The Liberators
Here they stand watching, overseeing life from its position in the home and reminding us that mindful relief could be just one scroll away.
The act of rituals is believed to have been around since as early as 70,000 years ago. An archaeological find in Botswana by archaeologist Professor Sheila Coulson shows that ancestors in Africa worshipped the Python. There is a rock carved in its resemblance that led to caves where it is believed that they performed the oldest known ritual to mankind. The ritual involved stone age people taking spearheads there to finish carving them and then only burning the red spearheads, a ritual destruction of artifacts.
Since these times the act of rituals has evolved to be very diverse; they maybe traditions of a community, acts of worship, or even gestural like how we greet someone for example, rituals are a feature of all known human societies. The Liberators are watchful dogs, guardians of your secrets, woes, and worries. They are linked to various ritual practices that already exist, but with a new purpose and meaning created for a modern society living in turbulent times. |
Their origins lie in Egyptian Shabti dolls where figurines were buried with the dead to take care of physical activities in the afterlife. The Liberators are here for the living, they are there to take your mental dealings and offer relief here and now. They also relate to the ritual of Guatemalan worry dolls which were designed for children to keep under their pillows at night, giving them the wisdom and knowledge to eliminate their worries in their dreams.
They collect all your unwanted thoughts, desires, and secrets. Personal anxieties are written on a small piece of paper, rolled up like a scroll and then posted into the torso of the black dog, where the figurine holds these thoughts so that each person can let their anxieties go. It is like giving the black dog back its thoughts, the act of transference from inner mind to outer world object, ejecting the unnecessary internal struggles back into the dog, literally!
They collect all your unwanted thoughts, desires, and secrets. Personal anxieties are written on a small piece of paper, rolled up like a scroll and then posted into the torso of the black dog, where the figurine holds these thoughts so that each person can let their anxieties go. It is like giving the black dog back its thoughts, the act of transference from inner mind to outer world object, ejecting the unnecessary internal struggles back into the dog, literally!
While communal rituals give us the comfort of familiarity, solidarity and shared experience, personal rituals can also create a feeling of connection in the grand scheme of things. While some may dismiss the practice as old fashioned, the act of ritual is an essential part of the human condition that remains with us today simply because it seems to work for so many people.
Recently, a friend told me about a little ritual that she did to try and stop energy draining people from turning up at her house. She literally froze them! She wrote on a piece of paper the names of people she needed a mental break from and froze them in cubes of ice. It was working for a while and then these folk started showing up again. She went to the freezer to check on her named ice cubes and saw they weren’t there. Then she remembers one of her children having a bag of ice on their head to relieve a headache, which it did not, and she connected the intrusion of these unwanted guests with the thawing of their names. She performed the ritual again. |
These little acts can direct energy, moving it away from feelings of dread to have the mental space to think about other positive things. These are the kinds of rituals that are needed now, a healthy way to connect to our minds without destructive habits that poison our physical selves to deal with mental pain. The solution could come from acts of mindfulness coupled with physical acts that are not harmful.