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Moonlady Showcase
GUERILLA RITUAL:
OLYMPICS OPENING AND CLOSING CEREMONIES AND THEIR TIES TO ANCIENT NORTH AMERICAN CULTURES
Sports mostly bore me. But I faithfully watch the Olympics every time they are broadcast. I love guerilla ritual, the kind you sneak on people by promising entertainment and delivering spiritual transformation instead. And nowhere is it done so publicly - and flamboyantly - as in the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies.
I even appreciate the irony that the ceremonies, which invariably extol the virtue of working together in unity, have become as competitive as the games themselves, with countries scrambling to one-up the previous host in spectacles costing millions of dollars. In ancient Greece, a cauldron was lit to begin the games and extinguished to signal their end, a tradition that returned in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. The 2000 summer games in Sydney, Australia, featured a multicolored cascade of water pouring from the top row of the stadium's end zone, surging down the tiers like rapids, and pooling at the bottom. A seven-ton rendition of the Olympic torch emerged out of the still water, like a lotus rising from the swamp. This year's is an angular glass-and-metal cauldron that evokes the combination of fire and ice. The flame alone is three-stories tall.
But don't let all the technical stuff fool you. At the heart of the ceremonies are approaches unchanged in thousands of years. Drumming and otherwise making a joyful (and very loud) noise, dancing and moving in unison, people playing symbolic roles for the community, making a pilgrimage - all these things are at the core of what makes us spiritual beings. These elements of ritual transcend language, for in our infant civilization we had none, instead communicating through action, gesture and symbol. They connect us to our roots as humans and fill a need overlooked in modern society - to remember who we are and where we came from.
Take drumming, for instance. What could get us more in touch with our primal side more than drumming? Ever since we first hit a hollow log with a stick to chase out the bees for honey and discovered it made a wonderful sound, we've been making rhythm with one another. The opening ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta summer games featured many variations on the trap set - America's contribution to drumming - along with a plethora of ethnic drums. Sydney's was hugely percussive, including hundreds of tap dancers and other Stomp-like shenanigans, and those of Nagano, Japan, in 1998 featured immense taiko drums.
This year's opening ceremonies feature 600 Native American drummers, plus dancers and singers, from the western desert region of the United States, including a female drum group called Eagle Bear Clan. That's remarkable, considering traditional Native American resistance to women in ceremonial roles, but entirely fitting to the roots theme. In West Virginia recently, a decorated potshard showing elderly women as ceremony drummers dates back to 500 AD, the Hopewell moundbuilders era, the prehistoric period of Native America. But this year's indigenous drumming won't be a performance, any more than the great corn-dance ritual at the Santa Domingo pueblo is, even though several hundred people come to watch it each year. The observer is inseparable from the observed, to quote a quantum physics law that is echoed in Native American philosophy. The drum, dance and song are a blessing that falls upon the eyes and ears of all who watch and hear.
A strong symbol is another ceremonial essential, something that boils a large concept down to one simple image. At the Olympics that symbol is a circle or ring, five of them to be exact. In 3500 BC, the nomadic hunter-gatherers here felt so strongly about this symbol, and felt such a need to join their many tribes as one, that they constructed a circle of round mounds on a high bluff in the swamps of northeast Louisiana. Called Watson Brake by archeologists, after the nearby community, it was not built for residence, nor for trade, but purely for spiritual gatherings. It's the oldest ceremonial construction in North America and perhaps the place where culture on this continent began. Two-thousand years later and some 50 miles away, the ancient indigenous people constructed another, more complicated earthworks site with the quizzical modern title of Poverty Point. I prefer to call it, as the site archeologist does, the Place of Rings, six of them this time, radiating out from the bayou bluff.
Inside these ancient circles, there were contests to be sure; ball games and gambling go way back. But folks undoubtedly gazed at more than athletic games: all of the people around were entertainment. There's nothing a mammal likes more than watching others of its own species. And the Olympics opening ceremony provides, with a cast this year numbering somewhere around 3,500. Or more, of you count the stadium spectators, estimated to be 56,000 in Salt Lake City. At Lillehammer, Norway's 1994 winter games, each attendee
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was given a flashlight; by turning it as the Olympic flame was extinguished in the closing ceremony, it symbolized how individuals keep a communal flame alive. In further one-upmanship, at Sydney's opening ceremony six years later, each attendee was given multiple toys such as blinking lights and streamers that they brandished on cue to immense effect. We can appreciate these cast-of-thousands spectacles for their grand-scale synchronization and technical wizardry. And while being visually dazzled we may not think we notice the metaphors they convey: how art and expression are as elemental to our lives as competition, how interconnecting paths weave the tapestry of life, how many can come together to create something greater than the individual parts. But the brain recognized the ritual-as-embodied-metaphor and soaked it all in.
For all its emphasis on masses of people, the focus of the opening ceremony comes down to the individual: only one person at a time can carry the torch that ignites the Olympic cauldron. The ritualistic, even shamanistic, act of one person taking on a role for the community was expanded when a torch relay of many runners was created for the 1934 games in Berlin. And just like the Olympic ceremonies, one-upsmanship has held sway here, too, with the original 12-day, 1,910-mile, seven-country tour swelling into the Sydney games' relay of 37,500 miles through 14 countries in 120 days. This year's was calm in comparison: a 65-day journey of 13,500 miles through 46 states. Again, look past the flash and see the embodied metaphor that makes for powerful ritual: that one person can make all the difference, even being the only thing ensuring that a part of human culture continues, and that it's our willingness to reach out to another human being, even a stranger, from which our humanity is created.
Even away from the public view, Olympic ritual symbology runs strong. In a ceremony before the relay race at the site of the ancient Olympic stadium in Olympia, Greece, women use curved mirrors like a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight and re-ignite the original Olympic flame - a symbolic connection of the human spirit, as embodied by fire, to the Sun, the center of our Solar System. The flame relay is echoed every year in Mexico when hundreds of torch-carrying Catholic faithful, mostly males, travel to the town where they were born or raised, and then continue on to the hill of Tepeyac and the great church of Our Lady of Guadelupe, the center of their spiritual universe. In further behind-the-scenes ceremonial acts, in recent games even the relay torch itself, not just the flame, has become replete with symbology. The year's is created from glass, representing the clear light and ice of winter; aged silver and copper, showcasing the American West and Utah's mining history; and high-polish silver, symbolizing the passionate heart and high speed of the athletes.
The torch relay is the most visible aspect of a massive pilgrimage that frames the games. Every athlete who competes is making a pilgrimage to the Olympic site, leaving their homes and taking a journey at the end of which they hope to transcend all personal limitations and reach their full potential. In the act of traveling from countries around the globe, they weave a web like the torch runners of Tepeyac, uniting us through time and space with that year's Olympic location in the center. In the opening ceremonies, the country-by-country parade of athletes, so often seen as a display of national and ethnic pride, is actually the last leg of the journey prior to the extreme test or experience that is so often a part of the pilgrimage process.
Yes, I love the Olympics, even though I rarely watch the sports. Certainly, there have been disappointing, even disturbing, ceremonies, like those of the 1984 games in Los Angeles that verged on American jingoism, and the Atlanta opening ceremony that was a glorified half-time show crossed with the worst production number ever from the Oscars. Winter Olympics, with their exaltation of the natural environment, tend to fare better. I'll never forget how Norway's closing ceremony conveyed a celebration of the magic that the Earth holds, with leprechaunish winter spirits overcoming the snow-skiing trolls who tried to upset the goodwill party, as well as the beautiful Shinto snow spirits that were so much a part of the games in Nagano, Japan. But the opening ceremony of the Sydney summer games was perhaps the best of all, with its beautiful ocean theme, strong storytelling narrative, great use of amateur performers like stilt-walkers and fire-dancers, and emphasis on women and indigenous cultures. When aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic cauldron, I just about dissolved from emotion on the spot.
I was at home watching the Sydney opening ceremony on television while reading a book on Teotihucan, the famous ruins outside of Mexico City. The temple complex was home to some 50,000 at its peak in 500 AD, with people from many tribes of the great basin of Mesoamerica to live there. In order to keep the peace and foster a sense of spiritual community among such diversity, huge performance art spectacles were held in which most of the entire population participated. At Teotihucan, steep sloping pyramids flank a wide avenue where the spectacles were held, creating an effect not unlike a sports stadium. Looking at the site's picture in my book, and Sydney's huge Olympic stadium on the screen, it was clear to me that we haven't changed so much at all.
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