"Brother Malidoma, be still. Tell me what is happening."

Since I was very young at the time, I don't recall what led up to this exercise. But how I remember the shrill peeping of a little chick as Grandfather rubbed its wet downy body against mine. I squirmed at the tickling sensations, but Grandfather held me tight to keep me from looking around.

"Grandfather, you are tickling me with a little chick. Why are you tickling me?"

"I'm not tickling you."

"Yes you are."

"But I am not, brother Malidoma." How did this relate to ritual? "Look," he explained, "we are doing what we are doing so as to learn how to play with the spirits. They are at the heart of ritual."

With his grip lessening, I turned to ask, "Why do people do rituals?" I could see no baby chick. "They kill chickens, goats and all kinds of animals, and they eat some and throw others away. Why?" Grandfather never looked at anybody while answering a question. He was working on a tobacco pouch while he spoke.

"Do you know why you go to the bathroom? Do you know why you urinate?"

"Of course I know. I can't help it."

"Well then, you know why we do rituals."

Village life rotates around subsistence activities (farming and hunting) and the practice of ritual. In a way, subsistence work links humans together while ritual links humans to the gods or God. Living with my parents throughout my university years, it felt like the dead were not really dead. At least once a day we had something to say to our ancestors. At least once a day a word is addressed to the shrine of Nature, be it at home before undertaking a journey to the farm or to another village, be it in the farm before working at it.

The presence of the Otherworld is never trivial. The general impression is that ritual should precede human involvement with the world and with each other. Thus planting begins with the offering of a sample of that which is going to be planted. In a way, the planting already happens at a divine level before happening actually. When one goes on a journey, be it into the city or be it to the nearby village, one must ritualize the travel at the ancestral shrine prior to undertaking the journey itself. It is assumed that, at the end of the ritual, in the course of which the traveler gives himself away to the gods, the journey itself has already happened in a metaphoric world. The rest is just translation of metaphor. When a person is suddenly sick, while he lies in pain, the head of the house first goes to a diviner and finds out what went wrong. There he finds out what ritual must be done. He comes back home, finds the elements that must enter into the ritual and performs it. Only after all this does it finally become necessary to do something directly with the sick person. By that time, the illness has been dealt with symbolically. What remains is the actualization of that which has already been performed.

It follows then that primitive cultures normally deal with the physical world at the last stage. What goes wrong in the visible world is only the tip of the iceberg. So to correct a dysfunctional state of affairs effectively, one must first locate its hidden area, its symbolic dimension, work with it first, and then assist in the restoration of the physical (visible) extension of it. Visible wrongs have their roots in the world of the spirit. To deal only with their visibility is like trimming the leaves of a weed when you mean to uproot it. Ritual is the mechanism that uproots these dysfunctions. It offers a realm in which the unseen part of the dysfunction is worked on in ways that affect the seen.

Consequently, each time we enter a ritual space we do so because something in the physical world has warned us of possible deterioration at hand. This presupposes that one does not enter into a ritual without a purpose, a goal. As I said earlier, ritual is called for because our soul communicates things to us that the body translates as need, or want, or absence. So we enter into ritual in order to respond to the call of the soul. So illness, perhaps, is the sign language of the soul in need of attention. This means that our soul is the part of us that picks up on situations well ahead of our conscious awareness of them. Purpose is the driving force that contributes to the effectiveness of the ritual.




Copyright © 1993 by Swan Raven & Co.

From Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community by Malidoma Patrice Somé (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1997). Used by arrangement with Penguin Putnam Publishers, Inc.