Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Any starting point that cannot account for its emergence out of ritual must therefore be of limited value, and this is the case for philosophy and all its children, which includes all of the human sciences. "Groups," "society," "mind," "consciousness," "Being and Becoming" and all the rest are concepts raised over the graves of ritual. This would mean that a real origin would have to precede ritual. But, of course, even a word like "ritual" is a product of the human sciences and is therefore a way of looking at rituals through the rearview mirror, so to speak. Still, what we now call "rituals" can share a common point of reference with peoples who engage in rituals, and with peoples who have left us records of the rituals they once engaged in in a way concepts that emerged in philosophy's wake can't. We could ask, for example, what happens when a particular act is performed and those performing the act could give us an answer. We could elicit a language, overlapping across ritual scenes, of interactions between beings performing rituals and beings summoned, or appeased, or vivified, by those rituals. And we can ask about the origins of rituals because any group of people performing rituals will have their own accounts of the origins of those rituals because the origins are part of their efficacy. Are inquiring into, narrating, and performing the origins of the things we do no longer part of the efficacy of those doings? If not, when did they cease to be so?”

— Adam Katz, Talk of the Center (Adam Katz) · Essays & Articles