In part two I discuss offerings, how we make them everyday and why it is important to be intentional about to whom we make them.
Ceremony
Ceremony is all around us. It is the steps of getting something done, it is process. When what we did was more attached to the comings and goings of the gods, doing itself was celebrated. In an atomised existence, everything are bits and never the whole, doing has become talking and the talking is tedium. Doing or action is still the means to the end, or the garden path of offering, but there is actually a lot less to say about it than the self help section or motivational Twitter or personal trainers on Instagram would know how to make content out of.
An action, committed to for the length of time it takes to bear fruit, in a world of psychology-mediated sanitisation, is called a habit. Once upon a time it was called piety. For it is our sacred portion of relating to and with our culture, our ecology and our articles of totemic significance, that gave ceremony its potency.
Habit has a sense of being inevitable and without our active participation. It’s not true, of course, but the adjustment this Animistic reframe offers means that the why for any specific habit becomes more intentional and subsequently, the habit itself is one we are more willing to choose.
How do I worship? How do I pray? How do I praise? How do I face challenges? How do I contend with seven generations looking back at me? These are all fields of play for ceremony. Ceremony reminds us, every time, that we are looking into, and talking with, the world and she is doing the same with us.
Ceremony is also not about me, where my decisions are special based on the categories that fragile egos form around. Yet they certainly include me. We are not alone in Ceremony, whether or not we are in ceremony with other humans, and so must be willing to become smaller and larger, depending on the demands of the being. You are inviting in forces/deities/extra-physical bodies and must welcome them to an altar in a manner befitting their style.
Ceremony is how we demonstrate hospitality for these beings.
I see these as the threshold of stepping away from these lifeways sanitised of spirit, that Tiokasin discusses. By seeing, knowing, hearing and honouring the abundance of Life in Ancestry, Earth and these Bodies of Bodies, we fundamentally alter our priorities.
While Tiokasin quips on vaccinations, others bring forward the sense of inversion, that how we live and how we think are arse backward from how forever cultures have been. I see this starkly in the position of the individual within Ceremony, or (to give it another name that brings light to other parts) the conversation between sacred objects, unseen forces and our flute-flesh bodies of bodies. Without fail you will find Fire at the centre. You will find Prayer or Song surrounding the Fire and you will find ancestors and gods and plant/animal/othered ally surrounding the Prayer and Song. Humanity is flute-flesh. Humanity is conch shell. Humanity is pen hand, mouth piece, vessel, doll. No matter how important the conversation, it is not the mouth that is the centre of it - but the everything between those mouths.
So honour thy needs, yet make way for the invited, intentionalise thy actions, intentionalise how thy gives thanks and makes offerings and at whose altar thy makes them- these are some basic, early steps into knowing, with our bodies of bodies, not our intellect, that the entire cosmos from curving edge to curving edge is alive and paying attention. Be a good friend to the living cosmos and invite life in, bless life with gifts and praise, honour life at the altar of your own.
Ryan Dickinson
When have you found yourself immersed in a task and felt like there is more presence in the immediate vicinity?
If you have an altar, what or who is on it, where is it and how do you make offerings at it?