Sedna’s Comb

Image Credit: Leslie Glaser

This is the story “Sedna’s Comb” as told by mythologist Martin Shaw:

“Once upon a time there was a village in the far North. A place of blue snow, hard thought, and a few distant seal holes. 

A man grew angry at his daughter’s refusal to marry. But no suitor flew at her altitude or could witness her many immensities. He grew ashamed of her. He took her in his kayak and chucked her overboard. As she tried to claw her way back on board, he cut her fingers off, and she sank under black water. 

From each finger sprung fish, whales, seals. Down in the coal black depths, she learnt to live in a different kind of way. A kind of house built around her, she became a Goddess of the sea beings: all those that know the dark, the cold, and can survive at great pressure. 

When travesty to the world above occurred, she would grow furious and the hunting would not be good. The village would starve. A rough cloud of anger would appear around Sedna. She would be obscured from view, but her wrath was everywhere. When the world is on fire, to lose contact with Sedna is a terrible thing. A dangerous thing. So the village would send the shaman down to see her.

The shaman has a seal-hole in their heart where magics rise and fall. 

The shaman ghost dances through history.

The shaman refuses not the perfume of Gethsemane. 

The shaman bleak-shudders through starts of mucky-water. 

Through the world’s own conscience to get to the very bottom. 

It’s a long journey, sometimes climbing and descending ladders of blades that cut your feet till blood clouds the water. 

Know this: it is not a journey that anyone would ever want to make. But suddenly, there they are, attending the blurry clouds of Sedna’s anger. 

And in there the One – Who – Is -A – Light makes a covenant with Sedna, courts her with drum thump and the grandeur of their ordinary tears. 

Such a courting causes a hole to appear in her wall of anger, and the shaman climbs through. 

Their sweetness becomes a comb, and there in the dark, the shaman combs all the tangles out of Sedna’s hair and gently braids it. Her anger simmers, then settles, and pathos opens up again from the deep freeze, moves their divine tendrils up and out over the land. 

Many hours later the shaman will be pulled half dead from the black-water, with their arms full of wildflowers. "

The Dark

I want to talk about the dark. Sedna’s realm is the dark. When I first sat with this story, about six years ago, I found this to feel a bit scary. I wondered - why am I being drawn to this story of such darkness and brutality even? Isn’t it better to place my focus on something brighter? 

I was only just beginning to learn there is a darkness that is something entirely different than our modern associations with it as evil, bad, and negative. That kind of darkness certainly exists and humanity has been steeped in it for a very long time. And it is indeed terrifying.

But I was learning of something else.

Of a darkness that is nurturing.

A darkness that is womb-like. 

A darkness of rich soil, of night, and space, and in this case – of the deep sea. 

This darkness is teeming with life. 

This darkness is the seed bed of creative intelligence; the beginning of all. 

This darkness is the ferocity of unconditional love, willing to slay whatever is not.

It is the womb.

It is necessary for life. 

If you ever hear an astronaut speak about the quality of the dark in space you will hear them attempting to describe something entirely other than what we know darkness to be. They describe it as alive, as a black color that is shimmering with depth. 

Or perhaps you have experienced the gift of being outside deep in the night and have felt it like a cloak of stillness gently holding you. 

In the cycle of life that nature teaches us, there is an eternal pattern of light-dark-light-dark. Of death-life-death-life-death-life, on and on.  

The darkness we refer to in modern times is a disfiguration of this cycle where light and life are synonymous and believed to only exist by negation of death and dark. 

Sedna is an Inuit Goddess. It can be said that archetypally, she is an aspect of the Great Mother Goddess whose specialty is creation and destruction. The Goddesses in this realm are destroyers of the darkness of the modern mind – the evildoing – so that the darkness of which they are can be remembered for what it is  - the elemental ground of all creation. They are the Night Mothers.

The darkness of modern thought is like the wizard behind the curtain, churning up predictions and stories of apocalyptic doom, zombie desolation, and utter demise. All coming from the part of self that is a scared little man with a megaphone. There is a reason why the term “doom scrolling” exists. That megaphone is beeping in our pockets, available to us all the time now if we choose to engage it. 

Yet Sedna, and the other Goddesses of the Dark are presiding over the Underworld. A realm with mind-blowing powers of transformation. Powers that can destruct and dissolve mental limitations of fear under their ferocious gaze that will not tolerate anything less than pure love. Theirs is the realm of all possibility. And to step into the unknown of their darkness is to open up a new paradigm.

Soul Ground

Like dream, the intelligence of myth is in how close it lives to the deep patterns of life that we call the archetypal. An archetype is a pattern of behavior that is universal. It is expressive of the laws of nature. 

Old stories, when they retain the bones of the laws of nature have a quality of being holographic, meaning you can find yourself in any part of them. So one of the seminal practices I have learned in encountering the old myths and fairytales and folktales is to wonder, which part of me is Sedna? Or the shaman, the seal hole, the father, the comb, the dark water, etc.? Each aspect can be looked at as being a part of the self. 

Sedna, for me is Soul. The fertile ground of Soul. The layer of self where we locate, recognize, and know that we are both an individual and an essential part of everything else. That we belong to a great process of inter-being with every other living thing. The Greeks had a term for this, it was ZoeBios. Zoe, meant the Universal soul, and bios, the individual soul. Bios was the bead hung on Zoe, the great necklace of being. 

We are both at once.

Can you think of an aspect of our everyday lives that has been more chucked overboard than this? 

The culture we live in demands it actually, in order to function. The thinking is that we can chuck it overboard to die and forget about it. 

The story tells us that not only can Soul never die but we need it in order to live. Denial and ignorance of Soul chokes the source of nourishment from us. And that we must, like the shaman, untangle the line of connection to her, to Soul, if we are to receive the lifeline inherent there. 

Betrayal

It’s hard to ask oneself where am I the father in this story? This is not meant as a practice to engage in shame or blame. This is about taking responsibility for what can be done in order to safely untangle from the brambled beast that has been created by so much human discarding of Soul. 

What is Sedna’s massive tangle of hair but the tangled mess that humans have wrought on the very basic law of nature that your well-being is my well-being and it cannot be any other way? What is the storm cloud of anger that surrounds Sedna but the psychic malaise of layers upon layers of untended to betrayal. Betrayal of her –of the interbeing-ness of life? We each carry our own bead on the necklace and its wounds and gifts are unique to each of us. These beads need tending to for they are the junctions where we are intimately connected to our creative power. 

We are right now, in a massive reckoning. We are, like the shaman and their people standing on the shoreline and contemplating what needs to be done.

The directive that the story tells us is this: we must each become the diver who goes to see Sedna. 

We must ask – where am I Sedna? What parts of me have been betrayed and chucked overboard? What parts of my ancestors were chucked overboard and I’m still carrying the wounds? What part of me needs tenderness and care to untangle? 

Usually it is the parts of ourself that we are most afraid of. There is a reason why the shaman’s dive is not a journey anyone would want to make. It feels utterly terrifying to reach out to the places that have been cut off. For they have a way of becoming the forsaken outcasts that we have privately and publicly declared them to be. And yet…what is needed? The story gives us this information so beautifully. It is not to suit up in armor and get out our weapons. But simply to show up with the drum thump of our vulnerable heart and the grandeur of our ordinary tears. 

Justice

So many of us are sitting right now with the question of how do we find justice? How do we find justice for all those who have been chucked off the boat?

I was listening to an interview of the poet Nikki Giovanni with Krista Tippett recently, and she spoke of a poem she was working on that had a line – “we cannot be un-raped.”

This is a hard truth to live with isn’t it? Sedna can’t be un-thrown off the boat, none of us can be un-violated. Giovanni spoke about ‘trying to learn to live with the fact that “some things,” we’re going to say, “you cannot do.” And then some things we’re going to say, “But though you have done them, we have to find a way to live with them.” And that doesn’t mean we reward you for what you’ve done, but it also means that we need another level of dialogue.’

There’s something about what she is saying in finding a way to live with all the wrongs that have been done. What comes to mind for me is that the massive tangle of Sedna’s hair and the ferociousness and enormity of the blurry cloud of anger around her is in fact everything that the culture has said – “you cannot be lived with.” In fact, “you cannot even be looked at.” And so this mass of shame, blame, guilt, rage, and grief has been discarded with the belief that if it is excommunicated it will die and fall away. But this is what the Night Mother teaches – nothing ever really dies. That gnarled tangle does what all life does – it goes on in another form. But without it being tended to, it morphs and grows into all kind of terrifying beast. 

If each character in the story is a part of myself then the relationship between Sedna and the shaman is profoundly meaningful. If I can journey to the Sedna of myself that has been deeply wronged and wounded and offer the tenderness of pure unconditional love to this part of myself then something novel can open up in the midst of this relationship. Something healing. And if I am willing to do this work with myself then it means that I no longer am contributing to the morphing of the terrible beast of tangled betrayal and I have instead recovered the line in to my own co-creative power with soul. This does not mean there is a condoning of wrongdoing, it means we have the power to free ourselves from remaining stuck in the choking tentacles of that wrongdoing and unconsciously adding to its power.

There is a need for consequences and laws that uphold the sanctity of life. Standing on the shoreline of the old myth, we call these justice. But there’s a fundamental problem here – the culture as it is built is not just. Justice doesn’t live there. And yet we keep looking only there. 

I hear her whispering at these times to look for a deeper source – the sacred order of life.

I wonder to myself – is justice the armful of wildflowers?

The end of the story does not have one side proclaiming victory over the other, it has two parties in recognition of their shared inseparableness. Sedna is left soothed, loved, tended to. The shaman is left half dead but with an armful of beauty. They both in fact are in a state of beauty. Not glamour, or prettiness, or something nice or lovely. But beauty as the deeply felt sense of being the soul of the world. This is the condition from which creation that is in alignment with the sacred order of life can occur. The kind of creation that serves all.  The kind of creation that might make a culture where justice does live. 

Repair

The whole story is a guide to a process of repair. Like nature itself in constant change and cycle, the process of tending to soul is ongoing, there is no beginning and no ending to it. It is a process of returning to the regenerative dark by having the courage to dive into the unknown. By the regular communing with soul. It’s like an old house – when it hasn’t been tended to in a long time, the initial work can be rough-going. It becomes smoother when the tending is regular.  

The shaman’s art is the ability to pass through gateways. There is no other way to get to Sedna. In order to pass a gateway, something must “die,” must be let go. What in you must die in order to create the space for a new story to emerge?

The reason why Sedna needs the shaman to comb her hair is because her hands have been cut off. If you have ever wondered as I have about the ecological role that humans are meant to play on Earth, then perhaps this is it– to be the hands of the soul. Or as Tyson Yunkaporta says in his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, “Your culture is not what your hands touch or make- it’s what moves your hands.”

Re-Pair.

Pair again to soul and let your hands (actions) arise from there.