Lovebite by John Moore & John Moore

Author:John Moore & John Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: law, myth, patriarchy, sex, sexuality
Published: 1990-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ball constructs the sweat lodge, the means of renewal, but the act of communal revitalization must come through the members of the community exercising mutual aid. As they do so, Ball — terminating a process inaugurated by the woodcutters’ destruction of the forest and women’s rites — cuts down the World Tree with an axe taken from his shamanic medicine bundle. The inhabitants of the old order, the old world symbolized by the lodge which will be demolished by the fall of the arboreal axis mundi, are urged to emerge and redeem themselves. All are invited and all respond. This is not a Judaeo-Christian apocalypse with distinctions drawn between saints and sinners. The inhabitants ask what they can do to be “safe at last”. They cannot do anything — neither good works nor faith will save them — apart from accept cosmic processes. The control complex desire to leap off the wheel of reincarnation, to be finally secure in the heavenly eternity of a patriarchal god, remains an illusion. Assurance resides in harmonization with karmic cycles of life, death and rebirth. For with this acceptance arises the possibility of resurrection. Hence the apocalyptic renewal, where the dead are brought back to life, and the living are rejuvenated. Those who were carried or “walked” into the lodge, “rushed” or “bounded” out. Infused with energy, they become “whole”.

Echoing Ball’s plunge, they all immerse themselves in the water, a futher cleansing which physically complements the ritual purification of the psyche in the sweat lodge. Submersed in the womb of all earthly life, the oceanic consciousness of the primal mother, they are reborn into totemic consciousness stripped of their clothes and their fear of death. “When they came to the surface, no longer fearful, but freshened and vigorous, they all swam back to shore. Most but not all remembered their former homes and villages. These Ball instructed to make their way back to their kinfolk and friends. But some had been dead so long they had no memory whatever of former times. These gathered together and approached Ball, saying to him:’... our Elder Brother, let us join you and form our own village together. Let us make our own ... clan together’. These new companions and kinfolk Ball gathered around him, leading them and Uncle back to Grandmother’s lodge, where they lived together with great happiness for many years” (Clifton 1984, p.35). [72] Unlike Styx, the Great Lake does not induce oblivion, but remembrance, and with the return of cult-lore memory — Mnemosyne, mother of the muses — the poetry of iconic language becomes generalized once again. Global dreamtime can recommence in all its variegated forms, as the peoples of the earth recoalesce into their multifarious assemblages. [73]

But those who have been dead for so long that they cannot recollect their origins — i.e., those whose cult-lore has been effaced in the mists of time — cluster around Ball and seek to constitute a new clan around the figure of the crone. And surely

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