Like all the Orisas Yemoja's daughter Ósun is known by different names. As Ibú Àyàn her name translates to mean Deep place of the Goddess of the Sound of the Drums, and she has miniature batás put on her shrine.1
Yemoja really strikes me as one of the remainders, as well as one of the reminders, of the many ancient cultures constructed out of harmony with the natural world. The beautiful Baka Forest People of Southeastern Cameroon are still one such group, although they struggle as globalization comes to them through logging practices that threaten their way of life.
The Baka Forest People are an egalitarian, drumming people, and music and song makes up an integral part of their life within the natural rhythms of the deep, tropical rainforest of equatorial Africa. Through music children learn to work and play. The Baka family group functions through (communal) cooperation, not (capitalist) competition. Baka women and girls are also drummers who literally drum the water of the river, standing in it and playing upon it by striking it with their arms and hands. The Baka also have yodeling traditions that sound very much like anything one might hear in the Swiss Alps, exemplifying yet again a musical tool of communication traversing land and time.
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It's not unusual that egalitarian societies are also often matrilineal. Howard Zinn, in A People's History of the United States, writes of the Iroquois:
Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal …Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clans might make up a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women.
I wonder if these women don't express some part of the prior history about which I've been talking, a history of that former time, a history linking the egalitarian Iroquois to the Baka, linking the drumming priestesses of Yemoja to the drumming priestesses of Inanna, a history of matrilineal societies not just of European descent, a history of earth- centered, woman-led ritual and spiritual guardianship, a history interrupted by another culture Gimbutas named "Kurgan," a culture that perhaps the ancient ancestors of the Iroquois escaped, at least for a while, simply by crossing over a land bridge. In her introduction, Gimbutas writes:
A balanced, nonpatriarchal and non-matriarchal social system is reflected by religion, mythologies, and folklore, by studies of the social structure of Old European and Minoan cultures, and is supported by the continuity of the elements of a matrilineal system in ancient Greece, Etruria, Rome, the Basque, and other countries of Europe. While European cultures continued a peaceful existence and reached a true florescence and sophistication of art and architecture in the 5th Millennium B.C., a very different Neolithic culture with the domesticated horse and lethal weapons emerged in the Volga basin of South Russia and after the middle of the 5th Millennium even west of the Black Sea…The basic features of the Kurgan culture go back to the 7th and 6th Millennia B.C. in the middle and lower Volga basin—patriarchy; patrilineality; small-scale agriculture and animal husbandry, including the domestication of the horse…the eminent place of the horse in cult; and, of great importance, armaments—bow and arrow, spear, and dagger. These characteristics match what has been reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European by means of linguistic studies and by comparative mythology. They stand in opposition to the Old European, gylanic, peaceful, sedentary culture with highly developed agriculture and with great architectural, sculptural, and ceramic traditions.2
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Although the 16th Century Mexican poet whose words opened this discussion was most likely male, his poetic entreaty reminded me of En-hedu-Ana, who, more than 3000 years earlier, having written her temple poems at Ur invoking Inanna, nevertheless expressed that this was in fact a changed Inanna, a goddess transformed, no longer the Great Goddess herself, but the daughter of a moon god, Nanna. In her discussion of the transformation and dethronement of Inanna, Layne Redmond draws on the work of William H. McNeill who suggests the rise of kingship in Mesopotamia correlates to the earliest known manifestation of the war dance. Redmond writes:
The drum, formerly the sacred instrument of priestesses used for spiritual transformation, took on a new, masculine function on the parade ground. As militarism increased, the progress of a battle became known as the dance of Inanna. The ancient goddess of life and death had become a goddess of war.3
Notes:
1 Mason, Orin Orisa, 318.
2 Gimbutas, "Introduction," The Language of the Goddess, xx.
3 Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women, 144.
