The ritual dismemberment of every last priestess, chief, and talented child on Eheu Isle should have been enough to keep the Realmwalker trapped in the hole he'd punched through the center of the world. The wily old god managed to pull power from their corpses anyway. ## ANALYSIS There's a joke in the archaeology and anthropology communities, that if you don't know what something is, it winds up termed "ritual." Find a weird bone pipe? It must have a ritual use! Find a box that doesn't literally have "this was used exclusively for shipping merchandise" stamped on it? It probably had a ritual purpose! We often think of rituals as solemn affairs, like funerals and church sermons. Joyous affairs like weddings get "ritualized" with long, formal sermons, especially in the Catholic and Orthodox religious traditions. Even looser rituals like attending a holiday meal (happy Thanksgiving, American friends!) are inherently _fraught,_ as family history and social norms evolve. Anthropologists 600 years from now will almost definitely think my turkey roasting pan I use once a year had "a ritual purpose," and to be honest, they'll be right. Then there's the other kind of rituals, like [the weird little superstitions baseball players get known for](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1179538-baseballs-50-weirdest-all-time-superstitions) or the way most people say "namaste" at the end of a yoga session. There are quasi-religious rituals like neighborhood kids hunting for Easter eggs, and not to beat the "sports are rituals" drum too hard, but most are _highly_ ritualized. Tennis is my favorite example: [this article from Atlas Obscura](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-are-tennis-crowds-quiet)  details the incredibly elitist roots of the game and explains how so many of the strange little rituals and rules evolved. Yet, most of the rituals that come up in fantasy stories are like the one in, well, my fantasy story. It's always some kind of ritual dismemberment or black-robed monks chanting some dark ritual, eye of newt to perform the ritual of making a witch's brew — rarely do we see "and the sorceress performed [the ritual necessary to kick off the chariot races](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirria)." The Romans certainly had big festivals where they slaughtered a goat, but we have this notion that these sorts of events are dramatic, cinematic events. The priest climbs up a towering temple or pyramid, slaughters a goat or a pig (or a person) on a huge stone pedestal, rips out the heart and triumphantly holds it aloft. Most of us have probably seen a movie like that, or come across a similar scene in a book. We rarely think about what happens afterwards. Consider a "ritually sacrificed animal." Imagine you're a powerful magistrate, and you've just finished examining a chicken liver to make sure there isn't anything wrong with it. This seems weird until you consider that a diseased liver in a local farm animal might be a pretty decent indicator of a coming plague. Anyway, let's say the liver looks perfect. Now you've got all this animal meat, potentially already cooked in the "sacred fire." There are all these people gathered around to see what the outcome of the ritual is, right? Anthropologists usually call that kind of event a "religious festival" or "ritual feast." Where I come from, we call it a [bull roast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_roast). Whenever I watch a movie where there's a "ritual" happening, the people are always dressed in very particular clothes, but it's not that different from how everyone at a football watch party wears a jersey, or everyone picks out formal wear to prom. I'm not saying tropes are bad, I'm saying I want to broaden and fresh and alter the ways we think about the past by pulling "rituals" out of the highly academic contexts in which they usually appear, and move away from the really alienating language that we use to talk about people in the ancient world. For example, when I read about [the rituals the ancient Mesopotamians performed to remove mold](https://eleanorkonik.com/fungus/) %% ( [[2021-06-21 Fungus]] ) %% from their house, I try not to think of them as "weird superstitions." Sure, maybe some stodgy old priest was just waving incense around and being useless — but maybe it looked more like an expert showing up at someone's house, using chemicals the homeowner didn't understand but had reason to trust, and getting paid. As someone who has more than once paid a plumber to solve a problem with piping I only barely understand, I try not to judge the ancients for letting an expert class attend to their health & safety needs. When you read about "ritual dismemberment" meant to "stop a god," I encourage you to read it through the lens of "somebody committed genocide" not "bad fantasy people did magic." History books are written in a way that makes it really easy to imagine the people inside them as being really different from us — but honestly, people are still people. The fundamental nature of the average human hasn't changed _that_ much in the last couple thousand years. We live, we love, we ask for help, [we complain about having an overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMJbVUUi34I). ## Further Reading - [Body Ritual Among the Nacirema](https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf) by Horace Miner is an incredible resource for putting the way we learn about other cultures into perspective and I highly recommend it. - [The Mysterious Fall of the Nacirema](http://people.uncw.edu/robertsonj/SEC210/TheMysteriousFalloftheNacirema.pdf) is a companion piece by Neil B. Thompson and equally worth reading. - The [Coldfire Trilogy](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36159.Black_Sun_Rising) by C. S. Friedman has one of the most brutal rituals I've ever seen described in prose, precisely because it's portrayed up close and personal and human and horrible and the emotional ramifications and consequences are explored. It's a very 90s adventure fantasy in tone, but the worldbuilding is top-notch and it does some unique things with demonstrating why someone might turn to genuine evil without becoming a caricature or being written off as "the villain who must be defeated." ## Endnotes 💚 If this story & the accompanying afterword made you think, consider forwarding it to a friend and encouraging them to [sign up](https://eleanorkonik.com/membership/) for more short fantasy, obscure history and weird science. 🦃 Know of any unusual rituals you'd like to share? Know something interesting about an ancient or upcoming holiday? [Leave a comment](https://eleanorkonik.com/ritual#endnotes) %% ( [[2021-11-24 Ritual]] ) %% & share with the community, or hit reply and share with just me.