#505： A Man's Need for Ritual
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Summary
For thousands of years, men s lives have been structured by rituals that helped them mark significant events, make sense of the world, and move from one phase of life to the next. In our modern age, our lives are largely devoid of rituals, and my guest today says we're worse off for it. His name is William Ayotte, and he's a poet, men's group facilitator, ritual leader, and author of Re Enchanted: A Meaningful Ritual in a Secular World.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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For thousands of years, men's lives were structured by rituals, rituals that helped
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them mark significant events, make sense of the world, and move from one phase of life
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to the next. In our modern age, our lives are largely devoid of rituals, and my guest
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today says we're worse off for it. His name is William Ayotte, and he's a poet, men's
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group facilitator, ritual leader, and author of Re-Enchanting the Forest, Meaningful Ritual
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in a Secular World. We begin our conversation discussing William's introduction to the power
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of ritual, why rituals have declined in Western culture, and what makes a ritual a ritual.
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We then discuss the history of the mythopoetic men's movement, kick-started by Robert Bly
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in his book Iron John. William then unpacks why it's important for men to undergo a rite
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of passage, why it's never too late to participate in one, and how men can have multiple rites
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of passage over their lifetime. We also discuss how to give your son a rite of passage. William
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also provides some ideas for daily rituals you can incorporate in your life, provide
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more meaning and enchantment to existence, and we enter a conversation with William's
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advice on how to get started with a men's group. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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Well, good to hear your voice. So you wrote a book that I really enjoyed,
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Re-Enchanting the Forest, Meaningful Ritual in a Secular World. You are a poet. You have
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led rituals for men and for other people as well, and you're making the case that even
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though we live in a secular world, we need more rituals. So what got you down the path,
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started down the path of exploring the power of rituals in human life?
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To be really frank and honest, I think it was necessity. I was in trouble personally. I was
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about 30 years of age. I was isolated. I was cut off. I was hurting. And at a certain point,
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I discovered that my past was even darker than I had pretended. And I joined a men's group.
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And it turned my life around. We were doing ritual in that space. And it really changed
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everything. It was like discovering a new map of the world. And at that point, I think that I kind
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of altered the way I saw things in the world and altered the way I saw myself. And that was a big
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I mean, before this experience with the men's group and the rituals they did there,
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I mean, what was your experience with ritual before? Was it just in the confines of church?
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No, I'm not a churchman. And though I come from a family of churchmen, oddly enough, but
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I had experienced ritual because I had been to an English boarding school. I had been to national
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football matches. You know, in the way that the Super Bowl is a ritual, the FA Cup final in the
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United Kingdom is a ritual. So I was used to the ritualization of things. But I hadn't really
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experienced deep healing rituals. I hadn't experienced those sort of things. And it wasn't
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until I got into a men's group, which was literally a ritual men's group, as defined in those days,
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that I began to realize that rituals served me and served a deeper part of me.
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So there are still rituals today, even though we might not think of them as rituals, like you said,
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like a sports game is a ritual. There are civic rituals that every country has.
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But there aren't the type of rituals that we, like the sort of the healing, the transformative
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rituals that there used to be. Like, why has there been a decline of that sort of ritual,
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particularly in the West? And what do you think of the consequences of that have been?
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That's a good question. I think there's been a hijack of the Western mind. It's been in place now and
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growing for the last hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, I don't know. There's a
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constant move towards reason and detail and logic at the expense of empathy and compassion and
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imagination. So if you like, it's a shift from the right brain to the left brain, though I'm not
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altogether sure about that. But it appeals to the masculine, and I do know that. I mean, we like
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lists and clarity and measurement, nerdy stuff. It's all good. But over time, we lose contact with
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that other wilder side of ourselves, with the sensual and the imaginative part of us. And if that bit of
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us, if that's the bit that loves ritual, and we separate from it, then at that point, the rituals
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we do begin to hollow out, and they have less meaning, and they become empty, empty ceremonial.
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That makes sense. This is something that Nietzsche talked about, about the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
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Absolutely. And ritual is about descent. It is about Dionysian descent. And we live in an
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Apollonian ascendant society. We want to get up there. We want to get into, and we like to get
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into the spiritual. We're not so keen on getting into the soulful.
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What do you think? So what's the difference between the two?
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I think we are talking about Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian distinction. I think that there used to
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be ancient mysteries and what we might think of as the soul, the psyche, it needs to experience, it needs
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to feel, it needs to go down, if you like. Whereas there is a quality in the human spirit that wants
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to rise up to, it wants cleanliness and sort of intellectual rigor. It wants a view, it wants to see
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from above. And that's not the case with the soul. So I think that's a distinction we can make. And
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certainly in men's work and in the work that I was doing, have been doing over the last 30 years, I think
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Well, before we get into talking about the type of rituals that you talk about in the book, let's do some
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definitions here. We're going to be Apollonian here for a second.
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What makes a ritual a ritual? Are there certain components that need to be in place?
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Yep. Well, you enter a different space when you enter a ritual. You cross a threshold. Your psyche
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or your soul, let's call it what we will, enters a different territory, either a place, a physical
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location, a difference, or an imaginal territory, a sphere, a place where you can do ritual work.
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The ritual then, the ritual itself then gives your soul a message. So there's a distinction that says
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that a ritual is a symbolic action through which the soul or the psyche can receive and understand
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a message. You know, the reality is the soul, and I'm using the word soul here, and you may choose to
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use the word psyche, Brett, but I'm using the word soul. The soul is a bit like a chicken. It can't
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count. It doesn't do data, but it can and does operate in symbols. It sees pictures, and it
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understands pictures. And for instance, I have a wedding ring on my finger here. When that ring was
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put on my finger, I understood that that was a symbol that meant my life had changed irrevocably
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and radically for life. If I were to take that ring off my finger, if I were to ritually take it off,
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then my life would change again. So that's what I mean by a ritual that actually touches the soul.
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That makes clear. So there needs to be a space that you go into. There could be some sort of
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tool or implementation, like a ring and every other...
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Or in a church, it could be like the Eucharist or like the tools of the ritual.
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I mean, there's a kind of a commonality to ritual around the world, which is, you know,
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and of course, it's the human rule of free, isn't it? There's a beginning, a middle, and an end to a
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story. You start a joke, you tell the joke, you tell them you've finished a joke. This is true in
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three-act structure in movies. It's true too in ritual. We have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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So they're all very significant, and they have very important roles to play within the ritual.
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And it sounds like, too, an underlying thing that for this all to happen, for this place to mean
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anything, the tools to mean anything, the action to mean anything, there has to be this underlying
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Absolutely. You need an intention. And in a way, the intention gives you a root map, a plan. But the
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intention is, you have to hold that very clearly in your mind, I'd say in your heart too. But that is
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a, you need to know why you are there, because that's what anchors you in the reality at the same
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time as you're entering into this mythical, mystical, misty space that can be ritual.
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And in these ritual spaces, they don't have to be like a special building or a special room. Like you
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could possibly create one just in your closet? Or if you just go outside, that can become a sacred
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I did rituals in rehab centers for years. I've done rituals in the most simple of places,
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in garages, in gardens and sheds, in all sorts of different places. It's about the space you create.
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It's like an empty space into which the extraordinary can come. It's not about the bells and the
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whistles. It's not about the building, though it's, hey, isn't it great to have a wonderful
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building? You know, I remember walking around Westminster Abbey and thinking, this is like
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putting your fingers in the plug. But you can do a ritual anywhere.
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Okay. So we decided to define what a ritual was. There needs to be a place, a time set aside from
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the profane, I guess is what they would say. There's tools that can be used possibly, not necessarily.
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There is an action that you do that's symbolic, that speaks to the psyche or the soul. And there
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has to be this underlying intent beneath that. So that's how you create the ritual. And you also
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said that a ritual is like a story with beginning, middle, and end.
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Yes. Yes. There are stages, phases, call it what you will. This guy called Van Genep,
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who wrote a book on rites of passage, started off a whole process of study. And he would say that there
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were three stages to a rite of passage, a separation, an ordeal, and a return. Now, in our secular world,
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words like ordeal can become a little bit over-larded and overloaded, if you know what I
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mean. So in my work, I tend to think of separation, transformation, and return. Ceremonially, we can do
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all sorts of things. But a decent ritual needs those three distinct phases, stages. You can do it going
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up in an elevator. It's not about time. You can do it going up, as I said, in an elevator, if you want.
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But as long as you go somewhere different in the landscape of your mind, you have separated. You've
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made a change. Then something transformational can happen, and you need to return. That's very often
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the bit in rituals that we forget, actually, is the return. We need to ground ourselves. We need to come
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back to the here and now. I think of it as ritual hygiene. We need to take care around that, because
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otherwise, we can kind of get lost in that lovely ritual space, that liminal space that we talk about,
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Well, you gave a good example of this that I've experienced personally. A concert is a ritual,
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in a way. There's a space where you set aside to play music, and you listen. But then you have this
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transformative experience, possibly, but then it just ends. That's the feeling you're talking about,
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like, not returning. You just, like, end it, and then you just, like, walk out, and you feel kind
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of like, whoa, what just happened? Absolutely. And that's why so many people find it so hard to
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leave a good concert, because they're plugged in. And no one said, oh, by the way, guys, it's over now.
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Thank you very much. So long, and thanks for all the fish. They've not had the closure that they need
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to be able to get back into the world, because the concert is very often a magical experience.
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It's an experience of the other, whatever we care to call it.
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But at that point, we are fully committed to that, and that's quite difficult. So we need something
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that clearly says, thank you very much indeed, which is why in theater, you used to have the
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lights coming up, or a curtain being drawn. It's a closure. It's, thank you very much. We're done now.
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So I want to point out, too, that this story, or these phases of ritual you pointed out,
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this is also something that Joseph Campbell talks about in his book.
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Right, Hero of a Thousand Faces, The Hero's Journey.
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Yes. And the hero's journey is, in itself, a classic rite of passage. It is a journey of descent.
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So it's Dionysian. You go into an underworld. You meet guides and strangers, and you fight battles,
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and you discover a treasure, and you then, you are changed by the experience, and then you come back
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over the threshold, and you bring your treasure back to the world. That's a pretty simplistic view
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of it, but that's a very similar journey. And Joseph Campbell, in his wisdom, saw this recurring
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again and again and again in mythologies around the world. I would say that it also happens in
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Well, I mean, it does sound like a ritual is, essentially, you are acting out this archetypical
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I think these were the mysteries of old. You know, we talk of the Eleusinian mysteries. We
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talk of ancient mystery rites. I think these rituals, these often, I imagine them to be initiatory
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rituals, I think they followed a prescribed route. And certainly, the rituals I know in the
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indigenous world tend to follow a route map and a pattern. And they are all about dissent
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and ordeal, and some of them are true ordeals, and to return and to come back and then to re-enter
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society. In certain rituals in Africa, when you have been through an initiatory ritual, you return
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to society with a different name. You are that different.
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So let's talk about another component of rituals is the communal aspect of it. Do you need a
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community to have a ritual? Or can you do it by yourself? Or is it like the community part,
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I think communities, I think we're ritual-making animals, aren't we? I mean, there are good reported
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stories of chimpanzees creating communal rituals. This is not a thing confined to humankind. But we are in
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community ritualistic. I think that community makes for better rituals in many aspects. I think it makes
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for deeper, more powerful rituals. Certainly, the notion of the village as a basis for a ritual is very
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powerful. And the gathering together, and sometimes these communities can be instant communities. I mean,
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a men's gathering is an instant community of men from all over the world. But it forms a community of
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like mind and interest. And at that point, the rituals deepen. And of course, this is the important
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thing in this work of dissent, is that you can create depth through creating trust, through creating
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levels of understanding. And that's what gives rituals added power. You can certainly do a ritual on your
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own, and it can be transformational. But if you're starting out to do ritual, if you're wanting to explore
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the notion of ritual, I don't think you can really do any better than finding yourself a ritual men's
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group and sitting in a circle with men and working out what works and what doesn't work in ritual space.
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Well, let's talk about this men's work that you've been talking about. In the book, that's how you got
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your start. You joined a men's group and you started taking part in ritual. And you talk a bit about
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Robert Bly. Now, some of our listeners might remember Robert Bly. They're old enough to remember he
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wrote Iron John. And he really kind of kickstarted this mythopoetic men's movement in the 80s and 90s.
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But that's, he's kind of, you know, I think a lot of younger listeners might not know about him and the
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cultural impact he had. So talk a little bit like what Robert Bly was trying to do with Iron John and the
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Yes. Well, he was a poet, a very fine poet and a brilliant translator. If you ever see any of his books
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lying around in secondhand bins and bookshops and bookshelves, give them a try. They are really
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good, solid pieces of work. And his translations are extraordinary. But, oh, we're now talking over
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30 years ago, 35 years ago, he started traveling around America and around the world eventually,
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giving poetry readings and opening up discussions. He's one of those guys who just likes to talk to
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people. He likes to hear. He really likes the feedback that he gets. And what he was beginning
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to perceive was that men, young men in America, were very often naive, as he would put them.
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They were, they liked to be liked. They were kind of soft and kind of up in their heads and willing
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to please and a little bit afraid of their own fierceness and their own energy. And he began to
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look at that. And he began to think in terms of grounding these young men. And basically what he
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was seeing, and if we return to Nietzsche, he was seeing the Apollonian in young men in, in the
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generations below him. And he wanted to bring back the Dionysian aspect to help them to get through to a
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more mature and aligned. And well, that's without putting words in his mouth, I'd say a more powerful,
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mature masculinity. And he did that for some years. He, he wrote Iron John, which he, in which he used
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story. And later in the workshops he did, he used poetry to address the issues that were coming up.
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Fearceness, fierceness, wildness, the issues that we have around our fathers, the issues we have around
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war, the issue, the deeper issues in men's lives. And he would use a poem to almost surgically to drop
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into a subject, open it up. And at that point, men could begin to experience their, their anger,
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their grief, their, their deeper feelings. And that's what he was really good at. He was very
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brave. He was very imaginative. And he, he brought a lot of teachers out with him and signed up with
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a lot of guys and, and traveled the world and did some remarkable work in his time. He also began to
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hook up with indigenous teachers, with guys from West Africa and Guatemala, men from indigenous
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cultures who brought a tribal sensibility with them. And that's when I kind of really perked up
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and I began to see the huge possibilities of ritual in that. But he was a great lover of ritual.
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And you can still see his influence today amongst men's groups.
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Oh, huge. Yeah. Yeah. Like the whole idea, like a lot of men's groups, they focus on the archetypical
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like ideas of masculinity, like, well, Draw Ruly was doing that 35 years ago.
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Absolutely. And, and also we must remember that he teamed up with people like James Hillman.
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You know, we're talking about great thinkers here. These are not, they're not weekend workshop guys in
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that sense. These are, these are people who are deep thinkers who have really made the journey and
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returned with their own gold, which they were sharing with us as men. So Michael Mead, James
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Hillman, Robert Moore, Maladoma Somme, Martin Prechtel, John Lee, these guys, they were really
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giving a gift and they transformed the lives of many men.
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And you can still see it today. I think it's interesting. This, uh, Jordan Peterson phenomenon
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that's going on right now, you know, say what you want about, but like he's tapping into that same
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thing that Robert Bly tapped into 35 years ago. I think he is. And whether you go for it or whether
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you don't, he's, he's beginning it, you know, he's begun, re-begun the debate. He's kind of got
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people interested. Suddenly words like stoicism and rigor are back in, back on the agenda in a way
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that they haven't been for a while. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. So let's talk about the, the role of ritual in a man's life. So Robert
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Bly, he saw that men were lacking of fierceness. They felt maybe lost. They were naive. How do you,
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do you think it's because of a lack of ritual, like a rite of passage that men, particularly men in the
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West, like lack? I think so. I think we've lost our, we've lost our natural, and I'm using the word
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tribal here, but, but we've lost our natural tribal rituals of initiation for young men. We, we tend
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not to go down that path anymore. And because of that, we, as young men, we self-initiate. We kind of
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fall in love with death in a little bit of a way. We, we go stealing motorcars and we do extreme sports
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and we get ourselves into fights and so on and so forth as a way of, of experiencing our manhood.
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Now, the reality is you can't, no one can give you your manhood. You have to take it. But at the same
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time, that needs to be done in a safe space where you can be tested, where you can be met by other
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men, where you can learn about other men as you're going through a deep initiatory process. So that's a,
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that's what we don't have anymore. And I think that's a, that's a real loss in our culture.
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Yeah. I would say we've, I've heard people say, right, that we've replaced rites of passage in
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a man's life with rites of achievement, right? It's like you get the job, you get the girl,
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you get the money, but I mean, but it's like not fulfilling, right? Like it's, there's no beginning
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to it. There's no end. You're not grounded. So you're always left like wanting more.
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You know, when we think of achievement, once again, we think of rising up, don't we? We think of getting
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up there, getting to the top of the greasy pole, climbing to the top of the pyramid. That is what
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we think of when we think of achievement. It's very competitive. What we, what we tend to lose
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sight of in that is that we, we're going up into our head at the same time. We're not connecting
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with our body. And what Bly was giving us, what those sort of people would say was that there was
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an understanding that these were messages to be embodied. I once, I have a memory of introducing
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Robert Bly once in a, in an event in England, Southern England. And I said to him, well, what
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do you want me to say about you? And he said, uh, just describe me as some kind of animal. I said,
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okay. So I stood up and I said, well, this is Robert Bly and he's a bit like a bear. At which point
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this voice behind me said, what do you mean a bear? And it was in his body. You know, that was it.
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He embodied his thinking, his ideas. He was fully present in his life. He was totally authentic.
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That's what he was giving us. He was giving us access to that in ourselves. And many of us,
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by going up into our heads, by becoming heady and intellectual, we are avoiding our bodies,
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but we're also avoiding our feelings. Let's say there's a man who's listening to this and they,
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they wanted, they, they, they missed out on a rite of passage and like, say they're in their
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thirties and forties. Is it too late for them to experience a rite of passage or is that something
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they could do today? Not at all. Not in the least. Um, I think I did my first true rite of passage would
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have been, I'd have been, Oh, I'd have been getting on for 40, if not over 40. It's not about, it's,
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it's not about your physical age. It's about your psychic readiness. It's about your willingness
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to undergo a transformational experience. Now, many men who go through such a rite of passage can go
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through a rite of passage at the age of 20 and they don't actually do it because they're in their head or
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they don't want to engage with it. That's fine. But usually by the age of 40, many men now have
00:25:24.660
had their, their life experiences has given them enough pain and enough grief and enough doubt
00:25:32.620
about themselves as men to really need to make some kind of a change. And that's the, those are the
00:25:42.200
kind of men that we used to meet. So, so it's not about age. It's about, has, has life knocked you
00:25:48.200
about a bit? And are you ready? That's the way it used to work. And I think that that age has actually
00:25:54.980
come down with issues around pornography and globalization and work and, uh, and, and things
00:26:05.160
like the Me Too movement and things like climate change. We are under pressure in a different sort of a
00:26:11.920
way. And to balance all that with the need to provide, cause that hasn't gone away. So the age
00:26:19.580
old need to provide, provide, and also to balance that with the need to be the new sensitive man that
00:26:27.720
we hear about. That's a stretch. And at that point, men are under enough pressure to want to gather with
00:26:35.000
other men and have a good look-see. And the best way to do that is through a ritual.
00:26:40.540
And what does that ritual look like? I mean, I imagine it's going to be different for depending on the
00:26:44.440
group you're a part of or your cultural background, but like in general, what is that going to look
00:26:49.460
like? Uh, very often it's about meeting. Oh, I don't know, up to, up to a hundred, 200, 300 strangers.
00:26:57.200
So, so immediately you have that male question of, uh, oh, is this going to come off? You know,
00:27:06.640
have I done the right thing coming here? So then you spend some time getting to know other men,
00:27:15.440
small groups, hanging out with men over dinner, whatever that might be. And you begin to build a
00:27:20.640
level of trust. You then get to the feelings, uh, sometimes around anger and irritations that
00:27:28.160
need to be expressed before you can all go into a ritual space. And that's the bit that brings out
00:27:35.680
the creativity that brings out the, the need to really, really undergo something. Men see that
00:27:44.300
they're building something together, this process, and that they go through it. Usually with someone
00:27:50.460
who's got enough wisdom, I suppose, to, to say, well, we, there are other men have gone down this
00:27:56.540
path before. It is okay. You're going to get a stretch, but it is okay. And I imagine for a lot
00:28:02.320
of these young guys or men, the same problem that Bly saw 35 years ago, this naivety, this lack of
00:28:09.320
fierceness, like probably a lot of that transformative work they're doing is like getting in touch with that
00:28:14.960
sort of fierceness within them. Yes. And, and also it's not just the fierceness, Brett. Sometimes it's
00:28:22.600
the empathy and the compassion. Sometimes it, what can be stunning for a man is to stand in a circle of
00:28:30.440
men feeling vulnerable, feeling exposed, feeling open, and to experience the tenderness of men.
00:28:38.560
That's not often talked about. And that was a salutary lesson for me. But I went into the hole,
00:28:48.080
I went into my grief, I went into my deepest pain. And there were men, strangers who supported me and
00:28:55.400
helped me through that. That was astonishing. I didn't expect that. I didn't think I had the right
00:29:01.620
to expect that. My past had set me up not to receive. Does that make sense?
00:29:06.360
Yeah, that makes sense. And to receive that kind of tenderness, that kind of care and nurture,
00:29:12.080
something I'd always put into the feminine pigeonhole, something I'd always denied in myself
00:29:19.300
and denied in other men, to actually receive that kind of empathy, that kind of tenderness,
00:29:24.720
the kind of stuff that you see on a battlefield after the battle, the kind of stuff that you see
00:29:29.940
when boxers put their arms around each other after a fight, that kind of intimacy,
00:29:35.660
that kind of understanding of each other. That's often the case. So there is the fierceness,
00:29:41.400
there is the search for a kind of a deeper masculinity. But there's also the search and
00:29:48.340
the discovery that it's layered. There are more things than just that kind of aggression.
00:29:56.280
There's assertion. There's assertion. But it's something else too.
00:29:59.440
Right. And imagine that one of the goals of the ritual is to integrate all those different parts.
00:30:04.680
Absolutely. And to come away feeling a sense of belonging and wholeness and connection. At its
00:30:12.320
best, that's what a ritual gives you. You actually feel, in a sense, bigger. I like to think it's a bit
00:30:22.260
like you're a snake sloughing off a skin. Well, if you don't slough off the skin, you can't grow.
00:30:28.660
Like a lobster, if you don't lose the shell, you can't grow. And that's a bit what it feels like.
00:30:34.460
You feel a little bit, a little bit raw, a little bit edgy, but you know you are growing. You know
00:30:41.960
that something immense has happened. And at its best, that's what happens in those kind of rituals.
00:30:47.180
And where can men go to find groups that do things like this?
00:30:52.620
Oh, I think they're around. I mean, you can see them in most cities, rural areas. You can put out
00:31:00.620
feelers and just say, you know, I'm really interested in joining a men's group. And of course,
00:31:06.160
if there isn't one, you can form one. That's what happened with me. I was at a workshop,
00:31:12.300
a seminar with a guy called John Lee, who'd come over to England. And he did the classic thing.
00:31:17.900
He said, there's a guy down here at the front of the room wants to start up a men's group. I would
00:31:22.920
suggest that any man in the room who is not in a men's group should come down here and join this man.
00:31:28.440
So I went down there and there were six or seven guys down there and we formed a men's group. And
00:31:32.400
it was absolutely fantastic. It was a gift, a huge gift to me. And at some point, we looked at each
00:31:37.940
other and said, who was the man down the front of the room? And John had just done a nice thing.
00:31:42.900
I think he just said, well, here's the guy. And we all came down and we were all that man.
00:31:46.480
There was no one man saying, I want a men's group. So my sense is that we can all get together with
00:31:52.100
other men. You can put an advert online. You can email your friends, email people in the expectation
00:32:00.100
that a high proportion of them will say no, or they'll be too busy, or this is woo-woo, or this is
00:32:04.980
rubbish. However, there will be men who are in the same space and say, yeah, I want to do that now.
00:32:11.280
And then there's a lot of stuff to read. There's a lot of stuff to work with. And there are workshops
00:32:16.000
and all sorts of things. There are people out there still.
00:32:18.800
Well, as I was reading this book, particularly the section on rites of passage, you know, I have a son,
00:32:23.980
he's eight. He's kind of getting that, he's getting pretty close to adolescence. And I've been
00:32:27.760
thinking about, well, is there something I can do to add a rite of passage, create one for him?
00:32:33.240
You know, cause we have some in our own faith, but I want something like, it's like, it's a family
00:32:36.560
one. What can fathers do? Like, what would a rite of passage look like for their son? Like what age
00:32:43.080
should they do it? What are some of the, at least, and it doesn't have to be, I think a lot of guys
00:32:47.060
are going to listen to this, they're going to follow this exactly to the T, but like, I think more I'm
00:32:50.140
looking for just sort of general ideas of what a rite of passage for a young boy really would look
00:32:56.480
like. Yeah. Well, I think it has to be triggered by the boy by that. I mean, there's a point at which
00:33:03.760
a boy starts paying attention and he's clearly engaging sexually at some level. He's looking
00:33:10.240
at girls or whatever he's doing. And he's, you know, he's out there, he's looking around. And at
00:33:14.940
that point in traditional cultures, regardless of orientation and sexuality, the, the, the boy
00:33:22.480
would be oiked out of the family home and taken off to the initiation hut. And I think that that's
00:33:28.700
something that fathers can do for their boys. However, and I'm going to maybe be a bit heretical
00:33:33.740
here. I don't think fathers should ever initiate their boys. I don't think they should initiate their
00:33:39.820
sons. Now they might be present when he returns for the last part of the ritual, but they shouldn't
00:33:46.460
be there initiating him because it's about a separation. Remember? And I said, we need to separate.
00:33:52.480
And at that point, it's about developing the trust with the men, creating the group of men whom you
00:33:59.920
can all trust to initiate each other's boys. There's some great work been done through people
00:34:07.020
like Michael Mead and over in this country, people, things like Band of Brothers and those sort of
00:34:12.300
outfits where, where they've worked with troubled youth. And that's the kind of stuff where you can
00:34:18.300
really work with youth to give them the challenges they need. And if a boy is looking over his
00:34:26.500
shoulder at his dad the whole time, how's dad reacting? How's dad taking this? Maybe he doesn't
00:34:33.380
say what he needs to say because dad's in the room. That's why I think dad needs to step out momentarily
00:34:39.820
to give the boy his chance and then to meet him when he comes back in and says,
00:34:48.020
I can see there's something different now and then give a blessing. Is that making sense?
00:34:53.420
Yeah, that makes sense. So let's say you have that group of men that you trust and willing to do a
00:34:59.120
rite of passage. What would that rite of passage look like? Was it just like go out to nature? Is it
00:35:03.980
like, I mean, what is that? I think you gather, you need to gather more than once. You need the boys
00:35:10.780
to see the men and to size them up and also to size each other up incidentally. But you need to,
00:35:18.540
the boys need to hear the men kind of modeling manhood. They need to see what it's like to be a
00:35:26.220
man and they need to hear what it's like to be a man, to be brought to your knees or punched on the
00:35:32.500
nose or betrayed or lost or all the things that we achieve as men, not to have that infected upon
00:35:39.840
them. And I've heard of groups in America where they shame their boys ritually so that they know
00:35:48.240
just how bad it can be out there. Well, if anyone does that in a room to boys, they've got the wrong
00:35:53.860
idea. That's not what kids need. They need something that is going to help them to stand up
00:36:00.180
and basically shaming them doesn't do it. So you need to, so you need to have the sense of a
00:36:06.380
community that the boys are a part of a community. And then you can possibly go away and set up this
00:36:12.920
separation that I'm talking about. You set up a special event and that's when you begin to really
00:36:19.040
bring your creativity to bear. You study rites of passage. You know, you study people like Michael
00:36:24.520
Mead or those kinds of folks and you, you, you, you see what they're, you see what they're, what
00:36:29.240
they're offering and you see the kind of things that can be done for boys and you, you give them a
00:36:35.540
challenge. You give them a journey if you like. It's almost like recreating, uh, uh, Joseph Campbell's
00:36:41.140
descent into the underworld. You give them tasks, you give them challenges, you give them those kinds of
00:36:46.880
things. And remember they're young, so they're not necessarily going to be doing much of the
00:36:51.580
expressive work. They're going to be so full of testosterone that they're not really going to be
00:36:55.960
able to, to weep in the way that a 45 year old man would weep in an initiatory process. But he is, uh,
00:37:03.180
any youth is going to be able to respond in the moment to any kind of a challenge like that. And when
00:37:10.740
they rise to it, they need to be seen to rise to it and they need to be given either a skill or a means
00:37:18.960
to get through the world or a route map, a sense of what the world is. Now the group of men can show
00:37:25.260
what the world is like. They can give the boy a route map. And, but once he begins to express
00:37:32.360
himself and he shows that he has this, some skill, some gift, maybe he sings a song, maybe he's a bit
00:37:39.200
of a tear away and he's got some other skill that needs to be named and blessed and brought out into the
00:37:46.340
open. And that's the bit that he takes home. That's the, that's the thing that is seen by the
00:37:53.220
group. And that is the thing that is blessed. Is that making sense?
00:37:56.480
That does make sense. And another, I think, point that I liked that you made in the book,
00:38:01.500
we talked about this earlier, is that even though you might've gone through a rite of passage from,
00:38:05.160
from boyhood to manhood, that doesn't have to be the only rite of passage you go through.
00:38:09.640
There are other parts of your life, transitory periods where another rite of passage would be
00:38:14.600
useful. Like say you're moving from middle age to elderhood, right? That, that might call for a
00:38:20.540
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there, there, there are innumerable rites of passage. I mean, there's,
00:38:26.460
oh, what we, there's a new job, a new location. There's a moving from one, one level of status to
00:38:33.640
another, if you like, in our culture. And there's also this, this, the, the move from being single to
00:38:40.220
marriage to, to moving into fatherhood, to, uh, moving into old age. I've, um, been undergoing,
00:38:46.540
I underwent a, uh, a ritual which was given to me, uh, in the far North of Sweden, up by the Arctic
00:38:52.760
circle, uh, uh, by some Sami people who basically rebirthed me into old age. Nice. I didn't realize it
00:39:03.720
had happened until I got home really, but it was a very powerful ritual. And it, it has set me up for
00:39:09.720
my latter years. I'm 66 and it kicked off a whole series of explorations. And it feels like I've
00:39:18.200
been undergoing that kind of an initiation over the last two, three years now.
00:39:22.940
We've talked about some like transformative, uh, ritual, like particularly the rite of passage,
00:39:26.920
uh, cause I think a lot of men are keyed in on that, but you talk about in the book,
00:39:30.080
there are rites of passage or not even right. There are rituals that you can do on a daily basis.
00:39:35.420
They're small, but like, first off, like what are those types of rituals? And like,
00:39:40.440
what do you think the benefit of doing something like that is?
00:39:43.020
Well, there are, there are, there are rituals that can appear really crazy. I mean, we can
00:39:46.460
ritualize anything, you know, that's a, uh, we can, you know, by doing it more than once
00:39:51.920
in a sense, we are ritualizing it. I used to have a, uh, as a writer, I used to have a ritual
00:39:57.840
of every day sharpening every pencil and putting it back in the pot, which is really interesting
00:40:04.540
because I'd already started writing on a laptop, but that was my ritual. And what it did was
00:40:09.160
it, it concentrated my mind. It got me to pay attention and to focus. So those are, those
00:40:14.640
are little rituals we can give ourselves. For me, it doesn't have to be a big event, but,
00:40:19.840
uh, by repeating little things, by paying attention, by seeing things, by opening up. In my case,
00:40:26.940
I, um, I use blot, which is a little gift, a little sacrifice. That's a Scandinavian word,
00:40:33.920
blot, that means, originally means blood, sacrifice. And, but that's a little gift. I carry
00:40:40.160
little gifties around with me, little beads or stones that I can just give in gratitude
00:40:45.560
for my day. I can give in gratitude for the place where I'm going. What it does is it brings
00:40:52.320
my attention down to those things around me and it gets me out of my head. It gets me connected.
00:40:59.540
And I think those are very important. We don't all meditate. I'm not a great meditator,
00:41:03.340
for instance. I like doing Tai Chi and I like Ji Gong and I like those kinds of things,
00:41:07.500
things that involve some kind of activity, but I'm not so good at sitting on my butt and meditating.
00:41:14.940
So these things give me a way of entering into the world in a slightly different way.
00:41:20.900
And of course, in doing that, I get, I move from my intense focus. And I think we all have that
00:41:27.400
these days, kind of like a concentration on doing things, doing them right, doing the next thing.
00:41:33.720
And I moved to a softer focus where the, where things can come in from the edge of my vision,
00:41:41.240
new ideas, new thoughts, in my case, a new poem. Something comes in those moments.
00:41:48.240
And that's what a little momentary ritual on a daily basis can give.
00:41:54.300
The blood, that was new to me. So as you say, when you say sacrifice, you give the little gifts
00:41:58.980
that you like, sometimes you just bury it in the ground. Like that's what you do, right?
00:42:04.980
Thank you. Thank you for this. Sometimes I will do it in honor of whatever it is I think that has
00:42:12.100
happened in this place. So I will leave a little pebble or a stone in a forest.
00:42:17.520
Very often just press it. And then when I walk away from it, it's none of my business,
00:42:22.240
but I will leave it there honoring what has happened there. Now I live in a country that is
00:42:32.400
layered upon layered upon layered with thousands of years of history. I'm lucky. I live in Wales,
00:42:38.680
just on the border with England. And there I have enough history, but every now and again,
00:42:44.080
I'll go for a walk and I'll get a sense of something and I'll make a little gift in honor
00:42:49.900
of those men and women who live their lives, who've worked the land, who've hunted here,
00:42:58.420
who have fought and died here, who have whatever that might be. But I will, in an imaginal way,
00:43:05.560
I will honor them. It's almost like an ancestral thing. Is that making sense?
00:43:10.500
And at that point, I am connecting with a greater whole. Now, I also choose to honor nature.
00:43:18.100
My view of a creator, of a God, is not of a creator. It's of creation. So I like to be a part
00:43:25.460
of that. And my way of connecting with that is by giving a gift, by making the connection. In exactly
00:43:32.500
the same way as in a church, you put some money in the plate. It's no different, really. But it does
00:43:38.040
open up a more direct and it gives me an opportunity to speak. I think there's something
00:43:43.820
very important in speaking out loud. I don't have any embarrassment now about speaking out loud when
00:43:50.040
I do a private ritual. Speaking that brings you present, your persona, your sound is very important.
00:43:57.680
Well, I think for a lot of people who are listening to this, I think they're probably intrigued by
00:44:01.480
rituals. But at the same time, they're afraid to pull the trigger on it because it feels weird
00:44:08.060
or it's woo-woo. So what do you say to those guys? Make the case, make the hard sell for giving
00:44:17.140
rituals a try. How's it going to improve their life or maybe change their life? Let's do the hard sell.
00:44:27.680
That's not very ritual-like. It's interesting when you talk about the fear, the fear of the
00:44:34.900
woo-woo and the weird and the strange and all that stuff. I think that's part of it. I think that's
00:44:40.860
part of what we're talking about in this drift towards the rational and the logical. What it
00:44:47.120
means is if we are afraid of that weirdness, then we tend to cover it up with something else. We tend to
00:44:55.100
shame it or put it down or say, oh, well, it's just a load of rubbish. But in actual fact,
00:44:59.640
it's good to go with the fear. Poet William Stafford used to talk about, there's a fear out
00:45:04.540
there. That's your life. Go with it. Explore it. Now, that's an interesting notion. And of course,
00:45:11.180
that's what you can do in rituals because you kind of unzip a little bit when you get into a ritual
00:45:15.820
space. That's a very, very important thing. It helps you to enter into the deeper feelings that
00:45:24.120
very often we don't go to. I call it gas work, which is grief, anger, and shame. These three in
00:45:32.560
men, they seem to be inextricably linked much of the time. So we feel very angry, but we wrap it in shame
00:45:38.320
or we feel very sad, but we wrap that in anger so that we don't have to feel sad. We don't have to
00:45:46.060
feel the grief. In a ritual space, you do feel those things with other men. And that's a very potent mix
00:45:53.160
and it cleans house for you. It really does clean house. If you're in any way addicted, if you've got
00:45:59.200
a difficulty, most of us at some point or another start ritualizing our entry into addictions,
00:46:06.560
be that drink, drugs, sex, food, whatever it is, we have a ritual way of doing it. Well,
00:46:13.320
there's a ritual way of coming out of it. We can give ourselves rituals to come out of the
00:46:19.380
underworld of that addiction, of that behavior, whatever it is. So these are really powerful
00:46:25.320
tools that we have at our disposal. And if we share them with other men, if we have other men to
00:46:29.940
witness us, to see us in our, let's call it our unzipped state, you can really do some good.
00:46:38.700
You're also preparing for the future to mark the difference between the past and all its shadow,
00:46:45.420
all its difficulty, all its unhappiness, and a clearer, healthier future. That's when you come
00:46:51.120
out. That's when you can receive the blessing. That's when you can really get the benefit of that
00:46:55.560
ritual. So it can actually do an awful lot of good for you.
00:46:58.760
Well, the way you describe it, I mean, it sounds kind of like therapy, but without
00:47:02.360
going to like the doctor, right? Because I mean, a therapy, like, even if you go to like a
00:47:06.760
traditional, like traditional therapy, it's sort of a ritual. There's a space you go into.
00:47:12.760
There's this person who's guiding you through, you know, things in your life.
00:47:16.800
Yeah. It's, it's, it's therapy without the talk very often. It's therapy by doing. It's a ritual
00:47:24.140
action in a therapeutic space. Now, the reality is there were ritual for millennia before there
00:47:34.380
were ever therapists. You know, if we've had, what is it, James Hillman, you should say we've
00:47:38.220
had, we've had, uh, uh, we've had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world's getting
00:47:42.100
worse, but that was a way of actually having a good look at what, what therapy and the therapoise,
00:47:46.940
the, the, the, the journey into therapy gave ritual does that, but it does it without the
00:47:53.480
intellectual stimulus that can take months and years to get to the point. I mean, many
00:47:58.920
of us, we go into, we go into therapy on day one, we have a good cry and then we kind of
00:48:03.160
hide ourselves for months. Well, in a ritual, you tend not to hide. You can, you can finesse
00:48:10.100
it, but you know, you're only cheating yourself.
00:48:12.440
Right. Like therapy sounds like it's Apollonian, right? It's a very high level.
00:48:16.600
It can be, it certainly can be. I mean, there are, no, there are some great body therapies
00:48:22.540
out there. There are some great body related therapies that, that touch the, that touch the
00:48:28.040
soul, that really touch the soul through the senses, through the body, through a kind of
00:48:33.020
like a reflective space, things like Pesso Boyden system, psychomotor, those kinds of things,
00:48:37.620
really solid body therapies. Those I think are fantastic. And of course we mix and match these
00:48:45.640
days, don't we? We do a bit of this. We do a bit of alternative stuff. We do a bit of therapy. We do
00:48:50.440
a, maybe go join a 12 step fellowship or a piece of recovery work or all these things. They can
00:48:55.900
support each other, like the different legs of a stool so that we don't fall over.
00:48:59.960
Well, William, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
00:49:05.020
I've enjoyed it immensely. I have to say, well, I've got a sad little website,
00:49:08.260
which is williamayotte.com. And there, if you want to go and have a look there, you can express,
00:49:15.320
there's a place where you can sign up and express an interest in the kind of work that I'm doing.
00:49:20.240
So we're currently thinking about another second ongoing group training people here in the UK,
00:49:27.200
but also I'm thinking about setting up an online training seminars around the ideas of ritual.
00:49:35.060
So if you want to go and sign up there, I think it asks you where you might be coming from, or by that,
00:49:41.020
I mean, which country you're living in, then we can kind of get back to you and ask a little bit
00:49:46.140
more about that. There is the book, of course, which is Re-enchanting the Forest, Meaningful Ritual
00:49:52.100
in a Secular World, and that's available on Amazon and other outlets. And let's just not make it all
00:49:59.320
about me. You can get in touch with other men. There's a lot of stuff out there. And I think that
00:50:04.760
once we feel the call, and it is a call, it might be through my work, but it might just be that the
00:50:13.020
idea of ritual brings you in contact with other men. That's really worth it. On my website, I've also
00:50:19.100
got a questionnaire for men, which I'm setting up, which will be giving me the material and the
00:50:25.460
information to check out many things. I'm writing a new book for and about men in the wake of
00:50:32.640
globalization and climate change and feminism and the internet, how that has changed our lives.
00:50:41.140
So I want to hear from men. So anyone who wants to sign up to that questionnaire would be very
00:50:47.560
Fantastic. Well, William, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:50:50.040
Great. It's been really good. Thank you very much, Brett.
00:50:52.480
My guest today was William Ayotte. He's the author of the book, Re-Enchanting the Forest.
00:50:56.320
It's available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website,
00:50:59.900
williamayotte.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash ritual. We can find links to
00:51:05.480
resources. We can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM
00:51:16.780
podcast. Check out our website, artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archive. There's
00:51:21.020
over 500 episodes there. We've also written thousands of articles over the years on things
00:51:24.860
like rituals and the power of rituals and how to incorporate rituals in your life. But also we
00:51:28.260
have things on personal finance, how to be a better husband, better father, physical fitness, you name
00:51:32.140
it, we've got it. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it. If you take one minute to give
00:51:35.840
us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, it helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you.
00:51:39.860
Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out
00:51:43.220
of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you not only
00:51:47.400
listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.