Rituals, Semantics and Our Interconnected World

In a friend’s book on Turkey, he describes the ritual foot washing as people enter the Blue Mosque, a practice dating back to when people were barefoot and walked dirty streets. Now they take off shoes and wash clean feet, and he wonders, “Why rituals continue to have meaning after they’ve lost their original purpose.”

That’s a rhetorical question that tends to fester and demand attention. The world is full of rituals that are no longer connected to a purpose. The religions that forbid pork did so originally because of disease, but pork, at least in developed countries, is safe now. The Ganges River in India is filthy, yet the ritual bathing continues. One can look at any culture, ethnic group or religion and find many examples of ritual that, under current conditions, seem to have no purpose, yet they are followed faithfully.

Practices, originated in any group of people, soon morph from pragmatic to symbolic. Humans, after all, live in a symbolic, semantic world. Sure, the world itself is made of objects and hard facts, but the words we use for these indicate the level of importance we place on them, the degree that we see them as positive or negative, useful or useless. Some obvious examples are “fruit trees,” “vegetables,” and “weeds.”  We call certain living things “trees,” and when we cut them down, they become “timber” or “firewood.”

We have names for our groups and also for people outside our groups, the former being positive terms, the latter often negative.

This process seems to go back to the earliest days of civilization. The Old Testament says something like, “In the beginning there was the word.”  It also goes into Adam naming the animals. The word, the name, the symbol, is more important than most of us stop to realize. Symbols are important, and rituals are symbolic actions. They seem to have value within a culture.

If you belong to some fraternal organization, perhaps you have a secret handshake, or a particular greeting. These identify you as a member. Obviously, each religion has a long list of symbols and rituals, all used to reinforce membership, even the degree of membership. Each nation has rituals, small and large, that identify the members, be it standing and saluting the national anthem or just watching a football game on TV. We need to establish our membership in our groups, as these are the people you can count on, the group of people, most of whom you’ll never meet, who have your back in so many different ways. In times of stress, we need to circle the wagons, and if we have no wagons, we pull out the virtual wagons.