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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

While it's likely that not everything we label as "for ritual purposes" was exactly that, I think you're hugely underestimating the force of religion. Think about all the huge temples and cathedrals that have been built just in the western world. You don't think Mesoamericans felt the same impulse? "Seized by astrological magic" is framing the question with a putdown that distorts your understanding. You can't predict the actions of ancient people with a modern mindset about astrology in particular or religion in general. To them, these ideas were very real and important.

If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane reasons.

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It's not a putdown at all, other than perhaps to a modern intelligentsia who would see, say, the NFL as a ritual instead of a complex economic organization, of which what we perceive externally as ritual is the least meaningful explanation for a vast economic machine.

Cathedrals are another example, where the Catholic church was mainly a vast economic and political colonial machine driven by economics and power, and churches established territory, merely under the convenience of state religion.

When you design any structure, form follows function, and function follows economy, which in turn has necessary conditions, like shortest distances, water, waste, an average 1500 kcal/person/day, security for families and offspring, what kind of costs to impose on invaders, a contract and accounting system for future delivery of goods and promises, credit for crops, tools for leverage, architecture that is the expression of all of it.

When we say ritual now, it implies sympathetic magic. The scientific method is not a ritual, nor is proving theorems, or using geometry to engineer things. These were human civilizations and my point is we might learn more about them faster if we didn't start with the premise they were superstitious and lacked political and economic agency. Sure, if one thinks all religions are equally nonsensical and its role is at best a noble lie, then an ancient one might also be that, but if it's a way to encode and transmit knowledge robustly and sustainably in a culture, I'd argue they were probably more like us than we think when we say they're doing rituals.

Maybe we're mostly in agreement? I certainly agree that ancient people were very similar to us, and that religion can have value by transmitting knowledge. But religions, almost any social meme complex, tend to have a lot of nonsense closely entwined with the beneficial payload. So when people act it out as a whole, it can have some really goofy side effects, like cathedrals (the details of what's inside, if not the brute fact of its location). You can't treat the ritual separate from its practical implications, because in the minds of people they derive from the same logical source, and if you try to take just the parts you like you'll actually be acting inconsistently with your supposed beliefs. Separating the good from the bogus at scale apparently takes centuries at best.

I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find the economic purposes under the apparently ritual artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the project and raised a similar point to your point about cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of course it was something like that." But even if we get enough evidence to figure out the economic or political role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other ritual aspects will not go away.

As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid, and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these replication crises and junk COVID papers.

We appear to be mostly in agreement, and specifially on the point that in practice archeologists probably necessarily do the exact economic analysis I'm advocating.

I suspect the friction point may be about whether the idea or meaning of a ritual is an encompassing abstraction for general social shared experience vs. a specific sub-category of experiences that I am saying requires sympathetic magic. My view ignores whether there are rituals that are not sympathetic magic, and I'd posit there aren't, and that ones that don't have it are are just habits. However, the exceptions others point out should show the limits to that heuristic as well.

Very much agree some science has been ritualized, which imo de-sciences it, and to me this discussion of our relationship to meaning is a really important idea at the root of this question. It's related to what we deal with as hackers, which is whether our abstractions are meaningful and powerful tools for illuminating complexity, or just a layer of obfuscating jargon.

A criticism I think we might agree on is crappy social science and theory papers are like a "Chinese Room," where the authors have taken opinions, transliterated them into something that gets published using some stats and p-hacking and formal methods, but it's as though they have never had "real" understanding of the subject or material, and the crossover is that this chinese room meets sympathetic magic pattern resembles the category of ritual I was describing.

It's helpful to refine this stuff, thank you.

"Ritual" in an anthropological context, the way I believe OP is using it, is a pretty broad term with no particular magic connotation (though I'd say "general social shared experience" is going too far). It seems to encompass e.g. burial practices, and our common celebrations of Christmas and Halloween would qualify as well. The definition in this cousin comment meshes with my understanding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29131502

I found a bunch of churches were built on ground that has been shown to contain soil bacteria with anti-biofilm properties. This means the 'holy ground' was literally able to heal wounds. Likewise, a lot of 'holy water' has similar healing properties because it often contained gold and silver nanoparticles.

The ritual use of these sites usually occurred afterwards once economic situation and custom solidified it as an area of rulership. Often cargo-cult'ing what would have been a genuine healing process.

>Think about all the huge temples

ancient temples. Modern temples look more like shopping malls or other large buildings than the ornate buildings of old.

What’s a little odd to me is we don’t call it “rituals” when applied to modern people, we call it “religious services”.

“Rituals” does have a bit of a connotation beyond religion don’t you think?

Maybe that's the point. Unlike with today's people, you can't know for sure the intentions behind archeological finds. Calling something "ritualistic" in archeology seems more likely to be correct, as not all social rituals are religious in nature.

I'm partially trained in anthropology and would love to provide some insight. While terms like 'ritual' and 'ceremonial' certainly indicate religious undertones, they are delineated in an anthropological context.

For example, an anthro operational definition for 'ritual' would be "actions with intentional symbolic meaning undertaken for a specific cultural purpose", where the cultural purpose could be childhood development (rites of adulthood), religious as previously mentioned, or perhaps just a fun activity within the society.

I say all of this but understand that this article isn't necessarily geared towards only anthropologists, and operational definitions may be in order. Just my 2cents

Sure, we tend to forget that things like Independence Day fireworks are also modern rituals. I don't see how that's super relevant to my original point, though? Religion is not the only ritual system, but it does seem to be the one with the most consistent track record of inciting huge non-economically-motivated resource expenditures (at least superficially; the economic impact of social cohesion is one of small-change-in-the-exponent things that's easy to underestimate). Anyway, I really just wanted to push back on the idea that "ritual purposes" is an implausible explanation for these kinds of things.

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