The Importance of Doing Rituals With Others

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Rituals cultivate goals and sub-goals. They take our mind off, temporarily, the overwhelming anxiety. When it's performed with other people who crucially are undergoing the same kind of emotions as us, what it does is rituals bring together those people so that we feel like we are not alone. We have social support. But in addition to this, it actually fuses our identity with theirs. The boundary between us and others almost becomes porous, so the grip becomes one.

Last week, a scientific assessment found wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years. Such rapid and significant losses are leaving many of us with a deep sense of grief and anxiety. To make sense of these emotions and channel them into action, people are increasingly performing rituals and commemorative acts for the natural world. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Prof Claire White about the power of rituals in bringing us together to process grief, and hears from author Andri Magnason about why he wrote a eulogy for Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier officially lost to the climate crisis. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod