Transfiguration

Alice Coltrane -Transfiguration (1978)-


It has been a while since the last time I listened to Alice Coltran's music.
It is indeed distinctive in it's sound as the music ceaselessly invigorates us to rediscover deeper, broader sense of spirituality that linger in our minds. 

It would remind you of the solemn air of a shrine,
and it would also remind you of a primitive type of fear that a human faces when reading an ancient mythology.
This type of fear is naturally very close in its place to sacredness, and what Alice Coltrane does in her music is to express by sound this mere line between the fear and sacredness, and surely embrace both with her motherly blues to bring us into a shamanic realm.



 I visited the Fushimi-Inari shrine, where they deify white fox, in Kyoto.
As I watched the quiet view of a pond in the shrine site, I witnessed two snakes crawling in the bush, tangling their brown bodies to each other.


In Japanese shintoism, snakes are considered as one of the sacred animals.
This does not surprise us since shintoism is a polytheistic, animisitc religion.
Snakes have been deified as a symbol of Magna Mater, the mother goddess, in polytheisic religion such as in ancient Greece and Egypt.
Along the history, when the weather turned extremely dry in West Asia, there were group of people who began to worship the weather gods, who became the paternal figures in monotheistic religion ("Snakes and the Cross" by Yoshinori Yasuda).
This could also be related to how desert environment may have influenced monotheistic religions and their view of the world.


"Rules" are important in the paternal gods of monotheistic world, while Magna Mater is doubtlessly shamanic "Rule-breaker" in polytheism. The sort of witch-like personality that mother goddesses were entitled to is indeed related to the image that we have of snakes being dreadful and inveigling.

I have received the image of this Magna Mater from Alice Coltrane's music.
Her music holds a type of flexibility that liberates the listener's ears from the rigidity of theoretical rules or formation.
And yet, Coltrane's music does not yield its absolutely unique aesthetic of sound to the "Rules".
I am one person, who listens to Coltrane's music as one artistic abstraction of a yearning.
Yearning for the motherly ground that bears peaceful creation, filled with soils damp and ripe, that would never display, but knows only to play.