Meaningful ink

It's a little odd that someone as center-of-attention-phobic as I am has chosen something that is bound to garner close looks.  I'm referring to my tattoos, which are obvious and colorful -- and include a full sleeve, so they're a little hard to hide.

Virtually everyone who comments on them, however, is complimentary.  With good reason; my artist, James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos in Ithaca, New York, is -- in a word -- brilliant, and realized my vision of what I wanted just about perfectly.

 

Just after it was finished

Not everyone's a fan, of course.  I was given the stink-eye by a sour-faced old lady in a local hardware store a while back, who informed me that having tattoos meant I was going to hell.

My response was, "Lady, that ship sailed years ago."

But if I do end up in hell because of my ink, I'll have a lot of company.  Not only is tattooing pretty common these days -- since I got my first one, about twenty years ago, it's gone from being an infrequent sight to just about everywhere -- humans have been decorating their bodies for a long time.  Ötzi "the Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body found frozen in glacial ice on the Austrian-Italian border, had 61 tattoos, mostly on his legs, arms, and back.  (Their significance is unknown.)  In historical times, tattooing has been observed in many cultures -- it was widespread in North and South American Indigenous people and throughout east Asia and Polynesia, which is probably how the tradition jumped to Europe in the eighteenth century (and explains its associations with sailors).

The role of self-expression in tattoos varies greatly from person to person.  Ask a dozen people why they chose to get inked and you'll get a dozen wildly different answers.  For me, it's in honor of my family and ethnic roots; the Celtic snake is for my wildlife-loving, half-Scottish father, the vines for my gardener mother.  But the reasons for getting tattooed are as varied as the designs are.

The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery that was described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of a twelve-hundred-year-old mummified body from the pre-Columbian Peruvian Chancay Culture, which showed some of the most intricate ancient tattoo patterns ever seen.  Virtually every square inch of the person's skin was covered with a fine latticework of black geometric designs -- the similarity was immediately noticed to the adornments on clay figurines from the same time and place.

This becomes even more amazing when you realize that the person was tattooed using the "stick-and-poke" method, which involved being jabbed over and over with implements like wooden needles, slivers of flint or obsidian, or sharpened bird bones.  This sounds a hell of a lot more painful than what I underwent, which was bad enough.

But it was still worth it. After I stopped screaming.

In any case, I find it fascinating how old the drive to adorn our bodies is, and also that the chosen designs had (and have) such depth of meaning that people were willing to wear them permanently.  For myself, I've never regretted them for a moment; I'm proud of my ink, whatever the sour-faced little old ladies of the world might think of it.  And knowing that what I have is part of a tradition that goes back thousands of years gives me a connection to the rituals and culture of the past.

And for me, that's something to cherish.  Even if I do end up in hell because of it.

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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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Woolly dogs

When I lived in Olympia, Washington, I knew a woman who was a professional spinner and weaver.  She made beautiful wearable items as well as decorative wall hangings, throw rugs, and blankets.

What's unusual about her is that among the many kinds of fiber she used was dog hair.  She owned three enormous (and extremely friendly and exuberant) Great Pyrenees, a breed with huge quantities of silky white hair, and she'd periodically brush their coats, wash the fur that came out, and spin it into thread.  She showed me a knit hat she'd made entirely from dog fur -- it was softer than angora.

Turns out, that region of the world has a long history of doing this.  A paper last week in Science looked at a legend amongst the Coast Salish, especially the Sto:lo, Skokomish, and Snuneymuxw tribes, of "woolly dogs" whose soft fur was spun, dyed, and woven into ceremonial rugs and cloaks that were a symbol of authority.  (My weaver friend in Washington didn't belong to this tradition -- she was from Luton, England -- although she may have gotten inspiration for it from Indigenous sources.  Or, maybe, she just owned three gigantic hairy dogs and came up with a way to use the copious fur they produced.  I'm not sure.)

In any case, the people of European descent who settled in the Northwest thought this was just a legend -- that any dogs belonging to the Coast Salish were very recent imports, possibly the descendants of dogs brought in by whalers and explorers from Japan or Russia.  In any case, the woolly dogs of the Salish had completely vanished by 1900, so it seemed like there was no way to be sure.  But there was one hard piece of evidence to study -- the pelt of a dog named Mutton who had been acquired as a puppy by an ethnographer in 1859.

Artist's rendition of what Mutton looked like [Image courtesy of Science and artist Karen Carr]

DNA analysis of Mutton's pelt showed something fascinating -- he wasn't closely related to Japanese breeds like the Akita or Shiba Inu, nor to northern European breeds like the Spitz and Samoyed.  Mutton's DNA showed his lineage had diverged from all other known dog breeds at least four thousand years ago, so very likely he and the others of his breed had been brought over from Siberia by the ancestors of the Coast Salish many millennia ago.

"It’s nice to hear Western science say this is how long you’ve had a relationship with woolly dogs," said study co-author Michael Pavel, a knowledge keeper of the Skokomish Nation.  "Often we are the subjects of research, but in this case, we were able to weave our considerable knowledge together with a Western scientific perspective."

Which is a polite way of saying, "we freakin' told you so."  Non-Indigenous American and European anthropologists have a long and sorry history of paying little attention to the cultural memories of Indigenous people, of dismissing their oral history as little more than a curiosity.  Time after time there's been vindication of the accuracy of these histories -- a recent example we looked at here at Skeptophilia is the tale, also from coastal tribes of the Northwest, that there'd been a monstrous earthquake and tsunami one midwinter night around three hundred years ago, which turned out to be right on the money.

Maybe the anthropologists are finally starting to take the traditions of Indigenous people more seriously.  One can only hope.

The ultimate story, though, is a sad one.  Christian missionaries in the Western Hemisphere generally did their damndest to eradicate any traces of Native beliefs and practices, especially ones that were involved in prestige and authority.  In the Northwest, that included forbidding the keeping of woolly dogs and the weaving of their fur into ceremonial garments.  Ultimately, the entire breed went extinct, and other than some woven pieces that have survived, knowledge of the practice itself died as well other than a cultural memory that it had once been done.

The men and women who contributed to the article in Science, though, by and large put a happier spin on it.  "All we knew was that the dogs were all gone, and [we had] just that -- stories," said Sto:lo Grand Chief Steven Point.  "Nobody knew what happened.  The woolly dog became a casualty of colonialism.  But the woolly dog is part of who we are, and it feels like a link to our past is being filled in.  It’s a good news story."

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Drinking scepters

I mean no disrespect to archaeologists, but there's a fundamental difficulty with trying to understand a vanished culture when all you have is fragmentary remains; too often, there's just insufficient evidence to be certain if you're doing more than guessing.

This was one of the main points of the classic essay "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," by Horace Miner, which appeared in American Anthropologist in 1956.  Miner was riffing on the determination of anthropologists to analyze everything as if it were part of some kind of tribal religious artifact, so applied those same biases to things commonly found in American bathrooms -- mirrors, sinks, bottles of shampoo, combs and brushes, and so on.  The essay is hilarious but at the same time neatly poniards the tendency to interpret, and very likely misinterpret, the significance of objects left behind by cultures we know little about.

The topic comes up because of a paper out of Cambridge University that appeared in Antiquity last week.  It concerned a set of gold and silver tubes that had been dug up at the Maikop kurgan (grave mound), in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, way back in 1897.  The tubes were decorated with intricate carvings; several had ornaments shaped like bulls or oxen. 

Details of some of the Maikop tubes

The beauty of the decoration, and the fact that they were fashioned from precious metals, led to their being called "scepters."  This automatically conjured up images of use as symbols of authority by royalty, or instruments for invoking spirits (think "magic wands") by priests.  Some, more prosaically, thought they might form the struts supporting a canopy, once again for someone of high prestige.

Over a century later, the artifacts were re-examined, including a microscopic analysis of residue found inside the tubes.  This residue had a couple of odd components; grains of barley starch and cereal phytoliths (mineral crystals found inside plant seeds).  The interior of the end of the tube was shaped in such a way that it would have accommodated a conical piece of plant stem, particularly a piece of cut reed (Phragmites) that could have acted as a filter.  The conclusion?

The researchers believe that the "scepters" were actually straws for drinking beer.

Now, in favor of their use by (or in honor of) a prestigious person, there are admittedly the facts that (1) the straws were made of gold and silver, and (2) they ended up in the grave at Maikop.  The surmise is that they were probably made for, and used at, the funeral of the person buried in the kurgan, and the beer drinking wasn't just to get a buzz, but was part of the ritual.  But we're not talking insignificant amounts, here.  The authors write:

[A] single, early second-millennium BC burial in Tell Bagüz near Mari in eastern Syria, containing eight bronze tip-strainers, appears to support our hypothesis.  The set of eight drinking tubes in the Maikop tomb may therefore represent the feasting equipment for eight individuals, who could have sat to drink beer from the single, large jar found in the tomb.  The volume of this vessel (32 litres) suggests that each participant's share would be about four litres (or seven pints) per person.

Okay, I'm admittedly a lightweight -- two pints is my limit -- but seven?  Even considering that it's likely our modern brewing techniques result in a beer with higher alcohol content, that is a lot of beer to drink at one go.  I can see the funeral going as follows:

Priest:  Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to pay our respects to our departed brother... um... hang on.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  Okay, where was I?  Oh, yeah... our departed brother, who left this life only a day ago...

Participant 1:  Hold on a second.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  Thanks, do go on.

Priest:  ... only a day ago, and was sadly gathered unto the arms of...

Participant 2:  Sorry.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  All right, what were you saying?

Priest (annoyed):  Anyone else, before I go on?

*five more people run outside to take a piss*

Be that as it may, the current analysis is pretty interesting, and it sounds like their hypothesis is supported by some decent evidence, but I do still think you have to be cautious not to over-conclude.  Trying to piece together a culture based on (extremely) fragmentary evidence is a sketchy enterprise.  Once again, I'm not meaning to diss the archaeologists, here; they do fantastic, and fascinating, work, and it's better to at least have a guess about the purpose of an artifact than simply to shrug our shoulders.

But it always makes me think about what archaeologists five thousand years from now will make of the artifacts left behind by us.  Think about it; trying to infer modern culture from the cover of a barbecue grill, a car tire, a piece of a mug saying "I 💙Cancun," a bird feeder, and a flip-flop.  Considering how far off the mark you could go with those makes misinterpreting beer straws as royal scepters seem like kind of a near miss.

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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

Meaningful ink

It's a little odd that someone as center-of-attention-phobic as I am has chosen something that is bound to garner close looks.  I'm referring to my tattoos, which are obvious and colorful -- and include a full sleeve, so they're a little hard to hide.

Virtually everyone who comments on them, however, is complimentary.  With good reason; my artist, James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos in Ithaca, New York, is -- in a word -- brilliant, and realized my vision of what I wanted just about perfectly.  

Just after it was finished

Not everyone's a fan, of course.  I was given the stink-eye by a sour-faced old lady in a local hardware store a while back, who informed me that having tattoos meant I was going to hell.

My response was, "Lady, that ship sailed years ago."

But if I do end up in hell because of my ink, I'll have a lot of company.  Not only is tattooing pretty common these days -- since I got my first one, about twenty years ago, it's gone from being an infrequent sight to just about everywhere -- humans have been decorating their bodies for a long time.  Ötzi "the Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body found frozen in glacial ice on the Austrian-Italian border, had 61 tattoos, mostly on his legs, arms, and back.  (Their significance is unknown.)  In historical times, tattooing has been observed in many cultures -- it was widespread in North and South American Indigenous people and throughout east Asia and Polynesia, which is probably how the tradition jumped to Europe in the eighteenth century (and explains its associations with sailors).

The role of self-expression in tattoos varies greatly from person to person.  Ask a dozen people why they chose to get inked and you'll get a dozen wildly different answers.  For me, it's in honor of my family and ethnic roots; the Celtic snake is for my wildlife-loving, half-Scottish father, the vines for my gardener mother.  But the reasons for getting tattooed are as varied as the designs are.

The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery that was described this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science of the oldest-known tattoo tools, some sharpened turkey leg and wing bones found near Fernvale, Tennessee that predate Ötzi by over five hundred years.  The hollow pointed tips of the bone tools still contained residue of black and red pigments, and the microscopic wear on the tips and edges match that found on tattoo tools found at other sites around the world.

The ordeal of being jabbed over and over with a sharpened bird bone, though, sounds a lot more painful than what I underwent, which was bad enough.

But it was worth it.  After I stopped screaming.

In any case, I find it fascinating how old the drive to adorn our bodies is, and also that the designs had (and have) such depth of meaning that people were willing to wear them permanently.  For myself, I've never regretted them for a moment; I'm proud of my ink, whatever the sour-faced little old ladies of the world might think of it.  And knowing that what I have is part of a tradition that goes back at least six thousand years gives me a connection to the rituals and culture of the past.

And for me, that's something to cherish.  Even if I do end up in hell because of it.

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Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

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

The power of ritual

I was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic home, but after spending my teenage years feeling 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 question was usually easy to answer.  Science, of course, was 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 of that, and I never was able to get answers that satisfied.  Most of them 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.)

But there's something about being part of a religion that I do miss, and it isn't just 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]

What got me thinking about this topic was a fascinating look in Science News at the effect that COVID-19 has had on rituals, and how that's affected individuals and society as a whole.  Not just religious rituals, of course; the pandemic has also put the kibosh on rituals like graduations, baby showers, weddings, funerals, secular holiday celebrations, sporting events, even personal ones like birthday parties and anniversaries.  All this has left a lot of us feeling unmoored.  What's taken their place -- Skyping, virtual get-togethers, Zoom meetings -- hasn't proven to be a replacement emotionally, even for non-religious people like myself.

Why humans are so attracted to rituals is an interesting question in and of itself, and one which the article looks at in some depth.  What interests me is not the obvious answer -- creating an in-group, a way to recognize our tribe.  There's a lot more to it than that.  It seems like humans are so wired into ritualistic behavior that it doesn't even matter what the context is.  One experiment the article cites took volunteers and separated them into two groups.  Each group was given a list of one-syllable words to read.  Members of the first group took turns, each participant reading aloud one column of words, then another participant moving on to the next, and so on.  The second group, though, did something different -- they recited the words together to the beat of a metronome.

The researchers gave the volunteers a standard "cooperation game" to play afterward.  The way it works is that you have two choices, X or Y.  If you choose X, you get seven dollars.  If you choose Y, you get ten dollars -- but if and only if every other member of the group also chooses Y.  If anyone chooses X, the ones who chose Y get nothing.

In the group who had recited the words in sequence, only 21% took the risk of cooperation and chose Y.  In the group who had chanted the words together, almost three times as many -- 62% of participants -- chose Y.

We bond to each other through rituals, even if it's something as silly as chanting a list of random words together.

Given that the pandemic is showing no signs of waning -- here in the United States, at least, where for some people wearing a mask to protect yourself and others is considered a fundamental infringement on your liberties -- my guess is that our rituals won't be returning to normalcy for a long time.  What's certain is that our desire for those rituals is very deeply wired into our brains, and their loss has hit a lot of people hard.  It remains to be seen whether we'll find alternate ways to exercise this drive, at least until there's an effective vaccine for COVID-19.

What long-term effect this will have on society -- on cohesion, connection, cooperation, even rates of depression and anxiety -- is unknown.

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Fan of true crime stories?  This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for you.

In The Poisoner's Handbook:Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum, you'll find out about how forensic science got off the ground -- through the efforts of two scientists, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, who took on the corruption-ridden law enforcement offices of Tammany Hall in order to stop people from literally getting away with murder.

In a book that reads more like a crime thriller than it does history, Blum takes us along with Norris and Gettler as they turned crime detection into a true science, resulting in hundreds of people being brought to justice for what would otherwise have been unsolved murders.  In Blum's hands, it's a fast, brilliant read -- if you're a fan of CSI, Forensics Files, and Bones, get a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook, you won't be able to put it down.

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

The power of ritual

Since leaving religion when I was in my early 30s, I've found that one thing I've kind of missed is taking part in a ritual.

It's not that I don't enjoy sleeping in on Sunday mornings, or that I miss the specific rituals I participated in while in church.  It's more that there's something comforting about being part of a group that is all doing the same thing, and for which membership in the group involves understanding the context of how the ritual works.

It's amazing how powerful this can be.  Other than my parents' funerals and the wedding of a friend, I haven't sat through a Catholic mass since I was about twenty.  Even so, I bet if I did decide to head on over to St. James Catholic Church next Sunday, I'd know exactly what to do when, and I probably could remember the order of mass, the words to the prayers, and even the lyrics for some of the hymns.

Old habits die hard.

All of this comes up because of a paper (currently in press) by Nicholas M. Hobson, Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton, and Michael Inzlicht called "When Novel Rituals Impact Intergroup Bias: Evidence from Economic Games and Neurophysiology" (the link is to a pre-release copy) that gives us an idea why rituals are so important -- and so ubiquitous in human cultures.

The researchers were trying to find out if getting people to do stereotypical and repetitive actions could alter their perception of belonging in a newly-formed group, and also whether those actions might cause them to change their behavior toward people who had not participated.  Here's an example of one of the rituals Hobson et al. came up with for their participants to perform:

1. Choose two different coins, either a dime, nickel, or quarter (but NOT a one or two dollar coin). It’s best if the two coins you select are different (for example, one a nickel and the other a dime). You will use these two coins throughout the duration of the experiment, over the course of the next week. It is important that you not lose them. Keep them in a safe spot and available. 
2. Get a cup or mug of some sort available. Fill it halfway with lukewarm water – being careful that the water isn’t is too hot or too cold. Gently submerge the two coins in the water. Place the cup down on a surface or on the floor in front of you. 
3. As the coins sit in water, close your eyes and take 5, slow, deep breaths. Afterward, bow your head and make a sweeping motion away holding the cup in your hands.
4. Next, gently remove the two coins from the water. Place the smaller coin in your NON dominant hand (left hand if you’re right handed) and the larger coin in your DOMINANT hand (right hand if you’re right-handed).
5. Hold your hands out in front of you, palms facing upwards so that the coins don’t fall. Lower your hands slowly down so that they become in line with your hips. Do this movement five times. Close your eyes and bow your head.
6. Next, keeping the coins in your hand, close your fingers around the coin, making a tight fist. Hold your fists in front of your chest and bring them together so that your knuckles and thumbs match up. Keeping them in this position, bring your arms straight up over your head. Do this movement five times. Close your eyes and bow your head. 
7. Keeping your fists as is, next bring your fists to either side of your head, so that the knuckles of each hand line up with your temples. Bring your fists together in front of your eyes. Do this movement five times. Close your eyes and bow your head.
8. Bring your fists back down in front of your body and open your hands so that your palms are facing upward with the coins resting. Bring both coins together into your DOMINANT hand. 
9. Finish off by closing your eyes and taking five, slow, deep breaths. As you do this bring your full attention, awareness, and focus on your conscious and unconscious mind. 
10. Lastly, return both coins back into the half-filled cup of water for a moment, and remove them. 

So kind of silly, but honestly, is it any odder than a lot of the rituals we participate in without any question?

So they got the "ritual group" to perform the steps at least three times a week.  Afterwards, they were mixed in with the "no-ritual group" -- people who had been given a task to estimate the number of dots in an image, rather than participating in the ritual.  They were then paired up and participated in a famous psychological experiment called the "Trust Game:"

If player 1 (sender role) sends player 2 (receiver role) all of their $10 endowment, this $10 amount becomes tripled upon being received by player 2 ($30).  In the second exchange (which did not actually occur, but participants were lead to believe that there was a second play), player 2 is then given the option to reciprocate the offer and send any amount of the $30 back to Player 1.  A perfectly cooperative exchange would be player 1 fully trusting player 2 (sending entire $10) to fairly reciprocate the offer (signaling their trustworthiness) by splitting the $30, $15 to each player.  Participants understood that in order to gain more than their original endowment, they would need to trust player 2 with a certain amount; the more money sent to player 2, the higher this individual payout, but the greater the risk of the endowment being lost.

And what happened is that people who had participated in the ritual trusted other members of the ritual group more than they did members of the non-ritual group!

What I find most interesting about this is the fact that the ritual the people were performing was pointless and absurd, and the participants knew it was meaningless -- and yet it still impacted their behavior.  How much more of an effect does this have when the rituals are perceived as meaningful?  Or not just meaningful, but essential for the salvation of a person's soul?

And how might this not only affect our interactions with other members of the ingroup, but how we treat people in the outgroup?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What all of this indicates is that however modern we perceive ourselves to be, our brains still function in the context of tribalism.  And while this has the beneficial effects of increasing group trust and coherence, it makes us prey to the worst of what humanity can do -- mistreatment and mistrust of those who we see as different.  As Hobson et al. put it:

Cultural stabilization of ritual began in human evolution when fast-growing groups began to experience elevated intergroup competition, necessitating ingroup cooperation...   In line with these theoretical claims, the current results partially support the claim that rituals offer a strategy for the regulation of ingroup behavior – but at a detriment to the outgroup.

Which makes me wonder if my missing the rituals I participated in might have a more deep-seated source than I realized.  Almost makes me want to go genuflect in front of a statue of a saint, or something.

Ice buckets for Satan

Thus far I have been challenged twice to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, both times by dear friends, and I haven't done it.  I have no particular qualms about jumping on board a do-something-silly-for-charity bandwagon, and am in full support of stem cell research.  My reluctance has to do with one thing, and one thing only:

I am a wuss about the cold.

I am one of those people who starts to shiver when the thermometer drops below 65F.  This is particularly ironic given that I live in upstate New York, where the climate is such that during most of the year, you do the Ice Bucket Challenge whether you want to or not simply by going outside.  In my own defense I will state that I was born and raised in southern Louisiana, in a town that (in my dad's words) was "so Deep South that if it was any deeper, you'd be floating."  So I have the tropics, or at least the subtropics, in my blood.

But I do feel a bit guilty about not getting someone, most likely my wife, to pour ice water on my head.  I mean, it seems like the least I could do, other than donating some money to the ALS Association, which I'm gonna do anyway.  But now I'm glad I didn't participate, because I just found out that by doing the Ice Bucket Challenge...

... I am baptizing myself in Satan's name.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or at least, that's the contention of a writer for the phenomenally bizarre site Before It's News, which features stories that haven't become news yet for a reason.  In this article, written by someone named Lyn Leahz, we find out that the whole Ice Bucket thing was devised by satanists, so that they can secretly steal your soul.

Or something like that.  It's hard to tell, actually, because the article features prose like this:

I recently found out about the Ice Bucket Challenge and I really didn’t pay attention to it until a good friend mentioned that an ex-satanist friend said that this is the very same ritual he did when he was a satanist and was like a covenant contract with the devil.  The enemy has come into America through the back door with what seems like a good work and a good cause but it is only on the surface.  As you dig a little deeper and take the time to research, you will see that what I am saying is true.  This is a type of sacrifice.  It is a type of satanic sacrifice...  There is definitely a spirit behind this cause and it is not the Holy Spirit...  To all those who have already participated, there is no condemnation, but there is a plea from the heart of God to pray, seek his face and ask forgiveness.

So there you go.  We also find out, through some videos that I only recommend watching after drinking a double scotch, that this is part of the Illuminati-sponsored "fire and ice challenges" that are to "purify America before the Great Sacrifice."  This comes from "evangelist Anita Fuentes," who said, and I quote: "'Now Anita,' you may be saying, 'how is this Ice Bucket Challenge related to a ritual purification before human sacrifice?'"  Which, to be honest, was nothing that I myself would ever have thought to say.  But she goes on to say that dumping water on the head is baptism, and that this means that America is being "ritually cleansed."  Why?  Because of the Illuminati, and pyramids, and the New World Order, and the Book of Revelation.  At that point, I kind of gave up, because the video is 43 minutes long, and I just don't have that kind of patience.

We also have the contention that during the moment of shock from pouring cold water on your head, demons could enter your body.  Which, you would think, would make doing the Polar Bear Swim a seriously dangerous proposition.  Not to mention the buddy of mine who owns a sauna, and in January likes to run out of the sauna bare-ass naked, do a belly flop in the snow, and "make anatomically correct snow angels."

And allow me to add, I've seen no evidence of my friend being possessed by demons.  He's a little odd, granted, but I don't think demons are at fault.

So I think the whole thing is kind of ridiculous.  If pouring ice water on your head is your idea of fun, knock yourself out.  I still may end up being guilted into doing this, depending on how much my two friends who nominated me decide to push matters.  If so, I better do it soon, because it's already getting cool up here in the Frozen North.  And no way am I pouring ice water on myself if it's below 65F.  That's just asking too much from a card-carrying wuss.

Burning down the house

I try to be kind, I really do.  I listened patiently to the student in my Critical Thinking class who told me with great enthusiasm how well astrology worked, and how it has "recently become much more scientific" in the way astrologers construct their charts and predictions.  I refrained from guffawing in the face of the woman who, while visiting my home, informed me that my dad's rock collection had "very powerful crystal energies."  I didn't even give so much as a snort when an acquaintance told me she had been in psychic communication with her pets.

I know that if I'm working toward my stated goal -- to foster skepticism and rationalism -- then from a methodological standpoint, it works better to argue from a logical, scientific perspective than it does simply to bellow laughter at one's opponent.

Still, it's hard sometimes.  Take the case of the naked Wiccan arsonists.  (Source)

Aftab Mughal, of Nottingham, England, had been feeling as if his life was becoming increasingly negative -- he was under stress, and things just "weren't going right" for him.  So he went to visit his friend, Terence Williams, to ask for advice.  Williams, a Wiccan, said that Mughal needed to participate in a ceremony to cleanse him of "negative vibrations," so they set up the ritual in Williams' apartment.

First, they walked around burning white sage sticks.  But this didn't seem to do enough to remove the negativity, in Williams' opinion.  So the two took the obvious next step, which was to set fire first to some pieces of paper, and then to a wooden broom.  Amazingly enough, this also had no effect on Mughal's mood, so Williams came up with an innovative solution: both men needed to strip naked and burn their clothes.

Have I mentioned that all of this was taking place inside Williams' apartment?

Firefighters were summoned by neighbors when they saw smoke billowing out of Williams' window, and one fireman banged on the window to get the two men's attention, because they seemed not to care that the apartment was basically on fire and the room they were in was filling up with smoke.  Firefighters broke in the door and tried to get Williams and Mughal to leave, but the two nude Wiccans ran upstairs to get away.  The firemen followed them, and finally forcibly removed both men from the burning apartment.

Once outside, the firefighters tried to get Mughal and Williams to cover up with blankets, but they threw the blankets on the ground and basically capered about in the all-together, apparently not caring about the negative vibrations they were inducing in passersby.

The end result was that the pair was charged with arson, and the case went to court last week.

The prosecuting attorney, Siward James-Moore, said, "Aftab Mughal, as far as he was concerned, he didn't think the ritual was one that made him fear for his safety and he was bemused when the fire brigade arrived." James-Moore himself seemed more than a little bemused by the whole thing, and added that when a fireman tried to get the two Wiccans to leave the apartment, "The flames were licking around Mr. Williams' ankles at that stage.  He was staring right through him."

Ultimately, Mughal and Williams pleaded guilty to arson, but because the judge considered that the fire was caused by "stupidity, not by malice," they received no jail time, and were sentenced to 120 hours of unpaid community service.

Okay, now while I was reading this, I tried to maintain my sense of decorum, I really did.  I attempted to hold firm to the attitude that these men were only acting out of their seriously-held religious beliefs, and as such, I should be tolerant and understanding.  But when I got to the part about the firemen attempting to get them to cover themselves up, and their tossing the blankets to the ground and running around outside naked while the firemen chased them, I have to admit that my reaction was, and I quote:  BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

I mean, really.  You can argue the benefits of religious beliefs from a number of angles -- that religion has incited people to perform acts of great altruism, that it has inspired beautiful art and transcendent music, that it has given people hope in the face of desperate times.  Unfortunately, though, religion has also fostered some pretty bizarre behavior.  And I maintain: whatever your criticisms of the scientific view of the world, rationalism has never incited anyone to dance around naked in his apartment while it was on fire.