Interweaving a New Future Together
The weave of unity is infinite, ever flowing & creative. -Patricia Albere
Words related to the ancient art of weaving are often used as metaphors, especially when expressing the deep, intricate nature of life and human awareness. My curiosity was peaked regarding that relationship of words when reading about the history of weaving — and learning that women were the first weavers. “The facts of women’s experience of life are primordial,” poet and author Barbara Mor wrote.
“The first God, Mother Earth, was the sign of a human response to an experienced fact,” Mor explained in The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. “The first arts and religions, the first crafts and social patterns, were designed in recognition and celebration of her.” From earliest times — giving birth, sustaining life, and nurturing that life — women recognized themselves in Mother Earth. And women told their stories (were women also the first storytellers?) by communicating that innate, fertile connection to life through art — creating clay vessels, weaving fabric, making paint, and painting on rocks and structures around them — linking their experiences to the Divine. And they recognized themselves in Her reflection.
Barbara Mor shares that “religious rites were combined with industry. Women’s religions were organic, a unity of body and spirit, of daily life tasks and cosmic meaning.” All of life was sacred, interconnected, shared. “The sacred is the emotional force which connects the part to the whole,” philosopher and poet William Irwin Thompson wrote.
“Cosmic mind and human mind are not essentially different, or separate, nor are cosmic body and human body,” Mor emphasized. “Everything is interconnected in a vast webwork of cosmic being — a universal weaving — in which each individual thing, or life-form, is a kind of energy knot, or interlock, in the overall vibrating pattern.” The intimacy in Barbara Mor’s words here conjures the essence of nature’s magic. I stare into a spider’s web and lose myself in the interrelated universe she has woven, clearly guided by a Divine source. Following their own instinctual nature, did the women who invented spinning and weaving — twisting something raw into filament-like threads, then weaving them into something whole — do the same? Beyond the practical attributes of string and cloth for early humans, was there a desire to express something ‘sensed’ within themselves?
“Some forty thousand years ago, at the beginning of the last phase of the Old Stone Age, human beings began to act very differently from the way they ever had before,” wrote linguist and archeologist (and one of my admired costume history colleagues) Dr. Elizabeth Wayland Barber in Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. As the massive sheets of ice that had covered the northern continents began melting, “humans started to invent and make things at a tremendous rate.” In addition to making a variety of novel tools to assist with everyday tasks, they created art, using bits of bone and ivory, sculpting what they observed in their world — animals, birds, each other. They also painted pictures of animals and drew outlines of their own hands onto cave walls. (Archeology now believes many of those hands were female and that women were often the cave artists expressing their life experiences.) When I first saw images of those drawn hands, it took my breath away — it seemed so intimate, as if I could reach through time and touch her — I knew her. It was as though we were related through some cosmic cellular connection. Did the cave artist, our long-ago kin, also have a moment of wondering and self-reflection?
Dr. Carl Johan Calleman says, “Yes.” In The Nine Waves of Creation: Quantum Physics, Holographic Evolution, and the Destiny of Humanity, the world-renowned scientist writes about the beginnings of self-reflective capabilities of humans during the “Fifth Wave” of consciousness — a long phase of human development that, based on ancient Mayan wisdom, began over 100,000 years ago and later included the emergence of cave painting. “Findings from the beginning of the Fifth Wave indicate that Homo sapiens then became more self-reflective and less animal-like. Even if the human beings in resonance with the Fifth Wave did not have rational minds, indications are that they started to experience a soul, could feel empathy, and possibly started to experience their existence in a larger spiritual context.” Therefore, as I ran my fingers over images on book pages illustrating the artwork of our early ancestors, it could, indeed, have been a spiritual, soul-to-soul connection that I was experiencing with the cave artist.
Twenty to thirty thousand years ago, according to Dr. Barber, “these ancestors invented string and sewing and thus provided the first chapter in the story of women’s long association with the fiber crafts” — and with magic! “Spinning and weaving were imbued with magic powers,” Barbara Mor shared, writing about the creative work of our early female relations. “In ancient textiles, a highly charged symbol language was used to communicate herstory and myth.” (Remember all the “spinning and weaving” in those old fairytales? But that’s another story!) In her research of prehistoric societies, Dr. Barber wrote about the “sort of sisterhood” that grew as women “gathered in one another’s courtyards or houses to spin, sew, weave, and have fellowship.” This “great importance [that] clothmaking had in women’s lives,” she added, led to it “becoming central to their mythology as well.” Throughout this early history, “this art was the primary vehicle for articulating a woman’s various roles as mother, provider, worker, entrepreneur, and artist, and was a vital force for self-definition, early steps to creative expression.”
Working on the larger looms — like ones used for the ritual production of the “storytelling cloths” for their community — with the warp threads stretched in place, women often sat or stood side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, “weaving simultaneously, passing the bobbins to each other to lay in the weft — the actual ‘weaving’,” as Dr. Barber clarified — moving together in a flowing, in-sync rhythm. A rhythm connecting this communal alliance in an intricate bond that has been repeated for millennia.
“The Great Mother is the great cosmic weaver,” wrote Barbara Mor, and “we participate in her substance, her nature, her processes, her play, and her work.” The author tells of the “women weavers of the matrifocal Navajo” who consider her “the Great Spider Woman, the original weaver of the universe.” Joseph Campbell, the celebrated mythologist, believed the Goddess was originally depicted as a Cosmic Mother, set to weaving the Universe. Kathy Jones of Glastonbury writes of the ancient British Goddess as the “Great Mother from whom all life is born…the Matrix…Spinner of the Thread of Life and Destiny, Weaver of the Web of Continuity and Connection…of Life and Time.” Even certain present-day cultures, like the Batak tribes of Sumatra, according to Dr. Barber, reverently honor a mystical creation story and consider “the act of creation itself as women’s special work, not only in producing babies, who grow where nothing has existed before, but also in creating cloth, which comes into being where nothing has existed before.” As Dr. Barber shared: “Cloth and its making are taken as analogs for life and birth.”
Is this way of creating something out of nothing the most divinely sourced human power — whether it’s creating a new life, a new idea, or a new future? In the Odyssey, recognizing Goddess Athena’s cunning, skill, and resourcefulness — symbolized by her expertise in the art of divinely inspired weaving — Homer called on Athena time and again to come up with clever plots to rescue Odysseus and his men: “Come, let us weave a plan!”
It’s no wonder we love using weaving metaphors when we want to call something new into being, or to explain our deepest imaginings, our spiritual ponderings, our way of explaining the world in an intimate, shared, deeply connected, even otherworldly expression. “It’s the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery,” Dostoevsky wrote.
The qualities of the Great Goddess were seen “as the projections of women’s experiences of themselves,” Barbara Mor explained. Therefore, these weaving metaphors simply reflected the experiences of real women in earliest times, times when women were recognized and revered as the givers and sustainers of life. And by creating the art of spinning and weaving — what must have been considered as supernatural and mysterious as giving birth — perhaps they invented communication itself, inventing a way to articulate their world thread by thread. Mysteries of the Universe, wise counsel sent by the Great Mother, sacred messages received from the future — all were woven into the fabric. There is an old proverb, I don’t know its origin, encouraging our participation in the wondrous: “Begin to weave and the divine will provide the thread.”
During the time human evolution reached its next phase, beginning about five thousand years ago — the “Sixth Wave of Creation” continuing with Dr. Calleman’s distinctions — the experiences of women were being altered drastically. Women and the world lost so much when patriarchal forces took over with their judgmental “sky gods” and in the “barbarian wars” that followed — subduing and endangering the lives of women, destroying their hallowed places, vilifying their nature religions. As their freedoms were taken away, women wove secret, coded messages to each other or to a forbidden beloved into the design of the fabric. Often these were messages of collective wisdom gathered to pass on through generations for a future time when they could be heard again.
I remember standing in a textile museum in Cusco, Peru, years ago, surrounded by extraordinary artistry — tapestries, fabrics, and garments, many created by women centuries before, others by women of today following ancient traditions — and in a still, quiet moment I could ‘hear’ or perhaps it was more ‘feel’ what I’d describe as women’s voices speaking in a long-lost language, like an offering of holy blessings. The moment felt vibrant and transformative, feminine and familial.
I’d like to think that all those woven messages — coming through millennia, many surviving even when the cloth did not, and now being heard and deciphered, bringing those weaving metaphors to life — became part of the inspiration to repair historical records by including women and sharing women’s immense contributions to the world. But there was something more. The revelations had the feel of a celestial instruction. Were we being shown how to work together to weave a future where no one is left out and everyone is reverently connected? However, how do we untangle those prized qualities that once served humanity — self-reflection, individual choice, even the journey to find ourselves — but ultimately kept us separate and divided? How do we move from an us-versus-them world and cross the threshold into a world where, borrowing words from Rumi, we all “wear the transparent garment of love”?
Like those first weavers who invented something where nothing had existed before, there are those today who also see with evolutionary eyes, and hear the sacred instructions, but now are resonating with the newly released frequencies of the “Ninth Wave” — this final and highest stage of human evolution according to Dr. Calleman. “The gravitational force from the future is love,” spiritual teacher and author Patricia Albere reminds us, “calling forth a new world through communion with one another…through mutual awakening.” Using threads spun by the Divine, in unity, we are now weaving a shared new future, a new way of being human — only through love. “And what is it to work with love?” Kahlil Gibran asked. “It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart.” ~
Patricia Albere — EvolutionaryCollective.com
Dr. Carl J. Calleman — Calleman.com
Barbara Mor — The Great Cosmic Mother
Dr. Elizabeth Wayland Barber — Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years
Kathy Jones — In the Heart of the Goddess
