The Cybelines: Elements of a Multicultural Monotheistic Paganism
The Lesbians
Part I: The Drums.
Close your eyes. Picture, in the garden of your mind's eyes, a full moon
lighting up a spot of land, with a large fire, with a flat stone upon which
sits bread and wine. Add smiling, laughing women dancing around the fire,
playing a rapid, energizing rhythm upon their frame drums.
Change the races of the women, their clothing and the styles of their hair.
Alter the image of the ground beneath their feet; change the sand to grass,
change the grasses, make the ground stone, then marble, then grass again.
Add mosiac inlays to the edges of their drums; change the drumheads from
fish skin to goat skin. Add brass systrums to the drums, then turn them
silver.
The picture in your mind has been altered radically, yet essential elements
remain. The women, the moon, the fire, the drumming, the fruits of the earth
are always there, changed yet unchanging. Your sense of sisterhood with
them, in whatever garb, in whichever place, remains within you and urges you
to join in the dance.
In the eleven thousand years of its existence, it has always been the
unchanged essentials of the faith that call us to the circle around the
fire. Our footfalls start to match the rhythm of the drums as we approach
the Mother of all Women and the Mother of Creation. The rhythm matches the
innate rhythm of life within us all, set in motion in the cosmos at the dawn
of time by the Magna Mater.
Because the rhythms of the Mother are innate to us and to Her Creation, the
call to Her, the sense of familiarity that we feel when we come across them
are to be found in all places and all times, whether or not the line from
the priestesses of Anatolia ever touched a place. It cannot ever truly be
extinguished. Bhride's fire burns again in Ireland and flickers to the
sounds of the Bodhran being played, primal patterns carrying into the night.
A few hours later in the valley of a river undreamed of by the ancients, the
same scene is conjured by women of a different tradition, yet ultimately
honouring the same Great Mother. Her call, heard by the ancients, brought
the women to the fires beneath the moon. Whether the summons' source is
honoured as Hawthor, Isis, Innana, Bhride, Cybele, Ashteroth, Magna Mater or
any of many other names, Her call touches upon a yearning in all women that
brings us forth to Her unless it is suppressed by our own fears or by others
whose fear is imposed upon us.
Multiple feminist authors, notably Luce Irigaray, have spoken of a unique
spirit within women reflecting a suppressed language of women and have
striven to find it and learn to express it. Irigaray characterized it as a
language of emotion. Mary Daly and others tried to capture it in their
writing, yet the language of women has never truly been silenced, even when
proscribed by law. It is the language of the rhythm of the drums, full of
emotion and expressing that emotion freely. Layne Redmond understood this
and explored it in depth in her work, "When the Drummers were Women."
Beneath the stars and the moon, warmed by the fire, joy pours forth in the
language of the drums from women gathered together. The joy of the closeness
of many sisters is coupled with the joy of the presence of the Mother and
pours forth into the night and rises to the sky. With drums in their hands,
men who recognise the presence of the Divine Feminine within themselves join
in the voices that are filled with the essential rhythm of the Mother, of
the Earth, of Creation, and their presence can enrich us further.
Percussion, then is the universal voice of women and their emotion. It is
the language of women and their Creator, with a Rosetta Stone set in the
essence of us all. It permits us to call out and it translates the call of
the Mother. It is this that allows us to hear the messages from the hearts
of our ancient sisters and to truly understand their very essence. It binds
us to them and to each in a most intimate kinship, a sharing of each other's
very depths. Without knowing Phrygian, Ancient Greek, Sumerian or ancient
Gaelic, our sisters call us to their circle across time and space in the
voice of rhythms and we understand them clearly; we all call to the Mother
together in the same tongue, Her tongue, the language that she set within us
at the dawn of humankind.
For us to speak from our souls without a censor, then, percussion is
essential, essential to ourselves and essential to the community gathered.
The language of the drums, of the emotion conveyed to each other and to the
skies, is the best and purest language of the Divine Feminine that can be
attained for it is the original language of the Goddess, mirrored in the
rhythms of nature.
--
"We are of that generation that so changed the world that future days and
nights can never be the same."