Ritual the Habitual

We're all ritualists

I’ve been thinking about ritual and its role in our lives. By “our,” I’m not referring to religious studies students, spiritual practitioners, or members of any other sub-group. I mean us humans, including the most hardheaded rationalists and skeptics. We’re all ritualists, you see.

Years before my head was properly cracked open and my erstwhile materialist concepts trickled down the drain, my mind was opened a degree or two to the nature and ubiquity of ritual by a little book by one Herbert Fingarette. (I think it was The Secular as Sacred, a piece of assigned reading for a class on East Asian religions.) In that little book, Fingarette points out—and this is all I really remember of his book, but it was enough—that a handshake is itself a ritual, an almost magical act. When we perform a handshake, a certain purpose is served: a social bond has been established, a greeting has occurred. No apparent magic is involved, no wand-waving or incantations; it hardly seems like a ritual at all, it’s so ordinary. But look at it from the point of view of an alien observer.

To such an observer, it would be obvious that there’s something going on. ‘Wait, why did they just stick their arms out and grab one another’s hands?’ The alien’s taking furious notes, trying to parse the situation. What is the meaning of the act? What do they believe they’re doing?

To those who participate in them routinely, rituals like the humble handshake become second-nature. They’re an extension of the culture that has produced them and so mostly pass unremarked upon. Engaging in a ritual from an unfamiliar culture, on the other hand (no pun…), feels anything but natural.

Imagine you’re native to a non-western culture that’s managed to stay insulated from television and all the rest of it over the centuries. You have no concept of shaking hands. In your home culture, greetings are elaborate, formal and verbal, an acknowledgement of lineage and social standing, a carefully weighed enactment of respect. There’s no physical contact between parties. Now, by some quirk of fate, you find yourself at a backyard barbecue in Iowa or a bowling alley in San Diego. There are people to greet and be greeted by. And apparently clasping someone’s hands and giving them a “shake” is all that’s needed.

This is beyond bizarre.

Is there some symbolic significance to the shaking part, you wonder? Why is it the right hand that’s used? (Do these people clean themselves with the left? That would be no more barbaric than their crude use of flattened tree bodies.) Bravely, you set aside your reservations and doubts, push through your own modesty, and engage the handshaking ritual. It feels…strange, to say the least. The feel of someone else’s sweaty hand on yours, the odd little pump, all of it. It’s hard to believe you performed it correctly (should you have squeezed less hard?). But everyone seems to think you did fine. Clearly they believe that the ritual was effective. They must think it’s always effective, so unwavering is their belief. Unbelievable, the faith these people place in their handshake ritual.

For the observers, of course—the insiders who are initiated into the mysteries of the handshake—there’s no such thing as an ineffective handshake. Sure, there may be nuances (who held on too long, who squeezed too tight or was a limp fish), but if a handshake occurred at all, then the box was checked, the greeting occurred. The performance of ritual implies the outcome. It’s just what happens. No big deal.

Those words, “no big deal,” say a lot about how normal ritual can be. It’s strange even to remark on it.

I hope I’ve made my point that ritual is a lot more universal than we realize, and we all subscribe to its efficacy, whether we realize it or not. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.

I’ll offer one other quick example: wedding vows. No one denies that two people are married once they’ve said their vows in public, put on the ring and kissed (that’s three rituals in one, actually). The ritual is what makes them married. Do they have to believe in it? Well, sort of, but belief isn’t really the point. The doing is the point. Belief is only necessary insofar as it gets people to the altar.

In a coming post, we’ll take a look at a (to most readers) foreign example of a ritual, one from Vedic/Hindu tradition. We’ll look at the ritual’s form and function and see how it works—and how that functionality becomes inevitable once you’re seeing it—and doing it—from the inside.