If you allow yourself to be dwarfed by the second column on the right side of the Princeton University Chapel just past noon on a Tuesday, and watch the front left square of pews, framed like a postcard by high Gothic arches, you may observe a ritual.
Two Catholic priests cross a side stage framed by more, smaller arches. Between them is a golden pedestal topped with a small portrait that the distant observer cannot make out but will assume is of Jesus Christ. To such an observer, the ritual is entirely unknowable; she cannot speak the Latin of their hymns, or understand the meaning of their symbols, or assign significance to the little bobs they bow while facing away from the churchgoers.
The audience, however, is participating in a familiar performance. They know when to sit, when to stand, and when to start singing. The people in that square of pews, nestled in the frame of the arches, know where to sit. They know not to crane and watch, as the observer does, when the priests walk to cabinets along the Chapel’s walls to shelve golden objects and retrieve candelabras. Eventually, the movements and the Latin recitations die down. The churchgoers begin to listen to a longer English speech.
At the Chapel, I was at once allured by the enigma of the mass and disappointed at the irreversibility of my separation from it. I could not experience the collective joy and spiritual benefit of the ritual, yet my position also felt privileged. I was in the presence of something sacred, and its unknowability made me feel like I could absorb some of its power just by watching and breathing its rarefied air. There was a thrill to the removal and privileged access, but also a profound pain in knowing that I was an outsider. I was pulled apart by fascination with the power of the ritual and loneliness at the reality that my observation and removal made clear—that I could never be a part of it.
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The tension between the pain of removal from and the thrill of observation of a ritual is especially well-depicted in Tom Cruise’s isolation in the film Eyes Wide Shut amid a strange and well-appointed sex cult of New Yorkers.
The film’s centerpiece ritual scene, however, is meant for none of us—not even our bewildered, intrigued on-screen representative, Tom Cruise’s Bill Harford. The director, Stanley Kubrick, wants us to understand what it’s like to witness a ritual we can’t truly be a part of. It’s meant to be unknowable.
Cruise is led from Manhattan to a mansion outside the city that hosts a ritualistic gathering of people in Venetian masks. A man in red vestments, labeled Red Cloak in the credits, leads a chant and swings a golden orb on a chain that issues wispy smoke; his dress and ceremony are not unlike those of the Chapel’s priests. After Red Cloak strikes his staff on ornate tiles, a set of women discard their robes before the ballroom of masks and select partners for the ritual.
After wandering around the gilded halls, observing the hedonism, Cruise is summoned back to the main ballroom. The hundreds of masked heads at the ritual have turned to focus solely on him. It’s an ambush. When the room’s intimidating focus was on the women, Cruise found the ritual thrilling and sexy and secret. He was seeing something he wasn’t meant to see, and no one knew he’d gotten in on the secret. Now, the game has turned on him, as have hundreds of eyes of people he may or may not know. He senses mortal danger.
Cruise has already used the password “fidelio” to enter the party, but when Red Cloak asks Cruise for a secondary “house” password and Cruise can’t provide it, Red Cloak asks him to take off his clothes. Cruise ends up only having to remove his mask, but still, he is exposed before his society, made completely known for his alterity.
Red Cloak’s request that Cruise take off his clothes makes clear that the ritual was not for him in the same way that the Catholic mass in the University Chapel was not for me. If I had tried to join the ritual, it would have gone less poorly than Cruise’s attempt, though that would be due more to the genitality of the churchgoers than it would my ability to blend in. They, at least, would not have asked me to get naked.
Cruise’s experience symbolizes the possibility of explosiveness that accompanies removed observation of a ritual. If the purpose of the ritual comes into conflict with an observer’s presence there—for instance, when Cruise’s alterity disrupts the necessary secrecy of the ritual, or if I had disrupted the Catholic mass by singing gibberish Latin—the careful balance of observation is shattered. Watching the ritual is fun until the distance between observer and observed is annihilated and the fundamental incompatibility between the ritual and the outsider becomes painfully, explosively evident.
In the University Chapel, watching the mass was thrilling, but that postcard sensation of removal was lonely and disheartening. Here was something beautiful and rewarding, and I couldn’t be a part of it. Cruise’s type of explosive reaction makes clear what has always existed between the observer and the ritual: not only an impermeable boundary, but a painful, isolating one.
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In the years since its release, conspiracy theorists have interpreted Eyes Wide Shut as evidence of a secret cabal of “elites” suspected of killing babies and drinking their blood, controlling the weather (per a Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet), and steering the economy. These elites—or, more haphazardly, “they”—are politicians and billionaires, businessmen and aristocrats. While conspiracists insist that this elite circle is masked, as in the movie, the reality of their power is undeniable. To them, ritual is the source of elite power. By performing sex rites or ritual killings, this upper echelon draws up power from a dark well and consolidates it around them, leaving none for poor sheeple like you or I.
This is unrealistic. Why, though? It’s not totally unreasonable to assume that people with quantities of money and power most people can only imagine, people like Elon Musk or Hillary Clinton or the late Queen Elizabeth—all frequent targets of conspiracy theorists—must have gotten their power from something mysterious, totally inaccessible, and objectively wrong. Having that much does, and should, feel wrong. It follows, in a sense, that incomprehensible and immoral amounts of money and power must come from an incomprehensible and immoral source.
Narratively, these conspiracy theories are balanced. It’s unintuitive to assume that money and power have the same banal sources on a small scale as on an exponentially greater one. This is what makes Eyes Wide Shut so appealing to conspiracy theorists: it’s an explanation that makes absolutely no logical sense but that makes complete narrative sense.
Conspiracy theories are baseless, though, because they presume that all things must be balanced according to a sense of narrative cohesion. One thousand dollars and one hundred billion dollars come from relatively related processes, even though the latter is one hundred million times the former. A presidential campaign is not all that different from a city council campaign: although the scale and the funding are different, both use the same strategies to attract votes and follow similar procedures to transition from civilian to public servant. None of these things involve blood sacrifice; they are just the product of a reality that defies instinct. It’s easier to believe that a billionaire’s fortune springs from a pagan sex ritual in a country mansion than from shrewd and inscrutable business practices, just as it’s easier to believe that Zeus controls the weather than it is to understand how air pressure, humidity, and temperature come about in the troposphere. Illogical explanations, much of the time, make more narrative “sense”.
Of ritual, French sociologist Émile Durkheim said, “Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and that quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation.” These heights are not individual, as conspiracy theorists purport, but rather collective. The experience of a ritual lifts every participant up together instead of consolidating it around an individual.
The priests I observed in the University Chapel were not summoning riches or power for themselves from beyond. Watching the ritual, you could tell that it was the complete opposite. While no one is accusing the Catholic Church of using masses to drum up satanic power, those same accusations crop up all the time for rituals that are no more satanic than theirs.
In 2000, for example, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones infiltrated and recorded a meeting at Bohemian Grove, a member’s club in northern California that has consisted of several presidents, high-up government officials, and billionaires. Jones was convinced that the meetings involved Satanic human sacrifice rituals which somehow fed into the power of his “global elite.”
His video footage confirms none of this. It shows men in robes performing a ritual they call the “Cremation of Care,” by which members, “by the power of Fellowship,” burn an effigy representing the mundane cares of daily life. “Dull Care is slain!” cries the leader of the ritual; “Our funeral pyre awaits the corpse of care.”
This isn’t meant to accrue power. It’s odd and cultish, but it’s meant to be fun. The straw effigy meant to represent mundanities like tax forms and mothers-in-law was not, as Jones claims, a real dead body prepared for satanic sacrifice. If Jones had even tried, in good faith, to understand the purpose of this ritual—to let tightly-wound, wealthy, middle-aged men who long for their college frat boy days let loose for a few nights and light something on fire—he could access its symbolic language, and the veil over its function would drop. Jones’ theories and their believers, I suspect, come from a place of frustration with their alterity and a desire for narrative congruence. I find it ironic that the solution to both problems would be a genuine, clear-headed attempt at understanding.
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Rituals lack any tangible, measurable effect, yet always have a function. Their task is to “…trigger that sense of causality even if the causality is not really there,” in the words of Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist of ritual. Performing a set of actions with no real effect on the real world is useful because that performance affects the participant, and because the act of performing rituals collectively makes the process feel more real and powerful. Burning a straw figure that represents dullness is much more fun with a costumed group and a script than it is alone. Praying alone is powerful, but attending a mass—performing the same actions, singing the same songs, and watching priests carry out the same ritualistic performance—these habits, this sense of connection, and the power in a group of people all expecting the same result of the ritual is what makes it real.
Whether or not God is on the other side, the ritual makes churchgoers feel as though they’re connecting with Him, since that is the expected result of otherwise meaningless actions. This is the crux of why I can only ever be an observer of the mass: I can’t expect the intended result. The function of the ritual is lost on me because I don’t believe in God.
I could learn Latin and practice my hymns and understand perfectly why everyone sits when they do and stands up when they do, and why the priests need to carry around big gold candelabras, and I would still be an outsider—the arched frame would just narrow a bit, zooming closer. All that would change would be the physical distance from which I observe the ritual. I couldn’t truly be a part of it because I could never truly experience its function. It’s disappointing. If Tom Cruise can’t understand and commit to the purpose of the occult sex rituals, he can’t derive from them what the true participants can. He could master the language of the masks and the meaning of the performance. He could know that there really is no “house” password, and still, he would be an outsider. Alex Jones could have watched his grainy footage of the Bohemian Grove ritual a thousand times, infiltrated the group itself, and said the corny chants alongside Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger, and still, he would not be a true participant. The suffering of otherness, of watching the ritual and knowing you can’t belong and experience its “exaltations”, would remain.
According to Xygalatas, in fire walking rituals in Spain, inflections of the heartbeats of the watchers and the walkers synchronize, peaking and falling at the same moments. I thought that was beautiful. I found it enchanting that a spiritual action with no tangible consequences could create an undeniably real, biological connection between people, the observers and the leaders of the ritual becoming as one. Watching the mass at the Chapel, I imagined the power of their togetherness, their “extraordinary height of exaltation”, and was profoundly jealous. Maybe I could join and be a part of something really extraordinary. My heartbeat would synchronize with God’s, and the pain of separation would vanish. I would exist inside the frame.
Then I read the original study Xygalatas had referenced in the interview. The researchers studied “12 fire-walkers, nine spectators who were either relatives or friends of at least one fire-walker, and 17 spectators, not related to any of the locals, who were visiting the village for the ritual”. The heartbeats of the relatives and friends synchronized with the fire-walkers.
The spectators’ heart rates showed no correlation at all.