ABSTRACT
The Council of All Beings is a deep ecology ritual of “despair and empowerment” wherein human participants, masked, speak on behalf of beings of the natural world. Participants first open themselves to a particular animal or another natural archetype—the lion, the pangolin, the stream, the mountain, the barred owl, etc.—then create masks that they wear to an arranged gathering, “The Council of All Beings,” wherein they speak, transformed, as the being whose mask they have created. The ritual is intended to assist the participant in a deep transformation away from the anthropocentric and toward the biocentric. Deep ecology argues that a radical revolution of consciousness is necessary for humans to successfully address the unfolding nightmare of the climate crisis. The Council of All Beings, developed in the 1980s by John Seed and Joanna Macy, is an exercise intended to facilitate this radical reorientation. Most (but not all) of the beings represented at a Council of All Beings are animals.
