Food, Ritual, and Death

Food, Ritual, and Death Ben Okri (bio) Human life is perched constantly on a mystery. We do not witness our birth and we are absent at our death. These two great ellipses shape the core of our existence. We are held tremulous in the stretch of unknowing. The things we know for an absolute fact are few. We know, sometimes, that we live, we exist. We intuit that we shall die. All we know about with any certainty is now, this ever moving, ever still moment. One of the things that makes us certain of our existence is pain. Of all the pains hunger is the most constant. Hunger is therefore one of the most existential things about us. We know nothing of the origins of food. The plants and animals from which we derive our nourishment have been here longer than we have. They are requisite for our existence. Our being is contingent upon them. They on the other hand are contingent upon sunlight, water, air, and earth—the four elements, as it were. Food therefore is a repository of the magic of sunlight, the mystery of water, the omnipresence of air, and the steadfastness of the earth. If you like, food is the storing house of the richness of the universe, the minerals of the earth, which was once stardust, the gold of the sun, the vitality of the air, the secret power of water. Because food has its source in the elements, from the universe, food has something sacred about it. This is the reason ancient cultures associate food with the gods. Food has something semi-divine. It brings us riches beyond the earth. To eat is to be nourished by the universe, by captured sunlight, and the alchemy of the elements. This is probably why harvest and harvest-time has a powerful place in ancient cults and religions, in pagan celebrations of the fertility of the earth. Think of all our food festivities, our Passovers, our Eid al-Fitrs, our Thanksgivings, our Christmas feasts, our Diwalis, our cornucopia. All across the world food brings people together. It calls forth from people a sense of gratitude and worship, celebration and mystery. For this reason food is linked with ritual. We find ourselves in this space of life and the mystery is why we are here. We have had intuitions as to our dim purpose here, but as nature and the universe give us no clear signs about it we are compelled as human beings to perpetually question our place here. We have observed the seasons, the movement of the sun, the passing from night to day. We have observed the changes in our bodies, in our fortunes. We sense a rhythm in the universe. We sense a rhythm in our lives. We are born, we age, we fall in love, give birth, then we die. The space between birth and death fills us with anxiety, with a sense of emptiness. Are our lives fundamentally tragic? To answer some of these questions is [End Page 1034] why we have ritual. A ritual is a way of giving meaning to a period in time. It is a recognition that some moments, some experiences, carry a secret significance that should be acknowledged. We could call these threshold experiences. Ritual gains its power through repetition. Repetition marks it in time, infuses it with periodicity, till it gains a power of its own. This can rise to the status of tradition, where ritual is fossilised. At the living moment ritual is a way of bringing the power of the higher to the lower, of acknowledging the subconscious content, the symbolic content, of our lives. Ritual is the celebration of a deeper dimension of our being, a participation in the invisible. We shake hands, anthropologists inform us, because it was originally a way of saying we are unarmed and come in peace. Before we eat we invoke the ancestors, and thank the gods, as a way of saying we may have prepared the food but we are helpless before its source. When a child is born we have elaborate ceremonies because we want to mark the momentous events whose origin is a mystery

Aesthetics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Nothing · Omnipresence · Vitality · Witness · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Philosophy

• Hearse Pies and Pastry Coffins

  Open Access•Amanda E Herbert, Michael Walkden•Global Food History•2023

  Add to list

• Archaeology of Organic Heritage

  Open Access•Alino Sumi, Alok Kumar Kanungo•Archaeologies•2025

  Add to list