Come gather ‘round, Sisters
I’ve something to say
No more biting my tongue
No more cause for delay.

For eons and eons
We’ve been stirring the stew
And cleaning up messes
When everyone was through

Are we dumb as a dishrag?
Is that what they thought?
Well, who changed their diapers
And scrubbed off their snot?

Now these overgrown children
In their contest of pissing
Hoard all their marbles
While we’re just subsisting.

Throwing lines on a round world
Dividing it to the last nth
Spreading rods, sticks, and missiles
And sharpening their flints

They’ve used up their sandbox
It is time to come home
We can unruffle them
And soothe their cockscomb

Give them a chance to recall
That they came through the Mother
So together we can straighten out
Their warmongering clutter

We have a secret weapon
For the planetary agenda:
Let’s lift up our skirts
And celebrate our pudenda!

Let the heart beat the rhythm
To swivel our hips
And hear the womb wisdom
That comes through our lips

Shimmy like an earthquake
Squat like a toad
Croon the inner ardor
‘Till we’re oo’ed, ah’ed, and oh’ed!

From the juice of our yonis
And the sweat off our tits
Flows a salve of creation
That can heal the Earth’s splits

Since the music is rising
- This is our chance -
Our bodies are channeling
Baubo’s (w)hoary dance.

James: Because of our move to Europe, I hadn’t painted in a year. So this was going to be a practice piece. The original photo shows Becca actually lying down on a bed; it was beautiful, but not a piece for the book. Right! It just so happened I was contemplating yoni wisdom and humor while reading The Metamorphosis of Baubo by Winifred Milius Lubell at the time. With a little change here and there on the original image (putting her skirt in her hand, making her appear to be moving), themes merged, and voilà!

Becca: Rarely in these works do I accentuate how Man in his supremacy has screwed up the world, but Dance of Baubo gave me the opportunity to expound upon it in the only way that makes sense at this stage of the game: with humor. The poem presumes a setting of a coffee klatch gone raunchy, where women speak to women from their minds, hearts, and vulvas. Instead of a stag party lubricated by alcohol, this women’s council is loosened by bawdy words and belly laughs, so that they jump up on the table and dance their declarations. “Dice entre las piernas” is an old saying (“She speaks from between her legs”) that Clarissa Pinkola Estés invokes in Women Who Run With the Wolves to introduce her re-telling of the Baubo myth. Winifred Milius Lubell, in her book The Metamorphosis of Baubo, says that Baubo’s power “was that of her body”. Her laughter was used “in sacred and joyful ritual to ease a stressful situation, to set painful matters in perspective, and to restore balance.” My poem looks at the tragedy of our modern world in just this light.

The poem lends itself to be sung, with the listeners stamping out the dactylic meter with their feet. The voice of the dancer speaks for every patient mother who has dealt with stirring the cooking pot, changing diapers, cleaning with dishrags, and comforting her snot-nosed kids. The time has come, the Universal Mother proclaims, for bratty boys to stop wrecking the Earth. The return of feminine wisdom can aright the disequilibrium of our society. Women respond by reviving the hoary (ancient) / whorey (promiscuous) dance of Baubo.

Demeter (Ceres), Earth Goddess of Grain and the Harvest, has one child, a daughter named Persephone (Proserpine). One day while gathering flowers, Persephone is abducted by the God of the Underworld, Hades (Pluto), and carried below the earth to be his bride. Zeus (Jupiter) had given his tacit consent to their union. Upon discovering her absence, Demeter searches and searches for her beloved daughter, without success. Hecate (Goddess of Death and the Moon) and Helios (the Sun) reveal the abduction. Angry and distraught, Demeter neglects mortals, whose fields wither and yield no harvests.

In her wanderings, the pall of grief disguising her goddess nature, she comes to Eleusis, where she sits down to rest at the well. There an old nurse, Baubo, approaches her. Entering into a woman-to-woman conversation with the sad newcomer, the old lady cracks jokes and begins to dance. Gradually Demeter raises her eyes to see that this is no ordinary dance, for Baubo is flashing her skirt, revealing her nakedness. And most amazing of all, her yoni seems to be communicating through the dance. What with her frolicking and obscene gestures, Baubo causes the great Goddess to smile, chuckle, and then have a wholehearted laugh. Feeling caught up in one big feminine inside joke, Demeter laughs until she cries.

This fresh perspective sets Demeter on the road to restoring her grace to agriculture, discovering the whereabouts of her daughter, and making a deal to have Persephone dwell on Earth two thirds of the year. The time of Persephone’s absence, as well as Demeter’s mourning, was an ancient explanation for winter.

It is recorded that mystical ritual and trance dance were celebrated every year at Demeter’s temple at Eleusis. Through the themes of grain and the earth’s fertility, initiates purportedly learned the secrets of life and death. Details of these Baubo-style dances and initiation ceremonies are scant, as participants upheld a code of secrecy. The Eleusinian Mysteries remain, to this day, a mystery.

Although the story of Baubo comes to us from ancient Greece, the skirt-raising gesture of Baubo has been found in many ancient cultures (such as the Sumerian Goddess Bau) all the way back to Paleolithic times. Sheilah-na-gig is a female figure carved in stone, shown in a squatting position, knees apart, with her hands either indicating her vulva or parting the labia. Oddly enough, these stylized though graphic carvings were found primarily in Irish churches dating from the 12th-16th centuries. Most of the Sheilas were defaced or destroyed during the Victorian Era.

§§ See also: AMATERATSU.