Where Have All The Good Gods Gone?
As I promised in my last post, this one will look at the question of sport as ritual.
It helps to start with a definition.
According to the folks at Dictionary.com, a ritual is an “established procedure for a religious or other rite or an observance or set form of public worship.”
Anthropologist Evan M. Zuesse expanded these ideas, saying we can understand as ritual those “conscious, voluntary, repetitious, stylized and symbolic actions that are centered on cosmic structures and/or sacred presences.”
While these notions are a good place to start, they don’t really get at the full scope of the matter. For that, I’m turning to the descriptions offered by the neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and the late psychiatrist Eugene D’Aquili in their “The Mystical Mind.”
Their considerably more technical definition points out that ritual is a “stereotyped or repetitive behavior” done over and over that results “in some greater coordination between individuals towards some common goal or purpose.”
