Ritual and African Wisdom

1997

(The group has just completed singing a Dagara song. Malidoma then begins the talk.)

MALIDOMA: You should have a couple dozen songs, so that whenever there is an opportunity to get together, there would be some kind of musical diversity. Singing is pretty good, especially when you don’t have much to say. So you sing, cover up yourself. In the village I have the feeling that songs and poems are the same thing. Poems are not said. You’ve got to sing it. When you’re going through one form of challenge or another, singing is the “first aid kit” that you use in order to affirm life over whatever else is happening. This is why I have the feeling that a culture that doesn’t sing is a culture that is going down the tubes. We ought to learn how to sing, and sing even if it just means that we get together and sing for 10 hours. That’s all right. At some of the longest rituals that I’ve done, for instance funeral rituals that go for 72 hours nonstop, the reason why people can last that long is because they sing. If you don’t sing you get bored or you get sleepy, or something else happens, and you’re busy. I think singing is really one of the very first steps towards practical rituals. This is why a ritual without a song is really like a meal without dessert. Something is missing. Some major ingredient is not there. I didn’t know what to talk about tonight, and Mr. Losey suggested that we speak about ritual. What do you say about that? Is that all right? That’s a subject boring enough to be talked about, so we’ll try that.

It’s really hard to present ritual in some detail that the mind can grasp, because there is some sense in which ritual speaks much more loudly to the psyche, to the soul, to the heart than it does to the mind. The mind is always sneaking around trying to dissect and analyze and put into cages and loops whatever ritual is. In the end, who really benefits from the ritual is the psyche, the part of ourselves that nourishes itself with matters that are not concrete, things that are not solid. For a lot of reasons when you are in the midst of ritual it is more like some kind of a restaurant where everyone who is there has a very specific menu even though it is the same house, the same seats. What you eat is not the same as what the other person is eating, except that no one envies what the other one is eating because everyone is eating what they need to eat. So there is something that is fixed in it, but inside of it everything is custom-made for everybody.

If you can understand that, then you would be able to distinguish it with maybe the kind of thing that I like to refer to as Ceremony, which has a certain kind of rigidity to it. If you go to the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California on January 1, what is there is very fixed. You are supposed to walk certain ways. No spontaneity is allowed, because security is going to get disturbed and they’re going to come after you. On Memorial Day, what would they do in Arlington Cemetery, for instance? You’re supposed to be really solemn. If you’re not they will remove you and put someone who can do that. This is “predictable gesture” as opposed to the unpredictable, otherwise called “spontaneous”, that constitutes the main ingredient of ritual and is supported by a certain framework that remains constant in order to allow for this kind of flexibility and spontaneity.

In tribal communities and in villages, what supports life is not the economy. It is not the mass production or lack thereof. It is basically rituals. How can rituals support a community? That’s a big question. To comprehend it you have to get out of the economic thinking that is common to capitalistic cultures. Ritual can support a community because it nourishes a part of the self that is very important for the nourishment of the physical body. There is something in us that if it is not nourished, no matter what you eat you are not going to be full. What you need in order for your body to be feeling full even with the lightest meal or the smallest dish is something that you can find in ritual. If it is well done, whatever you eat thereafter is only a completion of the nourishment cycle. This is one of the reasons why 70% of village time is spent either preparing for or doing or recovering from ritual. This large amount of time says something quite interesting. It has something to do with the fact that maybe they are placing a very large importance on feeding the soul as a condition to feeding the body. This is also why they can survive in the middle of tremendous, serious scarcity.

In a context in which you have no supermarket and no grocery stores, and you have to wait every five days for a market day to occur so that you can buy something (if you do have some coins in your pocket), how do you conceive of filling up your refrigerator which you don’t have over there because there is no electricity, no running water, no nothing? What happens is that the whole idea of nourishment is conceived totally differently. There is a certain meal that the body and the soul can share together which is not available in supermarkets or grocery stores or department stores or catalogs or in anybody’s house. I have come to notice that it feels to me that maybe the consumer society has replaced soul nourishment with the spread of chains or supermarkets. It feels to me that any person who is interested in matters that have spiritual content to it should therefore reconsider seriously the whole business of ritual.

MALIDOMA: This kind of nourishment which saves one from being alienated and from being isolated seems to me to be at the core of what you may call a human sense of belonging. One of the things that we cannot live without is this sense that people care about us, that we fit somewhere. Somewhere that is solid and consistent. Somewhere where every time we think about it we are proud. We are happy about it, and we would not trade it for anything.

I think that this is a legitimate human awareness which has to be somewhat cultivated, protected and actually allowed to tighten itself. A human need for closeness to one another, for what we would call “intimacy”, is so real that there are certain regulations around the feeling of being in it. You can’t just go out and buy it. In the aisles of supermarkets there is no section that says, “Intimacy”. If you go to a department store, there is no area where you can buy some stuff that says how to be intimate or that this will grant it to you. So there is a problem there that even with all the things that exist in the store, there are still things that are basic that haven’t made it there yet. We don’t understand what the manufacturer and the distributor are thinking about, why they haven’t produced something in that area. This is because for some reason we are trying to beat an indigenous system by taking a very long road.

The road to closeness starts with an understanding of what community requires. If you understand it well you will see that among its requirements is a huge place that is given to rituals. This is why we need to understand really well what it is so that we can sniff it, recognize it, finger-point at it, and just be with it and do it in a natural way so that it doesn’t feel like what we know in religious practices—which are so radically separated from what so-called secular life is so that when you go into church you know you are not going to work, and when you go to work you know you are not going to pray or not going to church—but so that life becomes holistically constructed as something having to do with the wholeness of everything so that everything is tied to everything else, so that what you do can become a ritual unto itself nourishing you as you commune with it.

This is why I believe that the first requirement toward ritual is the space you are in. The space you are in has to be colonized in such a way that it carries the potential of being a ritual place, whether it be in a high multi-story building somewhere with you hanging on top of it or it is down on the floor somewhere in nature. One of the things that we are constantly required to do is every time we enter into a place where we know we are going to be for a long time is to think, “How can I turn this into a ritual place for me?” Basically it influences your own output. The way you work is influenced by the manner in which you approach the place you are in. It is important in the business of recognizing ritual places as well as turning any place into a ritual place to know what it takes to make a place into a ritual place. What does it take to turn a place into a ritual place? There are certain things that must be kept in mind. For me, at least, the first thing is that you have to be able to bring whatever things you are attached to, things which constitute a link between you and the Otherworld, to that place. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that you have to recognize that there are certain colors that vibrate certain kinds of energies that affect you positively or negatively. Don’t allow colors that vibrate negatively towards you to hang around the space where you work.

The third thing is to remember that there are certain imageries that attract your attention more immediately than others. You will see some people who will stop to look at certain things while other people just drive by and keep going. Why is it that you notice certain things and not others? This is because these things are speaking to you. You have to be able to recreate things that are able to talk to you wherever you find yourself.

As a result, eventually you have to have what we call a shrine in the place itself. What is a shrine? The closest to it is what you may call an alter. Not a Christian alter, but a place that constitutes a special seat for the Spirit, given to Spirit, and where you can go in order to interact with Spirit. By “Spirit” here you must think about all the impalpable connections that you have—connections with things or beings from the Otherworld, especially with Ancestors. That is one thing we cannot escape from. We can try to run away or pretend that we don’t have anything to do with it, but our Ancestors are on our toes every day. That’s for sure. We can dwell in denial but it would keep haunting us. So if anything at all, in thinking about Ancestors we have a little sacred place, a little space that is special where we say, “This is where you’re going to be. This is where I want you to be as you stay with me in this space that I’m going to spend so much time in.” Eventually here you are. By the time you reach this state you’ve colonized the whole place, reconverted it, turned it upside-down. It is what I call a “development”. You have developed the place from primitivism to post-modernism. From then on you will find out that you’re running the show. Nobody else is. The things you want to see happen there will take place there. By the way, any person who steps into that place cannot take you into a path that you are not meant to go to. In other words, you cannot be coerced in your own territory. That’s not possible. So that is the first step.

MALIDOMA: Space, therefore, must be approached in this manner. Otherwise you run the risk of alienating yourself from what you’re doing and finding yourself always feeling like you are trailing behind a certain ideal. This is what happens. Every time you have the feeling that you wanted to be over there and you’re here, and you don’t know how it happened that you are here while wanting to be there, and you don’t know how to go from the here to the there—it means that there is a discrepancy between you and your connection with the Otherworld.  

There is another thing that we wanted to talk about that has something to do with structure, what I call the “anatomy of ritual”, or I call it the “topology of ritual”. Different kinds of rituals that are important. Any ritual follows certain structures, and when the space is set—and the space is always noticeable because in the midst of it is a shrine or alter—then there is one thing. You have set the intention. You don’t do a ritual without an intention, without a purpose. You do a ritual because you want something that is not working now to end up working. You want something in this world to become better by associating it with the Otherworld. There is a stress here on intentionality. Why am I getting into this ritual? Why are we wanting to do a ritual? That is important.

Once you have the intention, that intention must be articulated within what you call “invocation”. An invocation is basically a prayer. It is an official invitation or summoning or calling of spiritual beings—Ancestors, Kontombles (the beings from the Otherworld), the trees, the hills, the rivers, etc.—to come and partake in the challenge that we are facing, which is to go from the here to the there. So you invite beings from the Otherworld, telling them, “Listen, this is what the problem is. I want you to come over and participate in helping us resolve the particular problem that we’re talking about.” You see it is very precise. You are not saying to come in there and hang out with us.

MALIDOMA: There is a need here to get out of formalities and a kind of empty politeness that sometimes bores the Otherworld to death. If you don’t want to, why force yourself? This is not a nine-to-five job. If you don’t want to do it, go home. It is important to act as if it is urgent. If it is not going to be done the world is going to end. You’ve got to be serious about it. Usually Spirit responds to emotion. If you are angry or sad, usually they hear it loud and clear. But if you are just at the same level of vibration you do not register on their Richter scale. They will say it doesn’t mean anything. It is important therefore to make sure that the yardstick by which you measure the intensity of ritual is based on the content of its opening, the way it opens.

Q:  We’re planning to do a grieving ritual, and I know for myself and probably for mostly everybody else that I have some fears about that, about the whole process and about losing control. So when you say this it’s like “okay,” but there’s a conflict. How do you address that?

MALIDOMA: It is important here to realize that the source of this feeling is culturally connected. In this culture things are so controlled, so well-planned. Even people’s behaviors are planned ahead of time so that there is very little space left for the unpredictable, the spontaneous or the unplanned. Your conflict comes from the fact that there is a lot of unpredictable in yourself. When a context like this is presented to you, all this unpredictable starts getting excited. Because it gets excited, the predictable part of yourself starts feeling really ill at ease because it will say, “Well, I’ve never planned that you would come out because this world is not yours. It’s mine. So as a result I don’t know what’s going to be left of me after I’ve let you have it your own way.”

In fact this feeling is quite appropriate. It is stating the fact that there is still a part of you that has not been totally swallowed by this culture, a part of you that is still ancient enough to want to enter into a place where there is a little room for the unpredictable. Controlled unpredictability is not chaos necessarily. It looks chaotic from the perspective of a person who is not inside of it. If you watch, for instance, a funeral ritual in the village, this is the most chaotic thing seen from outside. It is worse than what they do on Wall Street in New York buying and selling stocks. The way it is articulated, this is really emotional, you see people who are really carried away and you don’t know where to fit this kind of behavior. Yet there is a very solid framework inside of which this is possible. Otherwise, outside of that framework the person would kill him or herself. There is something really scary about it.

So the conflict you feel is a legitimate as well as a sane thing. The repression of an attitude that ends up making that conflict determine your not being involved is a loss, because it means that there is something inside that wants to come out, and that something is in need of being slowly allowed to come out. It will come out the way you are ready for it to come out. It is not going to come out the way someone else is ready for it to come out.

MALIDOMA: I’m going to back up a little bit here, because we are still in the business of tearing apart ritual. We talked about invocation. Then there is this other section of it that is called “healing”. The healing is the actual carrying out of what the ritual intends to produce. In other words, after you say to Spirit to come over and participate in the accomplishment of this and this and this, you have to jump onto what you said you are going to do and do it. Choreography plays an important role here. That is to say, the way you do what you say you are going to do. Humans are very ritualistic. They like to say “parade”. Parade has its source in ritual and not in showing off. What happens here is that there is a need for a certain amount of visibility. You want to be seen, associated or doing something. That means in this context that you want to be seen by Spirit actually trying to accomplish something. That kind of visibility attracts Spirit, who comes and joins you in getting it done.

That is why it’s always good to see yourself as an embodiment of Spirit, lending your own body to Spirit in order to accomplish what you want to do. In the Otherworld there are cultures that don’t have bodies, so it’s sometimes quite difficult to make things happen in the human world without borrowing bodies. One of the things that we have abundantly is bodies. Since we can’t do very much with those bodies, make it or turn it into a temple wherein Spirit can dwell. Make it possible for us to be able to accomplish things. They call that in plain terms “energy flowing through us”. Basically it is Spirit inhabiting us, inside of us. It is always important in any kind of invocational prayer to say, “Listen, by myself I can’t do much, but I know that if you get inside me, if you take over I’ll know what to do. I’ll do the right thing, because actually it’s not me but you doing it. On the outside it looks like it’s me, but it’s not because it’s you in the control room allowing me to do things.”

The healing part is the longest part of the ritual. This is when you are engaged in the business of doing exactly what you said you were going to do. In a grief ritual the business is to unload tons and tons of frustration and deprivation and loss and anger and sorrow. You name it. How can you get rid of this without becoming a vessel to Spirit? It is really hard, and that is probably one of the reasons why every time someone dies in the tribe everything stops for 72 hours. Of course if you look at it economically this is a disaster, but if you look at it from the point of view of the soul’s desire for nourishment this is a feast. Here there is no telling how long it would take for an unloading to happen. You just keep doing it. You’ll see when we explain it in detail how it is articulated. The idea is that you cannot give a timeframe to a healing process or give a deadline to a healing process. Only humans give themselves deadlines because they are time-caught. Spirit doesn’t do that. When is it going to be over? Specifically, when it’s over.

This is something which again when you are trapped in a culture that thinks in certain ways you may hear it. You may hear about the other alternative, but it is not that easy to make happen that other alternative. It is unbelievable how deeply buried into our cultural fabric we are. You can see the logic of something, but when it comes to actually being in it, acting it, it turns out that there are certain forces that you weren’t even aware of. In the worst case you start weaning and whining about how wrong something is, and you don’t even realize that you are defeating yourself. This is something that you can’t tell someone because the minute someone is in that posture, no matter what argument you bring in that person will find a counter argument. They will say, “Yes, but…” As soon as we start cooking up buts and buts and buts we’re in trouble.

This is one of the problems that I have encountered, at least here and in Europe. When people don’t want something it is amazing how they can use their own language to defeat themselves. They can argue themselves in and out of anything. English is especially good at that. We have to be aware that sometimes the things we are most vehement against are the very things we need. It is because we are at the threshold, at the doorway into it. That is when our own social programming kicks in and provides us with strong argumentative tools to knock ourselves away from it. What can you do? You can only bow to the situation and say you were not ready.

After the healing comes the part you may call the “closing”. The closing is always something having to do with thanks that is given to the Spirit for whatever you have been able to achieve collectively or individually. If you’ve asked spirits to come over, you have to thank them for what their presence among us has allowed us to do. In some cases people tell them to go away because now we must come back to normal. Other people say, “If you want to stick around, stick around, or if you have other business to attend you are now free.” I look at it as just a formula that satisfies our needs, but I think that just thanking the spirit for the great thing that we have been able to obtain with their help is enough. They are going to go if they have to. They are not going to wait until we tell them. If they see us doing something that is mundane they are going to get out of there, because they are not interested in mundane stuff. They always like where there is some amount of intensity. I’m not going to say, “Don’t tell them to go away.” People like to say, “If you have other commitments, you may leave.” That gives it a certain kind of power, because we are authorizing Spirit to go. It is like signing a release for them to go. That pleases them. Usually they smile and will let us have it our way.

You understand that all along while the ritual is happening, there is singing and there are rhythms that are going on to get the doorways between this world and the spirit world open. This has to be stressed, because if you don’t stress that Spirit gets bored quickly and goes away. Music and rhythm are key to the maintenance of an open doorway between this world and the Otherworld. You will see it in the village. Every Diviner you go to, before he or she begins to work for you he or she has to open the gateway between this world and that world through music. Usually they have a shaker that they start shaking for a long time, and they start making the invocation in the meantime. That’s what opens the door. When they stop, it’s quite clear. Or they may have a bell that they keep ringing and ringing and ringing until the door is open. When you’re dealing with a collectivity, a group of people, somehow they have to be involved in rhythm and chant while the whole thing is going on. That’s what maintains the doorways open. Otherwise it just doesn’t work.

MALIDOMA: Again this is an area where it is really hard to get people out of it. This culture has taught all of us very well how to be a spectator. If you go to a show you’re supposed to sit there and refrain from spontaneous involvement. Only when it is over are you expected to clap your hands, and that’s it. This is the only way you show your appreciation. You see, in Africa it doesn’t work that way. When, for instance, there is a concert going on, yes you spend some money for your seat but you never sit on it. You can’t stand sitting on a seat while other people are enjoying themselves in front of you. You join them. This is why anything that has this much intensity, of community involvement, it is hard to create an amphitheatre with all these seats that people can purchase, and then you go sit on it and refrain from any involvement until the end, where you are just supposed to clap your hands, and in the best scenario you scream a little bit just to add this cathartic part. It’s painful! Over time, if you practice that what happens is that in front of anything you take on the spectator mode. You’re waiting for the end. That’s exactly what it is.

I don’t know how to get people out of the spectator mode so that they can become more involved, so they can follow their own inner thrusts, the kind of energy that is moving them from within. It’s hard, because the only place where you are allowed to do that is in the context of ritual. That is not that widespread after all, and so everywhere else you are supposed to sit still and occupy your seat because you bought it at least for the next couple of hours, as if somebody is going to come and take it away from you.

This is why it’s important to really be attentive to the pre-programmed behavior that we exhibit, and yet usually when you are in the middle of it you don’t even notice it. You just do it first and then you realize, “Yeah, I did it.” This is strange, but that’s the way it is. This is also why in the healing part of a ritual it is so difficult, because as soon as people feel weird they take on this posture, “I gotta observe. I gotta take a look at what is going on, because I don’t understand what is happening to me.” If you go tell them, “Listen, you have to be more involved,” they’ll look at you as if there is something wrong with you. Not that the healing part has to degenerate into an all-out war because you want people to be more involved, but what happens in this kind of situation is that an energy is being severely misused. It is not doing justice to the people who are fully involved to have others there who are standing there passively watching the others being involved. It has got to be a situation in which only an outsider, that is to say a person who is never there and who is just passing by, can play that role. Even then you kick that person out of there, because that person who is a visitor should not be allowed on the premises of a ritual.

This is a part which is going to take whatever time is required in order to finish the ceremony. This is something to be added to the section pertaining to the healing part of the ritual. We talked about the closing having to do with just thanking Spirit. The overall shows ritual as something that is extremely animated.

There are two types of rituals that we need to briefly talk about and then close the whole thing. The most frequent one is what we call radical ritual, and the other one is called maintenance ritual. A radical ritual is a ritual that has something in it that is extremely demanding emotionally, physically, and you name it. The purpose of a radical ritual is to replace one state of the self with another state. For instance, a person who is suffering from a major emotional problem or disorder requires a radical ritual. How you can give a radical ritual is to put that person into a massive emotional experience. What that does is momentarily disconnect the person from the problem he or she has. The issue is to take that moment, to fill that space that is left because of the disconnection between the person and the problem and fill that space with something else. That way when that problem returns to the familiar place it will find it occupied, and so it is going to have to fight. After a radical ritual I have heard people saying things like, “I notice something new is happening to me. My life has changed. I don’t know what is going on, but something is new.” Yes, of course!

That problem has been disconnected from you and something else put in, but that doesn’t mean it has completely gone. The old thing gets so angry that it keeps looking for a doorway to enter. If you maintain the energy through what we call maintenance ritual, after a while the problem gets so tired that it goes looking for another host. It goes looking for someone else who is more receptive or more hospitable and starts cursing you in the process for being such a bad landlord or landlady. I would rather have a bad reputation towards problems than have something else.

That’s what radical ritual does. It is for a person who is in need of reconciliation with a big issue such as can’t enter into a relationship. It’s a pain in the neck; it’s scary. First of all, that person needs to be confronted with the reconciling element, like water, in a radical way. What is radical water, for instance? Sobbing is a result of radical water. If you dump that person into very cold water… Like in the snow. Lay her down in snow and cover her up with snow for two days or something. Or at least a few hours. Whatever is going to come out of there will feel really weird. At that time, if there is a whole circle of people to hold that person and hold that person, then lift that person out, sing lullabies, tell that person that she or he is the best in the whole world—a lie is good— (big laugh here!)

MALIDOMA: Whatever you do, be sincere about it. You can live with a lie. During that time this kind of attention really transforms the person. In the end, the person just remembers the feeling first of being in this extreme state and then being held by a whole village. It is like bringing the soul back into a sense and a place of community. That’s really radical. The feeling is the one that has occupied the new space that used to be occupied by this kind of distortion. As a result, for weeks or months after that the person is going to feel totally new. These are things that can be done, but you can’t do radical ritual by yourself.

A maintenance ritual is where you make sure that whatever you have is subject to the three months or 3,000 miles regular revision change of oil and filters and so forth. You recognize the fact that something is going on in you, and with water you just cleanse yourself again. It is not the same radical cold water. It’s maintenance water or regular water. Splash yourself with it or something like that. That will do.

These two rituals are different but related in a way. They are related because maintenance rituals are a derivative of radical rituals. They are appropriate only after a radical ritual has happened. Maintenance rituals can be done individually as opposed to a radical ritual that is done in community. More often than not a community that gets together should be mostly concerned with radical ritual.

In the course of one year there are certain kinds of ritual that you have to do. You have to do a ritual reconnecting you with the earth. More often than not it’s radical, because Earth is the only place that we haven’t yet figured out a way to go somewhere else and live. Even when we travel, after 12 hours we’re still on Earth. What can we do? We swallow our pride, and we recognize that Earth is our mother. This is why in our tribe people are used to being buried. They don’t wait until you are dead for you to be buried. You experience that once in a while in order to realize what it feels like to be in the earth’s lap, in the earth’s womb. This is something that helps us to eventually look at the ground on which we walk from a different perspective. This is radical ritual. That has to be done over and over and over again, because otherwise we forget quickly the disconnection. The gap becomes so huge that we don’t even know. Very quickly we call Earth “dirt”, because it’s “dirt-y”.

In the same way there are a lot of things over the years that we need to reconcile with because we encounter all kinds of adversities. These are things that create a state of conflict within ourselves which eventually require that we reconcile ourselves. It’s like balancing ourselves, balancing our own energetic account. That requires water in a way so that an encounter with water is not always only the cleansing opportunity but also the reconciling power.

These are rituals that any person, any group of people, any community can do. This is why we still need the wild out there with all the waters in order to be able to do these kinds of rituals. And God only knows how many things we have to reconcile. This is something to really, really think about. Other than that, when you hear “ritual” just think about something having to do with us calling in some being from the Otherworld in order to help us do something that we can’t do otherwise.

Q:  How is your grieving for the Ancestors in the Otherworld? Is it possible that they’re going to come stay with you?

MALIDOMA: You are grieving because they are with you. If they are not with you, you can’t even tell a thing. But you will bring more of the feeling, the presence into your life.

More often than not, you can’t think of something that hasn’t made a lock on you. You can’t see something that hasn’t seen you or hasn’t locked on you. You can’t feel something that hasn’t felt you. It is the same thing as thinking about somebody or something. We have to really reconfigure our perception to realize that whatever we see, for instance in our dream state, the intuitive feeling or seeing that we experience, all of that is connected with an ongoing interaction with beings from the Otherworld. It is just that we need to decipher this language in our own interests and not look at it as coincidence or just impromptu happenings.

Q:  How young are the children in the Village when they start to participate in ritual?

MALIDOMA: From birth onward. While you are inside you are going to a ritual. While you are born, your mother is on her back and going on ritual, you are experiencing it. You just grow up with it. Of course the children are free to do what they want to do. You can’t stop them from going wild or doing what they want. Then they will make your life miserable.

Copyright 1997 Malidoma Some