Festive rituals – and why we celebrate them

We generally celebrate our own birthdays just once a year – on a specific date in the calendar, officially documented in our birth certificate. Ceremonial events such as a coronation, the awarding of a ­Nobel Prize or the festivities to celebrate a cultural institution’s centenary follow for the most part a predetermined procedure and tend to be open only to invited guests, even if they can be expected to attract considerable public interest. Private parties and public ceremonies alike thus appear – at least at first glance – to be characterised by fairly rigid structures and regularities.

Religious rituals are often bound by strict rules too; the dates on which certain important religious festivals take place are for example dictated by the Christian calendar – Easter for instance doesn’t fall on a specific date like Christmas does, but is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. And even if the order of service in the Catholic Church is not exactly dictated by the Roman Missal – an official liturgical book containing texts, prayers and other instructions – it is certainly shaped to a large extent by it.

However, traditions such as these, which have evolved over hundreds of years, shouldn’t give the impression that celebrations, ceremonies and rituals are rigid or indeed monolithic entities. On the contrary, over more than 2,000 years of the Church’s history, several liturgical reforms have taken place with profound practical consequences. And if we look a little more closely, we soon realise that even regularly recurring celebrations of Mass and other church services are by no means always identical. Each occasion is as unique as all the many birthdays and ceremonies we have experienced during the course of our lives.

“A ritual, celebration or ceremony has whatever meaning any or all of its participants attribute to it.”

The research conducted into rituals over the past decades has shed considerable light on these hitherto largely neglected dynamics and produced some fascinating new insights. The participants in one particular ritual were asked for example what the meaning of the ritual was. Their responses were so diverse that some researchers concluded that a ritual with no universally acknowledged meaning can have no meaning at all. That’s not necessarily true, of course. In fact, a ritual, celebration or ceremony has whatever meaning any or all of its participants attribute to it.

Thus celebrations not only change in structure over time, and on a more detailed level each time they take place; the way they are perceived also varies depending on how they are individually interpreted. Let us use an example to illustrate this: when does one begin celebrating the completion of a university degree? Is it when one has taken the ­final exam or been given the final grade, when one tells one’s friends and family or when one is officially presented with the degree certificate at a university graduation ceremony? This will vary from one person to the next. Equally individual interpret­ations apply to the beginning or end of a birthday celebration or coronation ceremony. Our framing of an event, that is to say the way we transition from our everyday routine to an exceptional occurrence, thus depends on how we perceive it and attribute meaning or purpose to it. To this extent, it is subject to various fashions, trends and indeed cultural differences.

Hardly surprisingly, the dynamic way in which celebrations, ceremonies and rituals evolve, as we have seen from the above examples, also differs from one culture to another. This is obvious from the briefest glance at cross-cultural issues and practices such as monarchic rule or the burial of the dead, yet even these have trad­itionally been interpreted in such hom­ogenising fashion – even by scientists – as to virtually eradicate any of their culturally specific features.

Until the second half of the twentieth century, historians and religious ­scholars still believed that there was and always had been just one principal form of monarchic power – that known as “sacred kingship”. Upon closer scrutiny, however, not one of the numerous types of monarchy identified by historians was found to share a single defining criterion. Indeed, it has been discovered that the many forms of royal rule worldwide – from the basis for their legitimation to the way they design their ­enthronement ceremonies – differ just as widely as the societies in which they evolved.

It’s much the same with funeral ceremonies. Ranging from burials and cremations to the custom of leaving the dead in trees or in the jungle, each reflects a culturally specific concept of what it means to be human and of a possible continued existence after death. The spectrum is huge, people believing in everything from immortality and resurrection to the possibility of reincarnation or of passage into the realm of one’s ancestors. The festivities associated with these rituals are intended not least to help surviving friends and family come to terms with their grief and sorrow.

So why do we celebrate? Throughout history, all cultures have developed specific structural rituals for their daily coexistence that are aimed at encouraging socially desirable behaviour while outlawing and sanctioning undesirable conduct. In this context, celebrations are exceptional occurrences that foster a spirit of community and a sense of identity. Celebrations are as diverse as life itself and as the many cultures and religions that surround us and that we are aware of from the history of ­humankind. At the same time, the way we perceive and interpret celebrations differs greatly and is highly individual. However, what unites all the aforementioned examples of celebrations, cere­monies and rituals is that people of all cultures have always seen them as a way of elevating their daily lives, and have arranged them for themselves accordingly. As exceptional events, they help to ­varying extents to give meaning to life and to overcome crises such as suffering, illness and death. ―

Professor Gregor Ahn is the founding director of the Institute for Religious Studies at Heidelberg University, where he was a professor from 1996 to 2025. Besides religious theory and ancient Iranian religious history, his research focuses primarily on rituals and the role that religions play in digital media and games. He conducted research on Iranian religious history at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute of Oriental Philology on a DAAD scholarship from 1990 to 1991.