Ritual technology
Seven thoughts on ritual
Seven thoughts on ritual:
Rituals are the feedback loops we construct to construct ourselves.
Rituals shape the medium of time.
Rituals orient us.
Rituals are protocols.
Ritual is a form of play.
Rituals take place in a world set apart.
Rituals make meaning.
Lets take a closer look at these seven impressions, and explore what it means to build ritual technology. We’ll take a broad view of ritual that encompasses everything from sacred rites to making a morning cup of coffee.
1. Rituals are the feedback loops we construct to construct ourselves. Our impulses are fast and transient, but rituals are slow and recurrent. We change, our context changes, our rituals remain the same. Rituals are long-term memory in our self-system. They act as a kind of scaffold around which we can grow. We participate in rituals to bend the long arc of the self.
2. Rituals shape the medium of time. They structure time and give it narrative.
[Ritual] may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.
(Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1951. The Sabbath.)
Rituals are to time what places are to space. They ground us and connect us to the world around us through the medium of time.
(Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals.)
Ancient cultures structure lives and years around ritual: spring equinox, summer solstice, harvest time, winter feasts, birth, death, coming-of-age, rites of passage. Traditional rituals like these choreograph our life-story around a kind of symbolic or sacred higher time, connecting our lived experience to myths and ideas and seasons.
[These] higher times gather and reorder secular time. They introduce “warps” and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Events which were far apart could nevertheless be closely linked.
(Charles Taylor on ritual time-consciousness in A Secular Age)
Even small and everyday rituals like making a cup of coffee, morning meditation, or daily journaling create narrative structures within our lives. We perform these rituals like placing stones into the stream of time, marking moments with meaning.
3. Rituals orient us. We could say the ritual is in our OODA loop, the feedback loop we make sense with. We let the ritual in, so that it can drive orientation to some degree. It becomes part of our sense-making system.
For Boyd, the most important factor for survival is your sense-making system. This is the thing that keeps you oriented. There’s a reason that “orient” is the biggest circle on the OODA diagram. We survive by making sense.
When orientation breaks down—when you are disoriented—you lose your agency. Your model is wrong. You pay attention to the wrong things, your actions stop making sense, you flail.
(Subconscious, 2023, “Tools for thought in your OODA loop”)
Rituals get us out of deadlock by providing scripts to play out when we’ve lost the plot. When we don’t know what else to do, we can trust the process. Maybe it’s the right script, maybe not. Either way, rituals keep us moving.
Another insight from OODA loops: the timescale at which you can make sense is the timescale in which you have agency. Rituals operate at timescales beyond our present moment—days, years, lifetimes. Many traditional rituals encode multigenerational wisdom and collective memory. A ritual may let us operate on longer timescales too, participating in agency across generations.
4. Rituals are protocols. When performing a ritual, we make the part of ourselves that participates in the ritual like the ritual. We give up a bit of requisite variety, shape our range of motion, act in structured ways, to gain what the ritual has to offer.
When many of us participate in a ritual, we each become the like the ritual. The ritual is an interface, a common set of procedures. It can act as a stable point of coordination, a “source-of-truth”, in software terms, or a lego dot that helps us click together.
In this way, rituals can be a kit for constructing community. Perform the ritual together, and a particular kind of community will emerge around it.
Rituals channel our collective energy in a particular shared direction. There are returns to scale on coordination, so, ritual is adaptive.
5. Ritual is a form of play.
Ritual grew up in sacred play.
(Johann Huizinga, “Homo Ludens”)
Like all play, rituals require a suspension of disbelief. We have to be willing to play. In games studies, this stance is called the lusory attitude. Adopting the lusory attitude means accepting a game’s arbitrary rules in exchange for participating in the experience of play.
It is an invariable principle of all play… that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
(James Carse, “Finite and Infinite Games”)
The lusory attitude is not required. You never have to play. When you don’t take on a lusory attitude, the ritual means nothing to you, or means something different.
This is why many rituals begin with buy-in. The I-Ching begins with your question, the yoga instructor asks you to set an intention, an RPG will often start with character creation.
6. Rituals take place in a world set apart. You have to “step into” the world of the ritual.
All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the “consecrated spot” cannot be formally distinguished from the playground. The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis courts, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function playgrounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.
(Johan Huizinga, 1938, “Homo Ludens”)
By participating in a ritual occasion you are in a magical field, a field that is putting you in touch with your own great depth.
(Joseph Campbell, “The Myths and Masks of God”)
In games studies, these worlds-within-a-world are called magic circles. A magic circle is the space where the game takes place.
Within the magic circle, special meanings accrue and cluster around objects and behaviors. In effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players.
(Salen, Zimmerman, 2004, “Rules of Play”)
So, rituals have boundaries in time and space. You have to cross over the threshold into the magic circle to participate. This means there has to be a threshold to cross over.
Rituals need opening rites, and closing ceremonies. These boundaries mark our passage from the ordinary world into ritual time.
7. Rituals make meaning.
In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.
(Johann Huizinga, “Homo Ludens”)
In the ordinary world, things just are what they are. Sticks are just sticks, stones are just stones. In ritual world, things stand for things. Stones, arranged a certain way might become the boundary marker for a soccer game, or maybe a monument. In ritual, things mean something. We give them meaning.
Rituals are how we make meaning, personally and together.
Here’s my provocation…
We need ritual technology. Technology designed for ritual use.
Why? Most of the software we use daily is designed to engagement-max. Social media feeds, loot boxes, compulsion loops, gang gang yes yes yes ice cream so good. You’re caught in a feedback loop with the algorithm, and you are the squishiest part of that loop.
Ritual technology operates on a different timescale. Underneath the fast twitch of compulsion loops is the slow thrum of ritual. Elder feedback systems. An antidote to algorithmic engagement addiction?
We can tap into these low, slow loops if we want to. They will guide us slowly and surely in a direction.
What direction? That depends upon the ritual. Every ritual is going somewhere. By choosing rituals to practice, you can decide where you’ll go over the long term. You’re hitching a ride on something that swims slowly and with purpose through the currents of time.
Want to go somewhere new? We can even design new rituals, our own rituals. The thoughts above on ritual amount to my initial notes for a ritual technology pattern language.
The phrase “ritual technology” arose in my mind the other day and wouldn’t let me go. I realized that this is what Subconscious is and should be.
We choose to build a second brain because it lets us garden our thinking over days, months, and years. Where social media is compulsive, tools for thought are reflective. Where social media is here and now, tools for thought dwell in the long now. Tools for thought slowly build compounding momentum through low, slow feedback loops that point us in the directions we want to develop.
Tools for thought are ritual technology.