The power of ritual

I was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic home, but after spending my teenage years with question after question bubbling up inside me, I left Catholicism, never to return.  In my twenties I tried more than once to find a faith community that seemed right -- that made sense of the universe for me -- attending first a Quaker meeting, then a Unitarian church, and finally a Methodist church, and each time I ended up faced with the same questions I'd had, questions that no one seemed to be able to answer.

The prime question was "How do you know all this is true?"  

In other realms, that one was usually easier to answer.  Science, of course, is cut-and-dried; factual truth in science is measurable, quantifiable, observable.  But even with situations that aren't exactly rational, there's usually a way to approach the question.  How do I know that my family and friends love me?  Because they demonstrate it in a tangible way, every day.

But the claims of religion seemed to me to be outside even that, and I never was able to get answers that satisfied.  Most of the responses I did get boiled down to "I've had a personal experience of God" or "the existence of God gives meaning to my day-to-day experience," neither of which was particularly convincing for me.  I have never had anything like a transcendent spiritual experience of an omnipresent deity.  And something imbuing meaning into your life doesn't make it true.  I'd read plenty of meaningful fiction, after all.  And as far as my wanting it to be true, if there was one thing I'd learned by that point, it was that the universe is under no compulsion to behave in a way that makes me comfortable.

So ultimately, I left religion behind entirely.  I have no quarrels with anyone who has found a spiritual home that works for them, as long as they're not forcing it on anyone else; in fact, I've sometimes envied people who can find reason to believe, wholeheartedly, in a greater power.  I just never seemed to be able to manage it myself.

That's not to say I'm unhappy as an atheist.  Perhaps I can't access the reassurance and comfort that someone has who is deeply religious, but there are a lot of the petty rules and pointless, often harmful, restrictions that I wish I'd abandoned many years earlier.  (The chief of which is my years of shame over my bisexuality.  The damage done to the queer community by the largely religiously-motivated bigotry of our society is staggering and heartbreaking -- and given who just got elected to run the United States, it's far from over.)

But there's something about being part of a religion that I do miss, and it isn't only the sense of community.  You can find community in a book group or weekly sewing night or runners' club, after all.  What I find I miss most, strangely enough, is the ritual.

There's something compelling about the ritual of religion.  The Roman Catholicism of my youth is one of the most thoroughly ritualistic religions I know of; the idea is that any believer should be able to walk into any Catholic church in the world on Sunday morning and know what to do and what to say.  (Giving rise to the old joke, "How do you recognize a Catholic Star Wars fan?"  "If you say to them, 'May the Force be with you,' they respond, 'And also with you.'")  The vestments of the priests, the statuary and stained glass windows, the incense and candles and hymns and organ music -- it all comes together into something that, to the believer, is balm to the soul, leaving them connected to other believers around the world and back, literally millennia, in time.

Window in the Church of St. Oswald, Durham, England  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tom Parnell, Church of St Oswald - stained glass window, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason this comes up is twofold.  First, we're approaching the Christmas season, and I always associate this time of year with rituals that, for the most part, I no longer participate in -- Advent, Christmas music, decorating trees, Midnight Mass.  The result is that for me, the holiday season is largely a time of wistful sadness.  I look on all this as a very mixed bag, of course; it's hard to imagine my having a sufficient change of heart to stay up until the wee hours on Christmas Eve so I can get in my car and go take in a church service.

But seeing others participate in these things makes me realize what I've lost -- or, more accurately, what I've voluntarily given up.  And I can't help but feel some sense of grief about that.

The other reason is more upbeat -- a paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about an archaeological site deep in a cave in Israel that shows signs of having been used for the purposes of rituals...

... thirty-five thousand years ago.

The cave was occupied before that; the upper levels has evidence of inhabitants fifty thousand years ago, including a partial skull that shows evidence of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.  But there are deeper parts of the cave, places of perpetual darkness, where nevertheless people congregated.  There's art on the walls, and evidence of the soot from torch fires.

The authors write:

Identifying communal rituals in the Paleolithic is of scientific importance, as it reflects the expression of collective identity and the maintenance of group cohesion.  This study provides evidence indicating the practice of deep cave collective rituals in the Levant during the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) period.  It is demonstrated that these gatherings occurred within a distinct ritual compound and were centered around an engraved object in the deepest part of Manot Cave, a pivotal EUP site in southwest Asia.  The ritual compound, segregated from the living areas, encompasses a large gallery partitioned by a cluster of remarkable speleothems [water-deposited minerals].  Within this gallery, an engraved boulder stands out, displaying geometric signs suggesting a unique representation of a tortoise.  Isotopic analysis of calcite crusts on the boulder’s grooves revealed alignment with values found in speleothems from the cave dated to ~37 to 35 ka BP.  Additionally, meticulous shape analysis of the grooves’ cross-section and the discernible presence of microlinear scratches on the grooves’ walls confirmed their anthropogenic origin.  Examination of stalagmite laminae (36 ka BP) near the engraved boulder revealed a significant presence of wood ash particles within.  This finding provides evidence for using fire to illuminate the dark, deep part of the cave during rituals.  Acoustic tests conducted in various cave areas indicate that the ritual compound was well suited for communal gatherings, facilitating conversations, speeches, and hearing.  Our results underscore the critical role of collective practices centered around a symbolic object in fostering a functional social network within the regional EUP communities.

I find this absolutely fascinating.  The drive to create and participate in rituals is deep-seated, powerful, and has a very long history.  Its role in cultural cohesion is obvious.  Of course, the same force generates negative consequences; the us-versus-them attitudes that have driven the lion's share of the world's conflicts, both on the small scale and the global.  Rituals bind communities together, but also identify outsiders and keep them excluded.  (And the rituals often were guarded fiercely down to the level of minute details.  Consider that people were burned at the stake in England for such transgressions as translating the Bible into English.)

So it's complex.  But so is everything.  My yearning for participation in rituals celebrating a belief system I no longer belong to is, honestly, self-contradictory.  But all I can say is that we've been creatures of ceremony for over thirty thousand years, so I shouldn't expect myself to be exempt, somehow.

As Walt Whitman put it, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself.  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

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Summoning up nothing

Some years ago, as part of the research I did while writing my novel Sephirot, I purchased a copy of Richard Cavendish's book The Black Arts.  It's a comprehensive look at the darker side of human beliefs, quite exhaustive and well-written (it's unclear how much of it Cavendish actually believes is true; he's pretty good at keeping his own opinions of out it).  I was mostly interested in the section on the "Tree of Life" from the Kabbalah -- the Sephirot of the novel's title -- but as is typical for me, I got sidetracked and ended up reading the entire thing.

There's a whole part of the book devoted to magical rituals, summoning up evil spirits and whatnot, and what struck me all the way through was the counterpoint between (1) how deadly seriously the practitioners take it, and (2) how fundamentally silly it all is.  Here's one passage with a spell for conjuring up a demon, taken from the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon), a seventeenth-century sorcerers' grimoire much used by the infamous Aleister Crowley:

I conjure thee, O Spirit N., strengthened by the power of Almighty God, and I command thee by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes, and the most powerful Princes Genio and Liachide, Ministers of the Seat of Tartarus and Chief Princes of the Throne of Apologia in the ninth region.

Which is pretty fucking impressive-sounding if you can get it out without laughing.  This would be the difficulty I'd face if I was a sorcerer, which is undoubtedly why even after typing all this out, no evil spirit appeared.  I guess snickering while you're typing magic words is kind of off-putting to the Infernal Host.

Anyhow, if you chant all that and nothing happens -- which, let's face it, is the likeliest outcome -- the book then takes you through an escalating series of spells, gradually ramping up in the intensity of threats for what will happen to the demon if it doesn't obey you.  Ultimately there's this one, which is pretty dire:

O spirit N., who art wicked and disobedient, because thou hast not obeyed my commands and the glorious and incomprehensible names of the true God, the Creator of all things, now by the irresistible power of these Names I curse thee into the depths of the Bottomless Pit, there to remain in unquenchable fire and brimstone until the Day of Wrath unless thou shalt forthwith appear in this triangle before this circle to do my will.  Come quickly and in peace by the Names Adonai, Zebaoth, Adonai, Amioram.  Come, come, Adonai King of Kings commands thee.

Which, apparently, is the black magic equivalent of your dad saying "Don't make me ask you again!"  The whole thing is even more effective, the book says, if the magician chants all this while masturbating, so that when he has an orgasm "the full force of his magical power gushes forth."

Kind of makes you wonder how teenage boys don't summon demons several times a day.

Crowley absolutely loved this kind of rigamarole, especially because it involved sex, which appears to have been his entire raison d'être.  The book tells us that he "used this ritual in 1911 to summon a spirit called Abuldiz, but the results were not very satisfactory."

Which is unsurprising.  This, in fact, has always been what is the most baffling thing to me about magical thinking; that it simply doesn't work, and yet this seems to have little effect on its adherents.  For a time during my late teens I got seriously into divination.  Tarot cards, numerology, astrology, the works.  (I hasten to state that I never tried to conjure a demon.  Even at my most credulous, that stuff exceeded my Goofiness Tolerance Quotient.)  After an embarrassed and embarrassing period when, deep down, I knew it was all nonsense but wanted desperately for it to be true because it was so cool, I gave it all up as a bad job, decided rationality was the way to go, and pretty much never looked back.  (I do still own several Tarot card decks, however, which I can appreciate both from the fact that they're beautiful and from a touch of shame-faced nostalgia.)

But it's astonishing how few people go this direction.  The combination of confirmation bias (accepting slim evidence because it supports what we already believed) and dart-thrower's bias (noticing or giving more weight to hits than misses) is a mighty powerful force in the human psyche.  Add to that the fact that for certain miserable members of humanity, hoodwinking the gullible into belief is big business, and it's sad, though no real wonder, that when I type "astro-" into a Google search, "astrology" comes up before "astronomy."

Anyhow, those are my thoughts for a Monday morning, spurred by my looking for another book and happening to notice the Cavendish book still on my bookshelf.  It resides with various other books on ghosts, vampires, UFOs, cryptids, werewolves, and the like, and several with titles like Twenty Terrifying Unsolved Mysteries.  It's still entertaining to read that stuff even if I don't believe any of it.

On the other hand, if I get visited tonight by Abuldiz or whoever-the-fuck, I guess it'll serve me right.

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Faith of our fathers

One of the things we noticed on our tour of southern Europe -- not that it was any kind of surprise -- was the omnipresence of churches.

They often are built on hills, and overlook the landscape; many are beautiful, and a few -- like the Duomo in Florence -- are architectural wonders.

It's an interesting experience for a non-religious person like myself to walk into some of these buildings.  One of the first places we visited was the fifteenth-century Basilica de Santa Maria degli Angeli et dei Martiri in Rome, which is unprepossessing from the outside, but the inside is nothing short of stunning.

The churches of Europe are renowned for housing works of art, and one in the Basilica that struck me as beautiful (if somber) is The Head of St. John the Baptist by the modern Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj:

On the façade of the same church was another haunting sculpture:

This sort of painstaking artistry was evident in churches wherever we went.  There was the Church of St. Spiridion on the isle of Corfu:

And the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence:

But nowhere blew me away quite as much as the Church of La Sagrada Familia (the Holy Family) in Barcelona.  It was begun in 1882 by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who is a fine example illustrating the quote from Aristotle, "There never was a genius without a tincture of madness."  Gaudí knew it was such an extravagant plan that he'd never live to see it completed; in fact, it's still under construction today, and the locals call it "The church that will never be finished."  Like many of Gaudí's creations, from a distance the exterior looks like something out of Dr. Seuss:

Only when you get closer to you begin to see the intricate details of the sculptures in every recess:

All of this is suitably amazing... but then you step inside, and it takes your breath away.

Gaudí was a master of using light as part of his vision for the place, and the stained glass of La Sagrada Familia is the most beautiful I've ever seen.

According to the guide, Gaudí was intent not only on creating a monument to his religion, but creating a place that celebrated the natural world -- somewhere that all people, of every religion (or no religion at all) could wonder at and be uplifted by.

But still, I couldn't help remembering that places like this are built because of beliefs I don't share any longer.  In a very real way, I feel like an outsider when I enter these sacred spaces.  When I was a kid, growing up in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, every Sunday we sang the hymn "Faith of Our Fathers:"

Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword,
O how our hearts beat high with joy, whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, living still, we will be true to thee till death.

As a child I sang those words with tremendous gusto, but it didn't really work out that way, did it?  I left the church at age 21 and after a period of searching, I kind of gave it all up and for the most part, never looked back.

But there's a part of me that still resonates to the desire embodied in places like La Sagrada Familia.  I don't think I'll ever go back to the beliefs I tried like mad to hold onto in my youth, but there's a mystery and grandeur in these buildings that plucks my heart like a guitar string.  It goes beyond just desiring the sense of community you find in a church; there's a part of me, perhaps, that craves ritual as a sign of belonging, that needs beautiful symbols to help explain this strange and often chaotic universe.

There's no doubt that religion has much to answer for.  Not just big ticket items like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Islamic jihadist movement(s), but suppression of dissent, institutionalized bigotry, misogyny, cruelty, homophobia, abuse of power, and simple self-righteousness.

But religion has also been the impetus for the creation of great beauty.  It's doubtful Gaudí would have envisioned a masterwork like La Sagrada Familia had he not been religious, and the same can be said of works like Michelangelo's Pietà and Bach's Mass in B Minor, to name only two of hundreds.  It's obvious I'm of divided mind on this topic, and it's beyond me to figure out how to square that circle and resolve the seeming paradox.  I rejected religion's fundamental claims forty years ago, yet its draw for me has never really gone away.

A long-ago friend once said about me that I was a failed mystic -- if I'd had the balls, I'd have been a monk.  The comment stuck with me all these years because it hits so close to the mark.  To paraphrase the poster on Fox Mulder's wall, I Wish I Could Believe.

But until that unlikely event occurs, I can still appreciate the profundity and depth of what the religious impulse has created.  And nowhere has that been realized more beautifully than in Gaudí's Church That Will Never Be Finished, in the city of Barcelona.

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I feel pretty

The drive to adorn our bodies is pretty close to universal.

Clothing, for example, serves the triple purpose of protecting our skin, keeping us warm, and making us look good.  Well, some of us.  I'll admit up front that I have a fashion sense that, if you were to rank it on a scale of one to ten, would have to be expressed in imaginary numbers.  But for a lot of people, clothing choice is a means of self-expression, a confident assertion that they care to look their best.  

Then there are tattoos, about which I've written here before because I'm a serious fan (if you want to see photos of my ink, take a look at the link).  Tattooing goes back a long way -- Ötzi the "Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body discovered preserved in glacial ice in the Alps, had no fewer than 61 tattoos.  No one knows what Ötzi's ink signifies; my guess is that just like today, the meanings of tattoos back then were probably specific to the culture, perhaps even to the individual.  

Then there's jewelry.  We know from archaeological research that jewelry fashioned from gems and precious metals also has a long history; a 24-karat gold pendant found in Bulgaria is thought to have been made in around 4,300 B.C.E., which means that our distant ancestors used metal casting for more than just weapon-making.  So between decorative clothing, tattoos, and jewelry, we've been spending inordinate amounts of time and effort (and pain, in the case of tattooing, piercing, and scarification) altering our appearances.  

Why?  No way to be sure, but my guess is that there are a variety of reasons.  Enhancing sexual attractiveness certainly played, and plays, a role.  Some adornments were clearly signs of rank, power, or social role.  Others were personal means of self-expression.  Evolutionists talk about "highly conserved features" -- adaptations that are between common and universal within a species or a clade -- and the usual explanation is that anything that is so persistent must be highly selected, and therefore important for survival and reproduction.  It's thin ice to throw learned behaviors in this same category, but I think the same argument at least has some applicability here; given that adornment is common to just about all human groups studied, the likelihood is that it serves a pretty important purpose.  What's undeniable is that we spend a lot of time and resources on it that could be used for more directly beneficial activities.

What's most interesting is that we're the only species we know of that does this.  There are a few weak instances of this sort of behavior -- for example, the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea, in which the males collect brightly-colored objects like flower petals, shells, and bits of glass or stone to create a little garden to attract mates.  But we seem to be the only animals that regularly adorn their own bodies.

How far back does this impulse go?  We got at least a tentative answer to this in a paper this week in Science Advances, which was about an archaeological discovery in Morocco of shell beads that were used for jewelry...

... 150,000 years ago.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," said study co-author Steven Kuhn, of the University of Arizona.  "They’re the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait.  They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

A sampling of the Stone Age shell beads found in Morocco

Like with Ötzi's tattoos, we don't know what exactly the beads were intending to communicate.  Consider how culture-dependent those sorts of signals are; imagine, for example, taking someone from three thousand years ago, and trying to explain what the subtle and often complex significance of appearances and behaviors that we here in the present understand immediately.  "You think about how society works – somebody’s tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, ‘What’s your problem?'" Kuhn said.  "But if you see they’re wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it’s a police officer pulling you over."

Unfortunately, there's probably no way to know whether the shell beads were used purely for personal adornment, or if they had another religious or cultural significance.  "It’s one thing to know that people were capable of making them," Kuhn said, "but then the question becomes, 'OK, what stimulated them to do it?'...  We don’t know what they meant, but they’re clearly symbolic objects that were deployed in a way that other people could see them."

So think about that next time you put on a necklace or bracelet or earrings.  You are participating in a tradition that goes back at least 150,000 years.  Maybe our jewelry-making ability has improved beyond shell beads with a hole drilled through, but the impulse remains the same -- whatever its origins.

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Tunnel vision

Last week, Switzerland opened the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which at 57 kilometers is the longest underground traffic tunnel in the world.  The entire project took twelve years to complete, and cost over $12 billion.

All of which is cool enough, but things got even more interesting at the inauguration ceremony last week.  Because the powers-that-be saw fit to open the tunnel with a performance that can only be described as "really fucking weird."  It started with bunches of people in hard hats and orange jumpsuits doing a slow march into the tunnel, followed by their doing some kind of strange interpretive dance involving headbanging.  Then came a whole bunch of people wearing tiny tight garments that left you in no doubt about the size and shape of their naughty bits.  The almost-naked people proceeded to have what appeared to be a cross between a square dance and an aikido tournament, all while being watched over by an image of a very old lady with a creepy, knowing smile.

After this came some white Dementors flying around.  Then the almost-naked people came back, covered in gauzy veils, wearing expressions of extreme angst.  This was followed by about a dozen people flailing about wearing wigs and swinging around yards of swoopy material.  In the midst of which was a guy dressed up like a goat.  Some of these people were wearing suits with long colorful dreadlocks, sort of like Cousin Itt gone punk.

The whole thing culminated with the appearance of a huge-headed baby with wings.

I would strongly recommend watching the entire thing.  (Here are links to part I and part II.)  The whole time I watched it, I was thinking, "Who planned all of this, and what mind-altering chemicals had they just ingested?  And can I have some?"  I'm sure all of it was supposed to have deep significance and relevance to Swiss history and culture, but mostly what it did for me was cause me to say "What the fuck?" about 47 times.

But people do trippy things all the time, so my purpose here is not simply to report about a performance that looks like what J. K. Rowling would come up with if you gave her acid and then told her to write a script for a sequel to Zardoz.  The reason this comes up on Skeptophilia is the reaction of people who saw the ceremony.

Because large numbers of folks are completely freaking out over this.  Here is a variety of responses, gleaned from people who commented on the video and/or blogged about it:

• This is a satanic ritual.  These people have invoked the power of Satan.  That tunnel has been consecrated as a portal to hell.  I wish anyone who goes in there luck.
• A New World Order ceremony, complete with the all-seeing eye.  The real rulers of the world are coming out of the shadows.  We are near the end of them hidding [sic] -- prepare yourselves.
• They have called on Lucifer, they shouldn't be surprised when he shows up.
• Better pick which side you are on!  Jesus Christ's or Satan's...  Because at this rate, you DON'T have TIME to ride the fence.  They are flat out laying their evil ways and plans right to YOU, no longer are they in hiding.  Which side will you choose?  I pray you choose the Lord! Eternity is too long to be wrong. 
• FOR UNGODLY PEOPLE, THE WEIRDER THE BETTER!!!  THIS IS JUST A SMALL EXAMPLE OF DISGUSTING REPROBATE MINDS AT WORK!!!  I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL JESUS RETURNS AND DESTROYS THE FOUL WICKED!!!!
• sick and sad. they have there hands in everything.  FEMA train here it comes, even in switzerland.  stay tune bc they have big plans for this new rail train tunnel.
• FINALLY Illuminati ControllS [sic] Humans By RFID and Humanoid Robots In 2017 
• And so many buy all the paranormal bogus leaks from CERN.  Think.  Same country same leaders.
• THIS IS NOT ART.... THIS IS SATANIC OPENING CEREMONY/RITUAL RIGHT ON YOUR FACE!  you will see more and more of this until the world is used to the worshipping [sic] of Baphomet through entertainment.  You will fall in love with these dark presentations. AND you will embrace SATAN, the prince of this world!  YOU BETTER REPENT of you sins and seek the face of GOD!

So.  Okay.  Will all of you people just calm down for a moment?

The ceremony was bizarre, I'll grant you that, but I would strongly suspect that if Satan exists it takes more than bare-chested guys in tightie-whities jumping around on a train platform to summon him up.  What this looks like to me is an off-kilter experiment in modern dance, not an appeal to Lucifer.

A few other points:

• If this is a ritual of the Illuminati, the Illuminati need to lay off the controlled substances.
• If you "can't wait" for Jesus to return and butcher all of the nonbelievers, I think it's your morals that need some examination, not mine.
• FEMA is an agency in the United States.  Therefore there will not be any FEMA trains in Switzerland.
• CERN is a scientific research laboratory, and has nothing to do with mutant winged babies and guys in goat suits.
• The expression is "right in your face," not "right on your face."  If someone had a satanic ritual right on your face, it would be a far more serious matter.

Anyhow, that's our visit to the wacko fringe for the day.  If you're in Switzerland, make a point of taking a train through the new tunnel.  It'll significantly cut your travel time, and you'll have a nice tour of the nine circles of hell.  Such a deal.