Ritual
The False Face Society proper performs a ritual twice a year. The ceremony contains a telling of the False Face myth, an invocation to the spirits using tobacco, the main False Face ritual, and a doling out of mush at the end.
During the main part of the ritual, the False Face members, wearing masks, go through houses in the community, driving away sickness, disease and evil spirits. The False Face members use turtle shell rattles, shaking them and rubbing them along the floors and walls. The arrival of the False Faces is heralded by another medicine society that uses masks made of corn husk. If a sick person is found, a healing ritual may be performed using tobacco and singing. The tobacco is burned, and wood ashes are blown over the sick person.
The community then gathers at the longhouse where the False Faces enter and sit on the floor. The people bring tobacco which is collected as they arrive, and burned when the ceremony begins. The ceremony itself is meant to renew and restrengthen the power of the gathered masks, as well as the spirit of Hadu⁷i⁷ in general. The ritual continues with dancing. At the end of the ritual, corn mush is doled out to the assembled crowd, and everyone goes home.
The ritual is performed during the spring and fall. Other, smaller versions occur during the Midwinter Festival, and at an individual's home as requested.
Read more about this topic: False Face Society
Famous quotes containing the word ritual:
“Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequences of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)
“Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought. Promiscuity in women is illness, a leakage of identity. The promiscuous woman is self-contaminated and incapable of clear ideas. She has ruptured the ritual integrity of her body.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description.... Criticism is ceremonial revivification.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)