July 1, 2002

Home

Contents

Back Issues

free e-newsletter!

 

 

Amaterasu by Lauren Raine

Isis by Lauren Raine

Signatures of Sympathetic Magic Dancing the Masque of the Goddess by Lauren Raine

If you find Me not within, you shall never find Me.

-- Charge of the Goddess

Sing with my voice,
Play with my hands,
Let the way be open.

-- Chant by Abby Spinner

In 1999, M. Macha Nightmare and friends created a community ritual to honor the "Lady with a Thousand Faces." She called it "A Rainbow of Goddesses". Macha invited her friends to share stories about Goddesses from around the world, and to dance these stories with masks of the Goddess, creating their own costumes, using the masks as talismans on their altars, keeping a record of their dreams and journals as preparation.

Within a theatre in the round, the Goddesses emerged from the darkness as three narrators, stationed around the circle, read their stories. Local musicians provided live music. Beyond a performance, what Macha, Mary Landon, Diane Darling, and other contributors brought to life was a living vision of the Goddess.

Since then, the MASQUE OF THE GODDESS has evolved into a public ritual held by different groups in both urban and rural communities, in small public rituals, and in full theatrical productions. The script is constantly changing, as each woman (and men have chosen to dance the masks as well) invokes the Sacred Feminine through their performances. New stories emerge as each dancer brings a personal journey with the Goddess into the ritual.

Ritual theatre is a way to em-body the sacred. With mask, music, storytelling and dance we are can open a channel to archetypal intelligences that can inform and inspire in mysterious and transformative ways. The key to working with them is receptivity and reverence. "When I just travel with a role," actress Barbara Jasperson commented, "I often find that I suddenly become familiar with something I previously thought I knew nothing about."

What happens when we invite the Goddesses and Gods into our circle? The answer is, "If you build it, They will come." There is something synchronistic and inexplicable that so often happens, a seamlessness as the dance is engaged. "When you create within (a sacred paradigm)" playright Elizabeth Fuller said, "you find a strange thing. You are communicating with, being fed by, sources you know are within you, but have a much greater reflection somewhere else. You've touched something timeless."

Beyond the personal transformation performers working with the Goddess can experience, and beyond the magic of co-creating within a group, there is a grace I've so often seen. In a performance in Oakland, a woman danced Amaterasu, the Japanese Sun Goddess. She did it to honor friends in Japan, and also because the story of Amaterasu was a way for her to celebrate a kind of rebirth in her life, an emergence from her personal "cave of darkness". In the story of Amaterasu, the shining Sun left Her dark cave of disillusionment because She was tricked into seeing Herself in a mirror. She finally saw how beautiful She really was.

After the performance, as she was dressing in the cluttered, damp basement of the theatre, she noticed something lying on the floor near her chair. Picking it up, she discovered it was a folded origami paper crane. How did it get there? No one knew. But for the woman who danced the Sun Goddess of Japan, it was a blessing from Amaterasu.

The story of the creation of the mask for Corn Mother participates in the miraculous. Manna Youngbear was organizing the first of a 4 part series of performances at the Black Box Theatre in Oakland. I did not know many of the members of her group. My intention was only to show up at the performance.

Two weeks before the event, I found myself looking at an ear of corn at the supermarket. I don't eat corn, but it looked so interesting bought it, and made a plaster cast of it. The following day I attended a group meditation. During the meditation, I saw very clearly a native American woman, dancing in a fringed dress, holding in her hands two ears of corn.

I was so struck by this I decided to make a mask incorporating the ear of corn I had cast. Not long after I began, Manna called. In the course of our conversation, she told me one of her dancers, Christy, had decided to dance "Green Corn Woman". Christy had written her script for the performance based upon the Cherokee myth, created a costume, and was to be the only dancer without a mask. But now she had one, without either of us being aware of each other's vision. When Christy and I met before the performance we felt, indeed, that we had been graced with the presence of Corn Mother. We resolved to put a rainbow on the forehead of the mask, symbolizing the Rainbow Tribe of all peoples upon the Earth, all nourished by the Mother Goddess Corn Woman symbolized.

I've seen syncronicity happen in many ritual theatre events. I do not believe it is meant to be "explained". Working with the Goddess (and the God) in ritual is to enter a numinous magical realm where we often touch the miraculous.

"I wore the Sacred Clown mask for a Goddess 2000 ritual. Now I have a rubber nose, and a chicken hat - I guess it took!" participant Micheal Stewart tells us. "The Clown represents the element of chaos, bridging the mundane world and the world of the divine. In many cultures, such as the Zuni, a heyoka is always on the periphery." Michael goes on to comment that "Mythology is so lost to our world. But myth is often what underlies our deep desires and drives, our life scripts. Those are our roots, and in a ritual we may not understand exactly what we're experiencing, but it strikes a chord. We've lost our rites of passage. In Native cultures, when children come of age they have a ceremony and a child knows when he or she is an adult, how to conduct their lives as adult members of the tribe. Mythic enactment was how the cycles of life were taught."

The cave paintings at Lascaux are not works of art as we understand art. They are signatures of sympathetic magic, a way to honor the hunter and hunted with rites of reciprocity. Our ancestors shared a mythic way of experiencing their world that we have dismissed as primitive, illogical, or impractical. Yet the mythic mind is a taproot to subconsious, collective, and transpersonal dimensions of being. In traditional cultures, seers such as Black Elk of the Lakota shared their visions with the tribe. These visions became important ceremonies that served to align the tribe with deity. Australian aborigines devoted much of their lives to the "invisible world" by walking the Song lines, contacting the ancestors, and remembering the Dreamtime. They shared dreams, undertook vision quests, and participated in rituals that accumulated layers of meaning over generations of repetition. Myth, the dream, and daily life were seamless in a way we have lost.

In Bali, drama and dance are a form of worship. Masks are a way to aspect the Gods. The Balinese would not understand our cultural discourse on the meaning of art. Art, for them, is a channel to the Gods of their Hindu religion. As Sarah Mertz, an American artist, described her research on early African art, "In the past, everything was made for the greater meaning and use of the tribe. A spoon was more than a spoon, and a sacred pot was also used to store grain in - because they understood that there had to be a weaving between the material world and the other worlds in order to live right and well. An artist was one of those who did the weaving, but they didn't think of themselves as artists in the way that we do."

Creating sacred art, be it mask or drama, is to create a material form that embodies the essence of powers that are really beyond form. "Personae" is the Greek word for mask, and personae are multiple in human beings" Brian Weller says. "When I wore the Shaman mask it gave me the ability to see what the logos of that mask is within myself. What is the unfolding of the Shaman, not only in traditional times, but today? The Shaman persona is to see the limitations of our ego-mind, to surrender to a more spacious reality. We put on a mask and step into the theatre of the soul." Brian belongs to a group that has explored ritual theatre for many years. To him, "Ritual taps archaic places in us, it allows us to work with energies that may be foreign to contemporary life, but are still embedded within it".

In New York, an artist named Sylvan created a sculptural mask for Spiderwoman, creatrix Goddess of native Americans in the Southwest. She wore it in a performance to "spin a web of connectedness". "I think of masks as a vessel for the energy, the divine presence I'm offering to aspect" Sylvan explained. "By focusing the energy of the ritual into the mask, some of that energy is retained. It also seems to activate that archetypal understanding in me. When I was aspecting Grandmother Spider Woman in a ritual, I felt energy weave and thread through my body and spirit. I could see all the lines of power that connected me to everyone there and beyond. Lines that included my parents, my brother, and my sister-in-law. "

Drissana Devananda has danced Kali and Isis many times in ceremonial events. They are her guides, mentors, and inspiration. "When we create rituals, we're praying. It's a way to remember", she says, "a form of devotional practice. In the Hindu tradition, I learned that everyone has a deity they focus on as their personal deity. In the West, as we recall the forms of the Goddess for spiritual practice, I think it is important to have a particular deity we work with consistently in order to manifest what we need for spiritual and emotional growth."

Drissana is a teacher and priestess of the Goddess whose life is devoted to restoring the Divine Feminine to a world desperate for balance. Drissana teaches through ecstatic dance, but the Goddess is very much a part of her daily life.

"She dwells within us all the time, not just when we wear a mask, or are in workshop, or a ritual. We're really material aspects of The Goddesses, extensions of Them. We're not bodies seeking the spirit, we're spirits seeking bodily experiences. It's about re-membering we function from our whole bodies, the "bodymind". That is the place we re-member the Goddess within ourselves."