Volva, Völva, Vulva

At the crossroads of mycology, mythology and anatomy stands a wrapping, wombish staff carrier. Woven intimately throughout worlds of the dark, moist and dank, she transgresses the binaries of good and evil, transcends the distinction of above and below and transforms our very understanding of the feminine into something more complex and mycelial.

In what fertile ecologies of meaning might we find ourselves when we traverse the anastomosing rivers of relation between Volvas, Völvas and Vulvas?

When it comes to fungi, volvas are sac or cup-like structures found at the base of some Agaricales that is a remnant of the universal veil (the genus Amanita is a good example) or remains of the peridium that encloses immature fruit bodies of Gasteroid fungi.

Volvas are tissues that protect the young mushroom before the precious genetic packages we call spores are mature. Often times the volva is completely embedded within the soil, never to see the light of day, yet serves an imperative function for the mushroom that will soon emerge from their dark, mucilaginous membrane.

I have always seen fungal volvas as soft, tender thresholds that literally and figuratively cradle the mushrooms between that of the sun-lit epigeous realm and the dark, rhizospheric subterranean. One could stretch their imagination to make the myco-metaphor that it is the “womb” of the mushroom. And while I advise to myself and others the cautions of over-anthropomorphizing fungi, I do believe it can be a powerful tool of relating. Humans have been anthropomorphizing aspects of the natural world for millennia, taking the uncomprehendable and making it a little more relatable so that we can engage, empathize, and quite literally communicate with non-human beings. Is Thor really a human? Or do you think “he” IS the storms, lightning, thunder, strength, sacred groves of trees, protection, hallowing, and fertility that he is associated with? We personify so we can FEEL into the unfolding of a participatory relationship, instead of using logic to try and think our way into and out of the experience of another, ultimately leading to subjugation. What we want to understand, we tend to care for, and that which we care for, we are more likely to protect.

Amanita phalloides (The Death Cap) Photo by Debbie Veiss

The most well known volva-containing genus of mushroom forming fungi are undoubtably the Amanitas. I find it delightful and perplexing that this particular volva-containing genus contains everything from deliciously edible to potently psychoactive to extremely deadly mushrooms. The volva holds multitudes.

The etymology of the word volva is not well known, but some suggest its meaning stems from Latin volva, meaning “to roll” or “wrapper”. It could also be derived from the Sanskrit word uvlam meaning “wombish”. From an Old Norse perspective, it’s said to mean “staff carrier”.

The volva: a wrapper, wombish, a staff carrier.

What does the stipe of a mushroom resemble? A staff, perhaps?

Vulva, the outward facing structures of the vagina, also hails from this etymological line. This makes sense as as the vulva consists of the tissues & glands that externally “wrap” the vagina. The vulva, similar to the volva, is a threshold of birth, of emergence, of holding and of protection. They are the fleshy thresholds that serve to protect by contracting and relaxing the labia minora and labia majora which act as the gate for the uterus or womb as well as the long, erect “staff” of the cervix - a stipe gone internal.

The Vulva Gallery by Hilde Atalanta

A Völva, or as it’s pronounced in old Norse, Vǫlva, is a Nordic healer, also known as a Seeress or “one who sees.” They are the predecessors of medieval witches, practicing far before the Viking age over 2,000-3,000 years ago.

Völvas were and are (mainly) women magical practitioners and powerful healers. They were often leaders and revered highly in society until the spread of Christian oppression and the persecution of pagan, polytheistic, deeply animistic life ways forced them into hiding for many generations.

They practice a form of magic known as Seidr meaning “to bind” where one enters into trance to access insight from different realms. It’s speculated that they would travel amongst villages where they were reverently received and well-cared-for. Wearing long, sometimes colorful dresses, cloaks and furs, they always carried a large, personalized staff, one of the Völvas main magical tools. It is well known that the staff is the original wand. When the Völva arrived in a village, chosen females would to go sit with them and enter into Seidr bringing back insights for the community.

It’s suggested in these rituals henbane may have been used. However, it was considered a sign of illegitimacy if a Völva had to use mind-altering plants or mushrooms as her powers should come without extraneous aide.

All of this being said, there is some long-standing lore that speaks of Völvas working with Amanita muscaria (a volva-containing, psychoactive, mycorrhizal mushroom) in some of their rituals. This may, however, be a merging of other more well-known and evidence-based practices of European “witches” aka medicine women working with psychedelic lubes for traveling, healing and prophetic visions.

These psychedelic lubes contained powerful (and often regarded as poisonous) Solonaceae plants like henbane, belladonna, datura and mandrake, as well as the mushroom of Amanita muscaria. This particular mushroom carries a strongly mycophobic reputation despite the evidence-based ceremonial use by Indigenous peoples in the hyperboreal regions of Northern Europe and Siberia for thousands of years. These herbs and mushrooms were extracted in fat and rubbed onto broomsticks and/or wands, traditionally made from Betula (Birch). This was then applied directly to the mucous membrane of the vulva via mounting the broomsticks or other forms of self-application. These medicated lubes were said to give the experience of lightness, levitating, or flying to different realms paired with intense physical, visual and auditory hallucinations. They would quite literally fly away on their broomsticks.

This is where the symbology of witches flying on broomsticks came from.

If you want to read more on this subject, I highly recommend looking into the work on Tom Hatsis and his book The Witches Ointment and/or the teachings of Ash Ritter in her class on Balms + Broomsticks :: The Taboo History & Modern Adaptations Of Flying Ointments.

Marginalia of the earliest known illustrated example of a witch on a broomstick in the 1451 manuscript Hexenflug der Vaudoises (Flight of the Witches) authored by Martin Le France (1410-1461). 

Francisco Goya, 1799.

What connections can we begin to draw between these ones that traverse realms, these ones that carry staffs, these ones of mystery and magic? How do we relate to these ones who are emerging after hundreds of years of being deracinated, buried and shoved into the shadows of the colonial psyche and who still to this day remain shrouded in a sense of taboo? How do we regain trust with these ones so powerful and feared that they have faced centuries of oppression by the patriarchal over-culture and cultural homogenization?

These oppressive forces thought that by burying us it would be our grave, but they forgot that just like fungi, when magic, witches and women are buried, we re-emerge as something different, something rhizomatically recomposed, something terrifyingly beautiful that breaks open the cracks of colonialism just a little bit further; we rise as something more resilient, something that smells of rot and flour and blood and anise, something that works the world into fertile soil from the ground up.

Wether or not you physically possess a vulva, have a relationship with fungi, and/or believe in witches, what does it mean to embrace the Vo(u)lva? More importantly, what would it mean to become more wombish? To take on and embody characteristics of the womb - a soft and safe place of rest, repose, regeneration, wisdom, and deep nourishment that our world so deeply longs for.

How you relate to the many textures and facets of the living world will never be any choice but your own, but I hope to have inspired a sense of expanded curiosity and reverence for this myco-mythological triad that weave our world more weird, in the truest sense of the word (Germanic wyrd, meaning destiny, or to change fate).

May you always lean in just a little closer to that which elicits a sense of wonder. You never know just how far the staff traverses and how deep the mycelium extends.

Taylor Bright