The Huntress

A Journey to the 'Aumākua

Image by Susan Seddon Boulet

There was a woman who dreamt of the sea.

So begins The Huntress, an Inuit story born from snow and ice, redolent with seal fat and whale meat, mysterious as the color white, which, being achromatic, isn’t actually a color, but the absence of color. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White is a mystery, light that’s beyond color. It teaches us another way to see.

This story was a mystery to me the first time I heard Martin Shaw tell it at the Great Mother Conference a few years ago. I don’t know if I was a bad listener, but my mind wandered off about halfway through and I didn’t hear the end, yet somehow the story haunted me, circling back a year and a half ago to tap me on the shoulder to remind me we needed to work on our relationship.

I have a practice of navigating my life through stories, so I paid attention to this. When I was writing Piko, I was aware the Descent of Inanna was my guide, helping me transcend the more passive Underworld descent of Persephone I’d underwent in my 20s. When The Huntress tapped my shoulder, I was a bit confounded. Like I said, I didn’t get it, but after writing last week’s essay on the passing of my friend Virginia Dare, upon reflecting on my heart’s longing to live once again in a village, I realized I’d completed my journey (for now! It’s always for now with every story. There is always more to learn!), and that I had something to share about it that might be a contribution to my readers, so here that is.

I’ll ask one thing before I continue. Pay attention as you read to any image or a moment in the story that really arrests you. What makes your skin crawl, grabs you by the scruff, or causes the hair on the back of your neck to rise? What makes you gasp or choke on a breath, or maybe even shed a tear?

The Huntress

In another round of time, there was a village named Tikeraq. A man and woman lived there. This could be their story, but it’s not. It’s their daughter’s, and that is the story I’m going to tell you now, from the slope of a tropical mountain, far from the snow where this tale was born.

This daughter was a huntress, a strange girl, different from all the others, both male and female. Nobody matched her in stamina and strength. Nobody could keep up with her. Sometimes she’d amuse herself by letting the other hunters go out without her. When they were out of sight, she’d slide her kayak into the water and would appear beyond them. Nobody knew how she did it. It was a mystery, a fact of nature that couldn’t be explained.

Often her father went with her. He steered the kayak while she rowed and threw the harpoon when they encountered whales and seals. One day as they were headed back to the village, a beast swam to the edge of the kayak. The huntress rose up and hurled her harpoon into its open mouth. As the harpoon left her hand, her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell into a faint.

When she came to, she found herself kneeling on a thin beach like she was praying, ocean on either side. She had no idea where she was. Not knowing what else to do, she rose from her knees and followed the curve of the earth west following the coast. There were no signs of humans. Finally, she encountered wood chips on her path. She knew before much longer she’d come upon one of her kind.

She walked on with the sound of her own feet as company until she came upon a kayak. Although she couldn’t see anyone, a voice spoke:

“My kayak has trapped someone. If it’s a man I’ll kill him. If it’s a woman she’ll live.”

Before the sound of the words had left the air, a man came running to her over the snow, a shaman. He took her into his igloo and made her his wife.

Now this shaman had the power to make his kayak travel over water and land. Most of the time he was out in this kayak working his spells. She was alone. And she didn’t hunt anymore. She stayed in the igloo, doing the domestic chores, running the shaman’s home.

Everyday the shaman wasn’t there, a boy came to visit. He just showed up out of nowhere, which was strange since she should have been able to see him coming for miles in that open white landscape. She thought nothing of it, always fed him because she knew boys were aways hungry, and watched him disappear after without wondering where he was going.

One day the boy from nowhere said to her:

“Grandmother needs to speak with you.”

She left the igloo and walked out onto the tundra, on and on over the snow, and right into the igloo of an old woman who spoke without preamble:

“You have fed my grandson who is very dear to me. I am grateful for this and want to help you. The man you married is not a man. He is a dark power and he is weary of you. Soon you will end up like the rest of his wives. His igloo is full of them. The next time you make love look under the ice beneath you. You’ll see them.”

The huntress knew the old woman spoke truth. He had been distant and cruel to her for a long time. The old woman continued, “the other wives didn’t feed my grandson so I didn’t help them, but because of your generosity I will tell you of the one magic I possess that will save you. With this, the old woman dropped into a trance and described a scene as if it was happening right there and then:

“Your husband is coming to finish you off. Take this sealskin pail. There is something deep at its bottom. He’s at the igloo door. He ducks and enters. He’s looking for you! He sees you’re not there and thinks you’ve escaped. He’s furious—he’s coming! He knows you’re here with me. Take this pail. When the bow of his kayak appears throw the pail on top of it. He’s coming!”

The very moment the last word left the old woman’s mouth the kayak thrust into the igloo. Quick as a mink, the huntress threw the round pail over the kayak’s pointed bow, and just as quick she fell into unconsciousness. When she woke, she again found herself kneeling on a thin stretch of beach between sea and land, in between worlds. On her knees, she was, like she was praying.

Again, she stood up and followed the earth’s curve west. As she walked, she saw a huge animal she’d never seen before lying by an igloo. It didn’t stop her. On she walked. She walked until she reached the igloo of some people who fed her and let her sleep by the fire. In the morning the man asked, her, “Will you stay here with us?”

“I am headed west,” she replied. “I’ll keep walking.”

The man looked concerned. “There are beings in the west that kill people. They killed our child. Take this knife. It’s the only weapon that will keep you alive.”

The man reached to his belt and unfastened his knife. It was so small, the handle so short it was hard to hold, but this made it easy to conceal. The man told her it was deadly, but its magic required spit. He spit on the blade and thrust it, handle first, into the igloo wall. The huntress looked at the copper blade, knew it was deadly, but couldn’t control herself. Without thinking, she pressed her body onto the blade sticking out of the ice. When she slid off, the man took it out and handed it to her. She tucked it into her belt and walked on.

Deeper and deeper into the west she walked, felling ogres without stopping. On and on she walked towards the terrifying place those ogres came from, until she realized the name of that place. Tikeraq. Her own village. She was from the place where darkness was born.

When she walked into the village, the most terrifying ogre of all attacked her. It was her father, the man who steered her kayak.

Coming to a stop, she wetted her tongue, gathered her spittle, and told him a story that cut like a knife:

She told him of the days she’d hunted with her father, their kayak gliding over the waves. She told him of harpooning a monster, of falling into a trance, of following a trail of wood chips that led to her marrying a sorcerer. She told him of feeding a hungry boy, of a grandmother who showed her how a curved magic always defeats a straight. She told him of how she walked into the west, walking, walking, until she received a gift, the knife that defeats even the death-energy of the west.

As she spoke, she lodged her little knife in the wall of her father’s igloo. Close to the end of her story, he was ready to throw himself upon it, and he would have, if right at the climax, she hand’t pulled it from the ice.

The spell was broken. Was it the knife of the story? Shaken, her father spoke:

“When you disappeared, all I had left was the darkness you harpooned. I took the monster to shore and we all ate it. Ever since then, the desire to eat humans has been a plague in our village. No more.”

Now, if you go out early in the morning before the people awake and listen with your whole body, even in this round of time when the whir of traffic is louder than birdsong, you’ll hear the father and daughter pushing their kayak over the gravel shore, the splash of waves wetting the hull; and if you look out to sea you’ll see the father and daughter paddle their kayak together into the wide ocean where very wave touches every shore at the same time.

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Let’s pause a moment. Remember what I asked before I began the story? What image or moment grabs your attention, or even perhaps stabs you in the heart? That is your entrance into how this story wants to communicate with you in a particular way. For me, the first time I heard it was the vision of the shaman’s other dead wives looking up through the ice. Please record your image by using the button below, then come back to read on. It’s a way of feeding the story and activating it is a magical force, something we do when listening to stories at the Great Mother Conference, but there’s no reason why it should work here. Reading the story will affect you no matter, but in feeding it you are offering reciprocity. You will also be giving consent to being transformed by it, and since the relationship will now be reciprocal, into becoming part of the living body of this story, a carrier of its medicine that will potentially help others.

Part Two

Although, I’ve outlined this before in the early days of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles, since I’ve gained so many subscribers since then I think it’s worth repeating that one way of working with a story is to regard all characters in it as aspects of the self. This belief was proposed by Carl Jung and I have found it a fruitful practice, but I do want to note it is a psychologized Western vision of story that may not have held true for the original cultures where a story comes from. However, since I have had huge breakthroughs in my life through this practice. Today, I am going to actually parse this story through the Jungian lens, combined with that I’ve learned though my contemplation and integration of the Mū doctrines in mentorship with Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals. I don’t often do this here since I prefer mystery over fact. I’m a big fan of negative capability, but today you’re going to get a left-brain take on the story to balance out the right-brain images, which may be confounding. I knew they were for me when I first heard Shaw tell The Huntress. Western culture is so over-identified with logic and the left-brain, many of us don’t have the tools anymore to understand the language of symbols and images. I’m going to give us all some extracurricular tutoring to help us with this deficit. Hopefully, I will also provide you with a frame for how to work with stories on your own in the future.

Here is some info that will be helpful to know moving forwarded as I dissect the story.

The Three Energy Centers in the Hawaiian Tradition:

‘Unihipili—the Feminine

‘Uhane—the Masculine

‘Aumākua—the Androgynous/Holistic

Despite our conditioning through gender, all humans have each one of these centers, something also recognized by Jungian psychology, although as far as I know Jung did not have a name or recognize the ‘Aumākua. If anyone knows different, please enlighten me. The ‘Unihipili is Chaos, the formless ground of creation, yet it has characteristics and communicates to our ‘Uhane what to create in form. In mentorship we explore the nourishments and harms of each center. If the ‘Unihipili is broadcasting the nourishments, the ‘Uhane will create based on these instructions. Today on Earth, the Feminine and Masculine principles have been so distorted most of us are creating based on the ‘Unihipili’s harms, leading to constant inner stuggle that manifests outwardly as war. With this information, let’s proceed to look at the story.

We begin with a woman dreaming of the sea. What does the sea signify for you? For me, it’s the realm of formless creation, always in motion, Chaos the Greeks called it, Po, the Hawaiians. The Mū tell us water is the Mea Ne’e themselves, the plasmic beings who first came to Earth to make it hospitable for life. I know Jungian psychology identifies the ocean with the unconscious, but I think that’s too limiting and a manifestation of the collective brain damage to right-brain hemisphere that causes us to label and confine. The sea cannot really be defined this way. Creation comes out of formlessness. The Mea Ne’e are plasmic, without form, they flow over, under, within, in all directions here on Earth. Water cannot be stopped, even by dams. It just changes form. So we know right away at the story’s beginning, we are in a time of potential.

To live on Earth, requires taking a form and learning and growing through that avatar. The first forms we encounter in The Huntress are a man and a woman, but we’re told right away it’s not their story. It’s their daughter’s story. The story begins with the Feminine, the ‘Unihipili.

We are told this daughter is the greatest hunter in the village, effortlessly surpassing all the other hunters. She appears to have god-like powers. Yet, she is undifferentiated from her father, abstract, not fully human. Writing this, the Hawaiian Mother Earth and Father Sky, Papa and Wakea, come to mind. In Piko, I tell of how these two gave birth to the Hawaiian people through Wakea, Father Sky’s, union with their daughter, who gave birth to a stillborn child that became kalo (taro), the staple food of the Hawaiians, and then to another child who became the first human. Through this, we can see that this is going to be a journey toward becoming, as storyteller Martín Prechtel says, “a fully-cooked human.” In modern words, an integrated adult.

Next we’re told a beast approaches the kayak, and the daughter, with her father at the helm, hurls her spear at it. In psychological terms, this could be considered the shadow, but my mentorship with Ke’oni has deepened my understanding of this concept and shifted it sideways into a way of looking that has been more fruitful for me than wondering what I’m dragging around in a bag I can't see.

I think the beast is all that harms the ‘Unihipili of The Huntress. In hurling her spear, she says NO to this harm. Immediately, she falls into a faint and finds herself in a liminal zone, a spit of land between two bodies of water, alone, on her knees. She stands up at starts walking along the shore. This is where I see her accepting the ‘Uhane’s invitation to collaborate in creating in a new way, though we don’t know yet what that is. The Huntress will first have to explore what harms her ‘Unihipili and broadcast clear instructions before she can unite with her ‘Uhane.

She walks west—into the setting sun, the direction of death in the Native American Medicine Wheel, and many other cultures. After many days of walking, she finally sees evidence of human activity, wood chips. She comes upon a kayak, the vessel she herself used to hunt in, and immediately a shaman appears, proclaiming that his kayak has caught a human. If it’s a man he’ll die, a woman she’ll live. He abducts her to his igloo and makes her his wife.

It may seem as if the shaman is evil, but what if he’s a victim of the distorted masculine which emphasizes competition to the point where he’s ready to annihilate all other males? Sound familiar? One has only to look at the headlines to see this playing out all over our world. The shaman, without contact with his own ‘Unihipili, abducts The Huntress so he can feed on her Feminine, he is that desperate.

It would seem it’s all over for The Huntress, for the world. War will consume us. Yet who shows up at the very door of the evil shaman? A young boy. Despite everything, the ‘Uhane has not given up. He still wants to be the hero we need.

The Huntress does not let herself become consumed by bitterness, something that I know has definitely shut down my own ‘Unihipili when I think about the possibility of changing the life-destroying systems of the modern world. The boy is hungry. Day after day, she feeds him, builds his strength, until one day he announces his grandmother wants to see her.

Who is the grandmother? She’s a crone of course, an archetype of deep wisdom, someone who’s lived long enough to go through the journey The Huntress is on, someone wise enough to know she can’t make the trials of the journey disappear, but she can offer some knowledge that perhaps The Huntress wouldn’t have been able to access herself.

The Crone is someone who remembers knowledge from the time the world wasn’t at war. The advice she offers to The Huntress—to throw a sealskin pail on top of the kayak’s bow when it penetrates the igloo (which I have to point out is womb-shaped)—for me indicates she remembers what Iain MacGilchrist delineates so well in The Master and His Emissary, his epic synthesis of science and analysis of art that demonstrates how the state of the human brain shapes culture.

Through scientific research, MacGilchrist shows that the popular belief that the left brain is solely the realm of logic, the right of imagination, is a misconception. In fact, every function of the left brain is also carried out in the right. This is not the case going the other direction. There are things the right brain can do that the left cannot and is unaware of. In other words, the left brain hemisphere (the Masculine/Logic) is contained within the right hemisphere (the Feminine/Imagination), but the left brain has forgotten this. He thinks he’s the one in charge and has forgotten there’s a bridge back to source, back to the Chaos of Creation (represented in the physical organ by the corpus callosum, the gray matter between hemispheres). Why this has occurred is a subject for another essay, perhaps, but I will say, how lonely it must feel to think one’s so cut off. Anyone relate? The phrase hurt people hurt comes to mind.

We’ve establed that the ‘Unihipili/Chaos/Creation contains the ‘Uhane/Action/Hero. Or as Martin Shaw says in his telling of the story, “a curved magic defeats a straight.” Our cultural amnesia to this fact has resulted in the extreme polarization we see playing out on the world stage as war, and within our own lives through all the various forms of self-hatred like addiction that keep us from fulfilling our potential as individuals, resulting in the risk we will fail in what the Mū say is the purpose of the human experiment: to achieve what Buddhists call enlightenment, Hawaiians call hala, and the spiritual community calls ascension.

These are big, abstract words, I know. Let’s make it practical. Bring it down to earth, which is where these teachings are preserved in the actual bodies of ferns, who had reached evolutionary stasis by the time the Mū civilizations collapsed and our collective purpose was forgotten, and thus were able to hold the original emotional codes without being corrupted. This body of wisdom, known as pua’aehuehu, fern medicine, provides a path to Enlightenement/Hala/ Ascension through experiencing and integrating every possible emotion and quality of being human, including the painful. This journey always ends in the same place: Aloha mā—Love—not an emotion, but the transcendence of all emotions through transubstantiation. We are here to leave a legacy of love. Remember that. Even if you forget all the events in the story of The Huntress.

Back in that story, we find The Huntress recognizing the old woman speaks truth. When her husband’s kayak bursts through the igloo she throws the round pail over its pointed tip. Once again the ‘Unihipili says no to what harms it, which I interpret in this case as subservience to the distorted masculine represented by her abusive husband. Once again, after taking action, she immediately falls into a trance, waking on that same spit of land between two bodies of water. She still has work to do. She gets off her knees and starts walking again into the west, where death calls.

At this point in the journey, some people help her. They feed her and invite her to stay with them in their cozy igloo. Maybe you’ve experienced a temptation like this after great struggle. It would be so nice to just stay here and not have to work so hard to heal anymore! The Huntress, in touch with her ‘Uhane, finds the courage to say no. A strange thing happens next. When these kind folks hear she is intent on heading west, they tell her their are beings that kill people there, beings that actually killed their child. In some ways, they can be seen as people who’ve give up the spiritual journey. However, they are willing to help. They give her a short-handled knife, telling her that it’s animated by spittle, and that it’s the only thing that will keep her alive in the west. The man giving it to her stabs it handle-first into the igloo wall. The Huntress impales herself on it. Igloo=womb, knife=penis. The symbolism is pretty obvious! By sliding herself onto that knife embedded in the igloo, The Huntress acts out the union of her ‘Unihipili and ‘Uhane. There’s only one thing left to do: return to the village.

I’ve heard Martin Shaw speak many times of how the most difficult stage of the initiatory journey in our time is the return. Many of us are being called, or choosing to descend into the Underworld, and many of us are making it back, though many die there or just stay there as well. The problem is, our modern societies don’t have space for those who’ve come back from the journey. The knowledge they carry is too terrifying. Listening to these people makes us uncomfortable. Their very essence calls for changes most of us don’t want to make. We mock them, call them crazy, force them to live in poverty because they won’t fit into the normal working world, and worse, never acknowledge what they’ve learned. The initiatory journey has never supposed to be easy, but there used to be villagers waiting for us when we came back up, people who wanted us to triumph, not through achievement, but by becoming adults, those “fully cooked humans” I mentioned earlier, who could now make their own unique contribution to the village by modeling an integrated soul. In this state, it doesn't matter what one does. The chains of competition are broken, the Masculine and Feminine are united, and the third center, the ‘Aumākua becomes one’s guide. Less action is required. One is delivered unto one’s self and all actions stem organically from this inner knowing.

What does this look like in the real world? Let’s travel on with The Huntress.

After she pulls the knife out of the wall and tucks it in her back, she walks on into the west, killing ogres as needed (sacrificing the harms of her ‘Unihipili as many times as it takes). She knows she is walking toward the place where the ogres come from. As she walks, she realizes she has been walking in a great loop. The place where the ogres are born is her own village, Tikeraq.

As soon as she enters her village, she’s attacked by the chief of the ogres. It’s her own father. Now she has a knife that, wetted with spittle, could kill him. Is that what she does? No. Instead, she wets the knife with spit and tells him a story that cuts like a knife. She chooses a different way. (Interesting note: I learned from Ke’oni that saliva, which carries one’s DNA, is the proper offering to make when gathering plants. This is how the relationship becomes reciprocal and allows for information to flow between human and plant avatar.)

As she tells the story of her journey since she left him, she slots the blade into the wall of her father’s igloo. She is her own hero now, with her own masculine power. She makes sure to proclaim it with that knife so he knows her ‘Uhane is planted in her ‘Unihipili and is getting clear instructions of how they want to live in the world.

We aren’t told why, but the story says her father would have thrown himself on the blade if The Huntress hadn’t pulled it out of the wall at the climax. Was it shame? Maybe, but I think it’s way more than that. I see the father as motivated by the exhaustion of the distorted masculine who can see no way out of the nightmare he’s created except to kill himself. Alas, I’ve seen that play out in the world. I’m sure you have to, and beyond those individual friends we’ve lost, it seems our very culture is following this same path. As I write now, Israelis and Palestines are killing each other in the geographical location of the foundational myth of Western culture.

But in this story, the knife is not something that kills. It’s the blade of truth, an instrument of the ‘Aumākua. After the knife is pulled out, we’re told the father is scared, but the spell is broken. (Brothers, there’s no shame in being afraid. It is safe to be vulnerable. We are here for you!) For me this spell is the amnesia about the human experiment, we are here to seed the next world with love the way the octopus seeded this one with electricity, the last world’s experiment. Typing away on this miraculous computer charged by crystals, I say, well done, octopus. Thank you! (And still I hear my brothers choking on their tears.)

“When you disappeared, I had nothing left of you but the darkness you left behind,” the father tells his daughter. The masculine misses the feminine so much he’s willing to eat what harms her because she’s gone into hiding and won’t tell him what nourishes her. He’s that much of a hero. And he takes that harm, the only part of the feminine he has left, and brings it the village so they can partake of her, too. The masculine has to have a mission, even if it’s to destroy the world by continuing the cycle of harm broadcasted by the despairing ‘Unihipili.

He tells his daughter how the hunger to eat humans spread like a plague through the village in an act of entrainment that was perhaps not malicious, but the result of people who’d been abandoned, and then abandoned themselves. “No more,” the father says.With those words, he banishes that which harms the Feminine. We don't hear him invoke the nourishments, but sometimes a hero prefers to do that through actions over words. The last time we see them, father and daughter are quietly paddling their kayak together over the waves. The ‘Aumākua has triumphed.

Illustration for East of the Sun, West of the Moon, by Kay Nielsen

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I realize there are a few concepts in this essay that may be unfamiliar to new readers of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles. Instead of weighing down the narrative by explaining them every time, I’m inviting those who are curious to explore the archives where I set the foundation for the Corpus Callosum Chronicles with essays on Mū Hawaiian culture and pua’aehuehu. Paid subscribers get full access to the archives-almost two years’ worth of posts. Subscriptions are available at a yearly rate of $70, or monthly at $7. Upcoming essays include the last two parts of the nine part series, The Art of Spell-Casting, and an in-depth exploration of the folktales and myths I recounted in Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. Your paid subscriptions enable me to fulfill my kiakahi (purpose) with greater ease in this material world. Thank you!

I’d also like to repeat again that my interpretation of this story is mine and may have nothing to do with how the Inuit regard this story. Cultural-appropriation is another form of colonization and I hope I haven’t done that here. My intent is to share what I have learned from my relationship with this story, established in ceremony and reciprocity. In these times of change, stories are asking to move around the world. As a story-carrier, I am honored to share their wisdom and hope they contribute to the evolution and freedom of all life in all dimensions.

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Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light