The eclipse and the shared rituals

For thousands of years, humans have looked to the sky seeking answers, and few phenomena have sparked as much fascination as an eclipse. When the Sun disappears in broad daylight, the order of the world is disrupted. Before understanding what was happening, different cultures sought explanations and turned that extraordinary moment into omens, celebrations, prayers, and various rituals. And it is that eclipses have not only been explained but also ritualized.

Today we know what an eclipse is, we can calculate, predict, and scientifically explain it, but on Wednesday we did something very ancient again: we gathered to observe it. We no longer need a ritual to protect ourselves from an angry god or to scare away a monster eating the Sun, but we continue to turn an extraordinary phenomenon into a shared experience. And here appears one of the deepest functions of rituals, that of connecting us. Émile Durkheim explained it more than a century ago. When people gather, concentrate their attention on the same symbols, and share an emotion, what he called collective effervescence occurs, an energy that strengthens bonds and makes people feel part of something larger than themselves. The ritual not only connects us to what we consider sacred, but also reminds us that we are part of a group. Harvey Whitehouse and Jonathan Lanman delved deeper into this idea by studying the relationship between ritual, cohesion, and identity. They showed how rituals strengthen identification with the group, trust, cooperation, and bonds between its members. Whitehouse describes them as a "social glue" that helps keep groups together.

A major festival is much more than music and food. A funeral is much more than a ceremony. A vigil, a gathering, a sporting celebration, or a family dinner can also be rituals. They are moments when we do things together, share symbols and emotions, and recognize ourselves in each other.

Rituals build identity because they tell us who we are, but also with whom we are, as they form a common symbolic language. At the same time, they connect time. When we celebrate a festival that our grandparents already celebrated, we recover a memory. When we share it with our children, we transmit to them a way of belonging and building collective identity. The ritual thus becomes a bridge between past, present, and future.

But here arises a paradox of our time. We live in a society that constantly drives us towards individualism, with great risk, because a society cannot be sustained solely on individuals. We need spaces where we can meet and build an 'us'. Robert Putnam described the decline of many forms of community participation and the loss of social capital, the networks of relationships, trust, and norms of reciprocity that sustain a community. For Putnam, these bonds are fundamental to collective life.

That is why, when rituals disappear, we not only lose traditions, but we also lose opportunities to meet, trust, share memories, and feel that we belong somewhere.

Reclaiming rituals is not about looking back, but about understanding what we need to move forward. In an increasingly individualized world, continuing to meet, celebrate, remember, and share is also a way of caring for the most essential aspect that defines us as humans, the bonds that make us a community.