The story of White Buffalo Calf Woman offers a fascinating archetype that has application today.
White Buffalo Calf Woman is the central deity in Lakota cosmology.
This story is set in a time when there is no food and the Lakota are starving.
The tribe sends two men out on foot to look for food.
They do not find the food they are looking for, but they find a beautiful native woman.
One of the men immediately sees her divinity and is respectful.
The other man only sees the usefulness of her beauty as it applies to him, and he lusts after her, and he grabs her to rape her.
In an instant he is struck by lightning and is turned into a pile of smoldering bones.
The respectful man is told to go back to his camp and have the tribe prepare for her arrival.
When White Buffalo Calf Woman arrives, she gives the Lakota people the sacred pipe, and sacred ceremonies, and she gives them the sacred buffalo herd for food and resources, and tells them that some day she will return.
The symbolic takeaways:
The Divine Feminine is the source of abundance.
The famine can represent the quest for spiritual food.
White Buffalo Calf Woman is not the one who kills the disrespectful man. It is his own disrespect for the Divine Feminine that brings about his demise, which comes from Nature.
Meryl Ann Butler is an artist, author, educator and OpedNews Managing Editor who has been actively engaged in utilizing the arts as stepping-stones toward joy-filled wellbeing since she was a hippie. She began writing for OpEdNews in Feb, 2004. She became a Senior Editor in August 2012 and Managing Editor in January, (more...)
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