Mikonenet: Sacred Grief Work

The core sacred text for the mikonenet is the body.

• What does your body tell you about your grief?
• What do your body tell you about how you feel about your grief?
• How can you use song, words, movement, ritual, to cultivate an embodied practice of honoring your grief?

Years ago, I began a mikonenet practice as a way to work with my grief. My knowledge of this mostly lost ancient tradition was greatly expanded when I took a class with Kohenet Rachel Rose Reid, who connected me with some of the sources that I list here, that I had never before encountered. This Torah belongs to all of us, and I am eternally grateful to Kohenet Rachel Rose and the Kohenet tradition for expanding our access to this wisdom. May our learning and growth be a merit to the Kohenet project.

-JV

The mikonenet as described in Kohenet literature:

"Mekonenet: The Mourning Woman

Jeremiah, as he mourns for his exiled people, asks that the mourning women be called to come and weep. The word mekonenet means “one who laments” but can also mean “one who makes a nest.” The mekonenet embodies the pain and truth of change. She appears as Rachel weeping for her exiled children, as the wife of Pinchas, who dies in childbirth, and as the grieving Mother Zion. She also appears in Ezekiel as the women weeping for Tammuz. She brings the gifts of comforting the bereaved, burying the dead, healing the mourners, and facing cataclysmic change. "

Netivot: Paths of the Priestess

https://kohenet.org/netivot

The traditional mikonenet, or sacred grief worker, practiced an elaborate art that required training:

Notice: grief tending needs to be taught. In American culture, we mostly are not literate in practices of grief. It takes investment to learn how to wisely be with our grief.

The mikonenet was an honored spiritual leader. The community depended on her services in times of grief:

The goal of the mikonenet was to bring mourners to tears:

Princess Tamar illustrates how a mikonenet metabolizes grief. After Tamar is violated by her brother, she makes the secret pain visible and loud. I imagine her streaking ash tears down her cheeks, making sure that after her tears drip down her chin, they are not forgotten:

Many cultures practice sacred grieving. Our sacred texts reference these parallel practices:

In ancient Egypt, a professional sacred mourner was called a Dryt.

In India, the role is a Rudaali.

In ancient Greece, the sacred mourner was called a moirologist. Artist Ioanna Sakellaraki explores the tradition of professional mourning in Greece in this essay: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-greek-photographers-ode-to-the-dying-art-of-mourning

The mikonenet was so valued, even the poorest people reserved funds for her services:

The Talmud records some of the practices and canonical laments of the sacred grief workers:

The Mikonenet might be understood as an archetype of the wounded healer, as taught by Carl Jung:

"..[A] good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor's examining himself... it is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek Myth of the wounded physician."

Carl Jung

The mikonenet tradition was practiced through the generations by Yemenite Jews, as recorded here:

In "The Worlds of S. Ansky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century" (Stanford University Press, 2006) we learn about the mikonenet tradition as it was practiced in Eastern Europe:

The mikonenet tradition had almost entirely died out when the Kohenet movement began to revive it in the past few decades. At Temple of the Stranger, we often sing the Gud Garma chant from the Talmud as a community mourning prayer, using a stirring tune by Miriam Rubin and Miriam Bursky-Tammam to bring the ancient words of our mothers and aunties to life for the first time in 1500 years.