The Sistrum

In Egypt, where sapphire blue lotus flowers drift on the river Nile, the sistrum was a percussion instrument, shaken at religious ceremonies when coming into the presence of a deity, and was also believed to drive away evil in the form of Typhon. “It is thought to have imitated the sound of papyrus stalks being shaken, echoing an ancient rite connected with the myth in which the god Horus was raised in secret in a papyrus marsh.” First seen in the Old Kingdom, the instrument was “closely associated with ritual rites in honour of Isis, and in Egyptian art, the goddess and her priestesses are often depicted holding a sistrum, which had two forms, - an oval hoop or a temple shape. In Greek culture, the sistrum was shaped like an elongated hoop and used in processions, sacrifices, festivals and funerary contexts.” Most often made from metal (bronze), clay and wood, the sistrum was also used during religious rites in ancient Greece, with one of the earliest examples of clay, wood and moveable discs, found in Minoan Crete (2000-1900 BCE). Returning to Egypt, one sistrum was found crafted in the form of the "Bat emblem", and which was associated with the goddess Hathor, who was the patroness of music,” and was also known as “The Great One of Many Names.” 

G.R.S Mead in his book Thrice Great Hermes wrote of how “The sistrum (σεῖστρον) also shows that existent things must be shaken up (σείεσθαι) and never have cessation from impulse, but as it were be wakened up and agitated when they fall asleep and die away.” The arch of the sistrum may symbolise the arc of heaven, with the tingling objects echoing the celestial bodies. The movements of the sun, moon and stars. Mead continues: “for it is fabled to bring forth one, then two, and [then] three, and four, and five [at a birth], and then adds one by one until seven; so that in all she brings forth eight-and-twenty, the number of lights of the moon.”

These planetary associations extend to the beautiful sistrum that Julie made for me, with its hammered copper coins. Copper has long been associated with the goddess Venus, while “verdigris is the poison of the copper metal and has been interpreted by the alchemists as the dangerous aspect of the principle of love. Copper can easily become poisonous, for it is very quickly affected by outer influences; it is a dangerous metal, it is soft and malleable but has a poisonous quality.” In the Royal Tombs of Ur in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, the remains of sixty-eight women were found. Some had ribbons of gold in their hair, and one had silver. They had all voluntarily drunk poison from a copper cauldron, for their King and Queen who represented the Moon, and Ishtar, symbolising the planet Venus. To their people they were immortal stars, who dissolved into the night and brought with them renewal on the earthly plane of existence.

Copper has also been regarded as the blood of the earth, and appears in many mythologies and traditions from around the world, from Lithuania, and the god of clouds, rain and storm, Perkunas, who struck down his enemies with a copper axe, to Celtic mythology, and the shape-shifting sea god Manannán, who “travelled across the sea, faster than the wind could blow, in a magical self-propelling boat made of copper, drawn by a horse named Enbharr.” In the Finnish Epic The Kalevala it is written: “a man rose out of the sea, a hero from the waves. He was not the hugest of the huge nor yet the smallest of the small: he was as big as a man’s thumb, the span of a woman. His helmet was of copper, copper the boots on his feet, copper the gauntlets on his hands.” While a Latin spell to Artemis found on a copper nail, attributes to the goddess the power to bind her hounds and prevent them from attacking the domestic animals.

In Siberia, “among the different Tungusic groups of northern Manchuria (Tungus, Khingan, Birartchen, etc) copper mirrors play an important role… the mirror is said to help the shaman to “see the world” that is to concentrate or to “place the spirits” or to reflect the needs of mankind, and so on… looking into the mirror, the shaman can see the dead person’s soul.” Elsewhere in Siberia, copper chains are used to seize souls from the lower world. When captured, the shaman secures them to the ‘three tails’ of his costume. In a Tundra Yukaghir tale known as The Girl and the Evil Spirit, she “strikes the ground with her iron-pointed staff and turned into a bear, with a copper bell in each ear.”

From the shamanic staff to the druidic wand, hazel, which is the wood used by Julie, has long been sacred to poets, mages and bards. A hazel walking stick is said to make a good companion. “It aids communication on all levels and brings about an increase in psychic abilities.” The Irish Celtic god Aengus carried a hazel wand, and Irish druids and early bishops also carried hazel wands, while trees of hazel and hawthorn stood outside the castle of The Green Knight. In Brittany, there is a tale known as The Hazel Sceptre, where a young man named Perik was once walking over the sand dunes of Saint Efflam when he remembered the words of an old beggar: “where the dune of Saint Efflam now lies there was once a powerful town… it was governed by a king who’s sceptre was a hazel wand with which he could transform anything he wished. But the town and the king were dammed for their sins, so that one day, on God’s command, the sandbanks rose like the waves of a troubled sea and submerged the city. Just once a year, on the night of Pentecost, at the first stroke of midnight, the hill opens to reveal a passage through to the king’s palace… but you must hurry, for as soon as the last stroke of midnight has died away, the passageway closes again and will not upon until the following Pentecost.” In what appears to have all the hallmarks of a mystical initiation, Perik enters the town but becomes distracted by the beautiful women there, and in ecstasy, disappears along with the town when it sinks back into the sands.

Over the channel, among the rolling hills and apple orchards of south-west England, the hazel was seen as a mercurial tree, where old seers told of silver snakes that twine around the roots, here illustrating a swiftness of energy. The hazel also brings the first whisper of spring with its golden catkins, like tassels of gold and colloquially known as lambs tails, appearing in late January/early February. Later in spring, the leaves open, beautiful, lime coloured and heart-shaped, while in the autumn hazelnuts ripen and provide food for many small animals such as squirrels and dormice. “Kernels of the hazelnut, mixed with mead or honeyed water, are good for coughs which will not clear. Mixed with pepper in decoction they clear the head.”  

Hazelnuts have also long been associated with wisdom, and this connection appears in many Irish Celtic tales and several Dindshenchas poems. Nine hazels of knowledge were said to overhang Connla’s well and dropped their nuts into it to feed the salmon of wisdom. In The Adventure of Cormac, Cormac Mac Airt is “lured away from the royal fortress at Tara and into a magical mist. He then finds himself inside a royal dwelling made from beams of bronze and wattles of silver and thatched with the wings of white birds. There he sees a fountain with five streams flowing from it and the inhabitants of the Otherworld drinking its water. Nine purple or crimson (corcor) hazel trees grow over the fountain, which are referred to as the ‘hazels of Buan’ (everlasting, enduring).”

Along with oak, holly, apple, ash, yew and fir, hazel is a Celtic chieftain tree, while in Irish mythology, the hazel tree and hazelnuts were linked with poetic inspiration. Sharon Paice MacLeod in her book Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld: Mythic Origins, Sovereignty and Liminality, recounts the tale of Finn, who, one day, when he was in the wood, “saw a man in the top of a tree, a blackbird on his right shoulder and in his left hand a white vessel of bronze, in which was a skittish trout and a stag at the foot of the tree. And this was the practice of the man: cracking nuts; and he would give half the kernel of a nut to the blackbird that was on his right shoulder while he would eat the other half; and he would take an apple out of the bronze vessel that was in his left hand, divide it in two, throw one half to the stag that was at the foot of the tree and then eat the other half himself. And on it, he would drink a sip of the bronze vessel that was in his hand so that he and the trout and the stag and the blackbird drank together. In Celtic contexts, the hazel tree and its nuts were associated with divine wisdom or the gift of prophecy, and hazel trees are described as growing around a well of wisdom. The apple tree, and its fruit and branches, seem to symbolise journeys to and from the Otherworld. Drinking sacred water (or ritual beverages) was sometimes connected with the gift of divine knowledge.”

The apple tree, as well as being one of the chieftain trees, is often associated with the Silver Bough. In the Celtic lands, as W. Y. Evans-Wentz noted, “to enter the Otherworld before the appointed hour marked by death, a passport was often necessary, and this was usually a silver branch of the sacred apple tree bearing blossoms”. Lewis Spence in his book The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain, explains further that “the silver bough was, in effect a link with the unseen world, a talisman by the aid of which certain mortals with whom the gods desired to establish communion and fellowship were enabled to make an entrance into the overseas paradise of these divinities while yet alive. The bough, or branch, was cut from a mystical apple tree and gave forth magical music which none might resist… The tree from which it had been cut grew at the door of the court in Magh Mel ‘The Plain of Honey; A Silver tree upon which the sun shines, like unto gold in its splendid lustre’”.  

This branch, sometimes “laden with bells, magical birds, blossoms, apples, nuts or acorns,” was also a “hallmark of the Celtic poet. Master poets carried a bronze branch. Poets carried their branches, adorned with bells, as they entered formal performance areas, letting the music announce their presence and alter the mood of the room.”  This symbolic branch or ‘druidic wand’ most often had nine silver or golden bells tied to it (three times three being a sacred number in Celtic mythology). The tinkling bells were to quiet the clan round the fire when it was story time. It was and is still believed that the bells jingling were said to cause a mini rift or warp in time, bridging the past to the present through the sacred spoken word.’” 

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If you would like a sistrum, Julie, based in Northern England, makes beautiful, handcrafted and intuitive sistrums: julie.hancock@yahoo.co.uk

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Sources:

Thrice Great Hermes by G.R.S Mead 

Brittanica.com (Sistrum)

Encyclopaedia of Celtic Mythology by Patricia Monaghan

Celtic Civilisation by Jean Markle 

Tree Wisdom by Jaqueline Memory Patterson

My book The Silver Bough

Fire in the Head by Tom Cowan

Sistrum. Hattian. ca. 2300–2000 B.C. Met Museum

Sistrum of the Chantress Tapenuca. 1186–600 BC. Met Museum

Faience Sistrum Inscribed with the Name of Ptolemy I305–282 B.C. Met Museum