I no longer feel like a democrat. I feel that both political parties that are "in power" are no longer representing anything but corporate interests. But this statement by a former Republican representative is incredibly powerful. Take heart and contact your representative now before they bring the Iraq war to the floor for debate. There are some wonderful points and solution's in Michael Fox's statement: Bodies for Barrels: Betrayal and Energy Dependence: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042906Y.shtml The debate on the Iraq war is coming right up, so call your rep now and tell them how you feel about the war: Thursday April 27, 2006. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told Republican colleagues yesterday that they will have a full and lengthy floor debate on the Iraq war, a dramatic change of course for GOP leaders who had previously resisted Republican and Democratic calls for such a debate.

this was in response to a topic that came up in the think tank pod, on the history of the word Cunt. That word provoked a lot of excited response and this post on my blog provides background for my comment in the think tank pod. (Excerpt from original notes from the third chapter of my book,  When The Drummers Were Women, it was rewritten by an editor and made "popier and lighter", I kid you not those were her words!) Also since this is an excerpt, let me be clear that I am writing about the Paleolithic evidence of southern Europe.

    The period of time archaeologists call the Upper Paleolithic stretches from 35,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE.  The climate across the Eurasian land mass was still fluctuating with the recurring glaciations of the most recent Ice Age.
    Paleolithic people lived a nomadic existence, foraging in rhythm with the plants, animals and seasons.  Their survival depended upon keen awareness of the immediate environment and the forces operating in it.
    It was a period of relative leisure.  Scholar William Irwin Thompson has estimated that adult members of hunting and gathering economies expend an average of 15 hours a week providing for their needs.  In the Paleolithic, people lived in small groups that did not tax the capacity of the environment.  There was sustenance for everyone.
    It was also apparently a time of peace.  There is no clear archaeological evidence of large-scale, organized violence; in no art form are human beings depicted in aggressive postures, or bearing weapons.   Evidently Paleolithic humankind did not know war.
    Possibly because of the leisure this lifestyle would have given them, Paleolithic people began to fashion works of art.  These works, which included sculpture, carving and cave drawings, appear to have been created less for aesthetic pleasure than to embody religious concepts or to transmit accumulated information and wisdom.  In a pre-literate world, they acted as a visual language.  They are the earliest surviving expression of abstract thought.


THE BIRTH OF RELIGION
    The first evidence of human burial dates to about 70,000 BCE.  By 34,000 BCE, the dead were interred ceremoniously in the earth or in caves, often in fetal positions.  They were adorned with body ornaments and jewelry made of shells, beads, ivory and perforated animal teeth.  Their headdresses or hoods were decorated with rows of cowrie shells.  The cowrie shell, which resembles a vulva, is a very ancient and widespread symbol of rebirth.  Both sexes were buried with tools, vessels and food offerings, indicating a belief in continuing existence after death.
    Very often the remains were heavily painted with red ocher.  This pigment, produced by grinding hematite or other iron oxides, has been used for ritual purposes by cultures around the world,  In the Upper Paleolithic, it was used to redden graves, corpses, cave and shelter walls, engraved objects and sculptures of women.  Possibly it also served as body paint in ritual ceremonies.  
    In A History of Religious Ideas, Mircea Eliade notes, "Belief in a survival after death seems to be demonstrated from the earliest times, by the use of red ochre as a ritual substitute for blood, hence as a symbol of life."  As we will see, Paleolithic art makes clear that ocher had a special association with the blood of women.  
    We don't know whether the afterlife envisioned by Paleolithic people involved the survival of individual souls or the recycling of the materials of the body in the animate earth.  But these ritual burials demonstrate that they shared a belief in some form of continuance after death -- a belief that is the cornerstone of all religious traditions.

CARVED IN STONE
    Around 30,000 BCE, representations of the vulva of a human female, carved in stone and painted with red ocher, turned up all over Europe.  They appear in relief on cave walls and as small, amulet-sized sculptures, often polished from wear.  Some have been found in graves.  These vulval images are the oldest known representations of symbolic thought.
    The sculptured or inscribed vulvae vary in size and shape.  Some are oval or round, others are downward-pointing triangles.  A mammoth-ivory pendant from Dolni Vestonice, close to present-day Brno in the Czech Republic, is shaped like a wishbone, with a vulva incised between its "legs."  Some are realistic representations; some are abstract.  Sometimes they appear alone, but often they are associated with the Mother Goddess or her symbols, or seem to represent an aspect of her story.
    "It is not the anatomic 'sexual' organ that is being symbolized, but the storied characters and processes with which the symbol had become associated,"  Alexander Marshack explains.
    The vulva is preeminently a symbol of birth, representing beginnings, fertility, the gateway to life itself.  It is the primordial matrix from which everything arises.  As the female power to give birth gradually gave rise to the idea of a woman's power to invoke rebirth, the vulva symbolized this power of regeneration as well.
    It could also represent initiation into a new phase of existence.  For many thousands of years, people gathered ceremonially in caves whose dark, damp, womb-like interiors, painted with shamanistic images of animals, were probably the sites of initiation rites.  At the mouths of these caves excavators frequently find carvings of vulvae.
    Vulval images have also been found on some of the Paleolithic carved sticks called batons de commandement.  Abbe Breuil, a Catholic scholar who dominated the study of the Magdalenian painted caves of France, gave them this name because he thought they resembled military batons.  Their true function is a matter of conjecture among archaeologists.
    Marshack, Eliade and Thompson recognize them as lunar calendars.  A baton of the Middle Magdalenian period, towards the end of the Paleolithic, is engraved with a series of markings on its shaft that appear to represent a lunar count.  The presence of a vulva on this baton may further indicate that it was in some way related to menstruation or pregnancy.  
    Thompson saw these batons as feminine instruments of measurement and compares them to the pregnancy calendars still kept by Siberian tribal people.  As a ritual implement, he calls the baton de commandement "the most ancient symbol of feminine power."  
    Interestingly, archaeologist Horst Kirchner concluded they might be drumsticks.


GREAT MOTHER OF THE STONE AGE
    The Gravettian cultures, which flourished from 27,000 BCE - 19,000 BCE, saw the origins of sculpture in the round in the female figurines known as Paleolithic Venuses.  These small sculptures, skillfully carved in bone, ivory or stone, have been discovered at sites in Italy, France, Austria and as far north as Siberia.  Yet they are remarkably homogeneous in style -- mute testimony to the cultural unity of Paleolithic peoples.
    Paleolithic Venuses focus on the maternal organs.  Breasts and hips are rendered enormous; other features seem dwarfed or stunted by comparison.  The arms are thin, the legs taper to nothing; hands and feet are absent altogether.  These women are faceless, and most appear pregnant, though there is more variation than was at first realized.  Anthropologist Prudence C. Rice, who comprehensively studied the figurines, found that they represent women at every stage of life -- as young girls, pregnant women, non-pregnant women of child-bearing age, and women past the age of childbirth.
    By calling attention to the reproductive and nourishing functions of woman's body, these figures evoke the sacred mystery of birth.  The broad hips and full buttocks suggest her powerful ability to procreate.  From her large, luxurious, pendulous breasts flows the nourishing milk of life.  Since the Paleolithic, milk has represented the divine love of the mother.
    Although hundreds of Venus figures have been discovered, correspondingly few roughly made male figures have been found.  Only woman created new life out of her own body.  She was the rounded vessel from whom flowed life and shelter, protection and nourishment.
    The Venus of Willendorf, named for the place in Austria where she was unearthed, was carved out of limestone around 25,000 BCE.  Like most Venuses, she has no feet.  The legs were intentionally polished off at the ends of her calves by the original artist.  Art historian George Weber suggested a plausible explanation for this:  she is not standing but floating on her back.  Her feet are under the surface of the water.  A close examination of the sculpture reveals other anatomical hints to substantiate this idea.  Her head is tilted forward, a position that would be natural to floating but awkward in any other stance.  Her mountainous breasts and vast buttocks don't hang as they would if she were standing; they seem buoyant.  She shares these attributes with a number of Venuses.  
    Like most of these figurines, the Venus of Willendorf is painted with red ocher.  Coated blood red, floating in water, she represents the first mystery of transforming water into blood.  
    The primal theme of the first waters of creation is woven through the creation myths of almost every culture.  It reflects an intuitive knowledge of the origins of life in the shallow primordial sea that once covered the earth.  Water is the life-inducing, fertilizing energy of conception.  It supports the sacred seeds of life.  
    Linguistic evidence supports the generative qualities of water in early religious systems.  Eliade notes that in the ancient Sumerian language the symbol for water also represents "sperm, conception and generation."  Gerald Massey points out that Adam, the name of the Biblical first human, signifies blood, and "adamu is now known to signify the principle of female matter ... that is the mystical water, or matter of life and the red earth of mythology."
    Thus water becomes the source of all things, harboring all potentiality.  It purifies and regenerates; it heals and restores.  As the creator and nourisher of life, woman is also the universal source.  In a simple metaphorical transfer, the symbolic properties of water became properties of the great Mother.  
    The little statues called Venuses are representations of the rain-bearing, milk-giving Great Goddess.  Her womb is the primordial sea from which life first arose.  As the faceless first mother, she is the mythical ancestress, beyond time, place and identity, whose power echoed down the centuries into historical time.
    The blood-transformation mysteries of the great Mother revolved around the central miracle of birth.  She embodies the miraculous power of woman to create life by transforming the primal substance of water into blood.  She bleeds in rhythm with the moon.  When she doesn't bleed for 10 cycles of the moon, her blood is transformed into a new being - her waters break and she brings forth new life in blood.  The woman past the age of childbearing retains that lunar flow as "wise blood," the wisdom of the crone.
    

I am dedicated to the family of drums known as the frame drum.  this means that the diameter of the head of the drum is much larger than the depth of the drum's shell.  A bodhran from Ireland is a frame drum, as is a kanjira from India, a tambourine from the Middle East and the pandeiro, the Brazilian tambourine.

The first sound we hear is the pulse of our mother's blood. Drumming is the musical expression of this primal truth. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world the Great Goddess is portrayed with her frame drum, a powerful trance-inducing instrument -- the world’s oldest known drum, played predominantly by women.

The frame drum is first seen on a wall painting circa 5600 BCE on a shrine room wall in the Neolithic city of  Chatal Huyuk in what is now known as Turkey.  Almost every culture comes up with some version of the frame drum, it appears to be an archetypal idea continually showing up in new versions as people create new styles of playing on it.

Chanting, overtone singing and humming sacred sounds to the rhythms of the frame drum is an ancient technology for directly synchronizing the mind and body. The ancient Bee Priestesses, called the Melissae in Greek, or the Deborahs in Hebrew, served the Bee Goddesses: Aphrodite, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Persephone, Neith, all associated with the frame drum.  Many of the bee priestesses functioned as oracles. The drumming, humming and pranayama practices associated with these traditions are said to develop the oracular aspect of the mind. In the ancient world the oracle was a highly valued and honored position. The Pythia, the oracle at Delphi, was the most powerful position in the ancient Greek world for over 1000 years.
 
The seven realms of consciousness emanate from the first sound -- the pulse of the cosmic drum -- the heartbeat of the goddess. The Maha Devi or Great Goddess, Kundalini, manifests in sound form as a queen bee surrounded by buzzing, known as the Bhramari Devi, who awakens in a buzz of ascending consciousness and descending spiritual grace. This ascending buzzing energy illuminates the chakras which are interconnected with areas of the brain that are silent in the unawakened state. The brain explodes into awareness as these dormant areas are activated.
 
Focus on the heart chakra helps bring balance to ourselves, our culture and the world. In the twelve pointed lotus mandala of this chakra is a six pointed star formed by two interlocking triangles in perfect equilibrium. The fourth chakra understanding expands in all dimensions and directions as this six pointed star. This hexagram is the symbol of air and the ancient symbol of the bee goddess. The sacred bee creates her honeycomb in hexagonal shapes and buzzes within her geometrically perfect hive. Within the hexagon is a downward pointing triangle interlocked with an upward pointing triangle. This represents the perfect union of the macrocosm with microcosm, male and female, positive and negative and the interpenetration of the sacred with the material world. Within the hexagon is a downward pointing triangle. Inside this triangle burns the unflickering eternal flame representing the human spirit.
 
A defining experience for me was a pilgrimage to Crete with ten of my drumming students. Our wonderful group came together on this beautiful island, and filtered what we know of the ancient practices of Bee Priestesses through our contemporary drumming and spiritual disciplines.  We were tutored in ancient Greek to sing more accurately the Hymn to the Muse, written by Mesomedes of Crete in the 2nd c. C.E. We sang this ancient hymn deep within the womb of the earth in the Skoteino cave and in many of the chapels to Mary located near the more ancient sacred sites. 

This trip was a powerful experience in thinking mythically and working ritually, seeing what was, what is, and what can be.  Rituals are collective action -- what we feel, care for and imagine together and a means for influencing and accessing the deep resources of the unconscious mind. It is communication between the different dimensions of our being, between human and divine.  Using sacred symbols, sound and energy, to raise the group to an intensity of shared emotion, transformed our drumming and chanting into an act of self-realization.  I know that I want to continue this work.