I don't use divination or astrology to lead my life. I will check in with varying degrees of intensity, depending on how intensely my life is moving. Sometimes all it does is give me a few seconds to pause and wonder if the feel of the day is reflected by what the reading says, or help me focus on a certain area of my life.
If you're interested in Chinese Cosmology, then the Tong Shu is the place to look. Tong Shu means "Everything Book". It is based on the Chinese lunar calendar, and gives auspices for each day. It is the oldest continually published book in the world.
Trying to find a translation of this book that was understandable has been difficult. The literal translations made sense, but I needed a cultural translation. My Taoist teacher led me to Tong Shu online. I've been using it for the last couple of years. A few weeks ago I noticed there was a link to the site owner's blog, which gives a daily interpretation and history of the symbols used in the almanac. He also gives locations of the constellations for each day, a real blessing as I've yet to find a good map that translates the constellations into English.
Although I’d always heard that Chinese women had bound feet in the “olden days”, for some reason it had never occurred to me
that any of my female ancestors had them. It wasn’t until after all my
maternal ancestors had passed away that I asked a cousin about it. She
said that my great, great grandmother was the last woman to have bound
feet in our family. Luckily, I was raised by my grandmother and she had
memories of HER grandmother. One story stands out. If my grandmother
ever did anything wrong while growing up, her grandmother would never
beat her or say anything in anger, she would just make a gesture that
later ended up being used on me—drawing the index finger downward on a
child’s cheek to say, “shame on you.” She is the only gentle relative
I’ve ever heard of or known.
My great grandmother, the first girl to have "big" feet, was a cruel woman. She was born in 1900. She was very regal and intimidating. My cousin told me that sometimes she would wake up the kids in the middle of the night and start beating them for something they had done two weeks prior. Or worse, throw a bucket of water on them while they slept. She was probably addicted to opium, although all I know is that they had a special ma jong room in the house that had a big hookah in it. How did she get so mean?
My ancestors were herbalists. My great, great grandmother was known to spend most of her time on her knees sorting herbs. (Was it too painful to be on her feet?) The story of how her daughter ended up with "big" feet goes like this: My great, great grandfather traveled around a lot trading herbs as the Sichuan province is renowned for its special herbs that can be found nowhere else. He therefore heard news that footbinding was going out of style before the people in the village did. So, he didn’t bind his daughter’s feet, and got a lot of flack from the other villagers who teased him.
Bless him, bless him. But, with this unbinding, a thousand years of oppression, inexplicable suffering and resulting anger were also unbound. Neither Chinese, nor, after emigration, American culture, acknowledged or allowed space for women’s anger. My great, great grandmother, bound and oppressed, was gentle. My great grandmother, with her free feet, was vicious and cruel. Her daughter, my grandmother, could be cruel, but not quite as vicious. She found power through her drop-dead gorgeous beauty. Later in life she became bound up by her multiple plastic surgeries and the restrictions of her fundamentalist Christian church. Her daughter, my mother, left me as a newborn with my grandmother. For 25 years, she was the classic co-dependent wife of an alcoholic man who wasn’t my father. She was a compulsive liar. She developed a severe eating disorder. Her anger had become more inwardly directed. All of my maternal ancestors were unbound but still hobbled-- by their rage and sense of powerlessness rather than their tiny, broken feet.
Originally posted 4/18/06 at blissing.net
Footbinding was a fashion, a fad that went horribly, horribly wrong. It started about 1,000 years ago when a dancer with small feet performed in the Chinese imperial court atop a giant lotus sculpture. Women in the court started binding their feet to make them look smaller and create “golden lotuses”. As per usual, it spread to the masses, and not long thereafter, girls from the ages of 3 to 6 had to have their feet bound if there was any hope of them getting married when they were older.
Many times there were infections and toes would fall off or become gangrenous. As described in Aching for Beauty, by Wang Ping, the only feminist critique of footbinding by a Chinese woman that I’ve come across, the foot needed to be,
…small, slim, pointed, arched, fragrant, soft and straight…for about two or three years, little girls go through the inferno of torture: the flesh of her feet, which are tightly bound with layers of bandages day and night, is slowly putrefied, her toes crushed under the soles, and the insteps arched to the degree where the toes and heels meet. Loving mothers turn into monsters that beat their sobbing girls with sticks or brooms, forcing them to hop around to speed up the rotting flesh and make sure the bones are broken properly. When the feet are finally shrunk to the size of a baby’s—three inches long, half an inch wide in the front—they are completely deformed. All the tears and pus, all the decay and broken bones are hidden under the elaborate adornment of the shoes, which are never taken off, not even in bed. Yet violence is traceable everywhere: the odor of dead flesh seeping through the bandages, the tiny appendages that barely support the frail body.
A mother was not allowed to loosen the bindings no matter how much the little girl cried or begged. This was proof of her love for her daughter. She had to save face for her daughter’s wedding day, when everyone would look at her feet and judge whether she would be a good wife or not by the size of her feet. Look at your hand and imagine a grown woman’s foot fitting into its palm. Not all women had 3-inch feet, 4-, 5-, and 6-inch feet were also common. Men would marry women based solely on the smallness of her feet, having never seen their faces. Sometimes they married women old enough to be their mothers, just because their tiny feet were renowned.
Books were written about the erotic pleasures of tiny feet. Every aspect of them was eroticized—the way they smelled (apparently cheesy), the way they felt in the hand or in the mouth during intercourse, the way they made a woman teeter as she walked and how watching her evoked a sense of pity for her helplessness, how they looked like both female and male genitalia, how to insert a penis into the arch, the beautiful embroidered silk shoes shaped like lotus or lily leaves, the hoove-like animal-ness of them, etc. Footbinding had by then become something much deeper than a fad; it had become a reflection of the culture’s tastes and sensibilities in food, art, sexual practices, as well as its control of women.
[Orignally posted 3/6/06 at blissing]
Next: The women in my family.
Any news about the state of tigers in the world is of interest to me, and the Tiger attack at the San Francisco zoo on Christmas day last year was very moving. While meditating on the attack I knew that Tatiana was provoked. She is a symbol of the feminine tiger spirit reawakening. And, she is angry. The anger has been flowing through me as well, and I pray that I channel it constructively and that I stay healthy while doing it.
The White Tigress has been an important teacher to me for several years now. I will be presenting at the International Association for the Study of Dreams this July on the pivotal dream I had in 2000 that continues to inform and guide my life. The White Tigress is a representation of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, who is the not-well-known primordial earth mother goddess of China.
Recently, Teresa sent me this very moving photo of a tiger in India. That caption reads: A pregnant tigress was rescued by forest workers Sunday after being stoned by Indian villagers. Upon her release Tuesday, the tigress jumped into the Sundarikati River.
I will be posting more about the White Tigress, Xi Wang Mu, and my experiences with the feminine spirits of China throughout the year.
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