When the Rituals Stop Working
I am just returned from a two-week trip to South Africa. One of the women in our group is a highly regarded sangoma and ceremonialist in the lineage of Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. At one point she raised the question, “Why is it that many sangomas say that the ceremonies aren’t working as well as they used to?”
The ceremonies this woman conducts are powerful, in that they alter consciousness and induce a sense of the sacred. But what she was referring to was the power of ceremonies to bend reality, to make objects appear and disappear, to distort time and space, to transport people from one location to another, to heal illness and change the weather. One of our group related his experience in Burkina Faso, in a deep festive ritual where the entranced participants would raise their hands to the sky and lower them, and in an instant their costumes had changed. Why do such things rarely happen anymore?
I once read a similar lament from a South American shaman. “In my grandfather’s time,” he said, “our rituals would manifest living seedlings in the palms of our hands. Now it is rare that even a single seed appears.”
Whatever is going on, something similar is happening to the rituals of our own society, the rituals of modernity. They aren’t working as well as they used to. In both cases, it is because the story, the mythology that embeds the rituals is breaking down.
Another woman in our group was in intense pain from a pinched nerve in her shoulder. Finally she went to a Western medical doctor for a cortisone shot. The doctor’s office was festooned with signs urging patients to get all their vaccinations, ridiculing alternative medicine, and dismissing the idea that eating organic food would prevent disease. Our friend got her shot and a bunch of pills (painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, etc.) The next day, her shoulder was worse.
Our rituals aren’t working so well.
Let me pause to consider what I mean by ‘ritual” and “ceremony.” People use different definitions and apply them differently in different contexts, and I won’t try to rigidly distinguish them. But the normal understanding of ritual gets it exactly wrong. A ritual is not a set of merely symbolic actions that are therefore less real than practical actions. A true ritual feels more real than other acts, not less.
Stella and I performed a ritual yesterday together with our mortgage broker. You see, we wanted to refinance our mortgage at a lower interest rate. We had prepared for this ritual for several weeks, assembling the required offerings such as bank statements, tax returns, and credit scores, and executing innumerable mouse-clicks on Docusign. An extraterrestrial anthropologist watching all this would smirk under his beard at the superstitious natives clicking away at documents that they do not read or understand, believing nonetheless that they are doing something real. Anyway, now the big day had arrived for the final ritual. We sat around a table and the mortgage shaman, a nice young man named Jeff, passed us document after document to which we each affixed our ceremonial mark. Neither he nor we read a single word in that inch-thick sheaf of papers. Jeff could have replaced whole paragraphs and pages with excerpts from Beowulf and it would have made no difference.
Signing a contract is one of the prime rituals of modern society. It feels more real than other actions. It has consequences. Signing a contract is serious business. Taking an exam is another ritual. Going to the doctor’s office. Taking a supplement. Getting a vaccination. Bringing a lawsuit. Filing a patent. Casting a ballot. Issuing a judicial opinion. Passing legislation. Swiping a credit card.
A ritual can also be a ceremony, though normally none of the ones I just listed rise to that level. A ritual becomes a ceremony when it is performed with reverence. Any act can be a ceremony, even making your bed or greeting a guest, if it is done with reverence and precision.
Rituals lose their power as the agreements beneath them unravel. These are agreements about what things mean, who or what is legitimate, and ultimately what is real. These agreements weave a story-of-the-world from which the ritual draws its power, and each diligent, ceremonial performance of it strengthens that story. A perfunctory performance, in contrast, weakens the story that gave it power. That’s what happens when we routinely, thoughtlessly click “I agree” every time we subscribe to a website or log onto wifi at a cafe. We are supposedly signing a contract every time we do that. In so doing, we cheapen the very idea of contract. That mouse-click becomes a ritual in the popular sense: a meaningless symbolic action, an “empty ritual.”
Today, many of the rituals that run our society are losing their power. For example, the Trump administration simply ignores judicial rulings, the US Constitution, UN resolutions, treaties with other nations, and international law. To be fair, Donald Trump did not originate this trend, but he has certainly taken it to a new level. For decades, cynicism has eroded the forms of democratic governance from within, until they became mere pantomimes disguising the naked power operating behind the scenes. Outside of an agreement-field that makes it more, a judicial ruling is but some words spoken by a person dressed up in robes wielding a gavel. The Constitution is but a sheaf of parchment. The UN is but a bunch of chattering homo sapiens in a big auditorium in New York.
The suspicion grows that we are all playing a game of “let’s pretend.” The rituals that run the world have emptied, and we wonder if we are doing anything real.
To be sure, many of our rituals embedded in technology, medicine, governance, and finance still work reasonably well. Currency has not devolved into mere slips of paper, nor account balances into mere columns of figures. No hyperinflation has yet visited to destroy the story of value. The anesthesiologist’s potion still induces unconsciousness, and the antibiotic wipes out the infection. Everyone still believes that a judge’s sentence means that armed men will drag you off to jail. The intricate rituals of science and engineering deliver tools that work for their intended purpose. And yet, as we zoom out, the aggregate of these rituals fails to hold the world together as it once did.
Medicine can cure individual ailments, even as the overall level of health deteriorates across society. Psychiatric medications temporarily alleviate depression or anxiety, yet despite their continued development, society as a whole grows more depressed with each passing year. Each new technology saves labor and increases productivity, yet overall leisure continues to decrease as economic anxiety intensifies. Individually, each of our rituals to create safety, health, convenience, connection, and abundance functions as it ever did, yet life slips inexorably toward fear, illness, loneliness, and scarcity for the modern majority.
We are losing faith in our rituals and in the mythology beneath them. As a result (and also as a cause), we become attracted to the outposts of other mythologies, other stories of what is real, what is possible, and what a human being is. This explains, in part, why many people are so attracted to indigenous knowledge, Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, and New Age metaphysics. It is why UAPs and telepathy and the miraculous hold such fascination. (A miracle being something that is impossible from an accepted story-of-the-world.)
A couple days later, our friend with the shoulder pain had a remote healing session with Stella. Now for the first time in months she is able to sleep on her side. Stella’s healing work that she calls Resonant Attention is not ritualistic. It is a ceremony however, and it draws on a different mythology from the prevailing force-based causality.
To answer the sangoma’s question, the reason that the ceremonies don’t work quite as they used to is that their underlying mythology has been diluted by Western education and modern worldviews—explicitly through schooling, and implicitly through engaging modern medicine, market economies, and the products of technology. Together, these invite other cultures to doubt their story-of-the-real. Their myths, once accepted as literal accounts of what is and how the world came to be, once held as you and I might hold the Big Bang and Boltzmann’s Law of Gases, become metaphors and allegories, mere stories, cultural artifacts, mementos of a former time. They are no longer held in quite the same way. When you learn in school that change happens when you exert a force on a mass, and when you are surrounded by technologies based on that principle, other causal principles recede from your lived reality. This process is not sudden or uniform across a society or even within an individual. The more intact a culture, the more insulated from competing mythologies, then the more powerful its ceremonies will remain.
The mythology of modernity is collapsing. The next mythology will not replace it though; it will expand it. The worldview that was so total at its zenith is not wrong; it is just partial. We have grown against its limits. No one alive today remembers how liberating it once was to be free of moribund notions of God and spirit and a higher power, to be free of any notion of limit imposed by a natural order or divine law, to exult in our supremacy and its license to limitless creativity. Enlightenment thinkers spoke of the “shackles of religion.” The mythology of rational materialism was a womb in which humanity grew in a certain mode of development. Now a new mode of development beckons. Titanic forces are propelling us through the birth canal, and we see a light from another world.
In that world, we will still have access to the rituals of modernity: its technology, its medicine, its money, its legal structures, but mostly they will recede to a subordinate role. The old story (rational materialism, objectivity, metrics & measurement, quantification, standardization, scale, mechanical causality—the Story of Separation) will be but one of the many tributaries to the mighty river of human development. No longer will it impose itself on other cultures as the ultimate truth. Its gifts will remain available but its ontological imperialism will end. Freed from its hegemony, other cultures, what Orland Bishop calls communities of memory, will recover the power of their ceremonies without having to insulate themselves to remain intact. They will be free to coevolve with all the rest. They will join and intermingle with the other currents and eddies of the Great River. They will deliver their gifts to the world, that they have been holding for so, so long.
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