![]() Ritual and art (of which music is an example) may share many similarities, but art is markedly different. Simler has noted that at best, these synchronized performances may only explain the origin of rhythm, which is in fact a uniquely human ability, but likely not the origin of music. Furthermore, the synchronized nature of the sounds and movements could have given off the impression that the group was really a single giant organism, and therefore not to be messed with. These dances are speculated to once having had a special communicative ability: to scare food competitors (which may have included predators) with loud noises and sudden movements. Documented in ethnographies from all over the world, from the haka of the New Zealand Māori to the umzansi of the South African Zulu, war dances are a nearly universal type of ritual in ancient societies. He writes a great summary of Joseph Jordania’s book Why Do People Sing, in which audio-visual intimidation displays (AVIDs), a.k.a war dances, are credited with providing a primitive basis for modern forms of music. There’s one intriguing example of a ritual act having its basis in a communicative function in Kevin Simler’s article on a potential evolutionary explanation for the origin of music. More specifically for humans, symbols of ritual are “a set of evocative devices for rousing, channeling, and domesticating powerful emotions, such as hate, fear, affection, grief”. These can range from subtle posturing to loud, raucous screaming, all intended to communicate the status or health of the signaling individual to a potential leader or mate. Communicative displays, such as those used for intimidation, mating, or submission, are found in many of the animal kingdoms. There is no easy distinction between ancient human and animal rituals-both can be reducible to some behavior achieving a “specialized communicative function”. Along this positivist vein of thought, I will mainly speak of art in terms of its function in ritual. This uncomfortable proximity to religion, in turn, has prompted some philosophers, most notably Wittgenstein, to deride any talk of aesthetics as utterly meaningless. ![]() Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, raises an interesting consideration of art’s origins: that the “earliest artworks originated in the service of a ritual-first the magical, then the religious kind.” Even now, it is still widely acknowledged that there is an almost ineffable, magical quality to many famous art pieces. My intention is not to give a definition of art, only a functional description that might explain some of my own mental habits when I see artworks. Part 2 will look at the effects of ritual in inducing powerful trance states, which I argue is related to one dimension of art– to simulate trance states. Part 1 gives an outline of what I’ll call the Precipitate Metaphor of art. This is a two-part essay where I look at the characteristics of art through the lens of ritual. ![]()
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