Friday, April 5, 2013

Persephone Graces a Drum Dance Chant Gathering


On March 31st, which happens to have been Easter Sunday, fourteen souls came together at the Sugarloaf UU church to celebrate and serve the love of the Goddess through drumming, chanting, and dance.

The date was not chosen because it was Easter; however, we were mindful of the correspondence of our gathering with the day on which many of our Christian brothers and sisters celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, defeating death and opening the gate to eternal life.  This correspondence inspired our invocation of Persephone, daughter of the great Goddess Demeter and a goddess in her own right, she who blesses and sustains the souls of the dead, joining the realms of the living and the dead and opening the gate to eternal life.

I think it worthwhile to reflect on some of the correspondences between the ancient pagan religions of the Mediterranean basin and Christian religion as it developed over the first few centuries of the Common Era in that same part of the world:

First, the notion of incarnate deity, the divine manifesting in a living fleshly person, had been common in the Mediterranean world for centuries.  Egyptian kings had been considered gods, as had Persian emperors.  By Jesus time there were temples and priests dedicated to the god Augustus, founding emperor of the Roman Empire.  Mainstream Christian religion came to embrace the doctrine that Jesus had been God Incarnate when he walked on earth.  It’s a very un-Jewish idea and one that would perhaps have seemed strange to incomprehensible to Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Jew.

Second, the movement of Christ between the realms of the living and the dead: “He descended into hell.  The third day he rose again from the dead.  He ascended into heaven” parallels the movement of Persephone between the realms of living and dead, joining them.  Persephone’s journey is conceived of as recurrent, engendering the transitions of the seasons.  Christ is conceived to have made the journey once, but the Christian faithful celebrate the event seasonally.

Finally, the triple Goddess of ancient pagan religion parallels the triune God of Trinitarian Christianity.   The pagan triple Goddess is comprised of the elements: maiden, creatrix, and crone, or, in different language, daughter, mother, and wise elder woman.  The triple Goddess associated with the great Goddess Demeter is Core (the personal name of Demeter’s daughter), Persephone (a title accorded to Demeter’s daughter as a goddess in her own right), and Hecate.  The Christian Trinity is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit which is the spirit of wisdom/truth.  The archetypes have been re-organized and re-imaged as male, but persist across the religious traditions of the Mediterranean world.  Persephone is still with us, but today she is most commonly called Jesus Christ.

Our circle also included a healing ritual prompted by my familiar, Hummingbird Spirit.  Two of our gathered choose to receive healing with laying on of hands.  We chanted the words “Healing Spirits come, come.  Light our way, light our way” to a tune written by Joanne Hammil as a setting for a line from Rumi (“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.”)  A lesson for us from Hummingbird was that healing and illumination are much more intertwined that we usually think and are really both aspects of wholeness creation.  She also told me that healing of the individual always heals the world and healing of the world always heals the healers and that our gatherings should always include a chant for healing of the world as well as offer individual healing.  Both of the participants who choose to receive healing in the circle later reported positive results.

Our poly-rhythmic drumming segment seemed to engage us very deeply.  It was full of energy for me and two participants have told me that it was powerful for them.

At the end of the gathering there seemed to be an energy to gather again soon, so perhaps we’ll meet again near the cross quarter.

May we all be blessed