Rituals and mystical participation

Rituals are usually not directly harmful to the environment.

These include fireworks that leave large volumes of toxic smoke after combustion, farmers’ habit of burning the piles of branches and weeds during the cold season, a theatre that they like to light to brighten up the evening, charcoal barbecues, campfires, cooking food that causes Aboriginal people to desert their land, etc.

Yet in our way of life there are all kinds of rituels that sacralize our allegiance to the system. The Christmas festival, which made the divine child the God of consumerism; the Easter festival, which became the trading fund of pastry confectioners; birthdays with piles of gifts to unpack, early basis of love for unnecessary packaging; the pusher that fits into the baby’s psyche and will serve as the basis for adult love of the car; The requirement of laundry more white than nature that makes the fortune of laundry manufacturers…

Religious rituels seem to be free from ecological nuisances. The few candelabras whose smoke blackens the shrines are nothing compared to the colossal masses that the demons of the earth expel from volcanoes. Liturgical songs no more than shamanic incantations seem to have an unfortunate impact.

Yet, these rituels devote somewhere our form of culture. They keep the mind in a line of thought that implicitly contains a certain relation to the divinity, which might have taken the place of a primitive relation to nature. Traditional tribes, for example among the Indians of America, had a religious sense of order with regard to trees, wild animals, medicinal plants, devotion that our monotheism might have captured in the name of a God made in the image of the Father: the one who gives us food, rain, the germinative power of our seeds…

An ethnologist such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl described in the “primitives” a form of communication – or rather of communion with the natural world: a “mystical participation”. We find little evidence of this in our modern culture of objective analysis and reductionist postulates. At most, as a link to nature, there remains an adulation for sunny beaches, green hikes, high peaks to conquer. Mystical participation may have been only the natural relation to nature, with a well-known advantage: it guaranteed respect and protection.

It remains to know why we would have lost at the detours of our history…