Rituals of the Return
Pavamāna Mantra, Notes on Victor Turner, Ritual Process and Pulling the Death Card [XIII]
How may we keep ritual alive in our daily life?
When moving through a period of transition, initiation or completion (maybe all at the same time), how does ritual nourish and support the navigation of these processes?
Listen to a field recording of walking meditation with Pavamāna Mantra, recorded at Ulpotha, Sri Lanka:
Listen to another version by Floramor Medicine Music
Asato mā sadgamaya, tamaso mā jyotirgamaya, mṛtyormā'mṛtaṃ gamaya
“Lead us from darkness to light, lead us from the unreal to the real, from death to immortality”
After six weeks on the road criss-crossing all over East, South and Southeast Asia, taking in new sights, encountering new people, missed flight connections and surprise visits, I arrived back home in London. As I normally do when I return to my lady cave, I instinctively follow a number of rituals to reacquaint myself with this space. First, I seek out something to affect my senses: this time, I opened my suitcase to find the cinnamon incense sticks my sister and I picked up in Galle, Sri Lanka. They had kept me good company during my recent stay at Ulpotha, a yoga and ayurveda retreat centre, where their scent not only conjured a relaxing mood, but also kept the mosquitoes at bay. Pulling out two sticks and lighting them, I move around my home slowly, letting the smoke waft in all directions, the scent of burning cinnamon and spice drifting lazily through the air. Once I am certain the scent has diffused all over, I place them into a holder at the centre of my living room coffee table. As the fragrant and almost peppery smell dances around the room, I notice that my body feels at ease. I observe how pleased I am to be here, to feel safe. Memories of my recent stay in the forest, swimming in a fresh water lake, listening to bird-song every sunrise, feeling the clay-like dusty warm earth beneath my bare feet appear in my mind’s eye — not only as images — but a tender, opening sensation unfurls across my body too. I inhale the invisible air and let out a big sigh.
In my last Substack post, I discuss the limen or liminality in relation to how potent symbols may act as portals to the subtle and unseen “transitional process of becoming.”1 This description of the liminal phase are the words of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1983), whose fieldwork and research with the Ndembu peoples along the Zambezi river in current-day Zambia, has greatly influenced my own research and thinking. His investigation in a variety of topics such as social drama, performance and play, symbols, rites of passage and ritual continues to have a lasting impact for scholarship on culture today. In this post, I would like to explore a bit further the phase and condition of liminality itself during the act and performing of rituals.
Turner’s work with Ndembu peoples emphasised and focused more on the community/group level of interaction, such as social rituals of initiation, hunting and healing. And though we must also acknowledge the inherent complexity of his positionality as a white British man operating in a ‘field’ where both the Portuguese and the British had colonial presence, the insights gleaned from his work still hold much relevance for those of us working and producing in the fields of art and culture now. Not least the sense some of us might have that in our fast-paced, hyper-connected-yet-fragmented worlds, there is a feeling we may have misplaced or lost the practice and joy of bringing ceremony and ritual into our daily lives and in our wider social experiences. Importantly, how these moments actually consolidate relations, interpersonally and internally. That being said, if my experience or what I have observed in the world is an indication, ritual is very much alive and also very much needed. Elevating the everyday, the commonplace, is one method of keeping the embers of ceremony burning. I believe we all do this intuitively, but there is something profound available when intentionality is brought in, in the process of the ritualistic.
Elsewhere, Turner has also written “liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection” where we might be “encouraged to think about [one’s] society, cosmos and the powers that generate and sustain them.”2 What observing and enacting ritual can do is potentially unify on several levels the being-ness and becoming of a soul’s journey on an individual level and communal or collective level. The experience of going through the ritualistic also bends time. During these special experiences, time is elasticated because its organising characteristic does not define the experience: “liminality is the realm of the ‘primitive’ hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence.”3 What a gift and privilege to no longer feel enslaved to clock time, even if for a few brief moments a day.
***
I unpack my harmonium first, she has been tucked away in the carrying case for over twenty hours and her bellows want to breathe. The rest of my suitcases will be unpacked in stages over the course of the next few hours. I smoke a cigarette and desperately feel the need for a wash. After a long hot shower where I attempt to clean every crevice of my body and soak off all remnants of the journey back, I sit down at my desk with my journal and look at a beautiful deck of tarot by Leonora Carrington that a friend gifted to me last year for my birthday.
The entire deck is a twist on the classical tarot, this one is made up of only the twelve major arcana. I shuffle the deck in my hands, allowing it to reacquaint itself with me, with my energy. It has been a while. I prefer to hold the cards in my hands, close my eyes and continuously shuffle them until a sensation in my body tells me to stop. I finger through the deck until I stop because of another sensation running from my hands, up my arms, into my chest, tells me so. I pull a card: XII The Hanged Man. The first thought-feeling is “surrender,” a word my therapist often mirrors back to me. Always a useful reminder. According to the booklet accompanying the deck, the “vibration” of The Hanged Man is “a change of viewpoint providing a new perspective.” It is the same reason one practices inversions in yoga, to literally shift to see the world upside-down and therefore, experience and perceive the world differently.
When I pull a card in the middle of the deck, I usually pull the first and the last card too. Something meaningful to me about three. Prime number. Past, Present, Future. Holy trinity. Pythagorean triple. Sacred triangle. The list goes on. The first card in the desk is III Empress, a card that has been appearing frequently these last few months. Interesting that its appearance seems to correspond to the Uranus-Venus transit in my natal chart that I have been experiencing. All my relationships have been under a magnifying glass, not least the relationship to my own sense of well-being, creativity and femininity. She’s an archetype that I am resonating deeply with right now. My hand shifts to the bottom of the desk and slips out the final card: XIII Death. I sit up straight. Hello. I greet them. I have what my astrologer would call a holographic experience: I remember, meaning I call in memories and feel them, I acknowledge the moment I am in and all other moments when this card appeared, I feel the significance of presence, I recall what I have learned.
When I first started experimenting with tarot some years back, I carried this thought that there were “positive” and “negative”, even “bad” cards you could pull. I have also never owned the classical Rider Waite deck so my approach is less classical, instead using the unique, contemporary decks I have received over the years as gifts. The Death card was one such card that initially would bring feelings of hesitance, fear, a kind of repulsion. According to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, there are five kleshas, or “obstacles” that prevent us from yoga (union) with Supreme Consciousness, including abhinivisha (instinctive fear of death). I think of the first times I attempted a headstand and the blockage of kicking up to balance because of the fear of falling back, of feeling unsafe, of trusting on some fundamental level that you will not be destroyed in the process. No small feat to overcome.
Nowadays, I welcome the Death Card. It is a reminder of the constant motion of things, the wheel’s unending turning, even in moments when things feel stagnant. With every shedding or letting go, new things emerge, space is created, though as most of us know, the process is not usually pain-free or without struggle. The coming of Death, a completion, an ending also signifies new Life. But let us refrain from seeing these twin processes in binary terms too, this is the limen, both are co-existing, co-unfolding in the process. Everything is living and dying at the same time.
Elsewhere, in the art and science of alchemy, the initial three phases beginning with calcination, then dissolution and separation, are considered in Jungian terms as “the dark night of the soul,” a period of psychological, emotional and cerebral suffering as one attempts to identify, dissolve, let go and discard what one is “not” and lay the ground for the following phases eventually hopefully leading to individuation/self-actualisation. Meeting resistance and feeling a loss of control are anathema to an ego’s existence, they are not what the ego desires but nevertheless has to engage with if one is committed to the process. Perhaps the most challenging sensation I have observed in others and experienced myself is how to carry the grief associated with a death, with this loss of control, with unmet expectations, or unfulfilled fantasies or dreams, regardless if they are authentic to us or not. [Sidebar: grief is a topic for another day/post because it requires more time and space than I can give here.]
Back in May of 2020, in the height of the first lockdown, I was made redundant by Sotheby’s. I had spent ten years working in the auction business, starting out as an intern, climbing a corporate ladder. I had never lost of a job before and as someone who throughout their twenties prioritised my ‘career’ over everything, a learnt behaviour from watching my own father do the same, I was devastated and embarrassed. This way of being was also conditioned by a patriarchal societal framework where producing, doing, making money and therefore “being successful” are all revered, I had lost touch with my own inner sense of creativity for years. I took on other peoples’ dreams. Upon receiving the news of the redundancy, my ego was more than bruised, the over-achiever in me was furious, deeply disappointed in myself. A young, perfectionist part of myself was destroyed by what I perceived as “failure.” That part of me needed to die. That was a death where I had little agency in grappling with — nothing to do but surrender. I felt rudderless, lost for months, paralysed by uncertainty, but ultimately, it would be the experience that created an abundance of space for reflection and re-direction.
It took some time, but eventually I realised that I was being given a chance to re-design my life, how and with whom I would want to move through the world, and this was a true gift. The death was on many levels: practical and professional, personal, interpersonal, perspectival. The death brought in a living understanding of why I chose to work in this field to begin with and create space for the possibility of embodying a value I hold around creativity and expression as a generative, hopeful and nourishing vital energy and catalyst for individual and community growth and connection. I felt and feel inspired. Ongoing work in progress. These states of transition remain liminal, they are what I have come to see as the “betwixt-and-between”4 of awareness and unconscious behaviour. Somedays I am present for it, other days I return to that young place when triggered. What continues to keep the channels open and enlivened, even eroticised are the everyday rituals that can be brought into daily life to nurture. Ritual, as evidenced in Turner’s reflections, does much to support this growth by creating a stage5 for some resolution and the reconciliation of different parts, as well as provide a platform for transformation unfolding in its own time and rhythm.
Sharing some examples of everyday ritual practices that I love:
Gratitude List: Write 10 things you are grateful for once a day, especially on a tough day and notice if or how your mood shifts
Silent Eating: Next time you are sat down at a meal on your own, before you begin to eat, think and thank the entire constellation of people, plants/animals, processes required in order for the plate of food in front of you to exist. As you take each bite, feel how the food is nourishing your body.
Pull a Tarot Card in the morning and journal about what comes up for you
Play your favourite song at the moment as loud as possible and dance stark naked, imagining that you are shaking off any energy that is not you
Cleansing Ritual: Stand under a hot shower and imagine that the water is literally binding with whatever is “not you” (situations, thoughts, emotions, other people’s energies) and use your hands to cast off the water from your skin in a sweeping gesture. Lather yourself in an oil after and think about the containment of your own energy in your body (Jojoba, Castor or Avocado oil are wonderful options).
Meditation Practice from Jivamukti Yoga Method: Find your preferred seat/posture (I like to sit in Virasana because my hips are usually tight and sitting cross-legged gets uncomfortable after a while). Sit quietly. Inhale and silently say to yourself “Let”. When you exhale, silently say to yourself “Go”. Repeat continuously with each breathe. Try for 5 minutes and then gradually increase the time.
Walking Meditation: Find an quiet space outside somewhere and without any specific route, walk very intentionally with each step in silence. Feel the entirety of your foot as you lift it up and place it down slowly, beginning with the heel, then the middle then the toes. Take your next step by connecting the heel of the alternate foot with the front of your back foot. Notice the ground beneath you and observe what comes up for you.
Before bed, place one hand on your heart and another on your belly and breathe audibly for a few minutes, listening to your breath and observing what you feel in your body. Allow yourself to drift sensationally.
Additional Links:
Ulpotha Yoga and Retreat Centre
Samanta Duggal - Yoga Teacher, Somatic and Body Work, Vedic Chanting
Books by Victor Turner - Goodreads
The Art of Being and Becoming by Hazrat Inayat Khan
Some tunes for Deep Listening that have been on repeat:
Nada Brahma (Sound is Divine) by Sheila Chandra
Daughter of a Temple by Ganavya
Afro-Harping by Dorothy Ashby
An Ever Changing View by Matthew Halsall
All is Sound by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio
Planetary Unfolding by Michael Stearns
Victor Turner 1967, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndemdu Ritual, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 94.
Ibid, 105.
Ibid, 106.
Victor Turner 1987, The Anthropology of Performance, New York: Paj Publications, 7.
Ibid.