Baubo Redeemer
Another powerfully redemptive archetype or avatar for spiritual action is Baubo. She is basically a wise-cracking (no pun) vulva on legs, who roused Demeter (Earth Mother) out of her world-killing depression and inactivity after her loss of her divine daughter, Kore/Persephone (spring, renewal, etc.), to the Underworld of Hades (winter, frozen infertility, etc.), by basically telling her dirty jokes until the Earth (Mother) started laughing great, deep, irreverent belly laughs, arose from her lethargy and despond, and energetically went in search of her abducted daughter, ultimately being empowered to retrieve the divine lass and bring light, warmth, fertility and resurrection back into the world.
She’s a major Goddess in the Eleusinian Mysteries (Greek: Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια) surrounding the religion of Demeter (Roman Ceres) and Persephone (Greek Kore). I love the little statuette of her as ‘Baubo Iambe’ with her harp, because she’s a shaman, storyteller, comedienne, songstress, poet and Bard, the original ‘Vagina Monologue-ist.’ Few know that Baubo Iambe is what Iambic pentameter is based on! Her role as Poet/singer and Bard relates her reverence patterns to Sappho (the actual first poet, NOT Homer), was dedicated to Aphrodite, Baubo, Kore and Demeter.
Sappho trained Kores (priestess acolytes) in the arts (of love, of music, of poetry, of literature, of recitations, of ritual theatre, of dance, and of earthly and cosmic reverence patterns and observances) in her academy garden school on the Island of Lesbos. In many ways, she and her Lesbian Garden School were the philosophical precursors for Epicurus and his Athenian Garden School.
Terra cotta figurines of Baubo lifting their garments, which date to the fifth to third centuries BCE, are generally interpreted as apotropaic, driving evil forces away. Pre-patriarchal Spartan women were said to scare away attacking armies by charging them while lifting their skirts and exposing their vulvas, thereby wielding the dominant magic of life source mojo. Athenian women also deployed this strategy. The women’s non-violent arsenal of sex and birth magic trumped the homosocial armies’ weaponry and armoured warrior magic. Irish women ‘gentled’ their own returning warriors, who were often still in berserker mode from the battle, by marching out to meet them with bared breasts. Baubo has no need of an apotropaic visage, like the Gorgon, the Medusa, Athena’s aegis (the grimacing Medusa face used as an armour breastplate), or Kali, as her gentle, smiling face is actually Her belly and cunt, which is scary protective magic enough for those who are not pure of heart, mind and intent.
She is possibly the earliest of the Trickster divine aspects in Indo-European/Western shamanism and magic, related to ‘Cunti’ (Sanskrit = Source of all life) in pre-Vedic pantheons — a very smart Cunt (the proto-Indo-European Goddess and avatar, ‘smart’ as in funny and wise), psychopomp, and soul redeemer.
As to the C-word, I was quite happy using it for special occasions, being English (where it is a commonly used slur), and having spent bunches of time there pursuing higher education despite living in Canada, but after the Samantha Bee usage of the term for Ivanka Trump, and seeing Sally Fields’ response to that backfire (“I like Samantha Bee a lot, but she is flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt. Cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.”), I decided to use the term, from here on, only in a positive, laudatory sense, as is appropriate when referring to an angel, ally, guardian or Goddess.
