Marsh – Mother – Membrane: Small Cosmogony

I recall from my childhood that our street, the Marckstraat (‘mark’ after boundaries and the river of the same name that originates there), terminated in a vast dark pool called the Black Water. I was not allowed to go there under any circumstances; it was a terrifying place where you could lose your way or, worse still, be dragged under. Besides, there was a legend that girls who ventured to the edge of the marsh would suffer misfortune in motherhood. In the curse that clings to the Black Water resonates a deeper archetype that casts the marsh as the sanctuary of the Mother Goddess. In this essay I attempt to open up this dark chthonic space. For it is on the brink of the abyss that humans discern the caverns of symbolic thought, and marvel at the infinite dark energy of motherhood in iconography and myth.