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Hello friends,

Before we tuck in, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to all the new readers among us, as there are almost three thousand more of you here this month!

Thank you to everyone who made use of the discount code, I hope it was helpful. And thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting my work. Thanks to you, this week my Substack became the #1 Rising Publication in Literature! It was ridiculously surreal to see my publication alongside Reese's Book Club and Margaret Atwood. Thank you for making it possible for this work to reach so many people.

This article is part of the free monthly newsletter. Next week we’ll return to my new series for paid readers, The Old Gods of Europe.

If you’re new here, my name is Gabriela. I spend most of my life writing about the mytho-magical worlds of our earliest ancestors, sitting (at times rather uncomfortably) between scholarship and lived experience. I’m interested in recovering ways of seeing and being in the western world that restore the sense of meaning, belonging, and cultural identity once offered by shared mythologies and rituals that helped people navigate life’s great thresholds.

Alongside this publication, I teach courses that combine my scholarship with practice, exploring mythology, ritual, imagination, embodiment, altered states of consciousness, and deepened relationship with the natural world.

I’m currently writing my first non-fiction book, to be published by Shambhala Publications in 2027.

You can read more about me and this publication on the About page. A free subscription includes a monthly essay and poem on the first Sunday of each month, seasonal ritual prompts following the Wheel of the Year, and access to my Q&A Column The Ochre Papers.

Paid readers receive all of the above, plus a weekly Sunday essay with audio, full access to my complete archive, and every essay series I’ve ever published—including Before Olympus, still the most widely read to date.

I can’t thank you all enough for your interest and support of my work. I’m currently putting together a little gift for paid readers as a small thank you.

G xo

Listen via audio:

“What got the baby in gets the baby out!” grinned world-renowned childbirth educator Debra Pascali-Bonaro.

It was five hundred degrees in the tropical town of Ubud, in central Bali, and a group of women gathered in the home of traditional midwife Ibu Robin Lim to learn the old ways of birthkeeping.

In recent years, the word birthkeeper has become more common, often used interchangeably with doula or traditional midwife. More than a profession, it describes an ancient way of accompanying women through one of life's greatest thresholds. Before birth became the domain of hospitals, birthkeepers understood birth not merely as the arrival of a baby, but as the birth of a mother.

The word describes one of women’s oldest roles.

And it was this understanding of birth that had drawn me halfway across the world in the midst of one of the most demanding editorial stages of my current manuscript, to study with some of the most-renowned birthkeepers in the world.

It was a bit of a madness, really. I rose before dawn to edit chapters before spending my days sitting at the feet of women preserving one of humanity's oldest bodies of knowledge.

Though Debra’s line was a funny one, it contained a serious truth: birth responds to the same conditions that conception does—privacy, safety, softness, trust, lowered vigilance, intimacy, and surrender to a mystery. These are by no means sentimental ideas; they are the quintessential foundations that have created the conditions, throughout millennia, to initiate women into the rite of passage of birth.

For the last couple of centuries, we have interrupted this threshold. It’s almost as though, afraid of the unpredictability of the rapids, we have attempted to control the river’s flow, unable to let ourselves be carried, as John O’Donohue wrote, by our own unfolding.

The impulse to manage birth is only one expression of a much wider cultural disposition: our increasing difficulty in surrendering to the uncontrollable dimensions of human life. The same instinct appears wherever life asks us to yield to experiences of transformation (be it menstruation, adulthood, marriage, parenthood, menopause, illness, grief, ageing, or death). Increasingly, we approach each threshold not as a mystery to be entered but as a problem to be managed.

Beneath this lies a deep cultural story. The modern West has steadily exiled mystery itself, elevating certainty, prediction, and control above receptivity, surrender, and participation in the unknown.

For the first time in human history, we no longer prepare a seat at the table for the numinous. This impulse extends far beyond childbirth. It shapes our relationship with nature, with women’s bodies, and even with the sacred, which has been institutionalised, systematised, and rendered safe.

But the consequence of banishing the mystery has gorged a vast chasm between ourselves and soul, resulting in a spiritual amnesia that echoes through every dimension of human life, from the personal and familial, to the ecological, social and cultural.

Without the structures that human societies developed over millennia to accompany life’s great thresholds, to hold together the psychological, emotional, somatic, relational and spiritual dimensions of life, we are left to wrestle these passages alone. Instead of trusting the current that once carries us, we resist it. The very force that might have initiated us into a larger life becomes something to fear or control.

The Birth of the Mother

Midwife Ibu Robin Lim believes that peace on earth begins at birth. How we birth and are birthed defines how we live, and who we are.

Birth is our first experience of relationship. Before we know language, beliefs, or culture, we know what it is to be held and well received, or interrupted, hurried, resisted, and frightened. Developmental psychology, attachment research, and trauma studies increasingly recognise that our earliest experiences shape patterns of nervous system regulation, attachment, trust, and our relationship with the world.

Birth does not determine a life, but neither is it insignificant. It is the first threshold through which every human being passes.

Yet there is another birth taking place in the room that is often overlooked. If peace on earth begins at birth, it depends not only on how babies enter the world, but also on how mothers are received into motherhood. Every birth gives rise not to one new life, but to two.

Alongside the child, a mother is born.

Modern maternity care often places the baby's survival at the centre while the mother's transformation receives far less attention. When that crossing is not well held, the consequences can be profound. We know that traumatic birth experiences, loss of autonomy, emergency procedures, poor communication, and feelings of abandonment can all increase the risk of postpartum depression, anxiety, and birth-related trauma. The wound is not necessarily the intervention itself. More often, it is the experience of crossing one of life’s greatest thresholds without feeling safe, witnessed, respected, or held.

Yet the mother's wellbeing is not shaped only by whether birth was traumatic. It is also shaped by whether her passage into motherhood was accompanied and woven into the fabric of community. Across cultures, rites of passage did not merely mark transformation; they helped bring it about. They gave women time to shed one identity before gradually inhabiting another.

In years of mentoring women across life's major thresholds, I have encountered this experience repeatedly. Many describe feeling suspended between identities: no longer who they were, yet not fully established in who they are becoming.

The consequences ripple far beyond the individual. The erotic self may retreat without ever being consciously renewed, expectations once distributed across mothers, grandmothers, neighbours, and elder women become concentrated almost entirely upon a partner, and a transition that was once held by an entire community is expected to unfold within the walls of a single household.

Throughout most of human history, these thresholds were accompanied by stories, rituals, elder guidance, and communal recognition. Birth itself was woven into a rich symbolic world that extended far beyond labour, from traditions surrounding the placenta and umbilical cord to periods of postpartum seclusion and ceremonial welcome. Such practices did not merely commemorate birth; they helped women make sense of their transformation and gradually inhabit their new identity as mothers.

I explore the mythology and ritual traditions surrounding the placenta in more depth in my companion essay:

Placenta of the Forest

Gabriela Gutierrez

·

Apr 19

Read full story

Perhaps this is one of the hidden griefs of modern motherhood. We know how to celebrate the arrival of a baby, yet we are far less practiced at welcoming the arrival of a mother.

Who accompanies us across life’s great thresholds?

How were you born?

My mother had hoped for a natural birth, but circumstances led her to give birth in a public hospital under the care of a doctor she had never met. My father was not permitted into the birthing room. Labour became highly medicalised, and I was delivered with forceps. The male OBGYN also used the Kristeller manoeuvre, applying force to my mother’s abdomen with his body weight to hasten my birth. The World Health Organisation no longer recommends its routine use because of concerns about potential harm. My mother’s experience was one of fear, intervention, and a profound absence of agency.

The Medicalisation of Birth

It is worth remembering how recent our current birth culture is. For most of human history, and for most families only two or three generations ago, birth happened at home. Ask yourself where your mother was born. Your grandmother. Your grandfather. In many parts of the world, it is only within the last hundred years or so that birth moved from the home to the hospital as the dominant norm.

That shift brought real gains. Where serious complications arise, hospitals save lives. Access to surgery, blood products, antibiotics, foetal monitoring, neonatal care, and emergency teams can be the difference between tragedy and survival. This is deeply important, and should be said plainly.

But somewhere along the way, birth itself became conflated with sickness and emergency. It has always struck me as strange that birthing women are so often placed in institutions of illness, as though birth were a disease state requiring management from the outset.

The modern imagination reinforces this constantly: film scenes of screaming women in labour, husbands panicking, sirens, rushing corridors, hours of distress and those frantic commands to push.

This is not to deny that emergencies exist. They do. Some births require intervention, and thank goodness those interventions are available. Hospitals are essential when complications arise.

Birth itself is not a pathology. A woman's body is made for birth when conditions allow it. Like other mammals, labouring women instinctively seek darkness, privacy, warmth, and safety. Yet many women labour beneath bright lights, with repeated interruptions, observation, clocks, and institutional routines. Imagine this happened during, as Debra put it, what gets the baby in…? I don’t think there’d be much successful baby-making…

Stress hormones inhibit oxytocin, and research consistently shows that low-risk births attended with continuity of care involve fewer interventions. The question is not home versus hospital, but whether the physiology of birth is trusted.

It was the social critic Ivan Illich who warned that medicine itself could become overextended—that institutions designed to preserve health might also reshape our understanding of what it means to be healthy. Birth may be one of the clearest examples. Hospitals have become indispensable when complications arise. The danger comes when a labouring body begins to be treated as a medical emergency.

The Birthing Tradition

The first birth I attended was in 2018, in a hospital. It was enough to show me that one of humanity's greatest rites of passage had become profoundly unsupported. I left with the unsettling sense that something essential had been forgotten.

During those years, I was already immersed in the study of ancient religion, women’s mysteries, rites of passage, and the traditional roles women once held in their communities. That first birth taught me that we cannot navigate life's great thresholds alone.

Across cultures, elder women have always initiated younger women into the knowledge of the Blood Mysteries: menstruation, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and menopause, so that they, in turn, might one day accompany others.

Anthropologists have long recognised birth as one of humanity’s great rites of passage. In his landmark study The Rites of Passage (1909), Arnold van Gennep argued that major human transitions—from birth and puberty to marriage and death—follow a remarkably consistent structure across cultures. They involve separation from ordinary life, a liminal period of uncertainty and transformation, and finally reincorporation into the community with a new social identity.

Childbirth follows this pattern almost perfectly. As labour begins, a woman withdraws from the ordinary rhythms of daily life. She enters a threshold where the old identity has already begun to dissolve while the new one has not yet fully emerged. When she returns, she is no longer simply a daughter, sister, partner, or wife. She returns as mother.

Building on Van Gennep’s anthropological framework, midwife and researcher Rachel Reed describes childbirth as unfolding through five overlapping stages:1

Preparation – Pregnancy

Separation – Labour begins

Liminality – The threshold

Emergence – Mother and baby are born

Integration – Postpartum

Every society organises birth through its own system of meanings, relationships, rituals, and expectations. Comparing childbirth across cultures, medical anthropologist Brigitte Jordan demonstrated that while practices differ enormously, birth is always embedded within a wider social and cultural world.2

Birthwork: A Women’s Domain

For most of human history, birth was attended by women: mothers, aunties, elder women, traditional midwives, knowledgeable hands guiding knowledgeable bodies. Then birth moved into the hands of predominantly male medicine. In recent decades, it has begun moving back into the hands of women again, with many maternity professions now majority female.

Although maternity care is now predominantly provided by women, many of the systems they work within remain patriarchal, hierarchical, intervention-based, time-bound, and uncomfortable with female power that cannot be neatly scheduled or controlled.

The question is not simply whether women attend birth. It is whether birth itself is trusted.

Traditional midwifery begins from the assumption that birth is an intelligent physiological process that usually unfolds well when the right conditions are present. The midwife’s task is to protect those conditions while recognising when intervention is genuinely needed. She carries not only practical knowledge but emotional steadiness, ritual memory, and cultural continuity.

The transition did not end with delivery. Across many traditional cultures, the days and weeks following birth were understood as a continuation of the rite itself. Mothers were nourished, protected, relieved of ordinary responsibilities, and gradually reintroduced into community life. This postpartum period allowed not only the body to heal, but the identity of the mother to take shape.

Childbirth has always been one of humanity’s great rites of passage. Modern obstetrics has become exceptionally good at managing it as a medical event, but in the process Western culture has largely forgotten how to accompany it as an initiation. What has been lost is not simply home birth, but an entire cultural understanding of childbirth as initiation.

Medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has argued that modern hospital birth has itself become a highly structured ritual. The rituals, technologies, institutional routines, and protocols do more than provide medical care when needed; they also communicate a particular cultural story about birth. Within what Davis-Floyd calls the technocratic model, birth is understood primarily as a process to be managed through technology and institutional expertise.

Every culture ritualises birth in some way. The question is not whether birth is surrounded by ritual, but which rituals we choose, what they communicate, and whether they cultivate fear or trust, management or initiation. It means safety is more complex than location alone. Safety includes emotional safety, relational safety, continuity of care, freedom of movement, and informed consent.

Perhaps what has been most diminished in modern birth culture is not simply the home, the midwife, or even the physiology of labour, but the recognition that birth transforms more than the body. Every woman who gives birth crosses a threshold from which there is no return. Wherever she gives birth, she deserves to be met not as a patient, but as someone undergoing one of life's greatest initiations.

The West has not only medicalised birth; it has forgotten that childbirth is one of humanity’s great rites of passage, and in doing so has largely forgotten how to accompany women across the threshold into motherhood.

I hadn’t realised quite how much I myself needed to be in the company of healthy, sincere women again, or in the presence of female elders with integrity and heart.

What I found among the women in Bali was not only another way of attending birth, I found an answer to a question that modern Western culture has largely forgotten how to ask:

Who accompanies us across life’s great thresholds?

That month of initiation into the birth mysteries inclined my forehead to the ground.

Monthly Poem

There Comes the Strangest Moment, by Kate Light. 
From 'Good Poems for Hard Times', Selected by Garrison Keller

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want—my want. I love—my love. I’ll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what’s here to never go away.
I’ll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…

Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You’d have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you’d never change?
But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.

Ways to work with me

JULY 14 | Monthly Ritual Dismemberment

I offer a monthly dismemberment ceremony on each New Moon, drawing on initiatory traditions in which spiritual death makes space for renewal and return to the essentials. Open to all genders, with the option to attend live or via recording.

RITUAL DISMEMBERMENT

Self-Study Courses & Lectures

All of the following are available in self-paced format, allowing you to explore the material in your own time.

DARKNESS DREAMING | A three-week exploration of darkness as a fertile ally through myth, animism, and embodied practice.

THE THREE SECRET SELVES | A journey into the human, animal, and angelic dimensions of the self through myth, dreams, and soul flight.

THE BEE PRIESTESSES | Seven lectures exploring the ancient Melissae tradition through history, myth, dreamwork, and practice.

WHEN WOMEN WERE THE SHAMANS | A lecture series uncovering the forgotten traditions of female shamans in prehistoric cultures.

VIEW ALL COURSES & LECTURES

Mentorship

This is for anyone who would like support and/or supervision within both creative endeavours, spiritual work, or personal support drawing on myth, stories, and animistic techniques for inner transformation.

These personalised sessions are structured to meet once a month for 3 months.

3-MONTH MENTORSHIP