The evolutionary changes that furnished humans with the musical brain—an enlarged prefrontal cortex, and all the myriad bilateral connections with cortical and subcortical areas—formed a crucial step in social development of our species. With these evolutionary changes came self-consciousness (an aspect of perspective taking), which brought with it spiritual yearnings and the ability to consider that there might be things more important than one’s own life. I believe a particular kind of music—songs associated with religion, ritual, and belief—served a necessary function in creating early human social systems and societies. Music helped to infuse ritual practices with meaning, to make them memorable, and to share them with our friends, family, and living groups, facilitating a social order. This yearning for meaning lies at the foundation of what makes us human.
Like music, religion is found in all human societies (and for both, people disagree as to whether they have an evolutionary or a supernatural basis). In spite of great differences in beliefs and practices and in geographical location, no known human culture lacks religion. This strongly suggests that religion is more than a meme—information transmitted to people through culture—and may have an evolutionary basis. Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, taught us a century ago that anything that is universal to human culture is likely to contribute to human survival. Modern biologists extend this notion to animal behavior, looking for links across species as a way of understanding the evolution of the brain. Behaviors that we consider quintessentially human don’t just fall out of the sky from nowhere, but are distributed along a continuum of behaviors that are remarkably similar to those we see in animals (and so presumably contributed to animal survival). It may not be possible to cleanly distinguish ritual from religion, and perhaps the distinction is not as important as understanding the continuous nature of how they relate to one another, of how rituals became bound up into religion in the first place.
Rituals involve repetitive movement. Many animals show ritualized behavior, such as dogs circling a few times before lying down, birds swaying from one leg to another, or raccoons washing their faces after a meal. What separates these from human rituals is a cognitive component, human self-consciousness: We are aware (most of the time) of our behaviors, and we assign them a higher purpose and sense of meaning. We wash our hands because of
germs
. We light candles to mark an event. We talk about our rituals and sing about them. What sets religious practices apart is that they are
sets
of rituals, bound to a common narrative or worldview. That is, rituals exist in a part-whole relationship to religious practice.
The anthropologist Roy Rappaport defined ritual as “acts of display through which one or more participants transmit information concerning their physiological, psychological, or sociological states either to themselves or to one or more of their [fellow] participants.”
The
display
aspect is critical—rituals serve as a form of
communication
. Also critical is the inclusive nature of his definition, which explicitly allows for the display to be self-reflexive, to serve only the person engaged in the ritual. Thus, an individual washing her hands prior to preparing ceremonial food, or laying sticks at a fire altar, or even musicians executing a set of scales as a pre-concert warm-up—all signify to the doer that she is becoming ready (through this preparatory ritual) to advance to the next stage of a plan or operation.
Rappaport defined religion as “sets of sacred beliefs held in common by groups of people and . . . the more or less standard actions (rituals) that are undertaken with respect to these beliefs.” He defines
sacred
as those beliefs that are unverifiable through normal physical means or through the normal five senses—the belief or faith in things that are not corporeal but that can influence the course of our lives.
Religious ceremonies and practices almost always incorporate ritual behavior—repetitive motor actions: bowing seven times, making the sign of the cross, folding and unfolding your hands in a particular way. Anthropologists have identified certain features of human religious practices, believed to be universal, applying across disparate cultures, times, and places:
1. Actions are divorced from their usual goals. We may wash parts of the body that are already clean, talk to others who are not evidently there, pass a piece of fruit from hand to hand in a circle (when clearly the goal is not to pass the fruit
to
someone, but just to engage in the act of passing), walk around a stone exactly four times, or perform actions that do not have an immediate tangible goal.
2. The activity is typically undertaken in order to get something: more rain, more yams at harvest time, to heal a sick child, to appease the gods.
3. The practices are typically considered compulsory. Community members consider it unsafe or unwise (or improper) not to perform them.
4. Often no explanation is given about the form of the activity. That is, while all participants may understand the goal of the ritual (e.g., to influence the gods), typically no one provides an explanation of how
these particular actions
will yield the desired outcome.
5. Participants engage in behaviors with more order, regularity, and uniformity than in their normal lives: They line up instead of walking or standing anywhere they please; they dance instead of moving; they greet one another with special signs, gestures, or words; they wear similar or special clothing or makeup.
6. Objects are taken from the environment and infused with special meaning, sometimes by piling, ordering, stacking, or aligning them.
7. The environment is restructured and delimited—a holy circle, a taboo area, a special place that only the elders or the pure can enter.
8. There is a strong emotional drive to perform the activity, and anxiety is experienced if it is not performed (or if participants feel it hasn’t been done properly); individuals feel a sense of relief when it is completed.
9. Actions, gestures, or words are repeated—perhaps three to ten times or more. The exact number is crucial to proper observance, and if the wrong number is used, the performer starts over.
10. There is a strong emotional drive to perform the ritual in a particular way—the actions are somewhat rigidly interpreted and defined. Someone in the community—perhaps an elder—is known to perform each activity best, and others try to emulate that example.
11. The rituals almost always involve music or rhythmic, pitch-intoned chanting.
These features are found in the religious ceremonies of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Taoists, Buddhists, and Native Americans, as well as hundreds of ceremonies of preliterate and preindustrialized societies. And the story of ritual is intimately bound up with music—which almost always accompanies it—and with human nature. Whether you believe that man invented religion or received it from God is not the issue, and I don’t want to get distracted by that question here. The remarkable similarity of human religious rites to one another, and to certain animal rituals, can be invoked as evidence for either view. Several recent scientific studies have shown that there exist neural regions that might be called “God centers”: When they are electrically stimulated, people report having intense feelings of spirituality and communication with God. Some scientists argued overconfidently from these findings that religious belief must be “merely” a product of the brain, and that therefore humans must have invented God.
I told all this to my good friend, Hayyim Kassorla, a learned and respected Orthodox rabbi, and without missing a beat he snapped back, “
So what
if there’s a center in the brain that makes people think of God? Why wouldn’t there be? Maybe God put it there to help us to understand and communicate with him.” My mother, an observant Jew, added, “The similarity of human religious practice across cultures is because God found that these practices work and so he gave them—with some variation—to all peoples.” The point is that we can consider the biological, evolutionary, and neural evidence for ritual behaviors without necessarily impinging on anyone’s personal beliefs about the origin of the universe or spirituality. We don’t need to resolve the physical/metaphysical question before proceeding with the evolutionary one.
Ritual behavior is evidently innate and hardwired in humans. Most children enter a stage of development around age two, peaking around eight, in which they show phases of ritual behaviors: perfectionism, collecting, attachment to favorite objects, repetition of actions, and even a preoccupation with the ordering of things—a stage of “it has to be done this way” in which children may line up their toys or organize their environment in particular ways. Young girls hold tea parties for their real and imaginary friends. The table is set
just so
. The guests have to sit in assigned places. The hostess can become agitated when things are not organized or consistent with her own internal notion of the proper ritual order: “You sit here, he sits here. No! Mr. Rabbit gets his tea
first
!”
Spontaneously—without explicit instruction and without ever having heard of it from someone else—many children connect their ad hoc rituals to the supernatural or to magic, and they imagine effects the rituals might have on a variety of outcomes, from the weather to telekinesis to getting their way.
Of course I didn’t engage in tea party rituals as a child since I was a boy—my ritual phase was more automotive and involved seat belts and the seat belt song. In 1961, when I was three, the Ad Council of America launched a program of public service messages on television about the importance of “buckling up for safety” with car seat belts. A catchy jingle exhorted us to tell our parents that there was a correct order, a sequence of events that must be respected:
Before
driving, buckle up your safety belt. I remember hearing that jingle and singing it all around the house. Seat belts were new in 1961 and most cars didn’t have them; my parents had learned to drive without them. Although our family car, a Simca, was equipped with them, my parents hadn’t gotten used to using them, and probably weren’t convinced of their effectiveness. (There hadn’t been any crash test dummy experiments done yet.) My mother tells me that whenever she and my father got in the car, I would sing the little jingle and get furious if they drove even a few feet without having buckled up. I was deep in my “correct order of things” phase.
In children, rituals tend to be associated with anxiety states—fear of strangers, the unknown, attack by strangers or animals, and possible contamination. This leads to bedtime rituals such as checking for monsters, wanting to hear bedtime stories, or holding your special fuzzy blue blanket. The ritual adds a sense of order, constancy, and familiarity that psychologists believe counteracts the uncertainty and fear of the unknown dangers. Oxytocin—the trust-inducing hormone that is released during orgasm and communal singing—has been found to be connected to the performance of ritual, suggesting a neurochemical basis for why rituals have a comforting effect.
These behaviors are so widespread, and occur so regularly in childhood, that they no doubt have an evolutionary and genetic origin. A drive toward creating symmetry, toward lining up and ordering one’s environment, is present even in birds and some mammals. From an adaptation perspective, this order makes any intrusion by an outsider immediately and clearly visible. Those of our ancestors who found pleasure in hand washing or in creating symmetrical protective borders around their encampments may have been more successful at fending off both micro- and macroscopic threats to their health and safety, and passed on a desire to do so to us through the oxytocin system. Richard Dawkins’s observation is compelling: No one of us alive today had an ancestor who died in infancy. Every one of our ancestors lived long enough to pass on his or her genes to us. While we can’t say that every minute behavior of our ancestors was adaptive, none of them could have been grossly maladaptive, to the point of causing early death, or of making them fatally unattractive to a member of the opposite sex. The ubiquity of ritual behaviors does suggest they served, in some form, an important survival function.
Some ritual behaviors become uncontrollable, and when that happens nowadays we diagnose it as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Some researchers have speculated that impaired dopamine and GABA regulation—and the consequent abnormal control of the brain’s “habit circuits” in the basal ganglia—lead to OCD in both humans and animals. The basal ganglia store chunks or summaries of motor behavior, and when they are inadequately regulated, one only finds emotional satisfaction when they are allowed to run in a loop of repeated activity, over and over again.
Rituals in animals and adult humans tend to be born from many of the same concerns as children’s rituals—purity, contamination, safety, but also mating. To claim that human rituals, even when encased within sacred religious systems, are
uniquely
human, is to ignore the rich repertoire of animal rituals that resemble them. As just one of many possible examples, consider the mating ritual of the Australian bowerbird (of the family
Ptilono rhynchidae
). While it may strike us as elaborate and complex, it is in fact no more so than the mating rituals of hundreds of other species of birds, mammals, amphibians, and fish. Once a year, the male birds spend several days gathering brightly colored objects such as feathers, shells, and berries to create bowers, elaborately decorated structures, usually shaped like a pathway, a hut, or a small pole. After the bowers are completed, the males sing and dance, concluding a successful ritual by selecting a female to mate with (and the female typically chooses the male based on the quality of his bower and his singing and dancing).