to be ignorant and helpless. In Tayo’s search for inner awareness, the transcendence he looks for must come from within. Only an inner ceremony will restore him to wholeness. Finally he realizes that “he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid.” (Silko 257) He knows that from that time on:“human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand mile away, victims who had never seen these mesas... He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together -- the old stories, the war stories, their stories -- to become the story that was still being told.” (Silko 258)It is through the spiritual experience Tayo discovers on the Mesa that he comes to see that death and destruction devour every man, whatever his invented label or color. Yet, each man possesses the pattern, the way all the stories fit together, to generate the whole wed of being. All men, regardless of creed are equal in the eyes of the witchery, and so should be in the eyes of men when they are faced by the witchery, and also when they are not.Tayo heals himself through the power of his own consciousness, with his own ceremony. Yet such ceremonies of self understanding and understanding of others must go on, much like Tayo’s, for all of us to be able to overcome the witchery, the cockroach, that lies in every person. Leslie Marmon Silko’s vision extends beyond her Laguna Pueblo culture, to the white system of machines and beliefs, as she calls it. Ceremony brings to light the views that man and woman, humanity, should come about and realize, through a ceremony of conscious self-revelation, that all are equal parts in a web. A web that has already been made by the “spider woman&#...
