Malidoma Patrice Somé (1956–2021) was a teacher and writer from the Dagara, a farming people of Burkina Faso and northern Ghana, who spent much of his life bringing Dagara understandings of ritual, initiation and community to Western audiences. He taught that ritual is something experienced, not explained, that a true community includes both the living and the dead, and that without elders and real initiation a community falls into chaos. Therapeutic Shamanism shares much of his diagnosis of modern life, and differs from him over the dead and over the use of another culture’s rituals.
Who was Malidoma Somé? #
He was born on 30 January 1956 in Dano, in Burkina Faso, into a Dagara community. When he was four he was placed in a Jesuit boarding school, where he received a Western education; by his own account he suffered years of abuse there, and he left at about twenty. Back in his village he found it hard to fit into Dagara life and religion after so long away. The elders allowed him a belated initiation alongside much younger boys, the month-long baor, which he said was more dangerous for him than for them because he did not speak the language and had been raised outside the culture. He went on to study in France and the United States, at the Sorbonne and at Brandeis University.1
His name, as he explained it, means one who makes friends with the stranger or the enemy, and he saw his life’s purpose in that light, as bringing an understanding of African ways to Westerners and to build understanding between the two.12 He taught widely in the United States and Europe, led divination and initiation retreats, and founded a community on the east coast of the United States. His books are Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (1993), Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman (1994) and The Healing Wisdom of Africa (1999). He died on 9 December 2021, aged sixty-five.1
The Dagara are farmers, living mainly in northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, where families work their own small mixed-crop plots.3 The village ways he described are those of a settled farming people, not of hunter-gatherers.
What did he teach about ritual? #
That a sacred life is lived through ritual, every day, not on special occasions. In a Dagara village people speak to the ancestors or tend a shrine of nature at least once a day, at the level of the community, the family and the individual, so that the sacred is an ongoing part of life.4 At the start of anything important, water and ashes are given to the ancestors, poured on the ground as named ancestors are called.2
For him ritual works through the heart, not the head. “A ritual is a series of experiences, not a series of explanations”, and it helps people drop their need to have everything explained; “The heart has to be allowed as much self-expression as the mind, if not more.”2 He also described a Dagara funeral and the dynamics of grief there.4 The grief teacher Francis Weller drew on his teaching and on time spent in his village. See Who is Francis Weller, and what does he teach about grief?
What did he teach about community? #
That community is what nurtures the spirit, and that it is wider than the living. “A true community has to include the living and the dead”, so care for the ancestors is part of looking after oneself and one’s people.2 EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this hold it together. “In the absence of the elders there is chaos and instability”, and he contrasted the Dagara expectation that grandparents spend long hours with their grandchildren with a Western culture that puts its old people in homes.2 Where ritual is missing, in his words, “the young ones are restless or violent”, elders are lacking and adults are bewildered.4
Initiation sits at the heart of this. He described it simply as a rite of passageRite of passage. The deliberate death-and-rebirth (separation → liminal → incorporation, after van Gennep) by which the childhood-built identity is dismantled and a new one, rooted in the Soul, is grown. The lost route to Adulthood. More about this from one stage of life to another, in three parts: separation, ordeal and homecoming. The homecoming matters as much as the ordeal, because “Homecoming requires recognition and acknowledgement that the person has survived.” Young Westerners, he thought, improvise initiations of their own, seeking altered states through drink and drugs, with no one to receive them back, and “The problem is their initiations never end.”2 See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared? and Who was Arnold van Gennep, and what are the three stages of a rite of passage?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism meet his teaching? #
On belonging, on initiation and on the problem of coming home. In Therapeutic Shamanism hunter-gatherer people experienced themselves as individuals and, at the same time, as part of a tribe, as a cell is part of a body, and the tribe as part of all living things.5 Shamanism was not something a few specialists did. Everyone in the tribe lived it, and the shaman was simply the one best at it.6 See What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?
On initiation the diagnosis is the same as his. Without initiation ceremonies most people stay stuck in the identities they formed as small children, “effectively children in adult bodies”, and real Adults are rare.7 See What is an Elder?
They also meet over homecoming. Somé noticed that people who had powerful experiences in his workshops often felt them fade once back in what he called “the so-called real world”, and he was clear that Westerners must solve that problem for themselves, since “No villager can tell them how to do it.”2 Therapeutic Shamanism starts from the same observation. Days-long ceremonies, vision quests, sweat lodges and the like can work dramatically in the short term, but for domesticated people a few weeks or months back in ordinary modern life is usually enough for the effects to wear off, so the answer it gives is a shamanic practice woven into daily life.8
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism differ from him? #
Over the dead, first. For Somé the dead remain members of the community, to be given water and called by name. In Therapeutic Shamanism the individual dead need to move on. Hunter-gatherer peoples saw the dead as dangerous to the living and made very sure they departed, and it was as cultures began to Fall that people started to hold on to their dead and keep them close.9 What Therapeutic Shamanism honours as lasting are the AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer with a capital A, the great branches of Human from which our Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this come, not the individual dead. See What is the difference between an ancestor and an Ancestor? The Dagara are farmers, and this is one of the places where a farming people’s ways and a hunter-gatherer people’s ways part.
Over ritual, second. Somé taught Westerners rituals drawn from Dagara life. Therapeutic Shamanism aims to keep its practice culturally non-specific and draws on the animist inheritance common to all humans; his own remark that no villager can tell Westerners how to solve their problem sits close to that choice. See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
