The Crisis of Ritual
It’s a cliché in archaeology to call anything that can’t be explained ‘ritual’. Indeed, it’s so much of a cliché that it has now become a cliché to say that archaeologists call anything they can’t explain ‘ritual’. But at the heart of this long-running academic joke lies a sobering truth, which is particularly acute for historians of religion and belief – especially if they’re interested, as I am, in reaching back into remote periods when archaeology is our principal guide. That truth is that both archaeologists and historians have become unsure what ritual is or what it is for, which reflects a deep crisis in ritual – and the conceptualisation of human beings as ritual animals – that emerged in the mid-20th century. It was a crisis that afflicted western Christianity in the present, but it also had ramifications reaching into our understanding of the deeper past, aspects of which suddenly became more opaque than ever before.
The archaeologist’s stereotyped use of ‘ritual’ as a catch-all label for the unexplained is, on one level, a view of ritual as ‘ritual of the gaps’, by analogy with the infamous ‘God of the gaps’ argument – that God is the explanation for anything we can’t explain (i.e. the gaps in our knowledge). ‘Ritual of the gaps’, likewise, is the idea that anything about our ancestors we cannot explain can be dumped in the vague category of ‘ritual’ – weird stuff people in the past did for reasons we can’t hope to understand or explain, but probably had something to do with religion. It is obvious to anyone, I hope, that this is intellectually hapless; and if there are still any archaeologists out there who think this way, it is a sad reflection of archaeology’s failure to engage with religious studies and the history of belief. Until fairly recently, it was a disappointing feature of archaeological literature that few archaeologists were willing to actually focus on the study of ritual behaviour, leaving historians like me who actually want to know about ritual high and dry (although this is changing). Ultimately, however, the stereotyped archaeologist behaviour of using ritual as conceptual backfill (for I am not sure any real archaeologists hold views that are quite so facile) tells us a great deal about the 20th century as a period of crisis for faith.
It is a truism that the ‘sea of faith’ receded in the 20th century and left people unmoored from their religious heritage (and, arguably, from the collective human experience of the last 40,000 years or so). We all know this. What is less discussed is that there was also a crisis at this time within western Christianity – and among those who still went to church – which concerned the place of ritual (and liturgy, as a subset of ritual) in religious practice. The ressourcement of the Liturgical Movement of the first half of the century turned, in its second half, into a general scepticism about the significance of ritual altogether – even in the Roman Catholic Church, historically the most richly ritualistic expression of western Christianity (it is notable that this crisis has not affected the Eastern Rites, but that is another story). There had, of course, been crises of ritual before: the Reformation represented a rejection of Catholic ritualism, but in truth the societies of early modern Europe were so profoundly ritualistic (in their religious behaviour and beyond) that the Reformation generally resulted in the establishment of new ritual patterns rather than the rejection of the idea of ritual itself – the real radicals, like George Fox, being excepted.
It is ironic that the true crisis of ritual, in the 20th century, followed hot on the heels of the birth of anthropology and an obsession with ritual arising from the work of Sir James Fraser. But Fraserianism – the analysis of ritual, and the attempt to turn ritual into a form of history – was arguably only possible once the intellectual classes of Europe and America had become alienated from ritual as a way of being. This alienation finds its fullest expression in the pop-culture version of Fraserianism that is still with us today – namely folk horror, the trope of the urban outsider finding him or herself suddenly confronted by the dark rites of rural ‘others’. But Fraserianism (and folk horror) are only possible once ritual seems weird to us. If ritual is normal, if it is a recognised form of human expression and a widely accepted mode of living, then it is less likely to become an object of lurid interest.
The watchwords of 20th-century religious reform were authenticity, spontaneity, truthfulness, sincerity, and relevance. Religion was about the content of the message to be imparted, not form; and the form in which worship was conducted was, therefore, deemed contingent. People were no longer very religious, and therefore religion had to seem less religious in order to reach them. In the 1960s and ’70s especially, in a great wave of literal and metaphorical iconoclasm undammed by the Second Vatican Council, all but the simplest liturgy and ritual came to be disparaged as hollow play-acting and grandstanding dress-up – a thing of the past, no longer relevant to a church that had outgrown its infancy. Indeed, there were (and still are) many who were willing to define Christianity in opposition to the human desire for ritual, casting Jesus himself as a radical liturgical reformer who freed Christians from subservience to the human yearning for ritual, and perhaps even religion itself – leading to the oft-heard claim, baffling to anyone outside the church, that Christianity is not a religion – or people claiming to be ‘Christ-followers’, not Christians.
In some respects this kind of iconoclasm was rooted in the radical Reformation of the early modern period – a kind of late blooming of Anabaptism and Quakerism within the mainline denominations. But in other respects it was just an intra-Christian reflection of the crisis of faith affecting wider society. While everyone else in Postwar Europe and America was not sure they believed anything anymore, Christians were not sure what they believed about the relationship between religion and ritual, even if they held on to broadly orthodox Christian belief. This was reflected in wider society too, of course; the 1970s in Britain saw a steep decline in civic ritual, with the abandonment of local festivities, mayor-making ceremonies, proclamations of fairs and so on – most revivals of things like May Day celebrations and strangely violent folk customs date from the 1980s onwards, with the 1970s representing a Postwar nadir. Again, the reason for this seems to have been the feeling that society needed to move on from a state of childhood into a state of adulthood – where we all became sober grown-ups who realised the benefits of living in Brutalist tower blocks and setting aside the frivolities of dancing around the Maypole.
Of course, every action produces an opposite reaction, and the 1970s are also known for an almost obsessive public preoccupation with folklore and customs. But the lingering fear that lurks, I suspect, at the heart of every revivalist is that the human capacity for accepting ritual as a natural part of life has been so eroded in the modern west that every revival is living on borrowed time; sustained only for as long as enough enthusiasts remain alive to perpetuate it, and no longer an organic tradition that will be sustained indefinitely by the community itself. I hope this is not the case; as you may have guessed, I am among those who believes ritual is an inherent part of what it means to be human – indeed, I would go so far as to say ritual might define us as a species. Ritual (religious or otherwise) is, in my view, one of the most meaningful activities a human being can engage in. But the consequences of the 20th-century crisis of ritual – anxiety that ritual is no longer meaningful, or has lost its usefulness – lurk with us still, even if many people (like me) now actively reject scepticism about the value of ritual. Because it is not enough to be enthusiastic about ritual, and its revival; one of the great things about ritual is that it is not an individual endeavour, but something that defines communities over long stretches of time – that, after all, is one reason why I as a historian am so captivated by it! But if communities can no longer be relied upon to see the value of ritual, where does that leave us as ritual animals?
Perhaps I am being overly anxious. The human desire for ritual cannot be so easily pruned, and will return in due course like creeper returning to cover a building. But in the meantime, perhaps it is time to move beyond clichés about baffled archaeologists and recognise that ritual is one of the most important of all human creations, and one which defines our very being.