(the artktoi)

Paula Meehan:

Imaginary Bonnets With Real Bees In Them, which includes the poem The Solace of Artemis. (Artemis is one of the Goddesses for whose forgetting Grace Wells asks her daughter Holly’s forgiveness in her poem The Forgetting).

Karl Kerényi:

‘A mythological image of girlhood’ in James Hillman (ed). Facing the Gods Dallas, Texas, Spring Publications, Inc. (This short chapter is dedicated to his nine-year-old daughter).

Note:

Paul Shepard argues that shamans are latecomers whose psychic politics largely displaced earlier “spontaneous healers, usually women”, one of the changes that, he claims: “marked the decline of the great cults of the bear”. (Paul Shepard Coming Home to the Pleistocene Washington DC / Covelo, California, Shearwater Books 1998: 91-92).  Curiously, in this context, at the Bronze Age Dartmoor Whitehorse Hill tomb site that contained meadowsweet, referenced in this series in connection to Kathleen Jamie’s poem of that name, it was a bear pelt that contained the cremated remains in the tomb, probably those of a high status young woman between fifteen and twenty-five years of age.