Lipiushiau is to-date the first named drummer in history.1 Like En-hedu-Ana, Lipushiau was also high priestess to the moon god Nanna, and was appointed to his temple at Ur around 2380 BCE, placing her as a drummer in the same place about 100 years earlier than En-hedu-Ana. This would affirm an interpretation then that En-hedu-Ana was also a drummer, and that the striking up of song could very well have been a literal stroke to the frame drum.
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The rhythmic sound and ritualistic use of the frame drum is one of trance-induction, and historically its shamanistic use facilitated travel between heaven, earth and the underworld. This seems to me strikingly similar to what is called "possession" today in the many traditions associated with drum rhythms used to facilitate altered states of consciousness as well as to praise and invoke gods. The 16th century Aztec poem soliciting Montezuma mirrors En-hedu-Ana who praises and invokes Inanna in her temple at Ur. The drum-body of the Pardhans, the Neolithic clay pot as woman,
the African udu—a clay drum thought to have developed from women's water jugs—reveal
themselves as part of the concepts related through music, praise, prayer, song, and poetry as they are associated with the female as part of the divine, part of the center and temple of life. This center and temple of life still lives in the song coming to us from the Oaxaca tribes of Mexico even if this center has been under attack for a very, very long time.
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In the latest war moves against the sovereign state of Iraq it is extremely ironic to end up once again in the land over which the high priestesses Lipushiau and En-hedu-Ana once played and prayed, invoking the Great Goddess, when all else failed, from within the temple at Ur. During the initial bombing phases of Shock and Awe in Baghdad, I was astounded to hear temple prayer resounding through the city, piping somehow through unseen speakers, as an eerily-greenish night-vision-enabled film showed the incessant bombing. I heard a subsequent report that during this first bombing the vibrations were so severe birds simply fell from trees. This bombing vibration is antithetical to the peace-inducing, mind-altering vibration of the drum, the peaceful vibration of each of us, as we were formed into life, as Layne Redmond writes, by the rhythmic pulse of our mother's blood while we grew there, warm in the pool of her womb.
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What I continue to ponder is not just how certain history has been preserved through oral traditions such as poetry, drumming, and song, but what information still remains within those traditions, do we recognize it and how it teaches of ways of being in which spiritual traditions centering around the natural world long, long ago, are still expressed, are threatened but surviving, found here and there, once in a while, and even still in the embodiment of woman as physical manifestation of the divine life-giving force and regenerative processes of nature.
Following of course is a need for further analysis as to how these traditions, and women with them, have gone through millennia of silencing. To erase an earth-/goddess- centered paradigm it was necessary to silence the being whose body was seen as powerful within that paradigm, around whose body aspects of culture were actually constructed, as were the many examples of what is termed the omphalos, what Barbara Walker calls a Greek transliteration of Latin umbilicus, the navel, or hub of the world, center of the Goddess's body, and source of all things.2
The omphalos is egg-shaped and represents several things, including transformative symbols of regeneration and birth. For the Greeks it appears as certain sacred stones found in temple and shrines. Walker says the omphalos is always located at the site considered to be the "center of the earth, marked by the stone omphalos that concentrated the essence of the cosmic spirit of the Great Mother."3 There is an assumption then that our ancient ancestors understood our human connection to, our relationship with this Mother Earth. This is seen in the song from Lila Downs, moving from ancient Greece to Pre-Columbian Mexico: "And I believe in the mouth of my earth that from the root feeds my belly button. My center, my temple of life." That's a remarkable phrase recalling a former world-view. We are connected to our mothers through the navel cord. We are connected to the earth and each other through the omphalos of the Earth Mother, the land is her navel and we are sustained only by the actual roots of that land, and the metaphorical roots of the mind.
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Joy Harjo writes: Remember the earth whose skin you are…that you are all people…all people you…Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you….4
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The anti-woman, anti-man, anti-child, anti-earth, non-egalitarian paradigm teaches us to separate ourselves from one another based on gender, race, class, religion, country of origin, ethnicity, nationality, and anything else able to stratify us. And many women, a world of women—like Anna Akhmatova, saying I can in answer to the question, Can you describe this?—have been trying to write their way out of this paradigm probably since its beginning and assuredly since En-hedu-Ana first inscribed her words on tablets asking for Inanna's assistance in restoring the priestess to her rightful place in the temple at Ur. As the paradigm shifted toward patriarchal dominance of women, so too did women's symbols shift as they were assimilated into the new paradigm. Whereas once Inanna was a Great Mother Goddess, even she would undergo transformation—and the life-affirming power of the moon with her.
In her poem "Resistance," Suji Kwock Kim references events and conditions as they occurred during the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945. One of these was the Comfort Corps which Kim states reflects "the estimated 200,000 women of Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Dutch, and other descent who were mobilized into prison camps for sexual assault by the Japanese Army." Ending, and through the voice of Kim's grandfather, the poem asks:
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What won't we do to each other?
After liberation I saw a frenzy of reprisals against former collaborators.
An old man—guilty or innocent?—lashed to a grille of barbed wire.
Bodies hung from trees on the sides of the road, swaying.
At night a sickle glinted in the sky, sharp and pure. What did it reap.
Summer wind sang through the corpse-forest.5
Here the quarter-moon, once the horn of the cow goddess, is a "sickle" now glinting above so much violence. I'm fascinated by such expression which forces us into consideration of our own unconscious figurative and literal reflection of the adaptation to the violent shifts that have occurred, and how the extent of these shifts continues to show themselves as part of the violence that appears in our art.
Notes:
1 Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women.
2 Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1983), "Omphalos," 740.
3 Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 740.
4 Joy Harjo, "Remember," in She Had Some Horses (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983).
5 Suji Kwock Kim, "Resistance," in Notes from the Divided Country (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).
Images:
1 & 2. Udu drums of Nigeria.
