The Furious Spinner

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Day of the Salmon

And the Great Mother said:
Come my child and give me all that you are…
You are not alone and you have never been alone….
—-Linda Reuther, from Homecoming

Day Nine (Thursday, September 30)

Eleusian Mysteries
The Mysteries and celebration are now winding down, and the people offer libations to their ancestors and the Goddess.

The Salmon Mysteries
Demeter and Persephone feast with the Salmon People, then return home to teach others the sacred salmon ways.

Mystai Task
After any initiation, transformation, or pilgrimage, we must go back to our communities and families. To our lives. Often everything will seem the same as it was before we left. Nothing has miraculously changed. You may still feel burdened. This is just a habit. Remind yourself again and again that you have been released from your burdens, so act as if it were so. This doesn’t mean suppressing your emotions. It means the Mysteries are a beginning. Now you need to learn to stay out of your ruts permanently—you’ll have to jump out of them again and again. But you can do it! Life is a process, and so are the Mysteries.

Part of your responsibility is to step back into the community and bring your wisdom, your whole Self, with you. The Day of the Salmon is a good way to begin.

When we celebrated The Salmon Mysteries here, we invited part of the community here to share in an Autumnal Equinox Feast. Many of our ancestors considered Fall Equinox to be the Second Harvest, or Thanksgiving. Equinox was a time of balance, when the world hung on the edge of the light for a moment before tipping toward the dark. Where I live, in the Columbia River Gorge, this is when we berry pick and welcome the salmon back home.

Our ancestors gathered together often to celebrate the bounty of the Earth. They followed particular rituals, or customs. In some places, the bones of the first salmon—unburnt—were thrown back into the river. The last sheaf of grain to be harvested was dressed up as the Goddess and put at the head of the table. Food was prepared with care, with the knowledge that it was a gift from the Earth. By cooking and eating the food in a sacred manner, our ancestors were honoring the Earth and guaranteeing future bounty. They knew where all their food had come from. They had faith that the hunters, gatherers, and fishers took their harvest in a sacred way. Food was their direct connection to the Earth, Nature, and one another.

Each food at a feast held a particular significance. For example, they believed garlic and onion bestowed protection on the user. (They were right; both help us guard against colds and other illnesses.) According to Scott Cunningham, “Garlic was eaten on festival days to Hecate, and was left at a crossroads as a sacrifice in her name.”56 Bread, the staff of life, was added to the table in honor of Demeter. Olives or an olive branch honored Athena and symbolized peace. Cinnamon drew money and good health to the lucky user; peppermint brought love and stimulation.57 Women ate eggs, the perennial symbols of fertility, to help them conceive. Eggs were a central part in curing ceremonies all over the world. In indigenous medicine today, the use of eggs to help draw the disease out of a person is still prevalent. The egg—the disease now safely contained within—is then ceremoniously buried.

Today, most people walking in a vegetable garden could not identify which plants were which, let alone know the medicinal or magical properties for each plant. Most people who buy fish and meat have no idea in what manner the animals were raised, treated, and slaughtered. Girls and women (and increasingly boys and men) suffer from exploding rates of anorexia, bulimia, and other food disorders. More and more people are developing food sensitivities. We have lost our connection to food and therefore have lost our living, healing connection with the Earth.

“For a long time now, we have been unable to remember our former closeness with the Earth,” Paul Devereux, John Steele, and David Kubrin write in Earthmind. “Due to this amnesia, the ecological problems now thrust upon us have come as a shock.…We notice the emergence of an amnesia that is really a double forgetting, wherein a culture forgets, and then forgets that it has forgotten how to live in harmony with the planet.”58

Some believe it is too late to reestablish our connection to the planet; we may have had an intuitive relationship with Nature at one time, but it has long since been bred out of us. Besides, isn’t the planet dying anyway and there’s nothing we can do about it? Others maintain that everything is fine, we shouldn’t think about negative things, and it’ll all go away.

We ignore the state of the biosphere at our peril. Whether we are connected to our food and environment or not, we eat, we breathe, we consume, and our bodies tell us exactly how the planet is doing. Humans are experiencing epidemic rates of cancer and immune dysfunction illnesses.

We need help, and the Earth needs our help. In Sarah A. Conn’s essay “When the Earth Hurts, Who Responds?” she suggests that we “actively seek out a connection with the natural world that will sustain” us and the world and to (1) become aware of the larger world, (2) cultivate an emotional responsiveness to the world (3) develop and understand the interconnectedness of global problems, and (4) take action on behalf of the Earth.59

One of the ways to take action is to reestablish our link, individually and collectively, to our food. Practical ways to do this are: (1) Buy whole foods without preservatives and chemicals. (2) Seasonally buy organic food from local farmers (organic factory farms can often cause harm, too, just as those awful commercial factory farms do). (3) Don’t use chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers has caused more environmental (and human) damage than almost anything else besides cars. (4) Grow your own organic garden if you have the room and inclination. Nothing quite gets you in touch with the Earth as the earth!

If you eat meat, eat organic. It’s better for you and the animals. Same goes with eggs and cheeses. If you eat fish, find out which ones are safe (for your health and the environment).

This brings us to our sacred salmon, the lifeblood and soul of the Pacific Northwest. Wild salmon are in big trouble here in River City. If you are going to eat salmon, you should ask for and buy wild salmon. (Hatchery salmon have their problems, too, but I’ll leave that complicated discussion for another time.)

The Sierra Club website has the most articulate and succinct reasons why you should buy wild salmon: (1) Farmed salmon pollute. They are raised in floating pens and produce a great deal of waste which ruin local marine environments, plus this waste can spread disease and is full of the antibiotics the fish are given, which then can be harmful to humans and cause problems along shorelines. (2) Farmed salmon can escape. Since the farmed salmon here in the Pacific are actually Atlantic salmon, it becomes an exotic species when it escapes and can contaminate already precarious native stocks. (3) Wild salmon is better for you; it has higher levels of the Omega-3 fatty acids. Farmed salmon is injected with dye to give it the pink color wild salmon get from the wild food they eat.60

Some wild salmon runs are still thriving. Buy fish that has been caught from those areas. If a store sells wild salmon, they know where they get it from. (For instance, if you buy salmon from the Columbia River you should know that the river has high levels of dioxin, plus radioactive waste from Hanford is continually leaking into it. However, you could consider how long the salmon actually spend in the river compared with how long they are in the ocean—and that actually depends upon whether it is a wild salmon or a hatchery salmon. The hatchery salmon tend to stay closer to “home” and spend less time in the ocean than the wild salmon. Of course, when you buy them in the store, you can’t know which is wild and which is hatchery—as far as I know.)

It is a complex issue. Food and sustenance should be simpler than this. And it can be. Try buying locally, seasonally, organically. See if that helps with your relationship with food and Nature.

One of the other ways we can work on our connection to the world is by participating in communal celebration. Coming together to honor the turning of the Wheel of the Year—and to celebrate the return of the Salmon, for example—helps establish connections to each other and the rest of the planet. We express our gratitude for our plenty, we thank the Visibles and the Invisibles, and we eat together—sharing this bounty. We eat the same food, essentially, and are linked by it: It is a supremely intimate act. Celebrating in this way becomes a communal prayer to the forces of Nature, to the Divine.

So for this last day, you can celebrate privately, with your family and/or community, or with a group of friends.

Before eating, the Priestess, hostess, or someone else will say a grace. The word grace means “to praise outloud.” Saying grace hearkens back to our ancestors, some who prayed to the Graces. These Triple Goddesses were often depicted naked, attending Aphrodite. Their other name was Charites. They were probably very ancient goddesses. “The charis or ‘grace’ they bestowed was the gift of the Goddess: beauty, kindness, love, tenderness, pleasure, creativity, artistry, and sensuality.”61 To say grace outloud, then, is to call upon the Graces to bring love and joy to your table—what a wonderful gift for your guests!

With this final feast, we celebrate the wondrous mystical journey of the salmon and the reuniting of Demeter and Persephone. We celebrate the momentary balance of light and dark. We begin weaving the threads back into the tapestry of life. This is a great and wonderful task. Thank you for being a part of it.

You are the weaver, the tiller, the seed, the fruit, the bread, the oven, the fire. You are the child and the mother. The water and the salmon. The phoenix and the crow. The coyote and the belly laugh. The Milky Way and the stars. You are the heart and the heartbeat.

You are embraced. Held. Even in those times when you cannot get your face out of the muddy splash of memory or despair or sickness. Wait. Breathe. Wait. Breathe. I am there in the pause. And there again. I am your heart and your breath and the slap of your soles against my Earthy soul. Down and dirty. I await you. Sister, Daughter, Mother. Brother, Son, Father. Blessings.

In your dream you met Demeter
Splendid and severe, who said: Endure…
Peace daughter. Find your true kin.
—then you felt her kiss.

—Genevieve Taggard, from Demeter

Song of the Salmon

I celebrate myself and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belongs to me as good belongs to you.
—Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself


I sing the song of myself
As I wiggle from my mother’s sac
Resting here on the floor of my world.
Is it your world, too?

The gravel tickles my belly.
The water washes all around me.
I laugh and am filled with myself,
With this river, this world.

I eat the bones of my ancestors.
All the delicacies (and indelicacies)
Of this place I call home.
Is it your home, too?

What is above my wavering sky?
What is below this sandy bottom?
The water embraces me!
I ride the currents. Ahhh bliss!

This is the Big River I now travel,
Isn’t it? I have heard the stories!
The water changes me. My body longs for—
What? What do I long for?

Ocean! Depths I cannot imagine!
Bodies bumping against my body.
I dance, dance, dance.
Move. What is this feeling?

This new longing. I have seen.
I have felt. I have experienced.
Mother, these depths make me ache
For home. I am changing

Shapeshifting. Bloody red
I pulse with desire. Creativity
Explodes. In my Being. Do
You feel this Ecstasy! This desire!

Home. Ahhh Bliss! Release.
Momma. I grow weary. Time
To step out of this Bloody Dress.
Soon I will be fish food.

Other bodies knock against
Me. Bedraggled. Bedecked.
I await the nibbles of my
Children. As they eat of my body.

I sing the song of myself.
Of life in this glorious body
Tied to this Earthy place.
Is it your body too?

—Kim Antieau
Stevenson, Washington
September 2002

Footnotes:
56. Cunningham, p. 109.
57. Ibid, p. 75-175.
58. Paul Devereux, et al, Earthmind (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 2-3, quoted in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, ed. Theodore Roszak, et al (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), p. 61.
59.Sarah A. Conn, “When the Earth Hurts, Who Responds?” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, ed. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), p. 166-171.
60. Sierra Club website, http://www.sierraclub.org/e-files/wild_salmon.asp.
61. Walker, Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, p. 256.
62.
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