A Call to Innocence
An edited version of one of my comprehensive exam papers for my MA at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
CW: References violence against women and the earth.
Shimmering in a golden bowl, well water glimmers under a lush canopy of green. Beautiful maidens steward this blessed land, inviting any who seek shelter or sustenance to come to the well, drink from their bowls, and be nourished. This is the myth of the well maidens in the 13th century French poem The Elucidation. Before the Arthurian Court became a wasteland, the kingdom was a rich and vibrant place. It was not until King Amangon and his men began to rape the well maidens that the wells ran dry and the land began to decay. Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner apply an ecofeminist perspective to this myth in “The Rape of the Well-Maidens,” making a connection between sexual violence and violence to the Earth.
ECOPSYCHOLOGY
The Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States have seen a growing ecological threat in the emergence of the spotted lanternfly, which found its way from the Asian continent in the mid 2010s. For the last ten years, these beautiful creatures have been decimating forests and clearing crops, devastating the natural ecological balance of the areas they have been introduced to.
While the spotted lanternfly is considered an invasive species, it is also a victim of circumstance. These insects can only function as they know how to, eating plant sap and reproducing. This behavior would be no more or less destructive than that of any other insect if the lanternfly were in their native terrain. Here, with no natural predators and no evolutionary balance, the impact is overpopulation and the decay of plant matter.
There is something to be said about the mythic act of a creature sucking the life out of its host. While it would be dangerous to consider King Amangon and his men victims, they and the spotted lanternfly are kindred in that both have lost their relationship to their original home. This split is apparent in the king’s name, Amangon. A man, gone. The men in the well maiden myth have forgotten their close relationship with the living world in what Roszak calls repression of the ecological unconscious (62). From the moment that humanity’s connection with the living world was severed, we began to see ourselves as separate from the ecology of our environment, leading to environmental destruction.
If one were to observe an ordinary cityscape, take for example Downtown Los Angeles, the observer would see human-produced asphalt, metal, and glass, littered with small pockets of non-native trees to line the streets. While the population above-ground consumes electricity, shops mass-farmed produce at grocery stores, and drives carelessly over birds and small creatures with their factory-constructed cars, they rarely stop to consider the living world underneath their feet, stripped bare and choked with concrete.
Like eating out of the hands of the well maidens and then violating them, humans deplete the living world, consuming far more than the Earth’s supply can sustainably replenish. Sometimes, this looks like sending children into the body of the Earth to mine minerals for the cellphones and computers that we use for tasks like writing Substack articles. The impact on the Earth is unquestionably damaging. But the harm to the human psyche is equally devastating. Humanity is starved.
This insatiable hunger for the Earth Mother in the collective psyche has led to unspeakable levels of planetary damage. It is this hunger and the painful ignorance of separation, or “psychic numbing,” that lead the king’s men to rape the well maidens (Roszak 62). Like a hungry child throwing a tantrum, humanity’s continued starvation leads us to overconsume and overproduce, farming monoculture crops, depleting land of its natural resources, and as we are witnessing today, turning weapons upon the land, its architecture, and the people who inhabit it. We are living the well maiden myth repeatedly, on several levels—the continued rape of the maidens, the wasteland we find ourselves in today, and the grail quest, humanity’s desperation for reunion. We, the Earth’s children, are crying for our Mother. The return of the well maidens is a return to the Earth and humanity’s return to innocence, which can only happen when we remember ourselves as inseparable from the living world around us.
Works Cited
Gomes, Mary, and Allen Kanner. “The Rape of the Well-Maidens: Feminist Psychology and the Environmental Crisis.” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, edited by Theodore Roszak, Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. 111-121.
Roszak, Theodore, editor. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Sierra Club Books, 1995.
The Elucidation. Translated by William W. Kibler, The Camelot Project, University of Rochester, 2007, https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/elucidation.html.