Selkies - A Piscean Archetype.
The Selkie, by Sarah Green.
As the Gathering continues in Pisces, with a particular focus on Jupiter and Neptune, there’s an emphasis upon submarine matters, the spirit world, and ancestral memory.
Maybe you sense a heightened awareness of Voices coming through Old Tales; an unravelling of ancient skeins of story in your own life.
Among my own ancestral tales are those of the Selkies - a fitting Piscean archetype, and embodiment of yearning and liminality. The dissolution of boundaries between the wild and the “civilised”. These are tales potent with meaning under end-stage capitalism and a flailing patriarchy.
Selkies are seal-skinned creatures or Mer-people; threshold beings embodying both the human and the fae. One contained within the other.
I grew up hearing tales of Selkies from my grandmother. Her people for millennia were coastal dwellers for from the far northwest of Scotland (as well as Norway). She spoke the tales of the shapeshifters who swam ashore, shedding their animal pelts, and taking human form as they sunned themselves or rested on rocks. The darkness of these tales varied, but all are versions of the animal bridge/groom existing across many cultures.
Selkie sealskins were invariably stolen by would-be human lovers, and devastating bargains would be struck. Selkies were promised the return of their sealskins only if they remained with (usually a human man) on land for a period of years in coerced domesticity.
Often selkies would bear human children, and be further bound to the land by their love for a child, their wild self hungering and desiccating with the years.
Other-souled and ailing as they tended to their human duties, their spirits dwelt in a twilight Elsewhere until they recovered their lost pelts and escaped.
Slipping back into their wildskins was an ecstatic homecoming, after which they disappeared into the ocean from whence they came.
Selkie myths, like Pisces, depict the yearning for different worlds. One the pull towards human love, desire, and landlight; the other an irresistible yearning towards infinite depth and a formless freedom embodied in sublime union with the wild self.
