Life

YOU may not be Christian, or religious, but if you live in almost any developed country, you will find it hard to get away from Christmas rituals at this time of year. Of course, many of them are secular: where would the holidays be without rampant consumerism, drunken partying, over-indulgence and family feuds? Then there are the rituals whose religious origins have all but faded, such as Santa Claus.

But while Christmas rituals can be exciting for children, they certainly don't have any of the high drama of those practised by other faiths. Take the Australian Aboriginal religious initiation rites that includes scalp biting, fingernail extraction and cutting the initiate's penis with a stone knife, without which a man is not considered spiritually mature. Or the extremes of the sacred fire dances performed in New Guinea, where in order to commune with their ancestors men enter a trance state wearing masks decorated with blood drawn agonisingly from their own tongues. By contrast, the most extreme ritual a Christian is likely to engage in is being dunked during baptism. Why do some religions have rituals that are so much more traumatic than others?

This question has been exercising University of Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse for over two decades. He is not the first to note that religions tend to fall into two distinct types - those based on extensive teachings, such as Christianity and Islam, and those based on iconography and personal interpretations, including most small-scale religions and cults. Whitehouse's particular take, though, is to suggest that rituals themselves generate this dichotomy.

In recent years, several researchers have developed the idea that religion taps into intuitive ways of thinking. Even as young children we seem predisposed to believe in the supernatural, which probably explains why we develop beliefs in spirits, an afterlife and gods as we get older (New Scientist, 7 February 2009, p 30). This appears to explain many of the shared characteristics of religions across the globe. But it cannot be the whole story, says Whitehouse, because it also describes beliefs in non-religious supernatural beings, such as the tooth fairy and Father Christmas. So what distinguishes the fairies from the gods?

Whitehouse points out that even when religions are founded on intuitive ideas, acquiring religious knowledge often comes at a cost, and it is this difficult-to-acquire knowledge that is most highly valued. Indeed, it is the complex concepts that are hard to acquire and understand that give any religion its unique identity. This, he believes, is what distinguishes religions from other beliefs, such as superstition. And this is where the rituals come in, he argues. It helps the religious grasp the hard ideas underlying the religion.

It is not clear whether willingness to indulge in ritual is an inherited trait. Whitehouse suspects it is, and is planning studies with children to find out. Clearly, though, ritual is not the exclusive preserve of religion. Obsessive hand-washing, drinking tea in a certain way and crossing oneself with holy water all have one thing in common: "Rituals are by their very nature puzzling activities that invite interpretation," says Whitehouse. Rituals also have an emotional aspect - ranging from a comforting feeling of security or togetherness to extreme terror. And rituals can be repetitive - although the frequency of repetition varies enormously. These three traits are what make religion and ritual such good bedfellows. They provide the all-important elements that allow a religion to flourish: meaning, motivation and memory.

A complex web of interactions link rituals to religion, but for Whitehouse, any attempt to tease out a thread must start with memory. "The reason why there are only two types of religion is that there are only two basic systems of memory that matter," he argues. The first is semantic memory, which deals with things we are conscious of remembering and stores what we have learned about the world. Then there is episodic memory, which hangs onto memorable events from our own lives. Whitehouse argues that to persist and spread, a religion must elicit the help of rituals that reinforce memories in both these systems.

Consider some of the most extreme rituals (see above). According to Whitehouse, they are all classic examples of rituals that invoke episodic memory - creating personally significant events that are imprinted into the initiate's mind. They are characteristically infrequent, often once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and all are highly traumatic. Being personally consequential and shocking, they are likely to evoke intensely vivid memories, known as "flashbulb memory" (Cognition, vol 5, p 73) of the kind experienced by people with post-traumatic stress disorder. They also leave participants struggling to make sense of the experience, and so constructing elaborate personal meanings for what has happened. Such low-frequency, high-arousal rituals are the lifeblood of "imagistic" religions - cults and other religions based on iconography, analogy and intense cohesion.

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