DID YOU KNOW IN THE ANCIENT DAYS THE DRUMMERS WERE WOMEN?

Krista Holland, founder of the Frame Drumming Academy, is a leading independent researcher, teacher, and historian of the frame drum. Taught by the late Layne Redmond, author of When the Drummers were Women, Krista spent over fourteen years studying and apprenticing with Layne before her passing.

Before my teacher and mentor Layne Redmond, author of the book "When the Drummers were Women," passed away, she gifted me with archives of a collection of her slides that she had taken of "women with her frame drum" from her travels through Egypt, Greece and West Asia.

Many of the slides are the same images in Layne's book and displayed in her legendary slide shows.

One thing that strikes me about the images is that so many of the paintings and statues were created long before modern forms of travel were easily available. These paintings and statues were made before the invention of airplanes, cars, the internet, and Instagram.

How and why is this theme of "woman with her frame drum" so incredibly pervasive in art throughout time and across place?

Did the myths and stories and lore of women playing their frame drums carry over oceans and rivers, across deserts and mountains and unpaved landscapes?

Is the archetype of "woman with frame drum" some kind of symbolic archetype that pops up in the human imagination again and again and again?

Countless images - that span across thousands of years - found on almost every continent - in every artistic medium.

Woman with her sacred drum is genuinely a worldwide ancient - modern cross-cultural archetypal phenomenon.

The frame drum is an archetype and symbol that I have come to understand represents many multivalent things.

The frame drum is symbolic of the moon and her rhythmic cycles, the pulsing music of ancient fertility rites, and the sacred marriage rituals—the ancestral mythologies connected to the seasons and landscapes ripe with abundant fruiting and feasting and barren and fallow.

The Sacred Drum is a symbol of birth, growth, fruition, dissolution, death, and ultimate rebirth.

The frame drum symbolizes the Goddess's power and her ancient priestesshoods. Goddesses connected to the frame drum include Innana, Ishtar, Cybele, Demeter, Persephone, Hathor, Isis, Aphrodite, The Black Madonna, and Eros.

So, so many things contained within one simple circle...

CLICK here to begin your frame drumming journey!