Tales of Dragons, Rabbits and Roosters

Reimagined Graeae 1995 Unknown Artist

There once were three old women, who were blind to the gray world about them, save that they shared a single eye between them through which to see the world.

In order to see, each blind crone would take turns looking through the shared eye.  They spent their days passing the eye from woman to woman. As each took her turn she would describe the world she saw in living color to the other two.  It was as if each could see clearly through the seer’s eye. 

It never occurred to any one of the three to keep the eye for herself.  The world was full of possibilities for each of the women because of the collective vision and perspectives they shared.  

Poem from Images of Liberating Action: Opening a Collective Eye, Susan M. Maloney, 1995

Reviewing my IHCC days for the Anita Caspary piece I came across this drawing and poem in my files.

Part of the point in studying feminist spirituality is for women to learn to take God back in their hearts not as the authoritative father or his benevolent son but as the Mother/ Goddess/ Creator.  This means reexamining all the stories, rituals, symbols and prayers we used and asking ourselves does this include me and my experience as a woman.

Take for instance the story of Perseus who killed Medusa.  My sons, Ace and Mark, LOVE LOVE LOVE Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series.  I am very pleased because reading his books they have learned all about the Greek Gods and can tell their teachers who each one was and what they did.  Of course we recently watched the “Clash of the Titans” with Sam Worthington.  I enjoyed the movie as much as they did.

In this 2010 remake, Perseus has to find the Stygian Witches to ask them how to kill the Kraken coming to annihilate humanity.  The Stygian Witches were grey, frightening old crones who shared one eye between them.  After learning he needed to kill Medusa (the witches’ sister by the way) Perseus harassed the old women by tossing their eye out of their reach and making them scramble on hands and knees to find it.

In Greek and Roman mythology, the Stygian Witches were also called the Graeae who shared a single eye and a single tooth.  The Graeae were a primitive concept of the Triple Goddess “who was three in one and one in three”.  Throughout the pre-Christian world, you find Triple Goddess in her hundreds of forms as Creator/Preserver/Destroyer, Virgin/Mother/Crone, Past/Present/Future or Sun/Moon/Star.   The Graeae manifestation of the Triple Goddess was passed down through the play Phorcydes by Aeschylus, part of the dramatist’s trilogy on the life of Perseus.   In the early 7BC versions, the Graeae were young, beautiful and shaped like swans.  By 2010 they have become groveling sorceresses.

This poem is asking us, women, to re-imagine the Graeae, the Triple Goddess within us.  As we are now wiser, older, our hair has become grey but so has Greece and Rome.  And from where I stand the sky has also turned grey, filled with the pollution of man, the Kraken of our time.

Just like Rick Riordan who took an ancient play and 8 millennium later got it placed back on the bestsellers list, we can reframe the old stories.  The poem is asking us to work together, to share the seer’s eye that sees the possibilities, the future, and by describing our vision in living color, bring it to life.  Not for us but for our children, the next generation of Perseuses  who will eventually come to us and ask us how to annihilate the remade Kraken.