The Shamanic Journey of the Bee Priestess in The

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,THE SHAMANIC JOURNEY OF THE BEE PRIESTESS IN THE

WORK OF NANCY MACKO

Gloria Feman Orenstein, Prof. Comparative Lit.

University of Southern California

Nancy Macko’s video THE LORE OF THE BEE PRIESTESS takes the viewer on a multi-dimensional journey in search of the lost knowledge of her trans-historical identity. Macko’s quest resonates with pilgrimages made by women artists of the seventies and eighties in search of a Goddess heritage. Artists such as Ana Mendieta and Mary Beth Edelson are her precursors. These vision-quest journeys delineate a new archetype of female metaphysical travel, akin to time travel, in which the voyager explores the sacred sites of ancient civilizations and the body of The Earth Mother, in order to unravel the mystery of her soul’s extra-temporal incarnations.

When Macko related to me some of the actual lore of the Bees, understood as the epiphany of the Goddess in Minoan culture, she told me of a folk belief that seemed to unlock the implications of the tale narrated in the visionary world of her video. It is said that if someone has died, one must tell the bees. If the Beekeeper has died, it is of utmost importance to warn the bees, otherwise they will become confused at not encountering her, and their behavior will indicate that they are extremely upset. You must TELL THE BEES.

In this video we accompany the newly awakened Bee Priestess as she revisits the sites of her spiritual habitations across time and space only to find that the Goddess has died, the light of her civilization has gone out, the energy is gone. On a metaphorical level, one might say that we, too, in our own time and space, have never been told that our Goddess/Female Creator, has died,(had been extinguished and replaced by a patriarchal father God) and that consequently we are living in a confusion akin to that of the Bees. In the video, the Bee Priestess performs rites to imprint upon herself the ancient energies of the Cretan Snake Goddess in order to revive her lost powers. Macko uses layered images, both visual and aural in which voices and visions fuse their mark upon the spirit and body of the Bee Priestess, novitiate, We hear the voices murmuring: “Wake up Sisters”. Messages are being transmitted to her via ancestral whispers: “Obligation to humanity”, “Right action”, “Leaps of Faith”, It’s your power”, “Freedom”, “Faith”. The words awaken her through their meaning as well as through their vibrations. They summon her to become conscious of her mission. We view the Bee Priestess through the aperture of the hexagon of the honeycomb of the bees. She runs through the ancient sacred sites of Delphi, Olympia, Epidaurus, seeking the traces of her soul’s trans-historical manifestations. But the culture of the Mothers is in ruins. She explores a cave, haunted by visions of ancient goddesses and their artifacts. She turns to nature, observing the waterfalls, placing rocks in the water. She rushes to open the bee cages to wake up the bees. She seems to be reenacting an ancient ritual, but one that no longer functions in the absence of living Goddess energy. Frantically, she wanders through the theatre of Epidaurus, turning in circles, her arms uplifted like the Serpent Goddess, but without the serpent power. She spins, replicates herself, enters other dimensions, but to no avail. She reclaims her sexual energy through Flamenco dancing and the pulse of the drum like the heartbeat of the planet. The whirring sounds of messages traveling through the wings of bees resuscitate more Goddess artifacts. Juxtaposed to the flamenco-dancing feet are the bees doing their waggle dance. It is known that bees line up in relationship to where the sun is to tell each other, through the waggle dance, where the food is located. The bees communicate important information through their movements and their wingsongs. The Priestess imprints the memory of these forms on her body with tattoos. We see her inscribing white dots on her body. When the tattoo of the Goddess figurine has merged with her body, it lifts off her skin and becomes a part of nature (the water), turns gold, and is transformed into pure energy. According to the lore of the Bees, it is said that bees are souls of nymphs and messengers who fly to the heavens and become stars. Here in the film, the bees are like nymph-souls who take the memory of matriarchalcultures to the sky where they are transmuted into thestars of the Bee Goddess constellation. Hence it is not surprising that Macko’s future work, QUINTESSENCE: NEW CONSTELLATIONS will introduce the first visions of archaic matristic star-clusters as they begin to appear to us after lightyears of time- and- space-travel. Constellations such as Therangels (2002), Beeroses (2002), Queenangelbreast (2002) and Sacred Feminine (2002) image the forms that we will perceive as we rename the constellations according to our transformed future vision, enlightened by the return of the imprints from our archaic past, embodying epiphanies of the divine feminine. The constellations of the future are liminal worlds where flying breasts, flying bees, priestesses, angels , roses and women illuminate the firmament creating a sacred feminine skyscape. We become witnesses to the transmigration of souls and civilizations via the great Mysteries of spiritual alchemy and the cosmic cycles of rebirth and regeneration.

Since the nineties Nancy Macko has been seeking to understand why all matriarchal cultures have been extinguished, and why women have lost their power over time. She was drawn to a study of the culture of the bees, a matriarchy, which provided the imagery and concepts for her creation of the mythology of the Bee Priestess, imagining her social structure, her rituals and her traditions. While in Macko’s DANCE OF THE MELISSAE Bee Priestesses become the symbols of fertility and fecundity, evoking a time when women and nature were revered, here in THE LORE OF THE BEE PRIESTESS, we remote-view the psychic disturbances caused by the loss of knowledge of the death of the Goddess and her civilization. The Bees had NOT BEEN TOLD, and consequently their (our) society has gone awry.

But hope is not lost, for in the cosmos energy is constantly being transformed. The spirit of the matriarchal era is imprinted on nature…on the water and in the sky, and will be reborn in the New Constellations that Macko’s future work envisages. Science tells us that stars that were invisible to us before, over time, are becoming visible to us now, and in the future. These new stars and new constellations that we will soon be able to perceive, are radiating the imprints of archaic matristic cultures that have been transmuted into starlight.

In the series of large digital prints entitled THERA 1—6 (2002), Macko has mapped the trajectory of the cosmic journey of matristic energies and symbols from the underground city of Akrotiri on Thera, (a Minoan civilization which was buried after a volcanic eruption about 4,000 years ago) to the locus of their spiritual destinyas stars inhabiting the constellation of the Snake Bee Goddess. Creating a feminine spiritual landscape, Macko imagines the arc of transit of the symbols from this matristic culture as they metamorphose out of the blue otherworld of their vanished realm to their future incarnation as lightbodies in the celestial epiphany of the Goddess. All these images evoke a floating, ascending movement, a buoyant dance of eggs, a female figure climbing a ladder, a suggestion of hives mounting the ethers, and, ultimately, in (Thera 5), where The Goddess propels the bees on their final journey, an aerial flight towards their materialization as stars in the Constellation of The Snake Bee Goddess (Thera 6). Each work imagines a spiritual stage in this cosmic migration as Macko renders the hidden history of spiritual realities, the occult alchemy of matristic memory transmuted to starlight.

Another suite of twelve digital prints that relates to the Lore of the Bee Priestess is BUCRANIA,( 2002—04). It has been told that if you plant a bull’s head, (a bucranium) in the ground in the spring, when the sun is in Taurus, a swarm of bees will spring forth from the horns. This is the sacred Mystery of Regeneration. In Crete the bull’s crescent-shaped horns are known as The Horns of Consecration. They are obtained through the sacred ritual sacrifice, and are offered at the altar. Thus, the bull’s horns possess the spiritual power needed to bring forth life from death. The bees born from the bukrania are said to be “bull begotten”, and represent resurrection. In this series Macko uses red stains to represent life blood, or the menstrual blood of the Goddess whose form is inscribed on the bull’s head. I interpret the manifestation of blood in connection with the birth of the bees as analogous to the manifestation of tears of blood in the eyes of statues of the Virgin Mary or Jesus. These materializations of body fluids and essences indicate that divine alchemical transformations are transpiring, and that the spirit of the Goddess is awakening. In the Bucrania suite, the bull’s head dematerializes as the blood and body fluids take form, and lift off, rising as vapors in the ethers to mingle with the stars.

Yet a third series of digital Prints, THE NIRVANAS 1—9 from 2004, also referred to as BOIS D’NIRVANA, renders the primordial form of the archaic Mother Goddess visible to us in different seasons, at different times of the day and night, at different depths beneath the surface of the earth’s woodland carpet, and illuminated by sunlight, moonlight, and starlight. Macko explains in her Artist’s Statement that these works imagine a future world where the imprint from the archaic past will finally reach the earth over eons of time in which they have traveled on waves of light. We shall then be able to see the image of The Great Mother as a part of our earth’s landscape. Viewing the Goddess in BOIS D’NIRVANA is akin to the way Australian aboriginal

people view the traces of their ancestors from the Dreamtime imprinted upon the earth through terraformations. Just as these geographic features narrate the story of how and where the sacred ancestors once walked uponthe earth, so BOIS D’NIRVANA enables us to perceive the traces of our matriarchal ancestors’ revisitation of the earth after eons of exile,-- in our planet’s future. The many variations of the one repeated Goddess form embedded in nature eventually enables us to hallucinate the image of the Goddess inscribed on all possible earth landscapes. This is similar to the way that Ana Mendieta’s women sculpted in nature cause us to become haunted by the form of the Goddess we can now perceivein landscapes, seascapes, mountainscapes, rocks and caves. BOIS D’NIRVANA recalls Monet’s impressionist studies of the Rouen Cathedral at all hours of the day, creating an art historical metaphor of the earth as our original cathedral and sacred refuge.

Inspired by the literature of feminist utopias in the works of writers such as Marge Piercy, Dorothy Bryant, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nancy Macko has been creating a symbolic female language in order to render the visions of “jouissance” (ecstatic sensual pleasure) that will be experienced in the future rebirth of her imagined Eden, a Utopia of the Honeybee Society, where one will enjoy a life of peace among the Bee Priestesses. In EARLY WRITINGS OF THE BEE PRIESTESSSES 1—15 (circa 4792—1537BC, 1999) her water-based ink stamp drawings on paper depict symbolically the earliest encounters between the warring drones and the peacekeeping bee priestesses. The drawings are offered as the retrieved documentation attesting to the evidence of the existence of the bee priestess Cucuteni culture in the Moldavian region of Romania. In the war of the skep (a breast shaped woven form of a basket, used to protect the bees in winter) versus the trowel, representing the aggressivity of the drones, the bee priestesses rescue the roses that they have always loved, and save the flowering world of their utopia. Preserved in perfect condition, these writings inform us that the bee priestesses were scribes of their own history, a history that is now recovered, whose knowledge will revolutionize our understanding of millennia of life on our planet where cultures whose deity was imaged as female, revered the sacred nature of the earth, the value of female creativity and the harmony of life in a peace-loving culture.

In LOOKING FOR NIRVANA (2004) and NIRVANA FOR NOW (2004) the blossoming of the flora on the body of the Goddess overtakes the more confining, rigid structures in the paint-by–number grid, creating, in NIRVANA FOR NOW the emotional body of the Earth Mother in full flower. In IN THE GARDEN OF THE BEE PRIESTESSES (2004) the symbolic world of the Mother Goddess tumbles into being, first in black and white (First Map I), then in royal blue. The goddesses, the hives and the roses seem to join in a dance of life, whirling through space in a rush of light-hearted bliss. Then in the Sacred Grove pieces I, II, and III, the second suite of works from IN THE GARDEN OF THE BEE PRIESTESSES (2004) , reclining against a background of deep cosmic blue, a golden rebirth of the feminist Utopian symbols seems to have taken permanent root in the universe. There is a wallpapering effect of the overall design that lends an intimacy to this meeting of the Mothers in the new Eden, creating an image of deep space that is not frightening, but familial and alluring.

Finally, in CORNUCOPIA (2004) the edenic symbols merge to create vines, possibly the next branch on the Tree of Life of the Goddess civilization and the culture of the Bee Priestesses. Light-filled, growing ever upward, the matri-centric icons flow naturally into triads of breasts or Goddess forms surrounded by roses as they travel further on the lightwaves of the future to seed the new millennium with the organic Enlightenment that originated in the archaic times of our lost herstory.

Nancy Macko’s feminist utopian cosmogony creates a matrilineal timeline in her work MOTHER PROTECTS THE DAUGHTER PROTECTS THE MOTHER and TIMELINES (5000 BC to 1950 AD) from 2004. Her oeuvre as a whole tells the story of cosmogenesis, of the rebirth of a lost civilization and its values embedded in the mother-daughter bond, which is the fruit of the vine from the Goddess Tree of Life. Harkening back to the original Mysteries and sacred signs from the spiritual trans-migration of the culture of Thera, to the magical manifestation of the epiphany of the Goddess in the Bucrania, finally to emerge as the Cornucopia in the Garden of the Bee Priestess, this joyous journey through sacred space and time provides a powerful healing from the wounds of lost knowledge, lost tradition, and lost life. Focusing on the disturbance the bees experience if they are not “told” about the loss of their beekeeper, Macko understands how the erasure and denial of our matriarchal history has resulted in our own psychic disturbances, creating a world that is now out of balance. Thus we learn an important secret. It is urgent that we TELL THE BEES, so that we never again lose the memories that will assure the full flowering of our feminist future.