Yemaya said, “We’ve heard that Yawalla insists on the superiority of fighting males to hunting females. What say you, Lion Mother?”
The lioness gave a contemptuous snort. “Males, superior?” she sneered. “Another example of Yawalla’s insanity. Males are good for nothing except to lie around in the shade sleeping, or to waste their time bullying cubs. Everyone knows that females raise every generation to maturity, bring home the meat, teach the children to hunt, and keep the murderous fathers away. Males are so indolent that they never lift a claw if they can help it. They are the laziest creatures on the veldt.”
The goddesses went next to Hyena Mother, leader of the carrion eaters. Hyena Mother was less tormented than the others, because men didn’t covet her people’s skins, and hyenas had made a good living from the huge mounds of carrion that Yawalla’s men abandoned on the plains. She said, however, that they were obviously insane, for what sane creature would make a kill and then walk away from the meat? Furthermore, the killing had been so extensive that the herds supporting the hyena population had become quite thinned out.
Mawu said, “We’ve heard that Yawalla insists on the superiority of males to females. What say you, Hyena Mother?”
Hyena Mother laughed and laughed, until all the hyenas in the world began laughing with her. “That’s the best joke I’ve heard in all my days,” she gasped, wiping her eyes. “Those little pipsqueak males, superior? Everybody knows that females are bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, sexier, and better equipped to make a living than males are. It has to be so, because we females bear the responsibility for birthing, nourishing, raising, and training every generation of our kind. No wonder Yawalla’s men kill for nonsensical reasons and leave the good parts behind. They’re completely crazy.”
The goddesses went next to Rhinoceros Mother and found her in a state of near-collapse, so great was her sorrow over the decimation of her people. “They are destroying all my tribes for the most foolish reason in the world,” she said mournfully. “They have ancient, silly tales that equate one-horned mythical beasts with sexual potency. Therefore, the white god’s men eat rhinoceros horn in the absurd belief that it will cure their impotence and all other weaknesses. They won’t even go to the trouble of capturing my children, removing the horn, and letting them go again. These men are lunatics, willing to kill and kill for their erroneous notions instead of learning the truth.”
The goddesses went next to Gorilla Mother and heard much the same story from her. “They kill and kill my people, who only want to be left in peace and who cause no harm to any other creature,” she said. “I think the men must be insane enough to want to destroy themselves. There seems no other reason for their lunatic slaughter of the gorilla tribes, other than the fact that gorillas look something like them; so they may be killing one another in effigy. Of course they also kill one another for real—an unthinkable act, in the view of my people. Obviously they are out of their minds.”
The goddesses went next to Vulture Mother, leader of the great birds, widest-winged and keenest-eyed among all her kind. She bobbed her bald, wrinkled head and cackled that the humans had once had the good sense to revere her, three thousand and more rainy seasons ago. They gave her the name of Nekhbet and worshiped her as the symbol of every life’s ending and rebirthing. “But I fear their males are born crazy from the egg,” she said. “Perhaps the females also, to allow the males to neglect their primary duty, helping to nurture the young. Our bird brains are better than that.”
The goddesses consulted all other animal leaders they could find and heard the same thing over and over: The men of Yawalla were crazy killers who didn’t even wait for hunger, which was the only proper reason for killing. Even when fully fed, fat, and satisfied, they would go forth with terrible weapons and slaughter dozens of animals at a time, and eat none of them. “The white god is insane,” all the animals said, “and he has corrupted his people. They no longer know how to behave in the world. They have become a pestilence.”
Oshun, Yemaya, and Mawu realized that something would have to be done. They thought the only logical choices for their agents on Earth were the human females, who must be encouraged to control their males, as did the females of other species. On further investigation, however, the goddesses found that many if not all of the human females were greatly weakened by Yawalla’s rules, which often mutilated their bodies, robbed them of their children, forced them into sexual slavery, and taught the men, who should have been helping them, to treat them instead with mindless hostility.
“This Yawalla is an abomination,” said Mawu angrily. “He has even caused the women to forget Us, their images and preservers. The white god has got to go.”
“Let Us teach the women to despise him, then,” said Yemaya. “That’s the first step. Show them that he has no spiritual power over them, let them believe it thoroughly, and then they will regain temporal power. After all, nothing can change the fact that they are the mothers.”
“Let the mothers accept only men who show decent, rational, fatherly behavior toward children and other living things,” said Oshun. “Then the brutes who are not accepted may die out, and their violent heritage with them. Will that be Our plan, sisters?”
The goddesses agreed and set to work to change the minds of women, one woman at a time. It was slow going. Most men opposed the goddesses in their mission, though a few of the more rational ones saw the sense of their arguments and began to help. Some of the men came to believe that it was wrong to hunt without hunger. Women learned to despise leopard-skin coats and ivory ornaments, to reprimand others still ignorant enough to crave such things, and to laugh at men still ignorant enough to think rhinoceros horn would cure their impotence. Women taught their children, and they taught their children, and they in turn taught their children.
In time, the white god faded and became only one more minor consort of the powerful goddesses. Then Africa and its animal nations—the ones that managed to survive the great slaughters—began to flourish again. They lived a little more happily ever after, because it was understood among them that the only killers were those who couldn’t digest vegetable food and who needed meat for their own hunger and that of their children. The goddesses watched the white god closely and made sure that he never again seized the upper hand.
About the Author
BARBARA WALKER is the author of many books, including The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myth and Secrets, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, The I Ching of the Goddess, The Skeptical Feminist, The Crone, The Secrets of the Tarot, Woman’s Ritual, and Amazon.
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Other Books by Barbara G. Walker
BOOKS
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
The Secrets of the Tarot: Origins, History, and Symbolism
The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power
The I Ching of the Goddess
The Skeptical Feminist: Discovering the Virgin, Mother, and Crone
The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects
The Book of Sacred Stones: Fact and Fallacy in the Crystal World
Women’s Rituals: A Sourcebook
Amazon: A Novel
GRAPHICS
The Barbara Walker Tarot Deck
Credits
Cover design: Miricllo Grafico, Photograph: Wymore Twins, © Howard Schatz 1995
Copyright
FEMINIST FAIRY TALES. Copyright © 1996 by Barbara G. Walker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or herei
nafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST HARPERCOLLINS PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1997.
Illustrations by Laurie Harden
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Walker, Barbara G.
Feminist fairy tales / Barbara G. Walker.
ISBN 0-06-251319-2 (cloth)
ISBN 0-06-251320-6 (pbk.)
1. Women—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Fairy tales—Adaptations. 4. Feminism—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.A42516F46 1996
813’.54—dc20 95–39219
04 05 HAD 10 9
EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062288356
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