> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.medusarising.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Collective Effervescence, Neighboring, & Materialist Spirituality - URL: https://www.medusarising.org/collective-effervescence-neighboring-materialist-spirituality/ - Published: 2026-10-01T05:33:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-01T05:32:59.000Z - Description: Essay | Happy & connected people are hard to rule. - Author: Esmée Streachailt - Tags: Matriarchy, Sisterhood, Domination Systems ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/2026/08/Chalk-Line-Divider.png) The melding at raves. The endless smiles at weddings. The vibe at the local café. The catharsis of a mosh pit. The easy joy of neighbors building a sheltered bus stop for the kids. This was the core of our ancestors’ world when they worked the commons and cared for one another. It is the complex, deeply rooted energy that modern matriarchies still exude. Social ontology names it **Collective Effervescence**— a phenomenon matriarchies utilize[ better than any other social ontology](http://journalofsocialontology.org/index.php/jso/article/view/8732?ref=medusarising.org). It is forged from shared mission, mirror neurons, [chemosignals ](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&rct=j&url=https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11720269/&ved=2ahUKEwig0fnZodeVAxWJJjQIHbECARAQ%5Fr4PegoIAggACAAIJRAb&opi=89978449&cd&psig=AOvVaw3f2irzNta3MAAvM0QyVqbG&ust=1784293581244000)(popularly misnamed "pheromones"), and, often, a unifying beat. In indigenous cultures—many descended from historical matriarchies—festivals and ceremonies embody this effervescence. While these gatherings are acts of worship, the worship is inseparable from the fun. Everyone has a role, a responsibility, and the honor of fulfilling it well. This is precisely why capitalists and authoritarians need you isolated, unmoored, insecure, and socially precarious: **happy and connected people are hard to rule.** It is why the Enclosures happened. It is why thinkers resisting authoritarianism urge us to go out and get deeply connected within our local communities. ## Fun & "Mater-Realist" Spirituality We don't need to get overly "woo-woo" about collective effervescence; we just have to pitch in. You could take a purely materialist view and claim this feeling of transcendence is *only* our biology syncing up—and you’d still get the full experience. But I prefer a **mater-realist** view: The collective work of creating fun, meaning, or tangible results (planning, building, performing) and the experience of that fun—the release of bonding chemicals and subtle chemosignals—is how the physical body participates in transcendence. Transcendence is immanent. This shared work assures us of our common reality. It's how we each connect and add to the collective ontology, a shared and understood life-world. It bonds us beyond the demands of labor and basic survival, generating not just the *sense* of belonging, but the physical reality of it. **No precarity = no fascists.** This process also works in reverse. A happy crowd and a stressed crowd emit vastly different chemical signatures. An MMA fight, for instance, floods the air with cortisol and unreleased tension. Repeated over time, these high-stress environments enculturate specific forms of subjectivity, such as traditional performative masculinity. Shifting the frequency and nature of our shared emotional experiences is essential to shifting toward matricultural futures. [Collective Effervescence as Self-Organization and Enaction | Journal of Social Ontology![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/icon/favicon_en_US-0270b21e-58a8-4585-98ae-6ae64411e416.ico)Logo, Journal of Social Ontology (JSO)Authors Christian Kronsted![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/thumbnail/88x31-8e2930b8-ceeb-4623-bc8d-888e6cb8654e.png)](https://journalofsocialontology.org/index.php/jso/article/view/8732?ref=medusarising.org) This, right here, is why both capitalists and authoritarians want you isolated, unmoored, personally insecure and socially precarious. [Happy & connected people are hard to rule](http://www.templetonworldcharity.org/blog/tools-human-flourishing-collective-effervescence-koolulam-shira-gabriel-video?ref=medusarising.org). That is why the Enclosures were what they were. That’s why Timothy Snyder, Heather Marsh, and everyone on the *Not Today, Fascist!* side of politics now reminds us to go out and get *connected* in our communities. (You may recall me writing about them a good bit last year: **cf** [**The Emergency**](https://www.medusarising.org/tag/the-emergency-fascism/).) ## Neighboring as Direct Action A *mater-realist* spirituality—much like radical materialist feminism—views "mothering" not as a gendered mandate, but as the collective work of living a set of values. Sometimes that work looks like the insubordinate, ground-level neighboring seen in places like Minneapolis from covid19 through the ICE occupations and beyond. In the current political climate, neighboring isn’t just solidarity; it is active resistance. Neighboring solves immediate problems without waiting for official permission: - Bringing food to migrant families unable to leave their homes safely. - Raising rent money through direct community fundraising. - Walking immigrant or likely-targeted children safely to school. - Bearing witness and rinsing tear gas from burning eyes. Neighboring means showing up in physical reality with the people targeted by white-Christian nationalist projects, by capitalist demands for controlled social order. It directly addresses our current crisis: we prepare the path for a pro-social, pro-human future while actively pushing back against the fascist billy-club. Some stand on the front lines, some provide logistics, and some raise bail money for afterward. ## Courting Courage & The Life-World Collective effervescence has actively reshaped women's resistance across South America, as documented in Verónica Gago’s *Feminist International*. The lesson is clear: **we only get real by getting real together.** Courage calls to courage, but it also carries a chemical signature. Confidence and commitment can be sensed in the air just like fear. The power of movements like the *!Ni Una Menos!* strikes against femicide comes from the bond between people living *inside* the struggle. Collective effervescence is how we know we are showing up for each other rather than serving an external agenda. Femicide. The tightening enclosures of the fascist US regime. Its deepening gleeful violences. We live in the death-world, the decaying world, and we need to gather our for the regeneration that opens the way to the life-world. This power cannot be generated by people who coalesce strictly around a single political goal. It is built by coming together to create a shared **life-world**. Doing this across deeply ingrained social divisions requires: - **Bridge citizens, translators, and emissaries:** The generalists and natural networkers linking real, code switchers who connect distinct communities. - **A commitment to dis-alienation:** Refusing loyalty to global, heteronormative, capitalist, patriarchal systems. Creating new forms of loyalty, sistering, neighboring, and social bonds. - **A dedication to practice:** Dreaming, building, and embodying the multidimensional reciprocity (include our creature cousins and our ecologies) and mutual care required for a humane world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/2026/08/image-1.png) Obviously, the Seven Sisters were not Gorgons. Play is one of the ways to our own new stories. This is complex work. It's also work our radical feminist history shows us how to do. It will never fit into a bulleted strategy deck or a spreadsheet formula because this work is *not only* its mechanics. It requires skill, but at its heart, the process is emotive, intuitive, and built on shared resonance. Our mirror neurons allow us to understand one another subconsciously, but they do more than mirror: **they call forth hidden elements of our being.** They pull out courage, gentleness, and a ruthless certainty that oppressive structures will be held to account. Those mirror neurons and chemosignals also call forth paranoia, arrogance, and entitlement if those are closer to the surface as in authoritarian personalities: > The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, [superstition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition?ref=medusarising.org) and [stereotypy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypy?ref=medusarising.org), power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex. ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FAuthoritarian%5FPersonality?ref=medusarising.org)) We do not merely reflect one another—we enchant, or benight, harmonizing with old songs and listening for entirely new ones. ## Matriarchal Ritual vs. Patriarchal Control Patriarchal ritual tends toward the somber, self-important, and hierarchical: a leader commands, and the crowd follows. The leader hoards knowledge (or hallucinations) that the followers lack, using it to direct their lives. Women’s spiritual traditions and matriarchal rituals operate differently: - **Shared Ownership:** Everyone understands the practice, everyone helps build the festival grounds, and everyone shares in the experience. - **Care-Centered:** Anyone in distress receives immediate care and emotional witness. These are communities of care down to the simple act of sitting together for a shared cry. We know our homo sapiens ancestors co-existed with and inter-bred with other species of humans. [Ancient Humans & Our DNA | Helix![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/icon/apple-icon-47c22770-94f2-4bb6-8d89-19f56df1eb23.png)Helix![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/thumbnail/image-5286f3fc-edbf-4444-bff5-68b72ac5e9a4)](https://www.helix.com/blog/ancient-humans-our-dna?ref=medusarising.org) The citations in this very readable article are a gold mine. So we know that once upon a time some, **maybe most of us, were given to mutuality more than enmity**. I suspect lived among each other, being in the work and sharing the camaraderie, joy, frustration, and tragedy of making life together – there is deep risk in confronting our oppressions and oppressors. ### Reimagining the Ritual These new rituals and social bonds are ours to invent. We can echo our ancestors while radically reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other. In these renewed stories, *perhaps the Pleiades dance at the center of a universal ritual, calling their sisters and cousins into the movement, while Orion acts as the agile guardian* reminding men to mind their spiritual manners. A generation of feminists is calling for a shift into matriarchal gears. We are ready, even if the surrounding world is not. It is our work—and our privilege—to actively embody these dreams today. And, Sisters & Cousins, there is joy in building the alternative, parallax, liminal, new world gloriously *misaligned* with the norms and best practices of fundamentally anti-human and world-threatening systems. --- I'm bringing this spirit to TORCH! Hope to see you there, beloveds and felicities. [TORCH 2026 — Total Woman Victory![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/icon/favicon-d78ce571-c243-432f-bd28-ae2c95ff3a58.ico)Total Woman Victory![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/65/75/6575a206-4a74-4088-a0fc-76d31c2a9ab8/content/images/thumbnail/Untitled-design--40--1c97c7f7-79fb-437e-b863-6294d6212fa1.png)](https://www.totalwomanvictory.com/torch2026?ref=medusarising.org) **Esmée Streachailt** is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising. 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