| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Function of ritual

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 6 months ago

Yvonne Aburrow 2006

 

Many theorists of religion have posited that religion has a social function, ensuring social cohesiveness and smoothing over the cracks in life. However, this does not at first sight apply to Paganisms in the Western world, since Pagans are a minority and going against the grain.

 

Some studies have observed that Pagans were misfits in society until they found other Pagans; indeed many Pagans report feeling like outsiders before they found other Pagans to hang out with. I don't think this is because there's something wrong with Pagans; I think it is because our world-view is fairly radically different from the mainstream materialist perspective. If Pagans were in the majority, we wouldn't be misfits. (Though of course there are some sad bastards among Pagans, just as there are in other groups.)

 

But I think there is something in the idea that one needs to band together with others (or at least have a sense that others are contacting the same entities and engaging in similar practices). When I first realised I was a Pagan, I thought I was the only one (and apparently this is still quite a common experience). I had sorted out my beliefs, but I had little idea of how to put them into practice, and didn't think there was much point trying to contact the old gods if no-one else was contacting them (because if there was only one person calling to them, they might not hear me). So I needed a community to practice in, or with. It's easy to have a belief on your own, but it's less easy to practice on your own. Even solo practitioners are practising with reference to a tradition, and a set of ideas (and perhaps they feel reassured that there are other people out there talking to the same wights & deities and so on).

 

According to functionalists, the purpose of collective ritual practice is to minimise the importance of the self and ensure community cohesion; rites of passage are a special case in that they negotiate the change of status of the individual and return them to the community with their new status (e.g. graduation ceremonies). Certainly one can think of many ceremonies in life that perform this function, but the stated aim of much Pagan ritual is to enhance the spiritual growth of the individual and connect us to the cycle of the seasons. Maybe the lack of focus on community cohesion is one reason for the bitchcraft and bicker (though apparently that does occur in other religious traditions). But both rites of passage and seasonal festivals are about safely navigating through times of transition; at these crucial times we balance ourselves with the tides of the year or our lives and connect to the numinous. So clearly ritual has a social function beyond its stated aim. Maybe the reason that the social glue theory isn't a very good fit is twofold - because we are a minority, and because many of us are doing magical ritual, which is in a different category and has different aims from religious ritual. According to Grimes (1982), magic is about wielding power, whereas liturgical ritual is about waiting on power.


References

 

Ronald L Grimes (1982) Beginnings in Ritual Studies, Lanham & London: United Press of America

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.