War and Ritual Ecstasy

A review

I’m in Minneapolis this weekend, the city I lived in for 22 years. I’m visiting family, doing some work for my sister. I planted grape vines along her fence back in 2003, which I profiled here making wine, stomping grapes. She has a new privacy fence and she wants the grape vines gone. I am going to transplant them in the orchard, is the plan. Digging out the first one, I didn’t plan on it being this difficult.

I drove by my former house. The fruit trees are still there. The apricots were blooming. The greenhouse I built is still there. It remains something of an oasis in the city. I’m deeply grateful for that.

That said, following so many venomous liberals on Substack, the greater city feels a lot different to me than when I lived here. There has been such a push to demonize rural white people, make them seem like the greatest, most violent threat to American democracy, I’m struck by the peace I left in the rural place I live, compared to this considerably less peaceful city. Liberals here do not look as bloodthirsty as they seem on Substack. But then I’m sure if I walked around wearing a MAGA hat and an American flag T-shirt, the veritable knives would come out. Though mostly from the eyes of white people. Instead, curiously, just being myself, I have noticed a good deal more attention from women, than I ever did when I lived here, or I do in the rural area where I live. Go figure.

On the drive down I listened to a podcast from The Emerald, called War and the Ritual of Ecstasy. The host Joshua Michael Schrei is quite liberal, but not ideological, someone I think many of my readers would appreciate. The basic working thesis of his podcast is that human beings require ritual and trance states, for mental health and general well-being; abandoning that, thinking ourselves superior to that, that our reason and logic is sufficient, that we have evolved beyond that, is core to a lot of the problems we see in the world today.

War is like a ritual we go through, in the absence of any ritual to harness and transform that energy positively.

War is so prevalent that it seems to almost be a need of ours, and this need, as we will explore, is very deeply tied to the need we have for ritual, and the need we have for trance, and even the need we have for ecstasy…people need regular, cathartic, ritualized intensity, and if they do not have that…they will find ways to get it, up to and including slaughtering each other.

War, in his estimation, is not having a sacred and ritual way for men to go into a kind of trance as in battle, with their fellow men, to feel the intensity and intimacy of the hunt, of the kill, of life and death.

This episode is an attempt to answer the question, why we war, why we invade, and bomb and shatter, and destroy, and then in the process kill our fellow human beings by the millions. And how, at it’s heart, the drive to do this is not so separate from the great drive we have to be subsumed into the greater universe…to feel the individual self melt away in service of the larger, to find alterity, to find trance, to find, ultimately, bliss. For the search for pain and destruction is not without it’s deeper bliss, and the search for bliss is not without it’s pain. War is a misplaced longing for conjunctive bliss. War is a ritualized harnessing of feelings and drives that were once most often harnessed with initiation rituals. So war becomes the modern initiation vehicle, it becomes the place where men, terribly, sadly, fill their need for ritual ecstasy.

It’s an important point, just now, as the world seems headed toward a full-on, kinetic WWIII. Meanwhile America is being invaded by ten+ million military aged men, more then three times the number of the active military, while there is much talk in the nation about the inevitability of civil war. We are already in a civil war, the law and Justice have been weaponized against the leading presidential candidate and his supporters. There is an information war, of which this Substack is a part.

There are millions of young American men, lost, wandering, caught up in bad habits and addictions, hungry for they-know-not-what.

As soldiers march in lockstep they cease to be isolated individuals and become bonded to one another somatically. There is deep communal bonding in war, and in training for war, a similar bonding one might find in the intensity of an all night entheogenic ritual, or a four day sun dance or a collective fast. These bonds that one forges in times of intensity are bonds that are not forgotten. In many cultures, in war as in ecstatic trance there is drumming, a pulse through which to entrain, to bond, to entrance, to synchronize. There is group song and invocation, marching songs and battle cries. We’ve all heard those trance inducing battle cries, and they do something. Even to a passive audience half a world and ten centuries away.

We see that the bliss of conjunctive union, this exact experience of the sacrifice of the small self as it merges into the greater, is right at the heart of ecstatic ritual, it is the aim of ritual in fact, to experience the melting of the self into the greater, collective whole. This is ecstasy, this is ritual, this is also right at the heart of why people war. The annihilation of the individual cares and concerns, in a space that exists outside of normal time.

Our government is mystified, why young white men are not enlisting. It is the practice of governments in this modern age, rather than giving young men access to positive ecstatic rituals to strengthen them and empower them, they send them off to wars to be maimed and to die. What are these young men doing with their lives, not enlisted?

One might even begin to say, trans/woke ideology is like this ritualistic subsuming of the self into the collective whole, in something like shadow.

When people return to America from war, there is no ritual to re-integrate them into society, many become homeless, many become chronically drug addicted and mentally ill, many kill themselves.

To assume the body of a warrior is to ritualize access into an altered state, and that state must be thoroughly relinquished before any kind of reintegration into ordinary time and place can happen. So, through all these elements, through entrainment, bonding, drumming, song and invocation, through initiation, the merging of the individual into the greater in a specialized time of enactment, through the funneling toward a cathartic moment of rupture and sacrifice, participants in war enact a great ritual, enter into pique states, states of immediacy, of heightened perception of time outside of time, ecstasos, of conjunction with something larger. War, seen through this lens, is a mass change of consciousness ritual, war is trance.

Many men and women willingly go to war, knowing next to nothing as to why, simply that it fills a need for intensity, real intimacy, true brotherhood.

War fulfills all the things that human beings, particularly men, ritually and somatically need, but at an unthinkable cost. War becomes the way that men are allowed to feel their bodies, are allowed to feel intimacy, are allowed to shed tears, are allowed to find ecstasy, are allowed to find the ritual intensity they long for. War fulfills the need that intense cathartic ritual once fulfilled. It harnesses intense and primal needs and longings, and takes the warrior practitioner to a place of presence and immediacy that we deeply crave. And so, if we want to understand war, we need to understand the heart of why we crave these things in the first place. Why the human need for ritual intensity?

It began with the hunt. For most of 300,000 years, homo sapiens were the hunter, but we were also the prey. That tension, the intensity of being both hunter and prey, is fundamental to the ritual we need now, to break this endless cycle of war.

An experience that goes all the way back to the food cycle, of predator and prey….The basic cycle of life is this, everything that lives is food and the eater of food. This life, the very cycle of nature itself, is one of birth, death and devouring. As beings in this cycle we are biologically constructed around this core experience, an experience of being at the mercy of the source of nourishment, and the slayer of the source of nourishment simultaneously. When we dive into the root somatics of the food cycle, we see three hundred thousand years in which the source of all nourishment and life and bliss, and the source of pain and trauma, and possibly death were all one thing: the animal. We ate animals. Animals ate us. We were prey.

Sportsball is as close as we get to that ritual, most of us. That is a pale and rather pathetic replacement for the predator/prey relationship our ancestors had with the world. Yet how intensely do sportsball fans feel? Some of them treat it as if it is life and death. What if they did not have sportsball? Many of them would probably fight more. They might take up sports themselves, which is much healthier than watching it. Many might start preying on their fellows.

The animal was the deity. Look at the heroes clad in lions skins, the yogis seated on tiger skins, the shapeshifters, the jaguar shamans, the visions of goddess as lion devourerer, the vision of deity as one who feeds. Our relationship of predator/prey, controller/controlled, is hard wired as our fundamental embodied experience of the universe…the relationship with the predation cycle, and its associated awes and ecstasies, and traumas and joys, runs very, very deep.

War it seems, arrived just around the time we ceased to be prey to animals. No longer prey to animals, the less we hunted animals, the more we preyed on each other. It is a core need we have to fill, without the hunt we need to find other positive ways to find the bliss that was the hunt.

It’s about where fundamental experiences of bliss, awe, pain, fear, awakening, actually come from, how they are embedded in our root somatic structures, and how they long to be expressed…the quickest way to ecstasy is one in which the line between control and controlled is crossed, when we find ourselves at the mercy of the great universe. We first felt this in the altered states that came with hunting, with child birth, with the prolonged seeking of food and shelter. If it were not for this cycle of predation and prey, would we feel bliss at all? Where does bliss come from? Bliss is not simply about sitting around safe and good and happy. Bliss is about death, and what it is to be a small being in a great world, and what it is to let go, at last.

What do we know of this kind of bliss in America? What do we know about this kind of intensity of feeling? Is it any wonder that people take so many drugs, always pushing it further, trying to feel something of the ineffable, something of the divine? It is as pathological as war, the micro as in the macro, this poor replacement for the ecstasy of hunt.

The state of ecstasy grew out of the somatic reality of being both predator and prey. Ecstatic states of consciousness grew directly out of our experience as hunter and hunted. Pain and bliss merged in these states. Fear and wonder and conjunctive awe merged in these states. For men particularly, who do not experience the pain, danger, terror, exhaustion, wonder, joy, rupture, bliss, union of childbirth, our interaction with the food cycle was our readiest access to ecstasy. In fact, this cycle of devourerer and devoured, lives right at the heart of why we do ritual at all.

It is like all the pathologies of the age are about getting back to the intensity of feeling, what it was like living 50,000 years ago when there was to real separation between us and the world.

So the primary purpose of ritual is to enact this very food, eater of food, bliss, pain, ecstasy cycle, in order to take us into the states of consciousness that were afforded to our ancestors who were part of the cycle. Ritual takes us into necessary conjunctive states where we feel things that were once only felt when we were in direct relation with apex predators.

Then we discovered grains and animal husbandry, grains could be stored, we no longer needed to hunt, increased food security meant for greater longevity, such wealth was accumulated, more wealth and more people gave rise to greater and greater settlements unto cities, the further we became separated from nature and our origins.

Globalists don’t want you to eat bugs to save the planet from climate change, they want you to eat bugs to emasculate you and separate you even further from your origins, to make you even easier to control.

With the growth of agriculture, ecstatic states that used to be available to the hunter became less available. And so we ritualized these states, we recognized their necessity, we recognized both that we needed to feel ecstasy, and we recognized that there was a very specific danger that could come from no longer being so deeply immersed in the food chain. What is that danger? If we don’t have the ritual outlet in which to enact the cycle of predator and prey, we will prey on each other instead.

Cities led to far greater wars than had ever existed. It gave rise to a permanent warrior class, who then began to drive more war. Without the hunt, we began to hunt each other. Now we have a military industrial complex preying upon the whole world. Now we have globalists, pandemicists, liberal catastrophists seemingly bent on deliberately reducing standards of living and global population.

Without game, men prey on each other. Removed from the cycle of ritualized ecstatic, joyous, painful, feeding, offering, we offer each other up instead, because we still long for those states, those raw states, those ecstasies, those steps across the threshold. We still long for the urgent sight of the bristling animal, jaws gnashing, we long for the dilation of our eyes, the rising of neck hair, we long in some ways to be devoured, to let go, to surrender, we long for ecstatic intensity, we long to offer to feed others, to feed the world. We need ritualized remembrance of our place.

Even hunting now for the few people who do, is a few weekends a year, not so much a hunt as to sit and wait, the prey nothing that can harm us. The ritual intensity of the hunt is gone, except for a very few who have gone more traditional, less use of the gun, more dangerous game.

No matter what though, to kill a thing is to feel the inevitability of death, a clear reminder of our own mortality; Time is ever the hunter.

The more our need for ritual offering, for ritual intensity, is suppressed into the unconscious or deemed unnecessary, or filed away as irrational, the more it will find other ways to express itself. The ritual animist understands you don’t simply get rid of the human need to express and ritualize intensity, ecstasy, sacrifice…war can be seen to arrive when we are not feeding forces that need to be fed.

The gun too has separated most of us even from the ritual catharsis of war. Modern weaponry is a long way from the sword and shield. There are no drums. There is considerably less dropping of the self and merging with the group. There is still the brotherhood, the fraternity, the intensity, but considerably less the trance that feels no fear or pain. The modern battlefield is less trance and more sheer terror.

Meanwhile most people aspire to live in a peace that is really anything but.

The out-sourcing of violence, cultures that never have to think about violence, who live a suburban, gated life where violence is never a question, have not necessarily found peace. Instead, they have outsourced their violence, outsourced to the under class that supports their lifestyle, outsourced to the children who choke on the fumes as they stitch their shoes, outsourced to the ecosystems pillaged by their modern appetites. This isn’t peace.

Real peace would look like some ritual ecstasy that is a positive turn away from drugs and alcohol. Real peace would look more like liberals and conservatives coming together to initiate young people into adulthood. Real peace would look like taking better care of the soil, waters, habitat, pollinators, less increased extraction for the sake of saving the world from climate change with EVs and solar panels.

Peace requires a healthy relationship with our need for intensity. Peace is not a void or absence, peace is enacted through vigorous ritual that harvests the intensity of those prone to make war, so that young men get, “something meatier than a mindfulness course.” So that, you know, we could employ all of our soldiers in the ritualized re-greening of the world, complete with extended festivals and dances and rituals of ecstasy and pain, and athletic initiation, as we plant and grow and cultivate.

There is not less war because we are rational. Reason and logic and the industrial age have made war so much worse, so much more deadly, so much more damaging. Modern war is a few functionaries operating an endless supply of remote drones, far from any war zone. Our reason and logic has led to the technology that could exterminate most life on earth including human.

Schrei is mistaken about Ukraine and Putin though, calling Putin the adolescent who was never initiated into manhood, as if Putin were the cause of the war in Ukraine, and not just one of many actors, most of them on the supposed side of the Ukrainians. Quite literally the leadership of the West sacrificed an entire generation of young Ukrainian men, maybe even the whole country, in a failed attempt to weaken Russia. Schrei recovers himself though, admitting he sees a world of leaders most of whom were not initiated ritually into adulthood, acting out of juvenile sensibilities. “Where are the adult leaders?” he asks.

I sometimes think there is so much talk of civil war in America, and we are so very close to WWIII, because so many people are so very bloody bored with modernity. Sometimes I think WWIII, the damn death cult that is modern liberalism, is just a desperate need for catharsis. Something considerably less would probably do, if we could imagine what that ritual would look like.