5
In this chapter, I discuss a range of ritual practices. I then show how they are illuminated by the hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that memory is inherent in nature. According to this hypothesis, all organisms, including humans, draw upon a collective memory and in turn contribute to it.
Origins, Myths, and Rituals
In many societies, a kind of memory is presupposed in the myths on which the society is based. Myths are stories of origins. They concern the doings of gods, heroes, and superhuman beings. They propose that things are as they are because they were as they were. The present repeats the past. This repetition inevitably goes back to the first time something happened.
In our modern technological age, we are used to rapid changes, and people in all cultures are now aware of these changes, if only through the advent of smartphones. Everyone knows that they are part of a new world, unknown to their ancestors. Practically all governments in the world are committed to economic development through science and technology. The ideology of progress is an all-pervasive, modern orthodoxy. But in traditional societies, there was no such ideology. The present repeated the past. Even in modern societies, rituals are conservative and follow established forms.
An Australian anthropologist, Ted Strehlow (1908–78), who spent many years among the northern Aranda Aborigines of Australia, summarized the basic principles as follows:
The gurra ancestor hunts, kills, and eats bandicoots; and his sons are always engaged upon the same quest. The witchetty grub men of Lukara spend every day of their lives in digging up grubs from the roots of acacia trees . . . The ragia (wild plum tree) ancestor lives on the ragia berries which he is continually collecting into a large wooden vessel. The crayfish ancestor is always building fresh weirs across the course of the moving flood of water which he is pursuing; and he is forever engaged in spearing fish. If the myths gathered in the Northern Aranda area are treated collectively, a full and very detailed account will be found of all the occupations which are still practised in Central Australia.1
This idea of the past as a timeless model is alien to modern thinking, but in traditional societies all over the world, the mythic attitude predominated. The myths told stories of origins that took place in another time, the “dream time,” but which are still enacted in the present. Every technique, rule, and custom was followed because “the ancestors taught it to us.”2
The purpose of many rituals is to connect participants with the original event that the ritual commemorates, and also to link them with all those who have participated in the custom in the past. Rituals cross time, bringing the past into the present.
In all cultures, the effectiveness of rituals is believed to depend on conforming to the patterns handed down by the ancestors. Rituals are traditional by their very nature. Gestures and actions should be done in the correct way, and ritual forms of language are conserved even when the language is no longer in everyday use. For example, the liturgy of the Coptic Church is in the otherwise extinct language of ancient Egypt, the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church are in old Slavonic, and the Brahminic rituals of India are in Sanskrit.
Rituals of Remembrance
In rituals of remembrance, present participants are linked to the primal creative moment that the observance commemorates and, again, to all those who have taken part in this ritual before them. The Jewish feast of Passover recalls the original Passover dinner on the night before the Jews began their journey out of bondage in Egypt, through the wilderness and to the Promised Land. On that night, after a series of nine fearful curses, in the tenth and final curse on Egypt, the first-born sons of the Egyptians and their cattle were destroyed, while the Jewish people were passed over, because in each household they had sacrificed a male sheep or goat and sprinkled its blood on the doorposts of their homes. They cooked and ate the sacrificial animal with bitter herbs and in haste, preparing for their departure the next morning. By enacting this ritual and hearing the story that goes with it, present-day participants affirm their identity as Jews and their connection with all the Jewish people who have participated in this tradition before, right back to the first Passover. They are also connected with all those who will come after them.
Likewise, the Christian Holy Communion connects participants to the original Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, itself a Passover dinner, and to all those who have participated since. This is the basis of the doctrine of the communion of saints. The sacred time of the Mass is connected to the many Masses that have preceded it, and it will in turn be connected to the Masses that follow it. In the words of Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion:
[The Mass] can also be looked upon as a continuation of all the Masses which have taken place from the moment when [the Mass] was first established until the present moment . . . What is true of time in Christian worship is equally true of time in all religions, in magic, in myth and in legend. A ritual does not merely repeat the one that came before it (itself a repetition of an archetype), but is linked to it and continues it.3
Remembrance is at the heart of all Jewish liturgy and ritual. When Jesus at the Last Supper said, “Do this in memory of me,” he was uttering a thoroughly Jewish statement. As the theologian Matthew Fox has pointed out, “The essence of religion and the essence of ritual is healthy remembering. But it’s not just about remembering human events like the Passover and the Exodus and human liberation. It is also about remembering the creation events—the new moon, the equinox, the solstice, the seasons.”4 These religious rituals contain an element of remembering and reenacting the creation.
The principles of remembrance and hope for the future apply to many secular and national rituals as well. For example, the American Thanksgiving Day recalls the thanksgiving festival of the Pilgrim settlers of New England after their first harvest in 1621, itself in the tradition of thanksgiving days established in England by the Protestant Reformers to replace a far larger number of Roman Catholic religious festivals.
Many other countries commemorate days when seminal historical events took place, or celebrate the birthday of the state. In France, Bastille Day on July 14 commemorates the storming of the Bastille, a fortress and prison in Paris, on that day in 1789, a turning point in the French Revolution. In India, Independence Day on August 15 commemorates the independence of India from the British Empire in 1947. Independence Day in Mexico, on September 16, is celebrated with fireworks, parties, and music to recall Miguel Hidalgo’s “cry of independence” on that day, which helped trigger a revolt against the Spanish. In the Soviet Union, November 9 commemorated the 1917 revolution that established the first Communist government in Russia. In post-Soviet Russia, Victory Day, May 9, recalls the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. These secular, national rituals, like religious and tribal rituals, define the identities of those who participate in them and connect participants with those who have gone before and those who will come after.
Initiations and Rites of Passage
Initiation rituals are concerned with the crossing of boundaries, such as those between boyhood and manhood or between the unmarried and the married state. They are rites of passage. So are the rituals associated with the crossing of boundaries in space and time, from one country to another or from one year to another. And so are the rituals of birth and death.
Through a study of a wide range of rites of passage in different cultures, the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep showed that they typically have three phases.5 In the first, the initial state is removed. In rites of maturity, the state of childhood is stripped away. In many funeral customs, the person who has died is freed from the responsibilities of life: He or she no longer has the duties of a living person, and no longer needs to play the normal social roles. The individual is separated from his or her initial state and left in transition.
This threshold state is dangerous and ambiguous. In maturity rites, this state may be symbolized by going into the bush or forest far away from normal life, or by undergoing dangerous trials and ordeals. Finally, a ritual of integration ends this phase and emphasizes the individual’s integration into his or her new state. Such rituals have many similarities across cultures. Washing, head shaving, circumcision, and other bodily mutilations indicate separation, as do the crossing of streams and other obstacles, or spending time alone in the wilderness. Anointing, eating, and dressing in new clothes indicate integration.6
Initiation rituals carry individuals across social or religious boundaries, and at the same time they define these boundaries and make them manifest. The Gisu people of Uganda say that they initiate boys to make them men so that they do not remain uninitiated boys. These rituals are not simply a way of marking biological maturity, because they are carried out with boys at different stages of maturity; they are concerned with the crossing of cultural boundaries. The initiations define the categories that they presuppose.
In traditional rites of passage for young men in some Native American groups, the initiates spent time alone in the wilderness, without food, water, or shelter, and often in danger or pain. In this state of separation, they sought signs, dreams, or visions that would help them and their community when they returned as men. These rites of passage were often called “vision quests,” and several organizations now guide people from the modern Western world through vision quests modeled on these traditional practices.7
Even many secular practices reflect features of initiation rites, such as the passing of tests and the awarding of certificates in schools; passing examinations and gaining university degrees in graduation ceremonies; inductions into professional bodies after passing professional tests; the commissioning of army officers after their military training, and so on.
I was in the first age group that was not conscripted for national service in the U.K. armed forces following the Second World War. For many of the young men who were older than me, being in the armed forces was a rite of passage. When I went to Cambridge, about half the undergraduates in my year had just finished their national service, and many had been involved in active combat or served in places of mortal danger, such as Malaya, Kenya, or Cyprus. They had been at risk of losing their lives, not symbolically but actually. In most modern societies, there are no longer rites of passage in which young people confront death. But they are continually reinvented. Gangs often have dangerous rites of passage for new members, involving trials by ordeal.
One reason why many young people in modern societies take psychedelic drugs is because they serve as a rite of passage. Bad trips can be terrifying, and some drugs induce a near-death experience (NDE), especially dimethyltryptamine (DMT),8 one of the most intense of all psychedelics. But these initiations are often unguided, unlike traditional rites of passage, and can be dangerous and disorienting without a ritual of reintegration. In traditional societies, adolescent boys who have been through a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood are typically welcomed into the circle of initiated men. Likewise, girls who have undergone a rite of passage connected with their entering sexual maturity are welcomed into the circle of women. The same still happens in religious rites of passage such as the Christian confirmation ceremony and the Jewish bar mitzvah, or bat mitzvah for young women.
But people who take psychedelic drugs and undergo a transformative experience cannot be welcomed or reintegrated into the wider society because the drugs are illegal in most countries, and many people disapprove of them. However, there are now several religious groups, such as Santo Daime in Brazil, a legal psychedelic Christian church, where the taking of a psychedelic brew—in this case ayahuasca—happens within a ritual, and participants are initiated, guided, and helped by experienced elders. (I plan to discuss the spiritual role of psychedelics in a sequel to this book.)
Near-Death Experiences and Ritual Drowning
Many people have had a near-death experience spontaneously; in fact, more do so than ever before, thanks to coronary resuscitation and modern medicine. Many who would have died in the past now survive. There has been much research on this subject, and there are many books about NDEs, including the bestselling Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander, describing his own NDE when he was in a coma while suffering from meningitis.
Not everyone who nearly dies has an NDE; only a minority do so, about 12 to 40 percent, but that still means that many millions of people have had these experiences. And although most NDEs are highly pleasurable, a minority are not. Some people have the same kinds of experiences as positive NDEs, but they resist them and feel powerless, angry, or afraid. Other people feel they are completely alone in a void, and some find themselves in scenes of torment along with other human spirits in extreme distress.9
Many positive NDEs have essential features in common. They often begin with the experiencers floating out of their bodies, looking at their physical bodies from above, seeing themselves lying there with nurses and doctors attending to them. Then they often go through a tunnel into the light and feel that they are in a loving presence. They may meet deceased members of their family or beings of light. Some experience a life review, when the events of their lives flash before them. Many describe this experience as blissful. But then, because it is a near-death experience and not a death experience, they are drawn back into their physical bodies. Some say that they have died and been born again.10
NDEs often bring about positive changes, including less fear of death and more spiritual and loving attitudes. People who have experienced these changes often say that their NDE was the most profound and helpful experience of their life.11
Although everyone agrees that NDEs happen, their interpretation is hotly contested within the academic world. For materialists, it is inconceivable that consciousness can separate from the brain, and conscious life after bodily death is impossible, nothing but a superstition. Hence NDEs must be hallucinations, produced by the desperate activities of dying brains suffering from a lack of oxygen. However, some people have had NDEs while their brains were being monitored in operating theaters and showed no apparent electrical activity; they were flatlining.12 Nevertheless, materialists argue that precisely because they had these NDEs, there must have been brain activity to give rise to them, even if this activity was undetectable.
This is not really a scientific dispute about empirical facts, but a question of belief systems. For a die-hard materialist, no amount of evidence will ever show that conscious experience is separable from brains, because it would contradict the materialist philosophy. By contrast, religious believers usually welcome this evidence.
Some traditional rites of passage may well involve NDEs, and current scientific research on NDEs can shed much light on these rituals. For instance, the NDE phenomenon enables us to reinterpret a key practice of initiation described in the New Testament and practiced in the early Church: baptism by total immersion. The prototypical baptizer was John the Baptist.
What if John the Baptist was a drowner? He baptized people by immersing them in the river Jordan, including Jesus himself. What if John held the initiates under for just long enough for them to experience an NDE by drowning? When they recovered from this near-drowning experience, many of them would have said that they had died and been born again; that they had seen the light; and that they had lost the fear of death. This would have been a cheap, simple, rapid, and effective way to induce a life-transforming experience of death and rebirth. I imagine that people who had been suitably prepared would have lined up on the banks of the Jordan, and that John would have baptized one after another, with helpers to aid in the recovery. They may have lost a few, but that was before the days of health and safety laws and liability litigation.
Everything that the New Testament says about the experience of baptism makes sense if the people being baptized were having NDEs. The alternative is to argue that this experience of death and rebirth was symbolic. But then it would have to be symbolic of a near-death experience by drowning. Why do something symbolic when people could experience the real thing?
Early Christians practiced adult baptism in the tradition of John the Baptist, but infant baptism was already widespread by the second century AD, and by the third century was standard practice. Adults could still be baptized by having water poured over their heads three times, as they can today.
One surprising aspect of the Protestant Reformation was a revival of baptism by total immersion. In the religious ferment of sixteenth-century England and Germany, groups of radical reformers reinstated the baptism of adults by total immersion. They were called Anabaptists; the Greek prefix ana means “again” or “back to.” The early Anabaptism movement gave rise to a range of churches and religious communities including the Mennonites and the modern Baptist churches, which still practice the baptism of teenagers and adults by total immersion.
I suspect that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Anabaptists rediscovered this experience of an NDE through drowning. Even today, of all Christian denominations, those who talk most about the experience of death and rebirth—being born again—are Baptists. Perhaps few modern Baptists have NDEs during their baptisms because of the modern concern with health and safety, but in previous centuries, the importance of a direct experience of death and rebirth may have outweighed the fear of going too far.
A grotesque perversion of this ritual of death and rebirth is the use of waterboarding by the U.S. intelligence agencies. This is a form of water torture in which the victim is tied down on a sloping board at an angle of about ten to twenty degrees, with their face upward and their feet higher than their head. The victim’s face is covered with a cloth, and water is poured onto the face, causing a gag reflex and sensation of drowning.
Ironically, this form of torture was invented during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century to deal with Anabaptists, who were persecuted both by Roman Catholics and by mainstream Protestants as heretics. The Anabaptists believed in an adult baptism, since they rejected the value of infant baptism. In 1527, King Ferdinand of Spain declared that death by drowning, which he called a “third baptism,” was the proper response to Anabaptism.13 As a recent article in a theological journal by William Schweiker explained:
In the Inquisition, the practice was not drowning as such, but the threat of drowning, and, symbolically we can say, the threat of baptism. The tortura del agua or toca entailed, like waterboarding, forcing the victim to ingest water poured into a cloth stuffed into the mouth in order to give the sense of drowning . . . It was, we must surely say, a horrific inversion of the best spirit of Christian faith and symbolism. This poses questions . . . Is waterboarding a kind of forced conversion hidden within a political action and thereby all the more powerful as a tool in the hands of the state to demonize its enemy? Does this signal a breakthrough of the demonic within political and military action since a religious rite is being subverted for immoral ends? These questions are so buried in public discourse that their full import is hardly recognized, even by devout Christians.14
Sigmund Freud might have called this “the return of the repressed.” In his book Moses and Monotheism, he wrote, “What is forgotten is not extinguished but only ‘repressed.’” What has been repressed does not “enter consciousness smoothly and unaltered; it must always put up with distortions.”15
These distortions should not blind us to the fact that near-death experiences are transformative for most people who experience them. They are of great positive value.
According to the biblical accounts, an initiation through ritual drowning was at the root of Jesus’s own experience of God as a loving father. His baptism by John the Baptist awakened him to his direct relationship with God. According to Saint Mark’s Gospel, “And just as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased’” (Mark 1:10–11).
Ritual Sacrifice
Until recently, some traditional societies practiced human sacrifice, which is now banned by law everywhere. But it still happens, and is now called ritual murder. In 2006, in the Khurja region of Uttar Pradesh, India, about eighty-five kilometers from Delhi, there were dozens of child sacrifices to the goddess Kali, according to the local police.16 In 2008, a rebel commander in Liberia’s civil war admitted to taking part in human sacrifices as part of traditional ceremonies intended to ensure victory in battle. He said the sacrifices “included the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart, which was divided in pieces for us to eat.”17
In many cases, animal sacrifice is explicitly recognized as a substitute for human sacrifice, as in the Old Testament story of Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham, believing that God required him to sacrifice Isaac, was about to do so when an angel of God stopped him, and he sacrificed a ram instead (Genesis 22:2–8).
In the Jewish Passover story, when God was about to unleash the final and most dreadful of his ten curses on the Egyptians, killing their first-born sons and the first-born of their cattle (Exodus 11:4–6), the Jewish people were passed over because they did as Moses had told them: Each household slaughtered a male lamb and sprinkled or smeared its blood on the doorposts and above the door. The slaughter of the lamb acted as a substitute for the death of Jewish young men and cattle. The Jewish people also had a ceremony in which all the sins of the community were laid upon a goat, which was then driven to its death in the wilderness, taking away their sins with it. This was the original scapegoat (Leviticus 16:8).
From a modern, secular perspective, the idea that a person or an animal should be sacrificed to save others makes no sense. But in evolutionary terms, it is a deep-seated pattern. When predators such as lions attack a herd of animals, they identify one member of the group that seems especially vulnerable because it is young, old, or lame, and kill it. When they have done so and their appetite is satisfied, the other members of the herd relax; they are safe for a while. The death of one member of the group has saved the others.18 The same theme underlies stories of dragons that threaten whole communities, and that can be appeased by being offered a child, often a virgin girl, as a victim. She dies for the sake of the others; she saves them by her death.
In her book Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich argues persuasively that for most of human history, humans were more like scavengers than hunters and lived in continual fear of predation:
Humans, and before them, hominids, could not always have been the self-confident predators depicted in the standard museum diorama. The savannah that our hominid ancestors strode (or, more likely, crept warily) into was populated not only by edible ungulates, but by a host of deadly predators, including a variety of big saber-tooth cats as well as the ancestors of lions, leopards and cheetahs. Before, and well into, the age of man-the-hunter, there would have been man-the-hunted.19
Walter Burkert, a historian of religion, imagined the “unritualised, real situation” from which sacrificial rituals arose in terms of
a group surrounded by predators: men chased by wolves, or apes in the presence of leopards . . . Usually there will be but one way of salvation: one member of the group must fall prey to the hungry carnivores, then the rest will be safe for the time being. An outsider, an invalid, or a young animal will be most liable to become the victim.20
To this day, primates like chimpanzees are often victims of predation. In a recent study of a forest chimpanzee population, predation by leopards was the principal cause of death, and lions were also significant killers. Troops of savanna-based baboons are often attacked, and some lose a quarter of their members to predation every year.21 When they move through the savanna, they fall into a defensive marching order, with the young males on the periphery. A sick baboon that falls behind tries so hard to catch up that it exhausts itself and is soon the victim of a predator. Sometimes the young males literally sacrifice themselves in defense of the group; as a result, among wild primates, a high proportion of young males do not survive to maturity.22
These are not merely facts of life for wild animals or archaic ways of thinking in primitive societies. They are alive and well today. Every soldier, sailor, or member of an aircrew is a potential victim, prepared to die to save other members of their nation. In the twentieth century, at least twenty million young men did so in the First and Second World Wars. And today many members of armed forces and insurgent groups, freedom fighters, jihadists, and suicide bombers lay down their lives for others, in the ultimate self-sacrifice. They are heroes and martyrs for the people they are trying to save. The rhetoric of sacrifice helps provide a motivation for the risks they take, and also for the way their deaths are recognized and appreciated by the groups for which they are fighting.
For many secular-minded people, the most baffling aspect of Christianity is its portrayal of Jesus saving others through his death on the cross. And indeed, it makes no sense without the whole historical tradition of sacrifice in general, and in Jewish history in particular. How can Jesus be like a sacrificial lamb and take away sins? He is like the sacrificial lamb at Passover, and also like the scapegoat. The annual Jewish ritual of off-loading the sins of the community onto a literal scapegoat and driving it out into the wilderness, to its death, was one ingredient in this Christian imagery. In the Mass, just after the consecration of the bread and wine as the body and blood of Jesus, the Agnus Dei is sung or said:
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.
Jesus’s sacrificial death only makes sense in the context of animal sacrifice that is found in many religions, including Judaism, which provided the historical context for the Christian interpretation of Jesus’s death. A male sheep was a substitute for human sacrifice in the story of Abraham and Isaac, and the death of male lambs protected first-born Jewish sons in the Passover; the killing of male sheep substituted for the sacrifice of first-born male humans. But Jesus reversed this process. The sacrifice of a first-born male human substituted for male sheep and goats, ending animal sacrifice.
Animal sacrifice continues to this day in Judaism and Islam. Jews still slaughter lambs at Passover, and Muslims sacrifice cows, sheep, goats, or camels on Eid al-Adha, also known as Bakr-Eid, in commemoration of Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram instead of his son. By contrast, for Christians, the crucifixion of Jesus reversed and terminated this process. Animal sacrifice was superseded by a full and final human sacrifice, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
Sacrifice on the Altar of Science
Although the idea of substitutionary sacrifice seems nonsensical from a modern, secular point of view, it now happens on an unprecedented scale. This sacrifice does not take place in public, like traditional religious sacrifices, but behind closed doors in scientific laboratories. Within the U.S. alone, about twenty-five million vertebrate animals are killed each year in biomedical research, mainly mice, rats, birds, zebra fish, rabbits, guinea pigs, and frogs, with smaller numbers of dogs, cats, monkeys, and chimpanzees.23 They are sacrificed on the altar of science for the good of humanity. Indeed, the technical term for the killing of these animal victims is “sacrifice.” A search on Google Scholar for scientific papers containing the phrase “rats were sacrificed” brings up about 68,000 results, and “mice were sacrificed,” about 108,000.24
For biology students, sacrificing their first animals is a kind of rite of passage, just as dissecting a human corpse is a rite of passage for medical students. Sacrifice and dissection necessitate dissociation from normal human sentiments and emotions; those who are initiated are supposed to adopt a persona of scientific detachment. A young scientist, Alison Christy, reflected on her experiences in an eloquent blog post:
The first time I worked with rodents, I was a high school student doing a neuroscience research project at the University of South Alabama. In order to get clear brain histology, we had to perfuse the animals with saline. This means that the rat, a big, white animal, was injected with some kind of anesthetic, and we watched it run around a plastic tub until it became loopy and clumsy and finally lay still. We then placed it on a board and drove pins through its paws, crucifixion-style. We looped a string over his front teeth to hold his head back. We took shiny thin scissors and cut into the animal’s skin and right through his ribcage. Inside the ribcage was the dark-red, still-beating heart. Blood starts to clot in the brain as soon as an animal dies. To get clean slices of brain, we had to push the blood out while the animal was still alive . . . To perfuse an animal with saline, you insert a needle into the left ventricle of the still-beating heart, and you cut the right atrium of the heart with scissors. Then you push your solution through . . . Quickly, the liver blanches and the paws, nose and tail become pale. The animal is entirely bloodless. The brain will be free of contaminating blood.25
As Christy pointed out, most researchers get used to these kinds of procedures. She noticed that the same thing happened with medical students as they got used to dissecting corpses. To start with, they were silent and serious, and some even fainted or vomited. “But a week later you’ll see them chatting and laughing with their lab partners as they wiggle their fingers around the vessels of the heart. A few months later they’ll dissect the face without any hesitation . . . They act like completely different people than the ones who entered the lab only months before.”
Secular humanists reject the idea that humans can be saved by God, and instead put their trust in human science and reason. Many see scientists themselves in the role of saviors, liberating humanity from ignorance and suffering. But the old archetype of sacrifice has not gone away; science itself relies on it. Nor have fears of destruction through cataclysmic events been banished by expelling gods and goddesses from the secular world. In addition to the threats to human survival created by climate change and environmental destruction, we live under the shadow of vast arsenals of nuclear bombs that could yet unleash the ultimate holocaust.
In its original meaning, a holocaust was an animal sacrifice totally consumed by fire (the Greek holo means “whole”; kaustos, “burnt”). Whereas in the ancient world, relatively small numbers of animals were burnt on altars as offerings, a modern scientific holocaust through weapons of mass destruction would consume millions of people, and countless animals as well. Sacrificed for what or to whom? Not to God or to Mother Earth, but as a display of human power. Collectively, we are potentially more vengeful and terrifying than any of the vengeful gods or goddesses in myths and legends. Our potential for acts of destruction is vaster. And stories of divine destruction are located safely in the past. The scientific holocaust is located unsafely in the future, and we do not know whether it can be avoided or not.
Collective and Individual Rituals
All religions have collective acts of worship and thanksgiving, especially on holy days and festivals. All religions have ceremonies for marriage, death, and the naming of babies. Secular humanists recognize the need for such ceremonies and have constructed rituals of their own.
Many people practice rituals within their families, such as saying grace before meals. Some practice rituals individually, in private prayer and meditation, and through yoga, qigong, tai chi, and other spiritual disciplines.
Everyday life contains many more or less unconscious ritual elements, such as shaking hands. Convention decrees that this should be done with right hands rather than left hands. Stone carvings from ancient Greece show that this custom goes back to at least the fifth century BC. Handshakes may have begun as a gesture of peace, demonstrating that the right hand held no weapons. In the modern world, it is part of a brief ritual of greeting, parting, making agreements, or congratulating.
Many of us bless each other when parting, even if we are unconscious of what we are doing. The word goodbye is a mutated and shortened form of the blessing “God be with you.” Farewell, originally “Fare thee well,” is also a blessing. Adieu, a French form of goodbye, is literally à dieu, meaning “to God,” with the implied meaning “I commend you to God.” In Spanish, adiós means the same. Other ritualized words of parting contain an implicit prayer for preservation until meeting again: “See you,” which in French is au revoir; in German, auf Wiedersehen; in Italian, arrivederci.
Rituals are part of all our lives. We cannot live without them. But we have a choice in the rituals we take part in and the spirit in which we do so. They can be dull and habitual. Or they can be enlivening, inspiring, and spiritually rewarding.
Morphic Resonance
Why is the effectiveness of rituals so widely believed to depend on their similarity to the way they have been done before?
The way in which we understand rituals depends on our assumptions about the essence of nature. Ritual activities are related to deep-seated ideas of how minds and nature work. They make much more sense if nature, societies, and minds contain a kind of memory, and less sense if they do not.
The usual assumption in science is that the basic ordering principles of nature, the so-called laws of nature, are fixed.26 They were already present, fully formed, like a cosmic Napoleonic Code, at the moment of the Big Bang, when our universe came into being. Stars, atoms, molecules, crystals, and living organisms behave as they do because they are governed by these eternal laws, which are the same at all times and in all places.
This assumption was grounded in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theology, when the founders of modern science—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, and others—assumed that nature was governed by Logos, the eternal mind of God. The eternal mathematical laws of nature were ideas in God’s timeless mind. That is why they were invisible and immaterial yet present everywhere. They shared in God’s immutable, omnipresent, and omnipotent nature.27
Eternal laws made sense in the context of a nonevolutionary worldview and a nonevolutionary theology. But our cosmology is now radically evolutionary, and many scientists reject the idea of an immaterial, all-pervasive mind that sustains the laws of nature. Nevertheless, eternal laws remain the default scientific assumption, because most scientists think there is no alternative. But since the beginning of the twentieth century, some philosophers and scientists have suggested that the laws of nature might evolve, just as human laws evolve. Or, to use a less anthropomorphic metaphor, the so-called laws of nature may be more like habits. Memory may be inherent in nature. Stars, atoms, molecules, crystals, and living organisms may behave as they do because their predecessors behaved that way before. Each biological species may have a collective memory on which each individual draws and to which it contributes. Instincts may be like habits of the species. A young orb-web spider may know how to spin its web without being taught because it has inherited the memory of web spinning from countless previous spiders.
My own hypothesis is that nature’s habit-memory works through a process I call morphic resonance, which involves the influence of like upon like across space and time. Similar patterns of activity or vibration pick up what has happened in similar patterns before.28 The more often a pattern of activity has occurred, the more likely it is to occur again, other things being equal. The more the repetition, the deeper the grooves of habit. When habits are very deep-seated, like the behavior of hydrogen atoms or nitrogen molecules, they look as if they are changeless, as if they are governed by eternal laws. If we consider only long-established phenomena, it is impossible to tell the difference between eternal laws and long-established habits, because in both cases the same phenomena occur in much the same way over and over again. The difference between these two interpretations becomes experimentally observable when we consider new phenomena that have never happened before.
For example, when chemists make a new chemical compound and crystallize it, according to the eternal-law theory, it should crystallize the same way on the first, thousandth, and billionth occasion, because the relevant laws of quantum theory, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, and so on are always and everywhere the same. By contrast, if habits build up in nature, the substance may be very hard to crystallize the first time, because there is not yet a habit for that kind of crystal to form. But the more often these crystals are made, the easier it should be for crystals to form all around the world as a new habit builds up.
By morphic resonance, the second time the crystals are made, they should form more readily because of an influence from the first crystals, other things being equal; the third time more readily still, because of an influence from the first and second crystals; the fourth time yet more readily, because of morphic resonance from the first, second, and third crystals, and so on. Eventually this cumulative memory will lead to their crystallization following a deep groove of habit, and the rate of crystallization will reach an upper limit.
What actually happens? It is in fact well known that the more often crystals are made, the more readily they tend to form elsewhere. Turanose, a kind of sugar, was considered to be a liquid for decades before it first crystallized in the 1920s. Thereafter, it formed crystals all over the world.29 Reviewing cases such as this, the American chemist C.P. Saylor commented that it was “as though the seeds of crystallization, as dust, had been carried upon the winds from end to end of the earth.”30
There is no doubt that small fragments of previous crystals can act as seeds or nuclei that facilitate the process of crystallization from a supersaturated solution. That is why chemists assume that the spread of new crystallization processes depends on the transfer of seeds from laboratory to laboratory, like a kind of infection. Thus the formation of new kinds of crystals provides one way of testing the hypothesis of morphic resonance.31 Increased rates of crystallization should still be observable, even if visiting chemists are kept out of the laboratory and dust particles are filtered out of the air.
The hypothesis also applies to behavior. If rats in London learn a new trick, rats all around the world should be able to learn it more quickly, simply because the rats have learned it there. The more that learn it, the easier it should get elsewhere. There is already evidence from experiments with laboratory rats that this remarkable effect occurs.32 Likewise, it should be easier for people to learn what other people have already learned, and there is scientific evidence that this is so.33
The key to morphic resonance is similarity. Its usual effect is to reinforce similarities, leading to the buildup of habits. By contrast, rituals involve the reverse of this process. In rituals, patterns of activity are deliberately and consciously performed the way they were done before. In habits, previous patterns are repeated unconsciously; in rituals, they are repeated consciously. In habits, the presence of the past is unconscious; in rituals, it is conscious.
Through morphic resonance, rituals bring the past into the present. The greater the similarity between the present ritual and the past one, the stronger the resonant connection.34 Thus morphic resonance provides a natural explanation for the repetitive quality of rituals found in traditions all over the world and illuminates the way in which rituals connect present participants with all those who have done the ritual before, right back to the first time it was performed.
But rituals are not only about connecting across time; they are about opening up to the spiritual realm in the present, just as people opened up to this realm in the past. Repeating the same actions will help to bring about the same kind of spiritual connection. Americans taking part in the festival of Thanksgiving are giving thanks to God in the present, as well as linking up with previous generations of Americans giving thanks to God.
Two Ways of Participating in Rituals
RITUALS OF GREETING AND PARTING
We can become more conscious of our greeting and parting rituals. When we shake hands, we can see this as a gesture of peace. When we kiss or hug, we can become aware that this physical connection has ancient biological and social roots. Apes such as bonobos frequently kiss each other, and dogs and cats lick and nuzzle one another as expressions of intimacy and trust. Some animals exchange food by passing it from mouth to mouth, as adult wolves do with their cubs, and in some cultures, human mothers pass chewed-up food to their babies directly from mouth to mouth. Of course, kisses can be erotic, but in many cultures, they have long played a much more widespread social role in greetings and partings, including among the ancient Persians, Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, and Romans.35 Early Christians exchanged the “kiss of peace,” and in contemporary Roman Catholic and Anglican church services, members of the congregation exchange a “sign of peace,” a kiss, hug, or handshake, as part of the communion liturgy.
The expression of peaceful intentions is explicit in many forms of greeting, as in the Muslim greeting assalaamu alaikum, “Peace be with you,” and the similar Jewish greeting shalom aleichem, “Peace be upon you.” For Hindus, saying namaste or namaskar, which means “I bow to you,” together with the anjali mudra, the gesture of placing the hands together, can mean “I bow to the divine in you.” In all cases, these rituals can be treated as mere conventions, but they take on a new power and significance when we become more conscious of their deeper meanings.
Likewise, rituals of parting can take on a greater meaning and power when we recognize the blessing that is implicit or explicit in them, as in goodbye, adieu, adiós, and God bless you.
CHORAL EVENSONG
Choral evensong is an Anglican evening service in which choral music is sung, psalms chanted, and ancient poetry and prayers recited. On weekdays, it usually lasts around forty-five minutes, and on Sundays about an hour, because on Sundays it includes a sermon. Choirs in cathedrals, abbeys, churches, and chapels have sung evensong ever since the time of Queen Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. This is one of the great cultural and religious treasures of the Anglican Church, with its beautiful sixteenth-century English and wealth of musical settings. Great Elizabethan musicians such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd created exquisite polyphonic music for this service, and new musical settings have been composed ever since.
Choral evensong takes place in hundreds of churches and cathedrals every Sunday evening, not just in Britain but also in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the English-speaking world. In many cathedrals, abbeys, and college chapels, it happens on weekdays as well, when highly trained choirs sing extraordinarily beautiful music echoing around these great, sacred spaces. This service is often candlelit and is followed by the playing of the organ. In Roman Catholic cathedrals and monasteries, there is a similar evening service called choral vespers.
These contemplative, restful, peace-inducing services are open free of charge to all. If you are a Christian or come from a Christian background, much of the language will resonate with your own experience and that of your ancestral tradition. If you are an atheist or agnostic, you will probably find choral evensong inspiring and uplifting. And if you are from a different religious tradition, this service will give you a taste of the Christian tradition and provide an easily accessible way of participating in it. People of all faiths and of no faith are welcomed. For Britain and Ireland, a website, choralevensong.org, provides information on where to find choral evensong and choral vespers, when they will happen, and details of the choirs and the music they will sing.
Attending choral evensong or choral vespers provides a simple way of taking part in a long-established ritual that gives a strong sense of continuity over time, and that can confer blessings on all who share in it.