It is really sweet, thinking of the three joyous leaps by which tradition exhorts us to greet the sunrise tomorrow morning. It is telling that said leaps are to be followed by abandoned dancing. Ecstatic dance. Renewal. Hope. Fertility. Femininity. Top of the Divine Cycle, just after Death, Dissolution.

Our thankless, forgotten forebears knew how to praise and be thankful! Let us be grateful to these Priestesses. Let us remember the teachers, healers, leaders, all of whom patriarchs work hard to keep erased, obscured, co-opted.

Ishtar with Bull, Fish, Tortoise and Bird

Now a little tour of where we are today, and how we might still make a glorious case for dancing.

When the cult of Adam and Rome coopted the young Christian philosophy from the East, it seems to have done so to gain hold over an insurgent political force and thereby protect its dominance of existing markets. The new religion, with its focus on the links between personal, meditative faith and a living, transcendental community, was a very effective technology for either empowering – or enthralling – adherents. It roots were in a Judaic text, but the canopy was a bright and novel thing, lived rather than read. Rites were enthusiastic, and most sects (not all) focused on preserving and growing the community; this often involved reciprocity, equality and sustainability. Highly feminine values.

Rome removed most of the femininity from the stories and parked its version of the faith in a strictly patriarchal, White supremacist framing. No small feat, their project took the better part of 300 years. Gone was the nourishing body of Christ, literally suckling the human adherents of a dual-tenet faith. Here is a cadaver bleeding to death from torture. Also seeking to control the lately feminine religions of the North, Rome then mapped these newly sanitized stories onto the old ways, replacing the womb of Ostara with the fleece of Apollo, transforming her altar into a donation box, and renaming her Jeebus The King – and that was just the first bastardisation.

But oh, candy eggs and chocolate bunnies and the gory march of human cruelty and divine forgiveness that is the Passion. There’s still a likeable vestige or two.

As the modern bastardisation of these annual rites continues to mould the ancient festival day into ever-newer corruptions, I argue there is still much to find remarkable. We just have to look past the taffeta and celluloid. To thank our long, winding shoot of forebears for connecting us to the tree of life, and to feel them thank us for continuing forward despite the absurdity. To behold a bunny in the yard at first light. To read in Isaiah, who curtly, lengthily foretold the corporeal births of YHVH among humanity, a mixture of spirit with flesh that would signal first a chance for peace in our realm and then for justice; to encounter this phrase at verse 12 of Chapter 65, admonishing those who exercised their free will but “chose that wherein I delighted not” … to read this and to consider what the “delights” of the spirit are.

When is my spirit delighted? I ask now. I have a wave of things; many waves in fact. Perhaps too much I consider delightful to my spirit. Let me ask now, what does NOT delight my spirit? What smothers my spirit?

Does your spirit delight in observing misery? Walking right past it? Insisting there is nothing you should or could do?

Does your spirit delight in creating a little misery for another? To take more than you offer? To simply take?

Does your spirit delight in removing the humanity from another of our number, based on their color, their smell, or what you might have heard about the beliefs they hold or where they were born?

But these are so dramatic; then let’s ask ourselves if our spirit delights when we spread anger at the grocery store, sloth in our dens, or moral indifference in our public forums. Does it ever last, these ephemeral feelings we hope approximate the delights we know are out there for us?

My spirit is enlivened when I share my fortunes, when I commiserate my grief, when I grow a seed and the bread it creates can feed my mother, my child, my neighbor. When I remove the thorn from the foot of my friend or the lion’s paw. When I respect, honor, and forgive my opponent. When I seek no dominance in victory, but only equilibrium and peace. When I give up my hands, feet, body to a rhythm I don’t understand but only feel and dance a feeling-shape into the bigger world. My spirit is delighted when it seeks these things. If I am in YHVH’s image, then so it must be above as below.

Recall the fast our Roman cult yet observes in small ways. Fasting is an ancient discipline. Its purpose is to drive our monkey minds far enough out past the lights of worldly delights so that we are able to experience a darkness finally dark enough to spot the true delights. Starry embers dancing just beyond the horizon. When we spot them, their radiance burns the scales from our vision. We will never again be seduced by the false glitter of the Babylonian.