I awoke this morning near the end of a rare Christmas solar eclipse with fierce desert winds howling around my roof and through the eucalyptus and pine trees.  On the California coast where I live, only 20% of the eclipse was visible, so I hadn't gotten up to see it -- nevertheless, I was aware of its unusual energies across North America.  Perhaps that's why my plans for the morning were so unexpectedly altered.

I planned to begin the day typing revised pages of a science fantasy novel I wrote nearly twenty years ago for a BA in Creative Writing; I love the book and was looking forward to working on it today.  Instead, lying in bed thinking of the birth of light signified by this day, of the feminine moon eclipsing the sun on light's birthing-day, of the fertile seeds of light quickening within realms of creative darkness, of my fragrant Christmas tree, whose lights represent those same mysteries, of the little harps and musicians, jesters and Father Christmases, Green Men and Wise Women, owls, deer, goats, bears, and firebirds with which I'll trim my tree later today, the idea for a new webpage was suddenly born -- and I had no choice but to follow my excitement and begin the page.

I have few links for it yet -- they'll arrive gradually.  But as someone who has moved within realms of creativity and the imaginal all my life, I'd like to share my thoughts on myths about artists and creativity.......

Navajo Corn Maiden
[Negativized]
Fr. John Guiliani
[Courtesy of Bridge Building Images]

A sacred Navajo narrative comes to mind this morning: it is about Isanaklehe, Changing Woman.  After her child-bearing years, the Sun, her mate, convinced her to move to an island in the Pacific where, like Shiva, another divine dancer, she would spend her time dancing in a hogan made of whiteshell, turquoise, abalone, and black jet.  After many years, one of the elder deities, Talking God, brought two human children so that she might teach them the rituals that, until then, had been known only to the gods.  She taught them the chants and dances, but no sandpaintings, for they were as yet unknown.

The children returned to their people and shared the sacred rituals.  As the years passed, people began to forget certain things necessary to the rituals.  Changing Woman knew that she had to create a memory-device to help the people but she did not know how.  She went into a cornfield, sat under a great cornstalk (the Navajos' Tree of Life) and had a sing over herself.  Praying, going deeply within her own sacred being, she found the images that would create a new art form, one never before seen: sandpaintings.  From that time, the new art was woven into the existing fabric of ancient words and movements, and the rituals survived, fresh and potent.

Anthropologist and Buddhist teacher, Joan Halifax, commented in a 1996 interview that:

Traditionally, there are three female archetypes: the maiden/virgin, the mother, and the crone.  I think there is also a fourth, and that is the woman of craft.  She is the woman who takes her creativity and turns it toward the healing of the world.  She can be a weaver of textile or a weaver of text.  I think that's where the women of the twenty-first century will find themselves.  They will be virgins, mothers, crones and wise women, and many of them will be women of craft.

Changing Woman's creation of a new art form out her own depths speaks to this archetypal theme of "women of craft."  There are men of craft too, and as difficult as the artist's path usually is for women, it isn't necessarily any easier for men.

Yei Bi 'Chai Dance, Navajo
by Wayne Beyale
(Cover of Stars of the First People, Dorcas S. Miller,
Pruett Publishing, Boulder, CO, 1997)

Here again, a haunting and sacred Navajo narrative comes to mind.  Since nights are longest at this time of year, winter was the traditional time for the nine night Navajo ritual known as the Night Way (or Night Chant), a powerful, difficult ritual for curing blindness, paralysis, and related disorders.  The sacred narrative for this ritual is exceptionally rich but I especially love the bleak portion where its two young culture-heros have lost all hope.  One brother is blind, the other crippled; the blind one carries the crippled one, guided by the cripple's eyesight.  They have exhausted all their energies trying to convince the gods to help them, but the deities have only mocked the children and turned a deaf ear.

The boys have no choice but to give up.  They wander off alone, rejected, and completely abandoned.  Out of that moment of utter desolation, music arises in the soul of one boy and he begins to sing.  His brother joins in.  They have no hope, no further recourse, no future, nowhere to go, no one to help them and yet, in that darkest, most anguished place, music somehow erupts.  That human music is so pure that it wrings even the hearts of the gods.  They heal the children and then, so that such healing will henceforth be available to the Navajo people as well, they teach the boys the crucial prayer-chants, dances, and sandpaintings of the Night Way.

As these two sacred Navajo narratives show, deities as well as mortals are involved with the "creative impulse."  There are countless such examples: Shiva dances in the Himalayas; the Hopi Kachinas dance in the San Francisco Mountains near Flagstaff; Hathor dances in Egypt; Uzume dances with bawdy merriment outside Amaterasu's cave in Japan; out in space, India's primal seers (rishis) dance all of creation into existence as they kick up the dust of swirling stars.  Ireland's Brigid is connected with metal-working, so is Greece's Hephaestos, who makes magical jewelry for Aphrodite, just as dwarves make jewelry for Freya in Teutonic myth.  Athena invented the trumpet, Pan the pipes, Hermes the lyre, Hathor the tinkling sistrum, Brigid the keening (a form of funeral lament).  Medusa was murdered but her immense creative impulse survived in her son, Pegasus, the winged horse, whose hooves churned up the sacred waters of inspiration for the Muses; the Muses in turn churn up that impulse in each of us, inviting us to give voice and shape to our inborn creativity.

Everywhere and among all peoples the creative impulse surges strongly, finding new channels of hope and wonder............
 

Selected References:

Davidson, H. R. Ellis.  Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe: Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions.  Syracuse University Press, 1988.

Halifax, Joan: personal communication from Bronwyn Jones.

Jenks, Kathleen.  "Changing Woman:  The Navajo Therapist Goddess," in Psychological Perspectives, Autumn 1986, published by the Jung Institute of Los Angeles.

Matthews, Washington.  The Night Chant: A Navaho Ceremony.  University of Utah Press, 1995.

Monaghan, Patricia.  The New Book of Goddesses & Heroines. Llewellyn, 2000.
 

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