Jan A. Kozák The Symbolism of Secular Rituals The Structure of the Paper: 1) Preliminary remarks and disclaimers 2) A Slightly Hyperbolized Picture of Secularism 3) The Problem of Supposed Special Position of Secularism 4) Sketch of My Approach 5) The Invisibility of our Myths and Rituals 6) The Example of Flower Sacrifice 7) The Orthopractic Nature of Secular Rites and the Ironic Distance 8) Closer Look at Secular Christmas Ritual 9) Closer Look at New Year Ritual Symbolism 10) Wrap up 1) Preliminary Remarks When talking about secularism I will inevitably oversimplify a very complex phenomenon, construct a generalization out of an extremely diverse field and jump over a lot of fences. My aim is not to explain secularism and secular rituals in all their complexity (which is practically impossible) but only provide a certain limited perspective, which might unlock or inspire new ways of thinking about the phenomenon. 2) A Slightly Hyperbolized Picture of Secularism First let’s describe what I mean by secularism. I won’t use any shorthand definition here – I’d rather paint a picture: It is the basic worldview presented in our culture (movies, TV, theatre, newspapers, taught in schools) which can be described as sharing some of the core values with humanism, atheism, materialism and scientism. World is seen as a purely material entity, having its origin in the Big Bang and ruled by natural laws. The universe is governed by deterministic causality, which is only slightly disturbed by tiny random occurrences on the subatomic level. Wholes are explained as sums of their parts, like machines. If we want to heal a living entity, we approach it as if we were to repair a machine: we find the problematic organ and use some chemistry or surgery to repair the defective “cog wheel”. And it is very successful. Life is seen as a self-organization of matter, consciousness is an unexplained and basically unnecessary epiphenomenon, produced by brain. As such consciousness cannot exist independently, that is before the formation or after the organic failure, of the brain. All nonstandard experiences like visions, OBE etc. are just a products of brain chemistry. Humans developed through evolution and are the cleverest animals which gives them power over all other life on this planet. While human life has special value and cannot be violated (with the 1 exception of some misbehaving people and people of some of the other tribes), all other life (with the exception of our animal pets) can be commodified and used as we like, if certain other people agree with it. Religions are at best colourful traditions of legends and unrealistic beliefs which can give the organic robot (which is human being) some relief and support in life and might impart some morality (even if based on fiction). Of course the religious teachings and stories have to be taken as metaphors and educational fiction. At worst, religions are pre-scientific failed explanations of reality, products of wild imaginations of uninformed people, who didn’t have scientific method and the right equipment to see the reality correctly. We have now fortunately both scientific method and the right equipment, so we basically know how the world functions. Our limits are only on the distant edges of reality, because of the limits of our equipment. So we have some unsolved details with regards to the origin of the universe, origin of life on Earth, we don’t see clearly into the subatomic realm and the faraway macrocosm. Our knowledge is cumulative and becoming more and more precise. 3) The Problem of Supposed Special Position of Secularism What seems to me most striking in this respect is the notion presented usually in elementary and middle schools either directly or implicitly, that after tens of thousands of years of various different religions – that is of fictions and wild imaginations, that are clearly erroneous – we, just now, in the recent two centuries, have arrived at something fundamentally different. A completely different kind of knowledge. Only in our time and only we, says the teacher to the children, have the basically correct picture of the universe and human beings, while all other eras were in error. Some of those primitive religions or persons were precursors to our correct picture, people like Aristotle, Democritus, Newton - like prophets who have seen our truth in advance, even if sometimes only partially. This stance seems to me inherently suspicious: why we, why now? That would be an extremely curious happenstance, if just and only we would be special, while all other cultures and millennia of history were in error. „We are in a different position than all the other ages and cultures.“ Which is actually not so far away from the perspective of flatearthers who admit that other planets we see are round, just the one that is ours is special. 2 To me it seems infinitely more probable, that we are no different than our predecessors and our belief in our uniqueness is actually just a modern version of a natural belief of every culture in its cosmology. Functioning cosmology is not perceived by given culture as a separate interpretive layer mediating collective experience, but is directly identified with reality and the truth about things. Only when looking from distance at other cultures we see their cosmology as something visible, a model through which their experience is filtered. From that it is very easy to understand why for example some Christians maintain that Christianity is not a religion – simply because religion is what other people have, while we have something real, something radically different, not some silly rituals, but a personal relation to God. Even if all cultures have their cosmologies, some cultures don’t stress the aspect of superiority of their cosmology, but in the case of Secularism we inherited a certain superiority complex from Christianity and Judaism. The perspective, that we have a special unique relationship with God, while all other cultures are “idol worshipping gentiles” in historical Judaism and the perspective that only we and only our teaching is “true faith”, while all other traditions are “pagans” and “infidels” in historical Christianity both have the same underlying structure: The conviction that our cosmology has fundamentally different nature and status in contrast to all others, which are all erroneous. This critique doesn’t in any way question the obvious usefulness and results of science, of course. As it doesn’t question the wonderful art, literature, architecture and music of Christianity, Judaism or other religions. But material or cultural achievements actually don’t ever prove supposed ultimate status of any cosmology. The astonishing wonder of ancient Egyptian pyramids show the skill and power of the Egyptian culture, not the “reality” of their cosmology. 4) Sketch of My Approach Secularism is usually discussed and theorized in connection with politics, role of church and state in present day society, gender studies, minorities, ethics, values and other hot issues that fill the media. My approach to the topic is different, as can be seen from the previous critical observation. I see no essential breach in modern history, no special status of secularist cosmology. It is just the most recent cosmology in an endless series of cosmologies. It is true that some developments are more dramatic in the history of cosmologies – for example the so called “axial age” coined by Karl Jaspers brought forth a new and specific type of religions – so maybe today we are experiencing another axial era. But that doesn’t mean that we should succumb to the lure of our uniqueness. My background is in Classical Philology together with Sanskrit and Old Norse. For the last decade I studied the religions of the past – so called polytheistic religions from the Indo-European language area. Recently I noticed that a large number of practices and mythic images similar to those that I know from the cultures of ancient Rome, Greece, India or medieval pre-Christian Scandinavia, are present in today’s society, but they are not perceived as similar. Further away is sometimes better: The distance between the researcher and his/her subject when studying ancient or distant cultures allows him/her to see certain patterns more clearly then when reflecting his/her own culture. I tried to keep the same outside perspective and measure with the same metre when I switched my attention to the current culture. 3 One of my inspirations is a parodic article (Horace Mitchell Miner: „Body Ritual among the Nacirema“, American Anthropologist, vol 58: pp. 503-507, June 1956.)1 describing the strange customs of North American tribe of “Nacirema” (who are in fact “American” written in reverse). The author makes fun of the fact that anthropologists tend (or used) to look at the other (“primitive”) cultures with a specific expectation and bias that makes them look down on the other culture as an irrational “savagery” consisting of grotesque rites, absurd myths, superstitions and weird classifications. This attitude is materialized in the patronizing jargon they use for describing the other cultures, which is composed of terms and notions that simply don’t ever apply on their own culture, just on the “primitives”. Miner shows, that if they used the same alienating and patronizing “lens” when describing their own culture, they would be really surprised: (Here Miner describes our bathrooms of course...) 5) The Invisibility of our Myths and Rituals Western culture sees itself as “non-religious”, secular. We don’t have myths, other people have myths. We don’t have rituals, other people have rituals. It seems as if the spell of invisibility is mostly cast by the language we use. We have two sets of labels, one we use about ourselves and one we use about those of the past or distant culture. We don’t call our values and symbols “sacred” even if in practice they are – the human life, the individual freedom and other values are definitely sacred in similar sense as are sacred the cows in Hinduism. Even if every culture has certain defenses against internal violence of their populations, our culture is unique in the sacrosanct status of human life. That is not something natural and self-evident. 1 Thanks to my colleague Martin Pehal for bringing the article to my attention. 4 We have also founding myths, we have taboos (eugenics, racism, holocaust denial etc.), we have demons and their evil ruler (nazis and Adolf Hitler). Now I don’t want to relativize in any way the gruesome history of World Wars, but bring attention of the way in which the images, narratives and symbols are used every day in our culture – in movies, posters, discussions, arguments. What function they fulfill as mythic archetypes structuring our world into good and evil. Nazism, holocaust, Hitler are not just neutral historical facts, they are filled by powerful emotions, taboos, they shape our discourse and society. We reconnect with them periodically in calendrical and commemorative rituals, when our politicians (taking the role of the community priests) bring wreaths and bouquets of flowers to the monuments and speak about it in media. 6) The Example of Flower Sacrifice It seems all natural and common-sense to us: it is normal to bring flowers to monuments, to graves or to girls.2 But there is nothing natural or common-sense about it. Cut flowers used in this way are actually one member of a wider category “sacrifice” that we know well from other religions. In today’s India flowers and flower garlands are used in similar way. Other typical bloodless sacrificial offerings in world religions are fruits or vegetarian food, drinks, tobacco etc., while of course there are also animal or human sacrifices. We could bring rice cakes and alcohol to World War monuments (to our “holy sites”), or we could even sacrifice horses in front of them and sprinkle the stone with the blood of the dying animal, but that is not the custom in our culture. Our custom is to offer cut flowers. Even if they are not bloody, their sacrificial symbolism is evident, once we take notice of their ritual function: the flowers are cut at the peak of their growth, in the moment of their splendor. We could well sacrifice virgins, that would articulate the same symbolic pattern, but flowers seem more practical. If we look around more closely with this kind of perspective of a proverbial “anthropologist from Mars”, it is easy to see that a lot of what we do is actually not “common-sense”, but ritual and symbolic action comparable in form and inner logic to customs of ancient and modern religions. Recall people celebrating birthdays, recall the colourful subcultures associated with musical styles or book fandom, their rituals and symbolism, recall collective secular calendrical rites of Halloween, Christmas, New Year, Valentine’s day or various Independence or Bastille Days where the miniature cosmogony of the given state is reactualized and performed. Recall the enormous ritual activity connected with sports and sport fans (cheering and cheerleading), with education (e.g. hazing rituals of fraternities, gangs, sport teams, military units), with popular music and cinema (e.g. some popmusic or sportsman fans literally worshipping their idols, having usually an altar-like wall in their room, with photos of the idol and symbols associated with it; movie actors are called stars = dingir). Yes, in certain respects, our secular society is much less ritualized – for example in general we seem to lack functioning funerary rituals that would properly express and enact the process of separation and that would provide us with symbolic framework navigating us and our families through the difficult times and helping us cope with the loss. Similar lack can be seen in the area of puberty rites of passage (that would be an interesting topic for another talk). Also our public area is somewhat less ritualized then in some other religions: if we compare ancient Rome or present day Varanasi/Benares with secular cities like Berlin or Madrid we see much less shrines 2 I would like to thank my colleague Radek Chlup for introducing this flower-sacrifice interpretation to me. 5 and places that would receive daily worship. However, let’s not be blindfolded again by our terminology: putting garland in front of the statue of Ganesha is “worship”, while putting bouquet of flowers in front of the monument of the Unknown Soldier is not “worship”. So even if the act itself is practically identical, our usage of different words manipulate us into thinking, that those things have nothing in common. Of course, similar symbolic action doesn’t imply similarity in meaning: We can use the example of blinking versus winking mentioned by Clifford Geertz, where the same gesture of blinking can be either an involuntary reflex, or meaningful signal, or even a parody of the involuntary reflex. 7) The Orthopractic Nature of Secular Rites and the Ironic Distance Even if in both cases there is some kind of ritual activity, might say our critic, and even if both the statue and the monument can be seen as symbols of some culturally important and respected values, and even if the flowers are in both cases a kind of offering, there is one key and obvious difference, says the critic: In the case of the World War monument there is no “supernatural being” while in the case of Hindu god Ganesha there clearly is. That is the difference between religion and non-religion. My reply to that is (while putting aside the potentially endless discussion of the definition of religion): That is a typical modern objection, which is rooted in originally Christian conceptualization of religion as something structured around belief and doctrine. (Here I am following Talal Asad’s argument from his book Formations of the Secular.) Most of religions outside the monotheistic family are basically orthopractic (even Judaism is quite orthopractic) – there it is not really important what are the explanations, notions, doctrines, theories behind the practice, because they can vary from individual to individual and are not prescribed. What is shared and prescribed is the practice, not the belief. Different people can have very different explanations for their practice – some might perform a ritual because they believe in personified gods, some can do it with belief that there is one supreme entity and the present statue is just one of its masks, some can do the rite as a mere commemoration (like the mass in protestantism), some may do it because they would feel bad if they didn’t, others may do the rite while believing that the statues and symbols are in fact inner qualities of human being and others do it just because it is their custom and because it is important social event and so on and on. We in our postmodern society have developed one very strange approach to deal with most of the secular rituals and a lot of other cultural products – the ironic distance. This notion is one of the favourite topics of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, repeated across several of his books and lectures. Žižek draws attention to the usual practice of the secular consumers, who verbally express disregard to something while consuming it or cheerfully participating in it. They for example mock a “stupid blockbuster movie”, but then go and watch it, they complain about “shallow materialist christmas consumerism”, but they fully participate in it, they criticize the “dumb folk superstition” but then they perform it. I think that it is our own peculiar postmodern way enabling us to participate in culture, and especially in rituals. 6 8) Closer Look at Secular Christmas Ritual I would like to look more closely at secular Christmas and New Year rituals (as more or less a series of interconnected rites around the time of winter solstice), because Christmas is without doubt the most popular and grandiose ritual of the western hemisphere. The basic features are also quite constant across different nations and language areas, even if of course there is a lot of variance. We could devote a whole long lecture to the history of this ritual complex: pagan roots, which were then christianized and during the 19th century they were secularized. In the process of secularization, new symbols and motifs appeared and the old symbols were reinterpreted. My sources for the secularization of Christmas are two recommendable books: Leigh Eric Schmidt: Consumer Rites, The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Princeton University Press 1995. Daniel Miller (ed.): Unwrapping Christmas, Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001. Let’s skip the historical development and focus only on the specifics of the secular form: There seem to be three most visible innovations in case of the secular Christmas: 1) the Christmas tree emerged, 2) the ritual became family oriented, 3) the gift giving became much more prominent feature and with it the ritual became associated with enormous spending and commerce. The critics usually deplore the “commercialization” of Christmas as some kind of corruption of the “spirit” of the holiday – interestingly similar complaints come not only from people with Christian background, but also from secular humanists. They criticize how people spend enormous amounts of money on luxury goods and useless things every year, how people succumb to commercialism by spending even money they don’t have, by running into debts. Those critics are not acquainted with one of the typical features of sacrificial rituals, which is exactly excessive prodigality. Rituals like Potlatch of the indigenous tribes of pacific northwest of America exemplify such principle. In contrast to typical Potlatch we don’t practice the destruction of property, but the feature of abundant “giving away” is similar. Then there is the complex issue of Christmas as a hyperbolic configuration mirroring the sacrificial logic of our culture as a whole. Isn’t the Christmas sacrificial spending just a pars pro toto for our whole system? Capitalist consumerism with all its loud advertisements that fill half of all printed pages and TV screens seems like something normal and rational, just because we are accustomed to it, but from the perspective of the “anthropologist from Mars” it looks more like a very strange religious institution, where people are promised fulfilment and happiness in the form of paradisiacal images, while their religious practice consists in sacrificing their money for always newer and newer incarnations of objects that should provide them with a little droplet of the paradisiacal bliss pictured in the wondrous advertisement icons. Some of the objects have also practical usage, but large part of them are purely symbols or fetishes in a complex collective religious activity. However, back to the Christmas symbols: The Christmas tree seems like some kind of old pagan or folk survival – the symbolism of evergreen tree as a manifestation of life surviving and conquering the deathly realm of winter sounds like a motif from Celtic or Norse mythology, and it may be, but it is much more surely a motif from James George Frazer’s Golden Bough and in the 7 end it is probably our own 18th and 19th century nature symbolism that is discovered in the phenomenon of the Christmas tree. The tree itself appears suddenly in the urban society of 17th century Germany and from there it spreads during the 18th and 19th century all around the western world. The tree is usually a living tree that is cut just for the occasion, so it is a sacrificial victim in a similar way as the aforementioned cut flowers. There are people, who try to be humane and either have their tree planted in pot or use plastic tree instead, but they are a minority. The majority bring their sacrificial victim home, put it in a central place in their house and adorn it with ribbons and glittery things, reminding us of the adornment of sacrificial victim in Classical Antiquity or still in some parts of today’s India. Huge trees are also placed in the central squares of cities and villages. It is not difficult to see here the symbolism of axis mundi, well known from the work of Mircea Eliade. We could analyse every symbolic element of the secular Christmas ritual, and even focus on the culturally specific forms – like German Christkind, Russian Ded Moroz, French Père Noël, or the globalized Santa Claus, but in the limited time it seems more practical to concentrate on motifs that nicely illustrate some general principles. 9) Closer Look at New Year Ritual Symbolism In this respect the New Year ritual may serve well – the New Year celebrations are today purely secular, nevertheless they spontaneously acquired motifs that correspond well with the typical symbolism of religious New Year rituals. One of the typical features of the New Year rites ancient religions is the presence of liminal symbolism: The old year is destroyed, short period of chaos (or antistructure, as Victor Turner would call it) follows and then the new year is ritually initiated by repeating the cosmogony or at least alluding to it – we can use the Babylonian New Year ritual Akītu as an example, where the creation myth was recited and maybe also partly enacted. The liminal period is represented differently in different cultures, but usually there is an element of inversion or dissolution of social roles and hierarchies – we can recall the inversion of slaves and masters in the Roman Saturnalia or their temporary equality in Greek Kronia. Our New Year celebration enact the liminal dissolution of boundaries in a specifically modern way – in the form of excessive drinking. Alcohol dissolves social boundaries and coincidentally as a liquid object fits well in the symbolism of primordial chaos (which is very often in mythology represented in the form of watery element). But what about the repetition of cosmogony? There we have also a perfectly fitting ritual element – fireworks. Fireworks are usually associated not only with New Year, but also with other symbolic beginnings – with celebrations of independence or other similar statehood holidays. In all those cases we can see the logic of symbolic repetition of cosmogony. Our secular cosmogony is built around the image of the Big Bang, so we recreate it symbolically by fireworks. Big Bang is posited at the very beginning of our cosmos and as such is more a compelling and powerful mythic image than anything else. There is also a secondary symbolic resonance with the supreme power of Atomic Bomb – what more powerful is there in the secular world, than the Atomic Bomb? It is symptomatic that Robert 8 Oppenheimer, one of the architects of the bomb described its explosion in religious language quoting from Bhagavadgītā. It is not an accident – it seems to me – because Atomic Bomb is symbolically a microcosmic version of Big Bang – the supreme power that created whole universe – and thus has a sacred character. Again we come to the events of Second World War as to something with more than just historic significance. WWII is for secular world a kind of illud tempus, a special elevated time of sacred drama, from which our current world order emerged and from which our taboos are derived – we might compare it with the role of the myth of Trojan War in Classical Greek culture. 10) Wrap up As you can see, I am not a minimalist. I go big in my interpretations. All the time I was stressing the continuity and similarity of secular symbols and rituals to their ancient or religious counterparts, but I am of course aware of the fact, that it is just one side of the argument. There are also all the innumerable differences, discontinuities and dissemblances, but I have put them aside on purpose, because they supplied by the system itself. We all know the arguments for discontinuity, because that is part of the self-definition of secular cosmology. I just tried to supply a provocative (and I hope also inspirative) antithesis to that. Acknowledgment: This paper is my first venture into the area of modern rituals. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues RADEK CHLUP and MARTIN PEHAL for a lot of inspiration in this regard, for pointing me to the right literature and introducing me to several original ideas. I would like to thank also my friend and colleague HYNEK BEČKA, who brought my attention to the issue of secular Christmas. Bibliography ASAD, Talal: Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press 2003. GEERTZ, Clifford: Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books 1973. KING, Mike: Secularism: The Hidden Origins of Disbelief, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2007. MILLER, Daniel (ed.): Unwrapping Christmas, Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001. MINER, Horace Mitchell: „Body Ritual among the Nacirema“, American Anthropologist, vol 58: pp. 503-507, June 1956. SCHMIDT, Leigh Eric: Consumer Rites, The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Princeton University Press 1995. TURNER, Victor: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Aldine Transaction 1969. 9