Ask Carl Jung; Even Children Carry the Ancient Archetypes Inside Their Budding Psyches. All the more Reason to Tap into Mythology as an Ageless Beauty Heuristic.

Kinship: From our rural farms in Tennessee to the folks who inhabited the Bronze Age, similarities abound even in the beauty realm.

Did you know pigtails are considered Isis energy in the hairdo realm? I braid my hair, leave it overnight and voila, children point to me and call me Mermaid Hair (they tell me they allude to a Disney character?) My mother didn’t know this when I was six; it probably hadn’t been animated yet. But as a kid I had very thick curly hair and its maintenance  drove her crazy., that and three younger siblings tugging at her leg. Oh, the bliss of being a pampered only child for four whole years, but I digress.

Plaiting the hair is a family tradition; my mother came from a family of four sisters where braiding was handed down to her as a time saving solution for keeping your long hair away from your mother’s scissor happy hands.  My mother’s hands did the opposite; she relegated my coif to me around eight years old. 

So, I grew up learning to braid my own hair and then my sister’s, too, when she got old enough. Her thin hair barely got long enough for me to twist and turn but I learned to cultivate her cute wisps into little girl magic. 

Easily delighted, we bonded over our shared delight in our ability to transform the wild locks we inherited from our father’s sister and with such appreciation for the time together. Thinking back, hair time is one of my fondest memories of my sister before she turned into a teen brat. 

Now, decades later I use braids so my grey hair doesn’t get tangled and break off. Also, it cuts shampooing down to an unbelievably low frequency. (I probably shouldn’t admit this but when traveling I’ve gone weeks without lathering my head.) Don’t get me wrong; I’m so grateful now at this stage of life to still have hair, but to keep it below shoulder length is a real treat.  I use braiding especially when I am backpacking and definitely when I use my car like a sleeper bunk on a train.  

By ignoring the physics of curls, I learned the hard way to give my hair some structure; curly hair has the propensity for dreadlocking if you leave it to its own natural affinity for wrapping around things. Once after traveling up the Pacific Coast for several weeks with very little attention to hygiene much less beautification, I was horrified to find my neglect had some seriously demoralizing ramifications. The underneath of the back of my head was akin to a small rat’s nest. I had to cut a chunk about the circumference of my hand from the nape of my neck…and I was grateful to have the option of tying it into a ponytail for about six months to hide the damage. Eventually my locks returned to a reasonable length and I vowed to braid it from then on whenever I planned to turn ferral for an extended period of time. Thus my fondness for the history of the ancient beauty practice of weaving the hair, itself thought to have originated with the African Himba  practitioners of Namibia.

3500 BCE to 20th century Europe: The Shared School of Hard Knocks and Tangles Locks.

Learning the simple heuristic of braiding as a way to save my hair from major damage enabled me to travel around Europe and South America unencumbered by extensive hair maintenance giving me great personal freedom. As I traveled Europe I took overnight passages between Berlin and Paris on slow moving trains and when I arrived at dawn with braided hair I could literally roll out of my bunk and onto the street with less than five minutes of hair time. 

Researching the different types of braiding technique: (3500 BCE) cornrows, box braids, etc., I found a significant layer of meaning can be socially assigned: age, tribe, marital status, social rank. Currently in the big U.S. metropolis my braids give me a   creative vibe which comes with a-lot of smiling reactions from people who dig the carefree look.

In Good Company

Apparently the land of my maternal French grandmother and her ancestry  includes the figurine of the Venus of Brassemouy, found in 1892. 

Additionally the Vikings, possibly connected to my Scottish grandfather’s side of the family tree created the Valkyrie of Harby, a female figure with a ponytail clasped at the back of her neck. 

Even more astounding braid history relegated braiding to the Bronze Age and Iron Age when people in many areas of the world depict braided hair and beards : Near East, Asia Minor, Caucasus, East Mediterranean, Europe, India, China, Japan, Australasia, and Central Asia to name a few.  

Isis’ Maidens: Shared Hair Hacks make for a Global Beauty Tribe

Therefore, the braiding  hair “trend”  is  considered polygenic, my new and very useful word for the day, meaning having many distinct sources; originating at various places and times (thank you, Wikipedia). 

As previously mentioned there’s a mythological flair expressed when you don your tresses as braids. Hair braiding is mentioned taking place  “in 1279-1213 BCE  as recorded in the story of Isis: ‘when some of the queen’s maidens came to the well, she greeted them kindly and began to braid their hair.’ (Wikipedia again!) 

Thus, I suspect Isis knew what my grandparents’ ancestors, my mother, her sisters, my sister, and the girls I see at the gym braiding one another’s hair before a workout today also know through the collective unconscious that taking care of one’s hair can be fun, relaxing and a beauty survival technique for the existential travels of the likes of the Venuses, Isis and contemporaries like us. 

Eons later, we are still protecting the hair with the silent and unobtrusive bodily craft that women have been sharing with love and caring as a way to bridge with one another and to avail ourselves to lifestyles that allow us mobility without destroying our gratitude for our tresses.