Fire & Ice Greenland Ceremonies for the Goddess/Grail

Sent to by one of my students, I think it will be of interest to some.
michael

July 13, 2008

MY JOURNEY TO GREENLAND
Nita M. Renfrew

To my friends:
As many of you know, in the fall of 2006 an
Eskimo/Kalaallit spirit from Greenland began appearing to
me and led me on a wild, wild, wild journey. She answered
to the name of “Aanaa,” which means “Grandmother”,
or “Elder,” in Greenlandic. Since this coincided with
my meeting Eskimo shaman Angaangaq, or “Uncle,” as many
of you know him, I assumed it was his mother, and indeed, he
asserted that this was so (and continued to do so even in
Kangerlussuaq), urging me to follow her instructions no
matter how strange they might seem. (I will not at present
go into what all this entailed, but some of you, who have
accompanied me on the process for over a year, have been
able to follow it step by step.)
Eventually, Aanaa’s instructions led me on a journey to
Greenland in the physical world in late June of this year.
Aanaa told me the icecap melting is Mother Earth’s water
breaking just prior to giving birth to the New World, that
the Greenland icecap is the epicenter for this birth
process.

I was to go there to align with Mother Earth’s process
and bring the Grail energy (the Divine Feminine: the
ancestral energy with which I work) to help ease the Great
Mother’s birth pains in order for us to make the
transformation necessary to move up in consciousness rather
than be left behind or perish. (I might add that, all along,
I asked her, why me? Her answer always was that I would know
the answer when I was there.) Aanaa said I would experience
the Grail energies there in a way that they did not exist
elsewhere, that the Grail tradition that had been lost in
the West, had beeen preserved there for over 10,000 years.
After many, many setbacks, finally, on June 23, I arrived
in Nuuk (Greenland’s capital).

I stayed at the home of a
well-known Kalaallit woman healer whom Aanaa had led me to
communicate with by email over a year earlier: Manguaq
Berthelsen. In 2001, Manguaq was asked by a government
recently formed to clear the space in the government
building prior to assembling there. The bishop of
Greenland, upon learning this, proceeded to demand that the
official who had asked for this space clearing be removed
from his number-two post as government Administrator, and
denounced the whole affair as witchcraft. Manguaq was
publicly labeled a witch by one of the priests. The entire
government fell. (A number of mainstream press articles can
be googled on the Internet regarding this.)

Greenland, by the way, is a territory of Denmark, with a
parliamentary government for limited self-rule. Early on,
in the process of colonization in the 18th century, the
Danes began to do away systematically with the local
Eskimo/Kalaallit traditions, making them illegal, using the
Lutheran Church, the state church, no less, presided over by
a bishop appointed by the Danish king, to do so. To my
amazement, I found that it continues to be illegal, as it
was until recently in the U.S. for Native Americans, for
the Kalaallit to perform any traditional ceremonies.
The first thing I did upon arriving in Greenland was visit
Bishop Sofia Petersen, representing myself as a fellow
energy healer of Manguaq’s, to explain to the bishop that
energy healing and space clearing are not witchcraft, that
they are widespread and accepted practices in the U.S. and
the world at large. I asked her to consider reconciling her
differences with Manguaq, given that the consequences of
having been made an outcast by the foremost institutional
spiritual leader (in an official government capacity), in a
country of some 70,000 inhabitants, three quarters of whom
are Kalaallit, can be far-reaching. (For example,
Manguaq’s daughter Else, who is also a well-known healer,
was unable to find a job for two years.) I stressed the
point that as Christians we must know that Jesus’s way
was one of love and forgiveness, and that he hung out with
the outcasts, never condemning them. And Jesus was a
healer.

The next thing that happened in Nuuk was that when Else and
Manguaq and I, together, tuned energetically into my Aanaa,
whom they had known for some time had indeed led me to them
(part of the longer story), the consensus was that Aanaa (it
turned out that Uncle’s/Angaangaq’s mother was
Manguaq’s aunt) was far more than that one person, and
not simply Angaangaq’s mother at all, though it seemed
she had allowed us to believe that in the beginning,
perhaps in order to make things less confusing.
In fact, shortly after the momentous Full Moon-Spring
Equinox in March, when a major spiritual shift had taken
place in me, I had begun to realize that the Aanaa who was
guiding me was a great great spirit who far superseded any
one person’s spirit, and when I had asked her who she
really was, she had answered, the “Spirit of
Greenland.” Manguaq and Else felt she was the combined
Aanaa spirits of Greenland.

Else then looked at my hands, saying something in
Greenlandic to Manguaq, and shuddered. “I believe it was
your deeper self you led you here,” she proceeded, and
urged me to go to the National Museum the following day to
see the mummies. She shuddered again, and looked at me
strangely. “It’s your hands,” she continued in her
halting English, “they are the same as the mummy’s
hands, and your face, the way you are… Go see!”
Indeed when I visited the mummies the following day with
Manguaq (there were four of them—three women and a
baby—dating from ca. 1475, found in a cave in the north,
near Umanaq), I stood there entranced, all the feelings of
recognition flowing through me, and then I burst into
sobbing. One of them was me, lying there in a reclining
position as I often do, my legs slightly bent and pulled
up, toes pointed, head to the side, my hands with the long
thin fingers crossed over my chest.
Another was my mother Helma, who only recently transitioned
from this world. We had been put out in the cold to die, or
“move on” as it is referred to in the Eskimo/Inuit
world; presumably this was undertaken voluntarily when
people were no longer children, usually when they were too
sick or weak, or too old, to keep up, or when there was not
enough food. Sometimes, however, they were put out simply to
get rid of them…

On Friday, June 27, with this knowledge, I flew to
Kangerlussuaq to meet with Angaangaq/Uncle. In January,
Aanaa had instructed me to email him asking for his
assistance in my trip to Greenland. We had not been in
communication for nine months. He emailed back within a few
hours inviting me to come with my friends to his camp at
Kangerlussuaq on Friday, June 27, to help him prepare the
site for a Fire and Ice conference in the summer of 2009,
to bring back the sacred fire to Greenland after thousands
of years when the ice had come and no more trees grew,
according to an ancient prophecy, as he put it. I had been
preparing to visit Greenland with two friends for the
Full-Moon Spring Equinox in March, according to earlier
instructions from Aanaa, and we all understood now that
this was a sign to change the trip to June. Neither of my
two friends, who had prepared for months, were able to come
on this date, and I soon would understand why.

We drove for 45 minutes to the great valley where the camp
would be set up, and as we rounded a bend in the mountains,
before us, a scene right out of Jean Auel’s The Clan of
the Cave Bear unfolded below, taking my breath away. There
lay an enormous tundra valley studded by clear blue lakes,
and the glacier at the Eastern end. I and a friend who had
joined me the last minute, were left alone with our baggage
on a hilltop in the middle of the magnificent valley, near
the firepit, built last summer and awaiting the sacred fire
ceremony next year. The rest of the group, mostly local
Kalaallit, we were told, would come in a few hours.
At the airport in Iceland on the way there, I had fallen on
the stairs and sprained my left wrist badly (x-rays showed
no broken bones). Pondering why this had happened, I had
understood that it was a sign for me to release all
attempts to control my right brain, the intuitive side, and
go with whatever happened. So now I did just that: I was
moved to descend the hill to the firepit and do the first
of my Grail ceremonies that Aanaa had asked for. As I
started down, westward, a great dark eagle flew from the
north across the pale blue sky. I saw it cross in front of
the pale white horned Moon in mid-Heaven. The New Moon
would come in a few days, July 2; this was the only time
the moon was visible in the sky while I was there. I took
out my little Snow Drum, as she calls herself, who had come
all the way from New York City for this, and she sang with
all her might to the Moon and to the glacier in the East,
“Semarsuaq”—“Big Ice”—as she has
been known for aeons to the Kalaallit. I lay an apple out
for the Mother, and tiny blue and white flowers I found
growing on the path.

When we finished the ceremony, we walked to the top of the
rock hill again, while two eagles circled above. (A couple
of days later, I found an eagle feather and a hawk feather
in close proximity on the tundra.) Angaangaq arrived soon
with the three Kalaallit volunteers and the Canadian woman
who was a graduate of his three-year Wisdom Keeper program
and coordinator for the conference, who was there only for
the weekend. We set up camp with the tents. Five more local
volunteers arrived a few days later. The summer’s task was
to gather rocks from the riverbed next to the glacier, to
build a three-meter-high inuksuk, or traditional mound of
rocks overlooking the cermonial site, and four sweat lodges
for next summer’s Fire and Ice conference.

On Sunday, Angaagaq announced that we would ritually walk
the ancient Path of the Grandmothers, which wound up the
side of the southern mountain to a high valley where only
recently (after thousands of years) trees had begun to
grow, to about 4 or 5 feet. He said he needed to time the
walk in anticipation of the grandmothers from the Council
of Thirteen Grandmothers who would come next summer to walk
this path and gather firewood to bring back for the lighting
of the fire in the sacred firepit at the start of the
conference. As the senior “Elder’ or “Aanaa” in
the group (age 65), I, Nita, would represent these
grandmothers in our walk.

We set out toward the “sacred mountain” of the south,
up a narrow caribou path that, as Angaangaq explained, had
been used by both animals and humans for thousands of
years. It took me, the aanaa, at aanaa-pace, an hour to
reach the top. From there, we made our way west through a
rocky valley to the trees, a kind of willow that was now
growing to four or five feet tall for the first time in
thousands of years, due to the warming of the climate, for
another hour.

On the rocky hill slope, two falcons came to us, and took
turns diving and remaining suspended in the air for minutes
at a time directly in front of me, seemingly immobile before
my eyes, with the pale bright sun in the background. It was
like a transfiguration of some kind, with the falcons
stopping directly above and in front of me, wings
outstretched with head pointing up and bifurcated tail
downward, then diving into the current directly toward me,
but remaining suspended there in the dive for a few more
minutes, then upright again for more minutes. (This had a
special meaning for me: it was the Christ symbol, arms
outstretched on the cross, being transfigured.) I felt the
energies of flying pierce me over and over as they dove
toward me again and again, never reaching me physically (a
mother teaching her child to ride the wind). It was sheer
ecstasy. Angaangaq called me back from my trance state,
saying we had to finish timing the grandmothers walk.
Reluctantly, I continued on the steep, rock-strewn path.
It took another hour to reach the valley of the trees, a
total of two hours.

On the way back from the high valley, I stood on a mountain
peak and looked down to the place where the Big Ice was
calving with thundering groans. I felt the terrible great
pain. The first morning there (it is light 24 hours a day
at that time of year), I had sat before the others were up,
in front of Semarsuaq and meditated, open to any messages.
First, she told me I should know that, many centuries ago,
it was Angaangaq who had put me, and the one who was my
mother in this life, out on the ice to die. She did not
elaborate. Jolted to the bone by this information, still, I
had not expected what I received next. I felt only the
tremendous, agonizing pain of birth-giving that the Mother
was enduring. It would not be an easy birth for the New
World to come. A pain and suffering far more intense than I
could ever imagine wracked the bones of the Earth at that
place—Greenland.

The pain of all our ravaging of the
Earth, I suspected. I felt spiritually
chilled to the bone as I watched the Big Ice slowly melt,
heaving and groaning like thunder. After a while, I asked
her what her message was for me, and she answered simply,
“If you cannot reconcile the differences among
yourselves, how can you expect to affect a change in the
larger picture?” She would say nothing more, and I knew
she was right. That left not much hope for us.
In this case, Angaangaq and myself, two supposedly
spiritual people were not able to be in harmony. There had
been another elder at the airport when I arrived, Lars, a
Kalaallit sailor who had come from Sisimiut to help build
the site for the conference. We had waited for hours for
Angaangaq to show up at the airport, and Lars had begun to
drink a beer shortly before Angaangaq arrived. When
Angaangaq had arrived, he had looked disapproving and said
to me and my friend in English, “I cannot have this. Help
me to deal with it in a firm and dignified way.” That
evening, however, Angaagaq kept referring to Lars as “my
elder,’ with the greatest deference.

We all spent the night in a hotel there, and the following
day, when we were on our way to the valley, I asked where
Lars was, and Angaangaq announced that he had given
instructions to the hotel that when Lars turned up he was
to be told the mayor’s office was not paying for his
hotel room, and to tell him to return to Sisimiut.
Angaangaq referred to Lars now, not as “my elder,” but
as “that old man who should know better.” I protested,
saying that I kept hearing about how we in the West did not
show respect for our elders the way the Native Americans
did, and he was doing the same thing. I asked where the
love and compassion were in his heart, that he preached
about all the time with his teaching of “melting the ice
in the heart of man.” “I have only compassion and love
in my heart,” he answered angrily. “Don’t ever say
that to me again!” I pointed out to him that the day
before, Lars had been “my elder,” and today he was
“that old man.” Perhaps, I suggested, Lars needed
help. In any case, since there was no alcohol at the
campsite, this would no longer have been a problem. “I
don’t have time for that,” Angaangaq insisted, and
“that’s the end of the matter.”

Things had been icy between us ever since. Little did I
know that I would be the next respected “elder” on the
other end of the stick.

Later that morning, I looked toward the glacier, and saw on
the cliff below her, my name written in large capital
letters: N, I, T, A. It seemed perfectly natural at the
time. Every day, in the late morning, my name would appear
for a few hours when the sun hit in a certain way. At one
point, one of the Kalaallit women asked me how I spelled my
name, and I pointed to the cliff, saying, “That way.”
She burst out giggling, saying haltingly, “N, I, T, A.
right?”

We continued over the next few days to gather rocks at the
riverbed flowing in front of the glacier. The stones were
magnificent: red, blue, pale green, pink, yellow,
marbelized, black sparkling, and so on, lying on a bed of
sand sparkling like diamond dust. (Diamonds were in fact
discovered a ways south of there a few years back.)
In between working in the rock piles, Angaangaq took the
three Westerners to see the remains of a village on the
great lake where he said his grandmother had grown up. He
said he often sat there wondering which of the houses his
grandmother had inhabited. He showed us where the
ceremonial grounds for the shamanic ceremonies had been
held. Earlier, he had showed us two graves marked by stone
enclosures that he said were his ancestors’, that he had
rebuilt. He explained that his grandmother had conducted
ceremonies from each of the sacred mountains in the four
cardinal directions. She had once stood on the top of a
mountain looking to the south and said something to the
effect of, “Things are not good in the South.”

In emails to me Angaangaq had promised to show me where his
grandmother had performed her ceremonies so that I could
conduct my Grail ceremonies there. Now, he said we would
conduct my Grail ceremonies at the north mountain-peak site
for the New Moon. We did not speak of where the July 18,
Grail Full-Moon ceremony would take place.

The day before the New Moon ceremony, however, I overheard
him say to someone else that we would not be going to that
mountain because there was no time. I asked him, and he
said that was right, there would be no Grail ceremony, and
walked away. I said I would do the ceremony on my own, but
he tried to keep me from doing the ceremony at all, even
though he knew I had gone there for that sole purpose,
saying that he would bear the responsibility for any
consequences. That brightly-lit night, alone, I went up on
a small hill to a large stone with the silver chalice I had
brought for this purpose. I filled it with water, and
offered candy, flowers, tobacco, feathers and some of my
mother’s ashes, to honor Mother Earth’s breaking of the
water prior to giving birth, and to align with the birth
process. My little drum sang for two hours in the chill
wind that blew from the glacier 24 hours a day, till my
fingers were stiff with the cold.

As I called on the Divine Feminine which is the Grail
energy, and all loving female spirits in the area, human,
animal and mineral, to come forth and help Mother Earth in
giving birth to a New World, I knew that my special sisters
(and some brothers) were performing ceremonies in Ecuador
and in the U.S. to call up the Divine Feminine in the
world. The air around me filled with life as the spirits of
the land came from all around to support the Mother,
“mamita” in Ecuador. I felt the current of love from my
friends and from the land’s spirits. I also knew then why
I had beeen guided to Panama and Ecuador prior to coming to
Greenland. I used the seed rattle that my sister in Ecuador,
Susana the midwife, had given me for this purpose. I sent
out the energy from my womb, the old heart in her
tradition, to meet hers, from above the Arctic Circle to a
place south of the Equator. The silver chalice came from a
beloved grandmother in Panama. It stood on a
circle of white alpaca that came from the Andes to the
south.

The water in the chalice was from the glacier—breaking
water of birth.
After the ceremony, I asked for a special sign from the
Mother, and though I waited, all remained silent, holy,
still and calm.

That bright night, my sleep was long and deep.
The following day I heard Angaangaq say to someone that in
his meditation that morning, after many years, he had been
able to see the ancestors for the first time, as pale pink
silhouettes in the west, “thousands of pink
silhouettes.”

Later, as we walked to the rock deposit, I sought to walk
with Angaangaq, and said how I thought we should seek to
reconcile our differences, and I told him what the Mother
had said to me about affecting the world situation if we
could not reconcile the differences between us.
He answered me, “You have carried out the task you came
to do, and now it is time for you to move on. I need you to
leave.” As he said “move on,” I felt a chill.

He
continued, “You were chosen out of millions to be the
first grandmother to walk the grandmothers walk after
20,000 years. You should feel honored. Now it is time for
you to move on. You have done what you came here to do.”
“I came for the Grail ceremonies, at Aanaa’s
instructions,” I stated, and I still have the one on the
18th, the Full Moon. You have known that since January.”
No, it was to walk the grandmothers’ walk that you came,
he insisted, and, be honored.

That night, for the first time anyone could remember, the
wind that blew from the icecap was warm, not cold.
The following day, after breakfast, Angaangaq called me
aside, and we walked to the rocky hill I had been left on
the first day there. We sat on two rocks side by side. He
explained, I know you came for the Grail ceremonies, but I
cannot have other energies here. I have to control the
energies, and there is no room for any other than mine. I
need you to leave now. He added, however, that I was the
only one of many people who had kept the promise to come
and help him build the site, and also that I was the only
one who understood the importance of being here, but
nevertheless, that I had to go. He said the high cost of
the trip and any penalties for leaving early were my
problem, and walked away.

Far away as we were from the airport, it took me another
few days to get a plane back to Nuuk, than another few days
to Iceland and New York.

In Nuuk, once again at Manguaq’s home, I told her how I
had found so much suffering in the ice, and I had not
expected that. “Yes,” she said, “I too have felt the
suffering. The ice is weak and has lost its identity and it
is suffering. Before, when the ice was male and strong, it
was happy. Now it is suffering.”

I described to Manguaq what her cousin Angaangaq had told
us about the traditions his grandmother, also her
grandmother, had passed on to him. She smiled quietly, then
said about her and Angaangaq’s grandmother, “My
grandmother was a very ordinary person, very shy… She
never did any ceremonies… My grandmother was never in
Kangerlussuaq.”

I arrived at my apartment on Friday, July 11, in the
afternoon, having spent the entire plane trip pondering my
journey to Greenland, wondering what to make of it, trying
to pull the pieces together. I went to Central Park and the
Metropolitan Museum, to see the Turner show, which reminded
me of the scenes with the falcons… In Central Park, I
visited with a duck and her eight ducklings, resting on a
bank of the reservoir. I spoke to the spirits at Chalice
Hill, where I perform my Grail ceremonies, thanking them
for bringing me back safely. I sat on a great rock that had
the markings of the glacier in New York millions of years
ago. And I knew that I was as close to nature and Mother
Earth as I had ever been on the tundra above the Arctic
Circle.

Later that evening, at home, it suddenly struck me that I
felt whole again for the first time since my mother had
left me the previous fall. That terrible, terrible empty
feeling inside me, of feeling like an orphan, with no one
in the world but myself to really care for me, had left.
It seemed perfectly natural now, that the Full-Moon
ceremony on July 18 would be held in Central Park, and was
perhaps meant to be held there all along. After all, now I
had a direct connection to Semarsuaq, Big Ice, and didn’t
need to be there physically to connect. I realized I had
opened the portal to the ice on the New Moon, but I would
only enter that ice portal with the Full Moon.

I still had one big question about my trip when I was back
in New York… Aanaa had told me that I would experience
the Grail energies in Greenland, that did not exist
anywhere else. I had expected to experience something truly
sublime and wonderful and uplifting and exalting in the
energies before the icecap, but I had found the energy,
rather, to be succint and self-contained, like the oldest
rocks in the world around Nuuk, that did not speak easily,
certainly nothing mind-blowing or transporting. And it was
the energy of extreme suffering and pain.

Then, on Saturday, in New York, as the day wore on, it
gradually dawned on me that I had indeed experienced the
Grail energies in a way that I never could have done
anywhere else in the world. It was the Grail suffering!
Mother Earth suffering as her water broke, literally in the
form of ice. How painful that would be for a human mother,
for her water to break, the amniotic fluid in the form of
ice, frozen pieces dislodging from her womb, the seat of
her creative powers, traveling downward and out between her
legs, out into the world, preceding the baby she had
gestated for many months, the baby she was giving birth
to—a frozen baby. No, I realized, we had to do all we
could to make sure Mother Earth’s baby would not also be
frozen, like the water.

What a message I had been charged with… But I realized
that if I had been given this message, it was because we
humans needed to know the extent of the Mother’s
suffering, and then, we could still do something to change
things, to melt the ice in the Earth’s womb, the
“shungo,” her old heart. The Divine Feminine, the
Grail, needed to be warmed with love and caring, and
brought back as an equal partner with the male, in her true
splendor.

That was what it was all about.