URGENCY AND RITUAL PRECAUTIONS
The similarities highlighted by Fiske do not mean that rituals are
obsessive behaviors. But they suggest that some elements of rituals
trigger activation of those particular mental systems that work in
overdrive, as it were, in obsessive disorders. In particular, many ele-
ments of ritual scripts include cues that activate the contagion system,
the specialized system that deals with undetectable contaminants.
That it is dangerous to handle dirt, excrement or putrefying carcasses
is an intuition delivered by that system. All such intuitions are very
[240] easily acquired during early childhood and thereafter are quite impos-
sible to discard. This system triggers a powerful emotion of fear and
disgust and a strong desire to avoid the substances in question, with-
out providing a description of what the danger is. It also leads people
to imitate other people's precautions against potential danger, even
absent an explanation of how the precautions work. This is why peo-
ple in many human groups are easily convinced that the preparation
of certain foods requires extensive precautions, and why they rarely
venture to try out different methods.
Many elements in ritual scripts activate this contagion system.
The insistence on cleaning, cleansing, purifying, making a particular
space safer, avoiding any contact between what is in that space and
the outside—all these are cues that indicate possible contamination.
This may be why we find parallel emotions and behaviors in many
rituals. That there is a potential danger is intuitively perceived
although no danger need be explicitly described. That specific and
very precise rules must be followed seems compelling although there
is no clear connection between them and the danger that is to be
avoided. The overall sense of urgency may then be a consequence of
the fact that one of the mental systems activated is one that happens
to specialize, outside ritual contexts, in the management of precau-
tions against undetectable hazards. Any cultural artifact, such as a rit-
ual prescription, that alludes to such situations and presents what are
usual cues for this contagion system is likely to be highly attention-
grabbing. So it is perhaps not surprising that people feel emotionally
bound to perform rituals in the right way and that they fear dangers
that are not directly detectable. This is what the contagion system is
all about. These obvious features of ritual are not so much features of
ritual as features of the system that makes rituals highly salient cogni-
tive gadgets.
RELIGION EXPLAINED