"It was likely that it should so affect you! It was performed with (the instruments of) men, and all attuned according to (the influences of) Heaven." - Zhuangzi 14.3 (James Legge trans.)
This article is an investigation of the topics of ritual and ornament. Briefly stated, the first part of the thesis developed here is that, just as the world is animate and expressive from the perspective of the right hemisphere (see The Matter With Things outline of "headline differences" in the Introduction), so rote action becomes ritual, plain object becomes ornament, and literal text becomes figurative poetry when each of these are infused with that same feeling and spirit (or élan vital). These three, ritual, ornament, and poetry, can then be seen as mutually reinforcing aspects of reality as it is encountered
and understood by the right hemisphere's mode of attention. Xunzi wrote "With ritual, all things can change yet not bring chaos. But deviate from ritual and you face only loss." Consider how Subak rituals and the supreme water temple on the island of Bali, the Pura Ulun Danu Batur temple on the shore of Lake Batur by Mount Batur volcano, combine to form a single system. And what is a temple or building such as this? As Christopher Alexander wrote, "A building is an ornament… a profound, organized object reaching to heaven… a living thing." (The Nature of Order, Book Four, p107-8) The second part of the thesis is that, if the preceding is in some sense true, then if we are going to shift our way of attending, as McGilchrist suggests we ought, then perhaps learning to see the world as ritual, ornament, and poetry, as Xunzi, Alexander, and William Blake did, and engage with it accordingly, could be a step in the right direction. One of the benefits of doing so is that these are cultural metaphors that many people already have some familiarity with. ...This might not make sense yet, but we'll go more into all of that later.
The inclusion of poetry among these three derives from a possible route of inquiry according to which there appears to be an increasing contrast between literal and figurative interpretations as we move from presentation to re-presentation, that is, as we move from ritual (process/ icon/ firstness), to ornament (object/ index/ secondness), to poetry (abstraction/ symbol/ thirdness). And with the increasing contrast it also appears to become increasingly challenging within contemporary Western culture to understand the translucent aspect of each of these, as opposed to the merely superficial interpretation of each. Above I've inserted Peircean typology in parenthesis alongside each for a possible parallel comparison, as each implies a kind of developmental trajectory. In a chapter titled "On the linguistic nature of ornament" in his book The Nature of Ornament, Kent Bloomer writes:
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw a progression in which "First there is gesticulation; then rosaries or wampum; then picture language; then hieroglyphics; and finally alphabetic letters." ...Coleridge's notion of rosaries as a development beyond basic gesture may be read as a reference to plotting a sequence of gestures for emphasis and to develop a narrative over time. His "rosaries" are comparable to a form of chanting in which an idea is emphatically reiterated and reaffirmed, a rhetorical device that survives in modern poetry and oratory. It is striking to observe that in the history of ornament there is an abundance of figural repetition, almost to the point that repetition seems thematic to the very essence of ornament in the same way that repetition is regarded as a hallmark of poetry. In addition, despite their primitive status, gesture, repetition, and rhythm remain basic properties of modern speech and have not been jettisoned from our ordinary lives by advances in the rigidity of alphabetic, denotative, and scientific writing. Within the language of ornament is a vocabulary consisting of a repertoire of both meaningful and provocative gestures and figures. ...Indeed, ornament seems to be a form of visual figuration that discloses cycles and tends to be located in the margin between different kinds of things."
Why do I focus on 'poetry' here instead of, perhaps, song or verse? It has been somewhat more difficult to commoditize poetry, which speaks favorably of its ability to frustrate the LH desire to instrumentalize everything. And what has been called "found poetry" may epitomize both its fugitivity and ubiquity best of all. But perhaps more importantly, poetry, as a concept, appears to be broadly inclusive of anything legible (including epic length poems and stories), and anything displaying the aspects of musicality that are present in song, without however being restricted to prevailing notions of meter and verse. One must listen closely to poems. Indeed, ritual, ornament, and poetry all invite our full attention so that they may be entered into and properly appreciated. Consider the recitation of William Carlos Williams' poems in the film Paterson, or Patti Smith's long study of William Blake and her recitation of The Tyger:
Patti Smith: “I think I was asked to read “Tyger, Tyger” at a museum performance. And I often find reading poetry—quite beautiful, poetry is, but I always seem to want to take it to the next level. Something within me wants to sing poetry, which is really how I wound up having a rock 'n' roll band, just singing poetry. And then I wound up singing “Tyger, Tyger,” because whenever I read it, I hear the music. But William Blake was known for his singing voice, and I’m sure he sang these poems, but we don’t have any record of it. But his music is infused in his words, because where else would I have gotten it?” And a May 2021 conversation explored another connection:
Damien Clifford: "Is there a way of understanding the link, if there is one, between the poetry of words and physical movement through the lens of hemisphere work?"
Iain McGilchrist: "I think poetry is a special case of something bigger than itself. It’s the linguistic form of what is in fact movement. But poetry is also something that is in movement, and dance, and in ritual. I always think of ritual as a very good example of embodied metaphor. A really powerful and moving ritual speaks to things that cannot be easily put into words without great loss, at least not into words that are not poetic without great loss. So the connection is there."
In this article you can read extended quotes from Iain McGilchrist, followed by Zak Stein, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Confucius and Xunzi, the more functionalist perspective of David Graeber and David Wengrow, an integrated perspective of Barry Stephenson, and a Neoplatonic view from John Vervaeke. Reflections on technology and design are included, among the contributions of many other influential thinkers as well, including Stephen Lansing, Christopher Alexander, and Nikos Salingaros. But before jumping straight in, I'd like to first give a short review (and a modified hypothesis) to set some context:
In The Matter with Things McGilchrist suggests that: "Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten." These two very different sorts of tasks require two very different hemispheres. "How to eat" correlates with the left hemisphere, while "without being eaten" correlates with the right hemisphere. But what does "without being eaten" really imply? McGilchrist suggests that it implies the need for "broad, open, sustained attention for what's going on around you". Yes, but the object of this vigilance is not, as we might suppose, primarily predators to avoid. The best way to avoid being eaten is to learn how to anticipate and avoid a confrontation to begin with. In Life’s Hidden Resources for Learning (published in Arran Gare's journal Cosmos and History in 2008), Philip Henshaw made just this point, writing that "resourceful avoidance of conflict is the dominant behavior of stable natural systems". So how do we avoid conflict? In his introduction to A Discussion on Ritualization of Behaviour in Animals and Man, Julian Huxley wrote:
"Ritualization may be defined ethologically as the adaptive formalization or canalization of emotionally-motivated behaviour, under the... pressure of natural selection so as (a) to promote better and more unambiguous signal function, both intra- and inter-specifically; (b) to serve as more efficient stimulators or releasers of more efficient patterns of action in other individuals; (c) to reduce intra-specific danger; and (d) to serve as sexual or social bonding mechanisms."
Barry Stephenson quoted this same passage in Ritual: A Very Short Introduction, reinforcing and expanding upon these functions of establishing trust and reducing conflict. And moreover, as Clive Gamble wrote, "shared beliefs would have allowed people to connect across social universes much larger than the local social group". Gamble was referenced in Living with The Gods, by Neil MacGregor and cited by McGilchrist as well. Likewise, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, in The Major Transitions in Evolution, wrote that the inculcation of proper behavior is often achieved by ritual and myth. So that "throughout their lives, in speech, story, and song, all people sing the same tune" (Plato, Laws). But all this leaves something unexplained: Why did the development of these ritualistic skills and knowledge ostensibly involve connecting oneself and/or one's conspecifics to the divine? What explains the numinous aspect of ritual? Is the preservation of bodily integrity (the reason for avoiding conflict) somehow a sacred pursuit? And why should we value integrity in the first place? Is it so that life may 'presence to' and 'respond to' value as McGilchrist suggests? Perhaps. But why do that? Can the reason for any telos really be known? Ultimately, there is no explanation that will satisfy the left hemisphere, because there is no explanation that can be given in terms that it would understand... This mystery may explain the numinous aspect of rituals, and the impetus for religion. Consider the below points in The Matter with Things from McGilchrist:
- “...it is to be expected that what religions primarily do in response [to whatever-it-is that it perceives as divine] should itself be consistent with the mode of the right hemisphere: they engage in acts of worship, ceremonies, rituals that celebrate the sacred... What we are talking about here is a type of essentially metaphorical understanding, of which myth, poetry, drama and ritual are all manifestations... It is because there is so much that cannot be conveyed in any other way, because explicitness changes its nature, that we value – or should value – poetry, humour and embodied metaphor (otherwise known as ritual) of whatever kind.”
- "Within religion the left hemisphere helps us supplement ritual with theology. [See also "halakhah and aggadah".] ...What is encountered spiritually can be conveyed best by poetry, drama, ritual, image, narrative, music – by means, in other words, that are implicit, embodied, and contextually rich. They are resonant rather than declarative. The inherent weakness of the analytic method applied to theological matters has been aptly described as ‘cognitive hemianopia’. This suggests that only half the visual field, and therefore one hemisphere’s view, is being taken into account.”
- “Trust depends on shared beliefs; religion is the manifestation of that trust, and the embedding of it into the fabric of daily life. Religion embodies awareness of God in the world through deeply resonant myths, narratives and symbols, enacted in rituals, conducted in holy places, that parallel the cyclical passage of time. In doing so it exists as a repository of the accumulated wisdom of good men and women, so that each living being does not have to ‘re-invent the wheel’ but can benefit from common insights. While religions differ, particularly in their more superficial representations, their insights are for the main part congruent across time and across the world, a sort of ‘perennial philosophy’. A religious life expresses, as I have suggested, a disposition towards the world that has consistently the same qualities: humility, compassion, reverence.”
- “As we have seen, according to Goethe (and Plotinus before him), aspects of the world call forth in us, if we are open and attentive, the faculties that are needed to respond to them. The faculty to perceive the divine is no exception. Indeed that faculty is what we mean by soul. Soul does not exclude feeling or intellect or imagination, but it is not nearly exhausted by them. Though natural, it can be developed or stunted. Keats, who was wise beyond his years, called this world a ‘vale of Soul-making’. We grow a soul – or we can snuff it out. It is the most important purpose of a culture – any culture – to ensure that such faculties are aided to grow: the invocation of archetypal symbols, the practice of rituals, and the deployment of music and holy words in the approach to the divine have been universal across the world over time. It is only very recently that this universal practice has been abandoned.”
- “But one of the most important aspects of many experiences – such as the experience of love, of art of every kind, of the magnificence and beauty of the natural world, of ancient myths and narratives, of the solemnity of a religious ritual or of an ancient tradition – is that they require us to relinquish control. They speak of something much bigger than us, that cannot entirely be articulated; something ancient and enduring, which speaks, if it can be said to speak at all, through us, not just out of us. It is an eternal drama in which we each play a humble, but by no means insignificant part…”
- “...one of the reasons for having religion is constantly to remind us of a broader context; a moral order; a network of obligations to other humans, to the earth, and to the Other that lies beyond. Extending beyond our lives, that is, in space and time, yet rooted firmly in places, spaces, practices, here and now. A religion forms the bridge between worlds, which is the purpose of metaphor – and the purpose of ritual, which is metaphor embodied. One of the beautiful things about many religions, especially perhaps Hinduism, but also certainly in some traditions within the monotheistic religions – those I know of include Eastern (so-called Orthodox) Christianity, and Judaism – is that there are brief prayers of only a sentence or so, gestures, beautiful small rituals, that sanctify the familiar routine actions of daily life, and set them within the perspective of the infinite, of which we so easily lose sight. And inculcate a habit of reverence and gratitude towards the world: of seeing the sacred in every part of what is given.”
- “I cannot possibly penetrate to the core of the enigma of life by my own efforts. Nor can I wilfully invent myths or rituals without their being trivial and empty. This is why we have traditions of art, philosophy and, above all, religion. The fetishisation of novelty and the repudiation of history are reflections of a capitalist culture that depends on dissatisfaction with what we have and the constant seeking after new ‘improvements’ in order to fuel demand. It is not only false but obviously immoral in a number of respects. A culture (and the point of religion is to embody the ethos of a culture) is of critical importance for a society’s survival. Cultures are living; but precisely because of that they can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.”
And earlier, in The Master and His Emissary, he wrote:
- “…truth cannot be apprehended directly, explicitly; in the attempt, it becomes flattened to two-dimensionality, even deadened, by the left hemisphere. It has to be metaphorised, ‘carried across’ to our world, by mythology and by ritual, in which the gods approach us; or as we begin to approach them... In ancient Rome although the right hand was preferred for skilled work, the left hand was preferred for extraordinary activities such as religious ritual. Virgil (Moretum, line 25) states that laeva ministerio, dextra est intenta labori: the left hand is for performing rites, the right for work…”
Zak Stein
Just to underscore the importance of ritual and religion, McGilchrist notes that ten years before he died, William James wrote in a letter to a friend: "I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function." Zak Stein, a careful reader of McGilchrist who is in broad agreement with him concerning these points, presented his paper Opening the Eye of Value at the "Metaphysics and the Matter with Things: Thinking with Iain McGilchrist" conference in March 2024. He wrote:
- "The clarification of desire is the basic practice of many wisdom traditions— purification of the will—that has long been made the focus of ritual practices. It has long been made the focus of ritual because clarified desire discloses value. Cosmic Value, thus disclosed, can be made the focus of human will. The “participatory” nature of ritual, in which the human merges with Cosmic forces, provides for the beginnings of an “acosmic humanism” or non-dual humanism. The actualized, i.e., ritualized, human is awakened as a unique expression of panentheistic action within an evolving Cosmos."
- "Ritual practices provide access to what the Eye of Value sees across generations. The cumulative effects have been understood by anthropologists in terms of an evolving “sacred complex,” including, in order of emergence, rites, rituals, myths, religions, doctrinal religions. The first rites date to archaeological finds some 30,000 years BCE. It has been suggested that the emergence of rites — such as burials — happened before the emergence of grammatically complex, propositionally differentiated speech."
- "Healthy early childhood socialization involves direct experiences of clarified desire being met by the Cosmos. That is, actual needs for, e.g., warmth, food, affection, and soothing being truly satisfied by caregivers. This occurs in the equivalent of rites and rituals of caregiving, which are eventually put into languages equivalent to myths. This “sacred complex” (if you will) of early childhood leads to the idealization and then internalization of the persons who have so profoundly helped and loved you, who now live inside you, forming the basis of your conscience and personality."
- "
The Field of Value is discovered in the trans-verbal rites and archetypal image of the sacred complex. Civilization depends upon access to sacred values at the center of culture, not as doctrine and rhetoric, but as rituals that bind us as persons to each other and to the Cosmos." [Again: "Values are associated with like a 'list of values' that you kind of just 'take on' or something. But what we speak of is the field, grammar, or story of value, which allows for symbiotic relations between potentially polarizing values. This is a broader way of thinking about it. McGilchrist might argue that one of the 'design parameters' driving the evolution of the nervous system was actually its ability to attune to what is intrinsically valuable in the universe.]
And in several conversations before and since, Stein has expanded upon this sort of theme:
- "If we don't destroy the planet, then we could create sacred architectures where God could live among us. [Dempsey: I call that ‘building the cathedral’.] It’s in the Hebrew wisdom discourses about the temple. Creating structures in which the actual presence of the living field of value can reside. Humans have long believed themselves to be involved in some kind of sacred work. It would be such a gift to be able to create institutions and systems of ideas where young people could live with a real sense of sacred purpose. Not some crazy fundamentalist thing, but a ‘post-postmodern’ sacred vocation. I think it’s essential for psychological health.” [in conversation with Brendan Graham Dempsey]
There is a deep connection between education, ritual practice, and value-ception. The educational process (student/teacher asymmetry) and the evolution of value (perception/response) may both be viewed under or within the dispensation/ paradigm of sacred ritual. And one might say that, insofar as values of "utility" and values of the "sacred" appeal to polar opposite dispositions (for McGilchrist and Stein, via Scheler), then ritual is opposed to mere utility, and insofar as education works through embodied metaphor more than disembodied and literal instruction, education is as well. From reflections such as these Stein derives the raison d'etre of education. "What are the practices that would allow me to see value clearly enough
to know that, as I act, I'm falling into the stream of the Tao, the
experience of living value?" Connection to education: "That's legitimate teacherly authority... it’s a temporary, cooperative relationship to clarify the value being pursued." And again: "If we clarify our values well enough, and are looking to align them with the intrinsic value of the universe, then we would align our technologies with the universe, and not with profit maximization." Our awareness of values can be transformed into action through how we shape our world, our relationships, and our exposure to information, and this can support healthier psychologies. Importantly, what are these values? "Caregiving." Which is healthy for both men and women, as Sarah Hrdy describes in biological detail. In conversation at Noetic Nomads, Zak Stein said:
"The basic question is always "Who says you're the authority?" In some contexts teacherly authority is easily demonstrated. For example, let's say I want to make a guitar, and that you know how to make guitars (and I know this because I just watched you make a guitar). So I might choose to be a student to you, and you might choose to take on the role of teacherly authority. We're going to agree that there's an epistemic asymmetry here, in that you know more about making guitars than me, and that you can be trusted to lead me along that path. So in contexts like this, where teacherly authority is demonstrable, that's fairly easy. But there's many other contexts where it's not easy to demonstrate who has legitimate teacherly authority. This can be a big problem, especially for reflective males in high school, because it ends up being an authority issue."
Ritual is one very significant place in which teacherly authority can both be demonstrated (with respect to a practice) and can be legitimated (with respect to a transparent view upon reality). The criteria for establishing authority (or failing to do so) are relatively clear within some ritual contexts. After all, there are only a limited number of available ways that a ritual may be conducted if it is to succeed in establishing the desired relational harmonies and thereby become imbued with meaning. For example, the Buddhist notion of the Eightfold Path was an early attempt to create a set of guidelines for knowing the "right way" to live, and to be able to evaluate if one was progressing along the path of love and wisdom (or deviating from it). For another example, the highly ritualized sport of sumo wrestling is tightly regulated, though when viewed from outside of the culture in which it developed, the rules by which it operates may appear extremely arbitrary and irrational. Nonetheless, one may in fact say that there are legitimately authoritative teachers within the sport of sumo who know both the sport itself and the layered meanings behind it.
In his article on Mencius, Bryan Van Norden wrote "Propriety is manifested in respect or deference toward elders and legitimate authority figures, especially as manifested in ceremonies and etiquette. The [Chinese] character for the virtue of propriety is identical with the one for ritual, reflecting the close connection between this virtue and such practices. Mencius thinks that matters of ritual place legitimate ethical demands on us, but he stresses that they are not categorical, and can be overridden by more exigent obligations. For example, he notes that rescuing one’s sister–in–law if she were drowning would justify violation of the ritual prohibition on physical contact between unmarried men and women. Knowing when to violate ritual is a matter of wisdom." McGilchrist recalls that, as Schiller also noted, rational action is all about "perceiving when a general rule must be set aside"; the intelligent person understands that every rule has exceptions. Mencius explained the role of ritual: “The core of benevolence is serving one’s parents. The core of righteousness is obeying one’s elder brother. The core of wisdom is knowing these two and not abandoning them. The core of ritual propriety is the adornment of these two” (4A27; Van Norden 2008, 101). Would it be possible to generalize this, that Xunzi's "exulting ritual" (longli 隆禮) is, when properly understood, Mencius' beautification of caregiving?
When it comes to ritual, "what" we do often matters a lot less than "how" we attend to the process. (This was McGilchrist's point in one of his conversations with Vervaeke.) It is precisely how we attend that is the difference between whether it is imbued with meaning, or whether it seems utterly pointless. "Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention." (Jonathan Smith, 1987) Of course, what we do can affect how we attend. So it's a two-way street. There are many examples of this. I particularly find courtship rituals fascinating. We might say these could involve such things as gift giving, dating, and a profusion of other small gestures of love and affection. But underneath all this they require harmonization with another person as a whole, including their thoughts, feelings, desires, and values. Without that there can be no real responsiveness, no synchronization of two hearts beating as one. Some of this was described in Curie Virág's article "Rituals create community by translating our love into action" (see reference section). "It is not too much to say that ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then find words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts." (Mary Douglas, 1966)
Zak Stein’s videos (posted to video hosting services like YouTube) picked up around the time of Covid-19, when the use of video teleconferencing software really exploded online, along with the recording and sharing of these conversations. But the biggest disruption caused by Covid-19 was perhaps to the daily and annual traditions and rituals of community and family life. Youth socialization in schools either simply ended or was dramatically curtailed, music recitals, sports, graduation ceremonies, the isolation of vulnerable populations both young and old, and public gatherings of all types became the victim of policies of social distancing intended to “flatten the curve”. I’m not an epidemiologist, so I won’t impugn upon those involved who had to make some very difficult policy related decisions. But what I want to highlight is how the erosion of these rituals (and in some cases, their replacement or transformation into new rituals) affected public health.
I believe family life is constituted in large part by just such rituals, most obviously perhaps when speaking of births, deaths, marriages, graduations, retirements, reunions, holidays, etc. But also in much more common actions of greetings and departures, the daily household chores, meals, displays of affection, romance and sex, caregiving, and many others far too innumerable to list. Recall that according to Zhuangzi, "perfect ritual propriety" sometimes lies in what isn't done, as much as in what is done. In other words, when it comes to family rituals, it is resonance, both among family members and between the family and ‘reality itself’, that takes precedence over rote performance (which is how the left hemisphere construes ritual propriety).
The constitution of family life within a ritual context is ancient. It is possible to trace it back to the earliest records or other forms of evidence in nearly all traditions, including the Vedic religion (and subsequent Brahmanism) which centered on the myths and ritual ideologies of the Vedas. These constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and Indian philosophy. Tellingly, the Vedic rituals can be divided into Śrauta and Gṛhya rituals. Public ceremonies were relegated to the Śrautasutras, while most household ceremonies were incorporated in the Gṛhyasūtras. But ritual has been important throughout the world. Stein linked this back to Plotinus (recall Plotinus from the epigraph to McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things) in a remark he gave around the time of Covid-19, during a conversation:
"There's a way to create a human civilization. I’m thinking of Plotinus here in particular, who almost built a city. (Vervaeke: “Yes. Platonopolis.”) Exactly. He was in this kind of ‘civilizational design’ mindset from a deeply metaphilosophical, Platonic view. When you think about properly functioning religion, it's not just the books and stuff. There's a building, and we all get there, and we're in it together, and we do something. And that ‘something’ is a ritual that would be tremendously beautiful. The conception of it would not be all of us ‘looking at one thing,’ like some kind of ‘medieval ritual’, but in fact it would be this ‘moving between us' of the Holy Spirit and of the dialogos. Just by the fact that we're here together, looking in one another's eyes, that's what can happen sometimes. That's the way AA works, and a bunch of other things. It descends. It's there. There's a self-evident value in the experience of the personhood and the co-relating. They say you're ‘selling water by the well’ or ‘selling water by the river’ or something like that, because it's right there."
Today of course the word ‘ritual’ has metamorphosed into either denoting obsessive behavioral pathologies, pseudoscientific thinking, or suspicion of secret malign intention. The level of incomprehension here suggests it is best avoided at all costs. But when I look back on the rituals of caregiving within a relationship, and those of family life that I’ve had the good fortune to participate in, I see how it was through these tender experiences that I’ve come to know that which is ‘good, true, and beautiful’ in the world. I’ve experienced that ‘moving between us’ of the Holy Spirit that, in an earlier time perhaps, Plotinus had intended to bring greater awareness to - not just within the family, but within the entire body politic.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Iain McGilchrist references Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the architect of the notion of "flow", within his chapter on time in The Matter with Things. (Edward Slingerland has compared this to the Chinese concept de.) Mihaly once described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." It is a state of intrinsic motivation and complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990) he wrote (light editing):
"During the course of human evolution, every culture has developed activities designed primarily to improve the quality of experience. Even the least technologically advanced societies have some form of art, music, dance, and a variety of games that children and adults play. There are natives of New Guinea who spend more time looking in the jungle for the colorful feathers they use for decoration in their ritual dances than they spend looking for food. And this is by no means a rare example: art, play, and ritual probably occupy more time and energy in most cultures than work.
In fact, flow and religion have been intimately connected from earliest times. Many of the optimal experiences of mankind have taken place in the context of religious rituals. Not only art but drama, music, and dance had their origins in what we now would call “religious” settings; that is, activities aimed at connecting people with supernatural powers and entities. In modern times art, play, and life in general have lost their supernatural moorings. The cosmic order that in the past helped interpret and give meaning to human history has broken down into disconnected fragments. Many ideologies are now competing to provide the best explanation for the way we behave. None of them commands great popular support, and none has inspired the aesthetic visions or enjoyable rituals that previous models of cosmic order had spawned."
Csikszentmihalyi is making a strong claim there, however I think it is one that McGilchrist would endorse. The connection between spirit and culture runs through everything. Speaking of running, in 2009 the popular book Born to Run introduced Rarámuri culture to the world. A recent paper provides more context on the origin of the cultural practice for which they are most well known, and interestingly, suggests a possible role for it in rebalancing opponent processes. In "Running in Tarahumara (Rarámuri) Culture: Persistence Hunting, Footracing, Dancing, Work, and the Fallacy of the Athletic Savage" (2020) Daniel Lieberman and coauthors describe how the Rarámuri races, both rarajípare (men’s race) and ariwete (women’s race), are extensions of yúmari (pronounced “júmari”, a pre-Columbian ceremonial dance ritual enacted to petition and give thanks to Onorúame). These are considered a powerful form of prayer. Running is an important part of Rarámuri spirituality, "which emphasizes using rituals to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between opposing forces". The energy spent dancing during the Easter celebration ceremony is "thought to impart energy and strength to Onorúame’s winter-long struggle with his older brother, the devil [Riablo]". There are subtle similarities to the Iroquois legend recounted by McGilchrist here.
And the notion of "supernatural moorings" deserves attention. A ritual is not supernatural, there's more to it than that. Essential to the concept is the process of uniting the supernatural with the natural. (In this regard we might say that it is not unlike panentheism.) This unification, alignment, resonance, harmonization, etc. introduces all manner of complications. An idea that may be worth introducing here is that of "ritual feedback". This is the feedback between our experience of the natural and the experience of the numinous. Rituals surrounding food and eating are a great example of this. We preferentially eat at only certain times, and cook only certain healthy foods. But if we learn that they are not healthy, or if the process doesn't draw our attention to the numinous, we might change the ritual of food preparation and consumption accordingly. Because it is the experience of both the natural and the supernatural which guides the ritual. If the ritual commands too great of a sacrifice in terms of utility value, for example, if the cost of travel to a reunion with family or friends would require going into debt to pay for it, what does one do? This is a highly contextual problem, so there is no simple answer, but the notion of ritual feedback suggests finding a way to realize the numionous values without making too great of a personal utility sacrifice, when such an option is available. All the while recognizing that the value of utility is not the priority here, and so it cannot have final say in whatever decision is made.
The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once famously wrote "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". We might say the same of phenomenal experience and the hemisphere hypothesis, and by implication, ritual as well. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi confounds the smooth immaculate surfaces that a purely functionalist aesthetic would aspire to. The multiplying wrinkles of an aging facial complexion, the sagging skin, the weakening tissues, all these offend a utilitarian sensibility (not to mention the contemporary ethos of hedonism). Recall that the austere philosopher W.V.O. Quine once said, of what he considered to be an unnecessarily complicated idea, that its "overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes." But the process of aging is accompanied by both the overpopulation of aches and pains, as well as countless wabi-sabi rituals intended to inculcate a sense of 'aging with grace'. Though we may resent being reminded of the ineluctable march of time, when this is set "within the perspective of the infinite" it becomes a process we might not only tolerate, but come to a deeper understanding of, and even celebrate. There are also many rituals that are best engaged in with a corresponding feeling of pride, self-efficacy, and magnanimity (the antithesis of pusillanimity). The participants take on their role, strive to excel in its performance to their utmost. They don't hide from expressing, but rather have the courage of their conviction to exult in displays of the immeasurable virtues (Brahmaviharas) of peace, love, compassion, and joy. This can be essential to conducting a ritual properly, as minimal pride may translate into minimal effort and mediocre results (it is crucial to note that "ritual effectiveness" and "instrumental effectiveness" are not necessarily isomorphic concepts).
XunziWe are dealing with perspectives, with standpoints, with how we attend to the world. Joshu once said, "There are only two diseases: one is riding an ass to search for the ass; the other is riding an ass and being unwilling to dismount. If, having found the ass, one is unwilling to dismount, this disease is most difficult to cure." When we see the “how” as the “what” we are still riding that ass. But when the “what” becomes the “how” we have found the ass and are ready to dismount. This is harder for some people than for others.
Zak Stein's humanistic ethos would be familiar to the Confucian Xunzi, who was concerned with the ethics of filial piety embodied in ritual propriety. From the neoplatonist tradition, John Vervaeke once said "I talk about an “ecology of practices” because there is no “panacea practice”. Every practice has strengths, but it also has complementary weaknesses." Rituals may be similar to the notion of 'spiritual practices'. That may or may not coincide with Vervaeke's meaning, but is likely indistinguishable from Xunzi's. And from within Zen, the widely used expression "chop wood, carry water", modernized as "washing dishes" by Thich Nhat Hanh, captures the universal nature of this concept.
The various cultural associations that have accreted around the word “ritual” allow it to be used in differing contexts. On the one hand, this makes it a very useful word. But on the other hand, the problem (at least for the left hemisphere) is that we may not know which of the opposing definitions should be used in a given context. That’s the same problem we’ve seen with other words McGilchrist uses, most notable of which is the “un-word” itself - “God”. So let’s try to disambiguate the various senses in which the word “ritual” is used, while keeping in mind that two opposing meanings can both be correct, so long as they are read in context. In chapter 48, “Assume Formlessness”, of his book The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene makes the same point that Laozi made long ago. In the Tao Te Ching chapter 76 (Wing-Tsit Chan trans.) we read:
When man is born, he is tender and weak. At death he is stiff and hard.
All things, the grass as well as the trees, are tender and supple while alive. When dead, they are withered and dried.
Therefore the stiff and the hard are companions of death. The tender and the weak are companions of life.
Therefore, if the army is strong, it will not win. If a tree is stiff, it will break.
The strong and the great are inferior, while the tender and the weak are superior.
Greene associates “a coat of armor, a rigid system, a comforting ritual” all with rigidity. In one sense he is correct. But why is there this association between the word “ritual” and constraint and rigidity, rather than liberation and flexibility? There are some very good reasons for this. Recall that there are two main ways we can view rituals, according to the hemisphere hypothesis. And in a culture that has been captured by the left hemisphere, literal-minded people are likely to interpret ritual in a very rigid way, as a way to re-inscribe dogma and canalize behavior, rather than as a way to imaginatively inhabit new ways of being with each other and the world (Wengrow and Graeber). So in the context of fundamentalism the word “ritual” refers to a very literal approach that is rigid and conceptually inflexible. But the connections between the imagination, ritual, and reality, are many. McGilchrist wrote "My contention is that imagination, far from deceiving us, is the only means whereby we experience reality: it is the place where our individual creative consciousness meets the creative cosmos as a whole." To quote Richard Feynman: "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there." Barry Stephenson wrote "Through the twentieth century the idea of ritual impoverishment develops: one of the ills of Western culture is the absence of ritual." Could the Anthropocene be defined in part as a failure of the ritual imagination, "the creative power that enables us to enter into what is there"?
Within our left hemisphere captured culture, we’ve responded to the oppression of literalism with an equally misguided cultural relativism (contemporary postmodernism) and the slippery slope to nihilism. The left hemisphere is prone to such wild swings between extremes because the world remains opaque to it (two dimensional, flat, surface). True emancipation will have to wait until we can see the world within a right hemisphere context, where everything is transparent (three dimensional, depth, interior), and where ritual is understood as “embodied metaphor” and “enabling constraints”. Claude Lévi-Strauss once said “ritual debases thought in order that it should meet the requirements of life". Or in Vervaeke’s words, “ritual aligns you with the deepest structures of reality."
This is the view of a number of cultural anthropologists, including the authors of The Dawn of Everything, as well as philosophers like Xunzi and McGilchrist. Recall that Xunzi wrote “with ritual, all things can change”. Notably, this sentence seems quite absurd in our postmodern world. Also noteworthy is that, within Zen Buddhism, whose associations with the right hemisphere way of attending are many, there appears to be an almost explicit association between ritual and formlessness. In Beginnings in Ritual Studies, Ronald Grimes writes:
"Despite its proverbial iconoclasm and antiritualism, Zen is infused with ritual. Meditation, enlightenment, and direct transmission do not preclude ritual; they presuppose it. …The most obvious textual source for understanding the relation between Zen practice and ritual is the Heart Sutra, which is chanted regularly by Buddhists of both Rinzai and Soto schools. In the following passage, "form" includes what we usually mean by "ritual": “Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness.” (Conze 1958, 81) [In North American Zen centers and monasteries ritual is more likely to be discussed as the practice of mindfulness than as an example of the form/emptiness dialectic.]"
After reading this, one might be tempted to ask: Why have ritual at all if “form [ritual] is emptiness”? Why not just go straight to emptiness and ‘cut out the middle man’? This gets to the very heart of the hemisphere hypothesis itself, and it has to do with the paradox of the coincidence of opposites. It is precisely by means of rituals that formlessness is realized, which is why the Buddhist priest Richard Payne wrote, the "practice of ritual opens up the experience to an awareness of the moment in which one can be free, spontaneous, and fully present". This is a very deep and profound truth. And related to this paradox, in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Feng Youlan writes that "according to Chanism [Zen], the best method of cultivation... is not to practice any cultivation... there is no place for deliberate effort". And yet, "cultivation through non-cultivation is itself a kind of cultivation... If this is so, does not the wonderful Tao also lie in serving one's family and the state? ...we should be forced to answer yes. The Chan Masters themselves, however, did not give this logical answer. It was reserved for the Neo-Confucianists to do so."
Again, Feng Youlan (paraphrasing): "Confucius said "Take your stand in the li [rituals, ceremonies, proper conduct]." (Analects, VIII, 8.) "Not to know the li is to have no means of standing." (XX, 3.) Thus when he says that at thirty he could "stand," he means that he then understood the li and so could practice proper conduct. Confucius felt a sympathetic understanding for the traditional institutions, rituals, music, and literature of the early Chou dynasty. Mo Tzu, on the contrary, questioned their validity and usefulness, and tried to replace them with something that was simpler but, in his view, more useful." This was connected to the Mohist criticism that rituals can be used to maintain unjust social stratifications. But Confucianists were revolutionary in the sense that they believed rituals should apply to everyone equally (p165). And for them "the meaning of the ceremonies is poetic, not religious, a view further developed by Xunzi." Life was understood as the link between heaven and earth. "Heaven gives them birth, Earth gives them nourishment, and man gives them perfection. As to how this perfection is accomplished, Dong Zhongshu said that it is done through li (ritual) and yüeh (music), that is to say, through civilization and culture." Xunzi wrote:
“By ritual, Heaven and Earth harmoniously combine; By ritual, the sun and the moon radiantly shine; By ritual, the four seasons in progression arise; By ritual, the stars move orderly across the skies; By ritual, the great rivers through their courses flow; By ritual, the myriad things all thrive and grow; By ritual, for love and hate proper measure is made; By ritual, on joy and anger fit limits are laid. By ritual, compliant subordinates are created. By ritual, enlightened leaders are generated; With ritual, all things can change yet not bring chaos. But deviate from ritual and you face only loss. Is not ritual perfect indeed! It establishes a lofty standard that is ultimate of its kind, and none under Heaven can add to or subtract from it.” (Eric Hutton trans. 2014)
“The meaning of ritual is deep indeed. He who tries to enter it with the kind of perception that distinguishes hard and white, same and different, will drown there. The meaning of ritual is great indeed. He who tries to enter it with the uncouth and inane theories of the system-makers will perish there. The meaning of ritual is lofty indeed. He who tries to enter with the violent and arrogant ways of those who despise common customs and consider themselves to be above other men will meet his downfall there.” (Burton Watson trans. 1963)
In "Xunzi’s Theory of Ritual Revisited", Ori Tavor points out that for Xunzi, ritual functions on two levels: On the social level to ensure harmonious interactions in society, and as a tool for moral self-cultivation of the individual. "Ritual is the marker left by sages, a prescriptive script or guide for the rest of humanity to follow, inducing a transformative experience to enable one to develop a relationship with the divine... explained in terms of correspondence or attunement to the process of reality." "T.C. Kline, in his discussion of Xunzi’s theory of ritual, [also] directs our attention to the double role it fulfills. Ritual, he argues, begins with a negative step, one of constraint... a set of external restrictions that need to be internalized. But, emphasizes Kline, while this is a necessary condition for the process of ritualization, it is not a sufficient one. After the constraints are properly internalized and embodied, ritual participation allows us to see the world in a new way. “Ritual practice,” concludes Kline, “gives us access to new categories for seeing and evaluating the world both through direct performance of social roles embodied in the ritual order as well as through learning the spoken and symbolic vocabulary and grammar of ritual performance.” Tavor concludes:
"The connection between ritual and performance arts has been a subject of great interest... Ritual, like a scripted play, is subjunctive, a form of contingent or hypothetical action. Ritual, in this sense, is concerned with the domain of “as-if” [metaphor] rather than “as-is” (Turner 1983: 235). Ritual performances create an alternative version of reality, an order that is self-consciously different from other possible worlds. For Xunzi, the highly symbolic and subjunctive nature of ritual is of such major importance that he chooses it as the final conclusion of his “Discourse on Ritual” chapter, claiming that serving the dead as if they were alive and giving visible shape to what is originally formless represents the apex of civilized behavior."
One might read the Four Books and Five Classics to gain a more complete understanding. It is possible to confuse the homonyms li (ritual) and li (rational principle). The traditional Chinese character for ritual is 禮, and 礼 is the simplified Chinese and Japanese character with the same meaning (and 𠃞 is an ancient form), while 理 is the character for “rational principle”. (For example, Jeremy Lent coined the neologism "liology" several years ago, but it's important to note that he was referring to the “rational principle” concept.) The etymological history here shows that these are related concepts, so we may be talking about "differences of degree and not of kind". That said, both Confucius and Xunzi are referring to ritual (perhaps the broader of the two definitions), as is McGilchrist. So I'll now suggest that the most revealing way to read Xunzi in this section may be from the perspective of the hemisphere hypothesis. As Xunzi notes "He who tries to enter it [ritual] with the kind of perception that distinguishes... will drown there.” In other words, the right hemisphere is alive to the possibility of a sacred cosmos, and for its way of attending all is transparent, all becomes "embodied metaphor". (Recall that "embodied metaphor" is McGilchrist's shorthand definition of "ritual".) But, if we try to understand ritual "with the kind of perception that distinguishes", that is to say, if we try to understand it by means of the left hemisphere, then all we will see are empty and meaningless practices that in themselves cannot change our heart. And thus we "drown".
Xunxi uses the literary tool of hyperbole of course, and like all great works of literature he should be understood figuratively. He writes "with ritual, all things can change yet not bring chaos. But deviate from ritual and you face only loss." Here again we see the connection between ritual and the right hemisphere way of attending. Because we will indeed meet our downfall if the proper hemispheric asymmetry is inverted and the Master is deposed. There are still other reasons that support this reading of Xunzi. Consider that among the rich philosophical traditions he synthesized in his writing was the dual aspect monism of Taoism. And as we know, the influence of Taoism is very clear in McGilchrist's writing as well.
So if we conceive of ritual as inherently a way of attending, such that all the world is transparent embodied metaphor, then what is it that this metaphor reveals to us? What is it that we see? I think we see those 'ontological primitives', those highest values, and chief among them is certainly love. In other words, the relationship between ritual and love isn't one of mutual exclusion, but more akin to positive reinforcement. This was also the insight of the Neo-platonists, as Vervaeke noted, who believed that ritual orients people towards the cultivation of virtues such as love.
Implict throughout all this is that critcal difference between instrumentalism and realism, between the literal and the metaphorical, between the opaque and the transparent, between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, between 'mere matter in motion' and 'processual presencing'. That's the 'difference that makes a difference', to quote Bateson. On the frontiers of medicine, Michael Levin said: "We do all these bottom-up interventions now because we treat cells and tissues as simple mechanical machines. But they're not simple mechanical machines. They're agential beings with problem solving capacities. In the future, biomedicine is going to look a lot more like a kind of somatic psychiatry than like chemistry." More than just problem solving capacity, cells and tissues are able to discern nascent forms of nous, to include both meaning and purpose. So if we describe machines as 'things doing actions', could cells be described as 'agents enacting rituals'? Xunxi might've agreed, but he wouldn't stop there; for him all of creation partakes in the numinous.
As a ubiquitous aspect of culture, present in both religious
and secular contexts, rituals may be engaged in for a variety of reasons, or without any knowledge of their value whatsoever. The study of ritology, "ritual studies" [cf. Jeremy Lent's "liology", which is very different] suggests that rites are composed of rituals. And both of these (along with ceremonies, etc.) differ from traditions, customs, behavioral scripts, and behavioral phylogenies (Ernst Mayer, Behavior and Systematics). Though outwardly similar in appearance, what sets former apart is the difference between instrumentalism (Skinner/ Pentland) and realism (Stein), as noted before. Because what the left hemisphere sees as the literal 'liturgical script', the right hemisphere sees as 'embodied metaphor' (ritual). There may be a spectrum here, such that those acts which do not make sense when viewed literally, may invite a more metaphorical and thus ritualistic interpretation. But this isn't necessarily always the case. Actions may just as well make equal sense (or alternatively remain incoherent) when viewed from either a literal and metaphorical perspective. So what does make the difference? It is whether something is (or is not) revealed by the form of attention we deploy to the network of relationships in which we are embedded (something John Deely, via Peirce, called 'suprasubjectivity').
Insofar as it is associated with value realism, ritual involves deploying the right hemisphere's form of attention, which is capable of seeing through the surface to cohere with the depth, the divine. It should also be noted that there is the experience of movement and flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), the feeling of a seamless whole (that the discrete minutiae, in a sense, don't matter), that attends to the experience of ritual performance, and why one might say that ritual epitomizes the view of process philosophy. McGilchrist has noted that this form of attention also corresponds to the right hemisphere, whereas the left hemisphere sees a paralyzed world composed of discontinuous moments and unrelated elements. In addition to McGilchrist's connection of ritual to the right hemisphere, Zak Stein places ritual near the heart of something he called the "sacred complex". Recall that Sartre once said that, to avoid anguish and vertigo it is necessary "that I apprehend in myself a strict psychological determinism." Reification. Petrification. The Biblical heart of stone. The flight from freedom to a nonhuman stasis. Is the ritual context exculpatory in this same way? From a left hemisphere perspective ritual is purely deterministic. But from a right hemisphere perspective, it is liberating in the sense that it reunites us, and reengages us, within the flow of perennial cycles, cycles in which we live and move, grow and develop. Rituals need not relieve us from our obligations to love one another, but rather they can help to enable us to fulfill our obligations. So rather than the flight from life and freedom that escapism offers, the power of ritual lies in helping us to realize a deeper unity with the cosmic source of life.
Consider sacrifice and salvific acts, offerings to restore a right relationship between us and the sacred order, which are found in the earliest known forms of worship, and in all parts of the world. These exculpatory acts can be broadly interpreted in one of two ways. They either free us from needing to fulfill our obligations of love (that is, to care for each other and the world), or they reunite us with the sacred order so we are able to fulfill our obligations of love. Briefly, they either end or restore our relationships and responsibilities. You can tell which figurative interpretation will tend to predominate according to how the culture views their relationship with each other and the world around them: If they see themselves as interconnected, then exculpatory acts serve to restore the important relationships and the responsibilities that come with them. If they see themselves as fragmented and isolated, then they undermine and sever them because the broader implications are as opaque as their solipsism. What makes a culture tend more toward one view or the other? That is a bigger question whose answer involves both material and psychological components.
Now, supposing we grant this line of reasoning, that rituals need not be rigid, and on the contrary can be liberatory, what then should we make of the numerous horrors and atrocities that have been committed in the name of ritual (or in the name of anything sacred, for that matter)? Among the most shocking of these were rituals of human sacrifice, most famously (though not exclusively) among Mesoamerican cultures such as the Aztecs. If rituals can be used to justify this, is that not reason enough to avoid them altogether? But, before we ‘toss the baby out with the bathwater’, it’s worth noting that more mundane explanations for these rituals have been proposed by cultural anthropologists, such as the sort of politics that emerge in stratified societies where elites must find sufficiently convincing ways to retain their upper class position. And, setting aside Steven Pinker’s arguments in The Better Angels of our Nature, such horrors have continued today outside of an ostensibly ritualized context. All of which suggests that perverse rituals have at least as much to do with the machinations of power and propaganda, and the co-opting of ritual by the state apparatus, as they have to do with the sacred (if anything at all). And so, it may not be the ritual context that is the problem here, so much as the left hemisphere’s delusional ‘anti-value’ imposing itself upon that context.
In their book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow describe early cultures of the Fertile Crescent: “Among upland groups, furthest removed from a dependence on agriculture, we find stratification and violence becoming entrenched; while their lowland counterparts, who linked the production of crops to important social rituals, come out looking decidedly more egalitarian; and much of this egalitarianism relates to an increase in the economic and social visibility of women, reflected in their art and ritual". What ultimately explains violent cultures? They suggest: "...mutual and self-conscious differentiation, or schismogenesis... The more that uplanders came to organize their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, the more lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism – and vice versa. …one group of people seems to make a great display of going against some highly characteristic behaviour of their neighbours.” As the schismogenetic process ensues, people come to define themselves increasingly against each other. “It affected everything from the configuration of households, law, ritual and art, to conceptions of what it meant to be an admirable human being…” The ‘antitypes’ of Athens and Sparta are a perhaps more well known example. It is tempting to surmise that cultural schismogenesis not only might explain increasingly violent ritual practices, but it may also provide us with a tantalizing opportunity to test some of the broader predictions of the hemisphere hypothesis. That said, just as the hemisphere hypothesis doesn’t correlate with contemporary polarized politics, there's no guarantee we would meet with any greater success here.
We're taking a big picture view here, but it does all come back to values and 'presencing to reality'. For McGilchrist the 'hierarchy of values' is a very real part of reality. That's his 'values-based ontology'. That's just metaphysics. And to understand rituals we need phenomenology. We need to be able to compare the different sort of worlds that the hemispheres disclose to us, why they reveal the world to us in such different ways, and what these opposing views mean for us.
For the right hemisphere, rituals are processes that are specifically set aside for 'presencing to reality'. They don't necessarily need to serve any specific utilitarian purpose at all. In fact, the most ostentatious rituals often appear to be decidedly noninstrumental and anti-utilitarian (though the left hemisphere will always cynically suspect that there is some hidden utilitarian agenda). Even if there are utilitarian benefits, these are generally regarded as incidental, or of secondary importance. That is to say, they are only important insofar as they reveal or deepen our relationship with the ‘field of value’. The right hemisphere is able to presence to a values-based ontology, rediscover awe and wonder, and resacralize a left hemisphere captured world. [Mircea Eliade framed the plight of "modern man" as that of living in a "desacralized cosmos".] For the left hemisphere, ritual is nothing more than a tool in the service of regulation, control, and the projection of power. Taken to extremes, that can result in the elimination of freedom and the debasement of humanity. This is what happens when power and control are the only values we understand. This is the world described by Michel Foucault's notions of 'governmentality', the 'carceral system’, and how these create 'docile bodies' trained to slavishly adhere to protocol. It produces a sort of featureless conformity, a self imposed incarceration, a dismal and deluded world.
Reality is 'always and everywhere' available for us to presence to, whether we are engaged in ritual action or not. But if that is so, then why do we have rituals? It seems to be precisely because our phenomenology is a coincidentia oppositorum. We are the union of these two distinct orientations. Neither the right nor the left hemisphere’s mode of attention, taken alone, can sustain us. We need them both. So one might say that what the ritual context provides is an 'orientation to processes’ that increases the asymmetric bias in the direction of the right hemisphere. It is 1) as open to right hemisphere value-ception as possible and 2) as free from left hemisphere instrumentalism as possible. In our world, this directional bias will always vary. There are times when we can be in the flow of ritual experience, and other times when the cool gaze of the left hemisphere will preclude that possibility. So having the ability to (enter the right hemispehere mode of attention via specific 'embodied metaphors' and thereby) periodically 'rebalance' these tendencies is essential. When Xunzi wrote "By ritual, Heaven and Earth harmoniously combine" he might've been trying to explain that the only way to understand the cosmos is through the right hemisphere, and the right hemisphere presences to that values-based ontology through a ritualistic mode of engagement. What is thereby disclosed? That the world doesn't exist for any instrumental purpose at all (extrinsic value). It does what it does because it is good, true, and beautiful, etc. (intrinsic value). And the more we can bring an awareness of this nature into our daily lives, the better.
Bayo Akomolafe and Charles TaylorBayo Akomolafe has been on a journey spanning worlds. As he explained, "for as long as I can remember, I have always been [culturally] white. ...when I sought out Yoruba healer-priests who consulted ‘smaller’ gods and spoke with cowries, ram horns, and elaborate rituals, it was my way of wanting to be indigenous again." There was a problem though. His received notions of how the world works conflicted with his desire. So how did he resolve this? As he explains, "the scientific method, the curious rituals through which the scientific priestly caste alchemize drops of truth from the base elements of the familiar... are [considered to be] one ontological decibel above other forms of knowing, inherently privileged with truth." By comparison, "...the medicine man might... invite the seeker to perform rituals or produce objects that on the face of it have absolutely nothing to do with a reported problem... in a Newtonian arboreal world where effect neatly follows cause. But in a rhizomatic world, where cause and effect dynamics have to be thrown aside in favour of orgasmic intra-actions that are mutually co-constitutive, the inappropriate thing to do might be the very thing one needs to do."
So it was the rhizomatic world of mutually co-constitutive intra-action that, for him, reconciled the cultural cognitive dissonance produced by his desire for indigeneity and ritualization. (Note: While Akomolafe replaced an 'arboreal ontology' with a 'flat ontology', there are other paths to reconciliation, including those that aspire to combine the virtues of both.) Since then he has been a keen critic of the alienating effects produced by delusional worldviews. "The rituals of attending to what the world is doing are displaced by new modern rituals of trying to escape it." In the face of this situation, how might we respond? "Make your existence a ritual that honors everything your body and words touch." "The precious premise of such rituals is the transformation of normal ways of perceiving reality." He has been consistently seeking out and working with others who share his convictions, and together they've been creating a project that, in his words "is very dear to our aspirations to provide generative spaces for the exploration of new collective practices and rituals that attune us to an entangling world." If such rituals are not actually new in themselves, they are new to the unique places, times, and agential contexts that we are situated within.
Charles Taylor is a philosopher with an extensive body of work. His name appears in several places in this article alone. His latest book, Cosmic Connections, includes reflections on the nature and place of ritual. Paraphrasing from this work:
The “theoretic” phase of evolving culture, Merlin Donald argues, must have been preceded by what he calls a “mythical” one, in which the original sense of the common life was expressed in story (myth) and periodic ritual reconnections to the gods, spirits, forces which figure in the story. This might be collective dance and music, or invocations of the spirits of the woods, or of the deer, of mountains or rivers. We have always been aware of and concerned with our deeply interdependent relation to the cosmos, and the forces within it. It is what gives us the wisdom and the strength to realize a full life, and we regain the strength to realize this full potential by reconnecting, through ritual, story, ceremony, solemn assembly, to this place. We never totally lost this need, and the skills, including those of ritual invocation, we had in the earlier phase still survive among our poets, writers, painters, and composers. (Earlier Romantic poetry, for example, had a ritual-like nature.) Throughout human history, early or contemporary, the most important rituals are what one might call “rituals of restoration”: they are meant to reconnect to the powerful sources of strength and well-being, whether they be Roman sacrifices which aim to restore the pax deorum [peace of the gods] or contemporary festive celebrations, such as weddings, which rededicate us to our essential common values.
David Graeber and David Wengrow
For a more functionalist perspective on ritual, we can turn back to a book we encountered earlier. In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow placed considerable emphasis on the role of ritual in the creation of new ways of living (as did Émile Durkheim and Roy Rappaport). Like McGilchrist, they proposed an inversion of our way of thinking. To wit, that "anything we might consider 'statecraft', from diplomacy to the stockpiling of resources, existed in order to facilitate the rituals, rather than the other way around". Certainly Xunzi, as we've seen above, would agree. The implication is that when our "ritual play" introduces new "ritual calendars" over a modified "ritual landscape" the result is the emergence of new ways of being with each other and the world that are capable of uniting people across both space and time (intergenerational transmission). They write:
- “anthropologists often have such trouble defining what a ‘ritual’ even is... Some have gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only really exists during rituals… festivals are moments where entirely different social structures take over, such as the ‘youth abbeys’ that seem to have existed across medieval Europe, with their Boy Bishops, May Queens, Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason and Princes of Sots, who during the Christmas, Mayday or carnival season temporarily took over many of the functions of government and enacted a bawdy parody of government’s everyday forms. So there’s another school of thought which says that… The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world”
- “The most sophisticated, and to our minds compelling, proposals for how
to resolve the dilemma are currently Maurice Bloch’s (2008) notion of the ‘transcendental’ versus ‘transactional’ realms; and Seligman et al.’s (2008) argument that ritual creates a ‘subjunctive’ or ‘as if’
domain of order, consciously set apart from a reality that is always seen in a contrasting light, as fragmented and chaotic. Ritual creates a world which is marked off as standing apart from ordinary life, but is also where essentially imaginary, ongoing institutions (like clans, empires, etc.) exist and are maintained.”
- “Here is where things get complicated. To say that, for most of human history, the ritual year served as a kind of compendium of social possibilities (as it did in the European Middle Ages, for instance, when hierarchical pageants alternated with rambunctious carnivals), doesn’t really do the matter justice. This is because festivals are already seen as extraordinary, somewhat unreal, or at the very least as departures from the everyday order. Whereas, in fact, the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many – perhaps even most – people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time.”
- “[The Olmec] presided over a remarkable spread of cultural influence radiating from ceremonial centres, which may only have been densely occupied on specific occasions (such as ritual ball games) scheduled in concert with the demands of the agricultural calendar, and largely empty at other times of year. In other words, if these were ‘states’ in any sense at all, then they are probably best defined as seasonal versions of what Clifford Geertz once called ‘theatre states’, where organized power was realized only periodically, in grand but fleeting spectacles. Anything we might consider ‘statecraft’, from diplomacy to the stockpiling of resources, existed in order to facilitate the rituals, rather than the other way round. …In fact, nothing in Chavín’s monumental landscape really seems concerned with secular government at all. There are no obvious military fortifications or administrative quarters. Almost everything, on the other hand, seems to have something to do with ritual performance and the revelation or concealment of esoteric knowledge.”
- “...each earthwork was one element in a continuous ritual landscape. The earthworks’ alignments often reference particular segments of the Hopewell calendar (such as the solstices, phases of the moon and so on), with people presumably having to move back and forth regularly between the monuments to complete a full ceremonial cycle. This is complex: one can only imagine the kind of detailed knowledge of stars, rivers and seasons that would have been required to co-ordinate people from hundreds of miles away, such that they might congregate on time for rituals in centres that lasted only for periods of five or six days at a time, over the course of a year. Let alone what it would take to actually transform such a system across the length and breadth of a continent... It’s even possible that when the spectacular burials in Hopewell came to an end around ad 400, it was largely because Hopewell’s work was done. The idiosyncratic nature of its ritual art, for instance, gave way to standardized versions disseminated across the continent; while great treks to fantastic, temporary capitals that rose miraculously from the mud were no longer required to establish ties between groups, who now had a shared idiom for personal diplomacy, a common set of rules for interacting with strangers.”
- “Both in Cahokia and the Classic Maya, managerial activities seem to have focused on the administration of otherworldly matters, notably in the sophistication of their ritual calendars and precise orchestration of sacred space. [Compare with other examples of megalithic architecture, such as in the Old Kingdom of Egypt] These, however, had real-world effects, especially in the areas of city-planning, labour mobilization, public surveillance and careful monitoring of the maize cycle.” [Compare with Christianity’s contributions to the Scientific Revolution.]
- “...the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically – and the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other). ‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort... For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems. ...One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities. ...We have made the case that private property first appears as a concept in sacred contexts, as do police functions and powers of command, along with (in later times) a whole panoply of formal democratic procedures, like election and sortition...”
Roman Krznaric, Stephen Lansing, and Elinor Ostrom
In a recent conversation between
Roman Krznaric and Nate Hagens, they take a deep dive into some of the connections between ritual and social structure described above by Graeber and Wengrow. Paraphrasing Roman Krznaric:
“The Islamic historian from the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun, described asabiyyah, an Arabic word meaning collective solidarity or group feeling, in the Muqaddimah. He said that resilient civilizations have a very strong social glue, social trust, and modes of collective action and social responsibility. And those civilizations which tend to crumble are ones where that social glue falls apart. He looked at the Islamic regime in the south of Spain in the 13th and 14th century, which began to fall apart partly because of growing wealth inequalities where the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. We know that old story. Very few civilizations can survive for a long time with those kinds of long term inequalities. It’s a very clear finding from the studies of civilizational collapse. But there's something missing from his analysis of civilizational rise and fall. He focuses on intra-species solidarity. What's missing is interspecies solidarity to create societies which exist within planetary boundaries or exist within and work with the cycles of the living world.
So how do we create asabiyyah? One idea is citizens assemblies, an ancient Greek tradition that continued in Europe and has re-emerged amazingly in the last 20 years. There’s a new wave of deliberative democracy, direct participation through random selection. It’s the most exciting innovation in democracy since the extension of the franchise to women in the early 20th century. Anyone can set up a citizens assembly in their own town. They tend to come up with much more radical and transformative policy proposals than regular politicians, and tend to take a longer view than the politicians caught up in short term cycles. The French Climate Assembly, and one in Spain, put forward the proposal that ecocide should be a crime in national and international law. They are sowing the seeds of asabiyyah, of social trust, helping to build a new society in the shell of the old, so that in a moment of crisis we are ready.
Another idea recalls the coffeehouses of the 18th century. One of the things that they had was a communal table. You would sit with a stranger, and the table would have on it periodicals and pamphlets. These are places where strangers would discuss the big ideas of the day, like republicanism, anti-slavery, and so on. That's where Daniel Defoe and Tom Paine were doing their thing. In the UK today there are 30,000 coffee shops. Imagine if you put in communal tables in each of them and there were just 10 conversations between strangers a day, that would make over a hundred million conversations a year. Theodore Zeldin created the Oxford Muse to organize these things called conversation meals, where we would invite strangers from a city, maybe a hundred people, sometimes a thousand people in a public park. We'd invite them for a meal. Rich and poor, black and white, you know, different religions. And instead of giving them a menu of food, we gave them a menu of conversation with questions about life on it. There's all these social spaces that we need to reclaim for building asabiyyah, for building resilience, for having conversations, for sharing, for communal food. These actions don't necessarily change the system right now, but they start eroding it at the edges, so when the time comes we have enough of that social capital to rebuild and reform. It’s part of 'bending, not breaking'.
"If you go to the Spanish city of Valencia on the east coast, outside the west door of the cathedral, every Thursday at 12 noon, you can witness a ritual known as the
Tribunal of Waters, the Tribunal de les Aigües. And this is a
water court, a grassroots from below water court, which may be Europe's oldest legal democratic institution. Nine black cloaked figures sit in a semicircle outside the door of the Apostles. In Latin America a body's been set up called the Latin American Tribunal of Waters, partly inspired by the Valencia Tribunal of Waters." Krznaric went on to later describe "
Subak" (see Stephen Lansing’s
Perfect Order or John Miller's
A Crude Look at the Whole). This is a very complex example still present in contemporary Bali where ritual systems of "water temples" are able to align natural systems and human systems, as both
Steven Lansing and
Florian Doerr noted in several videos. We can hear a narrator say “Subak reflects the
Tri Hita Karana philosophy, which means the “three causes for prosperity”. Balinese believe that well-being is only possible if people are in harmony with realms of the spirit, nature, and among people themselves.” Recall that
McGilchrist echoed this, almost verbatim, as he frequently remarks "There are three things that make us fully human, and make us fulfilled: belonging to a cohesive social group, belonging in the natural world, and belonging in the spiritual world."
Following a presentation he gave to the Long Now Foundation, Lansing was
asked “Are the Balinese rituals actually useful in explaining Subak coordination, or is it just a purely selfish system? Do you really need all this religion stuff?” Lansing answered “We can build a very simple computer model, and it will grow water temple structures. But that's just a mathematical proof of concept. The real problem is getting people to agree to coordinate. It takes a rare level of cooperation to make this system work. That’s the tough part.” And so, rituals ‘metaphorically embody’ the deeper values behind this level of cooperation. Or as
Lansing put it, “I think the performance of those rituals is crucial to keeping people in the
frame of mind that this can actually work.” Lansing
noted within his slide presentation that local support for the Subak system only came belatedly. A 1988 Final Report produced by the Asian Development Bank concluded that "The substitution of the "high technology and bureaucratic" solution in the event proved counterproductive..." This wouldn’t surprise McGilchrist by any means, as he frequently rails against unwarranted faith in technological or bureaucratic solutions. The real missing ingredient in our sustainable systems is
translucency, such that the values to which we respond become visible. And I think that this is what ritual helps to make possible, as it provides a sort of implicit language of embodied metaphor.
In her book Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom drew on similar studies of common pool resources as those metioned by Krznaric, including examples of irrigation systems in Spain, Nepal, Switzerland, and Japan, and fisheries in Maine and Indonesia. (She also had experience in Kenya and Nigeria, and made research trips to Bolivia, Mexico, India, Australia, Philippines, Poland, and Zimbabwe.) For Ostrom, the values of communication, trust, and responsiveness (values of the RH) are elevated above sheer power and control (values of the LH). Whenever power and control come to dominate system dynamics it can easily be viewed as the consequence of a breakdown of trust, communication, and responsiveness, the fragmentation of social systems, and the loss of connection and relatedness. Overall, that is an insurrection of the sort McGilchrist describes.
Kristian Rönn, author of The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future) said "What makes AI unique is that, just like human intelligence, it’s sort of a dual use technology: we can use it for good or for bad. As with any type of dual use technology, what it ends up being used for depends entirely on the incentive structures in which it’s deployed. If they incentivize power seeking amongst nation states, and profit maximizing for enterprises, then I think we have a catastrophe in front of us." So the question becomes can we create incentive structures that don't become captured by the left hemisphere? Rönn proposed creating "distributed reputational markets" that, like citizens assemblies, would better reflect the broad, open awareness of the right hemisphere by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd and avoid the pitfalls of ESG metrics.
As noted above, a ritual is an "embodied metaphor" through which the transcendent can be glimpsed and aligned with. Was there ever any separation between the mundane and the transcendent? No. But what a ritual encourages is a shift in our focal depth, in our attention, in our way of engaging with the world, such that we are able to "see through" these actions and presence to the values that were there, 'behind' them, all along. By encouraging this shift, rituals can help us recover alignment (or coupling) when it is lost, and help us to maintain such alignment thereafter. The example of Subak demonstrates as much. But if the transparency of rituals is lost and they become opaque, if they become more about the superficial than the deeper values to which we are drawn to respond, then the evocative capacity of such rituals and their ability to help align us with the values of flourishing is lost as well.
It appears that for the Balinese, the rituals of Subak are still transparent, because although they are routine, and to the naive observer the actions may appear superficial (the sharing of food, the distribution of holy water, etc.), they also understand that these actions metaphorically embody deeper intrinsic values, such as individual, community, and agro-ecological health, and so on. That said, the consequences of the Green Revolution linger on in Bali, and as Stephen Lansing pointed out, this caused disruption to the carefully attuned water temple system. For example, some Balinese continue to spread artificial fertilizers over their crops, and this has detrimental effects on coral reefs downstream. As they struggle to adapt in the face of a rapidly changing world while maintaining their alignment with Tri Hita Karana values, the sort of "ritual feedback" that exists between the natural and the numinous, enabling attunement to both contexts, will need to be extended beyond the current Subak system boundaries.
Nikos Salingaros and Christopher Alexander
Nikos Salingaros is a physicist, mathematician, and architectural theorist best known for his work on urban theory and design philosophy. In 1982, he started a long-term collaboration with Christopher Alexander, becoming one of the editors of The Nature of Order, Alexander's four-volume masterwork on aesthetics and the geometric processes of nature. Salingaros’ writings similarly focus on biophilia as an essential component of the design of the human environment. (Urban theory seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance today, with notable work being done by Michael Eliason, among others.) It is notable that Alexander in "A City is Not a Tree" (1965) and Salingaros in "A Schizophrenic Approach to Building Cities" (2019) both warn of the danger of schizophrenia. A connection between Christopher Alexander and Iain McGilchrist was the subject of a paper by Or Ettlinger, and McGilchrist implicates modern design theory in the fourth of seven possible reasons he gives in The Master and His Emissary (2019) for why the left hemisphere’s ‘take’ on the world has come to dominate the way we think: "We have created a world around us which... reflects the LH's priorities and its vision." He specifically mentions ornamentation later:
“Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occasioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.”
In speaking of design and ornament, one might ask: What is the difference between ornament and art more generally? The response often given is that ornament is decorative, and so it is subsumed within the applied or decorative arts, with interior design being a still further division of this category. The point is that an ornamented object has a function that an object crafted without any adornment might fulfill equally well. In distinction to this, the fine arts comprise those things made or done primarily for aesthetics or creative expression. The relevance of these divisions is sometimes contested, and the distinctions (such that there are any) may be drawn differently. In A Pattern Language Christopher Alexander wrote:
"The main purpose of ornament in the environment - in buildings, rooms, and public spaces - is to make the world more whole by knitting it together... doors and windows are always important for ornament, because they are places of connection between the elements of buildings and the life in and around them. And exactly the same happens at hundreds of other places in the environment; in rooms, around our houses, in the kitchen, on a wall, along the surface of a path, on tops of roofs, around a column - in fact, anywhere at all where there are edges between things which are imperfectly knit together, where materials or objects meet, and where they change... embellish the rooms themselves with parts of your life which become the natural ornaments around you." (Pattern 249: Ornament, 1977)
In The Nature of Order, Book One, Alexander writes: "We shall find, necessarily, a post-Cartesian and non-mechanistic... view of the world in which the relative degree of life of different wholes is a commonplace and crucial way of talking about things. Such a new view of order will create a new relationship between ideas of ornament and function. In present views of architectural order, function is something we can understand intellectually; it can be analyzed through the Cartesian mechanistic canon. Ornament, on the other hand, is something we may like, but cannot understand intellectually. One is serious, the other frivolous. Ornament and function are therefore cut off from each other. There is no conception of order which lets us see buildings as both functional and ornamental at the same time. The view of order which I describe in this book is very different. It is even-handed with regard to ornament and function. Order is profoundly functional and profoundly ornamental. There is no difference between ornamental order and functional order. We learn to see that while they seem different, they are really only different aspects of a single kind of order." (p22)
And again: "In nature there is essentially nothing that can be identified as a pure ornament without function. Conversely, in nature there is essentially no system that can be identified as functional which is not also beautiful in an ornamental sense. In nature there simply is no division between ornament and function. Traditional buildings, too, often had a unity of ornament and function similar to that which occurs in nature. But within contemporary ideas about buildings, on the other hand, the division has existed. The more conscious architecture of our own time has largely failed in this respect. We have had function as a mechanistic concept, and ornament as a superficial and stylistic concept. Neither has been satisfactory. Indeed, in our time, the separation of ornament and function has been one of the symptoms of the breakdown of architecture." (p404)
According to Alexander's metaphysics, ornaments display a kind of coherence, harmonization, or alignment with a "field of centers," which may display aspects of "local symmetry" (as well as hierarchy, fractal repetition, and other qualities that are more or less difficult to describe). Key to all this however is a sense of wholeness, the perception of a gestalt, and the experience of beauty. Under the subheading "Function arising out of ornament" he describes the connection between his notion of centers and ornaments, then connects this with function, while indicating the asymmetric relationship that is present between ornament and function. The recognition of this asymmetry is consistent with McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis. As Alexander writes (still in Book One):
"Because of our still-prevailing 20th-century viewpoint, students are convinced that “beauty” comes about as a result of the concern with practical efficiency. In other words, if you make it practical and efficient, then it will follow that it becomes beautiful. Form follows function! But if we look at the examples I have given, it seems very unlikely that this is what took place when they were made. They were made deeply practical, yes. But they became deeply practical because their makers tried to make the centers strong. Example after example suggests emphatically that this is what came first: making the centers beautiful was the driving force. The practical efficiency that came along with it was a vital part of the package. But it was never the driving force in the mechanistic sense that we believe in today. Yet, today, this is so difficult to accept. In discussing these examples with students, I have often had a hard time convincing them that good and functional structures achieve their quality from a conscious effort by the maker to make the geometric field of centers. The essence of this point — because it puts its emphasis on beauty, not on puritanism — has seemed immoral, even heretical, to many of my students. They — often the most rational and most intelligent students— have an almost moralistic passion in their desire to prove that these beautiful things must have been produced by purely functional thinking. When I point out that these structures have a highly formal, geometric field of centers in them, they shy away from this thought possibly because it sounds to them as though I am claiming something flippant or immoral, while they are thinking that since these things are practical and efficient they must have been created from the point of view of functional and practical efficiency. It is a natural mistake to make. Within the mechanistic world-view of our time, it is natural to assume that something efficient must have been shaped by the desire for efficiency." (p423-4)
In The Nature of Order, Book Two, Alexander writes: "Most recently, in reaction to the banal simplicity of cubes and spheres, postmodernism has reintroduced complexity and ornament in a way that is too often merely dross, icing, fruitcake, and trinkets, overlaid on the fabric, shape and substance of our buildings. [Ornament as understood by the left hemisphere.] (p462) How can we architects act in a responsible way towards the Earth and towards the people of the Earth? In the way I have described living structure, the building becomes a living thing, only when it is conceived, throughout its fabric, as an ornament. ...Where roofs, walls, windows, rooms, passages, floors, ceilings, steps, sills, moldings, tiles, material surfaces work together — all of it — as an ornament which touches the soul. [Ornament as understood by the right hemisphere.] By my arguments, this is not only beautiful in conception but necessary." (p558)
In The Nature of Order, Book Three, Alexander goes further, and seems to channel Xunzi in that he expands the embrace of ornament to the utmost (just as Xunzi did of ritual). Alexander writes: “In a living building, everything is ultimately ornament… It must be understood that ornament is not something which is imposed to finish things off. It is, in itself, of the essence.” (p610) “Everything is joyful ornament… For me the joy of building is that, in a profound sense, I feel the whole building as an ornament. It is not a question of putting ornaments on a building, or into the walls and floors and columns, but rather that the whole building is an ornament - whose rooms, passages, staircases, windows, ceilings, paving, benches, lamps are all extensions, pieces of that ornament… all creation, everything in the world, really is an ornament… animals, and plants, and human beings, too.” (p613)
In The Nature of Order, Book Four, Alexander points out the erroneous "ultra-mechanistic assumption" that "ornament and function in a building are separate and unrelated categories" and therefore "architecture is irrelevant (p19) ...had its origin in the 19th century, when ornament became something to be applied, not something arising organically from its context. Adolf Loos, trying to overcome a spurious and disconnected attitude to ornament, began the early 20th century revolt against irrelevant and decadent ornament. In pursuit of a less decadent form of art, he argued, in a famous catchword, that "ornament is a crime." [In his book A Theory of Architecture Salingaros quotes Adolf Loos: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects ... not only is ornament produced by criminals but also a crime is committed through the fact that ornament inflicts serious injury on people’s health, on the national budget and hence on cultural evolution ... Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.” (Loos, 1971). This sentiment was shared by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier: “Decoration is of a sensorial and elementary order, as is color, and is suited to simple races, peasants and savages ... The peasant loves ornament and decorates his walls.” (Le Corbusier, 1927: p. 143). These two architects condemned the material culture of humankind from all around the globe, accumulated over millennia.]
Alexander again: "By mid-20th century, later versions of this assumption then said, essentially, that all ornament should be removed from buildings and that their geometry should be derived from function. This hinged on the tacit message that what is practical is only mechanical; and that any ornament or form which is not mechanical, is removable, unnecessary. A profound way of seeing form in which both ornament and function arose from a single evolving morphology, did not yet exist. Mid-century purity lasted until about 1970, when architects started again, like builders of old, bringing in ornament and shape out of sheer enjoyment. But even then, in the post-1970's postmodern works of the 20th century (which often have a frivolous attitude to shape and ornament) the conceptual split caused by our mechanistic world-picture still exists. There is a functioning part (the practical part), and an image part (the art part). In some of the latest buildings, built during the last three decades of the 20th century, this image part, because of the conceptual context, became truly arbitrary and absurd." (p26) "Above all, then, a building is an ornament. This statement is difficult to grasp since, in the last two centuries, we have become used to thinking of an ornament as something trivial. ...My meaning, when I say that a building, to be living, must be an ornament, goes even deeper. What I mean is that this sense of ornament — a profound, organized object reaching to heaven — applies equally to a functional object: to a freeway, or to a car, or to a flower which is a living thing." (p107-8)
Nikos Salingaros writes in A Theory of Architecture: "Ornament helps to connect us to our environment... buildings should have either a continuous swath of high-density visual structure that the eye can follow in traversing their overall form, or focal points of intense detail and contrast arranged in the middle or at the corners of compositional regions. These contrasting elements could include a thick border or edge of the building; a thick boundary (frame) around openings and discontinuities; concentrated and detailed structure in the centers or corners of walls; etc. (Alexander, 2004). The visually-intense framework should organize information via patterns and symmetries. ...Since we no longer think about ornament as an integral part of architecture, most ornament created today fails in its task. Ornamentation that does not aim at coherence produces its opposite — incoherence. ...Correcting an old misunderstanding, ornamentation does not superimpose unrelated structure; rather it is a subtle operation that generates highly-organized internal complexity. It therefore has to be extremely precise in order to be effective." (Chapter 4: The Sensory Value of Ornament, 2003)
Salingaros' criticism is at times very incisive: "Although most traditional architecture for human use adapts to human needs and sensibilities... A well-defined typology has been used throughout the ages to construct deliberately uncomfortable environments. These include defense installations and castles (experienced from the outside), and dungeons, prisons, crematoria, etc. (experienced from the inside). ...One would never have expected this architectural typology to spread to residences, schools, hospitals, and commercial buildings, but that’s precisely what happened." (A Theory of Architecture) The story of Laura Levis' death as a result of her inability to find the door to the emergency department is a powerful example.
And in Unified Architectural Theory: Form, Language, Complexity Salingaros bluntly stated: "Ornament and function go together. There is no structure in nature that can be classified as pure ornament without function. In traditional architecture, which was more tied to nature, such a separation never existed. The breakdown of the human adaptation of architecture can be traced to the forced conceptual separation of ornament from function, a relatively recent occurrence in human history. It is only in 20th-century architectural discourse that people began to think of ornament as separate from function: see “How Modernism Got Square” (Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2013). ...Therefore, we need to learn how to design things that have the quality of life, that possess wholeness." (Nikos Salingaros, "Ornament And Human Intelligence.") And again: "Around the world, ornament was traditionally applied to endow meaning to every element, object, and tool made by human beings. ...to imbue the things we use with an order, hierarchy, and legible information... Ornament is not only built on a utilitarian foundation, but also serves a purpose for social, psychological, and even spiritual enrichment."
According to Alexander, we need to understand the proper asymmetry. We might think of form and function in terms of Scheler's hierarchy of value, or, perhaps more simply, as a set of nested relationships such that form includes and leads us to function, but function does not include form and is unlikely to be realized without it. Function is derivative of form, rather than form is derivative of function. Fundamentally for Alexander, these are inseparable, but they should be viewed in this proper relation to one another. That may be a somewhat idiosyncratic use of these terms, so a comparison with the hemisphere hypothesis can be very illuminating of the dynamics. His criticism of contemporary society, as having inverted the proper relationship, is very nearly the same.
In the below portions of Salingaros' recent interview with Jim Rutt (which have been edited for conciseness), he addresses the connection between biomimetic design and ornamentation. To the modern aesthetic, ornamentation is anti-utilitarian and serves no practical purpose whatsoever. Ritual is often viewed in the same way. Thus, both of these can be disposed of without consequence (and often are disposed of). Here I'm suggesting there's a compelling parallelism, that to some extent ritual is to experience, as ornament is to architecture. Each is seen from the LH to be 'mere' decoration that is overlaid upon actions and objects that would be just as well, if not better, without them. But these (ritual and action, or ornament and object) are mutually entailing. No actions without rituals, no objects without ornamentation. Or as Alexander put it in so many words above, no function without form. One might also say that ritual is the deep, translucent unity of mind/experience, and ornament is the coherence of body/substrate. And these are united at a deeper level. Salingaros and Alexander are making the case that the asymmetry of the modernist view should be inverted, and ornamentation and ritual should be restored as central concerns for ontological/ axiological design, as they are aspects through which positive emotional valence and the experience of value can both be realized (and harmonized or aligned with). This, "without neglecting the other ‘arm’ of the dipole" because the "attempt to have it one way or the other comes from the left hemisphere’s urge to resolve what it sees as a contradiction." This article, describing the underlying psychological unity of ritual and ornament, could itself be called an "ornament" produced during the "ritual" of harmonizing the work of various authors/researchers.
Salingaros: “If any reader reads some of the articles of my colleagues and myself, they will see that living geometry is what the body reacts to in a positive way, and violations of living geometry create anxiety. Our mind has evolved to interpret living geometry, and other information in nature, in the environment in which we evolved. That’s what the brain is for. The brain was not created arbitrarily.This ‘biophilic design’ or ‘human architecture’ recognizes the positive valence of emotions. As you approach a building you should feel positive, that it’s reinforcing and makes you want to approach it further, and makes you want to enter the building. And once you’re in the building, the interior should be such that it gives you a positive emotion. This creates a salutogenic environment. It helps to heal because these emotions actually lead to the release of positive hormones that help to keep the immune system healthy. So this is a question of medical health in the environment.
A great architect will create a building that is so overwhelming with positive emotion that you feel the awe, like a great cathedral or a great mosque or a great Buddhist temple. As a Christian, I can go into a beautiful mosque or the madrasa (if you’re not allowed to go into the mosque) and I feel this wonderful emotion and healing. It’s not because of the religion, it’s because of the architecture. We can go to a civic lay building, like the public library, and feel the awe. A Japanese person, a tourist, can go to a great Christian cathedral and feel the awe. So it’s in the geometry, it is not in the particulars of the religion.” [Recall Zak Stein’s remarks about “creating structures in which the actual presence of the living field of value can reside”.]
Salingaros also introduces two key concepts in urban morphology, fractals and networks, and how these lead to ordered (scaled) hierarchies that are both efficient and well adjusted. He explores questions such as: How can ornament be justified, and why is it necessary? What are the ratios and hierarchies that promote neighborliness and beauty? What is it about our biological nature – perhaps even about the nature of matter itself – that makes us feel one thing in the presence of one kind of structure and something else in the presence of another? Speaking as a mathematician, he proposes a theoretical framework to answer these questions.
Salingaros: In the common literature the golden ratio is expressed as a rectangle. That turns out to have no relevance to anything, because we can have a building that’s very beautiful, that can have a rectangle of any aspect ratio. At the same time, we can have a very ugly building that’s perfectly a golden rectangle. So the golden rectangle does not mean anything. It is the Fibonacci sequence that creates the range of scales we need to see when we experience a room or building.So when we design a room, let’s look at the Fibonacci sequence and divide everything starting from the height of the room. You divide by consecutive Fibonacci numbers. You divide the height of the room into one third. Is there something that’s one third the height of the room? Maybe the window. Now subdivide that. Is there anything one-third the width or the height of the window? In traditional architecture, the panes are divided with mountings one-third the size of the window. In modern architecture since the 1930s, there’s nothing smaller than the size of the window. In traditional architecture, you have the surround of the door that is, say, seven centimeters. In modern architecture, the door just fits in straight into the hole of the wall. You see, all these smaller and intermediate scales are totally erased in modern and contemporary architecture, whereas, they’re all present in the older pre-war architecture. All the moldings of the old architecture were not there just for a whim. They were there because it gives you psychological comfort. These are the affordances of James Gibson. He came much later to give a scientific basis for this, but those moldings are there for a psychological purpose.
["Ornamentation was banned from the built environment after 1908 (minimalist environments becoming a fetish with architects thereafter), so that we progressively lost the healing effects of ornamentation in both interior and exterior built spaces... The goal of ornamentation is not to add something "pretty" so as to distract from the otherwise difficult living conditions. In fact, it serves to connect the residents in a deeper sense to their environment..." (P2P Urbanism, 2010)]
Ornament is integral to a human building. When you build the building, or at least in the past when you built a building, you were constrained by the materials and by the stresses, so you did the best you could. There were a few places that were left blank, not very interesting, and you fill those in with ornament, because intuitively you felt that there should be something there to draw the attention of the eye, something interesting and nice (baseboards, door surrounds, window sills, mullions, a cornice where the wall meets the ceiling. More are described in a paper on "object affordance and prehension in architecture"). So that was the ornament. Today, everything is blank, there’s nothing there. So there is a necessity for ornament to add to these intermediate and smaller scales. As I’ve said before, in the modernist buildings, everything below, say, two meters is just wiped out, there’s nothing there. That’s where ornament belongs.
The ornament is necessary for our well-being because it adds the human scale, say, from half a meter down to one millimeter. So you have 15 centimeters, five centimeters, one centimeter, three millimeters, these are very important. That’s where the ornament plays a role. If it’s not there, then something is missing and your body feels that something is missing. I will go further; the baby’s developing brain needs those scales in order to wire itself in the first six months. So a baby growing up in a minimalist environment is in danger of not developing.
Rutt: Not surprising. I live in a very remote area of Appalachia. People here live decently, but it’s never been rich by any means. But when you look at the older houses, and we are often in people’s older houses, even when these people here were quite poor, before electricity, when it was a two-day journey to the nearest city, when they built their houses, they spent considerable effort in ornamentation on the newel posts, on the door frames, on the fireplaces. They had no functional need to do this, and these were poor people who had to conserve their resources, but they nonetheless felt it was worth making that investment to put a lot of ornament into their buildings.
Salingaros: I would turn what you said around. These people felt in their body, in their gut that there was a functional need for that ornament, because that's all they had. They had the house, and they were going to spend their time in that house, and that house should be as positive as possible to their emotions in order to be a healthy environment for themselves and their family. So functionally, this ornament was necessary. They could not explain it that way. [Recall Note 102 in TMWT: "Social worker Susanne Sklar writes: I was not surprised when impoverished single mothers in the slums of Tijuana, Mexico told an American foundation that what they most wanted for their undernourished and ill-clad children was a school that was beautiful." (Sklar S, "How beauty will save the world: William Blake's prophetic vision", Spiritus, 2007, 7(1), 30-9)]The connective networks of a healthy city with human qualities are a fractal, because you have flows of different size and capacity and they must all be there and they must all connect very nicely, just like the mammalian lung. You cannot just eliminate the small streets like some modernists have (as in Brasilia) or all you have is a dead city. You need many, many different functions close together in the regular high density city in order to catalyze each. So you need to have residences, you need to have offices, retail, a little bit of industry (not heavy industry because it’s polluting). So you have all of these, and then they auto-catalyze and you have the living city.
Now, you go to Brasilia and it’s dead because there’s a single function. These are just government office buildings. The post-World War II construction of new urban regions is mono-functional. There is no auto-catalysis. Maybe 10,000 people go there in the morning, work in the offices, and then go back at night. It’s dead. You can’t have a car city, you need to have a pedestrian city that has access to car traffic. But the heart of the city is pedestrian areas. If you have an all-car city, then you spend all your time driving around. It’s not what human beings evolved to do. But modern architecture was explicitly a reaction to destroy all of the previous architectural and artistic culture. It is the irretrievable erasing of cultural heritage, a discontinuity. Modern architecture took over and started to destroy the culture of society.
Unfortunately, resistance in the form of bottom-up power doesn’t seem to work. It’s either top-down and then special interests do what they want and oppress the people. Or there is a revolution. And unfortunately, from what I have learned in history, revolutions tend to be sparked by other special interests who are hidden. It’s not spontaneous. So they get the people to rise up and demand something, but then it is just taken over, a sort of neat little trick. Then other special interests come in. So I’m very discouraged about that. I’m extremely pessimistic. I see a certain system of power that has a stranglehold on the education of architects, licensing system for architects, and a press that praises inhuman architecture and doesn’t care about human type of architecture that my friends and I are trying to promote. I see everything stacked against us. I’m not as young as I used to be. I had hoped for a revolution earlier, but it has not occurred. And Christopher Alexander, my good friend, was waiting for such a revolution all his life, but he died without seeing the revolution. [But see also Roman Krznaric’s work on citizens’ assemblies.]
But within the AI revolution a parallel revolution in architecture is being sparked. That’s a positive development, because it can create human-scale architecture and just bypass all this nonsense about the modernist style and the deconstructivist style. And it gives you the result instantly. So you can be generating alternative variants of your design and the AI will check each one and tell you which one is better. And then you make some changes, or the AI itself can make those changes. The AI can act as a diagnostic tool. This is a revolution, and we’re living in that revolution. [This is an example of the left hemisphere working in service to the right hemisphere.]
However, I need to warn the audience that AI is also being misapplied by the architectural establishment. It is used to create even more monstrous designs that somebody is going to build as a contemporary art museum. The reason they’re monstrous is because AI is used to create some abstract, artistic image of a building. It is not used to diagnose the human qualities of the building, which is what my friends and I are doing. So these are opposite applications of AI. [This is an example of the left hemisphere no longer working in service to the right hemisphere.]
Rutt: So are you applying AI to architecture today?
Salingaros: Absolutely. I have a new paper that’s under review. Well, we have three papers already published using AI to diagnose and validate living geometry. So this is not using AI to create crazy forms, it is using AI to question and revise the basis of architectural design to make it fit for human neurology. That’s what the architectural establishment refuses to look at.Rutt: This looks like an opportunity for new entrants that don’t need to have all the fancy credentials from the fancy architecture schools, if some common sense and ability to draft plus some AI might be able to get them to the point where they can design functional buildings.
Salingaros: Absolutely. You can avoid all of that. All you need is a client who is courageous, who wants something nice, and has an intuitive feeling. So far, very few people have done that. But let me tell you, those who have insisted have created some wonderful things.
Today, Christopher Alexander is something of a tragic figure who never saw his dreams for architecture more broadly realized (though he has many notable admirers, including Sarah Susanka). Salingaros, one of his collaborators, still struggles to advocate for them. But I think Alexander's work and passion for the values embodied in vernacular architecture will eventually be vindicated. There's a line in Ettlinger's paper that perhaps best illustrates the similar orientations of McGilchrist and Alexander: "Alexander describes “System A”, the one he advocates for, as opposed to “System B”, the institutional structures in which the contemporary world mostly operates. System A prioritizes relationships, wholeness, beauty, feeling, process, and unfolding. In contrast, System B prioritizes things, modularity, efficiency, gain, results, and predictability." This is, as anyone familiar with McGilchrist can clearly see, a fairly decent first pass description of hemispheric differences as well.
Alexander tried to articulate architecture using the language of System A. Ettlinger notes that his first "proposed remedy was to bring architects’ and builders’ attention away from approaching a project as a collection of “objects” to be built, and instead consider it as made of what he called patterns... [but] even though the patterns themselves were right hemisphere oriented, they were generally implemented with a left hemisphere mindset, which couldn’t allow them to truly come together into a coherent whole." So what did he do next? He then suggested the language of wholes, and "Alexander’s term “center” provides a clear articulation of the right hemisphere’s own view of the relationship between parts and wholes. Alexander proposed that we... increase wholeness by generating ever more centers within it." However, this approach seems to be just as vulnerable to left hemisphere capture as the previous "pattern language" was.
If that's the case, then what might be needed in order to fulfill Alexander's aspirations? What we may need is a language that is not just about patterns and wholes, but one that also includes those other more qualitative aspects of System A, particularly beauty and feeling. And here is where I think many reviewers of Alexander's corpus fail to appreciate the importance of what he wrote about "ornament". Without discounting the gains in understanding that pattern and wholeness provide, ornament also incorporates these significant aspects of System A. (The whole-part relationship is just one contrasting feature, as he also describes a form-function relationship.) When Alexander wrote "ornament, on the other hand, is something we may like, but cannot understand intellectually," he was stating a profound truth on par with his deepest cosmological speculations, because neither can we understand reality via left hemisphere intellectualization. So I think there is a good case to be made that the notion of ornament is central to Alexander's thought. In short, I'm suggesting that when we understand what Alexander meant about a feel for the whole, we will also understand what he meant when he said "everything is joyful ornament." These are related ideas in his thought. Arran Gare has been deeply influenced by Christopher Alexander and has a number of helpful papers on his thought concerning wholeness. In "Ethics, Philosophy, and the Environment" (2018) Gare wrote:
"In developing his insights into feeling, wholeness, centres, life and beauty in building, in the built environment and in life more generally, Alexander’s work can be taken as a major contribution to the revival of process metaphysics... That the development of such feeling is essential to good building is a central conclusion of Alexander’s work. As he put it: ‘I assert, simply, that all living process hinges on the production of deep feeling. And I assert that this one idea encapsulates all the other ideas, and covers all aspects of the living process.’"
In her presentation The Language of Ornament, Andrea Keller said "The Bradbury Building, built in 1893, is one of the most extraordinary buildings. It was in the movie Blade Runner. Numerous other films also feature the interior... When we talk about utility and materialism, and all this stuff, it's like we're missing the other half of the brain. We talk a lot about 'left brain' and 'right brain;' the 20th century was really a century of dominance of the ego, and we're coming to see that there were some failings. We've harmed the earth, and we've harmed a lot of people, and maybe we need a more holistic approach... If you're creating new ornaments, one valid way, that is appropriate for your area, is using plants that are common to your region (that is, if you're not honoring another language or tradition)." Perhaps more pragmatically, the 12th century monk Bernard of Clairvaux wrote "Since the devotion of the carnal populace cannot be incited with spiritual ornaments, it is necessary to employ the material ones." The long list of these might include Hôtel Tassel, Tribune Tower, Kölner Dom, Wieskirche, Sammezzano, Ranakpur Jain temple, Swaminarayan Akshardham, Bangka Lungshan, but it also includes Tibetan farmhouses, and Norwegian storehouses (Norwegian Museum of Cultural History).
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Vogelkop bowerbird
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Barry StephensonBarry Stephenson’s concise yet thorough treatment of the subject of ritual in his book by the same name for the Oxford series “A Very Short Introduction” begins by describing some early observations of ritual among animals such as the waggling of bees, the courtship rituals of birds, and ritualized fighting used to decide disputes before coming to blows. He explains how this facilitates communication, establishes trust and honesty, and avoids potentially dangerous interactions and the need for physical injury. (11) He then extends these insights to human interactions, viewing rituals in human society as antecedent to the forms of thought and interaction that we think of as uniquely human. “Could it be that our ideas, values, attitudes are not the antecedents of action but rather constituted by means of performance?” (101) He writes that this perspective on the subject may strike many people as an inverted view relative to our contemporary culture:
- “For people raised in the modern and postmodern industrial West, ritual has been significantly marginalized from cultural and intellectual landscapes. Historically, the influence of Protestant and Enlightenment sensibilities led to a suspiciousness of ritual. Compared with science, reason, and the market, ritual has often been derided as a relatively ineffectual way of engaging the world. On the other hand, in recent critical discussions on the nature and project of modernity, ritual is making something of a comeback, and there is a newfound popular interest in the creative, critical, transformative potential of ritual. To think about ritual is to reflect on attitudes and assumptions informing the narrative arc of modernity.” (2) "The modern West has undervalued the central importance of ritual to social life; and in so doing, modernity has turned away from an innate, embodied intelligence and know-how.” (13)
- What explains the marginalization of ritual? “Sigmund Freud, for example, described the obsessional neuroses he encountered in his patients as akin to religious rites and practices, thereby framing religion as a collective obsessional neurosis: ritual equals pathology. The repetitive, rhythmic, and formalized behavior of obsessive actions… [However] Julian Huxley saw a causal connection between the ills of the twentieth century (lack of social bonding, poor communication, escalation of conflict, mass killing in protracted wars) and ineffectual ritualization in society. Huxley reasoned that since ritualization is socially functional - regulating everything from mating to war - then a society that does not tend to patterns of ritualization is playing with fire.” (107) “In his study of the modern world as a "secular age," Charles Taylor refers to a process of "excarnation," the "transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that [religion] comes more and more to reside 'in the head'." (103) For Mary Douglas, rejection of ritual is the rejection of public forms of solidarity and institution building. Mircea Eliade framed the plight of "modern man" as that of living in a "desacralized cosmos," and linked this state of affairs to the disappearance of ritual. (108)
- “Through the twentieth century the idea of ritual impoverishment develops: one of the ills of Western culture is the absence of ritual, and the recovery of ritual is a cure to what ails us. In the wake of Eliade, a good deal of theorizing includes the claim that in industrial, modern, secular society rituals have either disappeared or are no longer effective; and where they do persist (weddings and funerals), commoditization and packaging has run roughshod over authenticity and efficacy. There is a strong stream of ritual theory that makes connection between a (supposed) pervasive spiritual and social anomie in Western culture and a lack of initiation rites to guide and move young people into adulthood.“ (109) "A history of social change from the perspective of changes to prominent rites and ceremonies remains to be written." (51) "...scholarship will need to tend to more cross-cultural and comparative research, of which there is very little in the field of ritual studies." (62)
- Stephenson frequently cites Roy Rappaport, who argues that “the binding of people around a shared sense of the sacred is best and perhaps only achieved through ritual. He further suggests that: “in the absence of what we, in a common sense way, call religion, humanity could not have emerged from its pre- or proto-human condition. It is, therefore, plausible to suppose, although beyond demonstration's possibilities, that religion's origins are, if not one with the origins of humanity, closely connected to them... [Moreover], religion's major conceptual and experiential constituents, the sacred, the numinous, the occult and the divine, and their integration into the Holy, are the creations of ritual.” (41) And in words that closely echo those of McGilchrist and Stein, “The action or dynamics of ritual, in Victor Turner's view, is a process of constructing, sometimes deconstructing meaning, beliefs, values." (59)
- We return again and again to a central question: What is ritual? Stephenson sheds light on a few central aspects: “It may make sense to speak of degrees of ritualization. An action is more like ritual the more it is formalized, stylized, and aesthetically elevated through gesture, music, art, and performance; the more it receives spatial and temporal framing; the more it is associated with sacred powers, founding figures, or historical or mythic events.” But “The problem here is that doing more doesn't necessarily make for more ritual. In fact, sometimes doing less is what is called for. Ritualization may proceed by building up, repeating, and elevating, but also through a stripping down or singularizing of action. In meditative traditions, simply following one's breath [or less in the case of zuowang] is ritualized action; in Quaker meeting houses, silence, simplicity, and aesthetic minimalism reign supreme. Is a Quaker meeting less of a ritual than an ornate Anglican Communion service?” (77) “…ritual is a way of framing activity, and hence contextual… there is a wider, distributed agency at work in ritual.“ (80, 85).
- Ritual is cathartic, a “means for triggering the release of feeling and emotion [which] explains the fusion of psychotherapy and performance in drama, music, and dance therapies. The use of theater and performance for purposes of healing is increasingly common in war-torn areas and in community development and reconciliation projects. …The best ritual (or theater, for that matter) will weave together the qualities of entertainment and efficacy. If ritual becomes overly prescriptive, staid, and dutiful, too much like work, it is unlikely to be experienced as joyous or entertaining; should theater aim too far in the direction of making a practical difference, it may become pretentious and the seats are likely to be empty. On the other hand, if ritual is doing no transformative work but is merely a way to pleasantly pass the time in the comfortable presence of like minded others, it lacks gravitas and, in time, will likely wither.” (93)
- “Richard Sennett argues that our rituals of citizenship and sociability have been turned into spectacles, with participants reduced to mere observers and consumers. [Guy Debord argued that modernity is a "society of the spectacle," which is to say "an epoch without festivals."] The problem Sennett detects— the pervasive erosion of our ability to cooperate in the modern world— is met with an answer that draws upon an embrace of the intricate daily round of ritualizations that breed manners, civility, dialogue, and care for one another. [See Dimitris Xygalatas re: work culture in Denmark.] The role of ritual in matters of deference and demeanor, so detailed by Erving Goffman, likely has something to say to a society seemingly incapable of the most basic forms of civility. (112)
- Another dimension of the return of ritual is found in the recent growth of festivals. In the past generation, public festivals and celebrations have been renewed and re-invented on a vast scale [Burning Man, Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), and live action role-playing (LARPing) are common examples]. Festive celebration involves a periodic gathering of a group, in a marked-off space and time for the purposes of play, engaging in aesthetic activity, sharing food, exchanging gifts, stories, songs, and then dispersal. Such moments [kairotic knots] of common action and feeling "both wrench us out of the everyday; and seem to put us in touch with something exceptional, beyond ourselves." Charles Taylor calls this the category of the "festive," and it is inherently related to the development of a more immediate, active, face-to face public sphere. It is also, suggests Taylor, "among the new forms of religion in our world." (112)
John Vervaeke
John Vervaeke's syncretic perspective, informed by his research in 4E cognitive science and neoplatonism, is somewhat unique among those engaged in ritual studies. Here he draws some connections between 'ritual metaphysics', the notion of theurgy as understood by neoplatonists, the intergenerational 'liturgical cosmos', the importance of flow (Csikszentmihalyi), orientation, the 'fitting gesture', and 'transfer appropriateness', the opacity of transformation, and the cultivation of virtue. In the below quotes, Vervaeke frames ritual as a (perhaps
incrementally more explicit and intentional) deployment of many of those attributes of cognition that are usually implicit and unconscious. And he suggests
that we are only recently gaining a renewed appreciation for the
importance of ritual in our lives.
John Vervaeke: "Ritual was put into question by the Protestant Reformation. Then the Scientific Revolution comes in and pushes us into a kind of "propositional tyranny". Ritual just seems irrational within that framework. Then with the secularization project under the Enlightenment ritual gets slotted largely into superstition, or things that so-called primitive people do because they don't have science. That's all wrapped up in the problems of imperialism and colonialism. Then Freud describes the psychodynamic unconscious and finds that it seeks out ritual, but he can only understand that as something deeply psychopathological. So ritual behavior becomes an indication of neurosis or perhaps even the onset of psychosis. And then you have this ever widening gulf between rationality, which is increasingly understood as computation, and anything other than that, which is superstition." [in conversation with Gregg Henriques]
John Vervaeke: "We have reduced knowing to a kind of 'propositional tyranny'. We've lost the procedural knowing, the participatory dimensions of rationality which probably are as important, and in some cases more important, than propositional rationality. They deal with dimensions of rationality that escape our kind of 'Flatland' understanding of rationality. So we have to both acknowledge the depth and breadth of it, but also the fact that it is opening up domains and dimensions of rationality that we are kind of blind to right now." Charles Stang: "Yeah, earlier I was complaining about a sort of diminished anthropology, ontology, and epistemology that is afflicting the study of the humanities. What you've just said lands very poignantly for me. As you've said, there's a kind of propositional tyranny that has flattened rationality. So under the banner of an expanded epistemology, what are the modes of reasoning that we might not recognize as deep forms of reasoning? What do they look like? Can we recover and redeploy them meaningfully today?"
John Vervaeke: "We have lost a contemplative axis of ratio. We have reduced it to the computational. And then it has been further reduced to a kind of communicative thing. And so we've got this reduction. Now, I would propose moving towards something like a 'virtue epistemology', because that combines propositional beliefs, procedural skills, states of consciousness, and participatory character traits. The fact that virtue epistemology and virtue ethics are taking off right now isn't a coincidence. It's an attempt to try and get back to, and broaden, our responsiveness to normativity, and to go beyond a propositional commitment to logical coherence and empirical adequacy. There are ways of disclosing the world, and in that sense knowing, that require transcendence. We're trying to find a 'fittedness to reality'. It could be to aspects of reality that we might not normally feel well fitted to, but we're trying to find a fittedness to that. There's a normativity to that. In ritual what we're doing is engaging in a kind of serious play. How broadly and how deeply, both out into the world and into my psyche, do the skills and the states of mind and the traits of character exercised in the ritual transfer? This is the problem of transfer of appropriate processing. ...When in place, there's a world disclosing aspect that puts a demand on you, and the possibility of who you could be becomes more real." [in conversation with Charles Stang]
John Vervaeke: "Ritual situates us in imaginal time, in order to afford imaginally augmented cognition and perception, to discern real patterns, to enter into right relationship with our future selves, to empower our self correction and our self-regulation, and to enact the serious play needed to self-transcend and aspire. I'm arguing that that's what ritual is. And if the argument is a sound argument, that means it's inherent, it's woven through your perception, your cognition, and it is intrinsic to cultivating rationality. There is a deep connection between ritual and rationality. This is of course implicit ritual, but there's no justification for it remaining so. How could there be, given how pervasive and powerful implicit ritual is through all of our perception, cognition, agency, and aspiration?" [Source: Rationality and ritual]
Vervaeke on Theurgy
John Vervaeke: "In the ancient world there were two distinctions made about theurgia [Late Latin]. First of all, it was very explicitly distinguished from sorcery and other kinds of magic. And secondly, there was a distinction made between external and internal theurgia, which was very similar to the distinction made between technical and natural divination. The external was sort of techniques, and the internal was much more the natural theurgia. They're not totally separable, but the internal theurgia was considered far superior. Sorcery was 'horizontal', like sympathetic magic in that it sought to align patterns in the environment with each other. Another important feature about sorcery is that its purpose was egocentric and therefore often immoral. Theurgia is not horizontal, it's vertical and directed towards the cultivation of virtue. And it's not egocentric, it's 'onto-centric' (reality-centric). Or if you want to put a religious spin on it, it's theo-centric. It's not oriented towards personal power, it's oriented towards the cultivation of virtue and wisdom. Theurgia made use of what are called synthemata (sunthemata), "having the same theme", we would say [cf. ornament]. For theurgists these are symbols of the vertical process of emanation and return. The idea here is that something at one level points to and in that sense is significant of a higher level. And therefore it aids us in moving from one level to another. The synthemata are symbols that transform consciousness, cognition, and character, and thereby disclose new levels, new arenas for cognition and awareness. So synthemata in that sense are catalysts for propelling the agent-arena relationship up a level of co-realization. So you're moving from one level to another level, and that is a transformative experience. It's an example of what I call 'transframing'; you're both sides of the relation. The self and the world are going through reframing, and they're doing it in tandem, mutually affording, causing, and constraining.
Now, the point about transframing being a transformative experience is you cannot reason yourself through it. We've already talked about how you cannot reason yourself from one level to another in the way that is required to cultivate wisdom. Of course you can move up levels of abstraction in a taxonomy, but we're talking more about this process of transframing in the vertical dimension of dialectic. And you can't reason your way through that kind of transformative experience. So this is putting an emphasis on the non-propositional, on the perspectival and the participatory. ...This is all about a sort of 'Gestalt psychology', moving from 'the features' to 'a Gestalt', going up a level and how the relationship to this is not one of linear inference or anything like that.
Theurgia is a set of rituals that make use of synthemata to help people leap to a higher level of self-consciousness and reality disclosure (more profound alethea) in a way so that they experience onto-normativity and receive sacred guidance. Every liturgy is also a set of rituals that make use of synthemata to help people leap to a higher level of self-consciousness, reality disclosure, alethea, in a way so that they experience onto-normativity. They get closer to the 'really real'. And that guides them, it challenges them, it demands from them transformation. Every liturgy (and I don't mean just specific to Christianity). It's also not something that happens 'in this place', liturgy participates in a 'liturgical cosmos'. Sacrament is another word for a ritual. It's a ritual use of synthemata, this thing that has the power to afford 'the leap'. Sacrament is the ritual use (or 'serious play') with synthemata.
Rituals evolve over time. They are actually intergenerational projects within the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And what is it that's being evolved in ritual? It is the "fitting gesture". The gesture that fits. Why gesture? Because you want to emphasize the perspectival, the participatory, the enacted, the embedded, the transjective, and it's fitting you to the situation. This takes place within the serious play found within a liminal state. One of the most important anthropologists of liminality, Victor Turner, brought the notion of flow into the discussion of ritual. He emphasizes that this is done through embodied cognition, so he's deeply into the non-propositional. ...A ritual involves skills. It involves states and frames of mind. It involves traits of character. Those are exactly the things that you're trying to train and coordinate as you cultivate a virtue. There's a kind of knowing through ritual that might be unique and needed for the cultivation of virtue.
Ritual teaches one not only how to conduct the ritual, but how to conduct oneself outside the ritual. This brings up the idea of 'transfer', that what you're doing in the ritual transfers to other domains of your life. So just as it's percolating through your psyche and disclosing levels of reality, it is also transferring to many different domains of your life. The knowing of the ritual action provides a model for fitting action in context or situations not themselves ritualized. So my practice in the ritual 'tutors me' so I can fit myself to other contexts. (It's enhancing relevance realization within a salience landscape.) This is an important aspect of your cognition. Your brain is hungry for transfer appropriateness, so it will try and make use of all kinds of information about context to see if the way you solved one problem can transfer to another. ...Rituals that are massively transfer appropriate disclose the non-propositional intelligibility of the world in a non-reductive, unique way.
Let me give you a practical example. If you're a student you should try and study information in the same way in which you're going to be tested on it. Of course you have to get the content into your head, but the manner, the orientation, the way you are formulating it, framing it, is a crucial part of any pedagogy of wisdom. Because the brain is not only trying to transfer content, it's trying to transfer orientation. The brain is extremely sensitive to context. Orientation is primordial to finding your way. When you're in a new context, what you need first, before you apply your knowledge, is to orient yourself. The paradigmatic gestures of ritual serve to pattern world engaging activity generally; they do not simply mirror, but intend to transform. This non-reductive noetic function of ritual cannot be reduced or replaced by something else. If this thesis is right or even plausible and your life is empty of ritual, that means there are ways of knowing yourself and the world that you are cut off from now.
Rituals that are massively transfer appropriate disclose the non-propositional intelligibility of the world in a non-reductive, unique way. So they're doing something phenomenologically, perspectively, and participatorily that's analogous to what science does. Science tries to find patterns that are context invariant, that you can find across the world in different contexts. Ritual is trying to find the transfer appropriate orientations that can be applied across many different contexts and therefore disclose something about the world as an arena for our agency. This is 'ritual metaphysics' and meta-orientation. Ritual activity produces the ritualized body. It's not just mental. We shape our bodies as the participants who come to engage with the structured and structuring environment of the ritual, through the deployment of certain oppositional strategies such as the opposition between what is divine and what is human, what is masculine and what is feminine, what is above and what is below. The ritual shapes the understanding and the experience of the participants as the participants come to master the ritual and internalize these schemes (orientations). Their bodies come to appropriate the ritual world in their habits, dispositions, and gestures.
Theurgia is a ritual or set of rituals that affords participatory exploration in the dialectic dialogos of reality. Within it we shape, but we are also shaped, to better fit the flow of that reality in a way that is non-replaceable by other cognitive behavior. Can we realize our practices not just as 'training', not just as 'practice', but as rituals? Because people are experiencing them that way, they're experiencing that, they're coming to know things about themselves and the world and reality in the practice. It's a ritual for them. We are hungry for ritual." [Source: Ritual Way of Knowing]
McGilchrist and Vervaeke
The differences in how McGilchrist and Vervaeke (who have spoken together on Rebel Wisdom, with Curt Jaimungal, with Schmachtenberger, and at the recent Center for Process Studies conference) describe ritual (a term Vervaeke often uses interchangeably with "practices") may be a reflection of their relative backgrounds and personal orientations. For example, despite his assurances to the contrary, Vervaeke appears less comfortable with using the metaphorical language of religious mythos, at least he doesn't use it as freely as McGilchrist. This may be one of the reasons he had earlier coined the phrase "religion that is not a religion", which is a very apophatic and Zen-like turn of phrase, but also explicit and conforms with his "nontheism". (His reticence here may be because, although he understands opponent processing, he describes it in the context of dialogos, and seems less eager to pursue the implications within the context of phenomenology to the extent that McGilchrist does via his hemisphere hypothesis.) So by comparison, McGilchrist seems very comfortable with using some of the more implicit and traditionally religious language, and has embraced panentheism.
It is also interesting to compare Forrest Landry and John Vervaeke on the topic of ritual, given their friendship and previous conversations. For both of them, meaning is intrinsic to the concept. But for Vervaeke at least, theurgy and magic are separate concepts within the domain of ritual studies. (We don't know if Landry would agree concerning this, and he doesn't specifically mention theurgy in An Immanent Metaphysics.) At the conclusion of his presentation on the topic of theurgia, Vervaeke says "There are so many bad books about this out there, about theurgia and theurgy. Dreck everywhere. It takes a lot of work, paying attention to bona fide scholars, to find the silver in all that dross." Does the Wikipedia page on theurgy make this distinction? Wikipedia does provide several differing definitions, according to different sources, and notes that theurgy is sometimes known as "divine magic". As if to distance his concept from many of these more popular definitions, Vervaeke prefers the Latin word "theurgia". And paraphrasing him loosely to provide a barebones description, he might define it as:
Theurgia: A set of rituals, to help disclose reality and orient people towards the cultivation of virtue and wisdom (onto-normativity), thereby orienting us within (and providing perspective on) situations we encounter outside the ritual context, and helping to align our actions with the reality and virtues thereby disclosed.
But these are inherently fuzzy ideas, and much depends on whose definitions we are adopting. While this starting point appears broadly concilient with McGilchrist, Vervaeke doesn't seem to know when to stop, and ends up all but explicitly prescribing an "ecology of practices". Now, this is precisely what McGilchrist wants to avoid doing, preferring to remain, like Zhuangzi, with the primitive and implicit, and respect the limitations of discursive thought. Why doesn't Vervaeke as well? I find this all somewhat ironic, given Vervaeke's earlier criticism of 'propositional tyranny'. This paraphrased exchange between Vervaeke and Schmachtenberger (who is here channeling McGilchrist) is illustrative, especially when we recall McGilchrist's criticism of the machine metaphor:
Vervaeke: "My proposal is, we need to basically co-opt and exapt the machinery of religion, because religions are collective intelligence machines that can fundamentally reorient us at a civilizational level. But it can't be like the Axial religions. It has to be as different from the Axial religions as the Axial religions were from the Bronze Age religions. I'm not saying that the religion of the future is 'Zen Neoplatonism', but these two could be brought into a profound opponent-processing from which the exaptation could occur."
Schmachtenberger: "We've had hundreds of thousands of years of sapiens existence, and we've only had religious philosophical structures for some small number of thousands of years. Most of human experience, and almost every indigenous wisdom tradition, was animistic. Is God transcendent or immanent? If anything they erred on the imminent side, that the Creator is indwelling within the creation. And if the Creator's indwelling within each aspect of the creation, then the destruction of anything is a violation of the sacred. There's something about erring in the direction of immanence that is less dangerous. I find that interesting.
To the extent that Vervaeke is drawn to novelty, which I think is evident in his preference for new words and phrases, McGilchrist draws us back to traditions and customs, such as animism, whose origins are diffuse and largely lost to us. All the same, while these orientations may illustrate their differing relationships with ritual, both thinkers find ritual, as each conceives it, absolutely essential. In The Master and His Emissary McGilchrist wrote that truth "has
to be metaphorised, ‘carried across’ to our world, by mythology and by
ritual". In this conversation with Vervaeke he is cautious to add,
however, that "I don't think practices in themselves will ever achieve
what needs to happen, because they can still go on without the mind and
heart of the person having fundamentally shifted." In other words,
whenever rituals become literalistic and opaque, they are empty and
meaningless. They enable us to approach deeper truth only when they are
metaphorical and translucent. In the below selection from the conversation between the two of them, McGilchrist elaborates on the fundamental uncertainty of reciprocity that characterizes all relationships, whether with another person, with a ritual practice (such as marriage), or with the cosmos as a whole, and how opening up to this enables personal growth.
McGilchrist: "I think 'reciprocal opening' [the opposite of 'reciprocal narrowing'] is a very important idea. Another thing worth saying, while talking about faith, is there is a similar reciprocity in the idea of belief. For example, I can say 'I believe' in a certain person. It means I put my trust in him or her. There is something about them that almost places a responsibility on me to respond. But also by that very fact, it places a responsibility on them to be true to what it is I believe in. If they let you down, then there has been a failure of this relationship. In life we are always assessing and helping to grow certain relationships. And there is no certainty about anything at all. But that doesn't make it blind. This concept of faith as 'blind' needs to be put to bed once and for all. If I am fording a stream and my companion has gone ahead across the stream, as I get near the bank I need a hand, and he or she holds out a hand to me. It's not a random hand. It's not blind to trust this hand. I have to take the hand. And that's the way I see it. You see something that is calling to you and saying "If you understand this it will radically change the way you think about the world". And there is no one right way to know.
So just to respond, "Well, I think I've already got it, and I'm not going to try this at all. I'm not going to put myself in the way of something happening." No, it has to be experiential; you have a responsibility to put yourself in the way of something happening. If you sit at home saying "I want to marry, but I'll never meet anyone," and you never ever leave the home, then you never get married. If you want to marry, you don't know who you will marry. It's entirely unpredictable. What happens may be chance. But nonetheless, you have to 'open yourself' to the possibility. Otherwise, it won't happen. And the same, I think, is true of our relationship with the cosmos at large, which I believe is a living organismic entity, a conscious 'entity' or 'god' (but I don't want to rule out anybody's attempt to make this encounter just because of a word)." [Again: "You need to be open to something before you can actually understand it. If you wait to know enough to open, then you've missed it. You always have to take a risk, as you do in love, that it may be rejected and you may be very hurt. But nothing is achieved without taking a risk."]
It’s easy to see at least four separate scenarios when it comes to ritual, depending on the values that motivate us and the actual results of our actions. Clearly those motivated by anti-value, who engage with a cold and calculating approach, and succeed in achieving their manipulative ends, are the most dangerous. On the other hand, those who engage with a loving attitude, and engender a more supportive and harmonious relationship with others, are a pleasure to be around. And between these polar opposites there are the avaricious yet incompetent, and the well-meaning but risk averse for whom the phrase “nothing ventured, nothing gained” applies. No doubt there are others besides these as well. Given such considerations, it may seem that the most rational choice is to keep one’s hands clean and avoid touching the subject altogether. Speaking for myself, the more I have learned about rituals, the deeper my experience of life feels and, more importantly, the greater my ability to engage in truly meaningful relationships with others. I don’t think I could live without them, and indeed, I find I could stand some improvement in this regard.
But a disinclination toward ritual may have nothing whatsoever to do with any of those scenarios. It is simply a matter of personal preference that will dispose us to any given approach for applying the lessons of the hemisphere hypothesis. Speaking for myself again, I am drawn to that which holds mystery (and perhaps promises something of the numinous). The term “ritual” calls forth in my mind a wide variety of images, including everything from people chanting around a bonfire half-naked, to solemn Christian liturgies, from the albatross’ graceful mating dance, to sumo wrestling in Japan, and from the simple greetings exchanged between strangers along the road, to the way grandma prepares a meal when guests arrive from out of town. What other idea is capable of uniting these disparate phenomena under a single heading? I’m interested in suggestions. On the other hand, maybe not all of these activities deserve equal consideration!
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| "Li" or 𠃞 written in small seal script |
Ritual Technology and Design Though art tends to emphasize qualities such as novelty
and self expression, which are not necessarily central to ritual, the aesthetic aspects of ritual are undeniable. Zak Stein wrote about 'axiological
design', and in this context we might suggest that design should
support, rather than erode and eliminate, healthy rituals. The erosion of
media culture, through social media, on demand streaming services (such
as Netflix), and digital video recording meant that families no longer
needed to gather together at specific times of the day to watch a
favored sitcom, or visit the video rental store on the weekend to select
a movie to view together. Seemingly small ritual actions, but important
given that many others had already been lost in contemporary culture.
Furthermore, the effect of this always "on demand" and effectively
infinite "asynchronous media" on culturally evolved evening and morning rituals of daily life, which by definition must synchronize with our chronobiology,
is extremely corrosive. And given that ritual is "embodied metaphor",
it is more akin to non-computational, 4E, right hemisphere oriented
forms of attending, and involves one's full attention. Which is to say
that, in general, one cannot multi-task a ritual without substantially
diminishing its value and losing something in the process. So the
contemporary rush toward utilitarian efficiency is harmful in this
regard. For all these reasons, and many more, restoring healthy
rituals and re-connecting with others through them motivates advocacy
work in this area. When the magic is gone and drained, when there is no more enchantment, love, or wonder, life has lost something very important.
It has been noted how much children love predictable routines. I recently watched the documentary film "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" about Fred Rogers, the host of the American half-hour educational children's television series "Mister Roger's Neighborhood" that ran from 1968 to 2001. It's a fascinating and deeply moving biography, and about it much could be said, but as regards the topic of ritual it is worth noting how Rogers used structure and predictability in every episode as a ritual container in which to hold and foster the healthy development of young children. In a very ritualistic manner, each episode began and ended in exactly the same way, and progressed through similar stages, and yet each one was unique.
There will never be a conversation between Fred Rogers, who died in 2003, and Iain McGilchrist. But it certainly does appear that they would've been in broad agreement concerning many things. At one moment in the film Fred Rogers is addressing a large meeting of some sort, and he says “We need to help our children become more and more aware that what is essential in life is invisible to the eye.” As an ordained Presbyterian minister, perhaps he had chapter 5 of the Epistle to the Galatians, concerning the "fruit of the spirit", in mind, and how "man does not live by bread alone". But maybe not. In many ways these values transcend the distinction between the secular and the sacred, and he certainly knew that. Another notable moment in the film [t=1:23:00] was a clip from when he was asked to address the nation following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Rogers never preached religion on his show, but at that time he did say “No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be tikkun olam, repairers of creation.”
Plotinus famously asked "But we – who are we?" The most important questions in philosophy are the ones that are ultimately impenetrable to the conscious thinking mind (the left hemisphere). Their answers can only be implicitly comprehended and the best we might do is gesture toward them through metaphor, or otherwise approach them indirectly. So maybe we could come at that question from the other way around. McGilchrist once said: "If you wanted to destroy the happiness of a people what would you do? Alienate them from nature, alienate them from the idea that there's any kind of spiritual or divine or sacred realm, and divide them one from another and destroy their traditions and history." (Elsewhere he states this positively as "There are three things that make us fully human, and make us fulfilled: belonging to a cohesive social group, belonging in the natural world, and belonging in the spiritual world.")
What does nature, the sacred, and traditions (a broad category that might include cultural practices, customs, rituals, etc.) all have in common? These are all aspects of who we are, and because of this they frustrate any attempt to discursively understand them. The sacred is nebulous and intangible. We can never really get to the bottom of nature and have a "theory of everything". And the processes of human culture and society often appear inefficient and arbitrary to the extreme. None of these really make a whole lot of sense to the left hemisphere, which is probably why reductive and eliminative explanations appeal to it so much. Sure, we can construct post-hoc explanations for each of them, but those rationalizations do not ultimately satisfy.
If these are indeed aspects of "who we are", then alienating a people from them, that is alienating them from their own being, would certainly "destroy their happiness". We can be both materially alienated, physically separated in the manner described here. And we can be psychologically alienated, and no longer have access to the largely implicit ways of understanding provided by means of the right hemisphere. At such times, by means of the left hemisphere, we may flounder in our inability to propositionally articulate the mysteries of life. Many people are oblivious to the fact that the left hemisphere's mode of attention is simply "the wrong tool for the job". It is incapable of doing precisely what is needed. To be happy we must be able to be comfortable with not knowing, with uncertainty. To trust that nature, the sacred, and traditions are "more than meets the eye". Be able to "presence to" the interior depth behind the two dimensional flat surface at which the left hemisphere stops, to pass through this "cloud of unknowing" and find peace. And then trust that our caring gestures and rituals are meaningful, even though we may not be able to explain exactly how or why, and whether or not they appear to be reciprocated. To fully embrace this sort of disposition, and relax into these processes, we need the sort of perspective provided by the right hemisphere, per McGilchrist.
Though we may not realize it, we practice rituals surrounding our use of technology. Consider how weapons are fetish items due to their power to protect or to destroy. They are handled with reverence and displayed during ceremonies. And those weapons with the greatest power are themselves shielded behind complex social rules and political structures. There may be no "big red button" on the commander's desk vulnerable to his errant whim, but in the hands of a rogue emissary, such technologies inevitably serve the values of power and control. (The same emissary, in service to the master, uses the same analytical scientific knowledge to preferentially gain an enriched understanding of the world.) In the contemporary metacrisis there are a profusion of technologies. Not all of them look like the tools of power and control. However this hasn't prevented the left hemisphere from finding creative ways to leverage them toward that end. (As the character Bugs tells Neo in Matrix: Resurrections, "The Matrix weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us.") We can look at the technologies surrounding the ballooning growth of the attention economy, technologies that pull us out of our embodied experiences of flow, and place us into a different "flow", that of a virtual surround, a simulated world.
This is a part of what has been described as "the eye of anti-value" (Zak Stein) or a "demonic complex" (Richard Tarnas, McGilchrist Conference, March 2024), take your pick, these are labels that gesture toward how our technologies can function to distort our connection to, or alienate us from, the sacred, from reality. And so it seems unavoidable that technology should be addressed if we are to preserve our connection to value, and that this will occur within the context of ritual. What does that mean? Every time we use technology it has either an enriching or corrupting influence on us. In the context of contemporary culture the trends in mental health suggest more the latter than the former. Our ritual relationship to technology should fully respect this danger. On the scale of nations, that might mean expanding some basic protections for children (and anyone not able to provide informed consent) from the erosion of their attention. For the adults, this might mean handling certain technologies that have potentially dangerous effects on the quality of our attention with the same caution and reverence that we afford to sharp weapons and hazardous materials.
Why would I speak of a ritualized relationship with technology? Isn't it enough to simply be aware of how they can affect our attention? Awareness of the effects of our technologies on our perception of reality is most important. And when we transform this awareness into action patterns, I'm suggesting this is precisely the process of ritualization unfolding. Because just as all the world becomes animate (infused with spirit, enlivened) from the perspective of the right hemisphere, any action becomes ritual (i.e. sacred action) when engaged from within this perspective of a sacred cosmos, or more generally when engaged with a reverential attitude. So without moving from awareness to action, without the process of transformation, awareness remains impotent. Efforts at "digital detox" or "tech hygiene" harken back to earlier ideas about ritual purification. What would it mean to ritually relate to technologies with the care and reverence that accords to their capacity to help or harm us? Could an understanding of "tech rituals" enable a more
informed, sustainable, and enriching relationship with our technology? As many have noted, it might begin with engaging only at specific times and places, with limited engagement proportional to one's capacity, using appropriate technology (perhaps physical books versus augmented reality), and without infringement on one's priorities. In other words, this is context sensitive abstention. Intentional use means defining one's goals before engaging with a technology, so as to prevent 'goal drift' while it is being used (or complete goal abandonment in the case of "infinite scrolling" where stopping cues are absent), and evaluating if those goals were met afterwards for improvement next time (cf. intentional living). This requires a broader perspective on technology use, and frustrates impulsive use that is triggered by supernormal stimuli.
In Stefania Operto’s article "Human, Not Too Human: Technology, Rites, and Identity” she notes “how the relationship between ritual and technology is expressed in the artistic and creative fields, sectors in which the liminoid character of these phenomena emerges with particular force”. Technology can be used to enhance our engagement with the sacred cosmos, and align us more closely with its values, rather than degrade those relationships. But only if we engage our technologies within the context of a ritual relationship. Zak Stein makes a similar distinction in regard to the relationship between technology and the pursuit of value in education, highlighting the immense challenges involved when the "eye of value" has been blinded by contemporary culture.
But what is ritual?
If we have a brain with two hemispheres, and thus two modes of attention, then provided we can recognize the "hallmark features" of each, we can in a manner of speaking bias our choices in the direction of one mode of attention over the other. As McGilchrist said "we can now make more weighted decisions about which, of any two paths, is likely to prove in the long run more veridical, more helpful." So the capacity to make such a decision, and choose between these two qualitatively dissimilar modes whose ethical and experiential implications are highly consequential, is just one way of explaining that attention is a moral act. McGilchrist certainly wasn't the first to observe the impact of the quality of our attention (see Simone Weil for another), he just connected it to his hemisphere hypothesis in a particularly lucid way. We haven't yet managed to "descend from the heights" (Bergson) to see where and how attention can shape the path of our daily lives and social interactions. But this is where I think 'embodied metaphors' come in.
For McGilchrist, ritual is "metaphor embodied", rituals "sanctify the familiar routine actions of daily life, and set them within the perspective of the infinite, of which we so easily lose sight. And inculcate a habit of reverence and gratitude towards the world: of seeing the sacred in every part of what is given" (Iain McGilchrist, 2021). This is consistent with the concept of 礼 within Confucianism. There are at least as many parallels between the thought of McGilchrist and Confucius, whose five primary virtues were humanity, responsibility, ritual, wisdom, and trustworthiness, as there are between McGilchrist and Laozi, the other giant of Chinese philosophy. And in the Tao Te Ching there are places where Laozi chose to highlight the dangers of taking an opaque and literalistic view on ritual. For example we read "When Tao is lost, only then does the doctrine of virtue arise. When virtue is lost, only then does the doctrine of humanity arise. When humanity is lost, only then does the doctrine of righteousness arise. When righteousness is lost, only then does the doctrine of [ritual] propriety arise. Now, [ritual] propriety is a superficial expression of loyalty and faithfulness, and the beginning of disorder." (TTC 38)
Zhuangzi develops and draws out the implied contrast here. In chapter six he tells a fable. One of three friends dies and the other two are questioned about their ritual propriety when they are found celebrating his life joyously, rather than expressing sorrow. They respond "What do you know about the real point of ritual?" Confucius is told about this encounter, and he remarks "Why would they do something as stupid as practicing conventional rituals to impress the eyes and ears of the common crowd?" (Brook Ziporyn, 2009). Ruan Ji, a tragic hero and model of authenticity, questioned whether rituals and convention were meant for him. He wrote "Are there any rituals for a man like I am?" Here we can see how Daoism excels at highlighting the contrast between the superficial and the authentic. So how do we know authenticity? “The Yellow Emperor said, “I performed [the Xianchi music in the wilds of Dongting] with the Human in me but attuned it to the Heavenly, advancing it with the trappings of Ritual and Responsibility, but rooting it in the Great Clarity. For perfect music — which is perfect joy — must start out by resonating with human affairs but also flowing along the guideline of the Heavenly.” (Chapter 14) An analogy was used to help explain this relationship that is uniquely attuned to both contexts: “When you step on a stranger’s foot in the marketplace, you apologize profusely for your rude carelessness. If it’s your brother’s foot, you laugh it off. But if it’s the foot of someone extremely intimate, like your parent or child, you don’t even mention it. Hence I say: Perfect Ritual Propriety sometimes lies in ignoring that the other person is even another person.” (Chapter 23) This was a point also made by Mencius, Schiller, and McGilchrist. Guo Xiang's commentary elaborates further: "He who knows the real point of ritual wanders outside the ordinary realm to handle what is within it, “holding to the mother to preserve the sons” (TCC 52), matching up to the characteristic human inclinations and proceeding directly forward on their basis. If instead you are constrained by names and reputation, and pulled around by forms and regulations, filial piety will not be based on sincerity and parental love will not be based on anything real. Then father and son, brother and brother, will only deceive one another about the real feelings in their breasts. How could that be the real point of ritual?”
The Confucian philosopher Xunzi also chose to highlight the importance of such a transluscent conception of ritual, declaring that through ritual we "give a shape to that which is without physical substance." (Eric Hutton, 2014) We can see that McGilchrist's "metaphor embodied" is essentially a restatement of Guo Xiang and Xunzi. They are all pointing to the way in which ritual is capable of reinforcing the right hemisphere mode of attention, with it's preference for "the journey" over "the destination", and the translucent over the opaque. Compare this view with that of cultural anthropologists, who have noted how rituals provide "a shared idiom for personal diplomacy, a common set of rules for interacting with strangers," one that is so thoroughgoing that "some have gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only really exists during rituals." (Barry Stephenson, 2015) That is to say, statecraft exists for and by means of rituals. (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021) This reflects a slightly more left hemisphere view on rituals because it could be read as foregrounding their instrumental value. But these two views, both right and left, should be synthesized to yield a more complete understanding, where both daily life and our broader social structures can be seen within the perspective of the everflowing infinite, enabling us to see the sacred in every part of what is given.
If we combine these, then on the account of writers like McGilchrist for whom ritual engagement displays many of the hallmarks of the right hemisphere, we may end up discovering the way that "is likely to prove in the long run more veridical, more helpful" might run parallel to, if not along, the obscure paths of ritual to a liminal "bridge between worlds", between chronos and kairos, where we can marvel at both the "extraordinary ordinariness" of life and the possibility of transformative change. McGilchrist famously wrote in his Epilogue "It is easy to misunderstand what cultures wiser than ours were trying to express..." He was speaking about God, but the same could be said of ritual as well, if not more so. Fortunately, the ubiquity of ritual in daily life and society appears to offer an easy entry point for exploration.
Keywords: As it has been explored in this article, ritual is so broad a category that it has aspects which may, in some way or another, touch upon ideas related to: 礼 rites ceremony religion myth philosophy music narrative poetry drama art performance commemoration intergenerational tradition custom “behavioral scripts” cultural practices "movement and flow" "archetypal symbols" sports yoga "fitting gestures" dance theatre humor solemnity gravitas “embodied metaphor” “a bridge between worlds” "ritual play" "serious play" social experimentation liminality "transfer appropriateness" "distributed agency" public festivals celebrations reunions holidays "rites of mobility" “aesthetic activity” sharing food exchanging gifts stories songs courtship bonding affection caregiving synchronization alignment "ecological rituals" “theurgia and synthemata” resacralization "prayer beads" "liturgical cosmos" sacrament sacrifice worship prayer catharsis vertical hierarchical "mode of attention" “evolving field of value" "building the cathedral" "sacred complex" "imbued with meaning" "presencing to reality" "extraordinary ordinariness" "ritual calendar" "ritual landscape" "ritual imagination" "ritual container" "ritual feedback" sacred space "processual knowing" animism panentheism spiritual magical mystical enchantment awe wonder the numinous the occult the divine the holy "enactive love" life trust fidelity humility compassion reverence gratitude soul-making "sacred work" meaning construction beliefs manners courtesy civility dialogue.
Supplemental References:
• Barry Stephenson. Ritual: A Very Short Introduction (2015) Consider the deficits of autism, and the associations with the LH mode of attention. We might ask: If McGilchrist's understanding of ritual as "embodied metaphor" is not too far from the mark, then what are the implications for a civilization where a significant portion of the people have difficulty understanding implied meaning and metaphor? Would they not have a much harder time seeing any point to rituals (let alone navigating the minefield of social interaction)? On this point, Barry Stephenson writes about 'ritual impoverishment': “For people raised in the modern and postmodern industrial West, ritual has been significantly marginalized from cultural and intellectual landscapes..."
• Burton Watson. Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings (1963) Chapter "A Discussion of Rites".
• Eric Hutton. Xunzi: The Complete Text (2014) "One performs the rain sacrifice and it rains. Why? I say: there is no special reason why. It is the same as when one does not perform the rain sacrifice and it rains anyway. ...this is not to be regarded as bringing one what one seeks, but rather is done to give things proper form."
• Brook Ziporyn. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings (2009)
• James Legge. The Writings of Kwang-dze (Zhuangzi) (1891)
• Stephen Lansing. Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (2006)
• Steve Biddulph. Wild Creature Mind: The Neuroscience Breakthrough that Helps You Transform Anxiety and Live a Fierce and Loving Life (2024) Emotions can often be no less transcendent (ontologically primitive) than values. The experience of love, or beauty, is deeply moving, and can draw us into reciprocal relationships. And they are teleological in kairos (not necessarily chronos). Rituals can both help connect us with, and process emotional experiences, whether these are salutogenic or pathogenic. Biddulph's approach appears similar to that of mindfulness, but with the contribution of insights from new sources, such as that of McGilchirst.
• Nikos Salingaros. Unified Architectural Theory, Lecture 8: “Fractals and ornament generate attachment” (2021)
• Nikos Salingaros. Unified Architectural Theory, Lecture 10: “Ornament and human intelligence” (2021)
• Astronaut Bill Anders: “If you can imagine yourself in a darkened room with only one clearly visible object, a small blue-green sphere about the size of a Christmas-tree ornament, then you can begin to grasp what the Earth looks like from space.” ...An ornament, in ritual circumambulation of the sun, resonating with the musica universalis.
• Henry Rosemont Jr. Capitalist Ideology And The Myth Of The Individual Self (2016) "Confucian society is basically family and communally oriented, with customs, traditions and rituals serving as the binding force of and between our many relationships and the responsibilities attendant on them."
• Jeremy Lent. The Patterning Instinct (2017) “A line in the Analects succinctly illuminates it: “Man is able to enlarge the Tao,” says Confucius, “it is not that the Tao enlarges man"... The specific tools for enlarging the Tao were available in the form of ritual observances, known as li, which were seen as a kind of cosmic resonance [between heaven and earth], a sacred acting out by humans of the overarching principles of the universe.” An emphasis on the goodness of humans, the importance of humanism, and an appreciation of the products of human culture is evident for both Confucius and McGilchrist. These find additional expression in McGilchrist's understanding of panentheism and his description of "McGilchrist's Wager".
• Iain McGilchrist. The Nocturnists Conversations (2023) "As empires grow and flourish, the messages that the right hemisphere would have given are fainter, and the very ways in which they would have come to us in the past have been neutralized, minimized, or dismissed. One is the proximity to the natural world, another is social cohesion. People who live in highly cohesive groups share their lives with one another, share their meals with one another, worship together. This is known to produce much higher rates of mental and physical well-being, with effects for rates of heart disease and so on."
• Iain McGilchrist. Music and the Divided Brain (2024) "One of the things we get wrong is the idea of a tradition as being fossilization, but a tradition is the only way in which we can hope to have change that makes any sense. All the great music came out of a living tradition that was always changing." Although speaking of tradition specifically, this may apply to customs, rituals, and other aspects of culture from which new Gestalt can emerge.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990)
• Sobonfu Somé. Why we still need ritual (2016) “Sobonfu Somé is the ‘keeper of the rituals’ of the Dagara Tribe in West Africa. She told me that ritual is to the soul as food and water is to the body. It’s what nourishes us deeply.”
• Curie Virág. Rituals create community by translating our love into action (2021) "The proper performance of ritual ceremonies represents the optimal way for people to enact their love... through ritual, Xunzi declares, we ‘give a shape to that which is without physical substance'... We are surrounded by ritual possibilities that allow us to realise our connections with one another: ceremonial occasions with which we celebrate and commemorate the milestones of our loved ones, but also those of a more modest variety – the exchange of greetings and courtesies, a shared meal carefully prepared, an act of kindness on behalf of a stranger. Such events open the possibility of bringing forth our concern for one another in a special ritualised space infused with dignity. In so doing, out of many disparate lives they can forge a collectivity built upon a shared yearning to connect to one another and, in our better moments, to participate in the creation of sense, order and beauty."
• Richard Payne. In Defense of Ritual (2022) "The legacy of Freud’s equation of ritual with obsessive-compulsive disorder also lingers as a negative value judgment about ritual. But the reality is quite the contrary. The process of systematic training and thorough learning of a ritual procedure allows one to be even more fully present in the moment. Like practicing jump shots in basketball or scales on the piano until they are fully present in one’s body, repetitive practice of ritual opens up the experience to an awareness of the moment in which one can be free, spontaneous, and fully present." [cf. the aphorism "life is a journey, not a destination"]
• Christopher Kavanagh. Religion without belief (2016) "Practice, in the Japanese religious environment, is given prominence over belief" and "lies at the very heart of the Japanese religious world". Barry Stephenson similarly wrote "many ritual traditions emphasize participation or observance over belief". (72)
• Matthew Segall. Metamodern Christianity: From the Ritual to the Political (2024) "Ritual is an enactive process that we engage in. We can certainly tear to shreds the fabric of life on the planet if we're not in ritual synchronization with the rhythms of that living planet... Ritual is a way of participating in the divine nature. If we don't have ritual means of connecting with the bigger picture, to include the entire history of the universe, then we're cut off and lost in our little abstract view of the world."
• Abigail Rouch. Revival – really? (2024) The article distinguishes between "weaponised Christianity" and “mystical Christianity”. There's just as much a resurgence in puritanism as there is in “a proper understanding of our position in the cosmos, not as the exploiter, but as the caretaker.” And this is telling: "Vernon notes that the Orthodoxy that has attracted Kingsnorth and Shaw... is more about participation through liturgy than converting to safeguard your immortal soul." People are drawn to the embodied metaphor of rituals, not abstract literalistic dogma.
• David DeSteno. How God Works (2021) The Ritual Design Lab is mentioned.
• Dimitris Xygalatas. Ritual (2022) Points out that (from the perspective of the left hemisphere) rituals are "causally opaque", in that like metaphors their function or meaning isn't immediately clear in the same way that say, brushing one's teeth is "causally transparent". (p6)
• Dimitris Xygalatas. Rituals as signals of mate quality (2022) Applying Zahavi's notion of signal selection to ritual. (see also Psychology Today)
• Julian Huxley. The Courtship habits of the Great Crested Grebe (1914)
• Ronald Grimes. Beginnings in Ritual Studies (1995)
• Catherine Bell. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (1997)
• Catherine Bell. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992)
• Edward Muir. Ritual in Early Modern Europe (1997)
• Jonathan Smith. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (1987)
• Victor Turner. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969)
• Cristine Legare et al. The importance of rituals in behaviour change (2022) The intersection of rituals and public health.
• Cristine Legare and Mark Nielsen. Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours (2020)
• Hobson et al. Rituals decrease the neural response to performance failure (2017) "Though rituals might appear on the surface to be wasteful for expended energy and time, the presence of rituals in different performance contexts suggests they are critical to self-regulation and goal attainment."
• Alastair McIntosh. COP26 as a Ritual Space (2021) "Ritual unblocks avenues to higher consciousness, to deeper ways of seeing, being, and therefore, to more focussed and hopefully more effective ways of doing." Bron Taylor's review of Poacher's Pilgrimage, McIntosh's earlier book: "If pilgrimage is a path to enchantment, there is no better guide than Alastair McIntosh."
• Ben Lillie. Science Needs a New Ritual (2015) Commentary on Mauna Kea telescope protests. “I think as scientists we miss the importance of ritual, in part because we see ourselves as people who have gotten past such things. Of course that’s wrong.”
• Werner Herzog. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) "The strongest hint of something spiritual, some religious ceremony in the cave, is this bear skull. It has been placed dead center on a rock resembling an altar. The staging seems deliberate. The skull faces the entrance of the cave, and around it, fragments of charcoal were found potentially used as incense. What exactly took place here, only the paintings could tell us."
• Charles Sherrington. Man on his nature (1942) "Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom..." At the boundaries of understanding within science, metaphors take over. For an example from science fiction, the second part of The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin is titled "The Spell". And finally, all pretense is dropped within the genre of magical realism.
• Alastair Reynolds. Zima Blue (2006) The story describes the "pleasure and contentment from the execution of a task, no matter how purposeless." The author suggests this kind of profound, peak experience of flow is only available to simple minds. And so the character of Zima, like Sartre himself, has an affinity for images of petrification. But these experiences are only unavailable to the left hemisphere, given what we know of ritual.
• Van de Cruys and Heylighen. The dark side of thinking through other minds. (2020) "Rituals are especially successful at important transition points in life (such as the transition to adulthood), characterized by higher uncertainty about how one should act."
• John Miller. A Crude Look at the Whole (2015) On the island of Bali, the need for coordinated cropping by farmers opened up "a niche for an elaborate religious institution with various shrines and temples tied to the irrigation systems." Balinese rice farming is an example of system wide cooperation leading to centuries of sustainable agriculture. (See Elinor Ostrom)
• Jordan Hall. On Cities, Civiums, and Becoming Christian (2024): "Rituals create the scaffolding that makes it easy for people to come into groups and live according to their values, into communions that are driven by those values, and to respond to the context of reality as it impinges upon the life that we’re trying to live... A group of people commit to contributing a significant amount of their time and attention to orienting towards the architecture, the hierarchy of values, and understanding how to live in that way and make concerted real commitments to live according to those values and to support each other in doing it."
• Rod Dreher. The Paul Kingsnorth Interview (2023) Paul Kingsnorth: "I think it’s impossible not to have religion, not to have a ritual center."
• Paul Kingsnorth. Why we cling on to Christmas (2021) "One thing I have learned... is the necessity of ritual in a human life... We reject ritual in the modern West. We don’t see why we should submit to any authority or respect any tradition. We believe that every one of us can invent the world anew. We are wrong about this, as we are about much else."
• Zevi Slavin. Introduction to the Study of Ritual (2024) Overview with quotes: "The ritual makes creation over again." (Mircea Eliade, 1958), "Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention." (Jonathan Smith, 1987), "Ritual debases thought in order that it should meet the requirements of life." (Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1971 lecture, Race and Culture), "It is not too much to say that ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then find words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts." (Mary Douglas, 1966), "Ritual practice is the activity of cultivating extraordinary ordinariness. But if the ritually extraordinary becomes a goal or is severed from ordinariness, it loses its capacity to transform." (Ronald Grimes, 2019, Marrying and Burying)
• Jack Kornfield. Wisdom, Compassion, and Courage in Uncertain Times (2017) "Politics is basically ritualized warfare. Instead of the Democrats or Republicans or libertarians taking their tanks and guns and saying 'Okay, I'm in charge now' it's done in a kind of ritualized way." He quotes Gandhi: "Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means." (The Story of My Experiments With Truth)
• Richard Watson. Songs of Life and Mind (2023) "The real creativity is not from how a system changes to facilitate its persistence, survival, reproduction. It's the dance that it and its environment do together, transforming each other into a new song." Richard Watson employs process philosophy and the power of metaphor to suggest new lines of research, on par with Kauffman and Deacon, while synthesizing the work of others like Bohm and Friston. "Natural harmonic induction" and resonance could similarly describe the relationship between ritual and value. He said "biological evolution construed more broadly is a fundamentally cognitive process." Can he expand his approach to a broader conception, to one of ritualistic processes? His metaphor smuggles in that suggestion, but his mechanism, so far, prohibits it. Nonetheless, Csikszentmihalyi suggests the genesis of numinous resonance could be found in ritual.
• Jerry Leach and Gary Kildea. Cricket As A Conflict Resolution Ritual in Papua New Guinea (1976).
• Paul Cooper. Poetry: Key Components of Poetry (2024)
Vervaeke Resources:
• John Vervaeke. Transcendence, transformation, rationality, ritual, and the divine double w/ Charles Stang (2022) Vervaeke references LA Paul's "Becoming a Vampire" as metaphor for transformative change.
• John Vervaeke. Rationality and ritual - Invited Cambridge talk. (2022) "With 4E cognitive science, cognition isn't in your head, it's in this dynamic looping between you and the world. And the world is as much a part of your cognition as your brain is, in a very real sense. ...Ritual aligns you with the deepest structures of reality."
• John Vervaeke. The Power of Ritual in Transcendent Experiences (2023) How historical perspectives on rituals inform contemporary attitudes.
• John Vervaeke. Theatre-ritual-movement ecology of practices w/ Ethan Kobayashi-Hsieh & Tamaki Kobayashi-Hsieh (2022)
• John Vervaeke. Navigating the Terrain of Movement and Meaning: A Conversation with John Vervaeke and Rafe Kelley (2023) Rafe Kelley: "I'm just starting to be aware that play and ritual are not so easy to distinguish."
• John Vervaeke. After Socrates: Episode 13 - Ritual Way of Knowing (2023)
• Curt Jaimungal. Iain McGilchrist Λ John Vervaeke: God, Being, Meaning (2022)
• Matt Rossano. Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion (2021)
• Kevin Schilbrack. Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (2004)
• Theodore Jennings. On Ritual Knowledge (1982)
• Gregory Shaw. Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (2003)
• Radek Chlup. Proclus: An Introduction (2016)
• Jan Zwicky. The Experience of Meaning (2019)
• Crystal Addey. Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism (2014)
• Hans Urs von Balthasar. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor (2003)
• Ron Williams and James Boyd. Ritual Art and Knowledge: Aesthetic Theory and Zoroastrian Ritual (1993)
• Ilinca Tanaseanu-Dobler. Theurgy in Late Antiquity: The Invention of a Ritual Tradition (2013)
• Jeffrey Kupperman. Living Theurgy: A Course in Iamblichus' Philosophy, Theology and Theurgy (2014)
• Bruce MacLennan. The Wisdom of Hypatia: Ancient Spiritual Practices for a More Meaningful Life (2013)
More Cultural Rituals:
Take note of the rituals around you. What are the rituals engaged in by our family, friends, and neighbors? Here is a brief selection.
• The Vedic religion, and subsequent Brahmanism, centered on the myths and ritual ideologies of the Vedas, which constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature (and Indian philosophy). The Vedic rituals can be "divided into Śrauta and Gṛhya rituals". Public ceremonies were relegated to the Śrautasutras, while most household ceremonies were incorporated in the Gṛhyasūtras. See also Buddhist Eightfold Path and Jain rituals.
• Dhikr is a form of worship in which phrases are repeatedly recited for the purpose of remembering God, in accordance with the Sufi belief that humans only need to remember (dhikr) their innate knowledge of God. Each Sufi order typically adopts a specific dhikr, accompanied by specific posture, breathing, and movement. Since this involves the repetition of phrases a specific number of times, prayer beads (rosaries) are often used to keep track of the count. Both women and men may perform dhikr. Though genders are traditionally segregated, the format is flexible.
• Art/Music/Theatre and the connections with ritual have been speculated on for a long time. Music and dance, in a variety of forms, frequently accompanies or is the primary act of ritual, and the close cousin of invocation and prayer.
• Other-than-human ritual enactments require ecological integrity, including the preservation of conditions (such as soundscapes)
that support it. And so anyone
concerned with environmental quality should by implication be aware of
the integrity of ecological rituals as well.
• If thought and language itself is bound up
in ritual, in ways we barely understand, then perhaps language learning
can be understood as a process of ritual acquisition. Language
acquisition then may be thought of as the memorization of the culturally
embedded "ritual scripts" within a linguistically scaffolded "memory (ritual) palace".
• Rituals of
food preparation and eating. Children are taught table manners. Katherine Bryant and Erin Hecht's 'External Fermentation Hypothesis' argues that the offloading of gut fermentation into an external cultural practice (a form of detrivory) could have provided the caloric boost that allowed our brains to expand. But cooking is general is "kitchen magic". It's not uncommon to hear that someone followed a recipe line by line, and yet still did not achieve the desired results. There's certainly an air of mystery surrounding this. The
Japanese tea ceremony is imbued with symbolism. "Hara hachi bu"
is a Confucian teaching that instructs people to not eat past 80
percent full (recognizing that desire often exceeds capacity). In the absence of external constraints, the benefit of self-reguling the indulgence of one's apetite are many.
• The field of mental health has produced many different practices (rituals) to help people cope with challenging situations. To take just one example, Dialectical Behavior Therapy promotes "Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills" with the acronym "DEAR MAN", a mnemonic device for progressing through several steps to improve communication. Therapy support groups, in which tools like this may be introduced to promote change, are highly structured, ritualistic activities.
• Robert's Rules of Order was written primarily to help guide voluntary associations in their operations of governance. The recitation of these rules during meetings tends to invoke an almost liturgical solemnity.
• Tending sacred forests: "Shinto shrines often honored spirits and gods of the forests, so the temple grounds hosted miniature stands of trees. In the 1970s, Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki began studying the shrine forests and decided the model could help rewild urban environments." The connection between nature and the sacred isn't restricted to any single religion. "Church forests in Ethiopia are small fragments of forest surrounding Orthodox Tewahedo Churches that have been tended for some 1,500 years." There are connections with agroecology (see also Longji rice terraces).
• Rituals of mobility, departure, and reunion: pilgrimages, parades, processions, marathons, (quests, and more mundane rites of greeting and exiting (in my family it is customary to wave goodbye until the departing person or group is out of sight). Fritjof Capra (currently 85) has practiced Tai Chi as a form of meditation for many decades. James Lovelock, who died at 103, would frequently take long walks at his "signature breakneck speed". During reunions of families, friends, etc, traditional games may be played (in a contemporary setting this may be as simple as Uno or croquet), and old stories retold, perhaps with use of memory aides like a photo album.
• Daniel Lieberman et al. Running in Tarahumara (Rarámuri) Culture: Persistence Hunting, Footracing, Dancing, Work, and the Fallacy of the Athletic Savage (2020) The Rarámuri races are extensions of a dance ritual enacted to petition, give thanks, and maintain a dynamic equilibrium between opposing forces. See also kaihōgyō.
• Joe Pinsker. The Strange Origins of American Birthday Celebrations. For most people, birthdays were once just another day. Industrialization changed that. (2021) "Not until the early 20th century were birthday celebrations a tradition nationwide." The cultural significance of gift giving was famously studied by Marcel Mauss.
• The 40 Below Club is a local winter ritual in Fairbanks Alaska, older than the "ice bucket challenge" which in 2014 enjoyed surprising popularity.
• Kristen Bahler. Inside the Highly Organized Lives of ‘Planner Addicts,’ a Massive Instagram Community of Women Who Make Beautiful To-Do Lists (2019) Heather Kell: “It’s more about organizing your life so that you have time to relax and not be busy all the time.” The close cousin of the logbook, journal, and diary, daily planners can become a meta-ritual, a ritual for recording the rituals of the 'ritual calendar'. Karl Friston
protects his time by sticking rigidly to a regimented routine. Marie Kondo, an organizing guru, has many rituals that derive from her Shinto heritage. The idea here is that there's always an appropriate ritual for any given moment. Figuring out what that is, and sequencing rituals throughout the day/week/year, is what one does.
• Courtship rituals may involve Zahavi's notion of signal selection, but perhaps more significantly they require harmonization with and demonstrated responsiveness to another person as a whole, including their thoughts, feelings, desires, and values.
• Alex Martin. Japan embraces ancient weather rituals (2024) "There are said to be around 300,000 festivals held across Japan every year, from major events drawing millions to tiny village rituals hosted by local shrines and temples... Historically, the amount of rain affecting crop growth was a major concern for Japan’s agrarian society. In response Buddhist monks perform rituals known as amagoi (rainmaking) or higoi (sun-making).”
• Sporting events (and training routines) are replete with rituals. The rules and regulations devised for the sports events themselves, such as swimming, and combined sporting events such as the Olympics, may otherwise seem almost arbitrary (causally opaque) outside of this framing. To ensure a successful outcome, the ritualistic behaviors of contestants and spectators can extend far beyond the bare rules of the games themselves.
• Military rituals can be very elaborate, consider the flamboyant "Beating Retreat Ceremony" at the Attari-Wagah Border between India and Pakistan. No such friendly contests of bravado (the ceremony includes a handshake and a smile) exist at the Korean border, nonetheless the ceremonialism is still present.
• Work and study. My first year in college I took a freshman chemistry class in which the professor comically explained 'how to study'. He described a complex process of preparation, taking several minutes, and involving several false starts, before finally buckling down to business. Not unlike a dog turning in circles before laying down, getting into the right frame of mind is a ritual.
• Ritual purification concerns not only cleanliness, but strict adherence to rules of sanitary behavior and abstention from anything thought to be a source of contamination. The simple routines of bathing and maintaining perfectly coiffed hair are part of the contemporary expression.
• Yoga, that group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices that originated in ancient India. One must have at least some degree of self control to engage in such rituals and associated esoterotica. Traditionally, the highest goal of the yogi was to unite with the divine.
• Sumo originated from an agricultural ritual dance performed in prayer for a good harvest, and it retains many ritual elements. These include the symbolic cleansing of the ring by tossing salt and rinsing the mouth with chikara-mizu (力水, power water) before a fight, which is similar to the ritual before entering a Shinto shrine. Ritual games such as these, while they do have rules and "winners and losers", they are not really about winning or losing at all. There is no utilitarian "ends" that override all other considerations. This is an "infinite game" in the language of James Carse, in that it "exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game". It's about whether a competitor has "good sumo" or not. The artistic elements of ritual performance were made clear when, upon achieving his 10th championship, Terunofuji said. “I have been able to compete in the style of sumo that I was aiming for since I became a sumo wrestler.”
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