As writing and the discipline of formalised record keeping developed from the early Greeks and Romans, it was always a fluid story telling, a telling of tales shaped to influence the masses. As with our contemporary history makers and story tellers, the media, and documentary makers, their stories are refracted through their own lenses and edited by the ones in power. The telling of history has never been absolute truth. Truth is a relative word. And like the recording of history, is fluid.

How then, can we find stories that were never recorded? How do we know they existed? If her truth has been almost entirely redacted from our recorded past how can it be found or validated?

And this, is what I have found to be the most frustrating about this story. There are little imprints and shadows of her threaded throughout his telling of her story, there once was a narrative for her… a truth that she owned.

While googling ‘Fabric Spiders’, I stumbled into a book made by the artist Louise Bourgeois, and her body of work that almost exclusively represents spiders, spiders as she.

Truth ascending. When I read her words, it just felt like it was all connected; we were all connected, our stories, her words.

My eyes prickled with tears when I came across her book: An Ode to Forgetting. A beautiful art book, printed on monogrammed towels from her wedding. Amongst the pages of her art, there are three pages of text. Her words felt like they could have been mine. A thread of resonance, of connection. He few words, elegantly capturing what I was trying to express. Her few words felt like spears and truth.

The first page: They will not be separated again. Her dark and her light will no longer be two separated parts of she, but come together again as two sides of the whole. She will embrace her light and her dark.

The second page: The return of the repressed. Her original truth, her voice, her power and her divinity once repressed and bound, shall return.

And the last page of text in her book: I had a flashback of something that never existed. Deep within the part of me that knows, there rests a story I was never told. I feel it to be true. They have removed it from history, as if she never existed. I have a memory of a story I was never told.

Books are such beautiful objects full of knowledge and power. Another book of significance along this research has been Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, mythologies and stories of the wild woman archetype. She draws on myth and fables, and talks of ritual and embracing all sides of she.

Two books that have been very influential during this research; Light is the New Black and Rise Sister Rise by Rebecca Campbell. Whether you are spiritually/esoterically inclined or not, they are an interesting look at the contemporary movement that is a kind of spiritualist feminist ideology.

This author makes reference to the word Virgin meaning a woman One-In-Herself, and not being attached the chaste meaning we think it to me. I had never come across this notion. I googled and googled, but alas the google bubble had me caught in a wheel of same-same. I was finding it very difficult to validate this idea, or find accessible information on any aspect of herstory.

B and I were opp shopping, in Savers of all places, I was searching through the china looking for something pretty I could smash for some of the Read Me images, and he handed me a book. Loved and dog eared and full of hand written notes. Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern by M. Esther Harding. Boom. Moments in time. A brilliant book noted as a psychological interpretation of the feminine principal as portrayed in myth, story and dreams. The book is so well referenced and written. Full of images of early symbols and rich with references to other text and authors on the topic. AND full of referenced descriptions of the original meaning of the word Virgin.

The hand written notes in the book, also offered other texts to read… this is just the beginning…