Building Religions 6: Ritual

Building Religions 6: Ritual

I haven't done much work in ritual studies, so I'm only going to cover a few scholars and their theories -- the classics, so to speak. Most of what I have to say will be applicable primarily to fantasy settings, which tend to be a bit more ritual-heavy, and they can apply equally well to descriptions of religious or magical rites. As I've mentioned before, the boundary between the two can be fluid. Let's start by running through the authors that I've covered already and what they have to say.



For Eliade, ritual is a way of recapturing an encounter with the sacred. A theophany is a one-time event, but by creating sacred space (a temple or a magic circle) or re-enacting a mythic event during a festival, people are able to participate to some degree in that event. One of the examples that he draws upon the most is that of New Year's celebrations, which he sees as renewals of the entire world: a descent into chaos, the overturning of social norms, then a re-creation of the world through the retelling or re-enactment of the creation myth. (Western New Year's parties are a shadow of all of this. What do you do? You drink, carouse, kiss people at random, and... make resolutions for the coming year. You let the old world slip into chaos, then set the terms of the new one.)

Well before Eliade, there was an ongoing discussion about the nature of ritual, specifically whether it arose after myth (to retell the story) or before (in which case, myth evolved to explain ritual). He's clearly on the side that it comes after, but Durkheim went in a different direction: he skipped the question of before or after to argue that one purpose of ritual was to recapture the communal feeling (effervescence) that's shared whenever large groups gather. The other purpose is to reinforce the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, or to negotiate those boundaries with extreme care. The latter gives an explanation for taboos surrounding sacred objects, places, or people, which he takes to be indicative of a need to prevent sacred power from crossing over into the profane world unguarded.

J. Z. Smith, after studying hunting rituals, disagreed with the idea of ritual as re-enactment, or at least with the idea that it's meant to manifest sacred reality in our world. After studying the rituals that African Pygmies used while hunting elephants -- songs that hunters are supposed to sing to their prey, promises that they make that they'll face them directly and fight them fairly -- he noticed that the rituals and the actual practice didn't match up at all. The Pygmies would set traps, use poisoned weapons, do whatever they had to in order to bring the elephants down: in other words, they completely ignored everything that their rituals said they'd do. For Smith, this demonstrated that ritual and practice don't necessarily align; in fact, ritual is about the way we wish the world worked, but it expresses the way that it's not.

To move away from people I've written about before, there's Bronislaw Malinowski, an early 20th-century anthropologist who had great things to say about ritual and magic. Rituals, he noticed, sprung up around risky events. They weren't substitutes for practical action (i.e., scientific knowledge), but supplements to protect against things that couldn't be controlled. Look at an event that causes anxiety -- births, hunting, fishing, weather, death -- and you'll find rituals to accompany them. (It translates well into modern terms, too. I used to ask students which of them had little rituals that they went through when they were preparing for exams, going on first dates, or driving, and always got multiple answers. Another anthropologist applied Malinowski's theories to sports, and looked at baseball players' superstitions.)

So if you're devising some rituals to add a little colour to your world, ask yourself the question of what need they're answering. Are they trying to repeat a sacred event, like Eliade would say, or acknowledging that we don't live in a sacred world, like Smith? Are they policing the line between sacred and profane, like Durkheim suggests, or acknowledging anxiety, like Malinowski? Even if you're working in a setting where ritual actually "works," they could still fulfill one of these needs.