The tenacity of religious ritual : a comparison of pre-christian, christian and post-christian marriage

M.A. (Biblical Studies)Abstract: In a seminal work from the perspective of Cognitive Science, McCauley and Lawson (2002: 1-4) open their discussion of the composition of religious ritual with some puzzles about this worldwide phenomenon. Why do rituals have a Janus-face – some – for example, weddings – highly emotional and salient and others – such as weekly communion – boring and hardly worth remembering? Why can there be a substitution in some rituals, but not in others – for example, using grape juice instead of wine is acceptable, but a priest cannot be replaced by a lay person? Why do some seem to be reversible but others not? Further questions can be added: What is the difference between ordinary, patterned behaviour and religious ritual? How should rituals be differentiated from ordinary day-to-day actions? What cognitive mechanisms are active in both? Why have humans tenaciously adhered to seemingly irrational behaviours since time immemorial without being clear why they do them, but are not prepared to refrain from performing these actions? What are the possible origins of ritual behaviour? And then, how do these origins predict the likelihood of the continued behaviours? Following McCauley and Lawson (1990; 2002), Justin Barrett (2004: 126) circumscribes ritual as follows: ‘…an event during which an agent acts on someone or something to bring about a state of affairs that would not naturally follow from the action. A religious ritual further requires the presence of a superhuman agent being included somewhere in the ritual or previous prerequisite rituals’. In this working definition, Barrett already provides an answer to the difference between ordinary ritualised actions and religious rituals. The latter decidedly brings into account the assumed interventions of culturally postulated superhuman agents (CPS-agents), sometimes called counter-intuitive beings (for example, gods). Although these CPS-agents are humanly constructed/conceptualised, believers hold them ontologically ‘very real’ without being able to prove their existence. In some mysterious ways, these gods are believed to intervene to bring about a state of affairs that is predicted by the ritual. This probably partly explains why rituals can be ‘irrational’, why their effects cannot be logically derived from the actions taken during the ritual but, together with the expectation of the gods’ ‘better’ understanding, are seen as ‘very real’ and following a ‘good order’. A young boy would still grow into a man without the ‘magical’ and illogical initiation rites to ‘make him a man’; common in many cultures, but something mysterious is believed..