marriage arespecial-agent rituals, in which the agent of the ritual is connected
to the deity more directly than the patient of the ritual. Now consider sacrifice.
Here the priest (agent) sacrifices an animal to the deity (patient). As any
participant of the ritual would agree, the purpose of the sacrifice is to express
gratitude, avert danger, or secure good relationship. Obviously, the deity did
not go through any enabling ritual beforehand to become a participant of the
ritual: a sacrifice is therefore an example of aspecial-patient ritual. The animal
in this ritual is aninstrumentconnected to the ritual action. Sometimes
an instrument can be closer to the deity than either the agent or the patient
(think about using holy water as a healing substance), resulting in aspecial-
instrument ritual.
Lawson and McCauley suggest that changes brought about by special-agent
rituals will be“super-permanent,”and such rituals will be therefore performed
only once in a lifetime (by the same participants). Special-patient or special-
instrument rituals, in contrast, will have less permanent effects, and will be
repeated over time (with the same patient as a participant). Due to their once-
in-a-lifetime nature, special-agent rituals will involve higher levels ofsensory
pageantry, that is, they will be more fancifully celebrated and emotionally
more appealing. Religions need both special-agent and special-patient (or
instrument) rituals, Lawson and McCauley suggest, in order that they have a
“balanced system:”a religion without any special-agent ritual will be tedious;
one with only special-agent rituals will stimulate the participants excessively.
The application of Lawson and McCauley’s theory to the New Testament
resulted in an interesting debate about the nature of ancient Jewish rituals
and the interpretation of the baptism of John against such a background. As
Kimmo Ketola (2007, pp. 102–3) and others (Uro, 2011d, pp. 123–6; Biró,
2013, pp. 133–41) observed, ancient Judaism lacked special-agent rituals:
circumcision, for example, could be theoretically performed by anyone. Based
on this observation, Uro suggested that John’s baptism introduced a special-
agent ritual thatfilled the void, which could explain its success. Another
interesting domain of application is the interpretation of healing and exorcism
rituals (Uro, 2016, pp. 99–127). In the Epistle of James we read about a
particular healing ritual among early Christians:“Are any among you sick?
They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them,
anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord”(Jas. 5:14). This ritual is
most naturally interpreted as a special-agent ritual, where the church elders have
the most direct connection to the deity. However, the healing was not
groom ordained the priest performing the wedding ceremony, does it make the agent and
patients of the wedding having the same immediacy to the divine agent?Ad absurdum, could
a wedding be a special-patient ritual if the bride was baptized by a priest who was two
generations older that the priest performing the wedding? The answer probably lies with
assigning the notion of immediacy to certain roles in the religious system and not to individuals.
116 Cognitive Science and the New Testament