Most of us have what we call daily rituals.
We brush our teeth while listening to the news, walk the dog around the same park, read the latest well-reviewed NYT fiction novel for ten minutes before bed. We also have less frequent rituals, usually around life events: rituals at weddings, at funerals, at births. To an alien, the notion that brushing your teeth while listening to the news every day fits into the same category as smashing a glass under a napkin at a wedding might seem odd–and it isn’t enough to say that the common denominator is as simple as habituation, that ritual is anything that people do repeatedly, regardless of the time scale.
The word ritual was tied to religious ceremony for a long time. In the early fourteenth century, it meant “formal act or procedure of religious observance performed according to an established manner.” Take it back further, to the Latin Ritus, and its etymology is “custom, usage.” Its root is likely the PIE *re, “to reason, count, observe carefully.”
Ask someone in the modern day what ritual has to do with reason, and they’d probably give you a strange look. ‘Ritual’ feels ancient, woo-woo, tapped into energies and symbolism. “Reason’ (according to most of the people you could ask) runs our daily lives–it’s how we make sense of ourselves, others and the world. But then, looked at from a certain angle, isn’t ritual a kind of sense-making as well?
Hypothesis: ritual is the human antidote to the paradox of time. Let me explain.
We experience time in two contradictory ways simultaneously. On the one hand, time is infinite. It stretches before and behind us with no marked beginning or end. When we think about it too hard, our brains end up in a kind of unresolved cul-da-sac (try to recall the first time you learned about the big bang, and the inevitable question that followed: ‘but what was before the big bang?’).
On the other hand, we experience time as finite, because of our finitude within it. We cannot help but see cycles (the turning of the seasons, for instance) not as pure circles but as indicators of time’s passage, i.e. of our passage through it.
Rituals are our response. Rituals elevate singular but iterative moments. They are a human attempt to take back some form of control or agency in the great spinning of time. They allow us to feel that we are not simply at the mercy of these cycles that move us ever closer to the end (yet another turn around the sun), but that we get to animate our time here through our own, human-made cycles. Rituals punctuate time.
I use the word punctuate quite literally here. What does punctuation do? It dictates the rhythm and pace of unfolding. It tells you when to pause, when to stop. Rituals do the same. They allow us to feel, even momentarily, as though we can step outside of time. That we can look in at our lives and impose meaning on what might objectively look like an utterly banal moment: a glass shatters under foot, a paste is applied to a face in a bathtub, a candle is lit at sundown, a partner brings a french press and two mugs to bed on a Sunday morning.
Ritual reaches a hand out of time, and invites us in more fully, asking us only to pay attention, to observe carefully.