The Furious Spinner

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mysteriotides nychtes, Night of the Mysteries

The beauty of the Way is that there is no “way.”
—Loy Ching-Yuen, The Book of the Heart

Day Eight (Wednesday, September 29)

The Eleusian Mysteries
No one alive really knows what went on inside the temple during the two nights of the Mysteries. During the week leading up to the Night of the Mysteries initiates may (or may not) have fasted, so they may have been exhausted upon reaching the sacred groun. At that point they may have drunk kykeon (herb-flavored barley-water which may or may not have been an intoxicant) as they went into the Telesterion.

Once inside, the initiates (and others who had experienced the Mysteries before) may have witnessed a reenactment of the Demeter and Persephone myth, although many scholars vehemently argue against this scenario. The initiates may or may not have been in the dark. They may have seen and heard frightening things, then had the Goddess revealed to them. They may or may not have been forced, somehow, to face their fear of death.

Some time during the Mysteries, the initiates may have reached into the sacred baskets and held the sacred objects. Then they may have recited something like, “I have fasted, I have drunk the kykeon, and I have taken things out of the basket and put them back.”

On the second night of the Mysteries some kind of sacred marriage may have been reenacted. The Goddess may have given birth to the divine child.

More than a few historians and scholars believe that “the reveal” near the end of the Mysteries was a single stalk of grain—Demeter was, after all, the grain goddess to many.

But no one knows for certain what happened, and even if we did, it probably would not mean to us what it did to the Greeks and others who worshipped Demeter and Persephone. Initiation “into the Eleusinian Mysteries was a process,” Patricia Monaghan writes. “The moment of initiation was just…a moment.”44 The Mysteries were about transformation—”transformation of the hearts of the initiates.”45

The Salmon Mysteries
In our story, we now follow Persephone. She returns from the Ocean to the Land of the Salmon people. The Salmon People welcome Persephone to her new home. She does not want to stay, but they don’t want to let her go. Interestingly, she does not try to escape. Instead, she sits by the water. She, too, must grieve her loss—the loss of who she was.

It could be argued that Persephone’s journey into the Underworld is precipitated by menarche. She starts out golden and ends up bloody red. Menarche marks the beginning of enormous change in a girl’s life, one most of us don’t really comprehend at the time it is actually happening. Our bodies are transforming—transmutating, really—in so many ways. We are manufacturing new chemicals and hormones and pumping them into our bloodstream. We are like the salmon changing from fresh water to ocean water.

Ancient people considered women’s menstrual blood as a powerful magical fluid. Women bleeding were seen as magical, better able to access their wisdom at this time, and potentially dangerous if they didn’t have their blood power under control. A girl’s first blood was especially valued and was often used on fields to ensure their productivity.

This deepening which happens during menstruation parallels Persephone’s journey into the Underworld. In a way, she has no control over what is happening. She falls into the river. We’re born women, so we bleed monthly. Persephone could see her journey to the Underworld as a terrible accident and burden, or she can go with the flow of it, so to speak, and access those subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) energies which become available during bleeding times (and journeys to the Underworld). Once a woman begins to bleed, everything changes in her life. She is no longer a girl: She is a young woman. She can sit along the sidelines mourning her loss, as Persephone does for a time, or if she’s smart, she can learn from her journey and step into her power and womanhood.

(Persephone’s journey could also illustrate what a menopausal woman experiences. Coming to the end of menstruation can be equally as confusing and taxing as adolescence! Persephone begins the story as a young woman. Perhaps she falls into the river during menarche. She lives her life in the Ocean. Then as she gets near menopause—when soon the wise blood fills her and she is red with its power—she returns home. We leave our mothers as young women, experience our lives, then often return when we are older. Menopause is its own powerful journey to the Underworld.)

For our purposes today, let’s keep Persephone as a relatively young woman. She comes to this new village. She does not participate in the community; she doesn’t eat or sleep. Finally, a group of young women sit with her. They probably tell jokes, the way young girls do, and giggle and lean against one another. They begin to do things together, and Persephone learns the ways of the tribe. This is very reminiscent of what happens to young girls in “real life.” When they become teenagers they are awkward, often obnoxious, and don’t know how to behave. They don’t want to be around their mothers, yet they don’t want to be away from them. Usually they find a core group of girls which become—for good or ill—the center of their lives for a time. From them, they learn the ways of the larger tribe—as opposed to the mother’s smaller tribe.

In our own lives, we fall into the Underworld for a variety of reasons: illness, grief, loss, mid-life, menstruation, menopause. Sometimes it is an awful journey, filled with peril and horror, where everything seems absolutely out of our control. Other times we are able to relax and see these journeys as times of deepening and transformation.

Eventually boys come sniffing around Persephone and fight for her attention. One’s hands had to be blood-free to participate in the Mysteries—no killers allowed. This is a rather remarkable requirement given the nature of the patriarchy. (Although the caveat was no one with “unexpiated” blood on their hands could participate.) Persephone won’t have anything to do with these warriors and is instead attracted to a peaceful young man who sits next to her and points out the stars to her.

Persephone soon becomes proficient in the ways of the Salmon People. She is a great comfort to these people whose numbers are diminishing, who feel like no one pays them any heed. She chooses her own name: Persephone. In this land, this Underworld, this Otherworld, Persephone learns to use fire. In fact, she learns to Dance with Fire. She becomes the best of all of those who can dance with fire.

Then one day Persephone looks over and sees her mother, the goddess Demeter; Demeter has just eaten the protective huckleberries and stepped over the threshold. Thresholds were numinous places. Before grain could be turned into bread, it had to be threshed and winnowed. Threshing consisted of pounding the grain with a flail. This released the grain from the straw. Apparently the threshold was a board on the floor which kept the precious grain from falling through the cracks. According to Pauline Campanelli, these threshing floors were considered so sacred that “when Kind David entered Judea, he purchased a threshing floor upon which he built a temple. The threshing floor had such a powerful link to fertility that even today...the groom must carry the bride across the threshold on their wedding night.”46

The threshing room was a place of transition. The wheat went into the room as a plant and came out as a grain and straw. The grain could then be cooked or milled into flour for bread. How appropriate for the Grain Goddess to step over a threshold to find Her Daughter who has just gained the knowledge of fire andcan now convert her Mother’s bounty—threshed grain—into food.

Huckleberries were a staple food of area Native Americans, and no fall feast was complete without them. Even now in the late summer and early fall, area residents go out huckleberry picking. Magically, huckleberries were reputed to bestow protection and magical dreams on those who ate them.47 Demeter sees her daughter as a powerful young woman, a goddess in her own right. They embrace. Demeter gives Persephone the huckleberries: the wild food; Persephone gives Demeter the bread: the cooked food.

Demeter wants her daughter back. Persephone isn’t certain what she wants to do at first. Demeter is prepared to offer the Salmon People something very valuable: She as the goddess will teach their ways to the rest of the world. She will teach humans to keep the air and waters clean, and she will teach the rituals and songs the humans need to know so that the salmon will keep coming back to the river. This is a tremendously valuable gift. She is essentially giving life to those in the Underworld—to those who are already dead. She is giving life back to that which was extinct.

Demeter offers to do what is absolutely necessary for our planet. The Earth has taken care of us forever. Yet just as Demeter wanted her beloved daughter by her side, the Earth needs love and attention. She cannot feed us if we continue to destroy the environment as we are doing. It is all connected. We are all connected. Demeter loses her daughter and doesn’t get her back at first because the Salmon People need to keep her. They need to keep Persephone because there aren’t enough Salmon People left. The landscape withers and dies because Demeter does not have the love of her life, and she doesn’t have the love of her life because the landscape has withered and died previously, metaphorically, because of the degradation of the environment.
Persephone learns to use and control fire while in the Underworld. By being able to control fire, Persephone becomes a shaman, channelling energy in many ways: for healing, transformation, rebirth, sustenance. She learns to cook. Menarche opened the door to her sexuality. She learns to “cook” her passion as well as her food.

Persephone becomes a true magician because of her journey to the Underworld. In Vicki Noble’s Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess Through Myth, Art and Tarot, she titles the chapter on the tarot card Magician “Dancing the Fire.” She writes, “The alchemy of fire is the Magician’s great secret. Her activating power changes one thing into another. Of all early techniques, fire was the most powerful and versatile: it allowed people to turn grain into bread, clay into stone, inflammable matter to ashes…The original power of the female group to harness and use fire is acknowledged in mythology all over the world and pertains to the sexual fire as well as the use of physical fire for cooking and transformation mysteries. …The shaman channels healing heat—the fire of the universe coming through the human being.”48

Imagine all of your life that you are surrounded by this beautiful golden plant. Then one day, someone teaches you how you can survive by eating this formerly inedible grain. Fire transforms the grain into bread. You mill it, you shape it, you add water and maybe some leavening to it, but essentially, it is the fire that transmutes this grain into food.

This would be a miracle.

Archaeologists have found miniature knives with grass resins on them in caves in France. This indicates our Neolithic ancestors harvested wild grains. Vicki Noble tells us that “scholars found the charred remains of fire, mortars and pestles for grinding grains, and the remains of bread having been baked in the primitive ovens. All this took place near ritual cave sanctuaries…later in Çatal Hüyük, the bread would be baked in the courtyard ovens of the ritual temples where priestesses led the sacred ceremonies.”49

Demeter provides the plants; Persephone provides the means to convert these plants into food. Persephone enables us to access the nutrients of the Goddess’s plants. By teaching us to cook, essentially, Persephone becomes the true link between people and the Goddess—people and the Earth. She is what we need to reestablish our connection with Nature: fire and the ability to use it peacefully. We don’t build weapons with it, we don’t create nuclear bombs with it. We cook with it. We cook our sexuality. We cook the gifts of the Earth.

Mystai Task
For you today, try to spend at least part of the Day of Mystery with others who have been working on the Salmon Mysteries. If not, create your own Day of Mystery. Dress in your Mystai clothes. (If you're meeting with others: Out of respect for the other Mystai, don’t wear any scent, including scented deodorants, laundry, hair spray, or mousse. Make certain your clothes are totally smoke-free. Many people have allergies or sensitivities, but they rarely speak out about them, not wanting to draw notice to themselves or make others feel uncomfortable. The important thing is to always try to make the ceremonial space safe for all participants, especially those who are most vulnerable.)

If you have made any collages over the week and want to share them with the others, bring them along with your sacred objects, blank poster board and pictures, guidebook, and journal. If symbolic play works for you, get some real clay.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Day of Mystery

Thrice happy are those who have seen the Mysteries.
—Sophocles (496-408 B.C.E.)

Since no one living knows what really happened on the Day of Mystery, it is up to you to create your own celebration—your own sacred ceremony. Give yourself a massage. Do a collage. Eat well. Bake bread. It would be appropriate to bake bread on this day. When we did the Day of Mystery, we baked bread. This is how it went:

Transforming the Grain into the Feast Bread:
We will then begin the baking process. Depending upon how much time has been allotted, the Mystai will make the dough, knead it, let it rise, knead it again, and bake it, using all organic ingredients if you can. Be aware of the process as you are doing it. Be aware of your Ancestors performing this task for thousands of years. This is a holy task. Remember, “sacred women have always baked sacred bread to be used in sacred ritual ceremonies,”52 Vicki Noble writes. “From Çatal Hüyük to Avebury, the sacrament of baking bread has been the focus of Goddess worship,”53 Elinor W. Gadon says.

Any kind of cooking is a sacred act. You are taking the greatest gift of the Earth—nourishment—and you are transforming it with your being, wit, desire, and a few other household ingredients into food for you, your family, and community. This is a holy act: nourishment makes a person whole and hale.

The act of cooking and food preparation has been trivialized by our society as “women’s work”—as if that were a bad thing! But Trivia was a goddess of the commonplace, the home. Trivia was most likely another name for Hecate, the guardian goddess of these entire Mysteries. We know how powerful and holy she is! We are made holy by her presence in our kitchens. Hecate is the ultimate kitchen witch.

Bless this food (and all food) as you prepare it. I dreamed once that I was in the house of a Rumanian wise woman, and she was showing me how to cook. She waved her hands around and said we should always talk to the spirits of everything. And so I do. Sometimes it’s a short conversation, like, “Goddess, bless this mess!” Or, “Make this stew a healing brew!” Or as I’m doing the laundry, I say, “Thank you for the heat, thank you for the water, thank you for the E-lec-tri-ci-ty!” I try to always thank the Visibles and Invisibles.

I modeled a character in my novel Coyote Cowgirl after this dream wise woman, named after the goddess of the hearth. (The hera of the novel, Jeanne, is an anorexic who does not eat and cannot cook and lives with a family of big gorgeous Amazon chefs. In order to get back the family jewels she carelessly ‘lost’, she agrees to cook for La Magia, a restaurant in a small town in southern Arizona—with the help of a very funny talking crystal skull, but that’s another part of the story.) In this scene, we get to hear Vesta’s philosophy of cooking and food—which, surprisingly enough, parallels my own:

I spooned Vesta’s soup into my mouth. Some kind of barley vegetable with a hint of cayenne? Delicious. The bread melted in my mouth.

“This is great,” I said.

Vesta nodded.

“She talks to the food,” Fernando said quietly. “She says you must always talk to the spirits of the food. Ask their permission.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Vesta said, as if she had heard it all before.

“What else does she say?” I asked.

Tangiers watched us as she sipped her soup.

“She says cooking is magic,” Fernando said. “You take a tomato, for instance, you cut it up, apply heat, add a touch of water, some herbs, sing to it, and you have spaghetti sauce. That’s magic.”

I smiled. Fernando had an easier time talking when he was repeating someone else’s words.
“The tomato is a good example,” Vesta said. “The Aztecs offered tomatoes to their gods to ask for healing. So I too ask for their healing when I use them.”

“I never thought of cooking like that,” I said.

“With two great cooks in your family?” Vesta said.

“Five,” I said. “My parents, brother, sister, and grandmother. I guess when I think about it, it did seem kind of magical what they did. Magical and mysterious, secret. And I didn’t know any of the secret codes.”

“It’s no secret,” Vesta said. “Any idiot can cook, can follow a recipe. But for the ingredients to transform into a wonderful meal, you have to have respect. The magic words come from you. From your own heart.”54

Bake this bread with an open heart, reciting your own magic words. As you are baking the bread (or cooking anything else), try to keep your mind clear, or at least imagine that your food is healing and nourishing for you and yours. When Mario and I cook, we try not to have on the TV, or if we do, it’s a baseball game or something benign, without murder and mayhem. And we try to keep our conversation pleasant. I swear I can go to a restaurant and sometimes know when the cook is in a bad mood just by how the food tastes!

I suggest making braided bread on this Day of Mystery. A grain of wheat ostensibly looks like a braid of hair. According to Barbara G. Walker some Germanic women used to cut off their braids as offerings to their goddess before figuring out they could braid bread and offer that instead. Thus braided bread was invented!55 Whether the tale is apocryphal or not, braided bread does remind me of the whole grain which reminds me of Demeter, the Grain Mother. It becomes a visual story of the transformation of grain into bread.

The Dance
While the bread rises, dance. Put on “The Calling” from Santana’s Supernatural album. Or some of Hildegard de Bingen’s music. Something which makes you move. Dance the Snake. Find direction through your body. Then Dance the Salmon. In the river, out in the ocean, up the river again. Imagine the rivers filled with wild salmon again.

Afterward have some refreshments, sit and relax.

Going Deep
You have come the Sacred Way. You have begun the transformation. You have danced the Snake Dance. Now you are ready to let go of that which weighs you down, that which keeps you from becoming your true self.

Meditate on your process during the last week. Then contemplate your life. Think of incidents in your life which bring you grief and pain. Ask yourself if you are ready to let them go. If you are, take a small piece of clay. Roll it into a tiny ball. As you shape it between your hands, think about the incident you are ready to release. Let the energy of this event flow into the ball. You are letting go of it. Letting go. It is now in the ball of clay, safe, with harm to none. Is there something else you wish to release? A bad habit? A bad memory? Let it go into another ball of clay, turn it over to Mother Earth. Release it.

Later, you can put the clay globes in the garden, on your porch, or out a nearby stream (as long as it is real clay and clay only).

Mother Earth Goddess has taken your burdens. She has nourished you your entire life. Now make a promise to Her. Make a promise of something concrete you will do for her over the next year. She takes care of us; we need to take care of her. What will you do? It doesn’t have to be huge. It just needs to be possible. You don’t have to promise to save the salmon from extinction, but you could promise to volunteer at one of the local environmental or peace groups. You could start a recycling drive in your neighborhood, or you could start recycling in your own house.

Let the bread rise again. Put it in to bake when it has risen.

Baking Prayer
Demeter, thank you for this bounty. Persephone, thank you for this fire. May this food heal and nourish all, heal and nourish all. Blessed be!

Grain into Bread:
The Mystai take the bread from the oven. When it is cool enough they slice once of the loaves. They prepare plates, condiments, and drinks for everyone. One of them will serve the Priestess her plate. Before they eat, each Mystai will offer a blessing.

After they have eaten some, the Priestess will say,
Demeter, Persephone, you have shown us the key.
Bless these women and men, they are all your kin.
The Mysteries are done and have just begun.
Mystes once, Melissa today.
We have found the Sacred Way!
Blessed beeee!
The Circle is open but unbroken.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.

Footnotes (I know you've lost some; I cut some of the text)
44. Monaghan, The Goddess Path, p. 143.
45. Ibid.
46. Pauline Campanelli, Ancient Ways: Reclaiming Pagan Traditions (St. Paul,Minnesota: Llewellyn: 1992), p. 131.
47. Scott Cunningham, Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewellyn: 1990), p. 129.
48. Noble, Motherpeace, p. 29.
49. Noble, Shakti Woman, p 24.
52. Noble, Shakti Woman, p. 24-25.
53. Gadon, p. 150.
54. Kim Antieau, Coyote Cowgirl (New York: TOR, due out May 2003). manuscript p. 56.
55. Walker, Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, p. 482. 0 comments

Monday, September 27, 2004

Rumblings of Transformation