Trees Become Women

The first women did not walk, and the first trees sang. In the first time, trees and women were the same.

The legend that tells of the making of the world fails to explain one critical detail: how the trees ever became women. This creation myth is common knowledge--children tell it to each other in rounds as a game. But there is more to the story, revealed only to girls and women who have achieved certain milestones.

Summary

Two more parts complete the creation myth:

1. At rare times a dark shadow crosses Old Tree's face, and she bleeds. That blood goes into a tree and fills its flesh with a spirit of life. A tree so filled begins to move and walk around--becomes a woman.
   Like the moon, the woman also bleeds, but because she is so much smaller than the moon she must let the blood out every month instead of just every year. Like the moon's blood, the woman's blood also carries the spirit of life, and from it she makes a girl. Also like the moon, the life that she makes is much smaller than herself.
   At first these girls were so small that women could not protect them, until one woman placed her girl between two pieces of wood and put her in the ground for safekeeping. From the place where the girl was buried, a tree grew bearing a new kind of nut. When the woman ate the nut, it took in the blood and made her belly swell. Then it caused her great pains and came out as a baby exactly the right size--just small enough to fit in her body, and just big enough to hold in her arms.


2. Each girl grew into a woman, and her blood also became girls, and so the women continued. Then it happened that a woman's blood made a baby that looked almost like a girl, but a part of its body was inside out. This was the first boy.
   The woman fed and carried the boy, as she would have done for a girl. The boy drank until she had no milk, and ate until she had no food. He ate all of the woman's lump-nuts so that she had none left, but although he had blood in him it was not the moon's blood, and no baby ever came from him.
   The boy grew and grew, and the woman grew old, old, with always a boy to take care of and never a girl. And when she died there were no more women after her, only this boy. Therefore whenever a girl's blood becomes a boy, it must be taken away so that she does not become an end to women.

Spread

The story of the lump-nuts, withheld from very young girls, is traditionally told on the night of a girl's Feast of First Blood. The story that follows it, of the boy that cursed a woman, is told only on the night of a Moon Woman initiation.

View from the future:

200 years
The women who lost the challenge against Moon Wish were not members of the Moon Women, and so the third part of the story was unknown to the exiles who traveled to the vastland coast.

During the journey they came to realize that the lump-nut superstition was false, and stopped telling the second part of the story as well.

Read here to learn how Old Tree created the world and became the moon:


Interested in details of the ceremonies the legend is part of?