January 2008
>Essay Index

Ceremony and the Seasonal Rhythms
Carol Proudfoot-Edgar, CSC

We are just completing a major round of ceremonies focused on the changing relationship of Sun with Earth. This seems a good time to reflect on the significance of ceremony in the life of people walking the shaman’s path.

Why do ceremonies persist for thousands and thousands of years? What is their role in the life of peoples that prompted humans everywhere to mark them in stone, acknowledge them with song, and draw pictures of ceremonial dances?

We know that the shaman’s role is to assist in maintaining harmony and the psychic integrity of the village – whether ‘village’ is defined in local or global terms. The shaman locates this integrity in the relationship between the humans and the rest of creation. There is a profound understanding in the practice of ceremony that no matter how hard we might try, we are prone to behaving in ways that perturb the harmony between peoples, between peoples and other beings with whom we share this Planet Home, and with Earth herself.

Ceremonies are ways to bring ourselves into realignment and to restore harmony when we are out of balance with the Whole.

This is why most ceremonies are rooted in Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms. To bring ourselves into alignment means recognizing our relationship to the Whole. To restore harmony means undertaking activities of releasing what prevents harmony and to do activities that further good relationship.

There are two important aspects to ceremony: First, they are a way for humans to give back to creation some of the energy that they are always receiving. Earth gives us a surface on which to place our feet while Sun warms with Light. Moon brings dreams while Air gives us the necessary breath for life. Everything connected with Earth provides us with something we use as two-legged beings.

In ceremony we give back through our dancing, singing, drumming, and making prayers. In these activities of ‘giving back’ we move from being primarily takers of energy to being givers of energy. This helps restore balance in the whole creation.

Second, ceremonies are the most profound way to acknowledge the intersection of the Temporal and the Eternal. We participate in both yet much of our daily consciousness is focused on our temporal selves. Ceremonies return our awareness to the fullness of who we are and the possibilities of even greater fullness.

This is why so many ceremonies involve the recurring seasonal shifts e.g. the Solstices and the Equinoxes. Here we acknowledge our gratitude for a continuity much greater than our individual lives….a continuity upon which every living being is dependent. Enacting our gratitude for this is often expressed in a combination of profound thanksgiving and joy…expressed in prayer and festivity.

Thus, when I am involved in creating or doing ceremony with others, I always explore the issues of: does this ceremony provide the opportunity for participants to “give back” and does this ceremony include some activity that locates us as temporal beings in the eternal cycles of Being?

If both are not included, then something is missing in the planned ceremony. It doesn’t matter what is the focus of the ceremony: seasonal shifts, honoring a birthday or a death, name-giving, harvesting, marriage or wedding anniversary, or healing another or places of the Earth.

These and other activities for which we do ceremony have their significance in promoting good relationship and in recognition of some recurring pattern that unites the temporal and the eternal.

Other activities marking times or events in our lives may be done through celebration. To celebrate such events is very much a part of our collective nature yet not to be confused with ceremony. Although the shaman’s path means seeing all through the eyes of the shaman, there are some responsibilities that have customarily been the focus of the shaman through history and one of these is to promote, if not provide, the enacting of ceremony on behalf of the Whole.
        
All ceremony is dependent on participants keeping strong the purpose and intention for which they are gathered. Such intention needs to be stated at the outside for it lets both the universe at large and the participants know the reason for which we gather. With the sound of the first prayer, first beat of the drum or seeds from the rattle, all come to attention for at that moment, indeed, the Centre of the Universe resides in the Circle of Ceremony.

May we do ceremony that returns us to walking in the Blessing Way.