It starts with the sound of a heartbeat.
Followed by the rhythmic beating of the loom; and callused hands weaving threads between ancient fingers. The fireplace in the corner is crackling, and the embers, which have remained lit for generations, glow golden. Figurines of women are placed around the fire, emblems of ancient ancestors. This is the Mother House.
In When Women Were The Land, Sylvia V. Linsteadt, novelist, poet, scholar of ancient history, animal tracker, and artist, walks us through a land of myth, storytelling, and the lineage of our mother houses.
The thread I'd like to share today draws from the final module in the course, Spindlewhorl. A spindlewhorl is the round weight found at the bottom of spindles, which were used to hand spin raw fibres into thread, and is a ritual offering from Neolithic Europe. Through myth, storytelling and history, we can see the power of weaving as being a conduit for women's storytelling. When women's voices were silenced, things like weaving were a means for their stories to be shared with the world.
But we can see that ancient women's work has been co-opted through myths and retellings. We can see this namely through the story of Ariadne. Set in Crete, the story of Ariadne, daughter of Minos, follows Theseus coming to Crete, where he is tasked to slay Ariadne’s brother, the Minotaur. In this classical myth, Ariadne is famous for her betrayal of her family, by giving the ball of thread to Theseus, for him to carry to the labyrinth centre, where her brother the Minotaur lies. Once Theseus slays the Minotaur, he follows Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth.
The story of Ariadne, one that echoes back to folktales of Old Europe, could suggest that Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth, holds a similar role to that of the Baba Yaga, or old wise grandmothers, offering young heroines and heroes a ball of thread to find their heart’s desire or guide them on their journey. It's a story of initiation, not the betrayal and downfall of a woman. As Linsteadt argues “I think about how old this motif must be. Older than the classical story of Ariadne. As old as the time when her story was told right. When she was a mother amongst the ancestors, and it was she you sought in order to be given guidance.”
Uprooted from this patriarchal retelling, Ariadne's story can be seen as a reflection of the journey of descent, rebirth and renewal. Whether that's an experience of childbirth, an initiation into womanhood, or a physical and spiritual journey.
When we look back to 'Old Europe', a term popularised by the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas with the publication of her book, The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe (1982), we can see through Gimbutas' work that Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures of Europe were egalitarian, matrilocal and matrilineal, meaning households prioritised the female line.
Following in Gimbutas's shoes, another pioneer in her own right, classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, was researching Greek religion and mythology, and the notion of a matriarchal and matrifocal Greek society (this was, however, a topic of interest amongst male anthropologists of the mid 19th century, yet their stance was one of this being a primitive phase of human evolution, a view with Harrison would fall back into, a woman finding her way and working in a male-dominated, patriarchal society).
Excavation of Minoan Crete at Knossos, which began in 1900, revealed a matrifocal culture, one where the mother line took centre stage. Similarly, Gimbutas, in her research of Macedonia and Greece, found in ruins of the Neolithic, Linsteadt shares “a great number of female-shaped figurines, and remarkable pottery assemblage painted with symbols she later interpreted in book The Language of the Goddess, based on decades of study not only of these Neolithic cultures but also the folklore and motifs of eastern and central Europe”. Perhaps these ancient figurines hail back to a time before Ariadne, to a goddess, who tends the labyrinth, and holds the key to personal transformation.
Ariadne's thread, harking back to matrifocal cultures, was one of women's knowledge. Thread that symbolises the power of tradition,stories, and folklore, as told by women. It is the thread that travels back through our motherlines.
