Women of the Wells: Can our native mythology really inform the way women live today?
In celebration of International Women’s Day, 2025
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‘The world which men have made isn’t working. Something needs to change. To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves – and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are. The stories we’ve been living by for the past few centuries – the stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination – don’t serve women and they certainly don’t serve the planet. Stories matter, you see. They’re not just entertainment – stories matter because humans are narrative creatures. It’s not simply that we like to tell stories, and to listen to them: it’s that narrative is hard-wired into us. It’s a function of our biology, and the way our brains have evolved over time. We make sense of the world and fashion our identities through the sharing and passing on of stories. And so the stories that we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, and the stories that are told to us by others about the world and our place in it, shape not just our own lives, but the world around us. The cultural narrative is the culture.
‘If the foundation stories of our culture show women as weak and inferior, then however much we may rail against it, we will be treated as if we are weak and inferior. Our voices will have no traction. But if the mythology and history of our culture includes women who are wise, women who are powerful and strong, it opens up a space for women to live up to those stories: to become wise, and powerful and strong. To be taken seriously, and to have our voices heard.’
From ‘If Women Rose Rooted’, by Sharon Blackie (2016)
Dear friends
I don’t imagine any of you who are reading this will doubt that the world as we’ve known it – certainly, as those of us who are now in our sixties have known it – is vanishing, and all too fast and, right now, all too brutally. To the extent we ever believed we had certainties, those certainties have all gone. In the meantime, though, we all live in and are part of this creaking and crumbling, corrupt and decadent Western civilisation, and the simple truth is that most of us can’t choose not to. But we can choose how we live in it. We can choose our behaviour, and the beliefs and values we’re going to try to live up to. We can choose how we respond to what’s happening in our bit of the world right now.
I’m not hugely interested in chronicling the details of, or agonising over, how and why some democracies can so easily be felled and the ‘world order’ can so easily be overturned. That one’s for the historians – at least, those who have the stomach for it. I’m a psychologist and a mythologist by professional and academic training as well as by inclination, and the questions I’m interested in are these:
In such times, what do we want to fall back on, to hold tight to? What do we want to preserve? What are our values; who do we think we are and what do we believe we’re for? What stories do we tell about who we are, and who we long now to become? What does a good life look like in these times?
These are the questions I’ve been exploring for a couple of decades now, in one way or another, in my books and more recently on this Substack. And as well as delving on occasion into the rather more abstract concept of the ‘archetypal feminine’, which is present in and relevant to all of us, I’m always exploring them in the context of women’s actual lived experience, and the hard work of reclaiming our voices and reimagining our stories today. This International Women’s Day seems like a good opportunity to raise those questions again. As you will all know by now, when our culture fails to offer us any meaningful stories to live by, I turn to the old stories for help. So today I’d like to offer you all some inspiration from our own British and Irish mythology and cosmology, and to highlight the many ways in which it was centred around women. A little of what follows will be familiar to those of you who’ve read If Women Rose Rooted and others of my books; some of it is new.
Over a decade ago now, when I first read Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful book Braiding Sweetgrass, I was sad to read her suggestion that the story of Eve is the story which belongs to, and so defines, non-Native American women in the West. In contrast to her own people’s stories about Skywoman, she writes this: ‘One woman [Skywoman] is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other [Eve] was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.’
Of course Robin would write that, because at the time she wrote her book, no one was raising awareness of the ways in which our own native mythology and cosmology centres women, and elevates them, in profoundly different ways from the old Biblical stories of Eve. But our own stories centre women precisely in the ‘good green world’, responsible for maintaining the balance and harmony between humans and the land – and, uniquely, carrying the moral and spiritual authority of the Otherworld that’s entangled with it. Nobody seemed to realise that. To the extent that the stories were known, they were offered up as entertainment, curiosities, rather than stories that once upon a time constituted an entire cosmology, a worldview. That was when I knew I needed to write If Women Rose Rooted, to raise awareness of a British and Irish mythology (which also extends into much of the rest of Europe, albeit often in less clear ways) that’s dominated by powerful women who are the creators and shapers of the land, its guardians and protectors, and who represent the moral and spiritual authority of the Otherworld.
Because – and this is important – the story of Eve that Robin is referring to isn’t native to Europe at all. This is not our native mythology. It doesn’t spring from our lands and our ancestry and our old, earth-centred ways of being in the world. Although we certainly adopted it wholesale, and there’s no question but that it’s had a profound impact on us, the story of Eve is a story from a tradition which arose in the Middle East. Our native ‘Insular Celtic’ – i.e. British and Irish – stories about women are very different, and they're much more aligned with the stories that Robin presents from her own tradition than they are with the Biblical stories that we much later embraced. So back in 2014, when I first set about writing If Women Rose Rooted, I felt it was more than time that women here knew that.1
These are the stories we women should have inherited, those of us with roots in these lands – but we lost them a long time ago. It’s important that we reclaim them. The stories we tell about the creation of the Earth and the origins of humankind show us how our culture views the world, our place in it, and our relationships with the other living things which inhabit it. If the stories we claim as foundation stories of our culture depict women as weak, untrustworthy and inferior, then however much we may rail against it, we will be treated as if we are weak, untrustworthy and inferior, and our voices will have no traction. But if the foundation stories of our culture include women who were wise, women who were powerful and strong, it would open up a space for women to live up to those stories: to become wise, and powerful and strong. To be taken seriously, and to have our voices heard.
That’s why, on this International Women’s Day, I want to share just a handful of the stories of the strong, powerful, wise – and sometimes dangerous – women which exist in our native traditions. There’ll be many more of those stories here over the coming year, but this time around, I’m focusing on those women who were associated with the wells and their waters, and who brought the life-giving gifts of the Otherworld to the land and its people. And here’s why those stories are important now: if the old order is being torn down, we need to remember that women have always been the ones who stitch the torn bits of life back together again, and with beautiful, bright threads. We are the ones who make it all new again.
‘In the old stories, it is women who make the world; why then shouldn’t we remake it? Women are the spinners, and the weavers; no matter how deeply we lose ourselves in the dark woods, we can always picture the shining thread of the river, far off in the distance. Women know how to find the way out of the woods; we have only to remember that we know it.’
From ‘If Women Rose Rooted’, by Sharon Blackie (2016)
I offer these stories especially to our sisters in America, who are going to need to find many creative ways to make their voices strong in the years ahead, in a country where only the men’s shouting seems to count right now. If you have ancestry in these lands, or in the wider countries of Europe where similar stories are abundant, these are your stories too. Embrace them. They’re from your lineage; they’re your birthright.
A 25% discount for International Women’s Day
As another way of celebrating International Women’s Day, I’m offering a 25% discount on a year’s paid subscription to ‘The Art of Enchantment’, in the hope of making this work more accessible to more of you. The offer is available just for the next week, and expires on March 15. You’ll be charged just £52.50 for access to my entire archive, as well as to participate in all the good things that lie ahead. I work very hard at producing high-quality new writing and other work exclusively for my engaged community here, and I hope that shows!
‘If women want to change things, we need authority, and authority comes in good part from inside ourselves. It comes from conviction, from understanding and owning our stories, from a strong sense of who we are and what our place is in the world.’
From ‘If Women Rose Rooted’, by Sharon Blackie (2016)
