Death Spirals
An invitation to lose our way.
Last summer, I heard Báyò Akómoláfé talk about a death spiral as part of a lecture series for the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Training. As soon as I heard of this phenomenon, I knew I would carry it in the marrow of my bones for the rest of my days, reaching for it often. It stirred both a deep remembrance and offered a path forward.
Army ants are sensorially compromised (blind, deaf) and rely on the trail of pheromones of other ants— specifically the ant right in front of them— to navigate themselves around. Sometimes, this pheromone trail closes itself into a loop, and the ants keep following each other in this spiral until they die of exhaustion. Hence, death spiral. These spirals can be as small as a dinner plate, or as large as a stadium, taking hours for each ant to make a full revolution. Zoom in for a moment, inside of this spiral, and be with the confused motivational “speakers”:
Just keep going.
We are almost home.
All there is to do is keep going.
This is the way.
This is the only way.
Akómoláfé offered that even this can be an anthropocentric read of the situation. We might see this a pheromonic accident— perhaps caused by an environmental trigger— when maybe it is an ant-based ritual, and death is simply the result of this ritual. Who is to say?
I think about this often because I find my experience of “waking up” or “being on the path” or “moving though the stages of adult development” to be like this. To be more specific: I find that living fused with the ego, with the small self, is a death spiral.
As we (either individually, or as a collective) attempt to address depression or despair, or even both personal and systemic injustice, it can often feel like the experience of dancing in circles. Oops, in our attempt to avoid death, we are performing a ritualization of death. We go around and around: maybe going to therapy, or practicing mindfulness, eating our veggies, trying to get 8 hours of sleep a night, staying on track for more and more promotions at work, yet things kind of remain the same. Haunted by those we are following, trying to get ourselves out of this mess, while doubling down in it.
What can break the spiral?
For the ants: it could be a leaf or a stick that falls, disrupting the flow. Or it could be an animal that walks across the spiral— intentionally or otherwise, this will disrupt the endless trek. These are more “accidents” of course. The exception. Can hardly be mentioned in integrity in this context. What happens — and it is so rare that this would happen— but what happens is rather… ghastly. For so-called nature isn’t always peaceful or pleasant. It is, as Akómoláfé says, “a rejection of continuity, a shape-shifting, a deterritorialization of itself… an invitation to lose our way, and to become something radically different. Perhaps something unintelligible. Perhaps something incomprehensible.” What happens is an infection of the zombie-ant fungus.
A spore settles into the body of an ant, and takes over the entire body except for the brain. Sound familiar? Sounds like possession. Once possessed by this fungal entity, the ant breaks away from their community. They walk far, far away, usually into a forest. In this case, “they” refers not only to the ant, but also the the fungus. An entanglement has occurred, it is not one leading the other, both are traveling. They travel until they find a leaf, and then they bite the underside of the leaf. This is now when things get gnarly: a hybrid, rather monstrous creature emerges. Something grows out of the head of the ant— a new station for sporulation. This whole process leads up to the eventual death of the ant.
The infection was an inflection point. This story of emancipation is a story of failure. The ant failed to stay on track with fellow spiral-ers. They failed to stay in line. They rejected continuity. Modernity is a field of intensity that enlists bodies into a death spiral: stay busy, stay small, stay fused with ego, stay suffering. Stay identified with what is inside of the circle. A teacher of mine says this is being identified with the qualities of Me: my experience, there’s a me and a you, birth and death and time are fixed. Yet we can open ourselves to follow a different path. To become infected with something else. To embody the qualities of I: experience without identification, interconnectedness, to tap into the infinite: beyond the constraints of space and time. To become possessed by the spiritual path. To exchange a death spiral for a healing spiral.
Not to avoid death, that is the only guarantee we each have, but to become something different in the process of death (the process of death is living.) To become something creatively, wholly, holy, and poetically different than who you thought you were, or what you thought you were, or how you thought you were.
Ancestral Lineage Healing is a type of spiritual repair work that addresses deep attachment and cultural wounds through contact and meditative time with your ancestral lineages.
I guide you as you cultivate your capacity for deep connection with blood-lineage ancestors that are well in spirit to invoke their support for healing generational trauma and cultural wounding through your ancestral lines.
Ancestral Mediumship is a form of connection and communication with the human dead. By allowing a connection with these Beings images, feelings, and messages can be transmitted to the living via the medium (me.)
Ancestral mediumship is a form of mediumship that focuses on asking questions and receiving answers from the field of consciousness from a clients ancestors of blood and bone.
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