For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

by Sasha Sagan

Weddings

All our best rituals are a kind of performance about what we need or want most. Sometimes they are so on the nose they barely qualify as art—for example, a kiss at the end of a ceremony to signify the sealing of the union. Sometimes the traditions are so open to interpretation that they mean something different to each of us. And sometimes the origins of the tradition are so old and so popular that we abide by them despite not understanding what they really mean. Throwing rice at the newlyweds after the ceremony was once a fertility rite, a way of trying to harness some good luck in conceiving many babies, but who thinks of that now, standing outside a church, sprinkling your friends?

chapter eleven

Sex

The ritual of sex fulfills so many of the promises of religion: the miracle of creation, a feeling of transcendence, a chance at a kind of afterlife as children carry on your DNA.

The only litmus test, so far as I can tell, should be Is anyone being hurt? If there is no deceit, manipulation, or abuse involved, who are we to judge?

Of all the things we do to keep our species going, why is it that sex evokes such strong opinions from people not directly involved in a given situation?

But sex is useful. Not just in terms of making babies but in terms of relieving stress, bonding you to someone you love, and helping you fall asleep. And it’s extremely powerful. Not just because there is sometimes a chance at creating a life, but because the mere hope of it can make us do and say things we never would otherwise. It’s like being put under a spell.

Greenblatt writes, “Pagans ridiculed that story as primitive and ethically incoherent. How could a god worthy of respect try to keep humans from the knowledge of good and evil? Jews and Christians of any sophistication preferred not to dwell upon it or distanced themselves by treating it as an allegory.”

The connection between lust and loss of control haunted and worried Augustine. These themes crescendoed in the form of an erection. Other body parts are easily controllable, but the penis has a mind of its own, and he did not like that. Greenblatt believes that this was primarily due to the deep shame Augustine felt when his own erection was pointed out by his father at a public bath. This set into motion a family drama that may have come to define him, and possibly Western civilization.

Sex can also lead to a range of problems. There are diseases. Childbirth can be fatal. Unplanned children are life altering. Sex is fun because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t bother. And species that don’t like reproducing don’t last.

No matter what the social mores of the time and place, sex, especially for the first time or with a new partner, is a portal from one reality to another. Everything can change: your relationship, your status in your society, sometimes your whole life.

chapter twelve

A Monthly Ritual

But in my research I discovered, to my astonishment, that there is no scientific proof of a correlation between the phases of the moon and the human female menstrual cycle, even though they are both around twenty-eight days long.

I’m disappointed, but still I crave to understand what’s really going on, even if it’s not the pretty myth I’d hoped for.

The waxing and waning are so steady, clear, and reliable. Once humans understood the way the moon grows and shrinks, we could mathematically predict its movements perfectly. The moon is more orthodox than even the most devout zealot.

It’s one of the hardest parts of being secular: you have to work to congregate.

Science has its own orthodoxy. If an idea or a theory cannot stand up to scrutiny, we must let it go. Testable proof and hard evidence dictate what is real and what is not.

No matter how much I’d like to, I cannot produce evidence that the moon controls our menstrual cycles. Maybe some future Newton will come along and enlighten us. Maybe not.

chapter thirteen

Autumn

Darkness and death are coming. They’re not here yet, but they’re on their way, so live while you still can.

There is no information up there about whether or not your crush will call, but there’s another way in which the stars affect us. They have, since the dawn of time, had a large and real influence over our imaginations and our calendars. Disparate societies in far-flung corners of the planet have often, without any ability to communicate with one another, based their most beloved stories around the same bright corners of the night sky.

In English we call them the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters, a group of bright blue stars that came to be about 100 million years ago.

But it’s the Celts, the Iron Age and medieval tenants of what is currently known as the British Isles, who connected the Pleiades and their movement across the sky to the harvest, the dying of the light, and our relationship with our own death. Their festival of Samhain is the great-grandmother of our Halloween. It was celebrated when the Pleiades reached the highest point in the night sky. This coincided with the moment in the year exactly between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. On Samhain, pre-Christian Brits would look at their cattle, their pigs, and their sheep and decide which would survive and which would be devoured during the coming winter. On the highest hills bonfires were lit, feasts were served, and the souls of the dead were invited to join the party.

How can something as old as lighting candles remain so popular? Whether it’s a prayer candle or the one inside a jack-o’-lantern, we find a way to incorporate this small magic trick in so many rituals. We must be still astonished that we managed to create a little day in the night. We’ve had it in our celebratory arsenal for more than a million years and the novelty has yet to wear off or go out of style.

These rituals all serve as reminders that death, like winter, is always coming. They are inextricably linked and there is no escape from either. Halloween warns us that there is something powerful and mysterious coming for each of us, and that before it does we must relish the present with glee.

Whatever is next, it comes for all of us.

chapter fourteen

Feast & Fast

Later, Jon said that more than anything the experience made him think about the “industrial food complex” and how the mass production of food was a kind of overcorrection to our deep, ancient fear of starvation. When we think about all the health problems in the United States that are due to obesity, it’s like a multi-millennia-long Twilight Zone episode. We, our species, got what we so desperately longed for in all those lean times, but there’s a catch. All this easy access, all these too-full bellies will kill us, too.

But why do so many traditions include fasting? Why encourage followers not to eat when there’s plenty? Maybe it’s because our bodies have evolved for it. Whether it’s somehow good for us or just tolerable, we have adapted to this because nature provides unsteadily, and species that cannot withstand lean times cannot survive the wait until the fat ones. In either case, religions that call for fasting may have unwittingly tapped into some deep biological programming.

For about a billion years life-forms on Earth didn’t eat other life-forms but subsisted on simple chemical energy. Slowly over the millennia Earthlings had to evolve the tools to break down food and make it into energy in new and complicated ways. It took a really long time. Now we do it with ease. It’s the stuff of miracles.

In this plate of food, I see clearly the presence of the entire universe supporting my existence.

No religion says Don’t feed the poor, God means for them to suffer. In fact, quite the opposite. Many religious traditions strongly emphasize charity. This is arguably the very best thing about religion: a kind of social pressure to help others.

But there is a secular argument for charitable works as well. If there’s no rhyme or reason to why you grew up with three square meals a day, if there is not a great safety net of justice in the universe, we humans must create one for one another. Something like: There but for the grace of chance go I.

chapter fifteen

Winter

People love the feeling of Christmas—the mood, the decor, the music—even if they have no connection with the belief system behind it. We all crave a little good cheer when the nights are long.

Even if we were to agree that every single word of the New Testament is literally true, nothing in the Bible suggests or supports the idea that Jesus Christ was born on December 25.

Whenever it was, the commemoration of his birth wasn’t established until about three centuries later, when Roman church leaders decided it should be on December 25. They did this so they could co-opt the existing polytheistic Roman holidays that centered around the winter solstice.

Previously, Emperor Aurelian, who ruled Rome for five years at the end of the third century CE, had been devoted to the sun god Sol. He must have felt that Sol was not getting enough credit, so he decreed that December 25 would be a holiday in Sol’s honor called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or “Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun,” which is an amazing pun about Christmas in English but, alas, not in Latin. It was a celebration of the changing of the seasons, the return of the light, the lengthening of days thinly disguised as the birthday of their sun god.

Before that, Saturnalia was a Roman gift-giving holiday honoring Saturn, the god of vaguely related things like abundance, capital, wealth, liberation, agriculture, cyclical renewal, and lead.

According to my old friend the Encyclopædia Britannica: “The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands to symbolize eternal life was a custom of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship was common among the pagan Europeans and survived their conversion to Christianity.” Humans have been decorating trees, particularly evergreens, for eons, for good luck and as reminders of what spring will bring. That’s why ornaments look so much like fruit.

Another precursor to Christmas was the birth of Mithra, the god of light of Persian extraction. Like Christians, the followers of Mithra believed their god was conceived without sex and born in late December. (Although this conception involved coming out of a rock.) Other virgin birth stories have been part of belief systems on every continent, from the Aztec earth mother goddess Coatlicue (who conceived her son Huitzilopochtli, a war god, when a ball of feathers fell from heaven) to the Yellow Emperor of China (whose mother supposedly got pregnant when she was exposed to a lightning bolt from the Big Dipper in the twenty-seventh century BCE).

The Druids used mistletoe in their ceremonies and connected it to, among other things, virility and fertility. It’s unclear if the modern custom of kissing beneath the plant at Christmas parties is a PG-i...

None of this makes Christmas any less legitimate. More than any other time of year, we need a holiday in the dead of winter. We need something to...

Hanukkah, no surprise, is rooted in the same struggle between darkness and light. Since the Han dynasty the people of China have marked the solstice with the consumption of little rice ball dumplings and the honoring of ancestors, called Dongzhi. The ancient people of the Punjab region of India marked it with an enormous bonfire on Lohri (which is still celebrated today, but over the centuries has moved from the end of December to the middle of January and now features children who sing door-to-door for little treats). There is Yaldā, which is celebrated in Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and most of the other central Asian nations that end in the suffix -stan. Beloved poems, particularly those of Hafiz, are read aloud by ca...

Before Christmas and Hanukkah, before monotheism or any other kind of theism, our ancestors were staring up at the stars, trying to gather clues about the changing of the seasons, the passing of time, and what the darkness might bring. The idea of marking the longest, coldest night with the knowledge that the warmth and light is not too far off, that is ancient.