Last summer, my sister Gay and I went on a pilgrimage to meet the Celtic Goddesses. We flew to London, rented a car, and took off on a meandering three week magical odyssey that neither of us will ever forget. We drank from sacred wells, gathered herbs and flowers from sacred sites, danced in stone circles, and buried silver snake charms in secret places across Ireland. It was a period of mystery and celebration, of moments so filled with the joy of being alive that Christians call them "grace" and pagans "immanence." And for me, the greatest magic took place on an island located in the waters between the Atlantic and the North Sea, just north of the Scottish Highlands.
The Ring of Brodgar lies on the main island of the Orkneys, on a narrow land bridge between the small lochs of Harray and Stenness. Both can be seen from the center of the Ring. The day we were there was in June, but the wind whipped across the ocean and brought a biting cold onto the land. It blew a large group of German tourists back onto their bus and out of sight. Gay and I were alone. There were no fences, no guards, just two women and the huge standing stones. The circle was so overwhelming that I had to ground myself. My sister, a visual artist, had no such need, but joined me in huddling down behind a hill of sea grass and pouring over the information we had gathered on the Ring.
Brodgar is a henge monument, which means that there is an earthen ring made by a ditch and outer bank that encircle the stones. The ditch was originally 10 feet deep and 30 across, cut out of solid rock with horn picks and stone axes. Two causeways cross the ditch, in the NW and SE. Originally there were 60 standing stones, all placed evenly 6 degrees apart around a space that was 104 feet in diameter. Thirty-six stones still stand, others, fallen, lie on the ground. Experts are uncertain exactly when it was built and the center of the Ring has never been excavated, though neolithic pottery has been found nearby. Best guesses put the construction at about 3000 bce, and estimate that it would have taken some 80,000 human hours to construct. It was clearly a great ceremonial center; "experts" link it to the moon.
Having retreated to the printed page to deal with the onslaught of sensual information (as intellectuals are wont to do), I was finally ready to deal with the stones.
We walked the circle slowly. I touched each stone, sometimes the touch lingered and became a caress. I pressed my cheek against a few, listened at another. I don't know why, what I expected to feel or hear. I was amazed at how thin yet massive they were, three times my height and only inches in depth. There was a sense of fragility about them that their age belied. We completed the circle and then walked through the dark heather to the very center of the Ring. Gay and I began a soft Maaa chant that was picked up by the wind and blown out to sea. I knelt to gather heather and, whether it was the solitude, the air of mystery, or my own expectations I don't know, but I had an incredible feeling of gratitude and peace. I was very reluctant to leave, but the wind finally drove us on. I took several rolls of film, knowing that I couldn't capture what I saw, much less capture Brodgar.
That night I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life. I was at the Ring. There were other women there with me, one next to each standing stone. The full moon washed everything silver, the stones, our faces, our clothes. I looked into the eyes of the women at either side of me and smiled. At that moment I knew that this was the 13th full moon of the year, and every girl who had turned 12 that year was waiting on the other side of the causeway to cross over and come into the Ring. The numbers were very clear to me; I knew them with absolute certainty. I don't remember the ceremony in my dream, I don't know if it was a dedication or an initiation. But it definitely was a rite of passage that welcomed these girls into womanhood. There were moments in the dream where I was a 12 year old girl myself, others when I was a woman. I know I was profoundly moved during the ceremony because I was participating in something terribly important and wonderful.
I woke
to a long-haired sheep staring in the window of the small B&B where
we had spent the night. But I couldn't shake the feelings of mystery and
magic. I told my sister, who immediately
exclaimed that my dream was
similar to revelations in the Bible. As an artist who works with form and
color, Gay sees some things immediately, while I am still struggling
with them to take shape. But when she said this, I felt the certainty of
"fit." Yes, that is exactly what my dream was, a revelation.
But I don't know if it revealed the past or the future. What I do know is that every semester young women come into my classroom seriously wounded by the initiation that patriarchal society has made them undergo in the attempt to shape them into future wives and mothers. Unlike what boys of their age experience, girls' physical freedom is curtailed and they begin to dramatically narrow their aspirations and dreams. They have learned that their bodies are unclean, that they don't (and can't possibly) meet the cultural expectations for beauty, that there is still a tremendous double standard for sexual behavior where good girls don't, fat girls can't, and nice girls do but don't really enjoy it, and, besides that, there is something really bad about sex anyway. In class we explore these issues and discuss research showing that, at puberty, girls tend to loose the intellectual edge they've had over boys in school, their math skills begin to falter and their self-images become fragile. We talk about the process by which this happens and why, and how all this contributes to women's oppression. And the students write letters they may never mail to the mothers who taught them survival techniques for a culture that is racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic. Then they plan how they will greet the first menstrual period of the daughters they themselves may one day have.
So whether or not my dream showed the past or not is irrelevant to me now. It is clearly my vision for the future. Let us create rituals that welcome girls into the wonder of womanhood, of personhood, of adulthood. I'm not an idealistic dreamer; I'm not suggesting that ritual and education alone are enough to change the world, or even one small corner of it. The challenge of Brodgar is to create a world where these rituals are a welcomed part. That means massive social change, and this can only be done by many of us doing hard work on many different levels....in Congress, in front of family planning clinics, in the classrooms, in sacred space. Through being and doing, we learn the importance and power of community. In this way the Goddess, whether female divine or metaphor, manifests Herself as action, as movement, as a Movement, and the magic of the Ring of Brodgar is available to us all.
Blessed Be.