Human rites
Rituals bind us, in modern societies and prehistoric tribes alike. But can our loyalties stretch to all of humankind?
Ritual is popularly misconstrued as an exotic, even quirky topic — a facet of human nature that, along with beliefs in supernatural agents and magical spells, is little more than a curious fossil of pre-scientific culture, doomed to eventual extinction in the wake of rational discovery and invention. Nothing could be further from the truth. Humans are as ritualistic today as they have ever been. This is not a comment on the changing fortunes of organised religion in different parts of the world (growing and spreading in some places while undoubtedly declining in others). It is a point about the profoundly ritualistic character of all human cultures, whether in families, schools, workplaces, governments, or international relations.
Rituals persist even where gods do not. Even the most secular political systems ever devised — for instance, those under the sway of historical materialism and its vision of a Communist utopia — were as devoted to ritual as any in human history. Meanwhile, back in Çatalhöyük, that place of buried secrets, we can see the traces of the evolution of ritual laid out beneath our feet.
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