I had the dream again last night. I tried to describe it to my boyfriend, but he called it a nightmare and told me that is what I should expect for pursuing "unnatural interests". Those interests being my PhD thesis on female marriage to sea goddess as earliest form of ritual same sex divine marriage as covenant for coastal villages in stone and Bronze Age Scandinavia.
I woke screaming from the dream, surprised my mouth was free, or I was unbound. I awoke soaked in sweat and thrashing violently. I also awoke cumming so hard I am not surprised my boyfriend did not recognize it. Not sure that qualifies as a thesis side effect.
The goddess of the deep sea, of ship killing storms and village destroying waves cast her nets and tentacles for men, as they cast their nets and harpoons for the children of her sea. It was for the women of the village to make an offering of love to her who drags down, lest she take their men in offering of blood instead.
The practice was limited to small villages by the Viking age, and burned out root and branch by the rising Christian church. Not big on pagans, lesbians, sex magic, public sex or tentacle porn your old-time witch burners, so not much evidence survives in anything but fragments.
Still, my thesis advisor was so excited he shook loose funding for me to go to Haida Gwai, the old Queen Charlotte Islands of Northern BC Canada to visit a dig of the Octopus people. There had been a tribe there whose women braided their hair in tentacles and held a special magic with the sea through their relationship with the Octopus woman. Of course, the Anglican Church and Residential Schools wiped out all their culture, language, history, and tolerance for wandering redheaded female grad students. Easy doesn't get you PhD.
I found myself on the strand in Sandspit, hiking boots and wool socks tucked into khaki pants that flapped against my legs in the whipping northern wind, save for the ass where they were stretched tight. I had a loose-fitting fisherman's knit sweater that was one of the few things that could downplay breasts my boyfriend compared to the frontal armament of the Bismarck. My red hair was cut to shoulder length and kept mostly out of the way by a no none sense hair band. My nose was sunburned, my nose both pert and freckled, and there was a blue pen forgotten behind my right ear. Enter Wendy Thomas, grad student, exit sanity.
Dr Khol met me by the strand the sea plane dropped me off at. He babbled nonstop, and less than linearly until he dropped me with his grad students at the cave. They added the last half of all the intriguing sentences he left in scatterbrained remnants as the great professor wandered.
There were a lot of parallels in the physical items at the dig between the sacral female sea marriage of Ran and the Octopus woman ritual site we were at. Local legend called it bloody virgin sacrifice, but it read like an 18th century sermon, not like anything typical of known coastal Salish practice, so the professor and I doubted that version as modern propaganda.
We had gathered on the dark of the moon at the cave where such ritual was supposed to be done. We had gathered all the items local legend said were traditionally offered. Weaving the baskets with our own hands to hold them. I argued for women only at the ritual, citing all known similar cults from Japan to Norway were women only, but was overruled on university diversity guidelines.
Charles, Anna, Michelle, Anwar and I descended into the cave by the light of oil lanterns. We began the traditional songs, and my dream seemed to creep up on me. I noticed my own chanting began to change, following into new rhythms, different stresses, and notes. Anna and Michelle followed with me. The blush on little Japanese Anna, and the visible nipples poking through the pleasantly plump Central African Michelle's blouse argued they were feeling the sexy vibe as well. Charles and Anwar's voices were getting shrill, as they were getting pale and sweaty. Whatever the men were feeling, they did not like it.
Then She came.
The bottom of the cave was the sea. Dark black water that had never seen the sun boiled as she rose, huge and terrifying. Naked and with skin that shifted colour like an octopus, her form was that of a mature woman, heavy breasted and hipped, with a rounded belly. Where her legs should be was a forest of impossibly long tentacles. Her hair was the dark green almost black of sea weed, and her eyes the black on black of a shark. Her human half alone was easily two meters high.
She rose from the sea serene and beautiful; her song rang from the walls both wordless and wonderful. Her body rippled with light that sang a song of loneliness and ancient aching need that tore a groan of answering lust from me.
Then Charles and Anwar screamed. Anwar threw the camera he was filming with, as Charles took up an oil filled lantern to throw.
''Demon from Hell". Charles shouted.
"It is going to kill us" screamed Anwar.
I wrestled the lantern from Charles, but it was too late. Her song had changed, and she flashed in anger as her tentacles struck at us.
