Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  People from the First House, the Obsidian, were supposed to go to the pastures and barns and poultry runs with songs for and about the domestic animals. These songs might be traditional, or composed by a poet-musician, or improvised on the spot, or a mixture; they were simple description, praise, without petitions for increase or any other demands. Often there was not much singing except for a few traditional choruses such as the Bull Song, which belongs in the category known as Lusty Folksong:

  Oh, the bull he rode the cow around

  the bull he rode the cow around

  the cow she bore the bull around

  the cow she bore the bull around

  aho ahey the bully bull

  Oh, the ram he rode the ewe around

  the ram he rode the ewe around

  the ewe she bore the ram around

  the ewe she bore the ram around

  aho ahey the ramrod ram

  The processional visit around the barns and pastures often turned into a session of cow-riding, or sheepdog exercises, or donkey races, or an impromptu horse show. Children made collars for favorite animals, woven of grass and pennyroyal, and the livestock might get a sprig of pennyroyal stuck in their halter or their mane or their wool, or have their stalls decorated, or be given a treat such as an extra handful of oats; and the poultry and himpi got an extra feeding.

  The Second House, the Blue Clay, sent people along the creeks of the hunting side of town to sing to the game animals. These songs were old and well-known, and it seemed that this procession was never scanted—somebody always went “singing to the deer.”

  The Third House, the Serpentine, sent people into the woods and hills to the various gathering-places and meadows used by the community. The speaker of the House was supposed to lead a long chant enumerating all the unsown crops, all the herbs, seeds, grasses, roots, fruits, barks, nuts, and leaves gathered for food or medicine or other uses by human beings.

  The people of the Fourth and Fifth Houses, the Adobes, went into the orchards with a similar chant of praise to the trees, and into the plowlands to name and praise the sown crops of the town.

  By early evening all these groups had returned to town, and people were making ready for the ceremony of the Second Night: the Wedding.

  Like the Mourning, this was a community observance of a personal act. Couples who had taken to living together during the year did not call themselves married until they had danced the Wedding Night. Any married couple who wanted to participated also, reaffirming their bond.

  The formality of the ceremony was slight. Everybody dancing the Wedding met on the dancing place, where singers from all the heyimas sang the Marriage Song—a very old, rather brief, joyous choral, never reproduced and never sung but in that place on that night—and if the weather was good and the musicians willing there might be some dancing afterwards; the Marriage Dance was a cheerful affair in ¾ time, with couples dancing down the line and under other couples’ raised arms, as in our old line and square dances. After that everybody went home to the Wedding Dinner, at which hot wine and dirty jokes were traditional.

  Two towns elaborated on this simple festival. In Chúkúlmas, bridegrooms were given a sedate and ceremonious dinner in their heyimas, and then sung to the house of their bride, where they would live henceforth, and only then was the Wedding Song sung for them. In Wakwaha, after the communal Wedding Song, the two Adobe Houses put on a sacred play, The Wedding of Awar and Bulekwe; and music, dancing, and other romantic, erotic, or mystical plays accompanied the ceremonial drama. People said. “You’re not really married till you’ve been married in Wakwaha,” and couples undertaking or celebrating a long-lasting marriage often went to dance the World at that town.

  THE THIRD DAY OF THE WORLD.

  Before dawn, in the darkness, the young adolescents—girls and boys up to fifteen or sixteen years old—got the little children up, and led them out onto the upper-storey balconies or the rooftop or any high place they could get onto. There they danced in place, not singing, with seed and deer-hoof rattles to keep the rhythm. The older siblings and cousins carried babies too young to walk, and taught the little ones the simple step-in-place of the dance. They faced southeast; and when the sun rose they greeted it with a whispered chant, the four-times-four heya. When the sun was clear of the hills, they went down and scattered out around the town and its gardens, the older children helping the younger ones, until every one had found or had been given a feather and a stone.

  Each child holding the stone in the right hand and the feather in the left—a cross-over or “marriage” of the usual ritual position of these two profoundly sacred things, the feather of the Right-Hand Houses and the stone of the Left—they regathered in the dancing place and came as a procession to the Hinge of the town, between the dancing place and the common place. They halted there, and one little one was chosen to go forward towards the common place and cry out, “Let the children in!”

  At this the adults, waiting in their houses, of which the doors must be kept shut till then, could open the doors and welcome in their children.

  Breakfast in any household with children was a festival; and the rest of the Last Day of the World was for the children. The elements of reversal were playful: an adult speaking to a child was supposed to bow down or go on all fours, on penalty of being whacked with pine-branches by any child in sight. Green Clowns appeared and played tricks and performed juggleries. The Lower Valley towns staged mock wars, mudball and oakgall battles, which might go on in the fallow fields and around the hunting side all afternoon, and frequently resulted in black eyes and minor bruises. A particular kind of marzipan, ground almonds sweetened with honey, colored and shaped into beasts, birds, flowers, and faces, was handed out by every self-respecting household. The day, often called Honey Day, ended with a Bee Dance and an Ant Dance by the very young children. This had to be concluded before the sun set. As the sun got low above the ridges, adolescents, back up on the roofs and balconies, began to call out heya, heya.

  Most people then went up to join them, or climbed a nearby hill; some of the older adolescents and adults would have spent the day climbing a nearby mountain. In Wakwaha, many would have gone up to the summits of Ama Kulkun. There they awaited the first sight of the new moon as it followed the sun down into the west. Clouds and rain of course often hid both sun and moon at that time of year; but clouds and rain were people of the sky, and the view was not what mattered, so long as one was up high, or looking up, skyward.

  When sun and moon were down, the Speaker of the Obsidian House asked the moon to carry the blessing of earth and the people of earth through the Houses of the Sky. This single voice ended the three days of the World Dance. People might wait in silence for a while in the twilight, “watching for the rainbow people” on the mountain slopes or in the air, walking on the roads of the wind; but before dark they went down, went home, whispering the heya chant as they entered their own door.

  THE DAY AFTER THE WORLD.

  The three days of the World Dance involve a kind of time-reversal: the dance goes from mourning after death, through work and marriage, to childhood and infancy. The Day after the World carries this movement one stage further.

  Anybody wishing to dance that day went early in the morning to the Black Adobe earth lodge, where the ceremonies had begun three days before. Members of that Lodge led the group—usually not many people—to certain places in side valleys or canyons, near springs or beside water. These places, often only a few paces in extent, and unmarked in any way, represented (reflected) places in the Four Houses, the Right-Hand World—places the reverse of graveyards: birthgrounds, where the unborn wait to be born.

  The location and significance of the birthgrounds was part of the teaching of the Black Adobe Lodge.

  At one of the birthgrounds, Lodge members would sing and teach to the other celebrants the song Shining of the Sun, which in both words and melody is related to the songs of Going Westward to the Sunrise, sung to the dying and
the newly dead. The “matrix” of the song was the word hwavgepragú, shining of the sun; the other words might be sung in part, but rarely all together, as printed here (written out for us by Alder of the Black Adobe of Sinshan):

  You are coming,

  hwavgepragú.

  Surely you are coming.

  The way is short.

  The way is easy

  from town to town.

  Come when you want to.

  Come into sunlight,

  hwavgepragú, shining of the sun.

  All oceans and sea-beaches were considered to be birthgrounds; the unborn were likely to be there. So there were always jokes when young women went down to the Mouths of the Na—“What did you come back with this time?”

  The following teaching-piece is part of the teachings of the Black Adobe Lodges on the Day after the World.

  The sands of all the beaches of all the coasts, the grains of sand of all the beaches of all the coasts of all the world, are the lives of the unborn, who will be born, who may be born. The waves of the sea, the bubbles of foam of the waves that break on the coasts of the seas of the world, all the flashes and gleams of light on the waves of the seas of the world, the flicker of sunlight on waves of the ocean, those are the lives of the Nine Houses of Life without end vanishing without stay forever.

  The poem “The Inland Sea,” (here), is related to these teachings also.

  The Sun Dance

  Two of the seven annual wakwa hedou, or Great Dances, were danced by all nine Houses. In the World Dance of cosmic renewal at the equinox of spring, Earth and Sky danced at the same time, but not together: people of the Earth Houses offered all earthly things to the use and for the blessing of the Sky people, who, dancing in their own places, received and returned the blessing to Earth. The World ceremonies were referred to by scholars as “parting” or “sorting”—getting everything established, as it were, in its own place. In the ceremonies of the Sun at the solstice of winter, all that was parted was brought back together. All beings of both Earth and Sky, of all planes of being, met and danced the Sun together. This was not an easy business for ordinary mortals. The Sun was considered the most arcane, intense, and dangerous of all dances. Those who wished to participate fully in the mysteries and ceremonies, to dance the Inner Sun, trained for years; of an old person tying, people said, “He’s ready to dance the Inner Sun.”

  Most people participated only in the general ceremonies or Outer Sun, and the extent of their participation was entirely a matter of choice. It was difficult to keep out of a townwide binge such as the Wine Dance, and everyone joined in at least one of the Nights of the World Dance, but the ceremonies of the Sun were particularly attractive to people of introverted or mystical temperament, and might merely be observed from outside by many townsfolk. Children and adolescents had an important part, both active and passive, in the advent period before the solstice, the time called the Twenty-One Days.

  During the Twenty-One Days, little children would find a seedling tree or shrub in the woods, transplant it into a tub or basket, and keep it hidden until, at the Sunrise, the morning of the solstice, they presented it triumphantly to a beloved or admired adult. Older children might do the same, or might have found and nurtured a wild gathering tree (a nut tree or fruit tree or an ink oak) unclaimed in the woods, or might have planted and tended a bearing tree in the town orchards, perhaps for several years, and this they would present at the Sunrise to an adult they wished to show love and honor to. Often the gift trees were decorated with oakgalls and nutshells painted in bright colors, with blown glass ornaments, and with feathers tied on the branches. These “featherwords” were wonderfully ornate and delicate little works of art.

  Children and adolescents also saw to it that the trees growing in the common place and dancing place of the town were decorated, though the rain was often hard on the fine show. Apprentices in the Milling Art in the Upper Valley towns strung small lights on the trees, making a marvellous colored glimmering display, most splendid on the first night of the Twenty-One, but thinning out and darkening as the ceremonial period went on. Branches of juniper, fir, pine, and evergreen toyon with its bright red berries were put up over balconies and doorways and made into wreaths and garlands for the rooms. Special candles, often colored red and scented with bay laurel or rosemary, were made by the young people, and lighted nightly for the Twenty-One Nights; by the last of the nights they should have burned quite down.

  The sacred or intellectual practices held in the five heyimas during the Twenty-One days were concerned with bringing the Left Hand and the Right Hand, the Earth and Sky, closer together until they should meet in the place and time of the solstice dance.

  Attention was not focussed on the material and individual manifestations of being—the rocks, plants, animals, persons enumerated and celebrated in the World Dance—but on the generic and the spiritual: the aspect under which even living creatures still/already inhabit the Houses of Death, Dream, Wilderness, Eternity. The dead and the unborn were to be invited to the dancing. The people of the rainbow, the images of dream and vision, all wild creatures, the waves of the sea, the sun, and all the other stars, were to be part of that dancing. So the earthly, mortal, human dancers invited that part of their own being which was before and would be after their earthly life: their soul, or their souls. Not the “spirit,” the essence of individuality, or not only the spirit; for individuality is mortality; but also the breath-soul, that which is shared with, taken from, given back to the wholeness of being; and the self that is beyond the self.

  The practices and exercises of the Inner Sun involved breathing, as does yoga, but the theories and techniques resemble those of yoga only very remotely. The athletic austerity of yoga would not have been very congenial to the general Valley preference for “middling,” ubbu; a closer parallel might be found in Chinese taoist practices.

  The direct way, the royal road to communication or relationship with the Four-House World, was through dream or trance. The indirect but durable connection, the “low road,” was through intellectual and physical discipline: the training of the Inner Sun. Inner Sun material was not written down; the teachings were transmitted orally or nonverbally through the long course of training mentioned above. None of that material is contained in the following description; I can discuss only the practices of the Outer Sun, as observed or as explained to me by participants and teachers.

  Outer Sun exercises and rituals of the Twenty-One Days, then, were a progression farther and farther into a controlled condition of collective trance.

  The means of achieving this condition were fasting, drumming, singing, dancing, and journeying.

  Dream-quest journeys of the Sun were not solitary walks on the mountains, but were undertaken by a group of four or five, who went for several days or for the whole three-week period into remote wild regions, over on the “wrong” side of Ama Kulkun or other harsh ridge-and-canyon country outside the usual territory of Valley use. This exceeding of boundaries was an affirmation of the community to which the seekers returned, “as the child returns to the mothers’ house, as the souls return from vision.” These quests into the wilderness in winter were considered dangerous, not so much physically as morally or socially; as they were often undertaken under a sanction of complete silence, not a word to be spoken during the entire journey, the psychological strain must have been fairly intense.

  Danger was also indicated in the “journeys backward,” rituals in which the normal limits establishing the safety and decency of daily life were deliberately transgressed. Such transgressions were undertaken only under the guidance and direction of students of the Inner Sun—but rival disciplines arose, such as the Lamb and Warrior Lodges, with their own esoteric rites. The “journeys backward” were not called reversals, yahwe, except by the cults. They involved risk-taking and feats of physical endurance of the kind usually and carefully avoided by Valley people; drug-taking—purges, emetics, and hallucinogenics; extreme a
scetic practices—fasting, sitting motionless, sensory deprivation; and, in the cults, self-mutilation and animal sacrifice.

  The most sinister and extraordinary manifestation of the Twenty-One Days was the White Clown: a horrific figure, masked and cloaked in white, nine or ten feet tall, who singly or in groups stalked children in the woods and fields and even in the streets and ways of the towns. Whether or not the White Clowns did any physical harm, they were spoken of as if they did, and there were plenty of confirmatory legends and tales of the fate of children who met with White Clowns—regular ghost stories: “They found the child next morning, standing against the trunk of the apple tree. He was as cold as the rain and as stiff as the wood, and his eyes were staring and staring—but the pupils of his eyes had turned dead white.”

  The children, who had to reconcile their work of herding and gathering and so on, and their care of their gift-trees, with the real terror of these lurking monsters, went out when possible in pairs or groups all during the Twenty-One Days.

  The other ceremonies of the period were held in the five heyimas, or jointly on the dancing place. Anyone could join the drumming and the dancing, dropping in and out of the group as they chose; the meters and simple steps were traditional. I would describe their character as restless yet monotonous, and curiously attractive; one was drawn in; time was obliterated. The dominant activity was the long singing. The words of a long singing were matrix syllables without rational meaning, with little or no “core” of meaningful words. A leader sang the chant, and those who joined her or him undertook to keep singing as long as the leader did. Such chants, held in one or several of the heyimas, might go on for days without a break, the fasting participants singing themselves through trance to total exhaustion. They might rest for four or five days and then repeat the long singing.