Ritual in the broad, common sense is everywhere: in daily life, in the office, in religion, in mating behavior, in education. Nobody is beyond them, we all have our habits, quirks and patterns.
We use rituals or rather ceremonies all the time, as ways to ease the mind, concentrate, meditate, focus, express thanks or atonement, or as a way to escape the world around us.
I consider them true rituals if they are also a way to connect to the deeper layers in ourselves, where I believe we have much easier access to the spiritual or extra-dimensional world. It is there that we connect more to the inner fire of our soul and the magic we all have. In that sense true rituals are practical magic, they offer us a way to reach beyond the rational, beyond the limits of space, time and normal causality.
Rituals are an essential part of life and I believe they are effective in more ways than is generally assumed, and have meaning beyond the psychological and the social. They also have a magical component which is not usually seen as a rational component of our reality. We take them seriously only from a religious perspective, as part of psychological routines and pat-terns and as a sociological phenomenon.
Studying ritual, ceremonies and such irrational behavior is left to the anthropologist, the (para-)psychologist and social scientist, maybe to theologians. They are hardly ever recognized by the medical establishment or psychiatrists as a practical way to deal with life, stress, danger and disease or (openly) used in the business world to predict the outcome of marketing plans. Rituals are not considered effective, let alone essential.
Their efficacy, which means affecting reality, is not acknowledged in our Western cultures, but I hope this book will help to change that notion Rituals are essential and evolutionary important, as they provided prehistoric man with group structure and hierarchy, enabling specialization and hence progress.
I would like to make, from the start, a distinction between ritual and ceremony. Ritual, the way I use the word, has a magical or spiritual component, while ceremony is limited to psychological and social effects. A true ritual is intended to influence the spiritual (otherworld, magical) realm. It uses magical links or correspondences which are processes and tools supposed to affect the extra-dimensional realm. This then reflects back into the tangible, normal reality. So ritual is a way to achieve results which don't follow the normal rationality and causality, but have their own.
I acknowledge the problem of definition here as some "rituals", especially many religious ones, were originally intended, designed and understood to be magically effective, but their true meaning got lost. They became more or less empty, more ceremonial than ritual.
In this book I look at rituals from a broad perspective, not much concerned with the details of specific rituals but trying to outline what is the essential ritual process, and what elements make up the ritual matrix. Why do we do them, how do they work, why are they more concerned with doing and acting than with thinking, what role did they play in evolution, what is the relationship of ritual with consciousness, time, evolution, law, our psyche and our being?
I argue they are a central part of our precognitive being and acting, very much related to intuition and the perception of information beyond normal space and time limits, Understanding ritual focuses on what is essential in reality construction (which is what perception ultimately is). This is an important issue in the ongoing debate about consciousness.
Ritual offers us ways and means to affect both internal and external reality. from easing our mind to actually affecting our body, the group, the outside world, the future, and even the laws of nature. It is therefore far more than just a theatrical performance or superstitious placebo act. This means I argue that rituals work. They have efficacy. I try to explore and explain this beyond the rational and yet in a way I seek to rationalize or at least ground the irrational. Efficacy doesn't mean that ritual always brings what is asked for or intended. In many cases what comes about might be different from what the performer of the ritual assumes or wants. Ritual is much more than or deeper than a mind-trip, it is rooted in mechanisms and relations that go beyond the cognitive, they are pre-cognitive, and part of our animal ancestry.
So looking at ritual, assuming it is a fundamental tool to overcome the mind-matter dichotomy, is much more than an anthropological exercise. The basic questions I address seem simple: Are rituals more than mere behavioral patterns? Why do we do them? Do they work? How?
These are issues that are very close to the essential controversy between a materialistic and an idealistic world view. A dispute that is again so acute and heated in our postmodern days but of course ran through all philosophical discussions in historical and probably prehistoric times.
Taking ritual seriously in the way I tackle it, by making the link to practical magic and effective otherworld contact is taking the bull by the horns.
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