The ancestry of Bone

Photo: Chamunda by George Serras

Body-less tribes abandon their karmic inheritance

deluded by meaning diatribes as Truth

divorced from the ancestry of bone architecture

and its soil-scented remembrance of ancient matter.

-Padma Menon, “The Outcast”

There is something very finite about Bone. We come to an ending in the architecture of Bone which is the skeleton of Body. In the intimacy of Bone, all masks of narratives, like flesh, become one with soil. What endures beyond flesh is Bone.

Bone is the essence of Body-centred inquiry because it is the material union of polarities—it is both mortal as the finitude of the architectural basis of Body, and immortal as that which endures beyond death. It is where mortality meets immortality and presents us with the mystery of non-duality as material alchemy.

Mainstream spiritualities and philosophies of our times propose Consciousness and matter as discrete domains. Usually, Consciousness is considered something higher and invested with divinity. Matter, including Body, is something to be transcended in aspirations of enlightenment, ascension and rising. We feel that Body and matter limit us with their finitude. Yet all our conceptual prowess or whatever we attribute to Consciousness happen while we are embodied beings. Even experiences that we call “out of body” occur in the presence of Body and while we are manifest in Body.

For ancient traditions, Body was the site of Reality and the centre of the unfolding of experience. This seems obvious when stated, yet we live as if we are anywhere but in Body. Our Reality is in narratives and theories rather than in the experiential truth of Body.

Our approach to Body is one of mastery and control or subjugation to our will rather than allowing Body to manifest in the plurality and multi-dimensionality which are body’s intelligences.

Where Body is the centre of Reality, bone is its architectural essence.

We speak of knowing things in our bones, or the “bare bones” of something. These are residues of the archetypal wisdom of Bone. In shamanic traditions bones are ritually reconstituted as symbolic reconstitution of Consciousness. In India, the after the cremation of a body, the family collect the bones in a ritual ceremony.

Consciousness in archetypal wisdom is immanent in matter and Bone is the essence of this Consciousness. We change Consciousness by rearranging our skeletal architecture.

The nature of dance in many of these archetypal traditions is this rearranging of our skeletal essence. In Indian dance the units of dance called Karanas reach into our Bone architecture to express dance constellations which are literally a reconstitution of bones.

These constellations are not representational of what we know, rather their purpose, such as it is, is to reveal sensations and experiences that are unknowable. Dance here is a technology of transforming Consciousness. It is the shamanic ritual of bones made intimate and experiential as expression of dance.

Ancient skeletal Goddesses abound across cultures. The Indian Goddess Chamunda is one such example. Chamunda’s physicality is what the mind would experience as scarcity. When we suck our bodies in towards the spine, ribs, and collar bones, and we allow the eyes to fall into the depths of their sockets, there is an incredible return to the marrow of our bones. Our mind’s story of abundance is an outward projected one of acquisition and increase. So, retreating to the bare bones of anything is an uneasy proposition for the mind.

Chamunda’s archetypal cosmos suggests that when our inquiry inevitably makes us an outcast (Chanda), we confront our anger and frustration. At the same time, we are also deluded by the hornless mind (Munda), bereft of primordial intelligence (hence the absence of horns). Such a mind soars recklessly in the skies only to dash itself against the windows of a high-rise tower. In Chamunda’s Body, Chanda transforms into ferocity and precision to behead Hubris (Munda). Munda’s aspiration is not denied, rather it becomes the majestic eagle on its knees at Her feet (Garuda). Tethered to the Earth and Garuda unites Earth and Sky in grounded flight. Chamunda, composed of Chanda and Munda, is the Divine Consciousness that can occupy the interstice between these two sensations.

Chamunda dances during the Pralaya or the Great Flood. Chanda and Munda themselves are the chaos of the Great Flood, the bewilderment of our mind-led intelligence overwhelmed by elemental forces of Consciousness. Chamunda suggests that the dance here is neither Chanda’s anger nor Munda’s Hubris. It is the return to Bone, to our Bodily essence, to our marrow or Rasa.

Rasa is the philosophy of archetypal dance. Rasa is a word with multiple associations and each one of them is meaningful in revealing the nature of this dance. Rasa as the marrow points to dance as something of Bony essence, birthed in the marrow of our skeletal Consciousness. It is this Rasa that we must taste in the dance invocation.

We have become queasy about Bone, as we have about Body in general. With the advent of textual and intellectual philosophies, Body lost Her pre-eminence as the birthplace of Reality. Chamunda harks back to an ancient wisdom, a remembrance of the ancestry of Bone, and of the Divinity of Body. Body is Deity, and nowhere is this more material than in the alchemy of Bone as the dancing essence of Body.

If Deities dance, it is because our Bones dance.