On the 19th it is the feast day of St. Joseph. I’m a folk witch, which means I draw my spiritual practice from my domestic life, from the religion of my ancestors and the wheel of the year, woven together. My helpers are the saints, ancestors and the Madonna. My tools are oil, salt, candles and holy cards. The weaving brings great joy and meaning to me, and I, for as much as possible, reside in the part of my brain that holds poetic memory. In the words of Milan Kundera;
“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful …”
Our concept of fatherhood is a modern one. For the smallest part of human history have we had nuclear families, for an even smaller part of human history we have had testing to determine which child is biologically connected to which father. It was not so long ago that in Scotland the royal line was determined through the mother, as biological fatherhood could never be certain. In Judaism still, the line comes through the mother.
For our ancestors, who worshipped the Great Mother and women as her earthly representation, father was a social role that was bestowed upon a kinsman of the mother - her uncle, or brother, or other relative. It was understood that the father would earn the child’s love and guide and protect them as they were growing. It was an honour.
I think of the word husband, so like the word husbandry… the respectful cultivation of the land. I think of the kingmaking ceremonies of the past, where the Great Mother would choose the steward of her body, the earth. This is where we get the legends of the holy grail and the Fisher King, who is dying from the wound in his thigh, as the land is laid waste around him. What happens when the steward does not fulfil his role, and the feminine principle is abused?
What happens when the husband thinks the land belongs to him?
In my own story, these concepts of fatherhood are something I must marry within. I see fathers protecting the mothers of their children so beautifully as bodyguards of the birth space, catching babies in birth pools, kissing brows, singing songs, holding vomit buckets. There is something so breathtaking about seeing a man staring into the eyes of his newborn baby, skin to skin, faces mirrors of each other. And yet, the law has allowed a man to terrorise me for years based on our modern understanding of biology and who owns who. My children have a wonderful, gentle and dedicated stepfather. I want to hold all these truths in my heart and remember love. So I pray.
In folk magic, St Joseph is the one you want when you’re moving house. There is a tradition of saint punishing, whereby if you bury his statue upside down in your front garden he’ll get your house sold so you’ll turn him upright again. Traditionally, the father builds the structure of the house, the mother makes it a home. In folk magic, you give offerings to St. Joseph depending on how well you have been “provided” for in the year that has passed.
Legend has it when they were choosing a husband for Mary, Joseph threw his staff down and it sprouted lilies, recognising him as the chosen one. There is something so undeniably erotic about a staff ejaculating flowers and we see the symbolism of renewal in March, where the sun awakens the life within the earth, like the father awakens the life within the mother. In the ancient love poem of the goddess Inanna and Dumuzi, Inanna says “he has sprouted, he has burgeoned, he is lettuce planted by the water… he is the one my womb loves best” which signifies to me that Joseph is also the Goddess’s chosen lover.
In the story of the Fisher King, of the wasteland that occurs when the King does not honour this sacred contract between man and earth, the question the knight must ask is “what ails thee?”
On St. Joseph’s day, I would like to propose that what ails us is a lack of sacred fatherhood and good husbandry. The story of the birth of Jesus, of a man acting as doula to the Goddess awakens us to the remembrance of social fatherhood as an honoured role. It reminds us that love and protection of the feminine principle and devotion to the divine child, which is another name for life on earth, the fruit of the womb of the Great Mother, is essential if we are to reclaim all that we have lost in this wasteland. The flowering staff reminds us of the beauty and wonder that can be found in making love, of a phallus that is not a weapon but that sprouts lilies and renews the land. Lilies symbolise purity, the innocence, pleasure and joy of our sexuality before we linked sex to property.
We may reflect on all this and ask ourselves - so is Joseph the father or the stepfather? The answer is both. We marry social and biological fatherhood. We honour them both. We remember conscious conception, and that a child begins as a desire in the mother’s heart, to which she invites the worthy man of her choice to participate in the miracle of creation and nurture.
“You are the one my womb loves best” she whispers to him.
