“The Drum Is Your Mother”
Not only is music associated with The Mother, with our mothers – but especially so is the drum.
Photograph by John Diamond, M.D.
Marija Gimbutas, drawing on her most extensive analysis of the signs and design patterns that appear repeatedly in the cult objects and painted pottery of Neolithic Europe, writes concerning the Goddess and music about “the intimate relation between the drum and the Goddess.” That “the most explicit decoration consists of breasts, a pair on either side of the (clay) drum… Further evidence for this relation between the drum and the Goddess comes from the Bronze Age … three chalk drums were recovered from a child’s grave … the main panel in the center of two of the drums is dominated by the face of the Goddess.”[1]
The Goddess who is our mother, is the water (the amniotic fluid, the milk, the water of life), the vessel that contains (the womb, her body, her breasts), and she is the drum, the vessel that gives us the undulations, the waves of water, the essence of music, the rhythm – Her rhythm.
So the drum is your Mother. Treat her accordingly.
Excerpt from The Way of the Pulse: Drumming with Spirit
[1] Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 71.
