Red Bead Speech I - Red Bead Woman

My ruby red bead necklace

I’ve spent the month of May into June working with voice. My voice, the voice of my ancestors, forgotten voices of Sussex, and the voice of Red Bead Woman and her red bead speech.

Red Bead Woman is an alchemical Yakut folktale of birth, death and rebirth, I heard told by mythologist Martin Shaw (December 2019) at the Westcountry’s School of Myth’s Wandering Court, at the edge of Dartmoor. 

Red Bead Woman is a magical being born of longing. Literally pulled up by her roots from the earth. She rides her magical speaking horse (which I interpret to be her shaman’s drum) to the place of her dismemberment by the old wild forest hag. Before her dismemberment she is an elective mute. She has all the beauty of youth, with her alchemical colours of red, black and white, but she chooses not to speak. All the while she is listening.

Her fiance, the young prince, abandons her at the edge of the forest. Wrapped up as he is in his own pursuits, he forgets to tend to the very thing that is most dear to him. Red Bead Woman takes the wrong turn in the wild forest (which in fairytales is in fact the right turn, the path that cannot be avoided) that leads her to dismemberment - to be torn apart by the great hag, who appears in her green iron hut resplendent as a form of the devouring goddess or the great dragon of alchemy spitting toads from her mouth. After her ritual dismemberment Red Bead Woman lies buried in the earth, but a fragment of her heart survives, and this proves to be fundamental to her rebirth. For “love is the art of the heart”, as my 22 year old self wrote in an old notebook. 

Red Bead Woman is reborn, this time with voice, since her suffering has given power to her voice and the courage now to speak. Through that power she is then able to enter the sacred marriage (the union of the masculine and feminine in ourselves) which brings healing to both her dismembered self and to the land.

The same thing happens to her fiance before the marriage. His sight is clouded, which causes him to take his eye off the person most precious to him to tend to his foxtraps in the forest, leading him to his ritual initiation with the wisdom dragon who devours him as she has devoured his fiancee. This results in his own dismemberment for 40 days and nights, and then another 40 days and nights, at the mercy of the elements in the wilderness outside the village. Red Bead Woman enters the Underworld and returns with voice. The prince goes into the Underworld and returns with clear sight. Through their union, their gathered wisdom is brought back to the village, and the sacred prophecy is forfilled. 

I take this process of birth, death and rebirth to mean:

If you know how to die, and you don’t fear death, then you can unlock the red bead wisdom way of speaking in your rebirth. Knowing when it is the right time to speak and when it is time to be silent. You learn how to grow roots. 

When I was young, I didn’t have strong roots, in the same way red bead woman is made from a mandrake root that is not yet strong enough to avoid being pulled up. She has to return into the ground through her dismemberment and consequently grows much stronger through her replanting.  Red Bead Woman is justifiably angry at her betrayal by the masculine ...how many times have we betrayed ourselves, and faced betrayal by others whom we trusted? 

However, since love is the art of the heart, it is through love that her small piece of surviving heart that she is reborn. Her horse too is part of her rebirth...the magical horse (gifted to her, stolen by the dragon, and forbidden to speak) finally tells her story of suffering to the village, thus enabling both the couple and the village to be healed.  The ability to hold on to an open heart, to be tender to ourselves in our darkest hour, brings with it the power of love to heal.

When I think of the horse, I think of the drum, and how it connects us with voice through singing and storytelling; with dance, and with ritual. The drum binds a village; when the drum speaks, its beat is fundamental to the healthy heartbeat of village life.  I remembered my drum that I bought in Java, when I lived there in my early 20s . I kept it for so long, and when I decided to sell it, I somehow parted with a part of my voice. It took many years wandering about a kind of wilderness until I finally gave birth to another drum...a drum I made by hand from horseskin, a dark horse which speaks with a much greater confidence and understanding, with the wisdom that is born of suffering the trials of life. With a newfound red bead speech my roots grow deeper.

Read Red Bead Speech II - On Voice

A Red Queen Speaks

Young woman, you pulled up your roots,

to plant yourself in the land

of spice and lava

where shadow puppets speak

in strange tongues

under a full mountain moon,

where your ring wriggled with snakes

the old man said, so you threw it away

scared, but perhaps he was pulling

your leg.

In sequined hotpants, golden crown

glinting as you danced

all night to the drum beat

of the bamboo beach bar

in Gili Trawangan, when

all there stood were woven huts, 

old Mama Mushroom in her green sarong,

the massage man with many children

who pulled your limbs from their sockets

before putting them back together

so you could climb to the sign

that pointed to the hill

where the trees spoke with red lipped leaves.

Two years immersed in strange magic

shared by Javanese mystics, teachers,

village trance dancers who threw sweet

fragrant offerings to keep

the spirits of the land content.

Back home you fell into a muteness

as the roots

tasting of fermented cassava 

that you put down in Java

shuddered, not knowing how

to dig down into the green grass 

chalk-backed hillsides that

were your ancestral stone.

The magic was always there,

slow cooking in the iron pot,

a stew getting richer with

the heat of experience, 

the same way Azorean pots buried

in the steaming lava earth

for at least three days

fizzed with the taste of a honeyed moon.

Words when spoken

from that fragment of heart regrown

possess a greater clarity of song

and tone, after the spit of toads

has rinsed around a slack jawed

tongue to dribble down

nine beating breasts.

They flavour better with age.

Remember the voice of your youth

dancing, now seated 

on the salt flint throne, 

warming to memories

under the same sun.