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Re: Ritual
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Hi Fitz

It's a peculiar one. Isn't the lack of seeing the importance of ritual a reflection of a person's lack of integration in the world? If we define it semantically as something done by others, it's obviously because we simply do not enact ritual events in our own lives. This comes from a lack of a sense of the 'sacred': not a sacredness which seems entwined with religion, for religion tries to bind the sacred into parcels of right and wrong. But I think a larger part comes from our relationship with the world. It's a 'mythic' thing and I mean 'mythic' in the way ascribed by Campbell, Eliade, Jung and the modern transpersonal psychologies.

If our mythic worldview is inorganic, cut-and-dried, factual, striving-to-define, so our ideas on the sacred, or ritual (which manifests as a by-product of recognition with the sacred) will reflect that. Indeed, they will go as far as denying it any validity. But surely much of this modern cultual ritual of running about at Xmas, far from being some obsessive disorder, is an internal attempt to give order to the year: to define it, to give it sanctity. I know that isn't the way it manifests itself nowadays, but are there not unconscious (natural) drives in us which strive to make special certain times, places, events. To ritualise them. If we have lost touch with the world of ritual and the sacred, is it not because we have lost touch with ourselves?


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Paulus
Posted by Paulus
9th January 2006ce
18:46

In reply to:

Ritual (fitzcoraldo)

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Re: Ritual (Littlestone)

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