Byung-Chul Han defines rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world:
Rituals transform the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space; they render time habitable. They structure time.
We no longer value rituals, and don’t use them to make our lives more stable. To the contrary, we have come to see stability and predictability as something negative.
As a result, in our current existence
time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream.
We have stripped daily life of beauty when we expelled ritual from it.
Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways.
In rituals, people come together to engage in a time-hallowed practice that takes them away from themselves. Rituals aren’t about anybody’s individual self and they remove us temporarily from the field of decision-making. Everything in a ritual was decided for us a long time ago, and that’s a great relief. In our self-obsessed culture, anything that distracts us from our fixation on the self is curative.
Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.
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