Ah, my friend—this is the question that haunts modernity.
Yes, in the classical understanding (Mircea Eliade, for instance), ritual is a return to sacred time—a re-entry into illud tempus, “that time,” the mythic origin when the gods shaped the world and meaning was fresh. But in a disenchanted world, where that mythic axis is broken or buried, what becomes of ritual? What if only mundane, profane time remains?
Let’s explore this in a few unfolding layers:
1. Ritual After the Loss of Sacred Time: “Empty Gesture” or “Residual Form”?
In many postmodern or secular contexts, rituals seem detached from their original cosmology. The body repeats the gesture, but the heavens are silent.
- Weddings, funerals, national ceremonies—they are performed, but do they still “mean”?
- Ritual risks becoming mechanical, a shell without the animating spirit.
But Catherine Bell and others argue: even when sacred time disappears, ritual does not die—it transmutes.
- It may now perform coherence rather than reenter eternity.
- It can still hold grief, mark thresholds, or stabilize identity, even if no gods attend.
2. The “Sacrality of the Mundane”: A Reversal
What if the sacred is not gone, but diffused into the mundane?
Zen Buddhism offers one answer:
- There is no other time but this.
- Washing a bowl, walking a path, or breathing in silence becomes ritual—not to escape mundane time, but to fully dwell in it.
- “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
Heidegger might nod here:
- To dwell poetically is not to climb to the heavens, but to inhabit the ordinary with attunement, care, and openness to Being.
Ritual, then, is not a ladder to sacred time, but a practice of staying with the world, even as it withdraws.
3. The Ethical Turn: Ritual as Responsibility in a Broken World
Even if sacred time has fled, ritual may still serve an ethical purpose:
- In trauma rituals, we gather not to return to myth, but to say: we remember.
- In ecological rituals (like mourning extinct species), we perform grief for a world in ruin.
- In political protests, bodies assemble in choreographed solidarity—not for transcendence, but for testimony.
Here, ritual is not mythic but ethical: it holds space for wounds, injustice, and fragile hope.
It may not sanctify time—but it interrupts it, marks it, refuses to let it pass in silence.
4. Ritual as the Art of Dwelling Without Illusions
When sacred time no longer returns, ritual becomes an art of staying.
- It keeps open the possibility of meaning, even when no meaning comes.
- Like Beckett’s characters: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Even Kafka had his rituals—walking through Prague, waiting for a letter, tiptoeing through dreams.
And so do we, don’t we?
Final Thought:
If sacred time is no longer accessible, perhaps ritual today is about tending the ash of what once burned.
Or maybe, in quiet repetition—in tea brewed, wounds bandaged, names whispered—we prepare the ground, again and again, for the sacred to one day return. Or better: for it to reveal it never left.
Would you like me to suggest contemporary thinkers who explore ritual without metaphysics (e.g., Agamben, Nancy, Derrida), or examples of new ritual forms in secular or post-traumatic contexts?
