What is the place and power of ritual today?Number anniversary, Culture and Democracy Issue 2 looks at ritual and its benefits as fiction that “strengthens the culture of the commons.”
This issue features an astonishing variety of rituals. While rituals are not inherently good (they are also used to evoke illiberalism and hatred), the forms of secular magic described here are benevolent. As collective practices, they emphasize the need for change based on the culture of the commons and “collective intelligence, the DNA of democracy.”
Ritual and rationalism
Pierre Amputine writes that in the past, rituals “mobilized symbols to express the inexpressible.”. They were tools to help us grasp what had escaped us and confront what we could not control and needed protection.
Yet humanity is currently suffering the consequences of a “massive rejection of the inexpressible” that is the product of “capitalist rational materialism.” Cut off from the invisible and immaterial, we are in a state of eco-anxiety and ill-prepared to navigate a threatening future.
The conditions are right to generate new knowledge, beliefs and stories that can move us towards “unprecedented solutions”, but for these to take root, a certain ritual is needed “that intertwines the energies, beliefs, hopes, knowledge and know-how of all people”.
Activist
Jay Jordan writes about the fight to protect the rural town of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in western France from airport development. In the 1970s, farmers there refused to sell their land to the state, but planners pressed ahead. By 2008, some of the land and buildings were vacant. A small group of activists settled there, Defense Zone (ZAD) was born.
Whenever the ZAD community was threatened with expulsion, tens of thousands of supporters showed up to blockade the site: in February 2016, 60,000 people partied on a section of highway where bulldozers were scheduled to start digging. “These actions functioned like rituals or spells, raising the collective energy and focusing it on the clear intention of thwarting the expulsion.”
The government eventually gave in, but out of spite, sent in police, helicopters and tanks to destroy the ZAD. Abandoning the facility and accepting the government’s conditions created rifts and conflict among activists.
A year later, in 2019, Jordan and three others began “using the power of ritual as a tool for community ‘care.'” The group used giant puppets, song, and fire to act out the defeat of riot police and the healing of the community’s heart. The rituals “gave the community strength and common intent, anchoring it by contributing to the development of a shared narrative and imagination.”
Artistic Principles
In the 1990s, queer communities harnessed the power of ritual through “artivism,” a new form of protest that emerged in response to the AIDS epidemic and accompanying waves of homophobia that limited traditional political activism. Antoine Pickels explores the tactics of this “symbolic and ritualized” activist performance art and asks what new strategies it can inspire.
For maximum effect, Artivism combined performance art, advertising language and visual media, drawing on pop art and camp aesthetics. It was partly subversive, “playing with provocation and scandal”, and necessarily theatrical. Participants often preferred to conceal their identities, due to the risk of social censure, and because they were few in number, “we had to make ourselves visible through symbolism, through imagery”.
Performances included “die-ins” (lying on the floor and pretending to be dead) and “kiss-ins” (kissing people on the mouth in public to remind audiences that the virus is not transmitted through saliva). The performances “played endlessly on the theme of death,” but acted more like a spell to ward off death than an act of mourning. For some, these acts functioned as “liberation,” while others “spoke to the truth and to the truth of death.” Still aliveThey took the drug when they were near death, and some survivors say it helped them fight the disease better or live with it in a less competitive manner.
In recent years, “driven by other urgencies,” artivism has become widespread. From the clown armies marching against globalization to the “Standing Man” protests against state and police violence in Istanbul, the performative aspect gives their actions strength.
Reconnecting the ritual
Virginie Fizane argues that we should use ritual to restore our lost connection with nature. A former professor and bookseller, she now grows medicinal plants in Anderlecht, Belgium, and uses them to make teas, “returning to the ancestral practices of women who were considered witches.” Her farming method combines biointensive agriculture and permaculture, following the rhythms of the seasons and the cycles of the earth, and respecting the environment.
By working outdoors in harmony with the natural world, she has found improvements in her physical and mental wellbeing, and since 2020 she has been running ritual celebrations called “Sorceress Cycles” to help people trapped in the “rhythm of modern life” reconnect with themselves and with nature.
“Our increasingly materialistic society lacks the rituals and ceremonies that exist in many religions,” she writes. But at a time when patriarchy and capitalism are dividing society and wreaking havoc on the planet, these rites and rituals have the power to “create a sense of trust and stability between ourselves and others.” This reconnection is essential: “Our health and the health of the planet depend on it.”
Collaborative Publishing CAIRN International Edition. Reviewed by Cadenza Academic Translations
