I read Engine Summer by John Crowley. It is one of those books that revels in the pleasure of stories and storytelling, which presents as its thesis the idea that storytelling is the most human thing. It is, in a sense, a post-apocalyptic novel. Future humans living in a society that we might think of as utopian call the humans of the past, the humans with access to technology only slightly more advanced than what we are used to, ‘angels’. Cinderblocks are ‘angelstone’. Stainless steel is ‘angel silver’. The protagonist encounters the history of these angels, always, in the form of stories told by his peers and elders – he is a participant in an oral tradition, and he does not know how to read.
Within the framework of the book the angels – which we would think mundane – are allowed a heroic beauty because they are gone. They can be elaborated upon – their relics are left, but not them, and this makes them fertile ground for imagination and ritual.
Various communities in the book build themselves around angel lore and angel-made things. They structure their lives around rituals, which are themselves built in this fertile gap in knowledge that the passing of the angels has facilitated. As I was reading this, I thought of the Greeks, passing down oral stories about their ancestors and gods, building statues in honor of beings that were no longer there, anointing and clothing them in reverence. A ‘hero’ is not someone who has done something particularly moral – he is someone who invites storytelling and songs, he is someone who is encoded not in flesh, but in words and rituals performed long after he is dead. There is an insubstantial quality to him, he becomes a marked negative space – although he existed at some point, he is no longer present to assert himself, and any number of stories can be told about him. He can be appropriated by different communities for different purposes. A hero, an angel, a dark fertile space which stimulates the imagination and fosters connectivity between people who take pleasure in an imagined shared past.
I think now about the uneasy fact that everyone around me today is clamoring for some kind of ritual. In academic contexts, people gleefully tell me that they are ‘obsessed with rituals’, that ‘everything can be ritual’. I have friends who are adult converts to certain religions not because of faith, but because they enjoy the liturgy, the long traditions of ritual passed down for hundreds of years. I see a frantic, surface level interest in new age spirituality, in hermeticism, in mystery cult. I think what this really is is a desire for that dark space in which invention proliferates; I don’t think there can be any ritual in a space where everything is known, where positives outweigh negatives.
Especially now, when positivity proliferates, people crave ritual because it opens a space between knowledge and ignorance: here is a story which is told, and which grows, and which is performed in the lacunae of history. It is the invocation of something greater which is not physically present, a performance which demands immanence. Ritual is necessarily paired with myth, which is local truth, marked by a certain alchemy of the past and the present. Once upon a time, things were like this. Because they were like that, we now do things like this. Much of that world has disappeared, and here are the relics that remain, potent objects which imply so much more, which are still in use at the center of our community as objects of ritual.
Contrast this with a historical notion of the past, which attempts a ceaseless unveiling, and which cordons off relics as artifacts. Whereas relics are typically central to performance, and invite an integration of the performer with the traditions they imply, artifacts are objects to be viewed, not handled (except by specialists): their presentation places a threshold between the past and the present. The mystery of the past morphs: suddenly, it is not something to be inhabited and elaborated upon, but instead a great gulf.
In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe, there is a character who creates his persona, depending on how you read him, either by claiming he is an anthropologist or claiming he is a descendent of his planet’s indigenous people (claimed by many people in the book to be extinct). Through one lens, he gains character as someone who chases a (potentially) vanished people; through another, he is a representative of these people, enacting their traditions and quirks. Because this is a Gene Wolfe novel, the situation is, of course, more complex than this, but I am interested in this duality between researcher and inheritor, in the fact that the researcher tries to recover something missing while the inheritor simply slips into that negative space. Which is more satisfying? The fanatical desire for ritual at any cost which seems to characterize the contemporary world seems to point to the latter.
Ritual is pleasurable. It contextualizes and connects. But I am troubled by the fact that so many seem to want to manufacture it, or embrace it in the first place that it appears without examining what it may be connecting them to, without being critical of the contexts they’re entering. Submitting to the mystery means submitting to a way of being. Every ritual has rules, and every inherited history demands some way of acting. I’m not saying that freedom must be everyone’s priority, but I do think that by enshrining ‘ritual’ as an isolated, desirable thing, its contemporary adherents lose the point that ritual is necessarily connective and richly symbolic. It can’t be experienced in a vacuum. More people might ask themselves if they’re submitting to something unworthy of them just because it has a ritual component.
And more than this, I ask myself: do people really want ritual, or do they want that structured negative space where myth proliferates, a socially upheld space for narrative-based, non-rational thinking? People trade their agency for the opportunity to access this space, especially when it is communal. Yet the aforementioned character in Fifth Head, by associating himself with a mysterious group that may or may not exist, avoids the trade-off I’ve outlined above – he is able to create himself, and manufacture meaning in his life, without compromising his agency. He is, at least in some sense, a cheat and a grifter – but he is, at the very least, making his own choices.
This is half a joke and half serious, but there is, perhaps, a third way to relate to history, beyond the researcher and the descendent/cultist. This is the trickster, the liar, the personal mythologizer who draws from history’s dark spots with a sense of play and irreverence. I am not saying that we should all be lying about our pasts, but I am saying that the search for ritual at all costs is, perhaps, only fear based, that the past as history is ultimately unsatisfying, and that there are other paths open to us that might allow us to engage with the continuum of human existence.