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.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes, but it does not mean that some rituals must not be questioned or kept. I do not think that a ritual is a good thing in itself.
Ol.
LikeLike
“does not mean that some rituals must not be questioned or kept”
Who said it does? Rituals, like other elements of culture, change over time. But discarding for the sake of discarding them is also not a good idea (probably a worse idea since the human need for ritual (tied to the human needs for connection and meaning) will mean new ones pop up in their place and without an element of time to wear off the sharp edges, new rituals can be more dysfunctional than what they replace…
https://x.com/LauraBeckerReal/status/1848566569569247570
LikeLike
Beautiful.
Il faut des rites. C’est ce qui fait qu’un jour est différent des autres jours, une heure, des autres heures. (Saint-Exupéry)
LikeLiked by 3 people
It’s weird how instinctive it is. Moved recently. Once I finished the final cleaning at the old house, and was locking the door to leave for the last time… it just felt like some kind of ceremony was called for. I made one up on the spot, thanked the house for its service, prayed for whoever rented it next, signed a cross on the front door, and left. And still felt like… where’s the service text for this? Should there be a libation or something? Is there a patron saint I should invoke?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Each culture has detailed rituals, for example, to make peace with the death of a loved one. I did them when my father died, and it helped. Cultures created these rites over millennia. We are abandoning them at a huge cost to ourselves and for what? To see ourselves as rootless blank slates that emerge out of nothing and exist in complete solitude historically, culturally, and religiously. What a great gain for liberation. Yippee.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That reminds me: we need to have the new house blessed!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Congratulations methyl!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks! We have not escaped rental serfdom quite yet, but we *have* escaped wall-to-wall carpet and are all (literally) breathing easier now. I’d had to get an inhaler for the first time in my life, at old house. Haven’t needed it since the move. It’s fantastic!
LikeLiked by 2 people
“escaped wall-to-wall carpet”
I have never understood the appeal of wall-to-wall carpet… especially in warmer/wetter climates…. mold and dust traps that will never feel truly clean…
LikeLiked by 1 person
For real. I’m sure it followed on the whole slab-foundation fad: concrete floors are hard on your feet and joints, and padded wall-to-wall carpet was the ‘solution’. The problem, of course, is that slab foundations were always totally inappropriate for the humid subtropics: if you don’t keep the building aggressively dehumidified 100% of the time, you get condensation on any thermal mass around, including the slab. If you’ve got a carpet on it, you never notice the condensation, and you also can’t see the mold growing under the carpet, or even check for it. That slab + carpet thing is the combo from hell. Never again.
And that’s the special climate-specific aspect of the thing– everywhere and at all times the stuff is an unhygienic dust trap that can never be properly cleaned. Why did anyone think that was a good idea?? I’m heartened to see the newer renos all ripping that junk out and replacing it with tile, linoleum, and polished concrete. House shoes are a way more efficient solution to the hard-floor problem than carpet ever was.
LikeLike
I think I’ve told this story before. After my mom passed away, a well-meaning but a total libtard neighbor, like the definition of a rootless, deracinated neoliberal subject, told me to “look into Mexican grieving rituals. I hear they’re good.”
LikeLiked by 1 person