Ceremony

Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko*

“We all have been waiting for help a long time. But it never has been easy. The people must do it. You must do it.”

There are some stories that are as alive as the reader, both moving them and moving with them in an iterative, organic process of mutual understanding between person and text. Ceremony is one such, changing each time you read it – and changing you – but with the same underlying message: an invitation daily to step outside the illusions and traumas of your past and no longer allow them to determine your present thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.

A true ceremony, in other words.

At a purely plot level, things are straightforward enough: Tayo, a resident of the Laguna Pueblo reservation, returns from having fought and been imprisoned during World War II with PTSD and in crisis over his current identity. His beloved father figure gone, friends lost to alcohol and escapism, the land violated and appropriated, he has nowhere to belong or be truly at home. His elders’ concern over his – and similar others’ – situation leads him to seek the help of a medicine man, who guides Tayo through a very particular type of ceremony that enables him to battle both inner and outer 'destroyers'. And that is precisely what I wish to dwell on here: that, in this book, life lived is, itself, the ceremony.

As such, this is no esoteric text, no fantasy; it is unyieldingly grounded in the harsh, external realities surrounding Tayo, even as the plot unfolds amid the seemingly mysterious world of witchery, sacred plants and animal spirits. As Tayo's ceremony evolves at both inner/symbolic and outer levels, we as the reader are also given the opportunity to engage with three key, tangible elements that he encounters on his way, to help guide ours: the Body – both of Human and Land; the Feminine; and the Masculine. Let us explore these now.

The Body – of Human and Land

“Remember these stars… I’ve seen them and I’ve seen the spotted cattle; I’ve seen a mountain and I’ve seen a woman” (p.152), the medicine man says to Tayo upon completing the symbolic aspect of the ceremony, to prepare him for its external manifestations and provide him with a map of where to look for healing.

In this context, the human and the land move as one, as much in their pain and suffering as in their renewal and power. We see Tayo stumble through rock and cactus and rest in nourishing shade; we follow his path to reclaim the cattle his beloved uncle had invested in against all conventional advice, and that roam the lands free, but at constant danger of being captured and appropriated by the wrong hands, as indeed is the body of Tayo himself.

Thus Ceremony very much validates the notion of symbiosis between human, land and land's creatures, in both devastating and sublime ways. There is no departure from reality here, no flight of fancy; but there is the unseen persona of the spirit of the land, forever present, watchful, allowing humans to choose which way to go – to love the land or stamp upon it. For example, in contrast to the white colonisers' razing down and corrupting the original Navajo homelands, there are the bear’s footprints through which Tayo walks as a symbol of his ceremonial homecoming – to the home within, to his “return to long life and happiness” (p.143). Later, he has a pivotal encounter with a mountain lion that recovers his faith in the ceremony after almost giving up, whose prints, along with the snake tracks he also sees, he sprinkles with yellow pollen to honour their life-bearing messages.

Ultimately, the land in Ceremony and Tayo’s slow allowing of his body and soul to connect with it, is a portal – probably the portal – to renewed life. And it is by entering this that Tayo then meets the one who will guide him onwards to deepest union with his own integrity:

The Feminine

The woman Tayo meets in Ceremony, Ts’eh, acts as the central human figure who re-animates Tayo into feelings of love and a state of integrity. Crucially, Ts’eh is fully materially and emotionally self-sufficient, self-contained and self-loving; arguably, these aspects of the feminine are what then leave him free – indeed, urge him to, should he truly wish to be worthy of her and with her – to find those qualities in himself. At the climax of his journey, we see that these qualities are the ones that enable him to fight the other urges within that would utterly sabotage him and, most likely, end his life.

So, Woman here is the life giver, but not in any altruistic sense. She is not there to serve or in any way be his cattle prod, much like Tayo himself does not presume to prod the cattle he seeks; rather, he simply channels their way back to freedom by cutting through the mesh that binds them – and it is actually Ts'eh who successfully corrals them for him. She Just Is, getting on with the tasks of her life, working with root and plant and stone, focused upon them, with no need, dependency, drama or subservience enacted towards Tayo. This stands in contrast with the other depictions of womanhood in the book, notably Tayo’s bitter, highly socially self-conscious aunt, and the femme fatale figure of the Black Swan, who seduced Tayo’s uncle and thus gave rise, in part, to the aunt’s bitterness.

The woman Tayo meets is an entirely different breed to both. In her Is-ness, Ts'eh exerts the magnetic life force in the book precisely by not looking outward for how she should be or behave. Her total ownership of her body and choices - and her inner compass, intricately weaved with the direction making of the land - are what point out her way and, ultimately, help Tayo find his.

The Masculine

The two conflicting depictions of Man in the book – that deliberately and consistently clash – are what we may call the Wounded Masculine and the Healing Masculine. By ‘wounded’, I do not just refer to being in a state of hurt, but acting in explicitly destructive ways from that state. This is most acutely embodied in Emo, Tayo’s malicious antagonist who mocks the latter’s refusal to engage in drunkenness and womanising, and grows to become the deadening force in the story, which Tayo must face. In this wounded masculine paradigm, the feminine is objectified, humiliated, and used for the purposes of self-aggrandisement and domination over others.

This presents a stark contrast to Tayo’s own encounter with Ts’eh, which models and, in turn, moulds the Healing Masculine – the one who acts in integrity, aligned with the feminine, honouring both her and the land, and holding his ground when said integrity is threatened. Resisting the violence of Emo and the temptations of his fallen friends, in the end Tayo completes the ceremony in the way of the true warrior, refusing to comply with the masculinity of violence and the imperialistic narrative driven self-sacrifice espoused in the war. Instead, he puts his soul integrity first.

So, if the Feminine in Ceremony is the embodiment of Is-ness, and the Healing Masculine represents Integrity, then the Land is the force that moves between them and moves them together, all three intricately united in a sacred dance that culminates in the completion of Tayo’s own ceremony – both literally and figuratively the choice between life and death.

The Ceremony

The book’s overarching motif is that life itself is a ceremony, which we are invited to partake in over and over again, in our most quotidian and sublime moments, on both the personal and collective levels:

“His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything… things which don’t shift and grow are dead things… It is a matter of transitions, you see; the changing, the becoming must be cared for closely. You would do as much for the seedlings as they become plants in the field” (pp.125-130).

In passages such as these, the text firmly places the act of symbolic ceremony within the actions of everyday life, notifying us as readers that attention to both the symbolic and literal aspects of our lives – our inner and outer work, so to speak – are necessary in order for real change to occur. As Tayo moves through the landscape and begins to feel a sense of wellbeing in his body once again, the narrative tells us: “the rainbows returned him to his home, but it wasn’t over. All kinds of evil were still on him” (p.144). By this point, the symbolic part of the ceremony has been near completed; that is, the inner work consisting of Tayo slowly separating out his war-induced PTSD from his experiences of the here-and-now, breaking the link between past and present at a feeling level in his body. This process then strengthened Tayo for the outer-world leg of the journey. Without giving away the heart-pounding ending, Tayo changes one of his major, previously default patterns – it may be said, the major one - that both marked him out as a ‘good candidate’ for the war and thereafter held him in its iron grip of nightmare and pain. What he initially perceived would be a sacrifice turned out to be the ceremonial letting go of a default mode that not only no longer served him, but would have jeopardised both his life and those of others.

Ceremony repeatedly invites us to consider that just as Tayo needed the symbolic spiritual elements - the mystery, and the healing of deep emotional wounds - to actually reach the point at which he could take such intense pattern-breaking action, so we, too, need reprogramming to take place at the level of our bone and blood, to actually feel different, in order to take the new, vital steps we know we need, but which can seem so threatening without the foundational healing. Similarly, without then taking the life-changing actions that are called for, the healing process itself will be eroded.

In this sense, the message of Ceremony is a serious one indeed, whereby the whole world is at stake; as Ts-eh tells Tayo:

"Death isn’t much… there are much worse things… The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten. They destroy the feeling people have for each other… their highest ambition is to gut human beings while they are still breathing, to hold the heart still beating so the victim will never feel anything again. When they finish, you watch yourself from a distance and you can’t even cry – not even for yourself… They are all around now. Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more." (pp.229-30).

Different traditions and conceptual understandings around the world have identified these ‘destroyers’ in different ways, whether as human, metaphorical or spiritual, or some combination thereof; but their essence remains the same: that of destroying integrity and destroying the desire for life itself. Whether a demon possessing a person in need of exorcism, or a generationally transmitted false core belief or programme eating away at your sense of self, it is that energy we fight through both inner work and then action, first on an individual level, which then inevitably affects the collective. That is where our power – searing, everyday power – lies. In this way, Ceremony shows us that inner work must at some point (soon) become outer work, with the first creating the firm foundations that allow the second, and then those external impacts feeding the validity and joy of yet more inner strengthening, thus creating a virtuous cycle that honours Self, others, and Life itself, in contrast to the vicious cycles instigated by the destroyers.

But how do we get there? Often, nobody teaches us this in our families, mainstream schools, or in the wider community… but it is not so in every community. And it is this that I believe to be the greatest gift of this book: Ceremony offers us the sacred seeds of ancient tradition to re-learn the paradigm, the essence, of coming back to our truth and our integrity. Of acting – and impacting the world – from that place. Whether we do this via intensive, somatic-based therapies, deep love and reverence for the land we step on, or via rooted, sacred cultural practices of spiritual journeying, the key ingredient is this symbiosis between deep personal change and outer action: one cannot exist without the other.

One way we can begin to light the spark of this symbiosis is with the healing questions that Ceremony invites us to ask of our own lives:

What is a particular pattern that you know no longer serves you – possibly never truly has – that you keep on repeating, and that you are being given another opportunity to let go of?

What would it mean for you if you did let it go? And if you didn't?

What is truly at stake here? What ceremony of change is being asked of you? What do you most fear that you would lose, forego, have to grieve, if you allowed this change to happen?

And then, if you did, what newness could you bring into your own life and into the world?

If any of the motifs explored in this beautiful book speak to you and you would like to engage further, subscribe here to receive some ideas and inner work exercises you can do, for free, and with my deepest desire for all of our growth and healing.

*Ceremony (1977) Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: The Viking Press.