The podcast explores the connection between war and ritual ecstasy, discussing the prevalence of war throughout history, the transformation of consciousness in combat, and the significance of ritual in ancient cultures. It delves into the deep connection between humans and animals, highlighting the symbolism of animals in rituals and warfare. The speaker reflects on the weight of explaining war to their child and advocates for the creation of alternative rituals to express emotions and foster peace.
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Quick takeaways
War fulfills the human need for ritualized intensity, ecstasy, and catharsis.
War and ritual ecstasy share similar characteristics such as syncopated group action and altered states of consciousness.
To achieve peace, intense ritual expression needs to be acknowledged and channeled in alternative ways.
Deep dives
The Need for Ritual Intensity in War
War fulfills the intense somatic need for ritualized intensity, ecstasy, and catharsis. It harnesses primal drives and instincts, taking individuals into peak states of consciousness. Soldiers marching in sync create entrainment and deep bonding, similar to the collective experience found in ecstatic rituals. War and ecstatic ritual share similarities in syncopated group action, drumming, song, and invocation. The ritualized violence of war meets the human need for intensity and serves as a substitute for sacred ritual times, offering a nonlinear time outside of ordinary existence. War becomes a theater of consciousness alteration and a modern initiation ritual.
The Root of War: The Predation Cycle
The innate human need for war is deeply rooted in our primal experience as both predator and prey. The ancient food chain cycle of predator and prey shaped our somatic structures and gave rise to feelings of fear, awe, ecstasy, and intimacy. Ritualized violence and sacrifice emerged as a way to honor and express this primal cycle. Throughout history, war fulfilled the need for ritual intensity and provided an outlet for the profound human longing for ecstasy and catharsis. Peace requires a healthy relationship with our need for intensity and the recognition that violence, when channeled through ritual, takes on a different form.
The Connection Between War and Ritual Ecstasy
War and ritual ecstasy share similar characteristics, such as syncopated group action, collective bonding, entrainment, and altered states of consciousness. The intense bonding and trance-like states experienced in war reflect deep human longings for transcendence and communion with something greater. Ritualized violence and war become a means to access these primal, transcendent states. The need for intensity, catharsis, and ritualized sacrifice is embedded in our ancestral history, and war serves as a modern initiation ritual that fulfills these deep human needs.
Reason and War: Complex Relationship
Reason alone cannot eliminate war, as history shows that rationality has been both harnessed in service of war and used for peaceful purposes. The belief that war will cease with the triumph of reason ignores the intertwined history of scientific progress and warfare. Peace requires reason in service of a premise rooted in harmony, balance, and long-term sustainability. Reason must recognize the human need for intense ritualized expression and provide alternative channels for our innate drives, curbing potential war-making tendencies.
Ritualizing War and the Pursuit of Peace
To achieve peace, we must acknowledge and honor the deep human need for intense ritual expression. Rituals that channel intense drives and foster ecstasy, pain, and catharsis can provide education and transformation for young people, curbing their inclination towards violence. Peace is not the absence of intensity but the intentional and collective enactment of vigorous rituals that harness and direct these intense drives. True peace arises from a harmonious relationship with our primal nature and a recognition of the interconnectedness of predator and prey, pain and bliss, violence and intimacy.
The horrors of war have been part of the human story since the beginning. While there have been differences in how different cultures have done it, war is so widespread that it is impossible to see it as anything other than a primal human drive that fulfills some type of deep somatic need. What is that somatic need? It is easy to chalk war up to a base and 'primitive' aggression or to cold, calculated policy objectives. But an increasing number of scholars and thinkers are finding something else when they examine the roots of war — war involves many of the same protocols and therefore serves much of the same purpose that traditional ecstatic ritual once served. Both traditionally involve group syncopation, drumming, invocation, consciousness alteration, all built around a ritual enactment within a dedicated time and space that leads participants towards a sacrificial catharsis that follows a mythic narrative. So war becomes a way of fulfilling the human need for ritual intensity. In a day when we live without initiation rites, when we have no ecstatic ritual outlet for the intensities we crave, war becomes — sadly, tragically — the acceptable way for people (men, particularly) to feel ecstasy. So to truly understand war involves understanding why human beings crave ritual intensity to begin with. This inquiry takes us deep into our ancestral past, when the intense ecstasies and traumas we felt were hardwired into us as the basic experience of being within the cycle of predator and prey. Drawing heavily on the book Blood Rites by Barbara Ehrenreich, this episode goes into the origins of war, and as we understand more its ritual, ecstatic foundations, leads to the conclusion that the way to peace is not a process of 'reason' triumphing over the 'primitive' — for humanity' s worst wars have come during the age of 'reason' — but rather in looking to rediscover ecstatic ritual outlets for our need for intensity.
