More Reflections on Faun and Revolutionary Music

(The following is a expansion of my recent comments about Faun,  the outspokenly Pagan German musical troupe that has become part of Europe's post-Christian avant-garde Left and one of its primary cultural magnets. Like today's commentary, this too was birthed by my correspondence with the writer Cate Montana, who has become one of my closest friends.)

***

I WAS ZENNING OUT, recovering from the monthly madness of the senior-citizen newsletter I edit and produce, when I decided to play some more of Faun's work including “Blaue Stunde,” a piece to which I had not really listened before.

Then playing it while actually paying attention,  I discovered several of those poetically indicative chills in the musical accompaniment and instantly became enough curious about the song to run down a translation of its lyrics. 

What I discovered was rather mind-blowing. From the lyrics of “Blaue Stunde” I would say whomever wrote them actually encountered the Goddess, much as I did in the water meadow at Wickersham on 15 August 1970...

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, a vast unkempt field beyond the buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington commune where I was then staying, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by ideological disputes, and I had left in bitterness and disgust. Now in search of inner peace I sprawled on the ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant full moon as if it were some mandala of last resort. Then to my astonishment there was a kind of psychic jolt, intangible yet seismic in its intensity, as if some unseen door had burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of spinning colors, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands, touched me, perhaps even kissed my brow, then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into revolving bands of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

….much as Apuleius (124-170 CE) encountered her at sea (for which see the account beginning on page 70 of The White Goddess [Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition: 1982]), much as Graves himself obviously encountered her but – lest he be declared insane – never dared acknowledge it save in his poetry: “Her sea-blue eyes were wild/ But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Whether such encounters are objectively real or merely an especially intricate manifestation of some carefully unacknowledged insanity spawned by our species' overwhelming terror of mortality – and I must confess I myself alternate between precisely those antitheticals – one does not write such poetically accurate description from belief or theory alone: again my own statement that one cannot be truly Pagan unless one has spent enough time in the back country to have seen the shadows dance. Indeed  as I wrote the preceding sentence it came to me – and with that bright undeniable certainty of an old-time flash-bulb going off – here is the entire story of my life: seeing the shadows dance sufficient times to learn not to flinch, to embrace the experience as a demonstration of love, and now that I am too old and worn down by age and poverty to retreat again to the wilderness and once more hide there from the Lords of Chaos who have usurped that which rightfully belongs to Our Lady, to at last bear witness to what half the time I know to be unequivocally true. Quoth Graves: “none greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess.”

Which, by the way, is why I bristle at the Xtians even when, as now, they occasionally acknowledge the relevance of ritual dance and thereby (unwittingly) underscore the irremediable contradiction between the dialectically inertial momentum of matter that is the essence of life versus the infinite hatred of sensuality and indeed of the entire physical realm that is implicit in the definitively misogynistic, definitively ecocidal dogma at the core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.

But perhaps I should not bristle quite so much. Ritual dance has been methodically denied the followers of the downpresser Abrahamic creeds since the Deuteronomic (patriarchal) "reforms" of approximately 600 BCE,  and the fact dance is now (begrudgingly) admitted to some Xtian ritual cannot be anything other than yet another example of how, when the Goddess is barred from the front door, she inevitably creeps in the back door – a truism that is of course dismissed as “an old wives' tale” – never mind that is precisely what she did via the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s – in which context note the noun "ballad" as a  derivative of the same root (Latin as I remember) that gave us "ballet." In other words, a ballad was once by definition  the musical and poetic accompaniment of a dance, a ritual dance, the  connection remaining so powerful that in some of the original folk-renaissance renderings of balladry (such as Martin Carthy's variant of “Willie's Lady”), the music is so vivid my mind's eye can see the turns of dance – the very sort of vision so emphatically underscored by Faun, obviously knowingly as I believe they are all classically trained musicians and being European are of course classically educated as well.

(How ironic one of our main hopes for a sustainable world comes from what was only recently the most warlike nation on this battered planet.)

Returning to “Blaue Stunde,” as an individual piece of music it stands in stunning contrast to the present-day music associated with U.S. expressions of the resurrection of the Goddess. What was performed nearly 50 years ago by the (probably murdered) Tim Buckley was wrenchingly powerful – “if you tell me of all the pain you've had/ I'll never smile again,” a line from “Phantasmagoria in Two” (a modern variant of the classic dialogue between poet and Muse), probably has no equal even in antiquity – but it has no  counterpart in today's U.S. Paganism, which has become like the USian people themselves, oppressively submissive. A good example is Loreena McKennitt's work, which was originally unapologetically Pagan, but which she has since – no doubt under severe external pressure – diligently repositioned as New-Age-ecumenical instead. Indeed – and despite the sometimes-bold content of its lyrics – in its new, self-consciously de-Paganized context, it often comes off more as lamentation than celebration or defiance. (And as I know all too well from my various odysseys into the organized versions of U.S. Goddess-centered Paganism, the decidedly serf-like passivity of its participants [and therefore of much of its present-day music] goes hand-in-hand with its definitively oppressed and obnoxiously oppressive we-are-all-victims pacifism. The result is a vehement but implicitly frightened [maybe-if-we-aren't-militant-they-won't-kill-us] rejection of politics in any form – which is of course the source of the real U.S. Left's unmitigated scorn of Paganism as “no different from many other religion in being just another opiate to facilitate the oppression of the masses” [the quote is from a Marxian comrade] – and which therefore provides us with a classic example, as valid as the induced racism and sexism that forever fragments the U.S. Working Class,  of “divide et impera” in action.)

It is an aside, albeit a pointedly relevant one, to note the curious anachronism within the Buckley video linked above. The song was recorded in 1967, while the video – obviously made by someone who recognized the poetic vision that was the wellspring of Buckley's best work – was made in 2011. Though he has been dead since 1975, and though the relatively free world of the '70s was almost indescribably different from the slave-world of today, in the parlance of hipster poets and musicians, “Tim Buckley Lives.” Indeed there may be no greater praise the human mind can formulate.

That said, “Blaue Stunde” is truly a horse of a different sort (if you will pardon the spontaneous emergence of a stream-of-subconscious reference to the Celtic/Scythian Goddess Epona), with what kind of horse she is revealed by the accompany drumming. “Blaue Stunde” is ritual dance, yes, but it has none of the implicit submissiveness that has come to define so much U.S. paganism, which given the omnipresence of the secret police (and precisely as suggested by the semiotic evidence I cited above), has probably been infiltrated and co-opted much as Women's Liberation was infiltrated and co-opted – so that the depth of one's commitment is now defined by only by one's material success. As the mainstream brand of U.S. feminism is surely Ayn Rand feminism, so it seems there is also a mainstream Ayn Rand Paganism. Such is the Pavlovian power of capitalism, specifically the mind-mangling might of Madison Avenue.

What first caught my attention about “Blaue Stunde” – what prompted me to seek out the lyrics (and what so surprised me about their content) – was obvious militance of the music. Focusing more closely, I realized it was the drumwork, which, when I began actually hearing it, stood my hair on end with that wondrous chill of recognition. Note the four-beat drum-flourish at the end of certain lines in the lyrics:

“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew” (drum flourish).

“Her fairy-like limbs were white as the moon
Her hair was like made of gold” (drum flourish).

Note also the drum riffs elsewhere in the piece.

What I realized, listening so intently, is “Blaue Stunde,” despite its poignant beauty, is most assuredly not the music of submission. It is instead the music of active resistance. Indeed – though I do not know how I knew it – I suddenly recognized the drums as  war drums, the sort of tribal ritual that is a prelude to a battle and the sort of music that accompanies you as you advance across open ground against a vastly superior enemy, you assuming you will not live to see the next moonrise or maybe even the next minute but not really giving a damn because that is the desperation to which you have been driven by the foe's depredations and yet by some miracle not only you yourself survive but so do most of your comrades and in the end you have won the day and won the future – perhaps as if Boudicca and all she symbolized had triumphed on that fateful morning in the midlands of Albion somewhere north of the still smoldering ruins of Londinium or if Wounded Knee had become the beginning of a victorious rising rather than the end of First Nations resistance. Whatever, I glimpsed it clearly for a moment, by the time-reference provided by its weaponry sometime in the pre-atomic past or more likely in the post-apocalyptic future...

(“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew”)

I am as you know given to reject such mind's-eye visions unless I am able to rationalize them at least to the extent of recognizing their real-time sources, and of course I have since tried to do that with “Blaue Stunde” and have succeeded to the extent of recognizing the longer riffs with the congas echoing as if through slumlord streets, the rhythm identical to what one so often heard on the Lower East Side during the weeks after the Tompkins Park (Police) Riot of 1967, as an organization called Jade Companions of the Flower Dance briefly united Hippies and Hispanics in common resistance to the invading cops and thrill-seeking suburban phonies. Verily, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Dylan, “red lights flashing in the hot Manhattan night,” complete with drums echoing ominously 24/7. 

Faun's eclectic combination of drums and pipes in “Blaue Stunde” also reminded me of an incident during one of the anti-Vietnam War protest marches when maybe 500 or 1000 Caucasian thugs had bottled up the entire 500,000-person demonstration in Central Park and kept us there until the members of the Columbia University Pipe Band edged their way to the front of the crowd, formed themselves into what a half-century earlier would have been a line of battle and, skirling their pipes and drumming a rhythm similar to (or maybe even identical to) that of "Blaue Stunde," led us out of the park and onto Fifth Avenue. The thugs, some of whom had baseball bats or chains and who were brazenly countenanced by the cops (as was commonplace in those days), fled in obvious fear as soon as the pipers began leading the advance.

But what it was about the punctuational drum flourishes in “Blaue Stunde” that first caught my attention remains undefined, never mind the undeniable recognition implicit in the initial chill. Though now as I think of it I believe I remember reading or hearing somewhere – most likely both as the reality of music remains beyond the descriptive ability of linear language – such drum-emphasis was, along with stringed instruments and pipes, characteristic of ancient epic poetry.

As to the use of genuine love poetry as inspiration to resistance, the only people I know of in the modern age to have done so are Celts...and of course Russians, in which context note “Beriozka” (Birch Tree), a favorite of the Red Army in World War II and – because birch is used in making musical instruments – an invocation of Yulya,  one of the many Slavonic names for the Goddess – hence the chorus: variations on the theme of “Yulee, Yulee lovely birch tree.” 
 
It was so beloved by the Red Army, it was recorded by the Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe.  and just for retro-kicks, here it is, static and all, as I heard it via the 78-rpm music of my earliest childhood.  Then of course there is how it is formally danced, in this instance preceded  by some of the most stunningly hypnotic choreography I have yet seen:   With this sort of aesthetic quality commonplace elsewhere, no wonder the rest of the  world damns us as “nyekulturniy.”

Not really relevant to this essay (which began as the sort free-association, semi-stream-of-consciousness thing Cate so often inspires whenever she and I talk or exchange emails) – or maybe relevant in some way I don't yet see – is the Faun piece that, were I a videographer, I would use – as I stated in an OAN essay in 2012 – as the accompaniment to that incredible footage of the horse rescue in Holland c. 2005.

Quoth Buffy Sainte-Marie many years ago, when only allegedly nutso people like myself (and unfortunately a few spooks) had any idea what obtained: “Goddess is alive/Magic is afoot”

LB/24 November – 2 December 2015

-30-

Food Stamps: Dems, Repubs Vote to Kill Poor People

Obama Says Cuts Ensure 'America's Children Don't Go Hungry'

THE FINAL VOTE against food-stamp recipients was a revealing 68-32, with only nine Senate Democrats opposing the cuts; that plus the president's enthusiastic approval of a decade of downsizing the government now admits will total at least $8.7 billion is tantamount to official notice from the Democratic Party it too wants the nation's poor people dead – that the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is over the forcefulness with which this genocide is to be accomplished. The Republicans wanted to slash the program by $40 billion,  which would have begun killing off lower-income people almost immediately. But the Democrats apparently feared the GOP's proposal would be too obviously murderous – almost as embarrassing as public endorsement of death camps – which is no doubt why the One Party of Two Names finally opted for the less dramatic, easier-to-obfuscate reduction that will short 850,000 food-stamp-dependent households a starvation-inflicting average of $90 per month.  

Meanwhile, with the Democrats ever more worried by the growing popularity of revolutionary socialism, they've intensified their efforts to hide their Ayn Rand malevolence behind classic, Josef Goebbels-type Big Lies, most recently President Obama's astonishing claim the food-stamp cutbacks will “make sure America's children don't go hungry.”  Though the “public integrity” Barack the Betrayer promised us in 2008 was long ago recognized as no less a deception than “change we can believe in,” portrayal of the deliberate imposition of hunger as a humanitarian act is a new low, a falsehood in comparison to which most of the president's other lies dwindle to insignificance. It is also in the mind-wrenching mode of “freedom is slavery,” a proclamation that characterized the (formerly) fictional tyranny described in George Orwell's prophetic 1984. Now we are implicitly shown its entirely non-fictional equivalent: “hunger is nourishment.” 

And for the 47.2 million USians who now depend on food stamps  to keep themselves and their children fed, the associated pangs will only intensify: as a prescient headline writer at Seattle's excellent on-line daily Crosscut has already implied, this is undoubtedly the beginning of the end  of the entire food stamp program, the formal name of which is S.N.A.P., the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Perhaps now the acronym will become a sardonic joke: Starvation Neutralizing America's Poor, as in “with a SNAP of its fingers, the Ruling Class has fucked us again.”

Hunger as nourishment? Verily, such is the quintessence of absolute evil.

*****

 

Outside Agitation on the Comment Threads of Other Relevant Reports

“50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst From Fukushima” Harvey Wasserman of EcoWatch exposes the apocalyptic reality of the Fukushima debacle. I quote a Cheyenne Ghost-Dance chant: “The white man's god/ has forsaken him/ Let us go and/ look for our Mother...” Then I add a nightmare notion that should especially bug the UFOs-have-landed folks: what if “the alleged 'divine revelations' that spawned patriarchy – Moses' Burning Bush, Ezekiel's fiery wheel, etc. ad nauseam -- were intergalactic equivalents of the smallpox-infested blankets by which Europeans exterminated First Nations peoples. Thus the ultimate purpose of patriarchy and its maturation over the centuries into capitalism and now finally into ecocidal fascism is to make Earth too toxic for life as we know it – precisely as is happening. Our final, dying clue as to who the Global Ruling Class serves by its relentless moral imbecility (and who – or rather what – will inherit the planet as a result), is found in the fact that of all earthly species, only the cockroach is totally immune to radiation and can within a single generation evolve immunity to any other toxin.”

***

“The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous - And for All of Us” Gabriella Coleman of Wired reports on the government's zero-tolerance, maximum-sentence prosecution of on-line civil disobedience, but then inexplicably claims such draconian measures are applied only to cyber-activists – that “physical tactics such as trespass or vandalism of property rarely result in serious criminal consequences for participants and tend to be minor civil infractions instead of federal crimes.” I imply she's either ignorant or in denial: obviously, “the new USian Empire norm – note the felonies for which the Oak Ridge 3 were convicted – is going to be maximum charges and maximum sentences in retaliation for ANY act of civil disobedience.” 

***

“Helping homeless students stay in school”  Joseph Sutton-Holcomb describes the valiant efforts of the specialists employed by local school districts to ensure the Seattle area's many homeless students are able to remain in school. A major challenge, he writes, is arranging the students' transportation to and from classes. I use the story as a teachable moment to point out the only way to end homelessness is to end capitalism.

Only now – too late for the comment thread – did I focus on the fact Sutton-Holcomb failed to report the specialists' tasks are made profoundly more difficult by the region's notorious hostility to mass transit,  with a growing number of local voters rejecting buses, trolleys and even commuter rail service as welfare that encourages laziness by pampering minorities and lower-income people in general. (Note: my OAN piece on the anti-transit-user hatefulness that defines Washington state politics was written nearly four years ago, but the bigotry it describes intensifies each time there is a transit vote,  as in Tacoma during the 2012 general election. Though the local transit authority was not forced to shut down, all that saved it was a small, unanticipated, post-2012 increase in sales tax revenues. Its service remains minimal, the nation's worst amongst comparable cities, with its 37 bus routes so radically downsized, their operations end as early as 5:20 p.m. daily. Meanwhile its minimized schedules inflict extreme hardship on anyone who does not have an automobile, while the refusal of even self-proclaimed “progressive” politicians to take ameliorative action again demonstrates the malice toward lower-income people that increasingly characterizes USian governance at every level.) 

***

“What does Al Jazeera America see in the Northwest?” Olivia Weitz reports on Al Jazeera's new Pacific Northwest bureau but notes that despite the news agency's reputation for accurate reporting, its U.S. viewership remains tiny. I point out it's no doubt “the (very rational) fear of being placed on one or more secret-police watch lists that keeps the Al Jazeera America audience so small. Thus the USian Empire's total surveillance regime fulfills another of its definitive purposes: ensuring that we the people remain imprisoned in ignorance.” 

***

“Whose Radical Jesus? The Story of a Literary Success” Truthout's Paul Buhle reviews Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House: 2013).  I point out that regardless of the truth or falsehood of Aslan's hypothesis, its ultimate function is to serve the Ruling Class by re-legitimizing the murderous and ecocidal religion of a god that failed. A far more genuinely revolutionary interpretation of the Jesus story, I add, “was written nearly 70 years ago by Robert Graves in King Jesus, which argues that while Jesus was indeed a rebel zealot, his primary purpose was to extinguish the last lingering remnants of the old goddess-centered religions. The 'money quote' -- morbid pun intended -- in Graves' telling of the story sums up the entire history of patriarchy, from its origins in Moses' burning bush and Ezekiel's fiery wheel to its final manifestations today as capitalism fulfills itself by morphing into terminal fascism. 'I am released from the jurisdiction of the Female,' says Jesus, 'I have come to destroy Her works' (King Jesus; Minerva Press, London: 1946, p. 256). The 'Female' of whom Jesus spoke was the goddess who is the variously titled Mother of All Being, Gaea, the Mother Nature whose act of creation was to give birth to the entire cosmos. Especially if we consider the Gaia Hypothesis -- that Earth (and perhaps by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating -- what Jesus said two thousand years ago is precisely what the capitalists are saying today: that they are released from Nature's jurisdiction; that they have come to destroy all her works.” 

LB/9 February 2014 

-30-

Warren, Norma Miedema and the Return of the Goddess

ENOUGH PARTISAN POLITICS for a while. Even after the energizing victory of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, I still doubt there is anyone in this nation – or for that matter anywhere on this tragically afflicted planet – who has the power and will to get us off the slide to extinction on which capitalism has launched us by its insatiable greed.

But if there is such a person, and if she is to save us from ourselves, surely her attributes will include not only the socioeconomic and political bravery of Warren but the death-defying courage and Gaian passion that makes Norma Miedema both a modern heroine and the back-to-the-future embodiment of a female consciousness seemingly absent from our species since the age of Celtic myth. It is not far-fetched to suggest Warren and Miedema represent parallel and entirely congruent aspects of a single impulse toward human survival. 

Warren of course is already becoming known throughout the world as a symbol of an electorate's awakening from political torpor. Miedema, who organized and led a  presumably impossible, deadly dangerous and therefore epic horse rescue in Holland, is scarcely known beyond her native land. As to the specifics of what Miedema did and why it is so psychologically and metaphysically important, I suppose these details too could be labeled political, albeit only in the broadest and yet most deeply personal sense of our win-or-become-extinct struggle against capitalism and patriarchy in general. I say this despite the fact most of the information I have about Miedema reached me only late Friday, and much of that was by inference alone – the ability of video-taped imagery to transcend the barriers of language – the entire package handed me by one of those Muse-haunted coincidences Carl Jung labeled synchronicity. Saturday I was still in joyous shock at the absolute correctness of the journalistic intuition that prompted my research and so moved by my discoveries I could not find words to write what I had learned. 

Hence it seemed there was naught to do but strap the ever-more-essential brace on my right knee and go for a long walk. The Internet said the outside temperature was 41 degrees Fahrenheit but it felt colder, maybe in the late 30s. The sun was setting a sickly storm-warning yellow behind the ramparts of the hospitals on the hill above the seasonally emptied expanse of Wright Park. Those who pay attention would have seen a graybeard geezer wearing a black beret and a faded olive canvas coat open to the wind and beneath the coat a bright red-and-yellow plaid wool neck scarf and under that a shirt of dark red coarse heavy wool girthed at the waist by a black belt-purse, all this above baggy black flannel workout pants with elastic cuffs tight over hiking boots: today's variant on my normal winter apparel. To others less attentive – and during the entire 45 minutes afoot I encountered only six humans total (two runners and four dog-walkers) – I was just a bespectacled vaguely foreign-looking old man hobbling with his hickory cane along formal tree-lined paths that had vanished beneath great drifts of brown and yellow leaves, maple and chestnut and birch and poplar, oak and ash too but without the bitter thorn that completes the trio of calendar trees by which one might curse an enemy, as Jack Orion, the Celtic Star Lord, had fatally cursed the interloping plagiarist who dared try usurp the bed he shared with the Goddess.

Now the pale sun was hospitalized and gone; now it was dusk, the lingering blue-shifted twilight of the Pacific Northwest, and I could not but see in Nature's temporary imposition of autumnal anarchy another harbinger of the apocalypse we now fear to be inevitable: this is how the park will look in the first fall of its abandonment, a mile of bare-branched silence, its summer children banished and surely dead and all our music lost forever. It was a terrible realization, lump-in-the-throat painful. 

Instinctively then I sought the ancient reassurance denied us by the we're-damned-forever sadism of the religions that still vainly seek to rule us, the Abrahamic cults of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and all the imperialistic science so derived, and I committed precisely the sort of reflexive heresy that surely would have gotten me arrested were the Christian fanatics yet as theocratically empowered as they were in the 1600s when one of my female ancestors was persecuted as a witch in Connecticut. I ungloved my right hand, reached out and touched the giant sequoia that soars near the middle of the park, then a few hundred yards later caressed the first of the smooth-trunked beeches that border its southern end. As I did so I realized I was mentally reciting, seemingly by instinct, the opening stanza from Robert Graves' reconstruction of “Cad Goddeu” or “The Battle of the Trees,” a mysterious and perplexing work by the ancient British poet Taliesin: 

The tops of the beech-tree have sprouted of late
Are changed and renewed from their withered state...

 

Graves believed the verses to be a poetically charged description of a historical event, but to me, the first lines have always had an aura of prophecy as well. The beech in European mythology is a tree of life, of restoration and regeneration. It is therefore a symbol of the Great Goddess – which makes it arguable Taliesin was prophesying her resurrection. So were the Ghost Dancers, 1500 years later and a continent away: 

The white man's god has forsaken him
Let us go and look for our Mother
We shall live again!

 

And poignantly forlorn as the park was in its dwindling light with the dark exclamation points of its few tall conifers and the fading mid-November ghosts of  October's bright deciduous color, the power I sensed beneath my fingers in that living wood, even in its dormancy, was so compelling it left me whispering fervent thanks to a deity who at the very least (and even if she has no objective existence) is the consummate symbol of our environmental salvation and whom I'm sometimes certain is real as life itself but nevertheless, more often than not, agnostically deny. 

All of which, as we shall soon see, has everything to do with Norma Miedema. 

*****

On the rare occasions I manage to suppress my cynicism enough to believe in the Goddess as I did for those moments during my walk in the park, to imagine her as objective reality and not just an essential symbol, I am invariably smitten, sometimes to tears, by joyful gratitude for the good fortune granted me by the women who inspired and clarified my words and pictures and blest me with sweet love and patient friendship sufficient to ease the wounds inflicted by a murder-minded mother. The essay entitled “Dancer Resurrected” expresses this gratefulness in detail, though it is entirely too long and desperately needful of a competent editor. In this context the historical events it references – the 1965 Blackout and the 1967 Easter Be-In – are prerequisites to the personal confirmation described in its penultimate section. The episodes related separately in “Abutments”  and “Doorways,” each of which remains personally compelling in its own right, are themselves assertions of faith and thankfulness. 

But always there is the relentless thrust of the counter-reasoning I describe in “Outlanders,” a memoir-chapter I wrote two years ago but have yet to publish because I am torn between the (seemingly impossible) task of writing plausible fiction sufficiently adept to hide the identities of the three women who are responsible for the most metaphysically pivotal, profoundly revealing, undeniably magical and yes shamelessly sensual weekend of my life. The alternative is to include essential details that would make their names unmistakable even behind the cover of aliases. Though one of the three has read the work and says “Do it; use my name. I'd love to see it in print,” she is a professional musician who yet smiles on cutting-edge outrageousness while the other two are seemingly beyond contact range and, I suspect, have in their elder years become far more private persons. All of which is irrelevant here; the relevant part of “Outlanders” is not subject to writerly angst, probably because it flatly contradicts the very evidence the rest of the chapter dares reveal: 

A big part of me rejects as patently absurd not just the idea of reincarnation but any other conception of life-after-death: at best a terrified byproduct of belief in the divine (itself the adult variant of the Santa Claus myth), at worst clinical dementia. By the same logic I likewise dismiss religious visions, past-life memories, ghosts and all the rest of the allegedly supportive evidence of a deity or a “hereafter” as genuine insanity – even when the phenomena in question is my own personal experience. In this frame of mind I regard all such episodes as but preliminary symptoms of the terminal madness that accompanies the unbearable moment-of-death realization that for each of us our death is truly the end of everything forever, the recognition of which destroys the human mind in the same way rot more gradually obliterates the body, the mind mercifully disintegrating into a chaos of hallucination much as the body deteriorates into an entropy of maggots; that death is not just the demise of one's physical body but the termination of one's consciousness and therefore a microcosm of apocalypse – the end of the world, indeed not just the end of all being but the end of all potential; that death proves the unspeakable meaninglessness of selfhood; that the nonsensical nature of life in general is thus established beyond dispute by the final destination of the passage from the Big Bang of conception through its siren-song aftermath of expanding possibilities that all lead nowhere save to ultimate betrayal, the hitherto-denied but now inescapable darkness of the Black Hole; infinite silence, an ultimate deafness never again to be relieved by the exquisiteness of music; every vestige of our own personal reality consigned to a grave thus the graveyard of reality itself – all such assertions condensed in one question that like everything else at the instant of death-as-oblivion is reduced to irrelevance. If such is death – and this mode of thinking allows me no alternative – then life is but a non sequitur, the dread knowledge with which irony-minded U.S. soldiers in Vietnam so often comforted their dying comrades: “it ain't nothing, bro; let it go; it ain't nothin.” 

 

And now, as if some presumably imaginary being had become so vexed at agnosticism and disbelief she materialized in emphatic rebuttal, there is that videotape I first saw on the Internet in 2006, Norma Miedema and six equestrian sisters rescuing a terrified and fractious herd of at least 100 horses marooned by a fatal storm – a rescue men with machines had thrice attempted and thrice failed. 

As is promised (or perhaps threatened) by a very old ballad: 

Cunning and art he did not lack
But aye her whistle it will fetch him back.

*****

True to form, by the time I got home from my walk, my cynicism had resumed its snarling negativity, but the video was there waiting. The previous night while watching a poorly subtitled cable-TV movie about Asian horse-herders, I had suddenly remembered the rescue I had viewed in 2006 and the atavistic echoes it evoked, and I spent whatever time it took to find it on the Internet and several more hours researching the event itself. It is an episode so powerful it suggests not just the reality or at least the psychological validity of the concept of a goddess but provides us a vivid and not-at-all-mystical portrait of Epona or a woman who is surely her priestess whether consciously or not.

For those unfamiliar with mythology, Epona is one of the innumerable representations of the Cosmic Mother – the womb that gives birth to all that ever was and ever will be – in this instance portrayed as the Bountiful Mare or a woman and mare together, the Goddess as she was (quite rationally) pictured by the ancient People of the Steppe, the Scythians and their genetically confirmed descendants the Celts. 

Such metaphysical constructs are always more instinctively familiar and comforting to me than those of the Abrahamic cults, and they have been so for as long as I can remember, which is probably no coincidence since DNA analysis has proven the equestrian tribes of Eastern Europe and Western Asia to have been amongst my earliest and most genetically dominant ancestors. Though my family name is English, probably originally German, far enough back maybe Jewish, my genetic heritage is almost pure Celt. Perhaps that's why the video in question invariably evokes delicious chills and affirmative gooseflesh and tears of recognition: Epona again, scarcely changed from when she was immortalized on England's White Horse Hill, some molecular part of me wordlessly remembering the age and truth so gracefully symbolized and – yes – mourning its loss and yearning for its restoration. 

The resurrection of the Goddess, which remains our species' most important yet most unreported story, was begun by (mostly male) scholars more than a century ago. But it's present-day impetus comes from a uniquely potent, utterly spontaneous combination of increasingly female artistic vision and breakthrough science. The former – precisely as Graves himself recognized – is always the realm of the Muse. The latter, though patriarchal in hierarchy and method, nevertheless shattered the patriarchy's biological and conceptual cornerstones, first by inventing the birth-control pill, which restored to women the control of their bodies men stole from them thousands of years ago, secondly by restating via the Gaia Hypothes the core principle of our species' first and oldest religion: that the Earth (and by extension the entire universe) is our Mother – alive, conscious and self-regulating. In this context, the misogynistic hatred and terror that motivates today's theocrats and their wars against women and nature are entirely predictable reactions. 

If Edward Whitmont (The Return of the Goddess, Crossroads:1982) is right about the re-emergence of Goddess-archetypes as survival mechanisms – and I cannot doubt his findings – it is to be expected that in this era of backlash and terminal climate change and the death and despair so inflicted, we would meet again an archetype approximating Epona, who let us not forget is also a warrior-goddess. Which I believe explains why – six years after her dramatic leadership of that epic horse rescue – the coverage the Dutch press is giving Norma Miedema suggests she is finally becoming one of our modern heroines, a role-model of the sort we have not seen in many lifetimes, as if she rode in from the plains of Scythia or materialized from the pages of Herodotus' Histories or Tacitus' Agricola.

Now that you've seen Norma Miedema's portrait, here is the video of what she organized and led. It's unfortunate the accompanying music is so distractingly modern; Faun's “OynengYar,” which I first heard only yesterday but seem to remember from forever, would be an infinitely better anthem. Too bad I have neither the Nurdish knowledge or skill to make it so: its “Dance My Love” is an invocation  not only of the Steppe but in the Kazakh tongue and almost certainly of pre-patriarchal traditions as well. But at least this Dutch version of the video is infinitely better and more detailed than the variant that first appeared in the United States six years ago, monitored as it is today by a maliciously Christian censor who – as I can personally attest – blocks any attempted reference to the pagan echoes the imagery so undeniably evokes. Note too this USian version is accompanied by an intrusively masculine and therefore obnoxiously inappropriate Vangelis piece, “Conquest of Paradise,” which some nyekulturniy malcontent has dubbed onto the tape no doubt in an attempt to assuage his threatened masculinity, his own small contribution to the war against women and nature. 
 

In resistance we have the brave precedent set by Elizabeth Warren, who alas may yet be betrayed by the opportunistic cowards and moral imbeciles with whom she must of political necessity interact. But in our time of need we are also given that which is beyond betrayal, the courage and sensitivity and wisdom shown us by Norma Miedema and the blessed memories of bonfires and moonlight sung us by Faun and in their symbiosis the quickening splendor of our species' oldest wellspring of mindfulness.

Let the roses and rosebuds bloom
Dance my love, dance my love.

LB/10-12 November 2012

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