Santa Caterina: Shaman

Santa Caterina: Acrylic and Gold Leaf on Panel
18 x 24, by zoe blue

(Other studies of this saint are here, here and here.)

In Charleroi, there is a patch of ground which seizes you when you cross it, forcing you dance. It is a sweet spot in the universe, and when the people of the surrounding areas need healing, they go there to dance the cure into being. It began as the site of a compulsive public mania of dancing, which has now been ritualized, the people led across the plot by a priest and always with the same effect.  Perhaps Santa Caterina is reaching down over that space with her violin, breathing madness and holiness into their small human forms, leading them to ecstasy. 

But who brought her to ecstasy? 

According to the author of Music and Trance, the difference between the dance of the possessed and the dance of the shaman is in who plays the music. A shaman plays her own music, and that music changes not just her perception, but transforms the world. Her music possesses others, imposing her own imagination onto the once solid forms of their universe. What makes Santa Caterina a saint, or a shaman, is that she doesn’t only change the world for herself: you cross her “patch of earth,” and you, too, are changed.

In this painting, Caterina is caught, mid-leap into the frame, simultaneously reaching into yet another universe to manipulate the dancers via her instrument. Having worked herself into a frenzy with her music, she has vaulted clear into another reality, one shining with the clear gold light that only the holy mind reaches, the light between one universe and another, between death and birth, that blazing moment of nothingness before the world is created anew.