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Re-enchanting the Forest: Meaningful Ritual in a Secular World
by
William Ayot

A Complimentary Chapter from

Coming Back In
Deep Rituals of Alignment and Healing

“Mastery is achieved
by letting things take their natural course.
Forcing things achieves nothing.”
Lao Tse – Tao Te Ching

“Unless the relationship between the living
and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues.”
Malidoma Patrice Somé

The various nature–based creeds and philosophies of the world speak of a kind of oneness in which everything is flowing together in a fundamental harmony of the human and the non-human, the material and the spiritual. This active confluence of the natural, invisible, and human worlds is no longer understood in the largely secular West while it’s a given in other cultures, where simple unforced alignment with this flow is obvious, desirable and normal. In this context, being out of kilter with, or going wilfully against the recognised tide of life, calls for careful rituals to get one back into alignment and sympathy.   

When I set out on the ritual path, I couldn’t quite understand why I might need to realign myself with anything, let alone some invisible flow of life. Firstly, as a typical westerner I was wedded to the cult of the individual and my sense of self, and secondly, I had no real attachment to anything, let alone the earth, or spirits. It wasn’t until I had travelled a little and seen that other cultures don’t raise the individual above the community (or nature, God or the Invisibles) that I understood that one could be out of whack with that which surrounds us.

Later, when I was studying Malidoma Somé’s work on radical rituals, which I’d always thought of a rituals of healing, I came to realize that what he was actually describing was a body of ritual that sought to balance the needs of the living with the desires and imperatives of the Other – in his case the dead, the ancestors. This was a lot for me to take in, and it wasn’t until I re-visited the Tao Te Ching’s concept of Wuwei, the Watercourse Way, that our spiritual, mental and physical health depends on us going with the greater flow of life, that a penny dropped somewhere and I got the picture.

Whether it be with our communities or the environment, with spirits or the ancestors we’ve all experienced times when we’ve found ourselves out of balance, exiled from what a Christian might call a state of grace. At such times we can become deeply unhappy. We feel lost and cut off. At such times a ritual of alignment can provide a lifeline. It can bring us back in.

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Becky was in her mid-thirties, slim, red-haired and determined to be chirpy. She came to me via a friend who thought that a ritual might help her to solve a particular issue that had been plaguing her for some years. We met and talked things through and it quickly became apparent that she was suffering from a problem that has become all too common in our modern society. Some decade or more before she had had an abortion, without her boyfriend’s knowledge. She had later married him and had a son whom they both adored. She felt she couldn’t tell her volatile (and on one occasion, violent) husband about the abortion but she was increasingly prey to nightmares and ‘flashbacks’ of her abortion experience and fantasies about her aborted daughter – she was adamant that the foetus had been female. We agreed that I would provide a ritual for her and that we would address her problem together. 

As we sat together in her friend’s front room, I prescribed a long list of things to collect. It included two sticks measured from the crook of her elbow to the heel of her thumb, rye flour, wheat flour, salt, feathers; white, pink and blue flowers; metres of white, rose and sky blue cloth; paints, pens, crayons, scissors, a penknife, paper, two pieces of old jewellery, glass beads, lemon balm, chamomile, lavender and some mead, the honey drink of the ancient inhabitants of Britain. Once again I asked her to bargain or barter, beg or ask for as much as she possibly could – the more involved and complex the task the more it took her into ritual space, and out of her unhappy state. It also took her out into community, and when we are out of alignment we often tend to isolate ourselves.  

Meeting again at her friend’s house, we sat together at a kitchen table and I opened the ritual, talking Becky through the process and explaining everything as we went along. Having asked her to lay out all her objects, I then asked her to create two stick-figures, one masculine and one feminine, a pair of little fetishes no longer than her forearm. Each was precisely and exactly made, with the greatest of care, and each was storied and personalised in the making, as she imbued both figures with her breath and energy. As she worked her full story came out – her desire for a daughter and her difficult relationship with her own mother. Gradually the two figures took shape with their own distinct little faces and characteristics. I then talked her through the complex but beautiful process for ‘creating a soul’, of making an object that represented both the essence and the potential of her unborn child. This ‘soul’ was layered and layered until such time as she had a small cloth ball, filled with rye flour for nurture, salt for preservation, jewels for what is precious, lemon balm for love, chamomile for purity and lavender for health. Next I gently asked her to wrap the figures she had made, one in rose and one in sky-blue cloth, and to tie the soul to the two figures, who now clearly represented the male and female halves of her baby’s undeveloped personality. Finally she bound all three together, making them one, swaddling it all in the full length of white cloth.

Becky, who had been getting quieter and quieter as the process unfolded, stopped before wrapping the finished object together. “It’s my baby, isn’t it?” she said. My silent nod witnessed her truth and she started to cry.

This moment of realisation has parallels in both theatre and therapy. There is the coming together of weeks of preparation and gathering; the sudden comprehension of the various objects and actions that have gone into the ritual, and the convergence of all four kinds of knowing (intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual) in one moment.  Like the point of catharsis in a tragedy or the sudden clear insight in therapy, we see a kind of fulcrum in any deep ritual which I have come to think of as the ritual shift.

The ritual shift can come as a slow discovery or a sudden download. The defining factor is the involvement of a bodily understanding, and often, a physical change in the manner or demeanour of the individual, a kind of general re-alignment that, like the crossing of any rubicon, has a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’. The important thing about the ritual shift is that it needs to be acknowledged and locked into the body, either by an anchoring action or object, or by an emotional experience that confirms the moment, locking it into the body-memory.   

And so it was with Becky. It suddenly seemed that we both knew exactly where we were, and precisely what we needed to do. When I left her for a while to spend time with her ‘daughter’, she smiled softly, and without any self-consciousness, was able to say the things she needed to say to her re-creation of the baby that she had lost all those years before. A while later we drove out to a spot that we had agreed and, amidst yew trees and ‘churchy’ shrubbery, we gave her lost baby the rite of burial that it had lacked. As we did this I was struck by Becky’s extraordinary dignity. Although she had cried from the moment of the ritual shift, and held her baby as if she would never give it up, she instinctively grasped the significance of the ritual and was able to lovingly place her sad little bundle of cloth, flour and sticks in its grave, and say the goodbyes she had always yearned to say, with a quiet grace. As we came away we agreed that she now had a place to go to, should she ever need to commune with her lost daughter.

These then are profound rituals we lack in our culture. Their absence leaves many of us both entangled and bereft, and I believe that – regardless of spirituality or morality – the more of these rituals we create, or re-instate, the better our psycho-spiritual and emotional health. Be they for people made redundant after a lifetime’s service to an uncaring employer, or for lonely expatriates permanently stuck in the limbo of exile, we can once again find ways to create healthy completions and closures where they are lacking.

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The other kind of ritual that I am often asked to perform is the ritual of the troubled soul – the atonement ritual and its many variants. In the absence of the confessional or any public means to express our regrets, we have got to a point in our culture where many of us carry an oppressive weight of guilt and shame without any means of getting past it. Troubled-soul rituals are common in the Native American tradition, which understands how we accumulate grief and shame in our lives and the necessity of occasional purges. Sadly in the West our fear of pain and suffering has got us to the point where we either shun these kinds of ritual completely or try to turn them into a positive experience. This means that, outside the therapy room and the confessional, much pain remains unaddressed and unhealed.

Pete was a sound engineer.  He had done some silly things and got himself into hot water – and had actually been arrested and released pending a decision about whether to prosecute, over something that he may or may not have done, which could be construed as criminal, or gullible, or just plain stupid, depending on the way the authorities viewed the issue. Much was shrouded in mystery, but it was clear that someone had been hurt. Pete was potentially in real trouble. He was sent to me by a friend, a therapist whom he had consulted and who knew the kind of work that I was doing. I agreed to talk to him about a ritual.

When Pete arrived, he was polite if reserved, and clearly very intelligent, but he was also slightly aloof, disembodied, even absent. My guess was that he lived in his head and didn’t ‘do’ emotions, and that the stress of his situation was getting to him. That said, he got to the point pretty quickly and asked for my help. We talked for a while and he explained the situation. I couldn’t get a handle on him and wasn’t too sure where he was coming from. Was he ‘covering the bases’, trying to wriggle out of something by doing a ritual which he had heard was effective, or did he genuinely feel the need to clear the past and make amends? I asked a few questions. He wasn’t exactly obstructive but he wasn’t giving anything away either. To put it plainly, he was a bit shifty.

I decided to tell him of my dilemma – that I wasn’t confident about his motivation. He shuffled around and sounded evasive, which did nothing to put my fears at rest. Eventually I said that I would set up a ritual for him, but that I would reserve the right to stop the proceedings if I felt that either of us were drifting out of integrity. Pete nodded uncomfortably.

I set up an extensive and I must say quite demanding list of things for him to get and do before the ritual, and we contracted to meet soon as, for legal reasons, time was pressing.  On the appointed evening we met at his neat and tidy home in the countryside, and I saw that he had done everything that I had asked, thoroughly, precisely and effectively. He hadn’t asked any questions, as people often do, but had simply acquired what he needed to acquire, exactly as instructed.

I explained the journey of the next twelve hours and described the early stages of the all-night ritual, in which he was going to express in word, deed and making, his feelings of remorse – assuming he had them – around what had happened, regardless of the legal niceties. I then talked him through the making of a soul-blót offering – a representation of his soul, which he was eventually going to sacrifice, by giving it to nature as a kind of decoy.

The sacrifice of a decoy-fetish is a common tribal solution in these kind of difficult situations. The perception is that the world of spirit is full of ‘hungry ghosts’, and has as much malign energy as good. Thus we put ourselves at risk when we interact with the Invisibles from a place of vulnerability, as Pete was about to. In a secular European context, a soul-blót serves as a decoy,

 a representation of the individual’s endangered soul or psyche (or their integrity or aspiration for example). Either way, the sacrifice of the decoy-fetish serves to ‘meet’ the threat by providing a representation of the individual, in lieu of their own precious soul. This is usually reinforced by repeating a simple mantra along the lines of, “Please accept this gift and leave me alone.” The tribal understanding is that the spirits – who have a delight in objects to which feeling or creativity is attached – will readily ‘eat’ such an offering and refrain from eating the individual.

As I spoke, I noticed that Peter was edgy, even nervous. By the time we began to make things in preparation for the night ahead he was as taut and tense as a piano wire. I slowed things down deliberately, explaining everything I was doing, as if he were a visitor from another planet. I noticed that he was filling up with feeling, and on the edge of tears.  “Now breathe on your soul-blót and make it yours,” I said. “And if you should shed a tear, so much the better. It’s good to add tears to your soul-blót.”

It was as if he just needed permission. For a while he silently wept, wiping his tears on the cloth-bound decoy that he was making. Long, pregnant silences only deepened things as he gave himself over to the ritual. Slowly, he began to express his regret. As he began to speak, I saw that he wasn’t trying to pull the wool over my eyes at all. He was just another isolated, lonely man who’d had no practice in community, or sharing. 

We left to greet the dawn on a cold, wet, miserable morning; walking and slipping over muddy fields towards a dim hillock on the lightening horizon. Pete had certainly done his homework in finding a suitable place to offer up his soul-blót. We could have stepped straight into the pages of an Arthurian romance, standing as we were in a dank meadow leading towards a long-deserted castle mound – the kind of forlorn and lonesome place that villagers would have shunned for hundreds of years. Pete seemed withdrawn, and I feared that he might have climbed back into his shell but, when the moment came to place his soul-blót in the ground, he surprised me by sinking unbidden to his knees on the sodden turf, and speaking with heart-wrenching authenticity. “Forgive me… Please take this offering in my place… I’m so sorry.” 

It is so rare for modern people to get down on their knees. In our secular society, with our egos and individuality, we have no space for surrender, still less contrition. To see Pete speaking from such a place of humility and submission was deeply moving. I added my silent tears those of this troubled and lonely man.

Finally, I helped him to his feet, and we chanted towards the thin misty sunrise, to help Pete to face the future with all that it might bring. (He was later to find that the police had decided not to prosecute). As we stood there, with me chanting away purposefully, and Pete still clearly touched by the experience, we saw a movement ahead of us. Out of a tree, for no apparent reason and quite out of character, a buzzard flew straight towards us and over Pete’s head, peeling away into the morning.  Pete’s look of awed astonishment spoke volumes. 

An indigenous medicine man or woman would see a clear and specific signal in this physical response from what David Abram calls the more-than-human world. And time and again – even when I’ve been in states of weary disinterest – the environment seems to comment on rituals and even add to them. The secular part of me knows that a couple of quiet figures in a landscape are likely to draw the curiosity of a lazy but hungry buzzard, but the lost and yearning part of me is likely to see a blessing or a gift as such a majestic creature swoops out of the dawn and passes overhead.

These kinds of deep rituals don’t need to be complicated, but they can’t be entered into casually. In alignment rituals, or any ritual designed to heal, we are often working with wounded or shamed parts of our psyches or souls. As a badly burned returnee soldier once said to me, “It was as if I left my soul behind.” Having been through a twenty-five year process of ‘re-enchantment’, I have learned when to create ritual and when to suggest the services of a therapist or a doctor but I believe that with care and love – and the help of our communities – we can provide individuals with re-aligning or healing rituals that can bind up our wounded souls and restore us to a kind of balance.

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Mary arrived during the afternoon, prepared and ready. There was an air of quiet determination about her and a sense of decisions having been made. She had a problem. She had lost the sight of one eye to toxoplasmosis and medical ineptitude. And she was afraid she was going to lose the other.

We had already talked about what she might want in a ritual. I had pointed out that I have no special powers, and that I would not be approaching a ritual in the expectation of curing her medical condition. That said, I thought I could help her in another way and we had agreed a ritual, which she had entered some six weeks earlier, when I sent her a long, long list of things to cut, gather, barter, buy and collect – including one genuine eagle feather. Once again the sheer complexity of the list got her into ritual space long before we met at my house. This is how she later described the experience: 

“I was intrigued by the seven, flat, water-worn stones. I resolved to get them from distinct places, all with their own unique story and conditions.  The rest looked straightforward enough, with the singular exception of ‘one eagle’s feather – genuine’.  Where do you find one of those?”

Some weeks later she had tracked one down to a falconry rescue centre.

Seeing Mary in front of me, nervous, anxious, and yet so committed that she had been prepared to track down a hard-to-find eagle’s feather rather than simply buy one on the internet, I was struck by the way people instinctively reach for ritual – no matter how hard its tasks – as a way of addressing their problems. People have come to me for rituals that have helped them through all manner of individual crises and difficulties but I would never dream of offering a ‘cure’ to any kind of physical problem. I would invariably recommend that the person go to see a doctor. However, what people are commonly seeking when they come to someone like me is something else, something extra that is no longer obtainable from busy doctors or even from priests. What people often want in these cases is the practiced attention of another soul, and through that attention a greater, deeper, wider connection to the natural healing of the world around them. This re-alignment can serve as shift enough to change a person’s attitude towards their life to the point where a particular condition is no longer an unmanageable issue, at which point – be that as placebo, psychological counter-measure, distraction, or initiatory rite – the ritual has done its job. A medicine man or woman, of course, would say that the spirits have responded to a cry for help and that a rip in the fabric of the world has been repaired.

We began with the setting up of a shrine in my kitchen and then an invocation under the stars. My aim was to start by bringing Mary back in, if possible, to a place of trust and belonging, which would benefit her on a host of levels. This is how Mary experienced it.

My memory of that evening is hazy.  There was a vast, empty, scrubbed kitchen table awaiting. Almost everything I had brought for the ritual got unloaded onto this generous foundation; a huge landscape of ingredients, in a combination never seen before.  It was like we were cooking up a spell, and I guess, effectively, we were!

We worked up a humdinger of a recipe… I didn’t half make a mess! Out of this mess my soul emerged, tied to a substantial stick. The whole thing was wrapped in white cloth and had a sling attached so that I could wear it next to my heart.  I was to sleep with it and keep it with me throughout the ritual.

We went to bed early in preparation for a pre-dawn start the next day.  I laid my soul on the bed as I changed out of my clothes. It looked kind of vulnerable lying there. As though wrapped in a winding sheet, yet to be brought back to life.

By the time she went off to bed filled with the ritual and ready to dream, Mary was visibly moved, as so many are, by the defenselessness and fragility of her soul-blót, which she held closely to her as she might a baby. Waking long before dawn we headed off to a fast-running local brook for the next part of the ritual.

It’s very dark and very, very quiet. The whispering of the stream gets louder and louder.  We are now at the edge.  William beckons me further.  The need for waterproof shoes is now becoming apparent to me.  I am to step into the middle of the stream and find a secure footing.  The water is shallow but the force is surprising so it takes a bit of balancing before I feel steady.  My feet register cold as the water scrambles around them and I am enveloped into the sound of the stream. Casting my offerings onto the water, grateful for the cover of the stream’s voice. I can see more easily where I have taken and not returned; where I have used with impunity, leaving things depleted, out of whack, unbalanced. The stream is glistening in the moonlight; the water cold, clear and true.  It’s chastening and invigorating, harsh but purifying.

As we finished this part of the ritual, I saw that Mary was changing, settling into the ritual process – more than just ‘getting it’.  “Where to now?” she asked, back at the car.

“Grey Hill,” I said and we headed off towards one of the highest points in the area. This was to be the hardest and most exacting part of the ritual, involving a 800ft climb. The idea was to blindfold Mary while telling her Hyemeyohsts Storm’s Jumping Mouse[i] story about the little mouse who gave away both eyes, while leading her to the very top of Grey Hill and taking off the blindfold as the sun rose over the far horizon, across the Severn Estuary. From my point of view it was important to fold the site into the ritual too. In lieu of the Sacred Mountain of the story, I was leading Mary, while sightless, to a remarkable sacred spot – a high place of ancient stone circles and imposing viewpoints – that had been used for ritual purposes for over four thousand years. Mary takes up the story:

Dawn was due at 06.23.  William led me to a track and I began to follow him up the hill.  The path was well worn and flanked by large bushes and trees preventing any view or perspective.  As we climbed, he told me the story of Jumping Mouse.

You know, it was just a story. But William was telling this story – to me – and we were here because I had lost the use of my left eye. When Wolf asks Mouse for his second eye, I went cold and clammy.  I found myself staring at my feet and, as the story unfolded, I felt leaden with dread. I accepted the blindfold passively.  The remaining steps were taken completely in the dark.  The story reached its climax as we reached ours. William removed the blindfold as we arrived at the top of Grey Hill at exactly 06.23. Dawn shot out across the countryside.  The sky seemed so close.  Clouds scudded against a pallid blue and the sun revealed the bounty of five counties.

Mary gasped as she stood atop the highest point of Grey Hill, and then sank into a quiet reverie, taking everything in.

The last part of the ritual involved her returning her sacrificial gifts to nature and then taking some time to go off alone and ‘talk to the universe’ and what she called ‘the-powers-that-be’. She came back looking calm and yet very determined.

There’s something about tucking into breakfast that makes life feel completely normal no matter how odd or eccentric your recent activities have been. So William and I ate our muesli and eggs at the now innocent looking kitchen table, chatted about this and that and enjoyed the sunlight streaming in.  More instructions for my final return home.  And then a pause. “William, what was the eagle’s feather for?” I asked.

“Ah,” he said. “That’s for me. Think of it as a trade.”

I took the long scenic route home.  It was a beautiful day and my heart was over-flowing with gratitude and awe at what we had done together. I never questioned how it would all turn out. It was now in the lap of the Gods.

Three and a half years later and Mary is living a very different kind of life. She says she is far more relaxed and is currently taking time with her husband to explore the waterways of Europe. I contacted her recently and asked – now that she had some distance and perspective – for her reflections on her ritual.

There have been big changes since. I am happier, healthier and more accepting of myself than I can remember at any other time – more able to tolerate peace.

I think the ritual helped me to integrate the experience [of losing my eye] fully and move on from it. The Jumping Mouse story as we climbed Grey Hill helped me place the loss and sacrifice into my life journey. Above all I believe it prevented me from creating some kind of crippled identity – another stamp in the Victim’s passport. The ritual made me grateful too.  It was a gift, which allowed me to experience gratitude, and that’s a gift in itself.

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