The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk Page A

battered old couches. Council would eventually replace them with beautiful cushions and fine, crafted seats, as they had gradually recycled the old scraps of carpeting that once covered the floor and laid down rugs that were works of art, woven of handspun wool, with soft but vibrant colors and intricate patterns of the sacred symbols, the quartered circle with the double spiral in the center.
    The Voices gave an aura of ceremony to what was otherwise a fairly informal gathering. As she made her way to a seat, Madrone felt their power flowing through the room. A chant began singing itself inside her head:
    When we are gone they will remain
,
Wind and rock, fire and rain
,
They will remain when we return
,
The wind will blow and the fire will burn
.
    She looked into the eyes of Coyote, painted spirals that seemed to draw her in and in. Maybe she was falling into trance herself. The humans around her seemed ephemeral, inconsequential, while the masked figures became eternal. And yet she could clearly remember the meeting when they established the Voices. It was only about five years before. She had been a devoted attender of meetings at that time, a stage everyone had to go through, Maya claimed. There was criticism of the meetings—they were too long, too heady; people left feeling drained and ungrounded. Of course, that was the nature of meetings, someone pointed out; but weren’t we here to transform things? someone else asked. Somehow the question got around to the representation of the Four Sacred Things. Many people felt that nothing could truly be decided when the Four Sacred Things were not present. The animals, the plants, the waters had no voice in Council, and yet every decision should take them into account. After seemingly interminable argument, they had one of those unlooked-for bursts of collective creativity, or perhaps madness, and established this ritual, where masked representatives for each of the sacred elements sat in trance in Council, channeling the Voices of wind, fire, water, and earth.
    “May the balance be restored,” she murmured as she seated herself, because that was the appropriate thing to say in the presence of any manifestation of the Four Sacred Things, or when entering or leaving a sacred space. She said it under her breath, so as not to interrupt anything.
    She slid onto a couch beside a short-haired, bony, brown woman with the muscles of a construction worker. The woman winked at her.
    “I’m Surya,” she said. “Carpenters’ Guild.”
    “Madrone, of Healers’,” she murmured back, feeling a little thread of attraction that she was far too tired to pursue. She was sinking into trance, and that was not appropriate for a Council meeting. But as she looked around the room, all she could see were energies, earth and air and fire and water congealing into bone and breath and nerve and blood, emerging into form and fading back into formlessness. They played through the colors of light coming through the skylights and through the forms carved into the beams and the lintels of the doorways. They played through the genetic bequests of the ancestors she saw reflected in the skin colors and bone structures and textures of hair around her, east, south, west, and north: Europe, Africa, Asia, the Islands, the Americas, all the waters of the world had flowed over this spirit-haunted land, leaving something washed ashore in their wake. Ivory, sepia, raw umber, burnt umber, ebony, charcoal, sienna—a palette of earth tones, like colors out of a paint box. Auspicious, they called it, when children of ancestors from all four directions sat together and the circle was whole.
    About fifty people were present, finishing up a discussion about reconciling the solar and lunar calendars, a topic about which Madrone had nothing to say. Salal, who was Crow of the meeting for the day, nodded at Madrone to show that she was aware of her entrance. Sal was one of the most skilled facilitators, and Madrone was