The Rituals That Ward Off Bad Luck Aren’t Arbitrary
gods. Although the elders had the causality wrong, performing additional rituals still would have had the desired psychological effect—mending and solidifying social harmony.
Joseph Henrich • The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space.
Byung-Chul Han • The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and la
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
In a way, it’s really science that’s been inspiring rituals all along. Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology. The changing of the seasons, the long summer days, the harvest, the endless winter nights, and t
... See moreSasha Sagan • For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
In fact, why not replace some of those stale old sacred dances with these new fake dances? So they did. At which point the meaningless dances became holy dances, because the holy dances had become meaningless.