Wolf Mother
“And she did not retreat by a single step, she didn’t lower her eyes.”
Wolf Mother, where ya been?
You look so worn, so thin.
You’re a taker, a devil’s maker
Let me hear you sing hey-ya, hey-ya
~”Wolf”, by First Aid Kit
It’s February, the month named for the festival of “Februa” during the month of Februārius. This festival is also known as “Lupercalia” or the festival of the god “Lupercus” who is an iteration of the god Pan. And “lupercus,” coming from the latin word “lupus” or “wolf.”
This festival was held on February 15 and celebrated the turning of the year toward spring. “Februa” means to purify or cleanse and this festival is a ritual purification that releases the past season. Rituals are often considered to be spiritual practices, and they are that, as well as somatic ones.They are somatic in that we physically and tangibly acknowledge the seemingly intangible patterns of change, the turning of the Earth that we cannot notice from our vantage point unless we are paying close attention to shifting skies. It feels like we’re standing on something still, not a giant rock hurling and spinning through space and time. Ritual not only brings what is beyond our scope of vision into consciousness, it also manifests by creating forms, containers, and vessels for what is otherwise invisible to us.
The motion of the Earth impacts our lives, our fields, our need for sunlight as does many forces of life that are not perceptible to our senses. When humans come together and invite in these forces they learn, or better said, remember, that they are not separate from them. This includes the aspects of us that make us animals and like those other animals we co-exist with. In doing this we mitigate what might be called “human supremacy” and the idea that we are an elite species. When we forget this, exile it, or ignore it, it becomes neglected and part of our collective shadow. This neglect doesn’t make it go away, just the opposite.
Lupercalia likely began as a pre-Roman celebration held by the Sabelline, or the Sabine, tribes that lived in the Apennine mountains of what is now Italy. These were animist, pre-pagan, peoples that lived in deep relationship with the landscape. People that were one of the shapes the land took, one of the shapes of the wind, the rocks, the hands of the forests, the lungs of the plants and trees.
Imagine that our human bodies are not separate from all that surrounds us but is instead its limbs, its organs, its dreams.
Originating from the Sabine people were the Samnites and they too were animistic as well as totemic.
Totemism is often placed under the umbrella of “animism” as an aspect of it. And other times it is considered a separate system of relating. Both are academic terms used to describe the way that humans participate in the social field of the landscape that perceives it as animate and fully conscious. A totemic culture relates the image, behavior, and role in the ecosystem of an animal or other non-human, natural, object or being as the symbolic representation of the people. Totemism usually includes practices of respect and reverence for that being or object. Often there is something particular about that being, for instance the wolf, that is kin to the group of people. There may be legends about how the humans and the animal, or other symbol, first bonded and created a pact between them to co-exist and help eachother .
This practice is adaptive in terms of survival as it forms alliances and determines rules of engagement including the sharing or resources. For example, crows and hunters have long been known to work together tracking prey. The crow will signal the hunter where the prey is and in return is afforded some of the remains. Basically the crow gets the hunter to kill something for them. What this amounts to is a multi-species culture that is generated by symbols, myths, and rituals passes from one generation to the next creating a sustainable “clan-based ecology” that is maintained by historical relational agreements.
The Samnites were totemic people and one group were the Hirpini or “wolf” people that lived in the area of Southern Italy now known as Campania around the cities of Benevento and Avellino.
Imagine that not only humans are the shapes taken by the land, but so are the other animals. They are us, and we are them. Imagine that the shapeshifters, the totemic peoples, knew this and could change themselves. Imagine they could change themselves into wolves. Or vice versa, the wolves could change into humans.
What if our bodies are mutable?
I’ve felt this. And by felt I mean I have received “felt” sensory input that changes me. For sure this is an experience that many have had with plants whereby we feel the plant’s presence and qualities in our own bodies. But to become them? What is that feeling?
One time I believe I experienced this was when I was walking on a nearby trail in the woods. The trail is an old railroad bed, the tracks were removed long ago, and it is now a dirt trail that loops along our local river. When I go for walks I often turn off my phone, I never have earbuds in, I prefer the silence. And I am often in a bit of a trance/daydream state of consciousness. This is a practice I’ve been doing for my entire life and often where much of my inspiration for my work and writing comes through to me.
On this one day, whilst in this rhythmic walking state, I was shook out of my dreaming by a loud screech. I naturally turned towards it to see an eagle springing from the top of a tree, wings spread and body stretched out on an air wave above the current of the river. Something broke through me for one millisecond and I could feel that uplift swirl of air pushing me up, I could feel the upward pulse of the wind on my chest, and for a split moment I became the eagle. This was a completely kinesthetic experience that, honestly, defies description.
Back to the wolf, we see many themes throughout history and in folklore that describe the human relationship with the wolf, the shapes we share, the way the landscape forms us in many of the same ways. The festival of Lupercalia brings this to consciousness, it makes it a tangible reality, and completes, over and over, one part of the cycle of the year so that another may begin. And it completes, over and over, the ancestral communion with the Wolf Mother.
The festival celebrates the “lupercal cave” where the mythological beginnings of Rome occurred. It is in this cave that Remus and Romulus were abandoned by their mother, Rhea Silvia, and survived because a wolf mother suckled them. After the twins were born they were exiled by King Amulius, of the ancient Latin city Alba Longa, who saw them as a threat to his reign.
The King had them left on the banks of the Tiber river in a basket. The river carried them away until they were caught by a wild Fig tree where they were soon found by a she-wolf who took them to the cave on Palatine Hill (now one of the seven hills of Rome) and fed them her own milk.
The festival began as a method of penance to absolve Remus and Romulus of the violence they caused each other in the founding of the city of Rome. They had had a dispute about where to build the city, on which hill, that led to Remus being killed by Romulus.
The original ritual involved the sacrifice of goats and a dog. The ritual knives were then purified with goat's milk, representing the milk of the she-wolf, and placed on the heads of two members of the Sodales Luperci (wolf cult) representing Remus and Romulus. This is an act of atonement as well as accountability. Although the original Remus and Romulus cannot be there to make amends, their descendants can take on that responsibility ritually.
Atonement in this framework is collective and the repetitive ritual acts involved bring the cycle that was created in the acts of Remus and Romulus to completion so that the violent energy is released by subsequent generations. This is also a ritual of ancestor veneration for the descendants of the Sabine peoples.
After the initial ritual a large feast and further celebration continue. The skin of the sacrificed goats is cut into strips of thongs and used by the Luperci to run around and “whip” anyone who they ran past with them. This sounds violent, but it was a game and considered good luck if one was fortunate enough to be struck. It was probably something like our familiar game of “It” tag.
...many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy.
~From Plutarch, Life of Caesar
The festival eventually grew and evolved into a large festival and it is believed to be the source of our contemporary St. Valentine’s Day. Lupercalia was celebrated in ancient Rome to purify the city and its inhabitants as well as promote fertility.
The wolf mother and her relationship with humans still remains iterated in our folklore, although our shapeshifting capacities have been remitted to mythology and legend.
The story of La Lupa, the She-Wolf
A retelling of the original story written in 1880 by Giovanni Verga as part of his collection, Vita dei Campi, about life in peasant Sicily.
Pina walked like a woman much younger than her age. She had hands like a man’s; rough and calloused, her fingers carved by wisdom and skill. She swayed when she moved, smooth yet with resolve, her head high and chest forward, almost noble. Though if you looked in her eyes, which most of the villagers avoided out of fear, you could see it, her skin had a pallor. If anyone had the courage to really see her they would have noticed she wore a tattered dress. That she carried recoveries, from case after case of malaria. Of caring for a child all alone. Of not having a husband. Of exile.
She had survived a long, hard peasant life in the fields from morning to night. This could have broken her, she had been torn to pieces by loss, disease, and being a woman during a time when only men were afforded social status and access to resources. Yet, something kept her lips bright red, her hips loose, her arms strong. Something kept her longing alive. She had a fire and a deadly thirst that drove her when others might have given up. As an outsider she had spent most of her life alone at the edge of the village where she had managed to keep up the land left to her when her husband died. Without the distractions of social acceptance, and with her deep desire for connection, she had bonded with non-human beings, with the others that lived outside the domesticated rules of the village. She had failed to become tamed by weaving circles, attending mass, and family dinners. Instead she became something feral, earning her the name “La Lupa”, the she-wolf, a derogatory word used to describe women who did not conform.
The other women in the village were afraid of her. Afraid of what she represented, the part of themselves that was buried in their bellies, the tails they had always wrapped tight and tucked so no one could ever see. And worse, for all humans man or woman, she represented the hunter. The hunter who had once only been prey. The human who was the one eaten but had become blood-thirsty enough to watch the wolves. La Lupa reminded the villagers that at one time humans learned to hunt by observing their own predators and becoming like them. By learning how to grow fangs and claws and where right where to drive them in. She reminded them how they learned how to kill.
La Lupa was a woman much like the old goddesses who took to the woods. Like Diana who the church had domesticated into the Virgin Mary, a demure and purified feminine force now only in the service to a male god. Or Artemis who killed with no remorse, Artemis who killed with love, with autonomy, with choice, with freedom.
The women in the village feared her so much they crossed themselves if they were unfortunate enough to pass by her. Of course, she never showed herself at church on Sundays. And there were rumors about her and Father Angiolino. After all she had given birth to a daughter who was supposedly her dead husband’s. But what had happened to him anyway? The rumors said she had stolen Padre's soul.
Her poor daughter was destined to a single life as well because no one would ever want to marry the child of La Lupa. Yet, the mother and daughter lived well on a piece of inherited land (most land at this time was familia and passed from generation to generation), where they grew many crops, drank homemade wine, kept bees, and played like a wolf mother and her pup in the sun. La Lupa kept the villagers' threats and trespasses at bay with her fangs. And by paying her workers well. She had many men that worked her crops and fields for pay, but also to be close to her, to be near her wilderness. This provided her with protection and fodder for continued village rumors that grew more and more complex with speculation and fantasy. The stories told of more than just an immoral woman, they told of her growing fangs at night, of her wandering about between “vespers and nones”* when no decent woman, and only very brave men, would dare to go out.
“In quell’ora fra vespera e nona,
in cui non ne va in volta una femmina buona”
“In that hour between vespers and nones,
in which a good woman does not go around”.
La Lupa had her secrets. That much was obvious. No woman, so hated and so often cursed by the others in the village could have lived as long without some magic. She walked with a knowing, her eyes always focused ahead, never wavering even at the name calling. People talked of her youthful appearance even though she had many years of age. The villagers said her lips were red because she soaked them in the blood of her lovers.
And then there was the tragedy of the poor young man Nanni. Just home from the war, La Lupa hired him to work her wheat fields. She had gone out to help him with the reaping, as she often went out with the men, when it happened that he was caught by her gaze and the hot burn of her eyes. He became fixated, a searing pain went up along the inner side of his spine into all his organs like a fattura (curse) or like when he had gone into battle, knees trembling in terror. Because he had faced death over and over, because he had himself been a predator, because he had killed enough, and because he was quite young and still a bit foolish, he didn’t run but instead stood and spoke to her “O che avete, gnà Pina”? or “what do you want signora Pina?”
Though she was aged, he couldn’t help but see her strength as she bundled the sheaves, her core was taught, erotic her confidence with the scythe, cutting, commanding the field. She wasn’t like other women who could keep their tails out of sight and their fangs retracted (note: these other women still had these but that’s a story for another time). With no compromise or adherence to the conventions of society, she pull and twisted the strands of wheat into giant sheaves, each piece flexing and bending to her will.
Day after day she came to him with the same gaze and each time he asked “Che volete, gnà Pina?”. (the use of “volete” here, which his the plural form of “you”, was often used to address others formally), Each day he imagined her answer, though she always turned away laughing or with a shrug as if she had no idea what he was talking about. Each day his own longing growing.
Finally, she answers him “Voglio te”, “I want you”.
“Te sei bello come il sole,
e dolce come il miele,
voglio te!”
“You who are beautiful like the sun
and sweet like honey,
I want you!”
The young man, whose name is Nanni, thinking he finally made her admit what she was after, and feeling quite arrogant about it, responds with his own demand. He asks to marry her daughter. The nerve of him, the young naivety. La Lupa pulls at her own hair in rage, screaming, growling, howling, her skin on fire, her loins fuming like Mount Etna whose veins of lava was running not far beneath their feet. Nanni, realizing he may have made a mistake, tries to comfort her and calm her down. In doing so he falls into her seductive embrace and they make love.
Knowing that she cannot keep on with such a young man without repercussions from the other villagers she agrees to allow him to marry her daughter, Maricchia, thereby keeping him close and keeping him quiet about what happened.
Maricchia and Nanni married, had several children, while La Lupa lived in a corner of their house, cooking and helping with the children, seemingly subdued. As time passed La Lupa became older and more reclusive, often ill. Yet, still sometimes going out to the fields to work with the men. Nanni, who still feared her kept a scapular, with an image of the Blessed Mother, around him at all times and would clasp it whenever he felt her cast her hot eyes upon him.
Then it happened on one hot day in August that La Lupa was out again during vespers and nones while the rest of the villagers stayed inside, cool, and safe from burning sirocco winds. This time was the heat of the day, the time when the fire of the devil was the strongest, when most of the people stayed inside not only to stay cool but to keep their souls from being taken by flames of the high sun.
“La gnà Pina era la sola anima viva
che si vedesse errare per la camagna,
sui sassi infuocati delle viottole
fra le stoppie riarse dei campi immense,
che si perdevano nell’afa,
lontan, lontano,
verso l’Etna nebbioso,
dove il cielo si aggravava sull’orizzonte.”
“Gnà Pina was the only living soul
who could be seen wandering the countryside,
on the burning stones of the lanes
among the arid stubble of the enormous fields,
which lost themselves in the muggy weather,
toward foggy Etna,
where the sky got denser on the horizon.”
This day she was looking for Nanni, who would likely be sleeping with the other field hands. She circled the land until she found him, covered in dust, asleep in a ditch. She pulled out a bottle of wine from her pack and opened it dribbling a tiny bit on his dry, parched lips. He woke to her black eyes staring at him, once again. Her face was so close he couldn’t breath, he shook himself thinking maybe he was having a nightmare and could wake up, he tried to run but his arms and legs were weak from the heat and the little bit of wine had made him only more thirsty and desperate for a drink, for something, anything that would quench his parched, dry soul. It was no use. He fell to temptation.
Some people call it the devil. The compulsions of humans, desires, addictions. But sometimes these are callings from outside the conventions of society from old things, from old beings, from the necessary sacrifices that we have traded for safety or comfort, or acceptance. Or sometimes we needed them to go away so we could survive; because of oppression, war, systems of domination. Sometimes our longings are a call to heresy, to break taboos and social norms in order to transform or shapeshift like our ancestors knew how to do and knew they had to do in order for the seasons to change, the fields to remain fruitful, for the divine to move us. Heresy keeps us from becoming extremists, it protects us from fundamentalism, it breaks up stagnation and outdated norms.
La Lupa, a wolf, maybe, a witch, for certain. A woman left to raise a child on her own when that was not a socially acceptable position to be in. She became the target of collective projection. A place where people could throw their own wildness out, instead of accepting it as part of themselves.
Maybe just a victim of bad luck, La Lupa becomes the she-wolf, an old totem from a time when people knew themselves as part of the landscape and as versions of other animals. Only now, instead of reverence and devotion, she is pushed to shadow. We know this is what happens when we try to make anything completely one way or the other, when we try to control the cycles of nature, when we believe too much in right and wrong. When we divide the world into heaven and hell, hell doesn’t go away, it rises from the underworld into our daily lives, into our politics, our nightmares, our folktales about lustful, widowed women who devour men’s souls. It comes for blood and walks tbhe fields during vespers and nones.
La Lupa’s story ends after her daughter reports her to the “brigadiere” (the sergeant). Nanni is taken as well and actually begs to be taken to prison to get away from La Lupa,.
“È la tentazione dell’inferno”,
“She is a temptation from hell”.
But what is she? In terms of archetypes she is something old and wild. This story was written after the unification of Italy. After Sicily had been invaded by the North and forced into union with a nation-state. A time when adherence to the dominant social paradigm was essential for immediate survival but which cost the loss of many freedoms once held by the peasants. Though feudal life was not easy, peasants had agency and common lands that sustained them. They had councils and power to impact the higher classes to some degree.
La Lupa is the wild woman, and doesn’t conform in any way to any conventional standard. Much like the forest goddesses, Diana and Artemis, who left city life to become sovereign. In this story instead of a goddess she is a devil. And the wolf, instead of a nurturing mother, or a symbol of potency, she is an outcast. The subconscious repression of human desire and instinct creates monsters and demons that during this time period often took the form of an evil woman in the form of witch or whore.
La Lupa tears Nanni apart, she destroys his conditioning, his sense of self that was an internalized aspect of the overculture. La lupa “gli facevano perdere l’anima ed il corpo”, “made him lose his soul and body”.
He finally tells her to never return to him or he’ll kill her. “Ammazzami” she says. “Kill me.” He lifts up an ax as she stands still and faces him, a true wolf that knows herself so well she doesn’t flinch in the face of death. A wolf that gives and takes death.
“E non si arretrò di un sol passo,
non chinò gli occhi”
“And she did not retreat by a single step,
she didn’t lower her eyes.”
“...seguitò ad andargli incontro,
con le mani piene di manipoli di papaveri rossi,
e mangiandoselo con gli occhi neri.”
“...she continued to go toward him,
with her hands full of red poppies,
and eating him up with her black eyes.”
