The Dark Feminine: Death in Childbirth and Entry into the Shamanic Realm
Janet Robinson vividly describes her feelings, dreams, and visions during and after her terrifying experience of abruptio placenta in childbirth.
This condition is extremely serious and life-threatening for both the mother and the fetus.
In this case the fetus died, and the work Janet did then gave her an opening into the shadowy, hidden dimensions of a woman’s life, and a firm connection with the Dark Mother.
At my first Symposium on Shamanism and Psychology, in May 1992, while trudging through the snow with some women to gather branches for a sweat lodge, the question of childbirth as a shamanic experience for women came up.
Together we freely talked about the painful, dismembering, and numinous experiences some women have in childbirth and how this goes unrecognized in our culture.
Nothing more was said at the time, but once again I found myself reflecting upon one of my experiences of giving birth, which resulted in stillbirth and my near death.
Although this had been the most significant experience in my life, I had kept it hidden for the most part, as it was clouded with guilt and shame.
At the same time I realized that my life as I now know it grew out of this crisis, and this essay is the culmination of what I faced in my early encounter with death: the wisdom of the Dark Feminine.
Death in childbirth brings up images of the terrible and devouring aspect of the mother in the archetype of the feminine.
Images of Kali, Coatlicue, Lilith, and Hecate come to mind.
Ajit Mookerjee writes of a vision of the divine Maya as described by Ramakrishna, which is rather horrifying to our Western mentality.
He saw an exquisitely beautiful woman heavy with child emerge from the Ganges, give birth, and begin tenderly to nurse her infant.
A moment later, she had assumed a terrible aspect, and seizing the child in her jaws, crushed it.
Devouring her offspring she entered the water.
Mahamaya is the all-creating, the all-nourishing, the all-devouring.
Thirty years have passed since my encounter with death in childbirth, and I have spent much of that time in Jungian analysis, in practicing psychotherapy, and in facing my own four children in an attempt to understand both the creative and destructive aspects of the archetypal and personal mother.
I have wrestled with the concept of the dual mother archetype, which contains the opposites of good and evil, as an adequate definition for women.
Although the archetype is defined as holding the opposites, our cultural experience of the feminine is split.
As a woman, I have experienced my cultural identity of the archetypal feminine from the perspective of a patriarchal anima projection that has been rooted in the body/mind split of Western dualism.
Images of the good (light, the spiritual, madonna) associated with the rational mind, are on the one side, while images of evil (dark, whore, witch), associated with the body, are on the other.
All women have received some aspects of these projections.
At one time in my life, I aspired to carry the image of the idealized woman and good mother.
I lived denying the evil or witch mother and was haunted by it when it erupted in rages, psychic and bodily symptoms, and illnesses.
Since the terrible or death-wielding aspect of the archetypal feminine is not adequately honored in our culture, it is difficult to accept its dark side as something numinous, wise, and intrinsic to our human nature.
Like many women, in order to find my Self I have been forced to go underneath the patriarchal projections to the dark regions of death where the archetypal feminine seems to remain whole and inclusive of its body, soul, and spirit nature.
Shamanism casts another light on death, and from its paleolithic origins allows us to look at the Dark Feminine as death in life, one inseparable from the another.
This has enabled me to consider my experience of death in childbirth within the context of a shamanic event or crisis and has brought another level of meaning to it in my life.
The following Navajo chant is from Judith Savage’s book Mourning Unlived Lives.
She used this chant in a discussion of how the color black is associated with Mother Earth or nature, and how it relates to a “dark shame” that is rooted in the somatic dimension of child loss.
I am ashamed before earth;
I am ashamed before heaven;
I am ashamed before dawn;
I am ashamed before twilight;
I am ashamed before blue sky;
I am ashamed before darkness;
I am ashamed before sun;
I am ashamed before that standing within me which speaks with me.
Some of these things are always looking at me.
I am never out of sight.
Therefore I must tell the truth.
I hold my word tight to my breast. (Savage 1989, 59)
In the summer of 1964 I was a young wife, mother of two little boys, and in my third pregnancy in three years.
I was deeply depressed, with the problem centering around issues of failure and loss in my life.
Physically this pregnancy had been different and difficult, and I had grown increasingly impatient with it and myself as the due date neared.
Active during my previous pregnancies, I decided that even more activity might facilitate this birth.
On a day in late summer, with a pickax in hand and an intensity my frustration was inclined to take, I chopped up a plot of hardened clay soil in my backyard, where I hoped one day to plant a garden.
That night I experienced a major contraction that did not end.
It was unusual, but reacting out of a stoical masochism learned from my mother, I waited for the typical signs of spotting and water breaking before contacting my doctor.
By the following afternoon, when my arms and legs were becoming increasingly numb and my vision blurred, I called my doctor.
He advised me to go to the hospital.
I was quickly admitted, and a nurse arrived promptly.
She placed a stethoscope on my abdomen, listened briefly, then looked up at me with a frown and immediately pushed me off in a wheelchair to a labor room.
She helped me onto a bed, where I lay in an acute state of awareness while my body took me into itself as if into a pressure chamber.
Pain was filling my body.
With a pensive look on her face, the nurse left the room, soon returning with a doctor.
I was told they were waiting for the bag of waters to break and to “Just hold on.”
They left, and I sank back into the pressure chamber of my body.
The pain continued to eat away at every part of me.
From time to time the nurse or a doctor appeared.
Never had I felt such pain and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold on.
The pain was consuming me when suddenly the waters broke and blood washed over and around me.
I was immediately surrounded by the nurse, doctors, and more medical staff, wiping up the blood spilling everywhere.
Finally my doctor, who had been absent until this time, came into the room and took my hand.
I started to cry, agonizing for the pain I could no longer bear.
Pain was screaming down the walls inside me, and I saw red everywhere.
He told me I was losing too much blood and that he was taking me into surgery to do a caesarean section.
I lost consciousness, slipping out of the bloodbath and into darkness.
At the time I didn’t know I was near death, but my experience took me into another level of consciousness.
I found myself out of the operating room and in the foothills.
Dawn was just breaking, and I was standing on a path under a large oak tree with a blanket around my shoulders.
I was freezing cold and permeated by a loneliness I hadn’t known before.
A light at the other end of the road pulled me toward it.
As I drew closer to the light, feeling that it was going to engulf me, I heard sounds of moaning coming from either side of the road.
The sounds seemed to have an energy pull to them, as though they were coming from some kind of spirits or ghostly figures.
The moaning on either side of the road and the light in the distance ahead were like two opposing forces of energy pulling at me.
This went on for a while until the moaning grew louder and louder, and I awoke in the intensive care unit of the hospital.
When a nurse appeared, I asked about my baby and was told that my doctor would be in the next day.
I slipped back into a dark, silent stillness.
~Janet Spencer Robinson, The Sacred Heritage The Influence of Shamanism on Analytical Psychology, ~Page 171-174
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