What happens in Chapter 13 of Ceremony?
Chapter 13 of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony focuses on a long poem embedded in the novel that explores the origins of witchery. During a gathering of witches from various places, one unnamed witch—considered the most fearsome among them—declines to reveal a bag filled with corpses and instead presents a story, claiming it to be the most potent form of magic. This story brings to life a pale, destroyerskin people who rise from the earth, unaware of how to coexist with the land, and who spread across the world carrying death, uranium, and the means for total destruction. The witch cautions that once the story is shared, it can't be retracted. The gathered witches become terrified and plead for the tale to end. It doesn’t. The chapter concludes with the haunting assertion that the story is already being told—already unleashed in the world—and that the destroyers and their weapons are already at work, making the witchery not a thing of the past but a current, unfolding reality.
Analysis
Silko's craft here is bold and innovative. By weaving this origin myth into the prose of her novel, she indicates a shift in how we perceive reality: this isn't just a narrative about witchery, but witchery unfolding itself on the page. The competitive-witch-gathering setup draws from traditional oral storytelling contests, but Silko turns the convention on its head—the ultimate "trick" is language itself, reducing magic to its most basic and most perilous form.
The unnamed witch represents a force of pure narrative agency, and the choice to focus on storytelling rather than displaying objects serves as a deliberate metafictional statement: stories, Silko argues, are the most powerful tool humans have. The "destroyers" aren’t explicitly identified as white Europeans, yet the imagery—pale skin, underground emergence, uranium, atomic bombs—clearly points to colonialism while maintaining a broad enough myth to implicate anyone involved in destruction.
The tone is carefully controlled: the verse shifts from taunting bravado ("'I don't have to show you anything'") to a growing sense of dread as the other witches plead for quiet, culminating in a flat, almost bureaucratic finality in the closing lines. This tonal shift—from an incantatory rhythm to a straightforward declaration—embodies the very irreversibility the witch describes. The theme of the story-that-can't-be-recalled runs throughout the novel; here, it's given its cosmic origin, linking Tayo's personal trauma to a broader planetary injury.
Key quotes from Chapter 13
“I don't have to show you anything. / I bring a story.”
The unnamed witch dismisses the other witches' displays of power and announces that language alone is the supreme destructive—and creative—force.
“Stolen rivers and mountains / the stolen land will eat their hearts / and jerk their mouths like fish flopping on dry sand.”
Mid-poem, the witch prophesies the eventual self-destruction of the destroyers, framing ecological violation as a curse that rebounds on its perpetrators.
“It's already turned loose. / It's already coming. / It can't be called back.”
The witch's closing lines collapse past and present tense, insisting that the story of destruction is not myth but active, ongoing reality.