One of the earliest known human sites speaks to the power of ritual. Today, let me show you how our ancestors related to ritual, how they used it, what it did for our entire species, and why ritual practices certainly change a lot over time, but they still matter today.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 2/20i1/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! BTW: If you like today’s topic, here’s an entire book about various religious rituals and their effect on our minds and bodies. Its chapter on speaking in tongues, starting on p. 68 of the PDF, is fascinating!)
The ‘little study’ where Renaissance people escaped their worries
During the early Renaissance, Italian men of means began withdrawing to private rooms in their homes where they could be alone to read, write, and study. People back then were only beginning to recognize how important alone-time was—for men, at least. Women in general still didn’t have much privacy unless they were very wealthy and powerful indeed, like Isabella d’Este. (<— And if you don’t click a single other link in this writeup, please at least see this one. It’s amazing. Someone recreated her famous study in virtual reality!)
But scholarly impulses in wealthy men got much more respect.
So these men began to build ‘little studies’ in their homes. Often, these were built into nooks in the home, like under the stairs. And when I say “little,” I mean it. The average American bathroom is likely larger than most of these Renaissance-era studies.
When you see Renaissance portraits, look for the subject to be inside a private study. These rooms were usually quite small and cramped, with a slanting desk and bookcases crammed full of books, papers, antiques, and curiosities. (They also often stacked books horizontally rather than arranging them vertically. When I noticed that, I felt so seen.)
After seeing many dozens of cramped little studies in paintings, it might be downright jarring to see a painting featuring a study built right out in the open! Usually, these depict people or saints who are particularly well-known for their scholarly side, like Saint Jerome. There’s an entire genre of Renaissance paintings about “Saint Jerome in his study with a lion somewhere in there and maybe also a housecat.”
In the example below, the ghostly kittycat on the left used to be much more substantial. The paint has faded a bit over time. The expected lion is also there, just in the background on the right. Notice the hook with a towel on it on the left, alongside an empty hook likely intended for that gorgeous red robe when it’s not in use. The painting also features the expected shelves and slanting desk, clutter everywhere, potted plants, and perhaps most importantly steps that set the entire nook apart from the rest of the house.
People always wanted to set this room or nook apart from the rest of the house somehow—not only with curtains and doors and steps, but also with ritual practices. This room wasn’t like the rest of the house. Nor were its activities related to anything done in the rest of the house. It was special.
And thus, even walking into it had to be special too.
Cleansing the mind and touching the divine with ritual practices
Before Renaissance men sat down in their studies, they cleansed their minds with certain rituals. They might strip down entirely, bathe or otherwise clean up, and put on the robes and cap of a scholar. Often, these special clothes were kept in the study and only used while in that one room. They helped their owners achieve a state of transcendence, which they hoped would allow them to temporarily touch and commune with divinity.
You really do get a sense, reading about how people back then used this space, of moving from the real world into an almost Gnostic-spiritual one that looked like reality but wasn’t.
Around 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli was having quite a rough life. He’d he’d been disgraced and abandoned by the ruling class he’d served for his entire life. The year before, his former masters had even imprisoned and tortured him before exiling him to his family farm! But in a letter, he describes his ritual cleansing practices, along with the effects these practices had upon him:
“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.” [Source]
At the time he wrote that letter, his ritual cleansing and reading must have been quite a balm for his spirit.
Of course, Renaissance society itself had lots of civic and religious rituals already. In fact, our species in general has had rituals almost from the very beginning of our sapience—such as wudu, performed by Muslims throughout the day to prepare themselves for prayer.
Defining ritual activity
Even when I was in college, archaeologists joked about how everything they dig up that they don’t immediately understand gets called ritual behavior. But as you’ll see today, in more recent years they’ve gotten a little better at identifying it.
For today’s purposes, we will use this 2020 Royal Society paper’s definition of ritual:
(a) predefined sequences characterized by rigidity, formality, and repetition that are (b) embedded in a larger system of symbolism and meaning, [and] (c) contain elements that lack direct instrumental purpose.’ Element (b) necessarily requires an associated degree of community, shared knowledge and normativity. A ‘ritualistic action’ is, largely, the behavioural components of elements (a) and (c): it is an action that is repetitive, redundant, often rigidly or formally performed, and which is causally opaque and goal demoted.
That term “causally opaque” means that the behavior is magical in nature. The action doesn’t relate to material changes. When we turn the key in our car’s ignition, it starts up. That’s a direct material change related to our goal (driving the car somewhere). But if we feel we must always recite a prayer before we drive, the prayer doesn’t actually do anything at all. We can drive the car without reciting the prayer. It has nothing to do with the actual action of driving.
Similarly, “goal demotion” indicates how related the behavior is to the goal at hand. If a totally-unrelated onlooker were to see the behavior, how easily would they guess its relation to the goal or the motivations of the behavior’s performer? If the answer is “not easily at all,” then it’s more goal-demoted. However, if the answer is “oh completely easily,” then it’s goal-apparent. The paper’s example is lighting a candle in a darkened room versus lighting it in an already-lit room, and that works well enough. Without knowing why the performer is lighting the candle, it might not make sense to see them doing it.
Group ritual behavior has one more component: Community. If someone has a lucky shirt they wear before playing a game, that’s ritualistic behavior. But if “on Wednesdays we wear pink,” that’s more of a group ritual.
The earliest ritual activity in humans
Homo sapiens sapiens first appeared on the scene around 300,000 years ago (300kya; also, see this source). One group of them began moving out of Africa around 70kya, but we’d been venturing outside of Africa for a while before that—perhaps starting almost 200kya. Somewhere between 15kya and 40kya, all other human species died out, leaving us the only one left on the planet.
Archaeologists differ in opinion regarding the very earliest known ritual activity in those earliest modern humans. Qafzeh, a site in Israel, contains what sure looks like a gravesite from 100-130kya. It held about 15 people’s remains and a bunch of red ocher-stained stone tools—and some chunks of red ocher itself. This find suggests that even that long ago, humans had burial beliefs and remembrance customs.
Some think humans began performing rituals around 37kya. That discovery involves a cave in northern Israel that could have held up to 100 people inside. We know that earlier Neanderthals had built a bounded circle of stones within it. Perhaps 176kya, these now-extinct humans had even explored deep into the cave and built stuff out of the stalagmites inside.
Later on, H. sapiens used these Neanderthal stone constructions. Before this ritual use, humans had been living near the cave for many thousands of years already. One archaeologist thinks the rituals revolved around tortoises somehow. One central stone in the cave has been engraved to look like a tortoise shell. Indeed, tortoise shells keep showing up in archaeological sites around then. But we don’t know what the animal or its shell represented to ancient humans.
In 2006 and 2007, we got reports from two sites in the Kalahari Desert that indicates that maybe humans were performing group rituals as early as 70kya. At this site, archaeologists found a carved snake 2m high and 6m long. Though it can be difficult to say exactly how our ancestors used any site, one of those two sites yielded tantalizing evidence of ritual activity:
But was this really a ritual site? The artefacts suggest it was. Thus, among the objects 115 spearheads were found, all unusual in character. Each is well-crafted but much more colourful than other spearheads from the same time and area, and were made from stone that must have been brought from hundreds of kilometres away. Moreover, some spearheads had been burned. “There is no functional explanation for the burning. This feature, in addition with other factors, combine to lead us to conclude this represents a ritual destruction of these artefacts,” said [Sheila] Coulson.
So between 70kya and 37kya, early modern humans began performing rituals.
The evolutionary advances leading to ritual behavior
Our very, very earliest H. sapiens ancestors didn’t do rituals because our brains hadn’t quite evolved that far yet. In fact, a lot of what makes H. sapiens what we are hadn’t quite finished evolving yet. Our height declined (though it’s now increasing again), along with brain size. Our teeth and jaws got smaller.
According to that Royal Society paper, we also got a boost out of the gate with a few unique evolutionary flourishes in our brains:
There are profound neural connections between the cerebellum and the parietal and frontal lobes, an interconnectivity that suggests the cerebellum may aid in the process of creative thinking, a cognitive prerequisite of fantasy play. The principal morphological differences were that H. sapiens had relatively larger parietal lobes and a particularly large cerebellum in comparison with Neanderthals
Earlier hominin species already had the prefrontal cortex to handle this stuff, but we took its function further than any other species ever had. These differences made us less detail-oriented and more creative and imaginative than, say, Neanderthals could be. And those differences, in turn, paved the way for complex group ritual behavior:
A shift away from a more functional to a more creative engagement with objects potentially paved the way for an expansion in symbolic thinking and with it a key building block for appreciating the opaque causality of ritual in adulthood.
Meanwhile, a 2014 paper asserts that evolution granted our brains vastly superior pattern processing (SPP). Its writers argue that SPP had a lot to do with how our species evolved spoken and written language, magical thinking, music and other creative behavior, and even false beliefs about gods and the supernatural.
Similarly, other scientists think that “prefrontal synthesis” helped early H. sapiens develop ritual behavior. This 2023 article describes it:
When asked to mentally combine two identical right triangles along their long edges, or hypotenuses, you envision a square. When asked to mentally cut a round pizza by two perpendicular lines, you visualize four identical slices.
This deliberate, responsive and reliable capacity to combine and recombine mental objects is called prefrontal synthesis.
This ability we have to imagine how things will combine and interact seems to have evolved around 70kya. It manifests as the creation of musical instruments, dyes, arrows, needles, homebuilding, and decorative adornments of all kinds.
What ritual does to a mfer
A bunch of interesting stuff happens to our brains when we engage in rituals. In this section, we include religious rituals, but any ritual can have the same effects.
For a start, for believers at least religious rituals can be very calming and soothing. A 2008 paper studied a small number of students at a Catholic college. The students either watched a religious video or performed recitations of the Catholic rosary. The ritual performers reported “a significant reduction in anxiety.”
A 2015 book chapter makes a similar claim. Its writer suggests that repetitive prayers can alter our neurochemistry. He also suggests that prayer may help its performers manage their own emotions. Interestingly, he ends his abstract by claiming that “religiosity may protect physical and mental health.” I’d suggest in turn that it’s not so much the religiosity itself but the ritual performances that go into religiosity that might have that effect.
One 2019 article speculates that shared rituals serve much the same function as grooming in other primates:
Recent data caps wild primates’ daily maximum grooming time to about 20 percent of their activity. [Evolutionary psychologist Robin] Dunbar calculates that this cap limits group size to fewer than 70 members, which is significantly less than the group capacities of modern humans, at about 150. The problem, then, was to find a way to trigger social bonding without touching. Laughter and music were good solutions, which Dunbar says create the same endorphin-producing effects as grooming by imposing stress on muscles. Language works, too [. . .] Because these effects can be achieved sans touch, social bonding can happen on a much larger scale.
Dunbar’s argument is that religion evolved as a way of allowing many people at once to take part in endorphin-triggering activation. Many of the rituals associated with religion, like song, dance, and assuming various postures for prayer, “are extremely good activators of the endorphin system precisely because they impose stress or pain on the body”.
Obviously, there are sharp limits to just how certain we can be when we start talking about evolutionary psychology. But that observation about grooming caught me by surprise! Maybe we don’t see macaques singing together because they groom each other enough to get the same effects in their relatively small groups. The article itself goes on to wonder if maybe it was agriculture and its accompanying need for very large settlements that created openings for our brains’ programming, which already contained all the elements needed, to leap to formal religions as a large-scale unifier.
The power of rituals: Uniting us, keeping us busy, and giving us a sense of meaning and purpose
From some recent papers, we can see how ritual practices can help people learn and find meaning in their work. Notice that none of them are explicitly religious in nature. Nor are any of these rituals extreme in nature; extreme rituals have way different effects and uses for those practicing them.
Here’s one from 2020 about how rituals can help develop kids’ cognitive abilities. That makes a lot of sense. When I briefly taught very young children English in Japan, my school’s technique involved a lot of hand motions that paired with particular words and expressions. It seemed to work very well!
A 2022 paper goes further, saying that children who engage in rituals also derive benefits from the experience like “lower rates of drug addiction, positive health outcomes, and greater life achievements.” Rituals that mark accomplishments and rites of passage, in particular, fit well here. So would rituals involving music or sounds.
A 2021 paper suggests that group rituals in the workplace can make that work seem more meaningful. I’ve worked in several places that used group rituals to forge a sense of belonging and teamwork even in jobs that do not ever involve anyone else at all. These rituals don’t even need to be complicated. One workplace just had everyone stand in a circle every morning, put a hand out toward the middle of the circle, and shout our team name before going to our purely solitary desks to begin our purely solitary tasks.
Another 2021 paper advises manufacturers and sellers to start encouraging rituals in their consumer base. These rituals can help create customer loyalty to a particular brand. And various brands have always used rituals like that: pre-game rituals involving snack food, inhaling the scent of one’s coffee before drinking, encouraging the creation of a morning grooming routine, and more.
One brand in particular, Starbucks Coffee, created the idea of a “Third Place” where coffee consumers could go to drink coffee around and with other people. As one site puts it, they “changed the game” by permanently altering consumers’ very conceptualization of coffeeshops.
Putting rituals into context: The human situation
When I talk about the human situation, I’m talking about more than just the human condition: What humans do alone and in groups, not just what our physicality and psychology are like. In that sense, the rituals we perform—especially in groups—make up a great deal of our species’ overall situations. Nowadays, our group ritual practices have waned in number, which leaves religious rituals among the last big ones that any large number of people consistently practice together.
But as a species, we still remember. The crying scene in 2019’s Midsommar would have had no emotional resonance at all, otherwise.
When this one neuroscientist, Andrew Newberg, talks about how religious rituals turn on and off parts of our brain, that makes a lot of sense to me:
The first, the parietal lobe, located in the upper back part of the cortex, is the area that processes sensory information, helps us create a sense of self, and helps to establish spatial relationships between that self and the rest of the world, says Newberg. Interestingly, he’s observed a deactivation of the parietal lobe during certain ritual activities. [. . .]
The other part of the brain heavily involved in religious experience is the frontal lobe, which normally help us to focus our attention and concentrate on things, says Newberg. “When that area shuts down, it could theoretically be experienced as a kind of loss of willful activity – that we’re no longer making something happen but it’s happening to us.”
I think Machiavelli would have completely understood.
Indeed, the Renaissance concept of vacatio animae, the disconnection of our spirits from our bodies during sleep, hints at a very old understanding of what altered states do to our cognition. Marsilio Ficino, a 15th-century Florentine philosopher, took that idea a bit further by suggesting that once freed of our bodies through sleep, our spirits can then enter a transcendent state.
So for Machiavelli to “enter the antique courts of the ancients” while awake, he needed to perform certain rituals to ready his mind for that ethereal state.
We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors
In this, Machiavelli was much like our ancestors from many tens of thousands of years ago, and like us today.
By understanding and harnessing the power of rituals, we can better prepare ourselves to study and learn, and to find greater meaning in our work and home life, improve our mental health—and grow closer to our families and the groups we join.
In doing so, we build upon the deep foundation that countless ancestors have provided for us. We tap into what it means to be human. We stand on the shoulders of those who’ve gone before, and then we look up at stars that suddenly seem much closer.
There’s something really cosmic about that kind of connection between us and those who’ve gone before us. I’ll always love thinking about it. And I hope you do too.
NEXT UP: The new tactics suggested for SPEERCHUL WARFARE, YAWL! Well, sort of new. Well, not new at all. But if they keep repeating bullshit often enough, it totally starts working. Hooray Team Jesus and see you next week! <3
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