Persona, "Ritual of Endarkenment", and the Carport Theatre

  

I'm pleased to be participating this fall in Tucson's Carport Theatre's Community Theatre presentation with  Excerpts from my "Ritual of Endarkenment".   

 Ritual of Endarkenment on SoundCloud

Persona: Masks that Hide and Masks that Reveal

October 25, 2025, 8 to 9:15 pm

Doors open at 7:30 pm

artwork by Lauren Raine

Theater, poetry, dance, music and art by local creatives:

Justin Begay, Scott Bird, Jolynn Farr, Heide Foley, Phil Franchine, Joke Harmonica, 

Laura Milkins, Jody R. Netzer,  Lauren Raine, Marcus Wilson, Jungin Yee

 

SOLD OUT

Sedna

Very recently I completed a commission for a "Sedna" mask/sculpture (above).  The story of Sedna, the Great Ocean Mother of the Inuit peoples in the far North, has a great deal of personal meaning to me, as it was the central theme of a truly magical Ritual Theatre Performance I was able to participate in with my masks and artists, musicians and healers from the community of Tucson, Arizona.  That experience was full of synchronicity and what I can only call "spiritual assistance".  Maybe "following the touchstones along the way" or "divine guidance"  is another way of putting it. At any rate, it was a Story that wanted to be told, and as they say, "If you build it they will come".  It was in 2004, and began, I believe and remember, with an encounter with an Eagle.   )

I had just moved into the Muse Community Arts Center in downtown Tucson (now sadly long gone).  I was living in my studio on the second floor of that lively and historic building.  I was walking about 2 blocks from the Muse, drinking a cup of coffee and not entirely awake at 7 in the morning when I noticed a large bird land on a low hanging branch of a tree not more than 10 feet from me.  A very big bird indeed!  As I looked up I realized I was being scrutinized by a golden eagle!  So I stood there in awe for a good 5 minutes while the eagle looked at me, and I looked at the eagle.  Finally, quite majestically, it spread its wings and flew off, leaving me feeling I had had an encounter with something extraordinary.  Eagles are very rare in urban Tucson.  And not long after that magical moment a Native American Storyteller named Grey Eagle came into my life with the story of Sedna. 

So, "Restoring the Balance", which is what we called our 2004 Event,  has been vividly on my mind as I made the mask above.  Perhaps this is a good time to share  the story again.  The beautiful  Opening Invocation is by Erica Swadley.  And the Closing is, in his own words, by Grey Eagle:  "We have heard this sacred story together, and now we can close with: That’s the way it was, and that’s the way it is".

"Spider Woman Weaving" (Morgana Canady)

Restoring the Balance

A Ritual Theatre Celebration of the Great Mother

O Great Mother Goddess,

we call on you now.

Rise up from your roots. Hear us, our voices of pathos.

See our dancing feet, how we beat out your rhythms.

With our hearts, we drum you back.

We are staggering toward you.

Will you run one hundred steps to us?

Will you spread your mantle of peace?

This is the sack of our offerings:

We give up our greed to feed the needy.

Here is our lust to restore compassion.

We release our hatred to stop the killing.

We forego our vengeance to discover balance.

We scorn our fears, to rebirth love.

We tread softly to bring back forests.

And Mother Answers:

No more no more no more!

I have sent you shining planets

to help you remember.

Mars and Venus beg you to reconcile.

From the depths of space, Sedna appears,

a planetary avatar to stop you in your tracks.

Time is ended, truth be told.

Release, forgive, restore.

Remember Me in all of My forms.

I will bring light to your shadows

and make you whole,

if you will call on Me.

Erica Swadley (2004)

In 2004, a few weeks before our first performance of Restoring the Balance, we learned that a new planet, in the cold depths of space beyond Pluto, was discovered by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) researchers. The little planet was named Sedna – who was also the primary character in our production. For our cast, this striking synchronicity affirmed that we were, somehow, part of a larger telling.

Why Sedna? What meaning does the story of Sedna, Ocean Mother to the Inuit people of the far North have for us today?  As it turns out, it's a story with a great deal of importance for the world of today.

                                                   Sedna, Ocean Mother of the Inuit

"Myth comes alive as it enters the cauldron of evolution,
itself drawing energy from the storytellers who shape it "

                                                   Elizabeth Fuller (2001)

My own mythic journey to Sedna began in January of 2004, when I had an exhibit of my masks at the Muse Community Arts Center in Tucson, Arizona. There I met Grey Eagle, a Native American ceremonial storyteller living in Patagonia, Arizona. Grey Eagle told, and collected, stories from indigenous peoples around the world, in particular those of his native Northwest. I felt honored when he offered me a version of Sedna, which he received from Inuit activists when he lived in Alaska.

I believe there are stories that want to be told. They are spun into our collective dreams on threads of synchronicity, woven into our imaginations because they are necessary to a particular time and place. In a 2002 interview, Elizabeth Fuller, actress and playwright, commented about this mysterious process, drawn from her career of 40 years:

"When you create within a sacred paradigm you find a strange thing . You are communicating with sources that you know are within you, but have a greater reflection somewhere else. You touch something timeless, as potent in you as anywhere else . You can experience it with great personal power, but eventually you realize that it's not just you. This is about the immanence and multiplicity of deity, the many faces of the Goddesses and the Gods" (2002).

Inspired by Grey Eagle’s gift , I organized a group to create a performance for the Global Art Project, an international arts network founded by Katherine Josten . Our event was also to be a non-denominational ritual with the theme of restoring reciprocity to humanity’s relationship with our Great Mother Earth. Central to Restoring the Balance was the story of Sedna , a myth as significant for our time as it has been for the Inuit people. Ironically, the Inuit are among the first human populations to be displaced by global warming. For the Inuit the problem is urgent. They live in precarious balance with one of the harshest environments on earth. Climate change is a direct threat to their way of life. As the western Arctic coastline recedes, they are losing their villages, while pollution and over-fishing has also contributed to the loss of their livelihood.

The Great Mother has a multiplicity of faces; but, ultimately, she is our universal Mother Earth. She represents the processes of nature which includes our own embodied, interdependent, and cyclical existence. As the story of Sedna illustrates, to betray the feminine is to betray the source of life, with dire consequences for all.

The Story of Sedna

"We are living in the Body. Not on the Body, but in the Body.
And what we do to the Earth, we are doing to ourselves."

Rachel Rosenthal (1989)

Sedna lived with her widowed father by the cold northwestern sea . Many young men offered her marriage, but f earful for her father’s welfare, she refused all offers. O ne day, a handsome and charming man visited her . He promised Sedna a better life if she would marry him. Best of all, he promised to send provisions to her father as well .

But Sedna’s new husband deceived her. H e was really Raven , disguised as a man . Instead of a better life, he took her to a desolate island where she lived, cold, hungry, and impoverished, until at last Sedna’s father came seeking her. Finding they had been deceived, he was furious . Taking his daughter into his kayak, he paddled for the mainland. Raven, learning of their escape, caused a great storm . Huge waves rolled toward the kayak. Sedna’s father, over come with terror and hoping to save his own life, cast his daughter from the boat. Sedna clung to the side of the boat, begging her father to save her, and in desperation, he cut off his daughter’s fingers and hands with his knife.

Sedna sank to the bottom of the ocean, and as she fell, her severed fingers became the fishes, the seals, and the whales. To this day, Sedna lives in a house of bones, at the bottom of the cold sea , attended by all of her undersea children .

As Grey Eagle (2004) wrote:

Sedna is cold and naked. She is covered with a tangle of hair that she can't comb because she has no hands. And it’s also said that all the broken taboos, and sins of the people who live in the above world fall into Sedna’s underwater realm, collecting on Sedna's body. When the accumulation is too great, Sedna sobs in pain. Then the sea creatures leave the shore, and gather to comfort her. (p.1)

When the “above world” no longer remembers Sedna’s sacrifice, the Inuit believe they have fallen from grace, and must suffer dire consequences. When the balance is broken, when the people have forgotten how to live in grateful reciprocity with the Ocean Mother and Her creatures, the sea ceases providing for those who depend upon Her resources . Ultimately, as Sedna suffers , so must they.

Erica Swadley as "Sedna's Shaman"

Grey Eagle continued:

Then people know it's time to gather, time to publicly confess their broken taboos. The men, remembering the name of Sedna’s father, do a long dance of contrition. Slowly dancing, they sing a song of remorse for the sins done by man to women, to earth, and to her children. And at last, their shaman purifies herself to take the dangerous journey to the underwater world where Sedna lives. She gathers fine sand with which she lovingly cleanses the filth from Sedna’s body, and she combs her hair. And she offers Sedna the prayers of love and respect she has brought with her . (p.2)

To atone is to “rejoin”, to establish once again good relationship with a larger community of being. Such rites of “at-one-ment” and purification, to the Inuit, are periodically necessary in order to reconcile the above world with the below world. Grey Eagle (2004) concluded:

When Sedna is at last comforted, She sends a prayer to Creator, asking Creator to forgive the people for the ways they have become out of balance. Her sobbing is no longer heard in the waves; the sea animals end their vigil and offer themselves again as food. And the Inuit are inspired to return Sedna’s gift by making better life stories. (p.3)

Myths are “life stories“, archetypal templates upon which religions and civilizations are built, and individual lives are imbued with meaning. How can we also create “better life stories” for today? L ife stories that speak of interdependence instead of inter-conflict? L ife stories that prepare us for a sustainable future? Not unlike the Inuit, we are also dancing the future into existence by the stories we tell. O ur stories, and our evolving cultural mythos, crystallize the ways we perceive, experience, and, ultimately live within the living body of the world.

James Lovelock and his primary collaborator, Lynn Margulis (1999), proposed that the Earth behaves as a vast super organism . Lovelock first published the Gaia Hypothesis in 1979, and within a short time, Gaia moved from the margins of scientific research to the current mainstream. The Gaia Theory demonstrates that the Earth consists of countless systems that are interlocking and self-regulating – in essence, a complex, evolving organism. Gaia theory, and contemporary ecology, affirms the ancient wisdom of Inuit storytellers. The myth of Sedna communicates the importance of good relationship and the understanding of intimate reciprocity within a creative, intelligent, and responsive environment – to which we are ultimately accountable

The Masks of the Goddess Project (1999-2008)

I've always been fascinated with masks as sacred tools - as “vessels” for the archetypal powers to express through the universal human mediums of art, theatre, dance and ritual. "Theatre" comes from the same Greek word as "theology,” as in theos or god . “Invoke” derives from the same Sanskrit root as “yoga” and “yoke” which mean to “join with”. In earlier times masks were created to contact the divine through ritual and ceremonial performances. To use a sacred mask was to in-voke, or to “join with the Gods”.

In 1999, after studying mask arts in Bali, I created 25 mixed media, multi-cultural masks. Each mask portrayed a Goddess, from different cultural and ethnic traditions, yet with a unifying theme . The masks were made for the “Invocation of the Goddess” at the 20th Annual Spiral Dance , held at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. In the years the project was active, additional masks were added to the collection.

I made life casts from the faces of actual women, of different races and different ages. Then, the masks were sculpted from leather and mixed media . A young African woman became the model for “Oshun”, River Goddess of West Africa. A friend in her 70’s became the model for Hecate, Greek Goddess of the Underworld. The cast of an Asian artist transformed into “Amaterasu”, Sun Goddess of Japan, and so on. My process included researching mythologies that represent the many sacred faces of the Divine Feminine throughout the world.  And at the 20th Annual Spiral Dance, it was my great pleasure to first see the masks “brought to life” by a procession of 25 costumed women, all invoking the presence of the Goddess for those gathered.

Having been inspired by Balinese sacred mask traditions when I lived there, I conceived of  offering my collection as contemporary "temple masks" , making them available to all those who wished to use them to celebrate the Divine Feminine. I, and many colleagues who are ritualists, choreographers, producers and priestesses, have used the masks for ritual, theatre, and dance for many years now,  as the collection was sent to groups that requested its use. As the masks were “danced”, they filled with energy and collective story.  

Mana Youngbear as "Tara"

The Goddess has a thousand faces - maiden, mother, wise crone, teacher, warrior, healer, destroyer, lover, nurturer of new life or the flame of creativity. She is found throughout world religions with names like red Kali, Quan Yin the compassionate, Sedna the ocean mother, and Mary, Madonna to the Savior. To me, most of all, she is Gaia, Mother Earth, the feminine “World Soul” or Anima Mundi. I believe that re-discovering these universal stories is very important f or the affirmation they offer to women seeking identity within a masculine identified theology that lacks a feminine name for God. Collectively, the “return of the Goddess” within contemporary religion and mythos is, I believe, important for the healing of our worldwide estrangement from the feminine, with its profound implications.

It’s been my privilege to see the collection used in diverse communities, including the New College of San Francisco , the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, the Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors in New York, Buka Creati Gallery in Bali, the Willits Community Center, the Matrilineage Symposium at the University of Syracuse, the Masks of Transformation Conference at the University of Southern Illinois; the Kripalu Institute in Massachusetts, and, as this article describes, in exhibit and performance at the Muse Community Arts Center in Tucson. 

Restoring the Balance and the Divine Feminine

Initially, the Masks of the Goddess were presented to the cast of Restoring the Balance as tools for invocation of the Divine Feminine. As contemporary temple masks, the masks were charged with these intentions: enabling performers to access the Goddess within themselves, calling forth the power of Goddess archetypes as we developed our ritual performance; and, finally, the masks assisted with invoking the blessings of the Goddess for all gathered at the performance ritual .


At our first meeting, I put the masks in a circle, asking members to choose a mask that spoke to them. Then, with drumming and guided meditation, we shared a shamanic journey. Afterwards, by discussing our visions, we determined which members of the group felt strongly called to “dance with a Goddess” . Another way of looking at this process was to discover which masks “wanted to be activated”.

Kathy Huhtaluhta as "Corn Mother"

In traditional cultures, tribes not only petition the Gods to speak, but sometimes the Gods themselves express a desire to be present in various oracular ways . In contemporary Santeria practice, for example, dancers volunteer to be possessed by deities as a form of community blessing . Masks, dance, and ritual are viewed as co-creative, a means for the invisible world to briefly enter our own.

Lastly, our invitation included the hope that these cross-cultural “faces of the Mother” would emphasize the global significance of our event, and the universal need to heal the degradation of the feminine . After rehearsals, the dancers took the masks home to keep on their personal altars as spirit vessels.

Katherine Josten, who chose to dance the role of Sedna, is the founder of the Global Art Project, a network creating partnerships between individual artists and groups around the world . As we prepared our performance, Katherine (2004) observed in her journal that:

The work of our group is not to re-enact the ancient goddess myths, but to take those myths to their next level of evolutionary unfolding. Artists are the myth makers. It is time for us to create the next chapter, to join the energies of Goddess and God. Time for a reconciliation of that which is within and without. The integration of male and female must occur in order to bring balance to the earth and human consciousness. A dialogue needs to occur so the pain of both may be brought to light and transmuted.

Restoring balance to the divided human spirit is what the work of the Goddess is truly about now . The Great Mother was banished from our world by a mythos that gradually took away divinity from women, and women are intimately identified with our cyclical, embodied existence within nature. How can there ever be peace when our collective psyche is divided against itself? The Goddess must return to our world on many levels if we are to evolve to an integral way of understanding the world.

Goddess Altar at the Muse Community Arts, created by participants

Katherine/Sedna was joined by Erica Swadley, shamanic practitioner and therapist, as “Sedna’s Shaman” . Quynn Elizabeth, founder of the Institute for Shamanic Arts as well as Earth Tribe TV in Tucson, danced Kali . White Tara, of Tibet, and Amaterasu Omikami, from Japan, were performed by dancer Mana Youngbear . Artist Valerie James, founder of the Los Madres Project in the desert south of Tucson, invoked the Virgin of Guadalupe . The Cherokee Corn Mother, Selu, was performed by Kathi Huatahluhta and Spider Woman was performed by Wiccan priestess and dancer Morgana Canady .

Valarie James as "The Virgin of Guadaloupe"

The first performance was staged at Nations Hall, in Tucson, Arizona, on April 9th, 2004. A community altar, built by the cast as a collaborative installation, became part of the ritual . The stage and audience formed a circle, as theatre in the round. We were fortunate to be joined by Will Clipman, Jeff Greinke, Alan and Audry Smith, as well as Saami chanter Kathi Huhtaluhta, who together composed music for each segment . Our storytellers were Paul Fisher and Sammi Alijagic . We opened with Erica Swadley reading her poem, “Invocation to the Great Mother.” The “Mask of Sedna” was next. Dance, music, and storytelling accompanied the performance of each mask. We closed with Morgana Canady’s performance of Spider Woman . Casting “threads” out into the audience, she gradually wove a cobweb with our audience. F or that brief moment, over 300 people were joined by holding the web .

I might add that Spider Woman (also called Thought Woman by Pueblo peoples) is particularly important to me . It’s said that Spider Woman spun the world into being with the stories she imagined, a creative power she passed on to all of her descendants . To this day, the Navajo honor Grandmother Spider Woman by rubbing a bit of spider web into the palms of infant girls so they will become beautiful weavers .

Since 2004, because the myth of Spider Woman speaks so profoundly about ecology, inter-dependence, and quantum co-creation, I have personally continued to spin webs, facilitate “prayer ties” with groups, and teach classes on making altars with personal icons. This is an ongoing community art project called “Spider Woman’s Hands ”. In 2007, I brought my Spider Woman Project to Michigan as a fellow at the Alden Dow Creativity Center and, in 2009 I’ll bring the project to the Henry Luce Center for the Arts at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.

After our performance at the Muse Community Arts Center, the cast met there for a last time . The biodegradable burlap cords from “Spider Woman’s Web” were distributed among the members. We scattered cords throughout the desert, symbolically extending our web and its blessing beyond our small community to a greater world . In addition, as part of the Global Art Project, photographs, letters, and a video about Restoring the Balance were sent to the AFEG-NEH-MABANG Traditional Dance Company, in Limbe, Republic of Cameroon.

Afterward: The Surprising

Authentic ritual is what anthropologist Victor Turner (1975)described as “communitas”: a collaboration between participants and a larger, invisible, extended community . If it has potency, ritual, like art, can include participants in a conversation whose mythological roots go far back into the past, and forward into the imaginal future. To enter fully into ritual space is to shift consciousness in order to undertake a mythic pilgrimage . Masks can aid the traveler by performing the function of “threshold tools” or “limens” .

In Turner’s (1971) article, “Pilgrimages as Social Processes ”, he wrote that a “limen” or a “liminal state” is a doorway that enables actors and ritualists (as “pilgrims”) to enter into a sacred space or pilgrimage center . In this magic circle or sacred arena, there is a fertile realm where deities, ancestors, and power animals may be encountered. Therein, transformations of spirit or personality are possible .

I remember a conversation with artist Ann Weller, who I met in 2001. She took on the role of the “Dark Goddess” as her n orthern California community designed a ritual to symbolically transform the violence of the past century at the millennium . Ann (2001) said:

I felt ridden by the Dark Goddess when I undertook my role. But the work was ultimately impersonal . I was a brief vessel for an immense archetypal intelligence manifesting within the drama we created . And yet, embodying the Dark Goddess did bring personal change . You can't work with sacred theatre and not be changed in some way . I found myself confronting daily those aspects of myself that were just not useful . I was being re-constructed, whether I was aware of it or not, to better serve Her in the world . Which meant better serving myself . That's how I look at it . The little overlay of how I imagined myself, which had never been very effective, was now utterly obvious to me . My authentic power began to manifest.

Traditionally, it was believed that w ithin the charged, liminal arena of ritual drama or sacred space , the Goddesses and Gods could enter the human dimension, thus blessing, communing, or prophesying with those present . That may be one of the reasons important rites throughout history, such as the Eleusinian mysteries of Greece and Rome, were called “mysteries” .

Perhaps we were given such a blessing at our auspicious event, in the form of photographs taken by Tucson photographer Ann Beam . When Ann documented our event, she was amazed to see that a number of the photos she later developed had anomalies. These strange “spirit photos” are, for me, another layer to our collaboration, a pentimento .

As Spider W oman (Morgana Canady) prepared to "spin", fibers appeared before her weaving hands that were not visibly part of the later “web weaving” choreography. When the web was eventually extended into the audience with actual cords, the dancer, like a filament at the center of the “web ”, was almost invisible in a mass of light . A photo of Erica Swadley, in her role as Sedna’s shaman (she was not masked for her performance), showed two separate faces superimposed on each other. After examining this photo, the photographer (Ann Beam) commented that one of the faces looked like Erica, but another appeared to be Asian.

(This was a photo of the end of the performance. The cast is dancing in a circle, and a white form appeared in the photo, between cast and audience. Ann Beam called this striking photo "the Visitor" (2004).)(I put the photo into negative, and with a close-up, with this result.)

In a photograph of Quynn Elizabeth, whose dance was devoted to the Hindu Goddess Kali , an inexplicable, goat-like form dramatically appeared behind her, and the suggestion of a goat appeared in other photographs of her dance as well . To Quynn, Morgana, and Erica, whose performances were devotional as well as theatrical, the photographs were affirming, a kind of “greeting card” from spirit guides.

I have since learned that in the traditional worship of Kali in India, goats were often sacrificed. Some viewers of these photographs have suggested that a “spirit goat” materialized in the photograph as a symbol of our offering . We did not have a goat to offer the Goddess when we invoked Her, so perhaps one was “ethereally” provided for us.

When I looked at the “goat” photo the first time, I personally recalled the ancient Hebrew ritual of the s capegoat. When deemed necessary, this ritual was p erformed for the well-being of the tribe. A litany of all the sins, troubles, and sorrows of the time was recited, then “laid” upon the back of a goat . The goat, a beast of great merit, was then released into the desert to symbolically bear these burdens away. A cleansing had occurred and a new cycle could begin . Not unlike the rituals of the Inuit, the act of naming the sins and broken taboos helped the tribe to return to psychic and emotional balance, and to a more harmonious relationship with the Sacred.

In the modern world, we have generally lost meaningful ritual, and, as such, we rarely have significant ways to collectively regain “at-one-ment .” We have no long ritual cycle of prayers and dances and confessions. W e have few tribal shamans to help us bear our “better life stories“ to Sedna in the World Below . We scapegoat each other. We scapegoat women. We scapegoat the living Earth without awareness. There is no “symbolic goat” to carry our “sins” into the chaotic wilderness of the collective unconscious; to carry our negativity into the desert so we can begin again in a new way.

I have no explanation for Anne’s photographs except what they mean to me as producer and co-creator of the event . Nor can I prove that the photos are authentic – although I know they are . In the aftermath of our own Restoring the Balance I feel the appearance of the spirit photographs are a final blessing.

Conclusion

"We have heard this sacred story together", Grey Eagle (2004) wrote, "And now we can close with: That’s the way it was, and that’s the way it is".

(A participant's shoulder is in foreground. Behind what resembles a hand
appears, apparently "weaving" with Morgana Canaday in her perforance.)

References

Beam, A., (2004), All p hotographs are reproduced with permission of the artist.

Fuller, E. (2001) Interview with Lauren Raine.

Grey Eagle, a/k/a Jackson, K.M. (2004). The story of Sedna. Unpublished manuscript.

Josten, K. (2004). Unpublished journal.

Lovelock, James ( 2006), GAIA - A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH, Oxford University Press.

Margulis, Lynn, (1999). SYMBIOTIC PLANET: A NEW LOOK AT EVOLUTION, New York: Basic Books.

Rosenthal, R. (1989). Interview with Lauren Raine.

Swadley, E. (2004) . “Invocation of the Great Mother.” Unpublished poem.

Turner, V.W. (1975). Dramas, fields, and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society . New York: Cornell University Press.

Weller, A. (2001). Interview with Lauren Raine.

Additional Resources

Ala Mankon Cultural and Development Association (A.M.A.C.U.D.A. Traditional Dance Group, AFEG-NEH-MABANG Dance), Limbe, Republic of Cameroon.

Clipman, W., at www.willclipman.com.

Fuller, E., The Independent Eye Theatre, at www.independenteye.org .

Grey Eagle, 1995 Gordan Ekvall Tracy Memorial Award for Ethnic Performers, at www.ethnicheritagecouncil.org/awards/tracieWinners.html.

Greinke, J., at www.jeffgreinke.com.

Huhtaluhta, K., Sami Records, at www.samirecords.com.

James, V., Las Madres Project, at www.lasmadresproject.org.

Josten, K., The Global Art Project, Tucson, AZ, at www.global-art.org.

Quynn, E., The Institute for the Shamanic Arts at WomenKraft Bldg., Tucson, Arizona, www.shamanworld.com

Quynn, E., Earth Tribe TV, at www.earthtribetv.org.

Raine, L., “The Masks of the Goddess Project” & “Spider Woman’s Hands”, www.rainewalker.com, & www.threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com (blog)

Smith, A. & Smith, A. (2004). Rainbow Didge Music (www.rainbowdidge.com)

Youngbear, M., Willits Young Actors Theatre, at www.willitsyoungactorstheatre.org.

"The Decline of the American Empire" - Commentary by Chris Hedges

In the famous 1976 BBC series I, CLAUDIUS, based upon the novel by Robert Graves,  which featured  Derek Jacobi as Claudius, John Hurt as Caligula, and Patrick Stewart and other dignitaries of the British Theatre, we encounter Claudius,  a reluctant, timid, and uniquely sane  Emperor of Rome in its decadent, declining years.  Claudius, born into the Royal family with a club foot and a stutter,  was made Emperor when the mad and sadistic Caligula was deposed.   Claudius was regarded by the Pretorian Guard, who forced him onto the throne,  as a joke.  And yet, he proved to be a very good Emperor indeed,  struggling to be as just as possible.  Claudius dreamed of the return of the democratic Republic that was once the noble foundation of Rome,  in a time of  decadence, endless scheming and murdering for power, and corrupt excess.  

We encounter Claudius towards the end of his life, having a private conversation with the mythic, and rather cynical  divine Sibyl,  as he composes his Memoirs for future times.  He is forced to admit that although he has so far survived all the plots and conspiracies of his time,  the ethics, nobility and unity of the Rome he desired was long, and irretrievably, gone.   

I try to keep this journal free of politics, but it's not always possible for me.  As a "boomer" who grew to young adulthood in the idealistic, optimistic,  and affluent, Kennedy years,  I sympathize with Claudius. I thought of that film series after reading the article I take the liberty of copying here by Chris Hedges.  And  I reluctantly agree with him too these days  - it is the end of the American Empire (even though it was never overtly called an "Empire", one has to admit it was).  And it looks quite possible that it's the end of the once robust  American Democracy as well,  which for all its flaws, I and most of my fellow citizens assumed was a certainty, a stable backdrop in spite of the difficulties of our tumultuous time.  Now...... people like myself don't know what to do. 

Yes, various friends and colleagues write that not just the U.S. but most of global industrial civilization,   and the medievil patriarchal systems that support it, along with capitalism........ are not sustainable, and a collapse has been inevitable.  And that in order for new worlds and ways that are more appropriate to the world now will arise, phoenix like, from the ashes.  I hope so,  I believe it probably is so, although I do not think I will see it in my lifetime.  That's the theme I'll explore in a future article, a more hopeful article.  

But right now, here we are.  As a U.S. citizen, I daily see that the Barbarians have arrived and are tearing down the temples and knocking the noses off of every statue, and grabbing all the loot as do so.  How do we re-organize ourselves, survive, how do we live in what is happening to that certainty that is no longer certain?  Rome is burning.

We are watching the destabilization, and deconstruction, of the U.S.,  which is composed of  states that are not all that "united" any more.  Daily the laws and system of the Constitution, which I remember having to make a Pledge of Allegiance to every morning as a school girl,  is broken by a regime that is becoming more authoritarian all the time.  And Climate Change brings bigger and more ominous storms, and AI deconstructs our notions of even what is "real" on the sidelines, becoming smarter, bigger, and more dangerous.  And in the closing words of  Chris Hedges,  like Nero before him: 

  

"Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down."

 

Puppet Theater of the Absurd - by Chris Hedges

 "Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead.  Our constitutional rights — due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent — have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd.

         Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down."

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact.

These demagogues, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse. Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs. They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity. Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become.

Hannah Arendt blames a society that willingly embraces radical evil on this collective “thoughtlessness.” Desperate to escape from the stagnation, where they and their children are trapped, hopeless and in despair, a betrayed population is conditioned to exploit everyone around them in a desperate scramble to advance. People are objects to be used, mirroring the cruelty inflicted by the ruling class.

A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized. Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin notes, “will be socially boycotted.” But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open society — a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice — are ridiculed. They are detrimental to existence in a diseased society.

When a society, as Plato notes, abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts — violence, greed and sexual exploitation — and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”

The only thing these dying regimes do well is spectacle. These bread and circus acts — like Trump’s $40 million Army parade to be held on his birthday on June 14 — keep a distressed population entertained.

The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality. The population is conditioned by mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure.  Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is, as Kierkegaard writes, a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.” In short, we became part of a herd, “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization — and yet are held together as a whole.” Those who question the public, those who denounce the corruption of the ruling class, are dismissed as dreamers, freaks or traitors. But only they, according to the Greek definition of the polis, can be considered citizens.

Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.

It is tempting to personalize the decay, as if ridding ourselves of Trump will return us to sanity and sobriety. But the rot and corruption has ruined all of our democratic institutions, which function in form, not in content. The consent of the governed is a cruel joke. Congress is a club on the take from billionaires and corporations. The courts are appendages of corporations and the rich. The press is an echo chamber of the elites, some of whom do not like Trump, but none of whom advocate the social and political reforms that could save us from despotism. It is about how we dress up despotism, not despotism itself.

The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in “Corruption and the Decline of Rome,” writes that what destroyed the Roman Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.” Power became about enriching private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the citizenry. Our government, in this sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards.

“[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” Edward Gibbon writes. “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

The Roman emperor Commodus, like Trump, was entranced with his own vanity. He commissioned statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He fancied himself a star of the arena, staging gladiatorial contests where he was crowned the victor and killing lions with a bow and arrow. The empire — he renamed Rome the Colonia Commodiana (Colony of Commodus) — was a vehicle to satiate his bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices the way Trump sells pardons and favors to those who invest in his cryptocurrencies or donate to his inauguration committee or presidential library.

Finally, the emperor’s advisors arranged to have him strangled to death in his bath by a professional wrestler after he announced that he would assume the consulship dressed as a gladiator. But his assassination did nothing to halt the decline. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax who was assassinated three months later. The Praetorian Guards auctioned off the office of emperor. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days. There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus.

Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead.

Our constitutional rights — due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent — have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd.

Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Our decay, our illiteracy and collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of the working poor and middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires.

Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down.

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