AFTERWARD

Authentic ritual is, to me, what anthropologist Victor Turner described as “communitas”: a collaboration between the participants and the invisible, a creative communion with an extended community whose mythological roots go far back into the past, and forward into the future. It is a conversation with the “archetypal powers“.

To enter fully into truly sacred ritual is to travel momentarily to a liminal place that exists “between the worlds“, to undertake a mythic pilgrimage where the miraculous can be expressed. In his article “Pilgrimages as Social Processes” Turner wrote,

“A limen is, of course, literally a “threshold.” A pilgrimage center, from the standpoint of the believing actor, also represents a threshold, a place and moment “in and out of time,” and such an actor - as the evidence of many pilgrims of many religions attests - hopes to have there direct experience of the sacred, invisible or supernatural order, either in the material aspect of miraculous healing or in the immaterial aspect of inward transformation of spirit or personality.”5

Within sacred theatre a “limen” opens to a charged arena of potent, participatory, and mysterious creativity, and wearing a sacred mask in mask traditions around the world is about becoming a vessel for a deity - the gods, the elementals, and the ancestral spirits. To enter the magic circle by intention and act, to make a bridge by putting on a mask, is to invite personal transformation. And sometimes, the miraculous.

Just as the evolution of our event was infused with synchronicity, so was its aftermath. I was pleased to read that in September of 2005 there is a major show on spirit photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, curated by historian Pierre Apraxine; because one of the most inexplicable blessings we shared were the extraordinary photographs taken by photographer Ann Beam. For me, they are a pentimento, another layer to our collaboration. And if the Museum of Art can talk about spirit photography, so can I.

In some, the women invoking the Goddesses become transparent, seeming to disappear into infusions of light and filaments of energy. As Spiderwoman prepares to "spin", fibers appear before her weaving hands; when the web extends into the audience, she is almost invisible in a mass of white light. The photos of Quynn Elizabeth, a shamanic practitioner, as she dances Kali, are especially inexplicable. Quynn, illuminated by red stage lights, is almost transparent. Behind her, a goat-like form appears in three separate photos.

To people like Quynn or Morgana, who brought to the role of Spiderwoman her background as a psychic, the spirit world and this world are always engaged in a symbolic overlay. They found the photographs affirming, to be understood as one might interpret a dream or a trance. As I looked at them, what occurred to me is the ancient ritual of the Scapegoat. Manifesting within the context of the dance of Kali, the great Purifier.

“Restoring the Balance” is also about the equilibrium of our energy systems. We are always in a moving point of balance. Like the yin/yang symbol, each seeming duality, light and dark, love and hate, good and bad, is the ebb and flow of a greater whole. Becoming ever more conscious and accepting of all that we are is to become more holistic and compassionate beings. We cannot transmute the so-called “shadow” aspects until we know them well, until we can name and comprehend them. Without awareness, the shadow is unconciously projected onto a perceived “other”. Where there is an “other”, there is no longer fellowship or the possibility of mutual evolution. There is an enemy.

The scapegoat was an important ritual in biblical times, performed when deemed necessary for the well-being of the tribe. A litany of all the sins, troubles and sorrows of the time was recited and then “laid” upon the back of a goat, which was released into the desert to literally and symbolically bear these burdens away from the people. A cleansing had occurred, and a new cycle could begin.

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Like the rituals of the Inuit, the ancient ritual of the scapegoat was about naming the “sins and broken taboos” that keep us from harmonious relationship to the Sacred. Grieved, redeemed, honored, transformed. In the modern world, generally without the benefit of meaningful ritual, we no longer have significant ways to collectively regain “at-one-ment”. We scapegoat without awareness, there is no symbolic goat to carry our “sins against nature and broken taboos”, as Grey Eagle expressed it, into the chaotic wilderness of the collective unconscious, and very few tribal shamans to help us collect our “better life stories“, and carry them into the World Below.

Without collective purification, the cataclysm of violence too often occurs. Others are made the scapegoat. Women are scapegoated. Mother Earth is scapegoated, desecrated, taken for granted. The link between nature, women and war is the same.

I have no explanation for Anne’s photographs. I know they are authentic. For me, in the aftermath of our own “Restoring the Balance“, it is Her blessing, reminder, and warning.

1 "Invocation to the Great Mother" by Erica Swadley, 2004
2 "The Story of Sedna", by Grey Eagle, Patagonia, Arizona, 2004.
3 From journal entry, Katherine Josten MFA, February, 2004.
4 Interview with Anne Weller, 2001, by Lauren Raine.
5 "Pilgrimages as Social Progress", article by Victor Turner PhD.
6 "The Coming of a New Millennium", by Heidi Neale & Nick Manolukas http://home.earthlink.net/~labrysx/index.html

Photographs by Ann Beam annbeamaz@cox.net
Copyright 2004, Lauren Raine MFA.

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