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There’s a crude memorial twelve thousand feet up in the Andes Mountains. Rocks, scraps of airplane fuselage, luggage, and other rubble piled together topped with an improvised iron cross. The cross bears the inscription “The world to its Uruguayan Brothers. Nearer O God to thee.” The memorial marks the place where the “Miracle in the Andes” played out. Here, for ten weeks, a small group of plane crash survivors stubbornly dodged death until the unmistakable rhythmic whoosh-whoosh of approaching helicopters signaled their rescue. Twenty-nine of the original forty-five passengers, however, never heard that glorious sound. The memorial marks their graves.
The memorial was erected nearly a month after the last survivors were plucked from the mountain. Returning to the site were ten members of the Chilean Andean Rescue Corps, an Uruguayan Air Force Officer, and a Catholic priest. After gathering and burying remains, they said a funeral Mass – the memorial serving as the altar. What human error and the laws of nature had wrought ended in ritual.
There’s a scene in The Last of Mohicans where Hawkeye and his companions come upon a remote homestead – burned, ransacked, the occupants murdered. As they depart, Cora – a well-bred English woman – protests strongly against leaving the dead without a proper Christian burial. Their indifference, she argues, is no less cruel than the murders’ violence. Cora’s sentiments arise from an odd, but deeply human imperative. We are compelled to ritually mark profound events, both tragic and celebratory. To not due so seems cold; almost inhuman.
From a rational or practical standpoint the human need for ritual appears strange. Returning to or lingering at locales of death and tragedy hardly seems adaptive. Yet we are repulsed by the thought of not doing something. To simply go on as before without some ritualized remembrance of the people, the place and the event leaves an open wound. Words unsaid and gestures unmade haunt us. So we go back. We perform ritual. We remember. And then we go on.
Ritual specialist Catherine Bell has argued that one of ritual’s great powers is how it takes physical inevitabilities and transforms them into cultural regularities. In other words, we use ritual to rob nature of the last word. For humans, ritual is how we take control of life. Ritual is a defiant fist raised in the air against nature’s hegemony. Nature decides when we are born. But ritual – christening, baptism – decides when we are admitted into our communities. Nature decides when our bodies mature. But ritual – a rite of passage, initiation – decides when we are deemed men and women. Nature arouses our attractions and lusts. But ritual decides who our legitimate partner will be. Nature terminates our existence. But ritual decides when we are dismissed from the lives of our loved ones.
Thus, ritual becomes larger than life. It surrounds, encompasses, and assimilates life’s vagaries. Whatever terror, triumph, or transition life imposes on us – there is a ritual for that. Intone the words, enact the gestures, perform the ritual, and be on your way. Abandoning ritual does not make us freer. Quite the opposite. It merely returns control back to nature.
Nature runs its course – utterly indifferent to human consequences. As a species, humans are unique in that we take offense at that indifference. Ritual is our testimony to that offense.
