The Ontology of Ofrenda

Ritual offerings represent portals that bridge the material with the metaphysical, breaching linear ideas of space-time by creating a dialogue with manifold unseen, more-than-human sentiences. The practice of making ritual offerings is a way to mediate our relationship with the more-than-human.

Día de Muertos is a tradition celebrated throughout Mexico, typically from October 31 to November 2, that involves gathering to pay respects and honor beloved friends, family, and even more-than-human kin, who have passed away. A tradition that survived the Spanish imposition of Catholicism and colonial conquest of Mexico, it is thought that the Day of the Dead might date as far back as the Aztecs.

The tradition is deeply intertwined with the cultural practice of ofrenda, consisting of building altars made of offerings to honor the departed relatives and loved ones. Such altars or ofrendas invoke the deceased persons’ presence by displaying photos of them, alongside the images of various saints, and figures of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Strewn with candles, calaveras (candied skulls), and cempasúchil (marigolds) whose smell helps guide the dead to the ofrenda, such altars are built in homes, cemeteries, and outside of churches.

Food such as a sweet bread known as pan de muerto, fruit, and precious little alfeñiques (sugar art) that depict miniature plates of the dead’s favourite meals as well as cigarettes and alcohol for those who enjoyed it, are placed to create a welcoming atmosphere to invite the dead home and to replenish them after their long journey. Such components come together to represent the four elements, including candles (fire), papel picado (air), food (earth), and glasses of water.

Western, industrialised cultures are largely dominated by reductive materialist ontologies. For those who may feel overwhelmed by philosophy, reductive materialism is encapsulated by the idea that things can only be explained in terms of material phenomena (e.g. atoms, molecules, synapses, etc.). It is the view that the material world (matter) is the only truly real thing, and that all happenings and processes can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components.

This tradition, and the larger cultural practice of ofrenda, represent a rupture in the materialist reductionist paradigm that dominates Western culture, inviting a porousness that cracks open the divide between physical reality and invisible, immaterial worlds. To make an offering to the dead in this way is to create a portal that bridges the material with the metaphysical. It is an act that serves to breach linear, colonial ideas of space-time through using our human agency to create a dialogue with the manifold unseen, more-than-human sentiences that too govern this world.

Offerings have long been an integral part of spiritual life across cultures and time, spanning from the Hindu puja ceremony to Andea ch’alla thanksgiving rites to Balinese tradition of canang sari, with the oldest known ritual offering dating back 70,000 years. An offering is something that you give to someone, the term often used synonymously with the word “gift”.

Cross-culturally, offerings take many forms and may consist of tobacco, flowers, incense, rice, tea, ritual chants, candlelights, animal sacrifice as well as bodily sacrifice through practices such as fasting and attending sweat lodges. As anthropologist and writer, Wade Davis, has pointed out in many a talk, the term “sacrifice” derives from the Latin, sacer meaning “sacred” and facere “to make or to do.” Thus, to sacrifice or offer something is to make it sacred.

Although peoples of different cultures make offerings for different reasons, from practicing reverence for and communion with one’s ancestors, wisdom holders and deities to honoring and expressing gratitude for more-than-human presences, offerings represent a tangible reciprocal gesture between ourselves and the unseen.

To make a ritual offering is to recognize that we are entangled in a world where matter is delicately interwoven with more-than-human potencies. Instead of simply taking and consuming (as most of us are accustomed to doing in capitalist societies), the act of ofrenda represents an exchange with the Other, allowing for the expression of gratitude in a tangible way.

Harvesting serviceberries alongside birds, Potawatomi author and botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer explores the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of many Indigenous cultures, reflecting upon the role gratitude plays in our exchanges with nature.

She writes, “Gratitude is so much more than a polite ‘thank you.’ It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.”

After gratitude comes reciprocity, according to Kimmerer. Wanting to give a gift in return for nature’s generosity and the overflowing abundance of serviceberries, she questions what she could possibly offer in return. “It could be a direct response, like weeding or water or a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. Or indirect, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity.”

Often, when thinking about restoring balance in the human relationship with nature, we hone in on solutions that center measurable actions like divesting from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions, forgetting about the vast plurality of unseen forces that govern our world. To embrace the ontology of ofrenda is to understand that small, ritual gestures of gratitude and reciprocity can also serve to change the shape of the realities that we inhabit.

Part II

In Part I, I explore the notion of making ritual offerings, ofrenda, and how different cultures world over weave this practice as a way of extending care and reverence to more-than-human lifeforms. To offer a handful of tobacco when meeting a forest for the first time, or to leave a bundle of candles and fruit to greet the spirits of a place, even plucking a strand of one’s hair so that a place may come to know you reciprocal mutuality, is to rupture space-time as we know it, inviting a dialogue between ourselves and the living, breathing Earth that we are entangled with.

Such offerings, made to more-than-human kin, ancestors, and the Gods of place, disrupt the materialist reductionist ways of knowing that have come to dominate Western, industrialized culture writ large, representing material acts with metaphysical implications that cannot be traced neatly to linear casualties.

In this second part, I share a personal experience that I had with the Wixárika together with other examples of Indigenous practice and cosmology, pointing to ofrenda as a pathway to restore balance in a collapsing world.

In August 2022, I took a trip to the sacred territory of Wirikuta, located in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Wirikuta is the sacred land of the Wixárika (Huichol) peoples and is the birthplace of the father sun, Tayau, in their cosmology.

I was attending and helping out with a 3-day regenerative gathering organized by my beloved kin, co-director of the Wixárika Research Center, Diana Négrin and regenerative agriculture consultant, Gerardo Ruiz Smith, who were seeking to sow seeds of agro-ecology in the sacred desert. The intention for the event was to bring Wixárika youth together with communal landowners (ejidatarios) in the village of Las Margaritas to learn about sustainable land care practices, dialogue about shared problems, and come into deeper relationship with one another.

The region is riddled with problems that go beyond the scope of what I hope to share here, but the gathering was intended to be a small drop in the ocean of seeding regenerative change in the region and dreaming future solutions that would benefit people and place.

There is something about the desert that grips you, a living hand that reaches out from between the creosote bushes and holds you firm against the naked, unfurling sky. So bone dry that at first glance the sprawling horizon appears to be lifeless, but it is merely a misunderstanding of the untrained eye, an old, colonial myth that the desert is an “empty” wasteland void of life.

In the expanse of it all, time folds into itself and the days seem to merge into a singular arc. I cannot tell you the precise sequence of events that led to the moment which I hope to reconjure, but towards the end of the gathering a group of us went out to a sacred site named el Bernalejo, the home of the sacred deer, Tamatsi Kauyumarie and one of the most important sacred regions in Wirikuta where the Wixárika leave their ceremonial offerings and hunt peyote.

In Mexico, summer is the rainy season, with the rains typically starting in May and ending in October. However, that summer was particularly dry, as it has been over the past several years due to ongoing climate change and industrialised farming practices, with it continuing to become dryer and dryer each consecutive year. The parched Earth cracking open beneath our feet, the whole desert aching to be kissed by rain.

As the small group of us climbed the stones that make up Bernalejo to leave offerings of candles, coins, and little decorated jícaras, the Wixárika Mara’akate (plural for Mara’akame meaning medicine man/shaman), chanted their prayers and through them, invoking the Gods of that place.

As a Westerner, having mere glimpses of Indigenous culture and practice, I could not understand the specifics of the prayers that were chanted, but perhaps I didn’t need to, because one could simply feel their potency. As they prayed, a gentle wind swept through the land bringing with it a flock of clouds which crowded the sky above, momentarily blotting out the sweltering desert sun overhead. At that moment, a light rain began to fall, little droplets falling upon our faces; a direct response to the Mara’akates’ prayers and our collective offerings.

Recounting her own experiences attending Wixárika ceremonies, writer Tracy Barnett, shares, “The series of ceremonies I was privileged to witness were all a part of an intricate system of practices designed by the ancestors to nurture a relationship with the forces of nature, and to maintain an equilibrium with those forces.”

Many people in the Western world may have the desire to attribute the gentle shower that graced us after our offering as a mere “coincidence”; a rare chance that occurred through sheer happenstance. The thought that an act that seeks to communicate with invisible, unseen forces could play a role in causality and change the shape of reality seems like pure fantasy to many.

Much of contemporary science and philosophy is built upon French philosopher René Descartes’ separation of the (subjective) thinking mind from the material world of “objects.” Such mind-body dualism privileges the mind over the material world, serving to reduce Nature to a mathematically determined mechanism, depriving Nature of her aliveness and agency.

The gentle shower that fell in response to a prayer is not considered as a way in which the Earth is engaging in a dialogue with us, responding to our reciprocal offerings, a gesture which speaks to the more-than-human directly, engaging her myriad ways of speaking.

Rather, a materialist understanding of the gentle rain shower that would explain away the magic of the rain as a product of water vapour rising into the atmosphere, cooling, and condensing into water droplets which later fell from the clouds as rain when the air became saturated and pressurised.

In her book For the Love of Matter, ecological philosopher Freya Matthews explains how Western materialist science has led to the de-animation of nature, “render[ing] the world a mere backdrop to questions concerning the meaning of life and the nature of the good. From the viewpoint of science, the answers to such questions must lie in the existential datum of humanity itself. Western thought had thus become humanistic, self-reflective.”

In this way, ofrenda represent doorways to eroding our self-reflective, anthropocentric conceptions of the world in which humans are understood to be the only nexus for action and change. Nature is not dead or mute; she is constantly speaking, moaning, and even crying out to us through ordinary gestures. She sings in murmurations of starlings, laughs through the salty mist of ocean spray, cries out as clouds gather overhead, saying “be careful” or “pay attention” in bright colours or spindly prickles, or a soft “hello” through a singular ray of sun that creeps in through the window. Moreover, she is beckoning for us to respond!

Similarly to the Wixárika, the Kogi, descendants of the Tairona, a pre-colonial civilisation that flourished before the arrival of the Spanish, an Indigenous group native to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in Colombia, talk of special sites upon the Earth where they make “payments” to the land in the form of offerings.

The Kogi see their role as caretakers and guardians of the Earth, referring to themselves as the “Elder Brothers” of humanity, urging us “Younger Brothers,” to grow up. In Kogi cosmology, it is said that at the beginning of time the Earth’s ‘mother’ wove an invisible black thread linking sacred sites along the coast, which in turn, correspond to locations in the mountains. What happens at one specific site is thought to reverberate at another.

Recognising the delicate interconnections between all things, part of the Kogi’s intention behind making offerings to sacred sites relates to their responsibility as Elder Brothers to maintain balance on Earth.

In 2012, British author and documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira, made a documentary, Aluna, together with the Kogi to send an ecological warning to us, Younger Brothers, about the ecological catastrophes we face if we don’t change our ways as a species.

Ereira had made an initial documentary about the Kogi, From the Heart of the World: the Elder Brother’s Warning, as early as 1990 when he was in Columbia searching for an unknown city deep in the jungle and learned of a nearby tribe that had existed in relative seclusion, remaining culturally intact for the past 500 years.

Wanting to know if the Kogi had a message to share with the outside world, he sent word to them. He was later invited to their village and placed before a council of elders then agreed he could make a film. In this first documentary, the Kogi have a similar message for us, Younger Brothers, emphasising that the world will come to an end if we do not dramatically change our ways.

Later, in 2008, Ereira received a message asking him to return to the Kogi village as there was grave concern that their warning had not been heeded. Instead of merely telling us about the damage being inflicted upon the Earth, the Kogi set out to viscerally show us the ways in which the Earth is interconnected. Several Kogi Mamas (spiritual leaders) set out on a journey to physically lay 400 kilometres of golden thread, linking sacred sites and illustrating how what happens in one place has a direct impact on what happens elsewhere.

One of the traditional offerings made by the Kogi was that of planting gold figurines at sacred sites. Compared to Western attitudes to gold, the Kogi saw gold as a gift from the Earth to be embellished by humans and shaped into ornate works, with the purpose of being returned to the Earth thereafter as an offering.

In a scene of the documentary, the Kogi Mamas are talking with a man who has just excavated an intricate gold object made by their ancestors from the ground. They are deeply upset by the man removing the piece from its place, explaining “These objects were left in special places. They are like people. They are part of the thread for us to connect with. They must not be moved. Did your ancestors make this? Selling this is like selling a person. Stop doing this! It’s like selling a child.”

Further they go on to describe the object as a macaw, having been left in the place where the macaws dwell. “There used to be many macaws, but because of the looting, there are almost no macaws now. The birds are disappearing.”

Recounting his own experiences with the Kogi Mamas, speaker, teacher, and author, Charles Eisenstein, describes a situation in which a Mama visited California, performing elaborate ceremonies on a particular spot of land. The Mama warned if the locals did not host ceremonies in that particular place, that there would be wildfires the following year. Needless to say the ceremonies weren’t performed, and the following two years forest fires devastated the region.

In the same piece, Eisenstein goes on to elaborate a view in which climate change and ecological crises are not only caused by the excessive consumption of fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases, but also attributed to the removal of sacred artefacts from their places. Such a view is radical by Western standards, ontologically being at odds with everything we have been taught about cause and effect, having radical implications for our approach towards activism and dealing with the ecological and social crises of our times.

“The ceremonies I speak of are in a different category from what the modern mind considers to be practical action in the world,” explains Eisenstein. In this way, ritual offerings and the ceremonies in which they are embedded can function as a form of direct action accountable to the more-than-human.

“Reality is not as we have been told. There are intelligences at work in the world beyond the human, and causal principles besides those of force. Synchronicity, morphic resonance, and autopoiesis, while not antithetical to force-based causality, can expand our horizons of possibility,” he writes. “Accordingly, it is not that a ceremony will ‘make’ different things happen in the world; it is that it tugs and molds reality into a form where different things happen.”

In making this point, it feels important to caution for a Both/Approach which benefits from the understandings of modern science, whilst also not reducing the world to them. The ethic of reciprocity woven into ofrenda represents a way of seeing and being with the world.

It transcends prescriptive actions like switching to electric vehicles, flying less, or consuming less meat (all of which we definitely should do), rather requiring an ontological shift that takes place within, allowing a way for us, borrowing Toko-pa Turner’s words, to “practice belonging ourselves back to the ecosystem,” and to make change through our embodied dialogue with it.

by Jasmine Virdi on May 26 and July 4, 2024 at foragedwisdom.substack.com