I was raised by the dirt of East Bay hills. I dug holes until my little arms and fingers hit bedrock, I made mud patties and set them out to dry, I stirred brown potions in broken terracotta pots, and I gathered bones.
I gathered bones of the little birds who chose our garden as their resting place, bones left by the feral cats who roamed our streets like shadow gods, the bones I found when digging, the bones I found while singing.
It was this practice that prompted my mother to tell me the stories of La Loba. The Wolf Woman. A beautiful beast who scours mountains, sifts through riverbeds, and digs into the earth collecting bones. She collects the bones of deer, of coyote, of crow, but most importantly, of wolves. And when she’s assembled every last piece of the skeleton, she sings. She sings flesh back onto the bones, she sings blood back into the veins, she sings a heartbeat back into the soul.
The Wolf Woman is said to live in the granite slopes of the Tarahumara tribe, to be buried in a well under the Phoenix sun, to haunt highways in the Wild West and stoke cave fires in Oaxaca. But she is also a story my mother, and her mother before her, brought with them from the Himalayas, from Chitral. She is the beast that gave my grandmother the savage strength to leave her ancestral home, to work night shifts in an Oakland hospital and breastfeed her babies during the day. That gave my mother the might to endure when she held a college acceptance letter in one hand and a positive pregnancy test in the other. The Halmasti, they called it.
The Halmasti is a demon hound, a thunder that erupts from the sky. This she-wolf appears when a child is born or when a corpse is washed before burial. Thus, neither are abandoned for seven days and nights – rounds of recitation of the Quran are conducted around the bodies of those who have passed and lullabies are sung to newborns. It is a folklore that is shared across the Turkic, Iranic, and Sinitic worlds, of which the Himalayas lay at the junction. A story that originated in ancient Sumer, where they told stories of a female demon known as Littu, stories adopted by the Semitic people as Lillith and spread all over European mythology. A child snatcher, a witch. The Chitralis merged this female entity with the Tiangou, a celestial hound of ancient Chinese mythology that descends from the skies with thunderous lightning to eat the sun and moon.
My mother and her mother before that were born on these mountains of metamorphic rock. Its rivers are braided into my hair. My lips are stained by its rhododendron. My skin is tempered by its tempests and my bones are molded from its ice and snow.
I have not been to these lands, I did not gather water at these rivers or crush the flowers to sweeten my milk, but sometimes I think I can feel the mountains rise with my breath. Sometimes I think I can feel the frost on my toes and white sunlight on my forehead. I can feel these mountains in the vibration of vocal cords as I listen to my elders tell the stories.
Muslim women with tattoos of ash and breastmilk shared their knowledge of the land as I laid my head on their lap – they shared the story of our home, stories that had been etched into their skin. They told me of the fairies that lived in a golden castle at the highest peak, who guarded the shepherds’ herds and kept the hearths aflame. Of the winged serpents that would erupt from its waters and the hound-women that would storm down from the heavens.
They told me the birth of Islam was cradled by women, just like this. Head to lap, mothers to daughters. It was spread from Mecca to the Maghreb, from mothers to Moors. Indeed, these Muslim Moors traced descent in the female line and established post-marital residence in the homes of the women. And when the Moors spread across Europe, they brought with them not only black power but the power and role of women in the Islamic faith. They brought with them female chiefs, holy women, and queendoms. They built mosques led by matriclans.
But in the hundreds of years of ensuing history, that power was purged. Countless women of color were murdered as witches in the holy war against the Wild Woman. The fire used to burn these women was lit by the fear of femininity, by the female practice of animism, of goddess worship, of women who were unshackled and undomesticated. Women of power were branded heretics and slaughtered in inquisition after inquisition. The consolidation of Christianity in Europe thus exercised any matriarchal spirits that could possibly possess their women.
And this phallic God only seeks to molest and mutilate more, to conquer and colonize more. Islam’s underlying inherent meditative and mystic, feminine and spiritual value has been devastated by male-dominated dogmatic imposition. The streets of my mother’s hometown used to be full of feral girls playing soccer in the dirt, dark hair moving through the air like it defied gravity. Today, those streets are empty, those girls are bound to their bedrooms, every inch of skin wrapped, every strand of flying hair tucked away. Sponsored by political and power-hungry male Islamic sects, this modern colonization is veiling women, circumcising their pleasure, and devastating traditions that have been upheld for thousands of years in the name of the divine. Today, ruling men are using this rhetoric to distract women from the cobra that is slowly coiling around them, crushing them as they pray.
The disappearance of female facial tattoos is linked to the waning of a matriarchy that once existed in the region. Sons – who now learn their faith from men in cement mosques rather than learning the generational knowledge of their families under an olive tree – tell their mothers they will go to hell for their tattoos. Tell them to beg for forgiveness.
I was raised in a matriclan. This year I will have the honor of receiving the traditional tattoos, a practice the women before me have honored for centuries, a custom serving as a fossil of the ancient people who survived until modernity. Yumna Al-Arashi, Egyptian-Yemeni photographer, spent her childhood looking up with fascination upon the dots, lines and symbols that graced her Yemeni great-grandmother's face. She spent a year migrating across the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian hinterlands, collecting portraits of 100 tattooed women on her journey. "I have the stars and the moon on my cheeks" a woman of Siliana, Tunisia told her. "They're the most beautiful things my eyes have seen. I don't know how to read or write, and I don't have any devices like you, but I know my land and my earth, the stars and moon help me navigate it. That's why I'm here." It is the responsibility of the women to have these symbols to protect their families from the spirits of the otherworld. They are symbols of their clan, of their lands, and of their own power.
My elders, with tattoos of ash and breastmilk, shared their knowledge not just of the magic in the lands and in our spirits, but in our breasts. Islam, in its original and purest form, empowers the woman and her witch.
Across the world, the figure of the witch serves as an awesome image of primordial feminine concern with herself. While the maternal role requires a woman’s very blood to run solely for the sake of nourishing others, the witch’s life is directed at herself, fueling the dark recesses of her psyche. The witch is a reflection of the unnamable and untamable aspects of a woman — an expression of her hidden passions, which are normally forced to stagnate and fester. Her power is rooted in her very femininity and her evil is rooted in the fear of her power.
The Spanish Inquisition arrived in the New World convinced of the existence of witches. By 1610, Cartagena, Colombia became the center of the Inquisition's battle to preserve the Catholic orthodoxy by persecuting perceived demons. Of the nearly six hundred cases of witchcraft judged by the Spanish Inquisition, more than half took place in Cartagena. The Inquisitors believed the truth could only be found through torture. The persecution of witchcraft provided the colonial authorities with an excuse to control the knowledge, bodies, and behavior of indigenous and enslaved women.
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My little family drove through the Niles Canyon every weekend. My young and naive parents thought they could raise their little girl in mountains, in rivers and golden hills, but we weren’t a family of fairies who could survive on nature’s pixie dust. So, while we spent the weekends dancing with daylight, we drove our beat-up Bronco back to our one-bedroom Hayward apartment during the week, so my mom and dad could go to work, so I could go to school.
I remember the drives. I remember how the morning drives were graced by white light glittering on creeks and almond flowers, but also how the night held something else. And in that darkness, my mother would tell me the story of the white witch that haunted those woods, that walked those roads.
She was a young bride, veiled in white, off to the altar in her horse drawn carriage. But in this place, where the trees seem to loom closer to you as you stare, where the darkness seems to eat up the moonlight, the horses were spooked, throwing the bride from her carriage and into the afterlife.
And so, for the past century, a woman in a wretched wedding dress walks Highway 84, perpetually pleading for a ride. And every now and then, a kind driver stops and opens their door to her. She tells them that she is trying to get to San Francisco and gives the driver the address, but just before the car reaches the Dumbarton Bridge, she vanishes.
She is the first witch I was introduced to. She haunted my closet at night and reached her slimy skeleton fingers out from under my bed when all the lights were off. I feared her for years and years. I cried when we drove through her canyon at night, I shook and shivered as our headlights illuminated a new part of the woods, praying to God she wasn’t there. And then I forgot about her, as I grew older, I forgot that those trees held something sinister, I forgot to turn on my night light and close my closet door at night.
In fact, I didn’t think of her for a decade, I didn’t think of her until I got my heart broken for the first time. As I sat in the backseat of our Bronco, barely keeping the broken pieces of myself together, I could almost see her running beside the car. I could see how her black lashes bled out onto her cheeks and left dalmatian spots on her wedding dress. How her veil tore on tree branches, a cruel sort of exit ceremony. She shook and shattered as the sun began to spill its evening cider. And as she shed the gloves that hid her dirty fingernails, the sky gave its very best impression of Neptune: a petrifyingly perfect blue. She is a sundowner, I thought, smitten with the sunrise and terrified of its twilight. And that very last act of abandonment did it for the poor girl, because when she was left with nothing but the moon’s foreboding stare, her knees buckled, and she tumbled down in a pile of silk, tulle, and tears. Her whimpers became downright sobs, which themselves dissolved into wild howls.
For one instantaneous and infinite second, I was the White Witch. I was so young, so naive, and so desperately trying to reach an aisle I would never be able to walk down.
My family moved a few years after that. We had outgrown the one-bedroom apartment when my sister was born and when our pack of dogs grew to ferocious and feral four. We moved to Antioch, where I met another white witch. Her name is Sarah Norton, another young woman killed when she was thrown from her carriage, whose spirit who resides in Antioch’s Black Diamond Mines. Mines that dug up every last inch of the land's black food. There is little left of that feast, except for Rose Hill Cemetery, whose tombstones are largely for children who had died in plagues of smallpox, scarlet fever, and typhoid fever. For over a decade, the people of the town have seen a woman dressed in a white, walking in the graveyard or standing by its entrance, guarding the children.
But she is thought of as a witch for more than her hauntings. Like my own mother, Sarah Norton was a midwife, a healer. Sarah helped hundreds of women deliver their babies, laboring with mothers while their husbands worked the mine. Her knowledge of procreation, fertility, successful delivery, and most dangerously, contraception and abortion made her a threat. Midwives were persecuted as witches because they threatened the supremacy of the Catholic Church and the power of male physicians.
The word witch comes from the word wit – wise. It was an appellation given to healers before the one-God religions crucified the Wild Mother religions. Midwives had knowledge of herbs and folk healing, brewing abortifacients and growing herbs that prevent a pregnancy. Midwives had access to the mysteries of birth and death, and to products of childbearing believed to have magical power: the caul, the placenta, and the umbilical cord. A woman with that kind of power and position was only met with suspicion by religious and medical authorities who would always seek ways to control such dangerous women.
My father, who hails from Melanesia, has always acknowledged and honored this power, in my mother, in my sister, in me. In Melanesia, menstruation found its way into the witch's lair: the appearance of the menstrual flow and its believed connection to fertility, abortion, and disease are all part of an occult realm of medicine that only women can control. The term for these medicines, moro, is also the term used to describe deep saturations of indigo dye on cloth. "Blue medicines" thus describes a tradition of herbalism, midwifery, and witchcraft. Witches have "blueness in them," they are "bluish people” whose very blood is believed to be poisonous. While both men and women may be witches, only women pass on this “affliction” to their children, since witchcraft always travels along the matriline or walla, meaning flower. In this place, they believe there is an obscure fundamental relationship between witchcraft and menstrual blood. The menstruating woman and the witch both have power to render magic. That all women have the potential to be witches and they are linked to witchcraft through the common bond of menstruation.
In Indonesia, Huaulu women believe the menstrual cycle was initiated by a terrifying female predator, a monster who introduced death to the world. But despite that, they recognize that death is necessary, for without death of the old, birth of the new cannot be sustained. Across the world, the Creation Mother is always also the Death Mother. Janet Hoskins, Professor of Anthropology and Religion at USC, says "the paradox is recognized, but the men cannot quite accept it, as they cannot quite accept its signs in women's bodies.”
Huaulu women are seen as connected to the earth, and to Puhum, the anthropomorphized primordial earth mother. The earth mother is associated with the night, with the changing shape and light of the moon. And as they bonded to her, the women’s’ periods runs in cycle with the moon, bleeding when it's new and ovulating when it’s full. They believe that human bodies come from this first mother, and that they are made of earth. That they grow and bloom, that they rot and return to the land. Female power is earthly, it’s regenerative.
And thus, dear reader, we approach the grand work of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and her Wild Woman. I received her book Women Who Run with the Wolves for my eighteenth birthday from my mother’s sister, with the words “may it illuminate your path” written on the inside cover. Estés describes that within every woman there is something wild, with beastly fangs and ancient knowing. It is a beautiful beast that is domesticated out of us, muffled and violently amputated. We are sanitized of our instincts and pushed off our natural cycles. The Wild Woman archetype sheaths the alpha matrilineal being. She came to the Navajo as the Spider Woman, to the Aztec as Coatlicue, to the Greek as Gaia. She came to my mother as she labored in water, as she held her baby to her breast for the first time. She visited my Umma when a soldier stole her from her jungle at just fourteen. She visited my Nani, when she had to scrape a fetus from her womb with a rusty hanger.
There is a forging fire that finds us. As girls, as women, as elders. We are burned alive. We are burnt at the stake. We are burnt to the ground and from the ashes, we rise again. For there is something within us that endures, something ancient, something wild.
Estés teaches us that as women, we have been cannibalized, our bones scattered in the desert sand. That our work is to recover our dismantled parts and sing them back to life, just as La Loba does. She is the archivist of feminine intuition, of female traditions. And just as she sings over the bones, we must call back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, of our souls.
In Mexico, women are said to carry luz de la vida – the light life. It is held not in their heart, not in their eyes, but en los ovarios. In her ovaries. La Loba is planted in us from birth, in the wild seeds in our guts.
Estés says that to restore a woman’s vitality, she must begin a psychic archaeological dig. It took time to grow into my pick and brush, it took years of digging to find bones. I shrieked and shivered with the White Witch of Niles Canyon, I practiced witchcraft with midwives, I traced tattoos on the faces of Bedouin brides, I bled alongside Melanesian mothers. I thundered from the skies like Halmasti and I sang to the bones with La Loba. I walked into the flames and emerged unburnt.
Nawal El Saadawi, Egypts most radical feminist, professed that she is a dangerous woman because she is “speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.” Throughout history, savage femininity has been persecuted. The witch hunt never ended. But lessons from matriarchal Moors and ancient Muslim mothers, from White Witches and Wolf Women, can teach us how to reclaim the shackles on our body, to shed the fetters on our sexuality, and flaunt the power of our feminine psyche.
These stories are different but the same, they are the stories of the Wild Woman. They are her past, present, and future.
And this is the story of how I found her. And so, dear reader, I pass on to you my pick and brush.
Go eat the sun and moon.
Go gather the bones.