Remember this: Life and Death are inevitable.
While taking my morning exercise I was burning small amounts of sage as I moved along to clarify my thoughts and remove any negative energy that might cloud my thinking or my mind. There is nothing like a clear mind. I moved along the gravel path with the morning sun over my shoulder as it rose in the East. I stopped and faced the general direction with this sense of something being near. In a wheat field sixty-five yards from me were three doe. One stood at attention while the other two seemed unaware they were being watched. I thought it an amusing spectacle especially when I started to whistle and one of the doe put her head down like a white Chinese goose about to attack. She ran a little forward then back and her other companions started to bounce around in circles like children playing. It’s a great mystery; life.
As deer always do, the small pod shimmied off into the tree line to disappear. I wondered on my path to the opening in the gate to leave. I was somewhat surprised on my way back that I should encounter in the morning glory filled ditch by a sign, a dead doe. Her carcass was turned with her udders up, distended and green from impending decomposition. Alas Death. I stood over the body pondering whether the doe was pregnant or nursing babies when she got hit by a vehicle. The bloating was moderate. I thought I saw the abdominal area roll but was suspicious of death gases or even an opossum. I could see the anal area and there was no evidence of entry caused by scavenger penetration. I wondered if I should go get a buck knife and cut the area open to see if there was life inside that might be trapped but my mind overrode that with the sight of the flesh turning green. I put my hand on the lateral side but felt nothing. I decided it was better not to vulture the body and left it at rest. I walked home to wash my hands for they were now unclean. The deer’s essence was gone and the body was empty. The circuit was broken and there was nothing present.
I have been thinking lately on rituals in hunting especially rituals of purification and the role spirit, hunter, life and death evoked. What could be the mindset of attitudes and beliefs towards pre- and post- hunting rituals? Have people who hunted lost sight of their relevance, practice, or maintaining a tradition of such acts. Have some of these traditions been discarded and replaced with more utilitarian ideas? How did those rituals compare to contemporary people who hunt in present times?
Delving in the treatment of this subject I wanted to see if I could take a closer inspection to the heart of the matter.
Upon my journey into understanding the surface of purification rituals pre- and post-hunt it is apparent, “both investigator and practitioner seek the correct procedure. The criteria for correctness range from efficacy (“When done this way, the ceremony works”) to precedent (“So and so performs the ceremony this way”) to historical precedence (“I was taught by a person who did it this way”)to textual verification (“I read that it was done this way”) to inspiration (“I was told by the spirits to do it this way”) to pragmatic considerations (“This is the only way we were able to do it”). (Bucko 121)
Here we can see that there is an assortment of ways to approach the topic of how one does a particular hunting ritual and the context the ritual is passed down. What does this mean in terms of dealing with the actual hunting of an animal? If there are different traditional styles of dealing with hunting what could rituals really mean or stand for? What about negative connotations towards hunting such as guilt, atonement or apologists practices?
Regardless of the traditions the outcome is not going to matter much if we think of time as non-linear and different situations are happening at random times with varying outcomes. If the endgame is to have a kill, you will have a kill or go home empty handed. Rituals give the traditional acts meaning as supplication, appreciation, and gratitude but most opinions are steeped in the negative sense such as guilt for taking life and making amends for it. There has been in media the implication of guilt, apology and atonement around wild game hunting. This may be dealt with on a case by case basis but should never be relocated to the whole of hunting as hunters and huntresses have separate unique identities. I submit that it is not always guilt and atonement. The first bag people grab when explaining something away is the one marked ‘negative connotation’ when looking at hunters both ancient, tribal, and present day non-tribal. I wanted to find an example of "guilt".
James Serpell weighed in on the subject:
“Other evidence of feelings of actual guilt by tribal hunters is provided by British scholar James Serpell: “Although it varies in detail from place to place, the undercurrent of guilt and the need for some form of atonement for animal slaughter is common among hunting people. In certain African tribes, for example, hunters are obliged to undergo ceremonial acts of purification in order to remove the stain of murder from their consciences. In others, the hunter will beg the animal for forgiveness so that it does not bear a grudge. The Barasana Indians of Columbia regard the act of killing animals as spiritually dangerous, and believe that their flesh is poisonous unless ritually purified first. Generally speaking, their anxieties about killing and eating game increase the larger and more anthropomorphic the animal involved. Among the Moi of Indochina, expiatory offerings are made for any animal killed by hunters, because they believe that it has been taken by force from its spiritual guardians who may decide to seek revenge. Moi folklore abounds with cautionary tales of evil befalling hunters who have failed to make necessary restitutions. Significantly, if an animal is caught in a trap, no offering is required because the Moi believe that the guardian spirit deliberately pushed the animal in, in order to punish it for some misdeed. Similarly the Chenchu hunters of India propriate the spirit world for any animal killed by themselves, but consider it unnecessary if the prey is killed by their hunting dogs, not by the hunters. The remains of animals after they have been eaten are also treated with ritual respect in many cultures. The bones are often carefully collected, reassembled in something like their original order and provided with a decent burial. (Mason 111)
Serpell speaks of the treatment of the animal's body and bones with a certain amount of assurances that the spirit of the dead animal lives on somehow. Humans do not have proof of spirit but we can't deny that there is something there either. Killing the animal in a certain way also made a difference in your degree of karma. I thought of Kosher food. Its matters in the way that food is killed because you are taking a kind of negative energy into yourself once you eat the flesh. When considering retribution on the part of the animal spirit that is owned by a spirit of the forest we can investigate another example of ritual in the hunting act.
Here we find the hunting act based around a fear of retribution on the part of the animal’s spirit or later as we will read the guardian or spirit owner. Let us consider the Tingchim. “We have seen that Tingchim’s three regular hunters perform a ritual in the forest each time an animal has been killed whereby particular pieces of meat are offered to the hunter’s latsen who acts as his personal supernatural helper and protector during the hunt. In this case, the latsen is not the owner of the wild animals but is worshipped as the ‘owner of the hunting, the hunt, and the gun’.Thanks to the help of this particular latsen, of which there may be more than one, the hunter and consumers of the meat will not suffer the consequences of having taken it from its nopa owner as long as the hunter first offers the correct share to all the latsen who helped and protected him against the dangers of the forest. (Balikci 211)
The psychology of these rituals are very interesting indeed. Sigmund Freud postulated that purification seemed to be the culprit. Here “the “primitive”rituals Freud describes may have been for purification rather than atonement: cleansing rather than penance is required if warriors are to resume social life without becoming a threat to communal health and stability.” (Feifel 120) In ancient times this would make sense due to disease or if the hunters were dealing with animal by-products that were not preserved well or left for too long before preserving. There was also the idea of death, because death is represented as present at the moment the heart stops beating and the brain dies. As a polluting decay from visually watching the body decompose back into the ground I am sure this was a mystery. Humans realized their mortality. With this mortality realized it would not be too hard an idea to accept that early humans thought they too could be carried to the grave. Of course hunters do not believe that unless they are jumped by a bear or shot by a another hunter.
Let us revisit the Tingchim where Balikci reiterates the hunter performs a ritual for gratitude for what he has as a blessing on himself. I then think this must have also been based loosely around some kind of cross contamination of the meat products for fear of sickness. “Immediately after killing the animal the hunter will perform the ritual in a hut or other secluded place where no one will be able to hear or see him perform it. No hunting rituals are ever performed at home. First, I was told that the head and the four limbs of the animal are cut and displayed around a leaf that represents the body of the animal. Small pieces from the entrails are mixed and arranged in little piles directly on the leaf, one pile for each of the latsen the hunter may have to thank. The offering ritual is whispered so that no one may hear the name of thelatsen. It is said that if the ritual was not properly performed, consuming the meat would make people sick in which case the hunter would have to return to the forest in order to perform a second ritual.” (Balikci 211) This ritual reminded me of the pgymy ritual that involved the woman and men during sun up before a hunt.
I also wanted to put forth an example of a known ritual which is the Lakota sweat lodge. Ritual aside because I am dwelling on symbolic meaning or all around meaning during a sweat lodge “the sweat serves to intensify suffering both symbolically and physiologically, it is ultimately concerned with alleviating that suffering by displacing it from everyday life to the ceremonial realm, where it can be controlled. Humor is used in that process to make suffering easier to bear. Narratives objectify suffering and build solidarity by providing the group with knowledge of a person’s hardships. Finally, prayer and song invoke the intercession of divine powers for the alleviation of one's suffering and the continuance of one’s life." (Bucko 43)
I thought this interesting especially if the sweat lodge precedes a hunting expedition where purification would mean solidarity between hunters, emptying out of impure spirits for when the wild game was killed the spirit of the animal could go into the hunters body by breath before it goes into the ether. At these times the spirit is where power seats itself especially when needed for war. Breath in the sweat lodge could be almost in accord with breathing the last breath of your prey. During the sweat there is prayer for what one needs and asking for guidance to bring about the realization of one's life purpose through spirit intervention. The sweat is not about the liquids coming out of your pores but the water being put on the rocks where water is poured and life is consumed. I was also intrigued by the idea that if one purifies themselves pre-hunt what about the fact that death has been turned loose and now the empty or purified human vessel is a container for "negative energy" or filled with the spirit of an animal that has to be released at some point?
I also found it fascinating when you look at sweats or rituals in the past. The rituals and traditions were centered around individualism and not the family. In present time, tradition is now about the hunting family through advertising which is the binding force that keeps everyone together but in the old days in some cultures it was these rituals that were rites of passage into adulthood that make the man or woman. Now we have children unable to grow up, make decisions, or fend for themselves when the going gets tough. The pivotal moment of being set out alone in the wildness to fast and find the spiritual path to their futures is only experienced in some cultures. Other groups think it is a rite of passage to go to prom but that will only get you a bill for a dress or suit, DUI, or pregnancy. How is that the road to adulthood in a positive way? That is a stereotype I know but you don't have to look to far to see the disabled youth of today falling by the wayside.
This reminded me of a berry juice concoction that was made before a hunt or war which caused the drinker to defecate till empty. This was useful because you didn't want to leave feces around for the prey or other people crossing your path that would kill you over competition. Also there was the liklihood you would be out in the heat anyway without water and this could make you sick. Rituals that seem mundane actually had valid reasoning behind them. Maybe not all I state but deep in there it lives.
When you look at examples in brief it makes you rethink what the rituals actually mean. Up to this point the population has depended on archeological explanations but general stuff is no different.
Revisiting the pre- and post- hunting rituals I get a sense that somehow they were based around the appreciation and gratitude of being provided the opportunity for a successful hunt. One always feels worthy when you are finally able to make contact with the wild game you pursue. I wondered if in our century when instant gratification reigns over much of our life that we have tossed aside rituals without realizing traditions helped us to remember the value of food, family, prey and self when in the presence of life and death. As traditions go I wondered if in contemporary hunting society if it is not true that the hunting act is more utilitarian. If tradition is more of a ritual on vacaction experience when one visits a culture that keeps it alive for cultural identity, monetary gain, or tourism. Maybe that is the point we are getting to; death of culture, tradition and ritual. People are throwing out what they think they don't need because of the new 'conscious thought process". I am not saying that is a bad thing but its something to think about. I believe personal ritual exists maybe in forms of inherited rituals or some that are made up on the spot because of good luck such as a lucky shirt or underwear. On the other hand if you consider retaining taxidermied animals much in the way of the Tingchim where the body or body parts have to sit in a certain position (forever in this case) to manifest a certain outcome. It makes you wonder if people do know the value of what they have or that their tradition of perfoming a ritual is clinging to moments that are fleeting. Hunters live in a time of dishevel when very little care is given to the treatment of his or her pursuit or thought and the deeper meaning of the concept of ritual and tradition especially in the realm of social media where everything is a commodity.
One day all of us will experience life and death in an hour; probably our own.
Written by: W Harley Bloodworth
~Courtesy of the AOFH~
Literature Cited:
Balikci, Anna. Lamas, Shamans, and Ancestors Village. Religions In Sikkim. Koninklijke Brill NV; Leiden, the Netherlands. 2008. Pg. 211Print
Bucko, Raymond A. The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge. History and contemporary practice. USA: University of Nebraska Press. 1988. Pg.121, 143 Print
Feifel, Herman. Death and the Quest for Meaning.North Bergen, NY; Jason Aronson, Inc. 1997 Pg. 120 Print
Mason, Jim. An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature. New York, NY: Latern Books. 2005 Pg. 111 Print
