Lupercalia: goat skins, kink, and fertility.
The snowdrops are up. That’s how I know it’s February. With February comes the Feast of Lupercalia or its mild, newer religious overlay. As much as I love chocolate, I get a sweet giggle out of the old ways. Besides, they’re not mutually exclusive by any means. As the story goes, in the old days, the young men would sacrifice a goat, and with strips from the new goat skin in hand, run naked through the town, flogging the bare bottoms of women who would present themselves for a fertility blessing. If you want fertility, and its cousin, prosperity, I suppose there was some juice in showing the world you’re ready for it.
Big Bangs and stardust
The ideas that make me most happy, the ones I want to toss into everyone’s skull, is that we are *all of us* made of the dust of the Big Bang. Living cells are information repositories, maintaining and transmitting the blueprints of the shape of all living things. But our brains, the biological balls of fat sloshing around inside the cathedral of our skulls, are also transmitting vital information. We humans have evolved this great capacity to change the world around us, using the ideas which shape the way we look at things. It is as important as reproducing ourselves. As our senses function and watch the world around us, we are literally the universe watching itself. All around us we see the shapes built first in our dreams, in our brains, made real by putting our hand to the idea, breathing life into something never before seen.
Co-evolution
But I never wanted children. There were plenty of personal reasons – I just never wanted to put a human being through growing up poor, and knew that my chances of maintaining the basics for more than myself were not especially good. A child of the 70s, I took seriously the idea of the population bomb, but more important, embraced the idea of co-evolution. 5,000 years from now, any creature with the ability to learn to read will be able to suss out our recipes, our poems, our grand narratives, our written ceremonies. That may make us unique among all the species of the earth. We may be the only ones who can agree to work with an imaginary concept and pretend it’s real to help us build the world. The place that does that for me is in song. There must be an evolutionary advantage to perceiving beauty, because a landscape, a starlit night, or the stars in my lovers’ eyes, can still capture me, and take my breath away, and stir an ache that demands that I try and get that through to everyone else.
About 20 years ago, I wrote a tune I’m relatively proud of, called Evolve, talking about the biological objective reality that we understand through an imaginary model called “evolution.” The model is based on more than a century of tested hypothesis, based on evidence from the fossil record, and observation of generations of living creatures. But it comes down to this: on a practical level we are faced with only one choice–evolve or die.
“A strand in the web of all existence
from “Evolve” by Christopher Bingham, title track of the album by Gaia Consort
Revealed in the joy of a midnight kiss
Spanning the centuries of starlit distance
Or so it would seem on a night like this
And life teaches life, teaches life, teaches life
Life teaches life one thing: evolve.”
You’re it
“You’re it.” Remember being small, playing tag, trying not to let out a sound while you hide in the leaves, breathless from running to that perfect hiding place that nobody knows… I keep looking at the big questions waiting to get tagged by the answer, while I keep writing songs about playing tag. I hope I’m capable of doing something for you that works — that as you listen to this music you lay back and dream of beacons in the seemingly endless night, of squirrelly little worms, and groups of cells swimming together through the squishy, lightning flashed mud and brine, of moving (if not rising) through it all, until you’re hiding silent in the sword ferns, and you suddenly feel the tap of the entire universe on your shoulder–or a slap on the ass with a strip of goat skin–as you try to keep from giggling and a voice in your head says; “You’re it.” Keep the imaginary universes working!
Here’s a couple of love songs to wish you a happy Lupercalia and Valentine’s Day:
- Coming Soon: Mama Can’t Do Drag. Keep an ear out for it!
For more information about Christopher Bingham, including his collected articles here on Pagan Song, his bio, and links to his Bone Poets Orchestra and Gaia Consort sites on the web, check out Chris’s page on Pagan Song.
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