gods and spirits are themselves said to be doing things—are per-
formed rather rarely, in fact, generally only once for a given person.
Think of weddings, initiations, birth rituals, etc. Rituals with special
patients are often repeated. People offer a sacrifice to the ancestors,
but they have to do so repeatedly in order to guarantee that the ances-
tors will oblige (with good crops or protection).
There is another difference. According to Lawson and McCauley,
rituals with special agents usually trigger high emotional arousal, often
by using time-tested techniques such as loud music, mind-altering
substances, feasting or fasting, etc. Rituals with special patients (we act
[260] upon the gods) are generally much more sober. Naturally, this is only
arelativedifference, given the particular ambience of each religious
tradition. You certainly find more colorful rituals in Voodoo than in
Methodism and more visible excitement in Brazil than in Finland. But
within each particular tradition, agent-special ceremonies generally
turn up the emotional volume, relative to what you find in patient-
special rituals. Why is that? Why should we have higher or lower lev-
els of sensory stimulation in ritual, depending on which role the
superhuman agent is playing in the script?
A tempting answer would be that some rituals are "louder" because
that makes them more convincing. After all, gods and spirits are gen-
erally discreet. The claim that they reallywere involved in turning the
boys into men or these two people into a family is, at first blush, diffi-
cult to believe. So perhaps having lots of sensory stimulation is a way
to make such effects more plausible. The patient-special rituals, on the
other hand, where people do things to gods and spirits, would not face
this difficulty. It does not require much effort to believe that our own
actions have effects on distant, generally invisible agents, since after all
many of our actions have effects on persons not present.
This is not a very sound answer, for it presupposes that which we
want to understand. True, people in many places use cheap gadgets
(loud musical instruments, drugs, masks, etc.) to accompany the sup-
posed presence of the ancestors or other such agents. Now gewgaws
and music may well strengthen your impression that the gods are
around (I doubt that, but let us accept it for the sake of argument), but
that will work only if you already assume that they are around. Other-
wise the gadgets remain gadgets.
The connection between rituals and social effects may offer a bet-
ter explanation. One-shot rituals, performed in principle only once for
a given person, are centered on the social changes introduced by peo-
RELIGION EXPLAINED