Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community

Ritual by Malidoma Patrice Some is indigenous ritual from the inside. It's not from a Western "expert" who goes inside for a month or a year or five years. It's written by an indigenous person who went outside to study Western research methods and come back. I think that more than just giving indigenous individuals a voice (not a small matter in the least), individuals from a certain culture have a great amount of "insider information," some linguistic and some idiomatic, that helps them interpret their own culture. I see analogies from my own life and those around me which indicate how much local information is needed for effective communication, and I extrapolate that small bit of information to realize how I would need quite a bit more information to function effectively in a culture so unlike mine. Cultural differences are not negligible.

Some's Ritual functions in a world where magic is real and the ancestors still have power in local communities. It's a world many in the West would reject. And yet, the idea that there are spirits and gods in the world still functions on a popular level in the US, even if not a scholarly one. Superstition abounds as those in metropolitan bastions of Western thought (media, academia, politics) look down upon the superstitious. But whether or not spirits interact in the world, the belief in spirits acts in the world. That belief is operative, whether or not there is supernatural power behind it.

Some writes of how ritual is operative, saying that there is a wheel of regular and occasional ceremonies that must be performed. Some says, "These ritualistic hierarchies are not designed at random. When the yearly village rituals are not performed, other rituals suffer with ineffectiveness" (29). There is a world-making function that these rituals accomplish: rituals both make the cosmos and make the rituals within that cosmos effective. As some might say, there is no such thing as a cafeteria Catholic: without a strong big-picture ritual world, the smaller rites lose effectiveness. And without the smaller rites, the big picture loses its relevance. When both are active, the ritual (and the power that upholds it/it upholds) stands.

Some describes ritual as being absolutely incompatible with the modern Western world. Western industrialism cannot stand the slow pace of ritual, and Western accumulations of power cannot stand how the power of ritual (communitas, the ancestors, the power of the individual) makes demands upon the individual and the community. Ritual demands much. It demands allegiance, it demands respect, it demands perpetuation. No one can serve two masters. The rituals of industrialism make humans cogs, the rituals of the indigenous world make humans part of a web of relationships among all that is and all that has ever been. Every human has great power and every human must be profoundly humble in the presence of the power that transcends them.