The Importance of Play Acting

Myth is the earliest science. It gives an account of phenomena by invoking gods to explain them. Even now, the processes of strictly logical reasoning on the basis of ascertained data are limited by the degree of completeness of the data, and right decisions often have to be made by intuition, without any clear logic. Everyone knows that answers to problems sometimes come inexplicably into mind by gestalt. Fortune favours the prepared mind because the subconscious mind works on the problem beyond the footlights of conscious reason. Realization must have come to the primeval genius as a gestalt happening—a revelation—or so it seemed. He was thrilled and excited by it, and so too were others to whom the sage explained it. It was this thrill and excitement that stimulated the urge to express it in play, and, having a purpose, stimulated other devotional arts like poetry and music too. Plato was clear:

Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.

Cited by J Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1949

The civilized state—law, order, craft, trade, art, poetry, knowledge and, ultimately science—grows out of myth. All begin in primitive ritual, imitative magic to mimic the great processional movements of existence—a sort of childish playing at being Nature which metamorphoses by superstition into necessary acts without which the world would stop. Primeval man “plays the vital order of Nature in a sacred play, in and through which he actualises anew or ‘recreates’ the events” thus maintaining cosmic order. Among the natural phenomena to be explained are also the social ones the primeval people are forming—their rituals, rites, sacrifices and ceremonies. They are explained as necessary to keep the world working. From this ritual play comes the earliest culture, law and government, and religion.

The primitive game began as a make belief reality, passed into being a synthetic reality then became a mystical reality. By then, it has become, for those participating, many generations down the line, the cause of what it began as representing. A gambler who settles on the same set of numbers gets trapped by his habit. He fears that if he does not bet them, they will come up that very week, so he must gamble every week—or lose out!

Among the early games must have been that of pretending to be the animals hunted. Ancient rock paintings show it, so it certainly happened, and suggests why many gods in many cultures are animals or half animals—humans with animal bodies or heads. Those simple, naïve, primeval people, who played at being the herds moving seasonally, become enslaved by the thought that they must do it for fear that the herds will go elsewhere if they do not keep up the ritual. In hunter-gatherer societies, the herds of animals would not appear in their seasonal migrations, or the even more important roots and berries collected would be blighted if the drama is not enacted. In primitive agricultural societies, the crops would rot, wither or not ripen.

At the great seasonal festivals, the community celebrates the grand happenings in the life of Nature by staging sacred performances, which represent the change of seasons, the rising and setting of the constellations, the growth and ripening of crops, birth, life and death kin man and beast.

J Huizinga

It is easy to appreciate that the primeval person playing the animal convinced themselves they were it—their drama had recreated the actual. The play has then ceased to be simply play and has become religious—the man imagines he has the spirit of the animal within him. With this delusion, drama or make belief becomes holy. What was a game has become a ritual—has become religion.

The Greeks had a sacred rite they called a “dromenon”—something acted. From it comes the word “drama” for the play itself. It was a cosmic act, the events leading to a vital natural occurrence. The drama was understood as a perfect recreation of the events anticipated, showing how they should be! Such acts had to be done precisely or they were worse than useless, inducing calamities. Religion is a game, but modern believers have forgotten!

Religion is play-acting consecrated to a god or gods. The gods are also part of the play, and so too is the act of consecration. Make belief is at the base of all religions. Clues to this are the way make belief, or pretending, in sport, poetry, song and the theatre are prescribed in ways similar to the make belief of religion, and the law, for that matter. They all occur in special places and at special times, have similar names and are repeated as needed. A sacred place is a church or a temple, but also a stadium, arena or tennis court, not to mention a law court. Originally they were all a grove or a field, marked off for the sacred purpose.

Primitive people know their religious game is not entirely real. They know they are play-acting when they wear fearsome masks to make themselves into evil spirits and go about scaring the women and children. The women act scared, though they know the mask only hides a man. Yet they still believe the real purpose of it all and so pretend to be duped. They act as if it were real because, for them, in a sense, it is, though they know they are playing roles. Only modern believers are completely duped by their Christian rituals. Intelligent people today can see ritual and religion for what it is—a show, a drama, a representation, a performance—but at the time it was thought of as reproducing a reality, and necessary for it. Some people still think it, being unable to see the ritual as merely a performance with extremely primitive origins.

The ritual, the sacred game, has to be formalised and repeated in its sacred or consecrated playground, the special place in which it is played. The inheritance of a sacred space for magic, mystery and sacrament from primitive imitative play is rationalized later as the need to isolate the communion or the initiate from evil influences. Consecrating the play area makes it holy and confers God’s protection, a bit of primitive magic—part of the game! It is so infantile as to be embarrasing. In respect of time, the occasion of the holy drama was a feast, a holy day, eventually a holiday, when the participants rejoiced that the continuity of existence had been guaranteed for another season.

When societies got far too big for everyone to act in the play, provision was made for spectators or a congregation who could join in to a degree by acting as the chorus or simply by their enthusiasm, the whole being accompanied by joy, merriment and feasting in celebration of a job accomplished to everyone’s advantage. From it, the community had a secure and wholesome feeling of order and well being to carry into the next season that the play has to be enacted.

All are games played according to prearranged rules. Indeed, in an important sense they serve to demonstrate that they have preserved the rules—they have fossilized them. Preserving the rules is their main function, for by doing it, they preserve the order of the universe. The rules stand for, indeed are, cosmic perfection.

No skepticism is possible where the rules of a game are concerned for the principle underlying them is an unshakeable truth.

Paul Valéry

Agreed rules are binding and cannot be gainsaid. The one who does so is the spoilsport and he is despised and ostracised. Early societies and cultures formed around those who agree to certain rules. The spoilsport is the apostate, the heretic, sometimes the rejected prophet who might cut loose and start a new game with his own rules. In other games, he is the outlaw, the seditionist and the iconoclast. The cheat is not as disrespected as the spoilsport because he nominally sticks to the rules. Since he knows he is cheating and so has an advantage over the others, he becomes the priest.

The origin of any sacred act can only lie in the credulity of all, and the spurious maintaining of it in the interests of a special group can only be the final phase of a long line of development.

So writes Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), apparently citing A E Jensen. It might be that the “special group” believed their own stories, after all, they were all they had to believe, but it is certain that particular invididuals invented them and inculcated them into the others. And this happened at the outset. There is no obvious reason why a bunch of animals should all spontaneously start to imitate Nature. One of them must start the games and be joined by others who become leaders when yet more join.

Primeval people played games that were either mimickry or contests. So one primitive game form was the contest, in Greek, the “agon”, which is shown on ancient Greek pottery, the flute players shown accompanying it indicating it is not just a fight. Nature was seen as dualistic and different forces were in contention, so simple mimickry was accompanied by sacred competition, though sometimes the competition is only mimicked too. At other times, it is serious, and might often have been to the death once the playing was accepted as having an essential purpose.

In primitive tribalism, the tribe was often divided into two halves (phratriai) in which inbreeding was not allowed. Each member had to select a sexual partner from the other half of the tribe. The two halves were strongly bound by tribal ties, but were rivals within the tribe. The dualism reflected their cosmic dualistic ideas about Nature. The totem of one might be a high flying bird, and that of the other a lowly tortoise. The Chinese called one “yang” and the other “yin”. “Yang” was sun, warmth and summer. “Yin” was moon, cold and winter. The tribal dualism was an imitation of Nature, of night and day, and summer and winter, as examples. At some stage the play required the youths and maids to separate and then come together again at some great festival of maturity called marriage. This mating ritual eventually was fossilized almost universally because it had reproductive advantages that strengthened tribal vigour. Less vigourous tribes were overcome and enslaved or obliged to adopt the same practices, until it was universal.

At these meetings, members of the phratriai contended in a series of individual contests. They had a ritual purpose and so the game element had already become representational being critical to the smooth running of the world, and the prosperity of the group. Each victory was ensured future success for the group. It saved the group in a small way for another season. It was good! A defeat left them uncertain. It was bad, though good for their rivals.

It did not matter that some contests depended only on luck not on skill or strength. Luck was sacred too! The idea of holiness for most people is a guarantee of happiness, of good fortune or good luck. Fate is the future, and might be good or bad. Religion conditions it to be good, believers think.

The contests were held and the honours bestowed on the winners. Honour is the prize of virtue, said Aristotle. It proves to a man his value, and to his peers. Virtue, honour, nobility and glory came from the contest, the agon, a game. Homer wrote in the bible of the ancient Greeks “always be the best and excel over others”. That was the noble aim. Nobility was founded on virtue, originally manly qualities and then good qualities. Honours went to the best, until some became wealthy enough to keep the honours anyway, giving rise to the noble class. The idea that nobles should be virtuous always remained, nevertheless. Though many were wicked and all were selective about what being virtuous required, many took their duty to be virtuous seriously.

The Hellenic games were always religious, and the agon was always sacred. Contests need not be of the physical type. Quizzes, singing, and eating and drinking contests were popular. Alexander the Great celebrated the death of Kalanos with a festival that involved heavy drinking contests in which 35 contenders died during the competition, and six more, including the winner died later. Alexander was himself a big drinker, and, since he died young and not in battle, might have died in a similar fashion—perhaps of an inflamed pancreas.

The Roman games were also sacred. The people’s right to the Roman games was a holy right. They had to be conducted with precise ceremony, and were usually either annual seasonal events, or one-off occasions in honour of a pledge made to a god. These characteristics show they were sacred events.

During the growth of civilization, the agonistic function attains its most beautiful form, as well as its most conspicuous, in the primeval phase. As a civilization becomes more complex, more variegated, and more overladen, and as the technique of production and social life itself become more finely organised, the old cultural soil is gradually smothered under a rank layer of ideas, systems of thought and knowledge, doctrines, rules and regulations, moralities and conventions which have all lost touch with play. Civilization… has grown more serious. It assigns only a secondary place to playing. The heroic period is over, and the agonistic phase too a thing of the past.

J Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1949

A law suit is a type of contest, and also began as play. In Greece, it was an agon, a contest with fixed rules, decided by an umpire. Trial by ordeal was judging a case by a test. That is what the agonistic origins of law were—a contest. The word “ordeal” simply means a divine judgement. Any judgement made by a god was just, to the primitive way of thinking. To determine justice therefore was a divine act requiring all the ritual procedure os any other sacred event. It was performed in a sacred space called a court.

The three goddesses, Diké—Justice, Tyché—Fortune, and Nemesis—Vengeance often appear together and look similar, Diké and Tyché even having scales in their hand. The latter two look like the same goddess at root. They are a reminder that law began as a game, an agon, a contest between two people aggrieved decided by fortune—the judgement of a god.

Contests could be physical, chance or verbal. Boasting and slanging matches were old forms of verbal dualling which became more sophisticated, when invectiveness gave way to winning debating points. Even today, our courts do not pretend to try to discover the truth. The point of litigation is to win, not to expose the truth. Suppression of evidence has often been used, usually by the prosecution in criminal cases, to ensure an otherwise dubious victory.

In war, victory also shows a cause is favoured by the gods. It is a just cause, and so the war must have been just. Rogue politicians like Bush and Blair argue the same case still, from their modern hypocritical Christianity. Time was, brief and intermittent though it admittedly was, when some Christian princes—the Merovingians did, for example—actually turned to single combat to settle disagreements. “It was better for one to fall than a whole army”. Indeed, the pretence of it remained a ritual of chivalry for hundreds more years but it no longer stopped battles. Can anyone imagine Bush or Blair agreeing to fight Saddam Hussain in single mortal combat? We would have fewer wars if it were obligatory for all war-mongering leaders to start the hostilities personally by single combat with the opposing leader.

Things have come to such a pass that the system of international law is no longer acknowledged, or observed, as the very basis of culture and civilized living. As soon as one member or more of a community of states virtually denies the binding character of international law and… proclaims the interest and power of its own group—be it nation, party, class, church or whatsoever else—as the sole norm of political behaviour, not only does the last vestige of the immemorial play-spirit vanish, but with it, any claim to civilization at all. Society then sinks down to the level of the barbaric, and original violence replaces ancient duties.

J Huizinga, Homo Ludens

While the warriors in ancient times had power, the sages and smiths had magical power. Knowledge out of the ordinary was cosmic knowledge, and therefore sacred. It revealed the divine order or rtam (Sanskrit, Persian, arta) which religious play acting kept as it should be. Competitions in this knowledge also found a part of the dualistic contests on the occasion of the sacred dramas. Catechisms are a simple form of them. In 589, at Toledo, the Visigoths converted from Arianism to Catholicism. The occasion was celebrated as a knowledge contest between the highest clerics on each side on the subject of theology.

Natural processes were seen as struggles of opposites. Heraclitus said strife was the father of all things. Empedocles saw attraction amd discord as conflicting elements. Anaximander also saw discord in that “things must necessarily perish in that same principle from which they arise, for they have to render expiation to one another and atone for the wrong they did according to the ordinance of time”. Time is Zurvan, in the Persian religion, apparently the father of the two contending spirits of Zoroastrianism.

The Persian religion was dualistic. It saw the world as a battleground between two equal gods, one good and one wicked. All human beings could do was to choose between them—personally—and so minutely influence the cosmic battle. Much of the Greek philosophical views were inspired by this, the world’s first super-religion, taken into Greece by the invading forces of Cyrus the Great around 550 BC. This same Cyrus was the original messiah of Judaism, being called God’s anointed in the Jewish scriptures.

Poetry and singing contests were also a part of the sacred festivals of primitive people. Both conflict and love imply rivalry, and such strife is the core of poetry and literature. And poetic language is arcane. It purposely sets riddles for the hearer thus overlapping with the knowledge contests. In Christendom, they revived in the cours d’amours of Languedoc at the time when its dominant religion was Catharism. The “Love Court” was a contest between troubadours conducted like a law court. The defence of honour in love was the poets’ nominal purpose, and a whole set of given poetic forms served it.

Myths were also presented in poetic form from ancient times, to be easier to remember, for they were meant to be recited or acted out. They were explanations of holy things, names, origins, meant seriously at first for they had become accepted as sacred by all but the cognoscenti, but gradually they lost meaning as factual knowledge progressed. They could not just be dropped but eventually had to be read allegorically to preserve any sacred meaning in them. The Christian holy books are the same.

Old myths become shackles that cannot be broken free from because people consider them as sacred. The skeptical Greek philosophers often could not voice their true opinions about religion for fear of the mob. It got Socrates! The elected demagogues that rule us today want to bring back this madness. They want to make it illegal to say, “The bible is not only not God’s truth, it is mainly not even true!” Such men are throwbacks to primitive times and they will take the whole of society with them, if we let them. Believers can keep their ancient myths and psalms, if they wish, but no sensible society will let them force them on to everyone else. They should keep them for the liturgical purposes they were intended for, not an absolute truth that they plainly are not.

Symbol and Reality

There are people who seem to think that TV and radio soaps and dramas are not fictional. Drama was originally a religious show, and people who believe in gods still think religious shows are somehow factual. Church ritual is a drama, a religious show, and they think it means something real. Are Americans worse in their inability to distinguish drama from reality than other people? Mrs Dale, a fictional doctor’s wife in a BBC radio serial in the 1950s always had a large postbag from wellwishers, so the British seem just as deluded. But on 30 October 1938, people began to flee from US cities when a radio drama, directed by Orson Welles of the Mercury Theatre about a Martian invasion, was broadcast. Many more courageous Americans dashed to recruitment offices to volunteer to defend the world. Both cowards and heroes thought the radio show was real.

It suggests that some people have genuine difficulty in distinguishing symbol and the reality it stands for. Such people think that possessing some symbol of wealth, perhaps a large car, means they are rich, and they begin to act as if they are. Advertizers depend on it, so it is obviously not a mistaken observation. People used to speak of “top show” in the middle of the last century, and today, young boys and girls like to think they are, or easily can be, celebrities, by affecting the appropriate behaviour and fashions. They too seem to be unable to distinguish reality and symbols. The availability of cheap credit, and half witted “reality” TV shows, helped spread the same illusions.

Religious belief is the same sort of delusion, and all the easier to fall in to. Believers mistake the symbols of piety, like church attendance and holding to certain views particularly on sexuality and homoxuality, as the same as genuine piety. Psychologists have noticed it and have distinguished the genuinely pious, those described as intrinsically religious, and the falsely pious described as extrinsically religious. The intrinsic variety are a much smaller body of people.

Symbols are ways of representing reality, like the symbols on a map standing for the features of the real landscape. Words are symbols, and language is the use of words as symbols to represent the real world. People are brought up in the real world that their language describes, so that the map called language can be seen directly to correspond with the reality as experienced. Part of the “reality” though is cultural, a particular interpretation put on to the world by a society. Spray painting an ugly warehouse wall might be acceptable, but spray painting a church will be called sacrilege, especially by Christians. Unless the law is that of a theocracy, spraying a wall in each case is an equal act, but the church is considered sacred, at least by some, while the warehouse is not. It is a cultural difference because, objectively, a wall has been sprayed in each case.

Now, Christians are often taught to believe things that are manifestly untrue, and to decry what is true based on extensive evidence that they refuse to consider fairly, if at all. The symbolic map of the world expressed in language that such people are taught is false—it does not correspond with reality. It is superstition, in no way differing in essence from carrying a rabbit’s foot or an amulet as a charm against disease or misfortune, instead of choosing medicine and science. To be useful, any map has to be accurate, or tolerably close to it, but no map can be exactly right because it is not the thing which it represents, and reality itself changes, as well as the meaning of the symbols. Maps and languages evolve over time like everything in reality, so maps are inevitably approximations. Each generation adjusts its maps and languages to correspond with their reality, and providing that no one is deliberately propagating falsehoods like religious believers, the symbols ought to adequately represent the reality.

Some people have their own motives for creating false maps, mainly to fool others who are uncritical. John Locke said that “vague and insignificant forms of speech and abuse of language” pass for “mysteries of science”, and “misapplied words with little or no meaning” are “mistaken for deep learning” and “the height of speculation” so that “they are but the covers of ignorance” and hinder “true knowledge”. Frequent users of such methods of obfuscation are religious professionals whether of traditional and accepted religions, or the pseudo-scientific sects and cults springing up today often as outright scams spread by tricksters preying on the gullibility of the innocent and unwary.

Ritual

The antique religions had, for the most part, no creed. They consisted entirely of institutions and practices.

W R Smith, Religion of the Semites

The word “ritual” these days is much abused. It is used as a disparaging synonym of “habitual”, especially when the habits are singular and personal, and even of obsessions. Freud has noted that religion is a social reflexion of personally obsessive behaviour, but there is no reason why personal obsessive behaviour could properly be described as “ritual”, even though it is ritualistic in being repetitive. Rituals are social conventions, but all social conventions are not rituals. It is meaningless to call greeting a neighbour with “good day” a ritual.

The central meaning of ritual is whatever pertains to rites, formal ceremonies, procedures or acts of a solemn and social character, often religious. Arnold van Gennep, a Belgian anthropologist, coined the phrase “rites of passage” in the title of his seminal book (Rites of Passage, 1908). Before religion was conceived as a distinct activity, rituals were formal family, clan or tribal occasions with no particular “religious” significance. He showed that ritual was meant for social bonding and the social demarcation of status, time and space. Celebrating birthdays and other anniversaries like the new year, change of status in society, and the crossing of boundaries into sacred spaces offered ways of dividing up time, space and society.

Certain times and spaces were set aside for celebrations, special social times which eventually were designated as “sacred”. So too were any implements required in the ceremonies which were rites of passage and consecration. The sacred occasions became associated with the clan or tribal totem, which eventually engendered the tribal spirit or god. Thus ritual became associated with religion as we understand it. Today many of them have become non-religious state occasions like the British opening of Parliament or the US inauguration of the President that are ritual but not particularly religious, or personal times like birthdays that are not religious, or weddings which were, but now often are not.

Moral and social education was traditionally staged according to age. On reaching an accepted standard, each person was ritually passed into the next stage. Each stage consisted of a period of teaching and practice, the social directives and ways of behaving being inculcated by a hierophant, a shaman, a guru, a wizard or a priest. When the directives had been understood and the behaviour had become habitual, they passed through an imaginary gate or door, or crossed a threshhold or were reborn into a new world, or a level of higher status. Rites of passage per se occurred in two or three stages, separation followed by adoption (incorporation) with an intermediate stage possible (liminality). These are the rites of passage Gennep described, and have the following characteristics:

• Ritual is affective not symbolic. Participants and audience are meant to feel emotional about it. The aim of the ritual is to be memorable by their emotional engagement. Because the promises were not to be forgotten, ritual was meant to bring on an emotional bond of attachment in the mind of the participant. Then there could be no excuse for failing to keep the promises made to society. All the drama and spectacle was for this purpose, and so too the fear of divine and communal punishment for apostasy, and the pride in the personal fulfilment of the promises brought in being accepted by the group.
• The ritual is preceded by a period of separation, detachment from some previous status in society, often by being dressed in some peculiar way, being left in some isolated place, fasting, self mortification, humiliation, or mock elevation—being required to act oddly. It stands for the chaos that preceded the balance, responsibility and maturity that is to follow. Our modern mischievous nights, trick or treat, and stag or hen nights are the remnants of such rituals. The events of the passion of Christ have the characteristics of a dramatized initiation ritual, perhaps that of the Essenes.
• Liminality, when it occurs, is a virtual crossing of some boundary or threshhold. The boundary might be a real threshhold or a doorway, but it is symbolic of a change of status or place.
• Adoption or incorporation is being welcomed back into society at a new level, with a new status, manhood, marriage, and so on. Adoption is often accompanied by a new name or way of dressing, and a formal introductory acceptance by their new peers. Monks and nuns demonstrate this in modern society still.
• Archaic language impressed solemnity and antiquity to impress the eternal nature of the ceremony, and then assumed a sense of sacredness, and eventually godliness.
• Promises were made as oaths and vows.
• Higher powers, totems, spirits and then gods, were called upon to witness the promises being made, and to take vengeance if they were broken. Really they were proxies for society itself, but came to be believed in themselves as supernatural powers.
• But, in case the gods and powers failed in their duty for some reason, society retained the right itself to punish any backsliding on the solemn vows being taken. It might be explicit as a law, or left understood as a question of honour, when those who felt dishonoured by any breaking of the vows, usually the family or clan, would undertake to avenge the dishonour. Thus the President of the US is impeached for betraying public trust.
• The ritual might be followed by joyful celebrations, feasting, drinking and dancing.
• Everyday rituals are often empty repetitions of some words of allegiance or loyalty like the US flag ceremony in schools, the Moslem prayers and the Christian daily or weekly mass.

Thus it is that ritual is a way of controlling future individual behaviour in respect of the social group, and that it what morality is too. People who have apostatized after being brought up in a religious tradition vouch for the power of emotion brought by seeing or hearing part of an abandoned ritual. Profound feelings of regret and wrongdoing are induced with a strong urge to return. It is the power of social conditioning.

Initiation

Initiation is a set of rituals to intoduce a young person into society. Such ceremonies are often called rites of passage. In primitive societies, it is the passage from the profane into the sacred, seen literally as a transformation of the whole person—a rebirth—the older person dying and being reborn in a new form, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. In slightly more advanced societies, it became the first participation in the sacrifice, as in India, but it is very widespread. The Catholic church has three sacraments of initiation, Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist.

Arkon Daraul (Secret Societies, 1961) explains that secret societies have an aim that anyone must agree upon who wants to be a member. To ensure that they do, they usually have a period of initiation to inculcate the object of the society and its view of the world into the minds of the novitiates by their attainment of increasingly sophisticated degrees of expertise. Initiations are training systems to indoctrinate people into the cult of believers. The system makes the new member submissive to the rules of membership, and often to the whims of a prophet or charismatic leader. So they condition the person to the defence of the community and its leader, often both physically and spiritually, and the upholding of its views as privileged above others even though the members are collectively too politically weak to impose their views openly.

Religiously inclined people, those who can see only good in their religion, have always stressed the “spiritual” aspects of these initiations rather than the more obvious conditioning aspect. Yet, Professor Rutton Webster (Primitive Secret Societies, 1908) saw that any altruistic motives and supernatural beliefs of the cult leaders were incidental to the impact of their psychological propaganda on the minds of the novices. The nervous effects of long fasts, of sleep deprivation, of constant excitement and expectation alternated with shocks and tribulations create extreme sensitivity—hyperaesthesia—which favours the permanent acceptance of the impressions meant to be perpetuated. The lessons of such schooling abides through life. Initiates believe their experiences are supernatural, yet what succeeds is psychological and physiological conditioning, and nothing else. Whether Chinese Tongs, Persian Assassins, Hindu Thugs, Moslem suicide bombers, or Christian Revivalists, the method of conversion has the same psychological basis. One initiate, cited by Daraul, said:

You have not experienced this feeling of initiation, this contact with the divine. How can you judge it?

Conditioning was discovered by accident early in human society. Much of it remains in the apparently innocent ceremonies of the world’s religions, and in the public devotions of their practitioners, hinting at their origins in primitive rituals, even if their purpose is denied today. Conditioning and group feeling is common today, even outside of religion. The appeal of patriotism depends upon key words associated with country or leader. Branding in advertising uses the same psychology to associate certain desired outcomes with buying particular brands. Even childhood training, such as potty training and washing, are conditioned responses. Humans are trained from infancy to obey, and religions and secret societies take advantage of it. Critical training is meant to make people realise why they do things, to question habits and assertions. Religions hate this, and secret societies will not tolerate it.

Early societies realized that anticipation of something life changing, shared experience, extremes of emotion in unusual situations, rituals which exhaust the body and overwhelm the mind constitute social training—so called rites of passage—a mental conditioning still used by those who seek to control others. Modern psychologists know it, and governments have used it. Secret and religious societies use processes indistinguishable from those of modern brainwashers. The mechanisms which are used can be summarized as:

1. Desire to participate in the ritual, and expectancy of something happening
2. Periods of isolation, vigils, hunger or abstinence, causing debilitation and time for reflection
3. Loud noise in the ceremony, numbing thought
4. Real or symbolic potions, sometimes narcotic and hypnotic
5. Staged but menacing threats and fear
6. Symbolic death and resurrection, often with renaming
7. Signs and key words that awaken the conditioned response when needed.

The Huskenaw ceremony of the North American Indians of Carolina makes the Indian brave at puberty “obedient and respectful to their superiors”. The novices are kept in the dark and half starved in a cabin for three weeks when they are continuously taught their rights and duties. Then they are given intoxicating beverages, often made of Datura plants. They seem to have been struck dumb, or have been told they must not speak for several weeks. After all of it, they are weak and exhausted but overjoyed to be full members of the tribe, the society for which the rites are essential. The initiates into the tribe are dedicated to obedience to the elders, maintenance of principles of proper conduct, and the welfare of the tribe.

In early nineteenth century Bulgaria, young boys were taken by the priests to undergo the test of fitness to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. The candidates were packed into a large special house with no lights for forty days. They slept on planks and ate only thin gruel. Their drink contained henbane to make them thirsty! In the whole time, the priests ceaselessly urged them to repent, to reform, to be loyal, submissive and dedicated. When they emerged it was to run through files of priests beating drums and shouting, “Dumb, dumb!” at them. They were not allowed to speak but only to make signs. In a month, uncouth, disrespectful peasant lads only in the seminary for the food were transformed into solemn, fearful and submissive men suitable for priestly training. Josef Stalin had the same sort of experience when he was at his seminary in Georgia.

These two separate accounts from societies half a world apart agree almost entirely, and the motives for the training are the same—to make surly youths into submissive citizens. Initiaton rites are practised most often at puberty, when the youth needs training and discipline, and, above all, is impressionable. The radical effect seen by the rituals must seem to be supernatural to primitive people, but today they ought not to be. The trainee is conditioned to blind obedience and loyalty to the “tribe” as represented by its totem, god or spirit. The initiate may believe they have experienced a divine power which henceforth will be a constant guide.

The Meaning of Ritual

A remarkable characteristic of rituals is that they are utterly meaningless in real terms, except as the peculiar custom of a group to give themselves a singular identity. They are often dramatic performances of some kind, perhaps stylized acts of separation and uniting, dying and rebirth, but they do nothing other than bonding together the participants by their sharing of the ritual act, and denoting the occasion. After countless generations of participating, the community who act out the ritual come to believe it has some mysterious purpose, but few have any idea that it is the bonding and marking of status, time or space that is it. Rather they have invented myths to explain it, and those who have any clear idea of the purpose of the ritual explain it mythically. The myths “explain” the ritual by indicating why it was first performed, and the imaginary benefits it confers.

The Christian ritual of the Eucharist is objectively pointless, but Christians accept its explanation as a repetition of the last meal of their God, Jesus Christ, who urged his followers just before his crucifixion to remember him by repeating it. Other meanings have then accumulated including the important one that by eating the body and drinking the blood of the God, they will become gods themselves, and so “live” forever. In reality, the body and blood of the God are wafer biscuits and a sip of wine, and often not even the latter, but they perform the magic of the ancient ambrosia and nectar of the gods, the food and drink that gave them immortality. Naturally, a wafer biscuit even accompanied by a drop of wine has no such effect, but communal participation in the ritual reinforces the beliefs of the participants who are therefore united in the falsehoods that distinguish them from others.

Ritual is a meaningless repeated activity believed by those sharing in it to have a mysterious purpose. To know the purpose is not always essential to the ritual because its real purpose is to commit the participants to the group—it is social—and sharing in the act will suffice. Religious ritual brings people together and commits them to a particular religious sect or interpretation.

In everyday interactions between people, talk does not always have symbolic meaning, but it still serves a social function. It is “phatic communion”, words used not for their particular meaning but simply as basic communication, as an indication of recognition and an opportunity to act in a, usually, friendly manner. Other human activities can serve the same functions, sharing an activity like eating together, working together or playing sport together, for example, and any of these type of activities can be the basis of religious ritual because it has the same function. Phatic communion is finding something trivial to say that one can expect a friendly response towards. “Nice day”, “good morning”, “how are you doing”, and “hope you are well”, are all typical examples.

A friendly response would be something similar, usually agreement or another response inviting agreement. “Mind your own business” would suggest nothing is to be gained by proceding with the conversation. “What do you think?” from a flustered man trying to change his car wheel, is probably not the right response to a passer by asking, “Got a flat?”. It is probably not an inane question but phatic communion meant to offer a base of friendship from someone willing to help, if your response is appropriate. Unless you mean to rebuff the approach, the response should be similar in kind, inviting agreement again. The chatter is not aimless but lets each make judgments about the other, and whether they should get involved.

Ritual is an extension of this to the community level. By joining in, the members of the group confirm that they approve of each other, and share a common bond of unity. Ritual is a shared activity involving special clothes or regalia, food, display, drama and procession, but also verbal ritual, repeated formulaic phrases, singing and chanting, call and response, sermons and exhortations, none of which needs to mean anything symbolically except the bonding together of the group. Even sermons and exhortations amount to formulaic repetitions of mutually held beliefs, though they might be new to the new intitiate.

The meaningless of it is shown by the words often being in a sacred language that no one understands except the priests themselves, and sometimes not many of them. Hindu and Buddhist temples might have ceremonies spoken in Sanskrit. Hebrew never was a language spoken by Jews but was ancient Canaanite revived for purposes of ritual. Latin, for most of the existence of the Roman Catholic Church, was the language of its mass. It shows that the ritual does not have to be understood, and might not be meant to be understood because it is somehow then more mysterious and sacred in character!

In historic times the exhortation was added to tell the congregation how their rulers expected them to behave—it laid down the law of the tribe or nation. Later even the exhortation became incomprehensible, or passed like musak over the heads of the congregation, as a type of phatic communion with God, but otherwise meaningless. Even ritual words that are taught by rote, like the Christian Lord’s Prayer, are declaimed with no conscious thought, and “speaking in tongues” is completely devoid of all meaning because it is just an ullulation of unconnected sounds and syllables:

Ritualistic utterances, whether made up of words that have symbolic significance at other times, of words in foreign or obsolete tongues, or of meaningless syllables, may be regarded as consisting in large part of presymbolic uses of language… accustomed sets of noises which convey no information, but to which feelings—oftern group feelings—are attached.

S I Hayakawa

Presymbolic “language” used in this way ritually does not need to be grammatical or syntactical because it is not speech at all. It is the equivalent of wolves howling at the moon, elephants trumpeting and dogs barking, or of humans cheering. It is phatic, signifying social recognition rather than information. Individuals in the group accept the noises with approval thereby showing their approval of the group. Ritual has little or no meaning so far as symbolic language is concerned. Its meaning is affective, its influence is in feeling. It makes the participants feel better because they get strength from seeing they are not alone in their convictions. The ritual affirms the social cohesion, the bonding together, of the group:

The Christian feels closer to his fellow Christians, the Elk feels more united with his brother Elks, the American feels more American and the Frenchman feels more French… Societies are held together by such bonds…

S I Hayakawa

People who are analytical and critical are amazed that Christians leave church feeling uplifted when enquiry shows they have virtually slept through the service. Often they cannot remember much about it, but they will agree it was a good service, and a good sermon, or that the vicar spoke so well, and has such a pleasant voice, and the choice of hymns was lovely.

The same is true of the enthusiastic supporters of political candidates whose speeches are rousingly cheered, who speak so patriotically, or whose policies are on the ball, when the briefest comparison with their voting record and personal morality just does not bear out the unqualified approval they get. The communion is again phatic, presymbolic. The speech smooths the audience’s fur. It is what they want to hear, but means nothing in reality, and few politicians ever stick to the commitments made in their speeches. Those who are honest and try to, or speak in ways that do not smooth fur but ruffles it, are often pilloried, especially by the press, but then in the ballot, people like Jimmy Carter.

Tens of thousands of years have elapsed since we shed our tails, but we are still communicating with a medium developed to meet the needs of arboreal man…

C K Ogden and I A Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1930)

The appeal of ritual is largely affective and not symbolic, especially for those participants who are inadequately familiar with ritual’s explanatory myth, and the affective appeal is enhanced by the costumes and regalia, the solemn atmosphere, the music and choral chanting, the bells and incense and the slow procession to the alter or dais.

But Religions are Divisive

Religionists do not want natural explanations for religion because they believe the origin of their own religion, if no others, is unnatural—what they prefer to call “supernatural”. Emile Durkheim’s perfectly sound and solid explanation of religion as coming out of primeval social bonding is therefore almost universally disparaged by believers. One of their chief criticisms is that religions in the modern world are anything but bonding—they are divisive. Rituals cannot have been meant to unite people because they can be divisive. It is a criticism mostly brought by those who think there is more to ritual than communal bonding. They will admit that religion nowadays is divisive purely to refute Durkheim’s argument, otherwise they firmly maintain that religion is no more divisive than any other aspect of society.

M Nye (Religion: The Basics) thinks the fact that Orange Order (Protestant) marches through Catholic neighbourhoods are divisive shows that ritual cannot be about bonding. Given that Orange Order marches are a ritual, they undoubtedly bond the Orange Order together in defiance of the Catholics. The march succeeds in bonding those it is meant to bond. It also plainly distinguishes Orangemen from Catholics. Does Mr Nye think there is indeed some magical formula in ritual that ought to work, and the fact that the Orange march amidst the Catholics does not induce the latter to turn Orange shows the ritual is a failure, and the Durkheim theory therefore false? Nye says he is, or was, an Anglican, so must have believed the alleged purpose of Anglican rituals. Anglican rituals bond together Anglicans in the Anglican Communion, or community. It does not bond Catholics or anyone else, and has not failed by not doing what it was not meant to do. Nye’s example is a typically feeble apologetic straw man—not a view seriously held by anyone, but presented to be knocked down in a symbolic refutation that believers will readily accept. With a proper theory dismissed in this cavalier way, the believer can happily continue unchallenged in their false beliefs.

Such people seem not to have noticed that Durkheim was not arguing that religion arose spontaneously in the modern world. He was explaining how it arose in primeval bands of people living in societies that differed from bands of chimpanzees chiefly in evolving language as a novel tool of social cohesion. It was a phase of human development that lasted for a million years, not merely twenty centuries. Social rituals in these primordial human groups helped them identify with the band, and these rituals became religion by extension, refinement and sophistication, then by fossilization in sacred books of obsolete beliefs.

In case any believer has not yet noticed, modern societies comprise far more than the number of people in a primordial human band, which was of the order of 2, meaning a few hundred. It is the size of the modern religious community, the average church congregation, and they are generally united. Anyone unhappy with the congregation can do what the unhappy member of the primordial group could do—leave! Some other group might accept them, or they could collect a band of their own. It is how US Christianity has spallated, disenchanted members start their own church, and now there are thousands of them, but each congregation is essentially united. Groups larger than the mean size of the primordial human group tend to fall apart and need to be held together. Thus the antagonism between religions in large modern states does not disprove Durkheim by exposing an exception to his idea, but confirms it.

Primeval tribes came together as federations which called themselves nations. Eventually when the nation solidified under a high king of the tribes, he, his princes and priests had to find ways of keeping the nation—far more people than the few hundred of the primeval band—from breaking up spontaneously, and the unifying culture of religion had to be extended beyond its natural bounds. The unifying factor remained what it was in the original pressure to socialize—security and economic plunder. The bigger group was less likely to be attacked by their smaller neighbours, and they could plunder their neighbours to rob them of their assets, and pressure of population made this a necessity.

Religion as culture and patriotism in this imperial phase are political forces for law and unity, which remain in force as long as the majority can be persuaded they have a stake in a united nation. Once they begin to doubt it, the federation starts to fall apart, and legal and social pressure grows to enforce it in totalitarianism. Religious differences, once ignored or voluntarily repressed, start to emerge. People want to distinguish themselves from the established culture—the one promoted by the ruling class—which they see as oppressive.

The intrinsic economic, cultural and religious instability of large groups starts to show itself, individuality increasingly asserts itself, and society begins to revert to the mean, the primordial band. Music, fashion and speech are all used particularly by disgruntled youth to re-assert their human group identity. Though it is called “individualism”, it is a phenomenon of the reversion to the human group, local bands differentiating themselves as mods, rockers, romantics, new romantics, hippies and hoodies. Ethnic minorities do the same, suddenly finding a new pride in their distinctive characteristics, and the Islamism of young Moslems falls into this category today, as does black knife and gun culture in the UK, and rap music. The imperium weakens and lays itself open to conquest, all the more so because a dying society often lashes out in a final act of desperation and misguided belief in its divine destiny, only to suffer ignominious defeat.

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