually, slumped down by the well with Demeter. Rather than tricking myself out of what I felt, I decided to stay in this darkness, to do nothing but breathe.
I still remember that first magic moment when I felt frustration and anger willingly move into a free flow of pleasure, a rumbling in my chest, a warming of my spine. Just like with Demeter, it started slowly. A flickering of a smile, a hint of joy. It was out of my control, a natural process which up until then I had denied myself. It didn’t need any outside encouragement. I allowed Baubo to show me the absurdity of my situation. She was making fun of me and it lifted my burden.
When I watched videos of Iranian nurses dressed in antiviral suits defiantly breaking out in colloquial dance moves during the Coronavirus outbreak, it reminded me of how Baubo’s great gift breathes air into otherwise tense situations. It also bears resemblance of a story Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ wrote in her book “Women Who Run with the Wolves’. The story takes place when General Eisenhower visited Rwanda at the time of the Second World War. The local governor envisioned a warm welcome, with all the native women lining both sides of the street of the parade. The only problem was that besides jewelry, they didn’t wear any clothes. The governor sent skirts and blouses for the women to wear at the event, and as instructed, the women dutifully showed up. But the governor heard that the women had left the blouses at home, because they didn’t like the look. The governor angrily summoned the headman who in turn spoke to the headwoman. She ensured him that as the General would drive by, the women planned to cover their breasts. We can only imagine General Eisenhower’s reaction as his jeep rolled on by and woman after bare-breasted woman gracefully lifted up her skirt to cover her chest and, I assume, a raucous smile.
Closer to home, many are the times I have stood in front of my five-year-old, exhausted and needing her to go to bed, when she would wriggle her bare bum at me and I could feel the pent up anger inside make way for laughter. Or when I needlessly argue with my husband and one instant of recognition can turn the tide. It is my own exhaustion with the overbearing mum or old judge in me that allows a precious moment of suspension for Baubo to come in and jiggle her titties at me.
The shackles of our collective past weigh heavy, but the playful crudeness of Baubo’s appearance can melt the rigid sincerity with which we carry this load.
What surprised me most is the effort I had put in to ignore her. It seems to me she is often nearby, waiting for me to notice her. I now recognize Baubo’s presence as a moment of choice, as my need to change everyday situations as well as reignite my inherent longing to stay in relation with myself and others. In her luscious Baubo style, she comes to ridicule our perceived stress of lives lived too far away from a more natural state of being.
In these times where most of our society functions far removed from the Earth’s and our own natural rhythms, and more people suffer from its inevitable consequences, Baubo comes as a welcome symbol of transformation. Here conventional notions of established belief systems, gender, social mores and aesthetics are shocked and laughed into dissolution by the crude life-giving, elemental dance of Baubo.
And as Baubo makes her way back into the collective, so does the vulva reclaim her power and recognition.
