Emma Restall Orr - Kissing the Hag: The Dark Goddess and the Unacceptable Nature of Women

Winchester, UK
Washington, USA

FIRST PUBLISHED BY O-BOOKS, 2009
O-Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,
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Text copyright: Emma Restall Orr 2008
ISBN: 978 1 84694 157 3
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this
book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Emma Restall Orr as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Stuart Davies

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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I offer this book, in thanks, to my grandmothers
the vicious pixie, Nina, for her pain and her poetry,
the glamorous wanderer, Alma, for her beauty and untamed heart.
With my words, I offer the peace of acceptance. We live within each other.

This book is drenched in the inspiration of my home in the heart of England, the beauty of its landscape and the cycles of its seasons. I raise a cup to the spirits of the quiet valley and dark forest.

For their inspiration and beauty, I give thanks to all the women who talked to me about their lives, who offered me their stories, their laughter and their tears, and in particular the Black Frog, Freyas Cat and, of course, in the final edit, the irrepressible BMCs. I acknowledge too every man who has found the hero within.

Amidst the exploration of ideas, as is often the case with my writing, I have placed brief anecdotes, memories and sketches of moments. Each of these stories is true. Though each is written in the first person, they are not all my own. In speaking to women over the period of my research, in living my lifes journey alongside others, I have collected many tales; some of these I here share. In order to protect the sources, at times two stories have been woven together. Names have all been changed.

Those who know me well will know which are my stories; those who know me a little will no doubt guess and be both right and wrong; those who dont know me should not worry either way. Further, I would dissuade any speculation as to whose stories they are. Details may change, but through millennia of human lives they have all been lived a thousand times and more.

Hag is not a nice word.

Yet there comes a time in every womans life when nice is tedious, when nice is insipid, seeping into the soul like souring milk, warping the mind. Indeed, nice can, at times, be all that is offensive.

Hag: its a fascinating word. As I speak it aloud, the sound is as smooth as an out breath. Aspirated, its vowel is extended and then clipped as if with a warning kick of death. It is a primal word, formed with barely any effort required. It whispers of cold wind, of thick fog and the stench of stagnant water. It is a word robed in spiders webs, dusty and worn, unsure where to place itself on the shiny veneers of today. Lingering at the edges of life, it waits to run a broken nail down some blackboard of the soul.

No, hag is not a nice word. Like princess or pole-dancer, the word quietly slips us a picture, and though for each of us the image may differ slightly, it invariably embodies all that is declared to be simply and irrefutably not nice in woman.

This book is about her.

It is about us all.

I sit here in the soft light of another new day.

My eyes ache to be closed, lids sliding as I watch, and breathe, conscious of tired muscles lifting and falling about my bones. My skin is rough, like linen too often washed in haste, dried in the salty breath of another seamless wind. It stretches, too loosely, over the scaffold of my face.

A few strands of hair dance before my eyes, picked up by the breeze, and silently I wonder at their lack of substance. Thin, like the last long grasses of autumn, scoured by the wind, burnt by the first frost, they touch so lightly, grazing against the weight of my bloated body. I am full, swollen with all that has been my life, holding within me its rich emptiness, and as I chuckle my belly shivers, lying upon itself in the folds of its idle carelessness.

I sit here, and watch, as life hurtles by.

Inside this body my words echo, thoughts half formed and drifting in the vast stillness of a lifetimes breathing. Words unspoken, tumbling past the chill of damp stone, an ancient well, ever seeking out the dark of water far below. It roots me, this stillness, feeding my ambivalence. So does the ache in my ankles, swollen, unmovable, like pillars in the mud wrapped up in dry ivy, dusty like the memories that hold me from crumbling. Where once there was life, sweet earth and grass soft and fresh, dew wet beneath bare toes, there is now just a glimmering of some distant dream.

And it seems to me as if now, were I simply to exhale, knowingly exhale, releasing the stories of my soul, the winds would take me for an old seed husk, up and far far away into the darkening skies. There is nothing more to do.

Let me spin you a yarn and use, if I may, long strands pulled from the language of our ancestral blood, threads rough and skinscratchy, dyed red with old hemp and purpled with woad, threads that have held together the pathways of our souls generation after generation, since the days when the great ocean steadily rose to cast adrift these islands from the great unceasing forests beyond.

Listen. Sit back and listen, to the call of the crows, the breeze in the old leaves, the words of our grandmothers.

~ ~

It was a time like so many times that have come and gone within these lands, a time when men found themselves living with peace.

Yet by peace I dont mean a peace that comes to the soul and fills the heart with the divine breath of tranquillity; this was, like most, the peace that comes when, by some quirk of fate, there is a lull amidst ages of cruel fighting. Such times are always rich with victory for some, while death and pain are the taste of others lives.

They are strange, such times. Men long used to battle, hearths used to scarcity, at first celebrate with feasting and wild colourful games, releasing the energy held still in reserve for the anger of the fight. Then there follows the quiet, when the tide recedes and exhaustion seeps across the land, with the longing and bitterness that accompany grief and violent change. Slowly, as the seasons turn, men start again to see the footprints of daily living. A few are able to sigh deeply enough to set aside the pain, but many stumble on the furrows of the newly sown fields, wandering into the forest, searching for distractions that will keep their minds from memories. There is left a deep craving, one that is felt ought not be mentioned, the craving for purpose, the longing again for the rush of the kill.