St Valentine's Day
Pancake Day
Easter Eggs
Birthdays
Father's Day
Mother's Day

and a few other invented by card companies!

'To me life in Western Europe is full of ritual activity and pretty deviod of spirituality.'

Couldn't agree more, fitz!

As much as is possible in a society that seems to adore the capitalist excesses of Christmas, I avoid it. But I see the horrors that people face in thinking they have to conform to it - spoling their ungrateful children, getting into hideous and unnecessary debt, stressing about silly things like have they bought enough food, what will aunty smellbag think, etc, etc. This IS undoubtedly a ritualised behaviour that people wish to conform to because it is what society expects of them. I refuse to do this and people ask me 'why'.

I don't think ritual (or habit) has anything (necessarily) to do with religion. I like my getting-up-in-the-morning rituals, but that doesn't make me religious or even vaguely spiritual.

We all need ritual or habit; people thrive within it and need it to punctuate our lives. Just like we need the changing seasons, strawberries in spring and apples in autumn. Without it we don't know what to expect next, we feel unsettled.

Why would not have our ancient ancestors felt any different? They needed the regularity of the phases of the moon to mark time (and the patterns of moods of their women!), spring lambing to ensure freedom from hunger, new growth of willows and rushes for building and weaving...

Organised religions grew out of these patterns, which we like so much. Its easier for us to adopt the religion if it already follows stuff we like and feel comfy with.

J
x

PS This should be interesting at 8pm tonight: Channel 4 'The Root of All Evil?' Atheist bloke turns as fundamentalist in his vigour to promote atheism as the very religions he is 'dissing'.

"To me life in Western Europe is full of ritual activity and pretty deviod of spirituality"

Its devoid of spirituality alright! But are we confusing "ritual activity" with "compulsive disorder". Mere repetition of pointless actions like -

Christmas shopping, buying stuff in M&S today and exchanging it tomorrow, getting a new mobile though there is nothing wrong with the old one, just having to have the latest ring tones, downing as much ale as you can to prove your manhood, conforming to daft spellings like R*man and Xtian - are compulsions.

Our few remaining festivals are cheapjack commercial exploitations designed to sell cards, gifts and booze. They lack any real ritual. Each generation creates its own new compulsions within its peer groups and despises those of previous age groups. That is how society evolves and eventually collapses. The alternative is stagnation, tyranny and obsessive observation of ritual.

To me - ritual is formalised behaviour that we choose to follow - Catholics taking communion for example. Would I could go back to a time when simple rustic folk danced the sun up on May morning, brought in greenery and yule logs at Christmas, sang the harvest home... but I can't. That is a romantic dream and we are divorced from the old folk ways. Fake replication without meaning is all that remains. Alas!

"I think ethnological studies of none western (capitalist) societies are possibly our best chance at trying to understand Britain 5000 years ago."

I completely 100 percent agree, Fitz-o. In fact have been trying to make this point for ages, but the silence is monolithic! We have to our hands extensive studies of tribal peoples from all over the world, from the Tunguska to Irian Jaya. Their animist and arguably pantheistic world-view is born directly from being part of the 'wild' in the wildeerness. Where agriculture begins, the separation begins, yet even then it seems to take thousands of years to forego the rituals, they become customs.

Back on point, stone age tribes do exist today, even though contact with westerners changes them irrevocably, the data is there to study.

The trip-up is that no (to my knowledge) existing 'primitive' societies build stone circles. Given this, even, we could surely learn enough via behavioural traits of historic and exisiting agrarian and/or hunter-gatherer communities to make more educated guesses regarding our ancestors? Better than time-team anyhow ;-)

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?

I ill-advisedly dived into this post a little way in and got a bit mired, thought I'd take a breath, step back and see what the original idea was here!

> To me life in Western Europe is full of ritual activity and pretty devoid of spirituality. Can this be applied to the past? probably not, I think ethnological studies of none western (capitalist) societies are possibly our best chance at trying to understand Britain 5000 years ago.

I totally agree with this. There's certainly caveats about it not being simple, but they're kind of obvious. To me the main point is that when we're looking at prehistory, there are huge, inevitable, unresolvable gaps in our image of life then. Some people cut loose and fill the gaps with wishful thinking, some hold tight and refuse to commit to anything that can't be scientifically verified. (Of course most people sit somewhere between these poles on the continuum somewhere...)

But I think both ends have their risks, and because of our science-heavy culture, we often miss the main danger of that end: the illusion of objectivity. In my experience, I don't think it's humanly possible to completely leave those gaps in unknowable entities like prehistory totally void. It seems that if they're not consciously addressed, they're filled unconsciously. We can't help having an image of life back then, but if we try to "stick to the facts", just the skeletal picture we get from archaeology, the flesh gets put on by our habitual assumptions about life that we've grown into here and now - leaving an image of the past arguably as distorted as any Atlantean fantasy, as well as informing our ideas from behind the scenes instead of being actively brought on-stage and dealt with.

I assume the attacks on the word "ritual" you're referring to come from this, where archaeological evidence is deemed too spartan to even guess at behavioural stuff like ritual - *how* objects were used, etc. But if we don't consciously imagine stuff like this, we're in danger of unwittingly applying our pretty empty experience of ritual to our picture of the past. And yeah, I think ethnology is crucial to consciously imagining prehistory.

Of course there's a whole minefield here, around the simplistic equation of contemporary "stone age" culture with the literal stone ages. But it always seems to me the bottom line is whatever the differences (and there'll be plenty), these cultures are much closer to the actual stone ages than we are. For us they're one of our best tools for building our imagination of the past. (As well as being an invaluable cultural repository of information about how to survive without modern tech, which we're trashing at our grave peril, but that's another story...)