Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community

by Malidoma Patrice Somé

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New York: Penguin/Arkana 1997, Swan Raven & Company 1993.  103pp  $12.95

Malidoma Patrice Somé, author of Of Water and the Spirit, describes a broad spectrum of ways in which rituals can be helpful. His perspective is that of a shaman trained in the West African Dagara cultural tradition, now living and teaching in the US. He eloquently shares his experiences of powerful shamanic healing practices.

For Somé, rituals are potent interventions on many levels. At the social level they are forms for expression of religious beliefs, or communal celebrations. Rituals affirm our connection with our community. A healing ritual may draw together relatives from the immediate and extended family, as well as from the community at large.

Where ritual is absent, the young ones are restless or violent, there are no real elders, and the grown-ups are bewildered. The future is dim. (p. 12)

Industrial society has lost much of its awareness of rituals.

Indigenous people are indigenous because there are no machines between them and their gods. There are no machines barring the door to the spirit world where one can enter in and listen to what is going on within at a deep level, participating in the vibration of Nature. Where machines speak in place of gods, people are hard put to listen, even more hard put to vibrate with the realm of Nature. (p. 17-18)

Healing rituals, properly performed, are tools to achieve specific healing effects. People performing the rituals may enhance the power of the rituals through their innate gifts for healing, through their learning in apprenticeship the ways of a shaman, and through the assistance of various natural energies and spirit assistants.

A person who lives in constant touch with the invisible realm of incomparable power is always in a good temperament and very understanding of people and situations. He does not fall prey to retaliatory invitations and does not experience wide swings in mood.

It is this kind of balance in a person that people in my village recognize as the presence of power in a person. This presence of power hides in a balanced person and speaks adequately enough about its aliveness. This hiddenness of power in a person is valued in my village because it speaks to life through its invisibility. This Presence of Power is not presence to the eye, but presence to the psyche. (p. 42)

Rituals also affirm our connection with the Infinite Source and with Nature. It is not merely reciting the words of a ritual or performing other acts that make it potent. Rituals must be used in a proper context.

Language in itself does not create or provide a space in which the natural and the supernatural world can safely migrate into this world. Sometimes, the words into which we want to put certain sacred spirits are a deadly virus to those very spirits. So, rather than let themselves be damaged by us, these spirits damage us instead.
(p. 38)

Ritual can serve to create and nurture community, and can heal the collective group.

Community is formed each time more than one person meets for a purpose. Development of community depends on what the people involved consent to. What one acknowledges in the formation of the community is the possibility of doing together what is impossible to do alone. This acknowledgment is also an objection against the isolation of individuals and individualism by a society in service of the Machine. What we want is to create community that meets the intrinsic need of every individual. The individual can finally discover within the community something to relate to, because deep down inside each of us is a craving for an honoring of our individualism. (p. 49)

This is a book to be savored, rich in healings on many levels.

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