Something like twenty-five years ago, I read Always Coming Home by my favorite author, Ursula LeGuinn. The people in this future-fantasy have a rich ritual life, including a ritual for the dead called Burning the Names. Names of the dead were “burned” in a community fire and grief was released.
From that, I adapted a ritual we call Drumming the Names. After the circle is cast, we start a slow, quiet rhythm. People begin calling out the names of their beloved dead, and everyone chants the name with them, to the beat. Often, the mourner will recite many versions of a name (a full name and “Grandma,” for example), while the first name offered is repeated. So you’ll hear “Nana” chanted over and over by your group while you say “Nana Jean. Jean Lipp. Nana,” and so on.
It’s pretty frickin beautiful. From the first time we did the ritual, we felt like it was an ancient tradition; like we’d inherited it from long ago.
Although LeGuinn described her Burning ritual as starting light and building, over many hours, to the names most painful to release, my experience is the opposite. We start with the big ones, the ones most pressing on our minds and hearts. Gradually, we include more and more names; ancestors, heroes, famous people, public tragedies (the Six Million, the 9/11 victims, the Haiti victims). As the circle becomes crowded with the dead (Gerald Gardner, Gene Roddenberry, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), it often becomes joyous. The drumming picks up, people dance, and we celebrate with our dead.
(In a smaller group, it will often simply quiet and fade, and not get to that ecstatic place, and that’s wonderful too, but I do love the ecstasy.)
A bunch of years ago—maybe 1994?—around there anyway, Isaac and I were invited up to the Center for Symbolic Studies for Samhain. Real Magic did a concert, and then Isaac and I led the ritual, which included the Drumming of the Names.
It seemed like there were two hundred people jammed into the room. The drumming became ecstatic. The names floated and danced around us; it was like a wave of noise and rhythm and memory and music. I remember we stood at the altar, holding hands, kind of witnessing it, and I turned to Isaac and I said “Someday they’ll drum our names.”
And so we did. On Saturday, we drummed Isaac’s name.
Blessed be.
