Question 1

What is ceremony in the novel, and how does it work?

Accepted Answer

In the Laguna Pueblo tradition that the novel draws on, ceremony is the name for the ritual practices — prayers, stories, sand paintings, dances, the recitation of sacred texts — through which the community maintains its relationship with the land, the rain, the sun, the animals, and the other forces on which human life depends. In Ceremony, Tayo's sickness — his inability to function, his guilt over his cousin Rocky's death, his drinking and his alienation — is diagnosed by the medicine man Ku'oosh and later by Betonie as a form of 'witchery,' a spiritual sickness that has been set in motion by forces larger than Tayo himself: the atomic bomb (tested near Laguna on the Jornada del Muerto), the Second World War, and the long history of colonialism that has disrupted the relationship between the Laguna people and the land. The ceremony that Betonie prescribes for Tayo is not a traditional ceremony but a new one, adapted to the new conditions: Betonie is himself a hybrid figure (part Laguna, part Mexican), and his ceremony is an improvisation from tradition rather than a repetition of it. The novel's argument is that ceremony must change to remain effective: 'The people must always have new ceremonies to reflect the times.'

Question 2

What is the role of Ts'eh in Ceremony?

Accepted Answer

Ts'eh — the woman Tayo meets on Mount Taylor who becomes his lover and his guide — is one of the most debated figures in the novel. She is simultaneously a realistic character (a woman living in a remote location who helps Tayo during his ceremony) and a mythological one: she is associated with Ts'its'tsi'nako (Thought Woman, the Laguna creation deity) and with the Yellow Woman of Laguna oral tradition, who appears in many stories as a figure who crosses between the human and supernatural worlds. Silko has been explicit that she intended Ts'eh to be understood on both levels simultaneously: she is a real woman and she is a manifestation of the supernatural forces that Tayo's ceremony is realigning him with. The novel's interleaving of traditional Laguna stories — printed in verse throughout the novel alongside the prose narrative — establishes the mythological framework within which Ts'eh operates; readers who trace the parallels between the traditional stories and the events of Tayo's narrative will recognize her as a figure from the tradition. Her relationship with Tayo is both an erotic connection and a ritual one: through her, Tayo is restored to his relationship with the land and the sacred.

Question 3

How does Ceremony address the trauma of Native veterans?

Accepted Answer

Ceremony is one of the first major American literary works to address the specific situation of Native American veterans — men who served in the US military in wars fought ostensibly for the democratic values of the country that had conquered and colonized their nations — and the particular form of psychological damage that this situation produces. Tayo's trauma is not simply the result of what he witnessed in the Pacific (though that is real and severe); it is intensified by the contradiction at the heart of his service: he was fighting for a country whose relationship to his own people has been one of conquest and attempted extermination. The traditional healing that the novel proposes is not a substitute for what Western psychiatry might offer but a different diagnosis of the problem: Tayo is sick not just because of what he saw but because the witchery that produced the war (the novel explicitly connects the atomic bomb to the witchery that the traditional stories describe) has infected the world in which he lives, and healing requires not just individual psychological recovery but a restoration of the relationship between the individual and the world.

Ceremony Reading Order

Complete Ceremony Book List

Ceremony

Almanac of the Dead

Storyteller

Ceremony — Frequently Asked Questions

What is ceremony in the novel, and how does it work?

What is the role of Ts'eh in Ceremony?

How does Ceremony address the trauma of Native veterans?

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