The Art of Ritual Prescription

exploring medicine & ritual - part III

Part 1 in this series focused on karma and its relationship to medicine.

Part 2 explored traditional Hindu approaches to working with ritual as remedy.

Into the Pool

Last time we covered the kinds of ritual measures that may be ‘prescribed’ by a Vedic astrologer. These measures, including mantras, gemstones, and deity worship, can sound impossibly woo-woo to the secular Western reader.

I understand the skepticism very well.

As a religious studies major, I perched high and dry while studying things like ritual healing from a safe distance. There were no gods for me. Until—first slowly, then suddenly—I slipped into the pool. (D.H. Lawrence: “…and I fall asleep with the gods, the gods / that are not, or that are / according to the soul's desire / like a pool into which we plunge, or do not plunge.”)

I found that no amount of reading about swimming prepares you for the experience; a different set of rules applies once you’re in. It’s not as if I left my rational mind behind, but it’s no longer the unchallenged leader of the pack. (Being fearful and controlling, I find it makes a better advisor than chief.)

Entertaining possibilities foreign to our own personal experience is a challenge for all of us, especially when dealing with something that seems outlandish. Yet life is infinitely stranger that we allow. And our reality conforms to our assumptions, to a point: if we deny the mysterious, we may succeed in closing ourselves off to it. If we test the edges of our familiar bubble, well, things might get interesting.

But we were speaking of ritual remedies.

In the last installment we discussed a traditionalist Hindu approach. It’s also possible to have ritual outside of a given tradition. Ritual has a grammar, and once you become familiar enough with it, you can start to improvise.

Let it be said that there’s a difference between escaping the confines of a particular religious tradition and escaping the act of ritual itself. Religion is something one can opt out of (though it may take a lot of self-reflective work to do so). But one might argue that as humans we’re always already bound by ritual. Layers of ritual that we ourselves have enacted, very often without even realizing we’re doing so. That’s because not all rituals are consciously constructed as such. Take a handshake: it enacts a ritual, social function without forethought or even conscious intent most of the time.

A kiss, too, is a ritual, and a potent one. Could a master magician have devised a more intimate way for two people to express attraction, care, lust? Like most rituals, a kiss marks time, making a watershed. There’s the time before we’ve kissed someone, and the time after. That’s how we know it was effective.

So rituals have power whether or not we’re very conscious of them as ritual acts, or whether we’ve constructed them ourselves.

Actually, constructing them can be a tricky business, just as uttering a sentence in a foreign language can be. It takes skill, care, attention and a good ear if you want your meaning to come across. Received forms of ritual—from a kiss to a Vedic yajña—have come down to us because they work. Once we depart from those received forms, we’re out on a limb. There’s risk involved. A newly-crafted ritual might simply fizzle. But it might also work in ways we didn’t expect.

For all these notes of caution, I’m not opposed to creating rituals—indeed it’s something that I’m activley involved in, whether on a one-on-one basis for Wayfinding clients or in a group context at Heartward Sanctuary.

There’s no formula for crafting a good ritual, though there are principles one could enumerate. Very broadly, we can say that effective rituals weave pragmatic, symbolic and (often) esoteric aspects around a core of focused intent.

I’ve been fortunate to witness and participate in many rituals, private and public, traditional and innovative. Often these binary distinctions melt and blur in the ritual cooker. Traditions are after all living things, and innovation is not their opposite. Adaptation is part of the game.

But I’d like to consider a figure who lies on the far end of the spectrum from any organized religion or established tradition, besides those of avante garde filmmaking and experimental theater.

I’m thinking of Alejandro Jodorowsky. I was delighted to learn several years ago that the controversial director of such films as “The Holy Mountain” and “The Dance of Reality” is also a dedicated diviner and highly original ritualist. In ways analogous to the work of a jyotishi, babalawo or any other type of diviner-priest, Jodorowsky has taken to following his Tarot readings with elaborate “psychomagic” prescriptions. These individualized theatric rituals are sometimes arduous, always aimed at dramatizing a client’s inner conflicts and resolving or transcending them.

Jodorowksy’s book on the subject is brilliant, highly entertaining and shot through with moments of wild genius. His free-wheeling, self-taught approach to ritual remediation is not easily replicated and certainly not without its risks, but the book remains a luminous reference point for anyone interested in the intersection of healing, divination and ritual theater. (I haven’t yet seen Jodorowsky’s 2019 film “Psychomagic, A Healing Art,” but you can watch the trailer here.)

I seem to have lost my copy of the book (hit me up if you borrowed it), so I won’t fill this post with examples of Jodorowskian ritual. The trailer gives a strong flavor of the type of costumed catharsis they typically entail.

Medicine as Ritual

Of course Jodorowsky, an iconoclast and anti-authoritarian to the core, would never cotton to a tradition as, well, traditional as Jyotish. Nonetheless, his approach is similar in certain respects to a jyotishi’s approach, since both are bound by the timeless logic of call and response: divination and ritual follow-up. Jodorowsky’s rowdy style of therapy serves as another reminder that this call and response dynamic functions as medicine. Indeed, one might turn this formulation around and argue that medicine is actually a ritual response to the diagnosis given by a divination of one sort or another.

A PET or CT scan is a particularly tech-intensive divination method, but a divination method nonetheless.

A chemo regimen is nothing if not an arduous ritual intervention.

Doctors, with their white coats, specialized jargon and societal privileges, are a priestly caste, their lives full of ritual acts. That they don’t think of themselves as performing ritual only means they are fully invested in their cosmology. To the true believer, there is no belief involved. The most powerful cults (a term I use in a value-neutral sense) are those whose cosmology is not recognized as in any way specific or culture-bound, but simply granted the status of truth. So it is with rational materialism, or scientism, which has become the predominant religious movement in the liberal West.

Limiting our discussion to the role of medicine, one might still protest: “but there are physical and biochemical processes at play in mainstream medicine: it’s science, not mumbo jumbo!”

Certainly, doctors are making use of potent technology. But many kinds of rituals are potent, many involve ingesting substances or changing the body, and shouldn’t be assumed that more subtle or “spiritual” measures (such as mantra repetition or fasting) can’t also alter biochemistry (if that is to be our yardstick).

The body-mind is our first and arguably still our best laboratory; as humans we’ve been experimenting since the beginning and replicating what works. Whether we call the result technology, science or magic depends on our biases and how well we understand the results.

To quote a teacher’s teacher in the Jyotish lineage, the purpose of doing a reading is to "avert the danger that has not yet come." Failing that, of course, a reading can be used to ameliorate the danger that is already here. Either way, its function is indistinguishable from that of medicine.

I began this article arguing that divination and ritual (always in call-and-response relationship) are a form of medicine. I find I’m ending it saying just the reverse: medicine is the special case. Ritual, the elder in the room, is among the most quintessential, inescapable of human acts. It never goes away, only changes form.

For better or worse, we are all ritualists. The question is what purpose we serve with our rituals, and how effective we are.