Rock and roll culture made drums a man's territory, but long ago the drummers were women. In the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and Middle East, as well as parts of Europe, before patriarchal Christianity put its stamp on everything, the divine feminine was worshipped in rituals led by women frame drummers. Then, the female body was a holy thing, rightly worshipped for bringing the life of humanity into the world. The goddesses of ritual were feminine beings writ large, the macrocosmic expression of the spectrum of female experience and possibility, and both women and men worshipped them.
In time, women were disavowed as holy beings and shamed for an original sin: the dispensation of self-awareness, the encouraging of self-knowledge. Childbirth, no longer holy or honorable, became our "burden" and its blood and pain our "punishment" (imagine, we were sold that lie, we fell for it! That the miracle of Creation, itself, moving through us in service to Life is a punishment!). Our deep connection to the tides of nature and our temperament for healing were criminalized. Men led ritual, and women who continued to practice the worship of the feminine, and all that she represents, were harassed, publicly humiliated, imprisoned, tortured, and killed in the most atrocious ways.
That history lives within us all.
More and more, I see women reclaiming the divine feminine, and more and more I see them doing it to the beat of a drum. Admittedly, I am one of those women. I've always been excited by drums of every sort: frames, kits, hand drums, drums of every type, size, and sound. The tone can be visceral, commanding, trance-inducing, alluring, enticing, awakening, and transportive. The beat of the drum resonates throughout the entire body, a pulse-beat, a universal tempo to which we all respond, willingly or otherwise. Though I have no training on the drum, I have a natural sense of rhythm that encourages me to converse with it. I often turn to the drum when I feel that there is so much to say that nothing can be said. The drum speaks for me when I falter. I put my hands to it and the sound reaches back into my body and my psyche, and further informs the conversation. I sit or stand, drum positioned between my thighs, and play until I am quieted, until my hands are no longer moved by the creative, expressive force so mysterious and beautiful, until being alive in this body once again feels like an honor. The drum banishes fear, shame, expectation, deception, and woe, just turns it to dust and sets it on the wind. The drum plants my feet beneath me and affirms my courage.
More women should drum. Drumming is good for us: for our hearts (synching the drum's beat to that of our most precious organ); our throats (saying what we cannot or do not say with our voices); our imaginations (dreaming our world into being); our psyches (healing the scars of history, both personal and collective). Our vitality and integrity is our gift to the world, and the knowledge and exercise of this reality makes women extraordinary beings.
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