Excerpts from “Feeding the Holy with Beauty: Indigenous Ritual in Theory and Practice”
The ornateness and the eloquence of the gratitude given during a morning feast of this kind was one of the things that caused the earth to come back alive again. Indeed, the gods and ancestors were feasting right along with us in their world, only what they were eating were the things we’d sent them the night before- candles, liquor, flowers, tobacco, incense, songs, prayers, ritual, and dance. They too had fallen down in a trance of ecstasy and were now being revived by the delicious steam and aroma of our thanking them for what they’d given us.
Martin Prechtel, Long Life Honey in the Heart
Introduction to Ritual and Ceremony
Ceremonial ritual is a universal spiritual and secular practice in human culture. Through the components of attentional focus, intention, co-presencing combined with specific physical action, objects and space that is separate from ordinary life, rituals have the power to move participants in deep, integrative way. They are moved into a subjective state that evokes deep emotions and makes meaning that can lead to transformation of the self and culture. The invitation and awareness of salient non-human agents and the use of trance inducing altered states; create an experience of ecstasy and effervescence that relieves existential anxiety. It produces the social structure, belief systems, and connection to that which is larger than the self in a way that unites humans, the community, and the universe/spirit.
Ritual as Language of the Sacred (removed)
Ritual sacrifice and offerings (removed)
Indigenous Ritual and Modern Industrial Society
For Malidoma Somé, and his African tribe of the Dagara, ritual is essential for a sense of wholeness for the individual and the health of the planet. “We have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a sane life with it [ritual]” (1993, p. 19). “A sacred life is a ritualized life, that is, one that draws constantly from the realm of the spiritual to handle even the smallest detail” (p. 21).
Somé, like Prechtel, notes the disappearance of indigenous style of ritual in modern society, and believes that this is due to its fast-paced industrial patterns that disconnects us from the earth, the spirits and each other.
The fading and disappearance of ritual in modern culture is, from the viewpoint of the Dagara, expressed in several ways: the weakening of the links with the spirit world, and general alienation of people from themselves and others. In a context like this there are no elders to help anyone remember through initiation of his or her important place in the community. Those who seek to remember have an attraction toward violence. They live their life constantly upset or angry, and those responsible for them are at a loss as to what to do. (1993, p. 14)
Somé believes that ritual is not compatible with the rapid rhythm that industrialism injects into modern life. For Ralph Meitner, a leading theorist in green psychology, our species in modern culture is “suffering from a kind of collect amnesia. We have forgotten something our ancestors once knew and practiced- certain attitudes and kinds of perception, an ability to empathize and identify with non-human life, respect for the mysterious, and humility in relationship to the infinite complexities of the natural world. It may be that at several crucial turning points in the history of human consciousness we chose a particular lane of development and thereby forgot and neglected something- with fateful consequences” (2005, p. 61). The way of ritual of indigenous peoples, on a mass culture level, has been forgotten and trivialized for centuries.
Somé describes the tension of being a human being in today’s modern Western culture without ritual to ground us:
The corporate world dims the light of the traditional world by exerting a powerful magnetic shadowlike pull on the psyche of the individual. Thus the individual feels compelled to respond. But as he or she tries to respond, the individual begins to realize that the source of the pull is illusive. For the machine world either refuses to provide a sense of complete satiation or it just doesn’t have it to provide. And yet the machine world cannot let go of the individual (or else the machine will cease its motion) in spite of the fact that it cannot fully provide for the individual’s needs. So one of the ways to maintain a certain sense of self is to remain somewhat linked to essential traditionalism. (1993, p. 20)
This traditionalism, Somé believes is available to all of us. We just need to make some changes in lifestyle.
Somé believes that we must slow down, and step outside of the rapid pace of modern industrial society. In addition to slowing down, we must open to the pain of being human, especially the pain and grief of living in today’s culture. We must not just retreat to the practices of an indigenous culture different from our own that we may idealize. “Throwing away ones culture for another is an insult to the dead” (Somé, 1993, p. 17). We must feel our woundedness, forgetfulness, and the grief of being human in our own past and culture.
The modern seeker of ritual primarily acknowledges that he or she is wounded, or hollowed out, or emptied of his or her vital subsistence to the point that the individual is almost disgusted with the present state of his or her life… I mean to say that the hurt that a person feels in the midst of this modern culture should be taken as a language spoken to him or herself by the body. And the meaning of such a language is found in doing something about the part of oneself that is not acknowledged… We think pain is a signal that we must stop, rather than find its source. Our souls do not like stagnation. Our souls aspire toward growth, that is, toward remembering all that is forgotten due to our trip here on earth. In this context, a body in pain is a soul in longing. To shut out the pain is to override the call of the soul… As long as one does not deploy special energy to repress and deny these wounds, but rather contains them creatively- that is, in ritual- then one is working on oneself as a potential survivor of the holocaust of the tyranny in progress” (1993, p. 21).
Ritual is a way to actively engage the grief of disconnection and amnesia from living in modern culture. It is a way to reweave our wholeness, and find a way to give beauty again that can feed the sacredness of all life. “To the Tzutujil, people were not put into this world to have a good time; they were put here to be beautiful. In our esoteric prayers humans were called ruq’op ruchiuleu, the ‘earspools, the jewels of the earth.’ Our Happiness fed the Gods, but our suffering did as well. The Gods were not interested in alleviating our pain but they were interested in furthering our existence if we made life shine with our human creativity” (Prechtel, 2002, p. 168). Our suffering and grief of living in today’s culture without initiation, respected elders, or ritual can be transformed into an offering of beauty for the holy.
In today’s industrial society, we can all use our grief and suffering to reconnect and establish balance with the earth, restoring our sanity. Creating ritual from our grief, we can make beauty with words, songs and actions, so that all of the world may live and flourish. Ritual can be the physical language we can use to communicate with the spiritual nature of the earth, finding harmony with the planet and a deep sense of wellbeing in our lives.
Practicing Ritual in Today’s Culture (removed)
Conclusion
In small ways, everyday, we as individuals and as a community, can come together and create beauty as an offering for the sacred. We can use the grief and the anxiety we feel from living in this culture to form beautiful prayers that we send into the void with no hope of reconciliation. We live in a culture that has very little respect for the slower, inefficient eloquent gifts. We can only allow this checkmate of living in a culture that we cannot escape. As our heart aches to be reconnected to the beauty and grace of this living existence, we can stay with our yearning. We yearn for something deeper and more poignant- a connection that feels deeper than any home we have ever lived. We yearn for a community who sees our essence, and speaks to that, instead of the identity we have created to get ahead. In this move to bring ritual more into our lives, can start slowly, taking the time to pause and really see what is around us. In making offerings of eloquence to that which is larger than us, we can only hope that our lives can be beautiful food for the holy when we finally die at our appointed hour.
Bibliography
Meztner, R. (1995). The psychopathology of the Human-Nature relationship. In T. Rosak, M. Gnomes, and A. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology (pp. 55-67). San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.
Prechtel, M. (2004). Long life, Honey in the Heart. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Somé , M. (1993). Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community. New York: Peguin Compass.