Gift of Lakshmi

A lot of people seem to worry about the academic progress of homeschoolers.

I don’t. I’m not worried about maths, or reading, or writing, or science, or anything else on the list of academic subjects we’re supposed to obsess over. That’s not to say I don’t value those things. Just that I don’t worry about them. Everything on that list can be learned by anyone, at any time, to any depth, and a classroom is not a prerequisite for any of it.

But you know what DOES worry me?

My child being told to push through severe mental stress like separation anxiety or bullying in the name of ‘resilience’.

My child having their sense of self and value tied to a red letter scribbled on the front of a standardised test. Over, and over, and over again.

My child hearing they’ve fallen behind because they couldn’t grasp what they were told in the way they were told it. That maybe they’re just not good enough and never will be.

My child feeling isolated or excluded because their mind or body works differently from what is expected of them. That failure is something to be feared and avoided at all costs.

My child being judged or labelled because they can’t consistently meet an agonisingly narrow definition of success.

Or, even worse, my child internalising that judgement or label until it’s embedded deep within their consciousness.

With all of this on the table, why on earth would I ever worry about maths? That’s about the last thing any of us should be sweating over.

We get WAY too worked up about academic progress.

It’s time we shut off that voice and let our hearts take the lead instead.

In order to enter Mordor, the realm of Sauron, and so commence the final phase of his quest, Frodo must follow his treacherous dark double, Gollum, into the dark tunnel which is really the lair of a gigantic she-spider Shelob. Mating with and later slaying her own male offspring, feeding on all living things, Shelob is depicted as an insatiable and thoroughly destructive female monster:

“Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench.

… still she was there, who was there before Sauron… and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness. Far and wide her lesser broods, bastards of the miserable mates, her own offspring, that she slew, spread from glen to glen…

Little she knew of or cared for towers, or rings, or anything devised by mind or hand, who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up and the darkness contain her.”

The above is possibly one of the most striking literary representations of Jungian Terrible Mother, whom Ted Hughes also calls the Black Witch or the Queen of Hell. As Hughes explains, the Great Goddess of matriarchal mysteries consists of two antithetical figures – the Goddess of Benign Love and the Goddess of the Underworld (although the benign figure is sometimes further divided into Mother and Sacred Bride). In the most ancient manifestations, such as in Tiamat, the two are united, whereas in pairs such as Aphrodite and Persephone, or Inanna and Ereshkigal, the separation becomes more prominent. Still, as Hughes maintains, in every epiphany of the Goddess both aspects are present, 'one latent behind the other. In the foreground they appear to be two, and opposites, but in the background they are one. The rational ego of the patriarchal man, however, finds it impossible to cope with the Goddess in her completeness (even though, on the inner plane, she actually represents the totality of his natural, biological and instinctual life). In order to preserve the equilibrium and control required of him by society, he splits the Goddess into the part that supports and confirms his rational existence, and the part that would disrupt it. The dark, rejected part … not only includes the orgiastic, amoral and even non-human biological drive for reproduction… but associates herself, being forbidden, with everything forbidden, uncontrollable, naturally or supernaturally hostile, thereby uniting the world of death with the world of elemental sexuality, animality and the daemonic.

— The Knife, The String and The Tooth: Manifestations of Shadow in THE LORD OF THE RINGS by Nataša Tučev

Illustration by Tom Gould for Tolkien's the Return of the King (1971)

It’s not a spiral, it’s a wheel 💗💗