Connecting Your Past With The Now

SOLD 

The Ancestor Drum

Features:

• Lightning-Struck Silver Maple Drum with Bark, Interior Reinforced
• Large Drum, Nearly 45-inches Round, 5 1/4-inches High, Maximum 16-inches Long, 12-inches Wide
• Goat Skin Top And Rawhide Ties
• Deerskin Lacing and Wooden Beads
• One Of The Most Resonant TVD Drums Ever Made
• Weight: Approx 7 lbs.
• Handmade Apple Wood Beater With Cotton Top and Leather Lacing / Beads on Handle

Hear The Ancestor Drum Now!




Ancestor Drum Price: $325 plus s/h  SOLD 5/10

The Ancestor Drum Story

     How can I possibly tell the story of such a sacred drum? Where to start?

In my backyard, I guess.

The beautiful Silver Maple tree and several of its kin were planted in the 1930s around a bucolic pond that fronted a quiet road north of town, the same road I would travel on my way to a nearby fishing lake when I was a teenager in the 1960s. It followed one of the main hunting paths used by the Eastern Native American tribes for centuries.

I eventually purchased the property where the Silver Maple grew, and lived beside it in a cabin for nearly three decades.

The Silver is of a variety that will grow many trunks, apparently, as this one had three main trunks, all climbing from a huge base that must have been 10 to12-feet in circumference, though I never measured it. All I did was love it.

I climbed it when in my 20s, mowed around it, planted flowers next to it, raked its leaves every Fall, slept and dreamed beneath its cool shadows on hot summer days, and picked up its branches, lots of branches, broken by ice storms every winter. And I clearly remember the sickening day when lightning struck it.

A tremendous flash of light, the riveting shock of static electrifying the air, then the deafening crash and thud of thunder. Even before the sound peeled and echoed away into the mountains, the big Silver was already on a hopeless path to death.

The lightning strike had hit the largest of the tree’s three main trunks, then ripped a deep, rugged zig-zag gash down its entire 70-80 foot length and into the roots, where it then exploded, creating a hole the size of a bucket in the root ball and in the soil around it.

It took my tree friend four years to die.

In the next few years, lightning would kill three more trees around the cabin, each at or very near a cardinal point on the compass. The Silver, the first to be struck, was in the North, a place often equated by ancient Celts as the place of battle, whether it be in a war with other clans or with one’s own fate and destiny. Indeed, for me, it was a time when I warred with ego while in search of meaning and connection during an ineffective struggle to understand the Christian God I had been taught.

Next, in order, came a tall pine on the south side, splintered one night during a ferocious storm. Then it was a cherry tree in the west, followed by an oak in the east-southeast, across the road from my property.

I got the message. By the time the last tree was struck, I was emerging from an intense study of shamanism with a new-found love and appreciation for All That Is and, combined with a life-long interest in the study of comparative religion, a clearer vision of a path I felt compelled to follow. The way of the wheel, it’s been called. And it’s also been referred to as the way of the ancestors.

Now, I don’t write this to recount my life, for it is just another among billions. But I write this to put in context a very special drum and how it came to be.

In the autumn of that fourth year, I called Eddie, the best tree trimmer in West Virginia, and a friend for 40 years. He brought down the ruined Silver Maple within an hour, skillfully slicing chunks of the body to land strategically in the yard, away from the cabin, electric lines, lawn furniture and an old wooden bridge next to the tree that crossed a shallow channel to a small island in the pond.

His helpers removed several truckloads of limbs as Eddie prepared to then reduce the logs to smaller pieces which they could lift onto their trucks. And it was then that Spirit nudged me. I asked Eddie to cut one length of a log into equal sized cross-cut pieces, each about five inches wide. It was a good sized log, about four feet in circumference at the larger end, and tapering off to about 40-inches or so on the other.

I made my own drum from one of the pieces, and then made several others. They are all with owners who hold to the beauty of the shaman’s path. So this, the Ancestor Drum, is now the last one. It has been with me many years, and at times I have placed a top on it and played it, or others played it during ceremonies. I had once decorated it with rabbit fur and Ogham Sticks in the Celtic tradition, then changed it again to a more indigenous tribal appearance. Somehow, though, it was never settled with my attempts to decorate it. I suppose that’s because it awaits someone else to do so. And that's why I did not affix the three ornaments to it, though I include round leather lacing with each piece so you can do so.

It was a very difficult drum to make because of all the damage done by the lightning strike. Though the bolt had entered into the tree above the point where this drum was located, the energy had all but obliterated the heartwood, from the center outward, nearly out to the bark (see image, above left). Lightning always follows water in a tree, so it was obvious that this part of the tree was nearly saturated. At any rate, I had to place braces within the frame for added support, and also had to add some wood filler (made from wood products and a natural adhesive).

Recently I gave it a complete makeover, with a brand new permanent goatskin top, rawhide ties, and some additional reinforcing within the frame’s structure itself. It is more handsome now than ever before. And it is now ready for someone to own.

During the four years the big Silver lived after the lightning strike, I took to spending time with it, just to give it support and, at times, to seek support from it. During this period, I was intensely studying the shaman/Celtic way and had learned about “tree talking” from a shaman teacher. And for some reason, in nearly every instance in which I sat with the tree, I found myself sinking back in time, sometimes back to my grandparents, only one of whom I ever knew, but often further back into the mists of the past when one enters into the chambers of ancestral energy, where your eyes do little good, but your sixth sense serves to alert you to their presence. The Old Ones. The Ancestors.

And so, as a tree, it held a connection to the ancient time. And now, as a drum, it holds more secrets of the Great Wheel, where life and death intermingle in the Alpha and Omega of Creation. Where healing can arise from something thought lost, like a tree hit by lightning which is then reborn as a drum to sound the thunder and give the light of spiritual healing and connection, sometimes including connection with the past.

In the Old Testament, God created All That Is with his voice, and from his first words came both sound and light. One could imagine it was like thunder and lightning.

Some Native American Apache tribes hold to a creation story of a “Bearded One Living Above” who awoke from a slumber to create the world, which included a number of gods, including Lightning-Maker and Lightning-Rumbler.

These beautiful stories hold truth beyond our knowing, but within our reach. All we need do is seek the wisdom of The Ancestors.

---

The bottom of The Ancestor Drum features an intricate array of braided leather and deerskin lacing with a Lilac disc and wooden beads. The Lilac, to me, is symbolic of the Ain Soph. The final form suggests the figure of a person if you put soft eyes to it.















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