Ritualism

“ Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy and beauty!" Remember that all acts of love and pleasure are rituals, must be rituals. "There are rituals of the elements and feasts of the times. A feast for the first night of the Prophet and his Bride! A feast for the three days of the writing of the Book of the Law. A feast for Tahuti and the child of the Prophet—secret, O Prophet! A feast for the Supreme Ritual, and a feast for the Equinox of the Gods. A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death! ”

“ The ritual which is comparatively rude and straightforward is the ritual which people call "ritualistic." It consists of plain things like bread and wine and fire, and men falling on their faces. But the ritual which is really complex, and many coloured, and elaborate, and needlessly formal, is the ritual which people enact without knowing it. It consists not of plain things like wine and fire, but of really peculiar, and local, and exceptional, and ingenious things—things like door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells, and silk hats, and white ties, and shiny cards, and confetti. ”

“ Yet it is from mythology, or from the still more reflective and deliberative expression of ritual, of rites and ceremonies, that the science of religion has sought to infer the nature of the gods man worships. The whole apparatus of religion, rites and ceremonies, sacrifice and altars, nature-worship and polytheism, has been investigated; the one thing overlooked has been the one thing for the sake of which all the others exist, the prayer in which man's soul rises, or seeks to rise, to God. ”

“ To the unprogressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, itself- hê pterou dynamis, the power of the wing—an element [203] of refinement, of ascension, with the promise of an endless destiny. While the ritual remains unchanged, the aesthetic element, only accidentally connected with it, expands with the freedom and mobility of the things of the intellect. Always, the fixed element is the religious observance; the fluid, unfixed element is the myth, the religious conception. This religion is itself pagan, and has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. ”

“ Our information regarding the least-developed communities indicates that with them religion, when it exists, is an affair of custom, of tradition and usage, handed down during a period the history of which we have no means of knowing. Worship as it first appears consists of ceremonies, generally, perhaps always, regarded as having objective effectiveness.1831 The ritual act itself, in the earliest systems, is powerful, in a sort magical, but tends to lose this character and take on the forms of ordinary human intercourse. ”

“ The process by which mores are developed and established is ritual. Ritual is so foreign to our mores that we do not recognize its power. In primitive society it is the prevailing method of activity, and primitive religion is entirely a matter of ritual. Ritual is the perfect form of drill and of the regulated habit which comes from drill. Acts which are ordained by authority and are repeated mechanically without intelligence run into ritual. If infants and children are subjected to ritual they never escape from its effects through life. ”

“ Through ritual certain acts come to be performed with great regularity, thoroughness, detail, and solemnity. "In primitive life it [ritual] is widely and effectively used to insure for educational, political, and domestic customs obedience to Page 416 the group standards." In contemporary life, certain social forms and observances, as well as certain religious ceremonies, are examples of the enforcement of given acts, by ritual. ”

“ Ritual is the technique of sanctifying custom; ritual creates and perpetuates myths as well as contributing to the preservation of social and religious customs. Again, ritual itself has been fathered by myths. Rituals are often at first social, later becoming economic and finally acquiring the sanctity and dignity of religious ceremonial. Ritual may be personal or group in practice—or both—as illustrated by prayer, dancing, and drama. ”

“ When God chose for Himself a people to honour and serve Him, to be witnesses for His honour, to bring in due time all nations to serve and worship Him, He taught that people what kind of House they should build Him, and with what kind of ritual they should serve Him; treating the matter of such importance as actually to inspire the architects, to prescribe each article of furniture and every detail of ornament, to appoint precisely the ceremonies and observances. ”

“ And so it comes about that in all the records we have left of the old religion the salient feature which catches and retains our attention is exactness of ritual. All must be performed not merely 'decently and in order,' but with the most scrupulous care alike for every detail of the ceremonial itself, and for the surrounding circumstances. ”

“ Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few. This sentiment fixes itself in the earliest times to certain usages of patriarchal life, the kindling of fire, the washing of the body, the slaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest, holidays and dances. Here are the beginnings of a ritual, at first as occasional and unfixed as the sentiment which it expresses, but destined to become the permanent element of religious life. ”

“ And what therefore I would earnestly desire that the Church of God in this land might draw forth from the present excitement and anxiety about ritual is, a faithful comparison of herself, in point of doctrine and practice, with the Apostolic and Primitive model. There are greater things than these; "The life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." ”

“ In this primitive phase of religion, dominated by ritual and emotion, we are dealing with essentially social phenomena. Ritual is more impressive, and emotion more active, when a whole society is concerned in the same ritual and the same emotion. Accordingly, a collective ritual and a collective emotion take their places as one of the binding forces of savage tribes. ”

“ The title of this book may strike the reader as strange and even dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is, to the modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms and ceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of a church or sect. ”

“ The evidence of ritual is adduced because of the conservative tendencies of rites on which the prosperity of tribes and states is believed to depend. While the attempt is made to show that the wilder features of myth survive from, or were borrowed from, or were imitated from, the ideas of people in the savage condition of thought, the existence—even among savages—of comparatively pure, if inarticulate, religious beliefs or sentiments is insisted on throughout. ”

“ But when you have gotten a ritual which supposes, as it must, certain doctrines, and which, as you said to your friend, instructs the people in these doctrines, are you not trammelling the private judgment of those worshippers who do not believe these doctrines and wish to have a ritual which is consistent with their belief? What right have you to impose a ritual upon them inconsistent with their belief? ”

“ The rites may be performed anywhere as occasion demands.
‘3. Spirits, not gods, are recognised.
‘4. The rites are magical rather than propitiatory. In other words, the desired objects are attained, not by propitiating divine beings by sacrifice, but by ceremonies which are believed to influence the course of nature directly through a physical sympathy or resemblance between the rite and the effect which it is the intention of the rite to produce.’ [2]
We will pass now to another point, the selection of the victim to be sacrificed ”

“ It must, however, be added that myths have influenced mainly the dogmas and ceremonies of religion—their part in more intimate or spiritual worship, the converse of the worshiper with the deity, has been comparatively slight. Religious ceremonies are ordinary social customs and forms transferred to dealings with supernatural Powers. ”

“ To found an ancient order those devote Their time—with ritual, regalia, goat, Blankets for tossing, chairs of little ease And all the modern inconveniences; These, saner, frown upon unmeaning rites And go to church for rational delights. ”

“ But, whilst ritual at least represents routine, it tends, historically speaking, to have a far deeper significance for the religious consciousness. A recurrent feature of religion, which many students of its phenomena would even consider constant and typical, is the attribution of a more or less self-contained and automatic efficacy to the ritual procedure as such. ”

“ Around these nameless beings, a ritual, simple in its origin, but luxuriant in its growth, has developed, overshadowing and obscuring them from our view, so that we, and perhaps the worshippers, cannot see the god for the ritual. ”

“ The ritual alone which accompanied divination practices and incantation formulae and was a chief factor in the celebration of festival days and of days set aside for one reason or the other to the worship of some god or goddess or group of deities, is free from traces of the astral theology. The more or less elaborate ceremonies prescribed for the occasions when the gods were approached are directly connected with the popular elements of the religion. ”

“ There must be a certain ritual, or external action, in harmony with the spiritual or internal movements of the soul. But though you cannot have reality without ritual, you may have ritual without reality. You may have an elaborate form, notwithstanding the total absence of the weightier matters of the law. It becomes therefore a matter of deep interest for us to consider what is the relative position of ritual in the Christian system, and what place it occupies in sacred Scripture. ”

“ Howsoever simple the system which we have studied may be, we have found within it all the great ideas and the principal ritual attitudes which are at the basis of even the most advanced religions: the division of things into sacred and profane, the notions of the soul, of spirits, of mythical personalities, and of a national and even international divinity, a negative cult with ascetic practices which are its exaggerated form, rites of oblation and communion, imitative rites, commemorative rites and expiatory rites; nothing essential is lacking. ”

“ The feeling which moves us to crown with steeples or spires our houses of worship is evidently akin to that which induced older races to erect a mound on which to place their temples, their idols, and altars of sacrifice. ”

“ Rites to procure the rebirth of edible animals and plants.
Now too we can fully understand the meaning of the bloody ritual in the ceremonies for the multiplication of the totem animals and plants. We have seen that a strengthening and fertilising virtue is attributed to human blood. What {p106} more natural than that it should be poured out by the men of the totem on the spot in which the disembodied spirits of the totem animals or plants are waiting for reincarnation? ”

“ There are events in the common course of history—revolutions, wars, divisions of races and nations—which in themselves can hardly be called religious, but which have at least one aspect distinctly religious. There are also institutions, customs, ceremonies, even vestures and forms of ritual, in which, though originally pagan or secular. ”

“ It is inevitable that this science should also try its hand on mythology. Our purpose is to employ the anthropological method—the study of the evolution of ideas, from the savage to the barbarous, and thence to the civilised stage—in the province of myth, ritual, and religion. ”

“ Although it seems probable that the ritual of primitive man contains elements of a more or less perfect dramatization of his mythology, I incline to the opinion that the ritual is the least variable and from it has grown the legend as we now know it. ”

“ The Todas seem to show us how the over-development of the ritual aspect of religion may lead to atrophy of those ideas and beliefs through which the religion has been built up and then how, in its turn, the ritual may suffer and acts which are performed mechanically, with no living ideas behind them, may come to be performed carelessly and incompletely, while religious observances which involve trouble or discomfort may be evaded or completely neglected. ”

“ It is noteworthy that every religion in its infancy is but sparely attended by forms and ceremonies, the more or less elaborate ritual that accompanies its subsequent growth being an almost inevitable result of its consolidation into a definite creed which shall stand as the supposed likeness of its original spiritual conception. This rise of ritual is largely responsible for the need of periodical reform which is a common occurrence in the development of every religion that has outlived its infancy. ”

“ It may be worth while to give instances of how some early rituals and creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous or preposterous, were really the indications of important moral and social conceptions evolving in the heart of man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected with the ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such innumerable examples are now to be found in the modern books on Anthropology. ”

“ This "cowardice" has in all ages and countries secured the permanence of ritual and religious traditions. Men have always argued, like one of the persons in M. Renans play, Le Prêtre de Némi, that "l'ordre du monde depend de l'ordre des rites qu'on observe." ”

“ It can be discerned in the animals, in their individual habits and still more in their collective evolutions. Ritual may be defined as the habitual performance of definite actions which have no direct relevance to the preservation of the physical organisms of the actors.
Flocks of birds perform their ritual evolutions in the sky. In Europe rooks and starlings are notable examples of this fact. Ritual is the primitive outcome of superfluous energy and leisure. It exemplifies the tendency of living bodies to repeat their own actions. ”