Living the Myth through Art and Ritual
- Matt Maes
- May 8
- 6 min read
Nestled in the verdant bohemian hills of Boulder, Colorado lives a magic calling to the free spirited to come play and honor timeless seasonal celebrations. The moon's gentle gaze lays over a silent lot behind a secret location, yet to become a playground for the night's living light. Here folk gather for personal contact with divinity, the kind of reverence that many seek in cathedrals. The trees are mighty spires, perceptual patterns formed by the tree branches as Nature's stained glass windows, the ultimate work of art gaining from moonlight what will soon be received by fire from tiki torches planted in the earth.
If you arrive early enough, you may typically see the humble work of a handful of crew raise up a tent in preparation for the evening's merchants - Homemade stew, medicinal chocolate, live painting by yours truly, and more draw curious crowds inward. The highly anticipated quarterly gatherings gravitate scores of eager feet to leave their energetic imprints across the indoor hardwood dance floor. Part ritual, part ecstatic dance, these gatherings are designed to activate the mind, body and spirit resulting in the sense of felt presence that bring new and familiar folk back again and again.
As you step inside the main hall, you may sense the reverence for symbolic meaning displayed by numerous tapestries and assortment of sacred items forming an altar honoring Shiva and Ganesha, a mighty depiction of Thor with his hammer Mjolnir featured in vivid artwork. One by one, as visitors of the ecstatic file inward, the middle circle pulses with presence.
Ubbe MacLean's lion like stride carries him around the hall, his Mjolnir replica in hand ready to bless the ceremony. On the night of my first time attending a gathering, he and I shared an instant connection over my piece "Sovereign Breath of the Eternal" featuring the Norse goddess Freya. Along with having a close affinity with her, both reflected in my life and art, she's been at the forefront of practically every advance of my art. I felt compelled to bring one of the tapestries as a gift for the house, and when I revealed the piece to him, his reaction shone waves of joyful reception, the beginning of a friendship filled with contemplation of runes, life experiences, and much more.
On a given night he may take a more prominent role alongside the ladies Brigitte Mars and Angela LaRue, however on this particular evening we were led by Brigitte and Erin Sunniva McHugh. For myself, one of my favorite aspects of this community is seeing how women and men are honored, reflected in the leadership team. On this night, I had the honor of being set up at the edge of the gathering with my Odin piece in progress which I've since named "Roaring Will of Ages".
Each of us took an extended moment of pause as a long red ribbon laced through the fingers of all in the circle. If your mind is quiet enough and spirit is open, you can feel the electricity of bodies as connected conduits. With markers in hand, we each wrote intentions that we sought to be given light through ceremony. With raised hands, we spoke our wills into the night through our minds and spirits.
Following our mystical prelude, Brigitte led us through a spellbinding presentation combining the chakras with colors, fruit, sound and movement, beginning with the root (Muladhara) to the crown (Sahasrara). Brigitte's words alongside the slideshow revealed connections between colors in nature correlated with the meaning of the chakras, such as yellow representing brilliance, red as passionate, green as flourishing, or the mystique of purple.
I'll take a moment here to say that if you're reading along and much of this sounds like woo, I can understand and spent much of my life seeing the same way. If it didn't make sense to my analytical mind then I would immediately discard it. Fortunately, along the way my curiosity has led me to truly respect the complexity of the world for what it is, that you must be humble and keep a flexible mind. Besides, science is now catching up to concepts that mystics have known for ages. For myself, it took having extraordinary encounters of my own to walk through the door and integrate understanding over my life experience as compounded and not the least bit reductive, as I had been before. My hope is that you find that place of peace and the anxious searching for answers is replaced with wondrous contemplation of the mystery, just as it has been for me.
With the conclusion of the opening ceremony, we were each released to dance (or in my case, paint). This was the first time that the Odin piece had seen an event since laying down the initial pencil work. A sizable canvas had sat in my Art Vault for a considerable amount of time before I finally felt the charge to bring him into form through a 7 hour blitz of pencil work. This is, after all, the king of the gods, not to mention one of, if not the most complex figure in all of mythology. To capture his various sides on canvas is a considerable undertaking to say the least, and one I've intended to do justice to the best of my ability.
As I study every mythical figure in my art, I also look at other art in which they may be depicted. I often see Odin with his two ravens Huginn and Muninn ("Thought" and "Memory"), and his wolves, Geri and Freki ("Greed" and "Hunger"), and his fabled spear Gungnir, but I never see illustrations of his stories, let alone in a single image. Still more mysterious are the runes inscribed on the head of the spear, the names of which seem to be nowhere to be found. Rest assured, I have a theory that they're none other than the name, each rune carrying qualities which aptly describe the nature of the fabled spear. In this piece I've made sure to include references to many of his great tales, but the one part that most strongly communicates his signature presence is his revealed eye.
This is the reason why I love beginning with the face, because once I've got that sense of personhood coming through then everything else comes alive. It's amazing to me how a single detail can be so important to bring a piece together, and how it could've gone so differently. You see, at first I'd thought to leave his eye shining to symbolize higher "sight" but decided it would be much more realistic to draw in an actual eye. With a single gaze, you see his brilliance, wildness, utterly compelling aliveness.
Brushstroke by brushstroke, black paint brought silhouettes into form. Midnight black hair, strong and weathered hands, ravens perched inside an ancient crown, wolves with fangs bared. The daybreak of white highlights turned each form into its playground, bringing the myth to life.
As captivated as I'd been in the deep work on this piece, it would be a cardinal sin not to get my feet onto the dance floor with such sublime bass thrumming right beside me. Content with the current progress, I laid my fan brush on the easel and let the paint dry while I applied pressure to another kind of surface. The raw rhythmic electricity finds its way through my feet and out my fingertips. Whether through flamenco guitar, commanding metal, regardless of the genre, that amplified bass calls my name to commune with the transcendent unbridled expression.
…In the warmth of the night, the dance floor had become a constellation of bodies moving in communion, each person orbiting their own ecstatic truth. There was something elemental here, primal yet refined—earth and sky meeting in ritual form. Drums throbbed, feathers spun, glittering eyes flashed across the dim, incense-hazed room. The divine had arrived not as an abstraction, but as sensation.
For those drawn to the mythic, the mysterious, and the magnetic pull of community bound by reverence, this gathering is more than just an event—it is a threshold. Step through it, and you may just find yourself transformed.
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