There's No Such Thing As Ceremonial Cacao

There’s no such thing as ceremonial cacao.

To every Manhattan ceremonial cacao priestess, Venice Beach luxury brand, and Tuluminati TikiTok influencer, I’m truly sorry to burst your 5D rainbow colored bubbles floating on the surface of the by-conscious-donation brew you’re doling out before the drum circle. 

But your bubble of light is mostly ego and unscrupulous marketing tactics.

If we want to go back to the true origins of cacao as a ceremonial tool, it was often integrated into broader ceremonial rites such as baptisms and funerary rites by the ancestral cultures who stewarded over it. 

Cacao pods were also used as a ‘hood pass’ of sorts, allowing members of one tribe to pass through the territory of another. It was used as currency, and as tribute.

But the notion of ‘ceremonial cacao’ as we know it today is mainly a marketing tactic.

If you go to the open air markets of the ancestral homelands of cacao, generally ranging from Southern Mexico to Peru, you won’t find any ceremonial cacao. You’ll definitely find ceremonial cacao in trendy boutiques run by foreign expats in Lake Atitlan and Nosara, but if you go to any true open air indigenous market and ask for ceremonial cacao, no one will understand what the fuck you’re talking about. 

You’re liable to primarily find cacao beans. 

And that’s because the very idea of ‘ceremony’ itself has largely been co-opted and pegged to a rootless identity that is more aligned with the mission statement of a McDonald’s franchise than an ancestral practice. Call it the ‘Synthesis Institute’ version of ceremony.

Ceremony has largely been reduced to a convenient novelty that serves the ambitions of entrepreneurial digital nomads in foreign countries and hip metropolitan neighborhoods. Apparently, the qualifications for what constitutes a ‘ceremony’ these days simply require a person to show up, set an intention, and say ‘Aho’ while wearing loose fitting white clothes and amber beads. 

I find it hugely ironic that so many white people reject the traditional ceremonies of their culture while bandwagoning onto a romanticized version of other people’s cultures in search of ‘healing’. 

Committing to a marital union in a nuptial ceremony that has deep roots in our ancestral culture? Pass. 

Drinking marked up cacao in a ceremonial setting arranged by a rent-a-shaman in San Marcos, Lake Atitlan? Hell yes! 

Ceremony is deeply ingrained into the value systems of a given culture. It is rooted in a shared sense of identity and purpose, tied into the moral ethos of a much broader set of principles that help to guide the tribe or society that maintains the rite.

Cherry picking the elements of a given culture that you want to endorse and abide by serves to strip ceremony of much of its integrity - which is perfectly fine with most people in our current era, as integrity requires character and discipline. 

You ever notice how people sit in ceremony every week for years at a time and are still never quite healed?

I first became dubious of this modernized approach to traditional ceremony a number of years ago when I followed the blog of a western ‘shamanic apprentice’ who sat in 200 ayahuasca ceremonies and still had a profoundly unenviable and ungrounded mental state that they broadcast onto the internet. 

Another case involved a western ‘ayahuasquero’ who owned a ‘ceremonial retreat center’ in Peru and who claimed to have sat in 2,000 ayahuasca ceremonies. He was one of the most fucked up people I’ve ever met. 

After chasing the ceremony high for a number of years a decade or so ago, I actually found much more healing distancing myself from loosely rooted ceremonial communities and the people peddling an endless string of cacao ceremonies and mushroom retreats as the salve to spiritual malaise. 

I found much deeper healing in honoring the actual ceremonies of my culture, which included getting married to a childhood friend with shared family values and having the wedding presided over and ordained by my late grandfather, who was a Baptist preacher. 

It’s much easier to imbibe ceremonial cacao on Friday, sit in an ayahuasca ceremony on Saturday, and do a Bufo ceremony on Sunday. 

I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of creating new cultural practices and redefining ‘ceremony’ to suit the individual tastes of a person on a case by case basis; it’s not my job to tell people what to do. 

But then we’re creating something entirely new, and not reconnecting with our ancestral roots as is the basis for most of the cacao and sacred medicine ceremonies that I’ve sat in or been around. 

The hybridization of different cultures seems to be a touch point throughout human history; people crossing borders and settling in non-native lands (sometimes by forcible occupation), intermarrying between clans, and changing names from ‘Dave’ to ‘Lotus Seeker’ while assuming a new identity. But in the context of cacao ceremonies, and every other type of new age healing modality, is this fetishizing of the cultural ‘other’ really just a symptom of our recalcitrance to embrace our own ancestral and epigenetic histories and traumas? 

I leave this piece here as a thought provoking appeal to reason rather than an admonishment or ultimatum. I’m down for people to find healing and love wherever they can find it, be it a cacao ceremony in Marin County or a nibble of an overpriced ceremonial chocolate bar in Condesa. 

But if anything, buy a non-ceremonial organic fair trade chocolate bar or cacao beverage and bless that shit yourself. Because it’s the same difference as buying into the hype of ceremonial cacao.