NARRATOR: When we think of religion, we tend to think of rites and ritual.
PANEL: We’re in a dark cave tunnel, the only light comes from a man up ahead with a torch. Something is BOOMING somewhere. A young teen is glancing back at us nervously.
NARRATOR: Ever since we humans became humans, we seem to have felt compelled to mark the transitions of life with deeply meaningful ceremony.
MAN WITH TORCH: Stay close, boys. The cavern has many false ways. If you want to come out as men—or at all—you must learn to follow the one true path.
PANEL: The tunnel has opened up to a large cavern, with prehistoric art painted on the rock. Men stand near a fire, and the BOOMING is getting louder.
NARRATOR: Take the coming-of-age initiation ceremony: After a dozen or so years of childhood, learning how your world works, it came time to learn the secret knowledge, the stuff the adults had been keeping for themselves.
It was also time to prove you were ready to join them, and take on all the responsibilities of protecting and serving your people.
It was time for a big ceremony, one loaded with symbolism.
FIRST MAN: Welcome! You have endured much together this month—and together you have demonstrated your worth.
SECOND MAN:: Truly, you are a band of brothers. Now for the good stuff. Here in the earth’s beating heart, you will join our brotherhood.
PANEL: Against the wall, one man is indicating a stone pit with a skeleton embedded in the floor, two men are beating a large gourd drum, and another man is seated, while in the foreground young teens are reacting to what they say.
PIT MAN: In this grave, the child you are will die, and you will be reborn as a man.
DRUM MAN: You will learn our secret songs of valor, or wisdom, of the hunt.
SEATED MAN: And I guess we’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about sex.
NARRATOR: For thousands of years, initiation rituals made puberty and adolescence relatively easy to go through. Instead of a confusing period, it was ordered and expected. Instead of teen angst, wondering who you were supposed to be, what you were supposed to do, you knew.
It was entirely sensible, and it made for very well-adjusted, happy people. People who felt intensely loyal and bonded to each other, which made for a very successful community.
Ritual made it a meaningful experience.
PANEL: Images of a graduate receiving his diploma, a bride tossing her bouquet, and a graveside funeral.
NARRATOR: You can say the same for all the milestones of our lives. Ritual is how we’ve always marked these moments… these transitions from one stage of life to the next…
PANEL: Children trick-or-treating, a Superbowl party spread, and friends singing Happy Birthday to an older man whose cake has caught fire.
NARRATOR: or observances of the yearly cycle…
PANEL: A woman at her kitchen table enjoying a mug of coffee.
NARRATOR: Even the little moments can become a ritual.
PANEL: A group of prehistoric men and women.
NARRATOR: Ritual is pattern—a pattern of behavior we feel has meaning, or that we expect will have some sort of desired outcome.
MAN 1: We learn what’s real by spotting patterns, right? So patterned behavior feels true.
WOMAN 1: “Feels” true? As opposed to “is” true?
WOMAN 2: Is he implying that truth isn’t objective facts, but a narrative that subjectively fits your experience?
MAN 2: But… If truth is proved by our experience of reality, how can it be anything other than subjective?
OTHERS: No no. Truth is truth. It’s an objective fact, regardless of your personal perspective.
If it feels true to you, do I have to accept it as true?
If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody’s there to see it, did it truly fall?
Can there be truth without language?
Oh shut up.
PANEL: A priestess is saying a prayer while flanked by two kneeling men, and a bishop is making that two-fingered gesture.
NARRATOR: Um, let’s try that again. Our most primal rituals—such as those where we leave one stage of life (and thus one social group) to join another—have always seemed far more solemn and momentous than other events.
KNEELING MAN: A religious person might say they are sacred.
BISHOP: Sacraments, even!
PANEL: Joe and Sis have their heads bowed.
JOE: But you don’t need religion to feel that such rituals are special, that they impart a sense of something bigger than us—something worthy of our respect.
NARRATOR: So ritual is not religion. It’s a cultural act, not a faith believed. That said, we can’t help but live our lives through rituals…
PANEL INSET: A classical Greek symposium drinking party, the host is wearing a balloon-animal hat.
NARRATOR: …life-affirming rituals…
PANEL: A neolithic Nordic couple is making love in freshly-tilled and planted fields.
NARRATOR: …rituals to please nature, (in the hope that nature will return the favor)…
MAN: This oughta encourage mother nature to make our soil fertile!*
WOMAN: I love it when you talk dirty.
FOOTNOTE: * A common practice among Indo-European peoples, from the Indian subcontinent to Scandinavia. (Still is, in places!)
PANEL INSET: A cornucopia.
NARRATOR: …rituals of thanksgiving when things go our way…
NARRATOR: And as we’ll see, ritual is a core concept od the roads to religion and rulers. But before we move on, just one more thought on rites of initiation:
PANEL: A boy huddles against a tree in a rainstorm, his bow and arrows on the ground.
NARRATOR: From time beyond memory, initiation rituals have required new members to endure some form of hardship… …an ordeal.
BOY (Thinking): I can take it… I can take it…
PANEL: A young man lies naked in a coffin surrounded by candles, a circle of men in hoods performing some ceremony.
NARRATOR: Ordeals involve some sort of stress: physical exertion, endurance, embarrassment, psychological abuse… extreme cases may even involve pain or mutilation.
YOUNG MAN (Thinking): I can take it… I can take it…
PANEL: A drill instructor is shouting at a new recruit.
NARRATOR: It’s impossible to overestimate how successful such ordeals are, taking advantage of our innate wiring to build a lifelong sense of unity and loyalty (especially so in young men).
RECRUIT (Thinking): I can take it… I can take it…
NARRATOR: Tribes and armies, faiths and football teams—even street gangs and secret societies…have recognized this since ancient times.
PANEL: Super-thrilled stick figure levitating with excitement, other stick figures welcoming him.
NARRATOR: Think of it as a high up-front membership fee: by investing so much of yourself in joining, you now have a huge stake in the group’s success.
HAPPY GUY: I’m at stake! “We” is now a huge part of who I am… it matters whether we succeed or not.
GROUP: But also, now that you’ve got skin in the game, your success (and your voive) mater to all of us!
PANEL: The happy hormones from before.
NARRATOR: More than that, going through this shared ordeal is a way of “taking one for the team.” In other words, you’ve sacrificed for your community. That has always been a source of great worth, both in your own heart, and in the hearts of others.
SARA T: Well, our hormones, anyway…
NARRATOR: And that leads us to the other core concept on the road to religion and rulers… sacrifice.
What does it mean “bete rot” on the sign? (in runes)?
Beets.
I’m trying to think of something witty to add to that, but I’m gonna need another cup of coffee first.
What are some rituals lawyer do? The judge saying “Oyez” springs to mind, though it once had a practical purpose.
Ritual, nothing—What we do is a full-blown liturgy! Complete with litanies that (like those of ancient pagan temples) must be recited precisely correctly, lest your hoped-for outcome be denied, or gods forbid you incur the wrath of the high priests of the Appellate Temple!
(That’s a bit of a spoiler, but as we proceed you’re going to see that our judicial system has a lot in common with ancient religion. I’m not just blathering on about this stuff for no reason!)
You are taking too narrow a view of religion. Religion does include beliefs. But it also includes practices, and social connections. |Link| Even in protestant Christianity, the religion that I grew up in, that places lots of emphasis on belief, you learn certain behaviors, like saying grace before meals, before you learn any accompanying belief. I am in favor of retiring the word “religion” its been around since the 17th century and we still can’t agree on what it actually is. It seems like it obfuscates more than it reveals. |Link|
You are talking about a version of religion that came along way, WAY after the first religions, which is where we’re going at the moment. I know it’s been hard for some people to think of the ancient world as completely alien to our modern world, even to present-day hunter-gatherers. It’s hard to think of a world devoid of what we think of as religion, government, nations, or all the other institutions, because we’re surrounded by them. But it’s important to know that our modern concepts are fairly recent inventions. It’s important to understand why they came to be, and how people have tried to deal with the perennial problems that result, to have an informed discussion of how we deal with them in 21st Century U.S. Constitutional Law.
I agree with this take. There are plenty of traditions that are still around today, that are unambiguously defined as religions by scholars and identified as religion by those practicing them, that have more to do with rituals and practice than belief. I do think Nathan has a point (assuming he’s going where I think he is) that relatively recent religions like Christianity (Protestantism especially) and Islam departed a lot from previous cultural traditions in how much they relied on belief, but I wouldn’t say that means the previous belief systems don’t also qualify as religions.
Do you mean to say that ancient religions did not include practices and social connections in addition to explicit beliefs?
How about we wait until we get there.
Most likely it’s a situation where all (or at least almost all) religions have rituals, but not all rituals are part of religion.
Crap, I meant to reply to Sewblon. I cannot brain today.
At least you managed to post something today. You’re ahead of me!
Hi Nathan, you seem to be getting a lot of criticism lately. I just wanted to say thanks for putting in all the work to make this whole thing. I was a bit worried when you didn’t post for quite a while in the middle of a pandemic (here or on Twitter) so it’s great to see you seem to be OK.
Much obliged! I actually did get Covid—despite being the one germaphobe in the family (gently mocked for it, too) who’s always washing his hands and covering up and getting his flu shots. There’s no justice. I made it, but others close to us didn’t. Still have long-haul symptoms that befuddle the doctors. But I’ve promised to get this done, so I’m doing it!
You showed this ritual at the top of boys entering manhood. I believe that there were also rituals to allow children to become non-binary genders. For many cultures, the most common non-binary gender role was for boys to become a liminal role between men and women, often seen as highly spiritual. The two-spirit, hijra, and kathoey are all examples of this. I imagine there were other transgender/non-binary gender roles like this, but those are the most well-known.
Do you have any sources for this belief?
(Seriously. I’d really like to read them.)
From what I have read, the concept of transgender/non-binary gender appears to be a relatively recent construct unique to western culture. The examples you mention are also relatively recent constructs from other cultures, none of which appear to make a distinction between gender and biological sex, and which don’t really fit the western concept. I understand that the Hijra of India get quite offended at being cited as an example of non-binary gender identity, seeing it as an insensitive attempt to appropriate their cultural identity for something they do not at all identify with, imposing western definitions without bothering to understand how they define themselves. The “Two-Spirit” people of some Native American cultures, likewise, are not shifting between gender identities, but between gender roles, and there’s a big difference. Other communities where the imposition of western notions at best don’t really work, and at worst exemplify colonialist/imperialist attitudes, include the Kathoey of Thailand and the Fa’afafine of Samoa. I’d say the brotherboys and sistergirls of Australian Aboriginal cultures may be the closest fit to the transgender/non-binary gender concept, but they wouldn’t say it themselves.
More importantly, none of those are examples of cultures practiced ten or twenty thousand years ago. Paleolithic bands of 50 or 100 people just weren’t big enough to experience these kinds of issues very often, maybe once every few generations? It’s hard to imagine any kind of long-term cultural practice arising in such conditions. And even then, what would have been the point? Neolithic villagers who’d settled down in one place for long periods are more likely to have come up with some sort of narrative for gender-nonconforming individuals, but for what purpose? In a life of subsistence farming, your role likely had more to do with the body you were born with than whatever identity you might have had. It’s the much larger societies with religions, surpluses, and significant division of labor where you could naturally develop both a narrative and a purpose for gender-nonconformity, and have it become part of your culture. And even then it didn’t happen right away.