RITUALS FOR PEACEMAKING – OFFERINGS TO THE MOTHER
I want to take a break from politics, from all the outrage and argument, and talk about Mother. Not just about our actual mothers and grandmothers. Not just about mothering.
I want to go way back, to the Earthly Body that underlies all of our physical existence, to the place which birthed our species.
Because every one of us comes from a mother. Because every one of us comes from the Great Mother Earth. And to the Earth, we will return.
Yet how often do we intentionally take time to offer back to She-Who-Built-Us? To She who made our arms and legs, our eyes and ears — all from Earth? To the Earth who provides our food and our drink, our clothes and the roofs over our heads? To the Earth Mother who has even provided the mater-ials of the device I am typing on at this very moment?
How often do we modern humans ritually acknowledge this bounty we receive every day of our lives?
This question is much more important than it may seem.
In honor of Mother’s Day, I want to talk about just how essential ritual is to peacemaking. To ceasing the endless cycles of war, and putting us on a practical path of sanity, tolerance, and coexistence.
HOMO SAPIENS VS. HOMO RITUALIS
As our Western nations have become increasingly secular, we have moved away from ritual, and headed towards the rational.
We have heard our species designated many times as
Homo Sapiens.
The ones who think.
The rational animal.
(Cringe. I can hardly say “rational” with a straight face, as I bear witness the most unhinged, irrational internet discourse imaginable.)
But, is “thinking” really the defining feature of humanity? Is that what we are here on this Earth to do?
Or are we here to offer something back?
Some authors have proposed an alternative term for us (shout out to Axel Michaels.)
Homo Ritualis.
The ritual-making animal.
Because if you really look at us—not just modern us, but ancestral us—what stands out isn’t just tool use, or opposable thumbs, or reasoning.
It’s the need to gather, to mark time, to make meaning out of chaos.
In ritual, we step out of ordinary reality, and situate ourselves in a much larger and older story.
And we come back, changed.
Humans seem to have a need for crossing a ritual threshold into wider and deeper levels of consciousness. Without this, we become vulnerable to manipulation, and liable to act out the most brutal aspects of ourselves.
Ritual is not a luxury for human beings. When we do not artfully create this alteration of consciousness, we will end up getting it in other ways, eventually. This is why I believe ritual for peacemaking isn’t optional—it’s essential.
THE JUVENARCHY
Without ritual initiation, things start to go sideways.
In my last post, I talked about “The Juvenarchy“—
rulers with grown bodies, but unripened hearts.
Juvenarchs are people in power who have never been initiated into adulthood in any real way. They are boys (undeserving, I might add, of the term “patriarch”) who haven’t experienced the ritual descent and dismemberment necessary for their juvenile selves to be reassembled into mature men.
What happens to humans—to homo ritualis—who need initiation, but who are deprived of it?
We improvise other ways to initiate ourselves.
By hook or by crook, we recreate that intensity, that rush of intimacy, through violence and domination. Through the everyday battles behind closed doors in the domestic sphere, through the violence on our own streets, through the relentless construction of inhumane systems, and through the killing fields of modern warfare.
If we don’t engage in ritual theater, we will engage in the theater of War.
WAR ON THE FEMALE BODY
As a Woman and a Mother residing in the relative “safety” of North America, still I cannot help but feel the impact of War, ringing in my own body, like a giant somatic gong.
As Mother’s Day approaches, I know many mothers who can hardly think of anything else.
Yet, amidst all the current media punditry about overseas struggles, I hear almost no one saying this out loud:
The female body is a site of war.
•The body of the Earth—ripped open for oil, rubbled over resource, bombed for displays of brute force.
•The body of the Mother—grieving her children sent into conflicts they never chose.
•The bodies of Women—regulated, covered, exposed, violated, controlled by extremists in the name of Sharia Law, as women and girls are punished by death, disfigurement, and torture for showing their hair or dancing in public.
This is not about “politics,” not about right or left. It is a deeply embodied, humanitarian issue, with women at its core.
THE LOSS OF RITUAL IN MODERN SOCIETY
Over the long range perspective, the wars in the Middle East reveal a pattern–they are about centuries of strict control over women’s bodies, centuries of sucking the blood from the body of the Earth, and centuries of domination and destruction of the indigenous peoples who–case in point–long practiced earth- and goddess-honoring rituals.
Yet, in all the debates, the everyday violent plight of hundreds of millions of women, and hundreds of indigenous tribes, is relegated to a footnote, instead of highlighted as fundamental to the conflict over Land, over Energy, over Power.
Because war is never just about strategy, or even ideology.
It is the massive perversion of a an unmet somatic need.
A need as ancient as the Mother Herself.
The roots of our behavior have to do with our bodies, our brains, our chemistry which hardwires us for intensity. This is the way we were designed.
And when we do not voluntarily create ways to fufill this intensity through initiatory rituals and artmaking, humans will default to war.
As the indigenous rituals of the Middle East have been suppressed by colonial projects spanning more than a millenium, we have seen violence becoming more and more severe, more and more militarized, more and more depraved.
IS WAR JUSTIFIED? IS WAR NATURAL? IS WAR INEVITABLE?
We can argue all day about whether a specific is justified or not, yet miss the deeper pattern entirely. We can dig our heels into the gloomy view that war simply “part of human nature” and therefore inevitable. Though, the path to peace involves asking some different questions:
Why do humans keep doing this?
How do we stop debating war, and actually achieve Peace?
How do we shift the worsening trends towards desecration of sacred Land?
How do we actually honor our Earth-Mother and these Earth-made bodies which we inhabit?
War is not natural, but, our nature is being neglected. It is a neglect of the physical, emotional, and neurological reality of our bodies. Let me emphasize again:
Humans have an innate need for ecstatic intensity.
For awe that rearranges us.
For fear that sharpens our senses.
For moments where our small identity drops away and we merge into something much larger than ourselves.
This is built-in feature of Homo Ritualis.
Older, more rooted cultures always acknowledged this, and made places for ecstasy. Ritual spaces, initiation rites, and festivals weren’t just for entertainment, they were actual cauldrons for transformation.
Places where we could transcend our edges, experience union with the larger cosmos, and then return again to ourselves—on purpose.
These are the very cultures which have beeen decimated for thousands of years, across the world, by violent imperialism.
Modern secular societies have also continued the purge of initiation rites in favor of “rationalism.” However, the human need for these cultural rites hasn’t magically disappeared.
The need just… waits. And mutates. And then leaks out.
Instead of ritual, we make war at incalculable scales.
THE WONDER AND THE WOUND: WHY HUMANS NEED RITUAL
The news is filled with images of bombings and blood abroad. Even modern Western societies, which are (currently) free from what we normally think of as large scale “kinetic” warfare, are infested with street battles, domestic violence, prison violence, culture wars, cancellation campaigns, character assassins.
Josh Schrei’s episode of The Emerald Podcast “War and Ritual Intensity” has really stuck with me, especially this wise observation, shared by an indigenous teacher of his:
“What we do not offer in ritual, the Earth will demand in blood.”
Because if we don’t create ways to consciously enter intensity—through ritual, through art, through shared altered states—then we end up unconsciously creating situations that force it.
We literalize, instead of ritualize, our fears, our rage, and our revenge. We physicalize the metaphysical concept of Jihad (Holy War), slaying our neighbors, instead of slaying metaphorical obstacles to Truth. And the results are catastrophically bloody.
As Schrei explores, the words “wonder” and “wound” are cousins, deriving from the same root. Its fascinating to feel how they come from the same place in us.
We’re wired for wonder. But when wonder has nowhere to go—no container, no guidance—it flips, and it becomes wound.
This is where war starts to make a terrible kind of sense.
It fulfills a deep human need, only in a horrifically misdirected way.
When you strip it down, war has the same “bones” as ritual:
Rhythm.
Brotherhood.
Sacrifice.
Altered states.
Mythic purpose.
Only, the artistic container doesn’t exist, so the symbolism collapses,
and the blood becomes literal. The story is written in newspapers, instead of mythic scripture.
Which brings us back to the juvenarchy. Because when neither our people, nor our leaders have been properly initiated, we start initiating each other through harm.
On personal levels.
On cultural levels.
On geopolitical levels.
MAKE RITUAL, NOT WAR
So for me, moving from war to peace isn’t a pie-in-the-sky philosophical discussion, and it isn’t an abstract concept. It comes down to what we do locally in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our places of worship.
For years, animating all the rituals I’ve helped create with my clients, and with my community, there has been an underlying desire for humans to return to this oldest of needs, to re-legitimize ritual as something necessary.
A practical yearning to make art instead of war.
To make a place for our natural intensity to move without wounding.
A place for the rage and grief to be witnessed before it spills over.
A place for the wonder to take root.
This is why I do ritual work.
Its true that most modern Americans no longer have intact cultural rituals to lean upon. Many of us don’t even know where to begin.
Yet, at the same time, to sit on the sidelines and NOT attempt a renaissance of ritual forms feels irresponsible to me.
So I keep making opportunities for us to experiment with intensely beautiful ritual space. We begin by stitching back together the fragments of memory and culture that still remain, using the glue of sound, movement, myth.
Because I believe our bodies remember.
Something deep inside us knows wow to bring forth ritual peacemaking.
We know how to bring back initiation.
We know how to restore ritual, one story, one ceremony at a time.
Ritual Practice is how I contribute to the Peace Process.
And this is why I consider the rituals of ancestral healing sessions to be a form of activism.
Creating space to touch both the wonder and the wound of our aeons-long lineages.
To feel what’s there—without needing to fix it or weaponize it.
To be held inside something intentional.
A container for the intensity of gratitude, of yearning, of rage and mercy.
The body. The lineage. The ache. The beauty.
All of it.
Together. Inside a container that can actually hold it.
So it doesn’t have to spill out somewhere else
Because the intensity is already here.
It’s up to us whether we can direct that intensity consciously, and make it into a holy offering.
🌸Ritual is for everyone 🌸
🌸LINK HERE TO EXPLORE RITUAL WITH ME, NALA WALLA🌸
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