Pagans Join in Global Ceremony to End Massacres

Healing Hearts at Wounded Knee (HHAWK), an organization comprised of First Nation leaders, has put out a call for religious groups and individuals to join them in a Global Ceremony to end massacre. And, Pagans are answering that call. The event is being held on the 125th anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee on Dec. 29.

Organizers explain that they are using the power of religious ceremony to break the cycle of hatred and conflict, and to heal multi-generational wounds. On their website they write,

Indigenous peoples around the world are bringing back ceremony, bringing back healing practices, bringing back the sacred into our lives. It is with the sacred that we can end massacre. It is with the sacred that we can heal. It is with the sacred that we can make this Great Turning to save our relations with one another, with our sacred planetary home, and with the Divine.

HHAWK is inviting both indigenous and non-indigenous persons to join in from wherever they are located around the globe.

Matt Whealton, a member of the Temple of Ra in San Francisco, was asked to record an Egyptian morning hymn for the the Healing Hearts at Wounded Knee Global Ceremony website. He first heard of the project at the Parliament of World Religions this past October in Salt Lake City. While there he met and had lunch with, Jean Fleury, the Tribal Peace Ambassador of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and also one of the organizers of HHAWK.

Whealton said, “As is often the case at the Parliament, people ask about one’s religious practice, especially if it is out of the mainstream. Over lunch with Jean, I described a bit about Kemetic Reconstruction, and my particular passion of working with the sounds of the ancient language in ritual contexts. I described the Morning Hymn from Egypt, how it might have been sung, etc, and she said ‘Well now, you have to sing it for me’. So I did, and then and there she asked if I could record it for the HHAWK website.”

Whealton said that after he finished singing, Fleury asked him a question that had a profound impact on him. She asked him if he knew that he was singing for the Ancestors out of Egypt. Whealton said, “To me that question meant something powerful. It meant and means that our own rituals and ceremonies as Kemetics, and Reconstructions in general, entail a kind of obligation to the ancient people who can no longer speak directly for themselves or through their own descendants. It meant that I have an obligation to speak justly for those Ancestors, and speak justly for their descendants too, even if they no longer recognize the ancient Gods and Goddesses. It meant that an indigenous person recognizes that song as meaningful in the context of reciprocal relations and obligations of family, land, tradition, and sacredness of Indigenous Culture even though the line of the tradition was broken for 1500 years and even though I was not born to direct descendants of those Ancestors.”

In addition to recording the Egyptian morning hymn, Whealton is hosting a small ritual at his home in San Francisco on Dec 29 to correspond with the Wounded Knee Ceremony. In addition, P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, founder of a Graeco-Roman-Egyptian syncretist reconstructionist polytheist group dedicated to Antinous, is organizing a ceremony in Washington State.

From Opening Ceremonies of the Parliament of the World’s Religions 2015 [Photo Credit: H. Greene]

HHWAK says you don’t need to be part of a group to join in the Global Ceremony. Individuals can spend a time of quiet contemplation at noon on Dec. 29, or they can go to the website, or Facebook group and join in a ceremony at a location near them.

To join a conversation on this post:

Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.