res

Ritual 2.

Discussing or even exploring the prehistoric sites today is like visiting a museum, or peering around a church as a tourist. For all the formal beauties that are accessible, the essence of life is elusive. Contemporary artists are looking to ancient forms both to restore that breath and also to take it for themselves. The animating element is often ritual-private or public , newly created or recreated through research and imagination (in itself a breath of life ). Artmaking is a ritual, perhaps the most valid-if elitist - one left to this society. It is, however, in danger of becoming as disengaged as institutionalized religion. Emile Durkheim's conclusion that "religion is something eminently social" should also apply to art. "Collective representations accumulated over vast spans of space and time are results of a special intellectual activity . . . which is infinitely richer and more complex than that of the individual." 1

The dominant alienation of maker from what is made, and the aliena­ tion of art and work from life, has led some contemporary artists to a conscious restoration of severed connections. Over the last 15 to 20 years there has been a move to reconnect "medium and message," "subject and object," in the course of which some artists have become quite literally closer to their art. They have become more necessary to its perception­ not only as the actors in Body Art or Performance Art, but also as the major protagonists of their individual esthetic ideas in lectures and writing. The result has been an increased dialogue between them and their specialized art audiences. Too often, however, a broader audience re­ mains out of reach, even to those artists most resistant to the erosion of art's communicative functions, because available forms are not easily understood.

Immateriality and impermanence, for instance, though sometimes valid strategies against commodification, have often backfired, leading to the same kind of isolation and inaccessibility the artists hoped to over­ come. Although the form has changed - for example, from expensiv~ steel to inexpensive xerox, or from object to action -the content is still meaningless to many people. In an ambivalent antidote to this situation ,

The sacred principle is nothing more nor less than society transfigured and personified. . Howsoever little importance the religious ceremonies may have, they put the group into action.

- Emile Durkheim

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves , not things that enslave us.

-Guy Debord

When ye pray use no vaine repetition as the heathen

- Saint Matthew

1. Mary Beth Edelson. See for Yourself: Pilgrimage to a Neolithic Cave. 1977. Priva te ritual in Grapceva Cave , Hvar Island, Yugoslavia. (Photo· Mary Beth Edelson. )

2. Emilie Conrad-Da'oud and the Con tinuum group. Black and White Dance. 1975. Dry Lake near Palmdale, California. Perform ed at sunrise, the theme was the birth of a new energy from stark, barren ground, the blach and white motif representing the counterplay of opposites . (Photo: courtes y Meg Harlam. )

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3A. Houston Conwill. Passages: Earth/ Space H-3. 1980. Nexus Art Gallery , Atlanta, Georgia. Earth and wooden ritual objects. 9' x 9' x 9'.

3B. Susan Hiller. Dream Mapping. 1974. Collaborative performance, Purdies Farm, England. For three summer nights, six people slept out in a _field among natural "fairy circles" (which have been said to form energy patterns); their dreams , and their interactions with the place and with each other, were diagramed and compared. Hiller has noted that this piece was not intended to yield scientific results , but was an experiential structure aimed at intensified subjective experience and dream sharing as a definition of community. (Photo: Susan Hiller. )

many artists have found themselves drawn more directly into all aspects of making, explaining and distributing, even promoting and selling their art. In the process, they become public figures and their art, almost acci­ dentally, has to become more public too. For some this syndrome is ir­ relevant, part of one "movement" or another, or "making it"; for others it has been an eye-opener, a consciousness-raiser, a way for the audience and its life concerns to enter and directly affect the art being made.

Of those who have tried to replace society's passive expectations of art with a more active model, many have chosen to call their activities "ritu­ als." The word is used very broadly, but its use indicates a concern with that balance between individual and collective, theory and practice, object and action that is at the core of any belief system. Durkheim's division of religious phenomena into beliefs and rites is applicable to esthetics. "The first ," he says, "are states or opinions and consist in rep­ resentations; the second are determined modes of action."2

Any discussion of ritual in recent art raises the important question of the relationship of belief to the forms that convey it, or at least suggest its structure in a general way. Images and activities borrowed from ancient or foreign cultures are useful as talismans for self-development, as con­ tainers. But they become ritual in the true sense only when filled by a communal impulse that connects the past (the last time we performed this act) and the present (the ritual we are performing now) and the fu­ ture ( will we ever perform it again?).

When a ritual doesn 't work, it becomes an empty, self-conscious act, an exclusive object involving only the performer, and it is often embarras­ sing for anyone else to witness. When a ritual does work, it is inclusive, and leaves the viewer with a need to participate again. At this point, ritual becomes propaganda in the religious sense in which the word originated- the sense that evolved from the rituals of the Catholic Church, the sense of "spreading the word" ( or the seed, as in propaga­ tion). Today, as Dennis Oppenheim has put it, "ritual is an injected in­ gredient. ... It's an objectively placed idiom necessary to move the work away from certain kinds of sterility." 3 But the concept of knowing through doing and communicating through participating continues, whether it is applied to daily routines or mystical states of enlightenment.

The active , or formal, element of repetition which characterizes so much and such diverse American art from the last three decades can be seen as an acknowledgment of the need for ritual. Art that is called ritual but is never repeated is finally an isolated gesture rather than a com­ munal process. Repetition is necessary to ritual, and repetition was a major component of the work of those artists in the late 1960s who were adapting a deadpan Minimal style to an often sensually obsessive content. (Freud compared culture to neurosis, equating philosophy with paranoia, religion or ritual with compulsion, and art with hysteria.) It seems proba­ ble that in the New Stone Age, ritualization of tasks and "learning by heart" were the prime manner of perpetuating belief and history. Even­ tually oral history was handed down only by traveling bards and minstrels, who were "homeless," as artists are in this society. Eva Hesse said she used repetition in her sculpture because it recalled "the absur­ dity of life": "If something is absurd, it's much more exaggerated, more

Overlay I t 62 absurd if it's repeated ... . Repetition does enlarge or increase or exag­ gerate an idea or purpose in a statement."4 Yvonne Rainer has said of her choreography: "If something is complex, repetition gives people more time to take it in. "5

The feminist development of ritual in art came in response to a genuine need on both the personal level (for identity) and the communal level (for a revised history and a broader framework in which to make art). Mary Beth Edelson, who sees herself as creating a "liturgy" for the feminist move­ ment, introduced the function of ritual to her children in the early '70s:

I was setting aside a particular time, saying to them, "This activity that we do now is special. This time and these gestures I hope will make a lasting impression on you. So we are going to act it out. We are going to ritualize our behavior and document ourselves with photographs. The photographs will stand as a record of the unity and wonder that we experienced. "6

At the same time, women noticed correspondences with traditional female work and arts. Artists began to see utilitarian activities with esthe­ tic eyes, sometimes as the counterparts of mantras - social formulas for coping with oppression, for surviving. "The cumulative power of infinite repetition" was manifested, for instance, in the masonry techniques of the women who built the immense Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, a complex layering of small stone fragments. Vincent Scully has remarked how the ritual dances there were performed "tight up against the build­ ings . . . and the beat of those dances is built into the architecture, which thus dances too." 7 Artist Judith Todd has observed how the pueblo was laid out in clusters resembling matrilocal living patterns, and how the concentric arrangement and obsessive layering of the kivas, or domed underground chambers, also symbolized protection, the way the earth enfolds the soul, in a labyrinthine pattern. 8

The rituals of modern artists evoke primitive rituals, especially those of the agrarian cycle of the birth, growth, sacrifice, and rebirth of the year god; the circle dance encouraging sun and moon to turn; the Troy dances of life and death. Michelle Stuart has written about her earth-on-paper scrolls (see Chapter I): "Move the body repeatedly and you will start knowing yourself because you no longer know anything at all. When I pound rocks or rub over layers and layers of dirt or move my body in dance, I don't want to stop. . . . Destroying to create a new state of be­ ing. It's like a murder- the destructiveness of creating. "9 Yet the forms do not survive without the beliefs , as Jamake Highwater, a Blackfoot/ Cherokee who is both a participant in and articulate critic of avant-garde culture, says in his book Dance: Rituals of Experience. Describing the labyrinthine patterns of the farandole in sou them France - a snakelike winding dance which is still executed but has lost its significance-he observes that when expressive form is abandoned, "what remains is neither art nor ritual but something else . . . decorative entertain­ ment. "10

In the 1960s, experimental dance broke away from the theatre world and became more closely associated with the visual arts , influencing them, in turn, to incorporate body and movement. Repetition suggests

4. Jane Gilmor. Tableau, Delphi, Greece. 1978. One of a series. Photograph , 16" X 20".

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not only eroticism, but action and "revolution." Process and Performance and Ritual Art are all to a degree restless oppositions to the status quo. Visual artists' interest in dance coincided with the political need to "de­ materialize" art objects. Dance is also experience ritualized, and Mircea Eliade has observed that "reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation." 11 "No form of dance is permanent," wrote critic John Mar­ tin. "Only the basic principle of dance is enduring, and out of it, like the cycle of nature itself, rises an endless succession of new springs out of old winters. "12

Dance is considered the oldest art, and certainly the most socialized. With singing and music, it is the art most rooted in a continuing present: "Myths are things which never happen but always are." 13 Ritual takes place in the temporal framework of myth, in that Celtic "time between times" of twilights , mists , and hybrids which John Sharkey has compared to the "entrelacs" of Celtic visual arts, the intertwining knots and puns and curves-repetitive images arising from tasks set the contemplative mind. 14

Although Jesus was worshiped as "the dancers' master" (and the mosaic labyrinths set in the floors of medieval churches were surely ves­ tiges of dances as well as pilgrimage metaphors), "Christianity has lost its dances" 15 and consequently its spiral, growing motion, the natural cir­ cling around the spindle/axis. All that remains is the linear procession. A sixth-century Gnostic hymn warned: "Who danceth not, knoweth not what cometh to pass." A more recent version is Emma Goldman's "If there's no dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming." (A revolution is, by definition, a circle dance.) In contemporary art, ritual is not just a passive repetition but the acting out of collective needs.

Many of the megalithic circles are associated with dance through sur­ viving local folklore , which calls them Trippe Stones, Merry Maidens, Long Meg and her Lovers , or a wedding party. Christian superstition as­ sumed the revelers were turned into stones for dancing on the Sabbath. The stones are also said to bleed-like the spiral-inscribed, red sandstone Long Meg in northern England- connecting them with sacrifice; people turned to stone are returned to the earth. The megaliths are constantly associated with witches' dances and with the horned god become devil,

5. Scorhill Circle , Dartmoor. Bronze Age. 88 1 diameter; 23 mostly pointed stones, larges t c. 8' high. At least 13 more stones have been removed. (Photo: Chris Jennings .)

6. Grey Wethers, double stone circle , Dartmoor, Devon . Bronze Age. The circles have been restored. ( Photo: Chris Jennings.)

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and with the general wickedness of woman. Witness the awful tradition associated with the Scorhill and Grey Wethers circles on Dartmoor. Faith­ less wives and fickle maids were forced to wash in the dismal Cranmere Pool, to run three times around Scorhill; they were driven down to the banks of the Teign to pass through a holed stone, and then to Grey Wethers, where they prayed for forgiveness. If not forgiven, they would be crushed by one of the stones, which were also said to turn on their bases at sunrise each day.

The game of tag has been called a survivor of rites going back to the labyrinth, to the scapegoat fool or sacrifice - "buck passing," quite liter­ ally, since the person who is "It" in games in some parts of England is still called Bull, Stag, or Old Horney. Francis Huxley points out that tag (or tig) is an "endless game" that circulates the touch - a kind of infectious­ ness , reflected in a similar game in Madagascar where the chaser is call­ ed "the leper." He says that children who end the day as It "seem genuinely ill at ease," as though some racial memory of sacrifical victims operated. 16

Performance Art grew in the 1970s out of a double and contradictory source - first, the extremely individualized, even narcissistic, develop­ ment of a fragmented Video and Body Art influenced by dance and based on personal, often virtually incommunicable sensations; and second, the politicized streetworks or "guerrilla actions" influenced by the anarchic Happenings of the early '60s and by radical theatre groups like the Bread and Puppet Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Teatro Cam­ pesino. Since 1980, having incorporated an increasing amount of textual and narrative components in the '70s, Performance Art has come full circle and is approaching "theatre" again. In the intervening decade, it engendered an interest in publicizing the private ritual or inventing new public rituals. These were an integral part of the whole "primitivizing" tendency of the recent avant-garde.

Some artists, like Charles Simonds in his private rituals ( see Chapter 11), chose to maintain a formal isolation while communicating, through

Ritual I 167

7. Betsy Damon . 7,000-Year-Old Woman . 1977. Street performance, New Yorh City . ( Photo: Su Friedrich. )

8. Bruce Lacey and Jill Bruce . Dawn Ritual. 1978. Tregeseal Stone Circle, Cornw all , England. ( Photo. Bruce Lacey and Jill Bruce .)

film, a communal content. Others, like Betsy Damon in her 7,000-Year­ Old Woman , projected their private rituals into the communal realm-the streets-in person. Drawing a circle or spiral of powdered pigment on the pavement, she created "a female space in the hostile city" and within it slowly divested herself of "the burden of time" in the form of hundreds of small bags of pigment which made up her costume. These she took from her body in a slow, repetitive motion, and distributed to onlookers, so they could make something of their own. (She found that generally girls trea­ sured the little bags and boys threw them at each other. ) In this feminist giving process, Damon hoped to rediscover the part of herself she did not know-her "woman line" -and simultaneously to communicate it to others. In subsequent works, in galleries and workshops and more public domains, she has used the same colorful little sacks to exchange gifts and messages with her audience. In her Blind Beggarwoman series, she col­ lected stories and secrets orally, making herself a repository of a new female history.

A number of contemporary artists travel to ancient sites to reenact their own versions of ancient rituals. Bruce Lacey and Jill Bruce, in England, have made this the core of their work. Though they are aware of the different theories of prehistory, as artists they do not feel bound to support any single one of them. Their method is quasi-mystical. In costume, they build impermanent ritual sculptures on the ancient sites and perform around them. Assuming that prehistoric art was created not for esthetic reasons , but for a specific purpose-"to make something happen" - Bruce and Lacey are convinced that rituals worked through contact with energies since lost to "evolving" humans. In the mid-'70s , they set out to reestablish that contact, and have sometimes been mysteriously effective.

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9A. Peter Kiddle and Public Works. To Hunt the Cutty Wren. 1981. Public performance at Stonehouse, Plymouth , England. The Bird of Air and Bird of Water are dancing here . (Photo: Graham Green .)

9B. Peter Kiddle and Public Works. The Stones and the Share. 1979. A Beltane rite pe1Jormed annually overnight until sunrise on May 1st at Down Tor circle and row, Dartmoor. This recreated ( imaginary) ri tual involves the personae of various Guardians , the Feast-Givers , the Acolytes of Sun and Wind , the Keeper of the Tali sman, and the Ha rvest Lord. Performed with "anxiety and awe," it is a composite story of ques t and initiation, of the death and miraculous rebirth of John Barleycorn, who was killed and sowed into the earth: "They let him lie fo r a long time then I till the rain from heaven did fall I then Little John sprang up again I and he did amaze them all." The piece was written and directed by Peter Kiddle; design ed by Roger Bourke . ( Photo.· Cathy Kiddle.)

Lacey and Bruce learned to dowse and found themselves "getting into some sort of communication with animals. " In 1976 they began to go to the "medieval festivals" the English love. At their first, they did a rain­ making piece that resulted in a violent thunderstorm, ending a drought. They did "a successful fertility ritual'' at the Cerne Giant in 1977. The night they went to Avebury to do a dawn ritual turned out to be the night of the Perseus meteor shower. ("There were suddenly golden embers of light falling down to the earth. We thought what the hell is that.") In September 1977 they made "a journey of personal discovery" around the so-called Glastonbury Zodiac-a rather vague composite of topographical features , aerially readable as the signs of the zodiac, set around the an­ cient spiral hill. 17 At each site they performed a different ritual to combine aspects of its sign: A corn dolly was made at Virgo, relating to the early August "First Fruits" festivals (see Chapter VI); a fire was made for Leo on the "lion's groin" at the top of Green Down; the autumn equinox was observed from Libra, on the bank of the river Brue; "leaf-fish" barges were launched for Pisces and a bull's skull was placed in the center of a maze for Taurus.

Bruce and Lacey believe their rituals to be transmitters of "a form of communication developed before language," once used by animals and humans. "We are still the same animal as ancient man. We haven 't changed at all genetically .... The incredibly exciting thing is that we still have this ability and can still use it." Their enthusiasm is contagious; their seriousness is not lugubrious. When asked by an interviewer if they felt their rituals were as "hilarious" as he did, they answered:

Yes, we enjoy them. But they're very serious for us when we're doing them. We saw a lovely film on television about a primitive tribe somewhere doing a whole ritual on stilts . . . as they fell off, everyone roared with laughter. So-called seri­ ous rituals operate on all sorts of levels. . .. England is a very inhibited country and if you do what we do you're looked on as masturbating in public, very self­ indulgent. So artists have to pretend they're not doing things about themselves . . . a lot of artists are doing it, but they keep it quiet. With us it's a whole life­ style, everything blended together-art, life, music, poetry, holidays, hobbies. We don't see how you can split these things up .... We're doing it like children. It's all for real. 18

Also in England, Peter Kiddle, collaborator/leader of the "Public Works" group, produces a larger-scaled and many-leveled combination of myth, archetype, theatre, and populist entertainment. Working with col­ leagues and students at Dartington College of Arts in Devon , his scripted rituals take place with a few people on Dartmoor or other rural sites, or with much larger numbers in an urban festival context. The larger pieces always involve the people who live or work in the locale: "We take on the forms of ritual, ceremony, and spectacle in an attempt to share in and with the possibilities of the people's relationship to themselves, their geographic and social landscape and the active and imaginative world within which these relationships are contained." 19 Their pieces are cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary-modern visual spectacles with a traditional moral.

9A.

9B.

--¥ . . ·. rr

10.

10. Christine Oatman. Tree Ferns. 1977. Slide-text piece, Yosemite, California. Frozen ropes, resembling giant prehistoric fiddle head f erns , rise ghostlike from the snow, bringing the past to the present through their natural spiral growth form. (Photo: Iris Laudig. )

11. Judy Varga. Table of Noon/Mat of the Moon (I planted gardens of fire/ confederations of fire). May 30, 1981 . Wards Island , New York. Concrete, light­ colored beach sand, aluminum shee ting , white candles in aluminum rings. Total dimensions: 50' x 30' x 9f'. Made in an abandoned concrete foundation nestled in a grove of trees on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, the piece was activated by a processional performance in which the candles were lit consecutively through the mazelike path. Thi s "rite of passage" was performed at twilight, which the artist associates with alchemical transformation , when "solar light/energy gives over to lunar light / energy ," with the body as its vehicle. Synthesizer music by John Watts accompanied the ritual. ( Photo: Ron Berlin. )

Both Kiddle's small participatory poetic pieces and his festival work and parades are narrative and participatory, but the latter are more accessible to the general public-enlivened by wonderful costumes and visual ef­ fects , such as huge-winged birds, masks, headdresses , fire, and music that alternates between avant-garde experimentalism and marching bands. Incorporating topography, local customs, folklore , and images everyone is familiar with, their central theme is always the struggle be­ tween good and evil. In the 1978 "street opera" WinterShip , Spring ar­ rived and after a good deal of horseplay banished the Winter King and burned his Longboat on the River Dart. In the 1979 SpringWake, the Winter King was expelled from the Norman ruins of the Totnes castle. RainDough took place in the spring of 1978 in the little stone village of Harbertonford. A zany and complex tale of a sleepy witch and white "Chromosol" allies from outer space bringing a celestial bread recipe co­ veted by a vile black water monster, its melodrama and broad humor did not confuse its ritual content. The crowds responded enthusiastically as the episodic procession made its way through the village. The water monster, escorted by wet-suited, goggle-masked cohorts with flame throwers , emerged from the stream that cuts through town. Later, bril­ liantly colored kites floated up from surrounding hills at a signal from the banner-swinging witch atop her trapezoidal tower ( see plate 7).

In the summer of 1979, Public Works did one of its most political pieces-The Travels of Peggy MacFail-which dealt with the housing problems in the inner city of Plymouth, where the performance took place. The dour heroine, mythical Peggy, pushing a pram containing all her worldly goods, led her family through a white, painted 150-foot maze cleared on a gravel railroad siding and viewed from above by the audi­ ence. In the center was a Maypole with radiating colored strings. The performance culminated an all-day parade around the neighborhood and commented with good humor and a tinge of despair on what happens when you are "caught in the coils of democracy." Unlike most of Kiddle's works, this one had no happy ending. The maze's ends were blocked and the family was simply left there, trying to find its way out.

Kiddle 's work brings ancient memories to modern country people, rural images to inner-city dwellers. He and his writer wife Catherine, who works with the Gypsies in Devon, lived in a caravan for several years as part of the "Welfare State" traveling theatre. He sees his major theme as the journey- seasonal, social, or individual. The performances are not private art enlarged for public consumption, but are engendered by the needs and involvement of the community in collaboration with artists. Costumes and props are all made on the spot from found materials, and although the story is preconceived, it is usually so archetypal that it adapts itself by association to local conditions. Although the audience for ephemeral streetworks like these is necessarily smaller than that for a permanent bank plaza monument, the ratio of emotional intensity is proportionately larger because of the intimacy of the form. The best chance for an effective public art may lie in just this intimacy, in provid­ ing an oasis of communication within the vastness and impersonality of public contexts.

Since 1970 Christine Oatman has also been working in both very pri-

Ritual J 171

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vate and communal modes. She brings to her art a "childlike" (but not childish) delight in tales and images and in making things and places with mythical meaning- such as sand castles and mandalas and mud­ pies and earth drawings. She makes her own fragile "landscape fan­ tasies" ( documented in series of color slides) , as well as making fantasy objects with children in schools and in parks. There is a touching in­ terplay between the two kinds of work. Making art this way "seems like the most natural thing in the world," she says, "and it's just what I did when I was a little kid." 20

Oatman's ephemeral sculptures and images in nature evoke a mixture of joy and melancholy that I also associate with fleeting experiences of natural beauty itself. She works on the seashore and in the hills around San Diego, among the flora and fauna in which she grew up. Her works are triggered by a fusion of the history of the area, her own dreams and fantasies , and things she reads, especially fairy tales - those of Hans Christian Anderson, in particular, because "nature always speaks to his heroines, and helps them find their ways out of the forest."

Oatman has woven webs in trees and bound their limbs (as has Donna Henes, though their styles are very different; see below). She made a wildflower flying carpet on the desert floor, and three years later "her children" made "sand carpets" of shells and colored sands on the beach. Stone Wave (1978) froze a wave in gray, white, and black pebbles. Snail Trails (1976) was made with glowing bits of multicolored litter on a dark street, and she has had children make mandalas ("worlds within worlds") from twigs and bits of trash, simultaneously cleaning the parks and mak­ ing art. (See also plate 1.) In Tree Ferns (1977), she recreated the giant spiral-headed plants of prehistory, inspired by Dylan Thomas' lines from "Fern Hill": "So it must have been after the birth/of the simple light/In the first spinning place."

Dennis Oppenheim's film Whirlpool: Eye of the Storm (1973) (see plate 5), aerially drawn in smoke over the desert, as though to draw rain, re­ calls the web of symbols woven by various mythologists between the spiral whirlpool or "turning mill" that is the center of the world, the world tree or axis pole on which it turns; between the tornado, the nebula, celestial patterns ( especially that of Saturn) and the pole star, and the origins of fire by friction between firesticks (the Cronus and Prometheus myths); and the dialectical conjunction of fire and water-"burning

12. John Willenbecher. Burning Tetrahedron. August 20, 1978. Artpark, Lewiston, New York. Wooden form , 24' each side. The piece consisted of the process of building a massive sculpture and then ritually returning it to the air and the earth. (Photo: Sarah Milstead .)

13A, B. Charles Wilson. Les Feux de Joie ("The Fires of Joy"). 1978-79. St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana. Photo-text works (3' x l' to 9' x 3') with traditional midwinter fire towers (20' to 30' tall). (Photos: courtesy Marianne Desan Gallery. )

13C. Traditional midwinter fires along the Mississippi River Levee . Mid-1970s . One of the tex ts in Wilson's piece notes that some areas burn over 100 of these towers which are sometimes as tall as 80 ': "The origins of the tradition are lost. Local historians figure it has been anannualeventfornearly 150years . . Traditionally the builders touch them off on their way to midnight mass." Some attribute the custom to French priests in the 1730s, others to Germans in the early 1800s. (Photo: Dr. Harold Trapido. )

water" -wells and stones and stars. This is the elaborate metaphor of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill (see Chapter III), which gleefully makes the whole world into a cosmological riddle revolving around this central image.

Many of the ancient monuments, considered here in isolation, were only parts of a whole we can barely imagine. They might have belonged to a network of alignments or may have been markers for journeys or ritual courses. Some were fire-beacons , or "beckoning" points to the traveler. Fires were an attribute of Mercury (Hermes), god of journeys and mar­ kers. Like labyrinths, fires also marked turning points in the year's jour­ ney, or, later, those in a nation's history. In England, fires are still lit on the ancient beacon hills to mark annual festivals and great events. The night before the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, while a huge fire­ works display lit London, "bonfires blazed on 101 hilltops across the kingdom in joyous prelude," burbled the New York Times (July 29, 1981); a still greater cross-country pyrotechnical display was mounted for the Queen's Jubilee. Perhaps the most impressive fire line across the earth and across time is an ode to eternity as well as to cycles. It is a Brahmin chant, a fire fertility ritual that has been sung over the land in India continuously for over 3,000 years. Any village can simply "plug into" it and release its timeless sparks in that particular place and time .

Evidence of ancient fires has been found in many stone circles, imply­ ing either fertility or funerary rituals, or, more likely, a synthesis of the two. All over the world, burning torches were used symbolically to fer­ tilize fields and orchards ("Firebrand burn. Every branch a basketful!"). Singed wreaths were brought back from midsummer fires and carefully preserved for a year. Girls watched the fires through garlands of flowers to strengthen their eyes. Animals were purified by smoke and driven through fires to protect them from disease. In Greece people jumped over fires on St. John's Eve, holding stones on their heads; later they threw the stones into the flames , made crosses on their legs , and bathed in the sea. In Europe, couples held hands and leapt over the fire; the higher they leapt, the higher the flax would grow. 21 (I leapt over a fire at the summer Hood Fair in Devon before I knew what it meant; despite my ignorance, there was a sense of liberation in the gesture itself.)

In the Brahmin Vedas , the four elements are contained in wood until the wood is "dismembered" by fire , a mystery reenacted every time fire is made with sticks. First the wood is divided in two; then the female half is laid on the earth and the male vertical is twirled upon it until flame en­ sues. In India this may have evolved into the appalling custom of suttee; in Christian times a misogynous reversal against "pagan beliefs" resulted in the Church's pruriently puritanical habit of burning witches at the stake, from Joan of Arc to the women of Salem. Francis Huxley suggests that the name Prometheus comes from the Sanskrit for firesticks, and that fire was indeed "stolen from the experience of sexual intercourse. "22

Robert Graves observes that the bed and the hearth were both altars; that Hestia, the hearth goddess, was first worshipped as a mound of glowing ashes-the burning omphalos or the birthplace of the earth, later trans­ lated into stone.

Another complex tradition called the "Need Fire" survived into historic

12.

13A.

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Ritual I 175

14. Still from the film Wicker Man, written by Anthony Schaffer, directed by Robin Hardy. 1973. According to Julius Caesar, the Druids burned their sacrifices en masse in colossal wicker figures, though the veracity of this is now doubted. ( Photo: British Lion Films. )

15. Sylvia Scott. The Centre in the Midst of Conditions. July 7, 1974. Ceremonial sculpture executed at Bow l Hill , Wooches ter, Gloucester, England. A ring and banners of fire built in the center of a natural ring on top of a hill radiated en ergy to the spectators in the valley; f rom four corners , four bearers ignited the structure's outer ring . For the asbestos-costumed figure lying at the center, "reality w as , for an instant, a dark sky and three rings of.fire, burning until spent." ( Photo: T. E. Moore.)

Europe A ritual unattached to the calendar but instigated when calam­ ity struck, the fire was made by friction of wood ( usually oak), sometimes with a pole and wheel, sometimes kindled by a naked boy and girl in a dark room, or by an old couple, or by naked men. The "fool," or victim, was chosen by having everyone place a stone in the Need Fire; its mark­ ings or disappearance the next morning determined the owner's fate. Europe, Russia, Mexico, Africa and China, Greece and Inca Peru all had annual customs in which every fire was extinguished for a period of time ( usually in spring) until a "new fire" had been ritually delivered to each house. In Africa old flames were put out and new ones begun after the death of the king, to show his successor's ability to "make fire ," to "create." According to a medieval legend, the new fires were first ob­ tained from a woman's genitals, without male aid. The Prometheus myth and "new fire" tradition might also indicate a transition between matriar­ chy and patriarchy. Heat and fire were originally maternal elements, and fire was "stolen from nature." Among the Celts , it was Halloween, or Samhain, when the "new fire" was kindled and the souls of the dead returned. The Mexican Day of the Dead in early November is still a fire festival. The other great Celtic fire ceremony was Beltane, the first of May; in Germany that is Walpurgisnacht, or Witching Night-also a favored time to bum witches in the Middle Ages.

Fire is a boundary - between health/luck/fecundity and illness/bad fortune/barrenness; between light and dark, or between life and death. It is the universal symbol of transformation, of soul escaping from body, and it has always been associated with sacrifice - human and animal. The victim was often the most beloved, since it was an honor to be chosen as the means of ensuring the community's continuing life in these micro­ cosmic death and rebirth rituals. At the tradition's most primal, it in­ cludes totemic cannibalism- rebirth through communal identification with the dead one's powers by consumption, which was later adapted to the Christian Mass. Eating oneself in the flesh of another is "a metaphys­ ical idea of great subtlety," in which the part becomes the figure for the whole. 23 There are a number of recorded customs involving the ritual burning of effigies, of people, of huge wicker figures filled with people, of snakes or animals, and winter ceremonies like one in Lincolnshire, England, where a "fool" with blackened face and stripped paper costume was set alight.

Among both the Aztecs and the Tupi Indians in Brazil, there was a sacrificial ritual in which the honored victim was tied with a rope that represented the umbilical cord as well as the death knell, symbolizing the connections between "the horror of parturition" and "the horror of death. "24 In medieval Europe the various midsummer burnings of the Green Man or Vegetation King were undoubtedly vestiges of more drastic ancient rites touching on the primal agrarian cycle. This is the sacrifice of the king, the divine child, the tree god, the year god, or the grain (known as John Barleycorn, the Wild Man, the Leaf Man, Dionysus and Trip­ tolemus, Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris). Born of Mother Earth, he grows from horizontal germination to verticality, becomes her lover, and is finally "decapitated" by his subjects so he can be ground between stones, con­ sumed again, returned to the mother to be reborn and keep the cycle

16A. Mary Beth Edelson . Fire Flights in Deep Space. 1977. Private ritual in Indian cave, Chico Mountains , California, with grinding stones.

16B . Mary Beth Edelson. Where Is Our Fire? 1979. Public ritual with hanging fire spiral. The performers drew in the air with torches and developed a visual, collective meditation at the "Feminist Visions of the Future" conference at Chico. (Photo: Mary Beth Edelson. )

16A.

turning. "The king is dead, Long hve the king, Hail Mary!" Thus ends The Golden Bough-Sir James Frazer's stupefying compendium of re­ lated myths.

Mary Beth Edelson's theme of restoring "a hving mythology that cuts across many areas" - political and spiritual- takes a Jungian approach to this central agrarian myth. Private and pubhc ritual performances are her prime vehicles. The private pieces she performs alone in some mean­ ingful place, using time-lapse photography to release the images that ex­ press her sense of the timeless landscape. In Yugoslavia, Iceland, and elsewhere, she has gravitated to sites where collective energies have been important in the past. She seeks out spectacular places-isolated caves, ruins, beaches, and barrens - the way traditional landscapists do, in order to make her connections to them tangible to those who are not

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Ritual\ 179

17. Mary Beth Edelso n. Centerin g; Ritual with My Daughter. 1974. Photographs. 32" x 32".

there. Sometimes she disappears into the place, becoming a stone pillar, painting her body, becoming a female-shaped blur wielding a line of light, a ghostly entity crossing barriers (see p. 18). She often deanthropomor­ phizes herself in order to become part of a broader :im:age of nature. In these photographic pieces, the viewer can identify, but n:0t participate ­ an appropriate response to any strong emotion in the television age.

In her workshops and public, participatory rituals, however, Edelson insists on a more challenging collaboration. These works take place in­ doors and out. She has burned spirals in the cornfields of Iowa, read from Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her while en­ throned in a vaginal cave-sculpture (Toothless ), invoked the spirits of past and future through the personal experiences of her audience/ collaborators. She uses stone and fire , light and dark, as her basic ele­ ments, and amorphous black robes which, when worn by women in rapid movement, take on lives of their own. Edelson is gradmilly evolving a communal vocabulary of gesture and image based on the symbolic trea­ sury of matriarchal myth: egg, shell, spiral, moon, horns, mandala, mound, and uroboros - the tail-eating snake. Her works insist on the function of art as a generator of emotions, ideas, and actions, though not without a leaven of humor that intentionally undermines the potential pretentiousness of her serious .goals.

The myth that is central to Edelson's rituals is that ,of Demeter and Persephone, commemorated ·by the Eleusinian mysteries which, like her art, were "mimetic of a journey to the other world to claim back from death the daughter of the Grain Mother Demeter, whose sorrow for her lost maiden could be assuaged only through the mystery ofrebirth."25 It is particularly meaningful to Edelson because she was denied custody of her young daughter after a divorce and spent years thereafter trying to confront and transcend her loss. In doing so, she discovered ( and is still discovering) the complexities of the Demeter/Persephone and Divine Son myths, which she has applied to private rituals with her cliildren.

Persephone and Demeter probably originated as parts of the same whole - the maiden and the mother/hag, three aspects of the original Earth Goddess who conoeived her son in a "thrice-plowed field." Until they were smothered by Christianity in the fourth ,century A.D. , the Eleusinian mysteries took place in ·September, at autmn11 ,s.owing. At their height, up to 30,000 initiates would prepare for six m0i:tlli.ths and then take the pilgrimage along the Sacred Road from Athens to Eleusis; its landmarks included a grove, a bridge over the "other world" (where masked men obscenely insulted the pilgrims), to the fertile plain where barley (the first cultivated grain) was grown, to the Maiden's Well, or Well of Flowers, and then to the temple in which the mysteries took place. The defamation of nature by "culture" is grotesquely illustrated by Eleusis today, its ruins trapped in the industrial wasteland that has re­ placed the fertile plain.

The British prehistoric monument most integrally concerned with this central cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, or death and fertility,is the great earth and stone complex at Avebury in Wiltshire, near the smaller and later Stonehenge. Since I can only touch on its forms and meanings here,

18. "The Barber's Stone," west of the south entrance, Ave bury. A 13-ton block excavated and reerected in 1938; beneath it was found the skeleton of a man killed by the falling stone during the 14th­ century destruction of the Avebury monument, instigated by the Church. (Photo: Chris Jennings. )

19. "The Devil's Chair," at south entrance to the Henge. One of the two larges t stones at Avebury. (Photo: Lucy R. Lippard .)

20A , B, C. Avebury: The Henge, the outer Stone Circle, Kennet Avenue stone at Avebury, Wiltshire, England; the ditched and banked Henge; the forecourt of Wes t Kennet Long Barrow with Silbury Hill in the distance. c. 2600 1.c. (Photos: Lucy R. Lippard .)

18.

19.

I recommend two very different views. They may seem to represent the poles and perils of academic and speculative treatments, but in fact they complement each other, bringing Stone Age culture to life. The two au­ thors are Aubrey Burl and Michael Dames. Burl is a traditional field archeologist and sworn enemy of the "speculators." Dames is a geogra­ pher/archeologist/art historian, and, significantly, a visual artist in his own right, whose "narrative" approach defies the conventional injunction of silence on "matters of faith and religion" with "no written evidence to back it up."26 Their books are Burl's The Stone Circles of the British Isles and Prehistoric Avebury and Dames' The Silbury Treasure and The Avebury Cycle.

The Avebury complex is dated from 3250 to 2600 B.c. It consists of the following six elements: the Sanctuary-now only post-hole remains in­ dicating the presence of an often-replaced, wooden, circular building, probably roofed, and a stone circle that was recorded in historic times, since destroyed; the curved Kennet Avenue, lined by a double row of giant stones, which leads from the Sanctuary to the Henge; The Henge, a grassy circle about 1,200 feet in diameter, banked and ditched to a depth of 50 feet , topped by a stone circle dated 2660 B.c. , and containing two smaller stone circles and a "cove"; the now totally lost Beckhampton Av­ enue of standing stones, continuing on the other side of the Henge; Sil­ bury Hill (dated c. 2600 B.c. ), a 130-foot-high conical mound with a 532- foot diameter (the largest known in Europe), made of earth over a round, tiered pyramid of chalk blocks ( see Chapter VI); and the West Kennet Long Barrow (c. 3250 B.C. , with a forecourt added c. 2600 B.c.) , a passage tomb with transepted chamber covered by an earth mound 340 feet long. (The whole Avebury area is also covered with barrows from different periods; Burl does not consider West Kennet as part of the complex in his book.)

Much of Avebury has been destroyed within historic memory in the name of two false idols-profit and puritanism (or property and Chris­ tianity, or ignorant greed and ignorant fear). Burl and Dames both detail the appalling story, providing a cautionary fable for our own equally ahis­ torical time. What we know of Avebury today is largely due to the detailed plans and research of John Aubrey in the seventeenth century and Wil­ liam Stukeley in the eighteenth, as well as to the excavations and restora­ tions of Alexander Keiller in the 1930s, documented by Dr. Isobel Smith. In the 1950s, the site, including much of the village that had been built inside the Henge, was donated to the National Trust through private con­ tributions.

The visible Avebury was built of earth and of 600 giant sarsen stones, reputedly weighing up to 90 tons. The sarsens are sandstone slabs found on the surrounding downs, naturally multicolored, pocked and eroded into extraordinary shapes. Sarsens (supposedly from Saracen or infidel) are also known as Bridestones, perhaps referring to the Celtic goddess Bride, associated with rivers and water, as is Avebury itself, lying at the conjunction of the rivers Kennet and Winterbourne, near Swallowhead Spring. The shapes of the sarsens have led to a variety of imaginative "namings" of Avebury components over the centuries, such as the Diamond Stone and the Devil's Throne. These may or may not reflect

Overlay I t 82 prehistoric functions. It has been surmised that the pairs. of facing "wide-hipped" diamonds and thinner, flat-topped stones in Kennet Av­ enue were female and male symbols. (Dames sees both as female-the goddess in her fertile and deathly aspects.) A now-destroyed holed stone has also led to innumerable hypotheses about sexual and astron<Dmkal rituals.

It is generally accepted that Avebury was primarily a ritual complex, though how it was used is much debated. Excavation has barely begun, but present data offer no evidence that the Henge and Silbury Hill were cemeteries. Isolated jaw, leg, arm, and skull bones of humans; deer and ox bones, and deer antlers have been found there, as have a few human skeletons at the feet of stones - probably sacrifices. The barrows in the surrounding countryside also seem to have been "shrines and temples:' rather than tombs, due to their lack of grave goods, the small, amount of spac:e alotted to chamber and the large amount to mound, aF1d alignments to sunrises and moonrises. Burl surmises that they were designed to "catch" sun or moon "as an act of symbolism" rather than for any scien­ tific purpose. (It should be noted here that Burl is not an aficionado of Alexander Thom's or any other astronomical theories;. see Chapter III.)

The monuments of Avebury are the largest of their kind m Engl:ciII!Idi.. For instance, Burl notes that" 15 Stonehenges could ha.ve fitted comfort­ ably into the North Circle."27 The nearby "cam,ewa.yed camp;' at Windmill Hill is the largest in the world. In 1911 it took fon.1it'· weeks to; reerect one 31 -ton stone with m0d~rn machfrrrery. TlIB HeNge- itsel!f'ha:s been estimated to have taken about 1,500,000 huma1ID.1 hours, or 10 to· 2©' years, before the stones were erected. The whole endeavor must ha.ve lasted over 100 years. "Avebury itself was built by a people driven by megalomania to create a colossal centre where their leaders lived and which would be used by everyone for their communal ceremonies. It was the center of their private world. "28

Half-hearted proposals by Burl and others that the Henge was intended for defense don't make sense; it took too long to build and he himseH' says that by the time the last quadrants of the great circle were completed, the steep-sided earlier ditches had already filled in. Nor do Thom's. astronom­ ical and mathematical hypotheses prove out here. N<Dr· are the aw.e:tmes· truly curved to make two serpents coupling in the Henge, as Stukeley and Dames would have it. They may have been a processional device deter­ mined by the meaning of the central ritual that took place there. Mircea Eliade suggests that funerary cults generally influenced and absorbed fertility cults, turning agrarian rites into ancestor worship. 29 Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend suggest that the whole agrarian cycle was preceded by the celestial cycle. 30

Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes posit Avebury as a transitional point, not only between Stone and Bronze Ages, but between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures: "The earth goddesses of phallic fertility rites which preoccupied the mind of Neolithic man ... lost their hold. There was a shift of interest from the earth and the womb upwards to the sun and the heavens - well symbolized by the change from the dark, closed tomb to the open, sun-orientated temple. "31

Burl and others draw "remarkable parallels" between Avebury's society

21.

21. Homed figure from Bus6 procession, Mohacs, Hungary. 1968. Thi s ceremony is probably traceable to the pagan rituals of the winter solstice; it is always heid on the seventh Sunday before Easter. That night a huge fire is built on the town's main square "to consume the miseries caused by winter." In the past. masked _figures symbolically ploughed up yards , pursued women across gardens with sticks , and made "movements unmistakably resembling those of the magic rites of fertility." (Photo.· Peter Komiss, from his book Heaven's Bridegroom, courtesy Corvina Press, Budapest, 1975.)

and rituals and those known among the North American Woodland In­ dians, the midwestern Adenas, the Hopewell and Mississippian mound builders. Excarnation-the "defleshing" of corpses left on platforms to dry so the soul could escape-was common in prehistoric Britain. Some­ times the bones were dried by fire (thus "bonefires") and important bones were apparently removed for ritual use. Burl sees "growing late Neolithic preferences for round houses and for rituals of the dead associated with water," conjecturing that there was once a charnel house on top of Sil­ bury Hill (as on North and Meso-American mounds) and that the Sanctuary was a mortuary where bodies were stored until buried, since many bones have been excavated nearby. He finally, but "very hesi­ tantly." pictures ceremonies taking place at Avebury at autumn, mid­ winter, and spring, "led by antlered medicine men or witch-doctors, the people dancing out the themes of death and rebirth, giving offerings, using human bones, and engaging in rituals of sex to bring back the warmth and richness of the summer soil." 32 Like many scholars , Burl traces the antlers from the Celtic horned god Cemunnos to today's re­ maining European horn dancers, noting that stags lost their antlers at the time of spring sowing and were symbols of regeneration, though he ig­ nores their association with the Great Goddess and the Virgin Mary, just as he disregards the ""female" lozenge symbols carved on ibones found at Avebury.

Burl ends his book on Avebury with Stukeley's tribute to these "last monuments of the patriarchal religion." He states unequivocally that he finds no British evidence for a Mother Goddess religion even in Ireland. Burl stands firm, so to speak, for a solar cult and a death-and-fertility cult which oddly omits the goddess from her necessary role therein. At the same time, however, he does acknowledge the Sacred Marriage rituals, the custom of maidens marking the first furrows; he sees the pitted hol­ lows in Kennet Avenue and the enigmatic pits filled with rich earth as offerings to the earth; he suggests that young girls were sacrificed at the Sanctuary and at Woodhenge "to give potency to the circles," that the antler picks were carefully buried in the Henge ditch as offerings because they were employed in "desecrating her," and that the perforated ox foot­ bones found in West Kennet might have been symbolic figures of "Death herself.''33

Reading Burl after Dames (I recommend the reverse process), I kept wondering how anyone so deeply involved in his subject as Bil!lrl could resist giving it more life. I kept wanting to p.at him on tt:ib,e back and say, "Go ahead, man, iive it up . .Speculate a lit:tle !" However, his understanda­ ble dependence on those "remarkable parallels" between Neohthic/ Bronze Age and Native American mccmUJ.mcents , and occasional grndging references to Eliade or Frazer, emerged more fully fl.esh,ed in his new book-Rites of the Gods-where ·scho.larnhip and cauticoll's imaginatinn are felidtously merged.

The appropriately named Dames, on the other band-whose earlier book on Silbury Hill is subtitled "The Great Goddess R,ediscGv-ered"­ begins his book on Avebury with the assertion that the entire oomplex re­ flects the symbolic <Seasonal cycle of tbe Great or Triple GGddess, "a body architecture . . . to be viewed as aspects of a supernatural mretaholism. "34

Overlay I t 84 This is the crux of his differences with Burl. In his own evocative if un­ provable reconstruction of an agrarian death and renewal cycle, Dames refuses to disregard all the data Burl mistrusts or downright disbelieves, such as clues from etymology, place names and folklore , as well as megalithic mathematics, science, and astronomy. As an unashamed romantic, Dames does not sound awkward and embarrassed when he of­ fers poetic speculation. His compelling network of interrelationships is (perhaps dangerously) welcome amidst the dry denials of any imagina­ tion that characterize so much of the archeological literature.

In brief, Dames sees the Sanctuary as the site of puberty rites for girls in springtime; the Henge as a summer "wedding ring" (Kennet Avenue from the Sanctuary being the girls' processional row and Beckhampton Avenue the boys') ; Silbury Hill as the pregnant vegetation goddess giving birth at Lammas in early August (when the hill's construction began); and the West Kennet Long Barrow as the hag-the death or "long," "winter," or "bone" goddess - where the bones/seeds germinate before rebirth begins the cycle again. Referring to topography and mythology as well as to archeological evidence, Dames integrates symbol, ritual, and myth with every natural feature of the area and with its human-made counterparts. No clue is ignored; no intuition, however far-fetched, is discarded. In the process he makes a convincing, if generalized, case for the resemblance of the hill and the barrow to the forms of Old European Neolithic goddesses, and in each phase of the cycle he introduces a wealth of natural phenomena to support his reconstruction of each calen­ drical ritual.

Dames says Avebury was chosen as the site for this major temple to the "ever-changing Goddess" because "there the deity was seen to function through the fortuitous alignment of two river confluences with sunrise and moonset positions at the summer quarter days . . . interpreted as a divine exhibition of harmony between underworld, terrestrial plane, and sky." 35 Water- its conjunction with the eye goddess and the eye-womb goddess ( who is presumably pictured in the Brittany tomb engravings) and its seasonal appearance and disappearance in the Avebury rivers - is central to Dames' thesis. Flowers, shells, the wavelike masonry in the West Kennet Long Barrow, perforated ox bones and meanders on pottery from Avebury, artifacts and anthropology of other cultures are brought in to weave a fabric of associations. He ties the feast of Saint Martin to the ox (mart) , to the moon and horns and goddess motifs; he shows folk cus­ toms connecting "snail stones" (ringed cylinders of blue glass which cured sore eyes) with the spiral snail shells found in the Sanctuary with the maze or Troy dances that might have taken place there, and with the universal vocabulary of the snake as androgynous fertility symbol, play­ ing with the conjunction of head and genitals (male and female, seed and vulva) in many cultures.

This connection, in turn, Dames relates to the Silbury spring­ Swallowhead- to the Celtic worship of water before sun and the elabo­ rate Celtic mythology of the head, the fact that like the snake, "the Great Goddess and her river Kennet runs into the ground in late autumn and re-emerges in the spring. "36 He throws an etymological curve with the derivation of Kennet from cunt ( cunning, ken, cunicle, cunctipotent,

22. Judith Todd. Hill Reclamation Ritual. 1978. San Francisco.

23. "Clooties," County Leix, Ireland. Rag offerings to holy wells or natural water sources. ( Photo: M. Andrain­ Arthaud. )

cunabula)37 and marks alignments not only between significant geo­ graphical and stone features in the landscape, relating their proportions and measurements, but offers the imagery described by these lines as part of the whole symbolic vocabulary of Neolithic cultures.

Dames' is a visual theory, which is probably why I am so taken by it. He ends with a triumphal 33-mile aerially perceptible image of the "com­ posite goddess" as a micro/macrocosmic life symbol, at which point I sus­ pect his insights finally run away with him. Nevertheless , the pictures he evokes are firmly based in what little we know of Neolithic belief. As such they can be seen as a kind of parallel myth for contemporary perceptions of prehistory. His view of a collaboration between natural and human­ made land forms is partly supported by Vincent Scully's studies of the Greek temples and Rio Grande pueblos; also by Francis Huxley's innu­ merable examples, such as the Aboriginal interpretation of the entire sur­ face, detail, and features of Ayers Rock in central Australia as a compo­ site mythical history of the race , even though to an uninitiated eye many of the figures , scenes, and animals would be invisible. Citing such exam­ ples, Dames recommends that English archeologists who deny the valid­ ity of such material "should watch more television . . . to hear the living

22. voices of prehistoric people in the Sudan, New Guinea and Amazonia saying aloud and clear, as a statement of fact: 'this low-lying swamp is our Mother's groin; this dry upland her head."' 38

23.

The Hopis in Arizona say of the twin San Francisco peaks there that they are "our mother; we nurse from these peaks for religious survival." On sunrise of November 1, 1978 (Celtic New Year and now the feminist New Year), Judith Todd related this and a mass of other information about hills sacred to the Mother Goddess to her own Twin Peaks Ritual as part of a "hill reclamation" series in San Francisco, California. Over 200 people participated in this public event; many others participated elsewhere by sending rituals and artifacts to be used, and by starting their own hill rituals at sunrise the same day. "Our web of rituals symbol­ ically reclaimed this whole continent," Todd wrote, "one huge mountain, as the body of the Great Goddess. "39 The procession up the hills formed a figure eight or infinity sign-"a unique kind of spiral form which is at once divided into two halves, yet whole and never ending," recalling an­ cient labyrinthine dances. At its culmination , the participants bound themselves to each other with knotted cords and chanted artist Donna Henes' Amulet Mandala: "tying a knot is making magic./making magic is making love./making love is typing a knot./tying a knot is making a connection./making a connection is making love."

Henes, who calls herself "Spider Woman," has for years been making public rituals designed to "make connections." She sees her sculptural webs in urban and natural settings as "true maps of my unconscious.

. . . Now I know it isn't circles and holes that are feminine , but the very compulsion to build webs. Web building is the most basic female instinct. Webs are what hold the world together. "4 0 One of her earliest public works-The Brooklyn Bridge Event of 1974-involved making plaster face masks of passers-by, who then stayed to make a mask of the next person, forging a sensuous and communal "bridge" between individuals and between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

24A.

24/B.

24A. Dbwnm R.enes, . SpiderWoman's, Web. 1975. New Yo nk:G:itiy1 Public sculpture.

24B . Donna Han es. Dressingi,Our Wounds in War.JTI1ClotheS> 198V: Wards Island, New York. ( Photo: Sarah-Jenkins. )

25. Donna Henes. Great Lakes Great Circle. 1978 . Ritual.

25 .

Ffenes, tlmn1 be~n' to make· actual· webs and c~c:oons as sculptures, drawing.random par,ticipants~into the, [mildihg,pme.esffi This led her into studies of the Great Goddess .. On the winter solstice of 1975, "the darkest day of the year," she lit a fire on. a New York beach and led a dance to "invoke. the female forces of'th-1.:t unixr.erse present in. alL people." The an­ nouncement ( used' yearly. since} spirals: a text over a'. photo of a single breast. On the spring equinox, Herres- annually performs her most popu­ lar public ritual - Eggs on End, Standing.on Ceremony-in which at just the right magnetic moment, she (and everyone) can make eggs stand on their ends, possible only at this moment. Widely reported by television and newspapers, this ritual is on its way to becoming a "folk custom."

Another ancient custom Henes has revived is that of tying "clooties," .. as the Irish call them, or bits of rag 01: clothing, to trees ( or by wells and stones associated with fertility). She' collects clothes from her friends , tears them into strips;. and ties them on gi;asses , hushes, or trees in parks and other public places. Continuing the winding, wrapping, swaddling process that has characterized the work of many women abstract sculptors, Henes uses line to transform landscape, trees, herself, and others,. In the 1978 Great· Lakes Great Circle traveling ceremony per­ formed. at lakes and Indian mounds., in t,n.e Mid1West, Hen es did a chant­ ing; "head-wrappin~:' ritual from which she emerged a "source-erer, knot ti~r,. weh:weaver, shaman, dreamer, d'arucer, bruja , witch (which means woman),. macro/micro cosmic traveller." Tne chant ends "200 years ago I wcmld.have-, been bumt. '.'

Pernap.s Henes'·most moving accretion of-healing, weos-, and knots was her l98@Dressing Our Wounds in Warm Clothes, executed over almost a month's time at a psychiatric hospital on Wards· Island in New York City. 41 Using donated rags, permeated with others'' lives , she tied 4,159 knots- on the hospital grounds, interacting all the while with patients, staff, and onlookers; performing cerern.orues; thinking of women and war as she tore her bandage.like strips; chanting for peace; making a new language that confuses the sick and the well, a language of knots recal­ ling. quipus, worry beads, rosaries, and other such repetitive devices for health and transformation.

1B Ca:Lifurnia in 1978, as, part of a:. series; in which he identifies with plants~. Stephelll' WhisleF "d/riessed". tfue- hmbs of a line of trees in black "habits for the Winter Solstice" - mourning for their leaves, their pro­ tection against the· winter. In 1976 Rosemary Wright made an artist's book about binding herself to a beech tree, as though being grafted back into nature. Henes was wrapping branches with red cloth long before she found out that it was a grave-marking custom of the Iroquois. In a cave on Crete, sacred to the goddess of childbearing, bits of cloth and pins were found in association with a large phallic stalactite. Strips of paper and cloth at shrines are also common to Denmark, North Africa, Tibet, and the Orient, especially the Japanese female-oriented Shinto re­ ligion. Into the nineteenth century, in Central Europe, a barren woman placed a new chemise on a fruitful tree on the eve of St. George's Day, and the next morning, if she found any living creature on it, she put it on and her wish was fulfilled. Similar birth and healing traditions are at­ tached to holed trees and holed stones, with their obvious birth imagery.

26. Men-an-tol (" Holed Stone"). Bronze Age, c. 16th century B.C. Cornwall, England. Uprights , 4t' high, holed slab 4' across . There appear to have been four stones , one now fallen; those three still standing were once arranged in a triangle, but the original placement and use are unknown. Holed stones are associated with healing and may be the remnants of"portholed" entrances to tombs , thereby associated with the birth passage and rebirth rites . Naked children were once passed three times through the hole of men-an-tol and then drawn along the grass three times toward the east to cure rickets and scrofula. Prophetic qualities were also attributed to the stone; in the 19th century, if two brass pins were laid on the stone it would make them move and answer questions " through some unknown agency." (Photo: Lucy R . Lippard .)

27-28. Ree Morton. To the Maids of the Mist. 1976. Artpark, Lewiston, New York. (Photos: courtesy Max Protetch Gallery .)

26.

The best-known modem depiction of these traditions is Arshile Gorky's painting Garden in Sochi (1942), recalling a similar well and rag-tree in his native Armenia.

For some artists, the notion of ritual is used to provide a flavor of am­ biguity or an implied solemnity; it is in other words a formal component. For a rare few, art has become a personal counterpart of religion. For others, the "ritual gesture," although never to be repeated, has the thera­ peutic value of an exorcism both for artist and participants. Ree Morton, in the summer of 1976 at Artpark on the Niagara River, knit past and present, self, history and natural forces in a piece called To the Maids of the Mist. It was sparked by a local Indian legend about the annual sac­ rifice of a "bride of the river," who was sent over Niagara Falls in a canoe filled with flowers and fruits. Morton dedicated her piece to these women and called it "a symbolic rescue," a "gesture toward being female." She decorated a ladder and two life preservers with modeled ribbons and roses. The ladder was placed between the cliffs and the river; one of the "wreaths" was tied to the shore and floated nearby; the other was con­ nected by a 70-foot rope to the artist's waist and was carried away by the strong current. When the rope was taut, Morton cut it loose, and the wreath floated free: "The rescue has become a memorial event." It was only after the piece's completion that she (a mother of teenage children) recognized its associations with the umbilical cord and the weaning process.

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29. Hera. Lifeways. 1977. Performan ce at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

30. Ulrike Rosenbach. Entwicklun g mit Julia. 1972. Videotape.

30. Adrienne Rich has suggested that an aspect of the feminist identifica-

tion with the Great Goddess is related to a lack of mothering in one's own life. 42 Yet it has also been employed by Edelson and many other women artists to understand more fully maternal ties with their own children, to universalize and redignify the denigrated roles of childbearing and child­ rearing. This intention seems best communicated when acted out, in time, in photo sequences, or in repeated performances. Hera's Lifeways , performed in Boston in 1977, followed a black-garbed "hag" as she resur­ rected (gave birth to) a nude young woman from an elliptical tomb, and led her through a maze and a series of ritual actions.

In 1972 in Germany, Ulrike Rosenbach bound together her own and her daughter's bodies with a very long bandage of transparent gauze; the rhythm of the wrapping, embracing motion was echoed in sounds of deep breathing. This might have been seen as a reverse birth piece, retying the umbilical cord, grafting her child back to her self. Rosenbach's video and performance work varies in subject but almost always refers to mythical or historical women's power. Mirrors and headdresses are her central props. In Mon Petit Chou (1973) she attached layers of cabbage leaves around her own head by wrapping them round and round with thread, making herself "the heart" and "the center," part of nature , as well as playing off the French term of endearment which makes the object of affection into an object of nature. She repeatedly interprets woman as the magnetic center of energy and, conversely, as a prisoner in a cage of her own image. In Projec tkinem (1974), Rosenbach used the mandala form, borrowed in this case from the Sioux Indians, replacing their central tree with a turning video monitor. She might have departed from a passage of Black Elk Speaks: "In the old days, when we were a strong and happy

31A. Geoffrey Hendrichs . Body/Hair, May 15, 1971. A purification performance in which he shaved off all body hair while leaving the hair on his head, as "a shedding of shin," and return to puberty. (Photo: Valerie Heroovis .)

31B. Stephen Whisler. Plant Work #2. 1977 . 3 photographs. 20" x 24". From a series of works about "a concrete and metaphorical union between man and plants, man's need to appropriate the means of life from them, to take the energy of the plant and transfonn it into his own." Here Whisler expresses the classic nature/culture split by inflicting damage on a "crotched" tree and then "sharing the pain" by bleeding into it .

31C. Dennis Evans. Instrumen t Case for Wind, Rain and Percussion. 1976. Porcelain , wood, thread . 36" x 28" X 26".

31 D. Nigel Rolfe. Markings. 1978. Black dust , white dust , light , sound. Perfonnance based on the stone inscriptions at the Irish Boyne Valley passage graves (New Grange, Dowth, Knowth). Moving in the dust marked with prehistoric motifs, the artist uses his own body to make "a landscape of dust , an echo of an idea which is both memory and intention," while the audience thinks of the ancient spaces­ "the peace there, the wind and the earth, the past and the future."

people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation , and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. "43

"On its most integral level, ritual is the interface between Nature and Culture. "44 It is not, however, incompatible with political struggle. The best modern model is the way the Native American people have de­ rived communal strength from resurrecting lost or disappearing beliefs. Jamake Highwater, distinguishing between ritual ("an unselfconscious act without deliberate 'esthetic concerns'") and art (" the creation of an exceptional individual who transforms his experience into a metaphoric idiom"), observes that art is unnecessary in tribal life so unified that communication is part of life. It is "only when the uniformity of social values in a group begins to shatter that meaning in the arts comes into existence .... Both white and non-white dancers have something in common: they're both aliens standing outside the value systems of the dominant culture. "45

31A.

31B.

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32. Miriam Sharon . The Desert People. (A) At Ashdoda Harbor, T el Aviv . 1978. (B) In Bedouin village in the desert .

Miriam Sharon's various Desert Projects (since 1975) combine several such elements - a ritual process intended to reestablish bonds between people ( especially women) and nature, the relationships of nomadic tents and dwellings to the land, and the political struggle of the Bedouins in the Israeli desert to maintain a way of life that is under attack by modern bureaucracy. With workers on the Tel Aviv waterfront, wearing "prehis­ toric" earth-covered costumes, she performed participatory rituals deriv­ ing from her work with Bedouin women in the desert. Sharon was at­ tempting to communicate to urban Israelis the plight and beliefs of the Desert People, whose rituals are being diluted and forgotten as they are forced to abandon their traditional nomadic way of life and are herded into cement compounds. Workers wearing the desert costume found themselves taking on the "skins" of their culturally distant compatriots. Sharon's art, in the desert, or in city factories and public places, rein­ forces Bedouin beliefs without imitating them. She brings the notion of ritual and play into the lives of people to whom "high" art is unfamiliar. Ashdoda Harbor, where the Tel Aviv waterfront performance took place in 1978, is named after the Great Goddess of the Sea People in the Canaanite period. Sharon also recalls the history of the desert oasis ruins and their resident female deities in an ongoing piece called Black Earth-A Tour Project . She sees her contribution as the "transmission of earth energies into a dying civilization. "46

Many of the feminist rituals I've mentioned here have also been in­ spired by the political structures of the Women's Liberation Movement, such as the leaderless meeting, consciousness-raising, going around the circle, and criticism/self-criticism. The responsive and respectful circle of private to public to private is offered in a spirit of intimacy as a means to strengthen the feeble bond between artist and viewer in a society where "uniformity of social values" has indeed shattered. These collectively generated rituals expand contemporary art by creating their own audi­ ences and by acknowledging the importance of exchange between artist and audience.

JC. ID.