Ritual Primitive wo/man invented ritual, which is a technique for promoting the good life and avoiding evil. Primitive man felt that s/he could control life. Now, ain’t that surprising-- it certainly was to me when I first read it. History can be thought of as being two periods: the first, extending from the dawn of humanity to the Renaissance, can be characterized as the ritualistic period; the second, as the modern period. Primitive wo/man felt that s/he had the ability to transfer life from one to another. A scalp ‘won’ in battle could, when treated properly, transfer life from the scalpee to the scalper. The aborigines felt that they could, by imitating the birth activities, increase the numbers of kangaroos, emus, and grubs that would be born in their world. There were ‘rites of passage’ that guided the stages of human life from birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Many primitives felt that birth was the beginning, the zero, and death was a promotion of the soul to superhuman status and indefinite durability. By means of ritual techniques wo/man imagined that he could take firm control of the material world and at the same time transcends that world by fashioning their own invisible projects, which made them supernatural, raised them over and above material decay and death. Primitive wo/man imagined that her control over nature is fairly complete, i.e. nothing happens unless somebody wants it to happen. “Ritual is actually a preindustrial technique of manufacture; it doesn’t exactly make new things…but it transfers the power of life and it renovates nature. But how can we have a technique of manufacture without machinery? Precisely by building a ritual altar and making that the locus of the transfer and renewal of life power…Unable to take down, repair, and put together again the actual machinery [of the world] when it goes wrong, [the ritualist]…takes to pieces and rebuilds their form by means of the [ritual] sacrifice.” Primitive man believed that his rituals worked; we, however, believe that primitive man’s ritual is just a bunch of mumbo jumbo; we believe in modern ritual because it is scientific and thereby works. The great advantage with primitive ritual was that there was an occasional virgin or chicken sacrificed to please the gods; however, they did not have the ability to destroy the world as does modern rituals. Splitting things into two polar opposite segments seems to dominate primitive society. After worrying over this characteristic our scientists have finally come to the conclusion that it was so because it was necessary for ritual. “A fundamental imperative of all ritual is that an individual cannot do it alone; man cannot impart life to himself without deriving it from his fellow man. If ritual is a technique for generating life, then ritual organization is a necessary cooperation in order to make that technique work”. Quotes from “Escape from Evil”--Becker
