Ceremony Against Witchery

Finding Roots in Haunted Ground

Photo by Amanda Kevin on Unsplash

As I mentioned in one of my last essays, I felt inclined to reread Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko before tapping out some related thoughts. I’m very glad I did. The reread allowed me to perceive threads in my own journey over the past decade-- threads I intuited and lived by, but truly did not realize were running through like fluorescent ley lines in the development of my own thinking.

Should you read Ceremony? Yes. Especially if you’ve been following along with my thinking about American mythology, about how we might learn to relate rightly to this continent we inhabit, about the transformation from conquest to communion. This novel is essential reading, not just as literature but as medicine-- as ceremony-- itself.

The Albion Problem

I mentioned in another recent essay over at Patterns for Life that I’m reading The Haunted Wood, a history of children’s literature, and in just the first chapter I found another clue that unlocks a bit of the mystery of all this interconnectedness. You see, so much of our children’s literature—books I grew up reading, books you grew up reading—is inextricably linked with mythic Britannia. From the field guides to the fairy tales, so many of these imaginatively compelling works are rooted in an Albion of one kind or another.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course, except for the fact that I was born and raised and have lived all my life in America—Pennsylvania in particular—and my experience of Albion has been only through imagination.

What this means is that much of my reading life has lacked the real, tangible roots one might have if they could, say, take a countryside trip across the downs. I’ve got volumes of fairy stories on my shelves, organized by locale: Welsh, Norwegian, Japanese, Russian, Inuit. You can’t escape the fact that enchantment, almost more than anything else, is an extremely localized phenomenon. And if your own hills aren’t haunted, then your imagination surely is, and we’re finding out that that doesn’t bode well.

Listen. We American children learned to recognize enchantment in English hedgerows, in Scottish moors, in the fae-haunted woods of Celtic legend-- but our own American mythology never tasted right. We knew what hobbits ate for second breakfast but we ourselves never sampled paw paws or serviceberries. Narnia felt more real than the Appalachian mountains.

Is this imaginative colonization? Is it part of why Americans struggle to relate rightly to the land we walk upon? We’ve been trained to locate enchantment elsewhere, in borrowed landscapes, through other peoples’ haunted ground. Our literary imaginations have been geographically dislocated.

Mutts Need Roots

So where does that leave us?

Maybe like me, you’re 100% purebred American mutt. Of my great-grandparents, half were 20^th century immigrants and half traced their immigration back to the 1700s. The 20^th century immigrants assimilated hard, especially the Russian ones, forbidding the kids to speak anything but English and losing the old religion completely by my mother’s generation. That I made it back so quickly to Orthodoxy has absolutely nothing to do with my heritage, and everything to do with Providence.

And that’s really where the journey got serious, because to truly practice Orthodox Christianity is to get out of your head and back into your heart and body. As I gradually became accustomed to embodied faith, I felt an increasing longing for actual rootedness, toes plunged deep in humus not just through a LARPed natural lifestyle (I never could afford most of the aesthetics), but through an intimate relationship with the ground I walked upon, the town I lived in, and the exact natural world around me.

It dawned on me that a Western European had very little to offer me in this area.

Around this time—it would have been about fifteen years ago—I read Ceremony for the first time.¹

Ceremony gave me a vision for what I was lacking—a vision of what true interconnection with the land here actually looked like according to the people who had loved it, people who had lived embodied, I-Thou relationships with the American continent, in all of its different biomes and habitats.

The novel follows Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran of World War II, as he returns home from the war carrying wounds far deeper than the shell shock and alcoholism his doctors can name. He’s been separated not just from the land and from his people, but from the cosmic patterns that give life meaning. The war did this to him, but not just the war—the entire apparatus of Western conquest, with an arm across the Pacific, completing a circuit of violence that began right here, with the destruction of indigenous peoples and their relationships to this very ground. All inseparable.

What Tayo needs isn’t Western medicine, isn’t psychotherapy, isn’t the VA hospital. Those things tried to help, but ultimately only made it worse because Tayo’s plight is why the Orthodox Church refuses to elucidate any kind of just war theory: we recognize that regardless of justification, war and violence profoundly damage human souls. Full stop.

What Tayo needs to heal is ceremony—participation in patterns older than his personal trauma, patterns that are rooted in his home, his specific landscape, his specific mountains, his specific ecosystem.

Betonie, the Navajo medicine man who helps Tayo, understands and subtly instructs us that the ceremonies themselves are not just inert containers, but are living realities that must adapt to address new forms of destruction. You can’t simply heal modern wounds with an ancient ceremony that functions like an externally applied magic spell. But you also can’t invent new ceremonies from nothing, divorced from the land and the people who have lived in relationship with it for millennia. The healing must both emerge from within the tradition and evolve as a subcreated engine, interacting with present circumstances.

This is precisely what I was reaching for in “Procession, Prayer and Presence”—how the enchanted cosmos reveals itself through ceremonies that have existence beyond our willingness to believe in them, ceremonies that can hold all our mixed motives and complex psychology while still operating on multiple levels simultaneously. Betonie’s ceremony works exactly this way. It’s processional, in that Tayo literally walks through sacred landscape, it’s prayer through invoking powers and patterns beyond human control, and it’s profoundly communal--even when Tayo walks alone, he’s participating in something huge, correcting misalignment not just with other humans, but with the angelic realm and the living world around him.

The ceremony and the medicine aren’t isolated in church or clinic. They happen on the land itself. The spotted cattle that Tayo seeks are not just livestock—they, too, are participants in the ceremony, markers of this right relationship restored.

For all its promise of healing, Ceremony refuses to shy away from the gravity of the wounds the land itself suffered when its people were disinherited. This means that for me, in my real, embodied life, it would not be so simple to participate in this medicine just by reading some Native American books and imitating some Native American ideas. Those were Western European ways of thinking about these things, and not what the land itself was and is asking of me. Though it may have been a good place to start, the healing calls for deeper practice. Which brings me to the next fluorescent ley line.

Witchery

The book itself is what the title says it is: it is an ontological act of spiritual medicine that crosses all sorts of temporal and spatial boundaries in order to join the supplicants—both Tayo and the reader—to this larger, rooted tradition of interconnectedness. It reveals how our Western acts of war, up to and including World War II in the book, are a large part of our inherited disease and dysfunction.

Silko, through her elder Betonie, introduces the concept of “witchery”—a destructive force of spiritual decay that creates separation, that severs relationships, that feeds on violence and extraction. It is diabolic in the etymological sense-- it separates, cuts, pulls apart. This witchery isn’t just metaphorical. In the cosmology of the novel, it’s as real as the land, as real as the rain, as real as Tayo’s trauma. And by participating in the ceremony of the novel, the reader is given an opportunity to begin a liturgical, symbolic (putting together, the opposite of diabolic) redress.

The witchery in Ceremony is exactly what I’ve been naming as the demons of American mythology in my essays on Rango and The Country Under Heaven. My Cherokee friend taught me that in his tradition, these witches are known as Raven-Mockers-- those who acquire and then pervert legitimate spiritual power into a force that hurts individuals, communities, and ecosystems, becoming an inverted priesthood of separation rather than connection. When my friend first related this set of stories to me, I was chilled to the bone.

Remember how I wrote about the Mayor in Rango stealing water from Dirt to feed Las Vegas? That’s a kind of witchery—taking abundance from where it naturally lives to create artificial excess elsewhere. Remember Ovid Vesper confronting literal demons that embody the violence of American conquest? That’s a kind of witchery made flesh and given teeth and claws. My Cherokee friend taught me that all of us can manifest a spirit of bad energy with our uncontrolled malicious thoughts, but witchery goes beyond the incidental hurts of immature humans into intentional objectification, exploitation, and deliberate malice.

Silko is naming the same spiritual reality, but from within her own Laguna cosmology rather than Christian demonology or Cherokee mythology. Witchery thrives on everything that conquest mythology promotes: extraction instead of reciprocity, domination instead of relationship, vertical power instead of horizontal communion.

The witchery feeds on itself, becomes self-perpetuating. This is why American violence keeps cycling through new iterations—new frontiers, new enemies, new wars. The mythology itself is demonic in its deception, as I wrote before. It promises freedom and prosperity while delivering death and destruction-- spiritual and ecological.

The Grieving Land

On this read, I was struck by how much our society has failed the veterans of our recent war iterations in Iraq and Afghanistan—by how little we as a society have acknowledged the damage these wars have done to the specific souls of the specific image bearers who spent time down range. The veterans are not okay. And because they are not okay, we are also not okay, and our land itself is not okay. It is all connected, going backwards and forwards in time.

Tayo’s PTSD isn’t just a psychological condition or relational dysfunction-- it’s spiritual dislocation from the land. The jungle in the Pacific overlays the desert in his mind. He confuses his uncle’s death with the death of Japanese soldiers. He can’t tell where he is in space or time, and that’s why his journey back to rootedness involves interacting with mythology in a new creative, life-giving, particular way.

Remember what I wrote about Memorial Day? How the ceremony itself has existence beyond our willingness to believe in it, how it can hold our mixed motives and still offer something real? But I also noted the limitations—how we’ve inherited a “cult of the soldier” that glorifies sacrifice without acknowledging the spiritual cost. The Memorial Day parades, the thank-you-for-your-service gestures, the VA hospitals—these are all attempts at ceremony, but they lack the ontological depth to actually heal. They’re linear where they need to be cyclical, individual where they need to be communal, abstract where they need to be rooted in specificity.

What Tayo needs—what our veterans need, what we all need—is what Betonie provides: ceremonies that interact directly with the spiritual nature of the wound, that operate on multiple levels of reality simultaneously, that restore right relationship with land and community and the spiritual world.

Orthodox Christianity, with its understanding of spiritual combat, with its liturgical processions and weeping icons and cyclical time and sacramental worldview—surely has resources for this work.

But do we live them? Have we developed ceremonies rooted in this American landscape? Have we learned how to process through these mountains and rivers with prayers that emerge from relationship with this place? Or are we still just importing European forms, operating as though we’re in exile from some other homeland? Are we still just reading about change instead of changing ourselves?

Spiralized Time

One of the most important things Ceremony teaches is about the nature of time itself. The novel doesn’t move in straight lines. It circles back, loops around, interweaves past and present and mythic time, and in this way even transcends what we normally think of as a pagan conception of circular time. As St. Maximus the Confessor taught us, we are not just moving forwards in a single dimension of time, and neither are we condemned to eternal recurrence-- instead, time spirals towards the eternal life of the Holy Trinity, and we can learn how to participate in this kind of multi-dimensionality through liturgical practice.

This is breathtakingly in contrast to Manifest Destiny mythology that points ever upward and forward, conquering new frontiers, always moving on. Flattened, linear time is part of the witchery. It drives us to move away, to start anew, “biggerin’ and biggerin’” ourselves. It severs us from our ancestors, makes us believe we can escape the consequences of historical violence by just moving forward and creating ourselves. But only God creates ex nihilo.

Healing is not about moving forward, forgetting the past, getting over the pain. We are taught that Christ bears His wounds even in His resurrected body: This means our idea of healing itself is too small. Instead, we have to learn to see healing as something fractalized and spiral, something that joins our suffering to a great composition, like a phrase of countermelody within a symphony. There’s a reason Tolkien fell to musical imagery in the Silmarillion.

This is something Orthodox Christianity understands deeply. The Church year is cyclical and spiralized. feast days returning annually, and each time we celebrate them, we’re not just remembering past events—we’re participating in them, made present through the liturgy, adding to the event our own fractalized experience of it. The Eucharist collapses and explodes time, making us contemporaries with Christ, with all the saints, with all believers across all ages, in ever greater particular detail.

When I wrote about the myrrh-streaming icon visiting our parish, I was trying to articulate this: how the levels of reality interpenetrate one another when we pray, how we access patterns that transcend our immediate circumstances. The icon processes into the church, we pray intensely, and the community offers up its existence through multiple planes of being. This is what is actually happening regardless of whether or not we can perceive it.

This is the same temporal framework that Ceremony operates within. Tayo doesn’t overcome his trauma by leaving it behind. He heals by participating in ceremonies that make him contemporaneous with his ancestors, that connect him to patterns older than the war, older than colonization, patterns rooted in this specific land’s ways of giving and receiving life.

Ceremony and Reading

Something that I felt deeply on my first reread, but have come to experience more and more personally each time, is how Ceremony isn’t just describing ceremony in literary context, it’s actually performing it. The novel itself is ceremonial ontology.

Look at how Silko structures the book: Poetry interwoven with prose. Creation stories interrupting non-linear narrative. Past and present bleeding into each other. The form itself enacts the interpenetration of multiple levels of reality. When you read Ceremony, you’re not just learning about Tayo’s healing. You’re participating in it. Perhaps all true healing involves this kind of perichoresis—mutual indwelling-- with one another? That sounds hard, but right.

Silko teaches us that true medicine must be intensely specific about its ecosystem. She names plants, describes weather patterns, details the particular ways water moves through the landscape. She’s not talking abstractly about “the land”—she’s talking about a particular land, with particular mesas and arroyos. Ultimately, I sadly realized that her enchanted landscape was almost as abstract to me as Albion-- though I have hiked the foothills of the Huachucas, I cannot call them my home.

This specificity matters. Enchantment is localized. Relationship is particular. You can’t love “nature” in general—you have to love these trees, this watershed, these cycles of bloom and dormancy.

The ceremony teaches me that I must live it out through my own embodied existence. I must pray it with my own blood and my own water. I must be here, as intensely and purposefully as I possibly can be. I must be here now, so that I can be here always. To be one of the priesthood of believers is to embrace the-- dare I say shamanic?²-- roots of our spiritual inheritance.

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I keep returning to this vision: groups of pilgrims chanting the Psalms and praying the Jesus Prayer while walking the Appalachian trail, making pilgrimage to American holy sites, developing rooted relationships with specific places that carry on for generations.

Ceremony helps me understand why this matters. It’s not just about having nice spiritual experiences or connecting with nature. It’s about healing wounds that go back centuries to those in the book of Genesis itself.

That’s why we needn’t wait for dramatic representation of pilgrimage and procession. We can all begin today, in our own small spheres of influence, with prayer and procession and presence, turning away from our digital-lives-as-fairylands and back to our own dirt.

The land is still waiting-- right there in the back yard. But learning to love it rightly isn’t about having the right feelings. It requires specificity in practice, in place, embodied repeatedly by particular people. It requires moving through our homes and landscapes with attention and reverence, showing up repeatedly, year after year, day after day, with prayer on every breath.

And it requires honesty about what we’ve inherited. We can’t develop rooted practices while pretending American land isn’t haunted by genocide, by slavery, by extraction, by all the manifestations of witchery that have wounded both people and place. The ceremonies must address these wounds, not paper over them.

This is why both Ceremony and The Country Under Heaven teach us that spiritual combat is necessary. You can’t just be nice to the land and hope that fixes things. You have to confront the demons, exorcise the witchery, engage in actual spiritual warfare against the forces that promote separation and violence-- and those forces run right down the center of every human heart.

But remember, this combat isn’t the rugged individualism of the lone gunman. It’s processional, communal, rooted in traditions that know how to fight these battles. Tayo doesn’t defeat the witchery alone—he participates in ceremonies given by his elders. Ovid Vesper doesn’t defeat demons through superior firepower—he’s transformed through prayer and pilgrimage.

The enchanted cosmos is real. It has never left us. These American landscapes are saturated with divine presence, with patterns of reciprocity, with the possibility of right relationship. But we have to develop the eyes to see it, the practices to participate in it, the ceremonies to restore what’s been broken. We have to first un-know before we can begin to know rightly.

May we learn to treat every drop of water as sacred, to walk these mountains with reverence. May we develop ceremonies that restore right relationship, that heal the veterans, that address the land’s grief. May we perceive the enchanted Americana that’s been here all along.

In Christ,

Laura

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P.S.— If this essay resonates with you, would you share it with your circle? And if you haven’t yet read Ceremony, I can’t recommend it strongly enough. It changed how I see this continent, how I understand healing, how I pray. It might do the same for you.

1. I wish I could give you an exact date, but my notebooking and record keeping has much to be desired. For a truly remarkable system to implement, do read Andrew Kern’s writing about it. When I grow up, I want to notebook like he does.

2. I use ‘shamanic’ carefully here, not to appropriate indigenous practices but to acknowledge that early Christian monastics understood themselves as spiritual mediators between heaven and earth, operating in liminal spaces. The desert fathers would have understood Betonie’s work, even as they’d name it differently.