Thinking of rituals and rationalism as polar opposites is the projection that shouldn't be applied. Ancient rituals should be seen as an early encoding of knowl

Thinking of rituals and rationalism as polar opposites is the projection that shouldn't be applied. Ancient rituals should be seen as an early encoding of knowledge, not as an antithesis to rationalism. Some of that knowledge, or perhaps much of it, must have been utterly wrong if it only evolved through random mutations, deliberate nonconformism and natural selection. But it's easy to see how a group with the ritual of "eat your dead" would soon be displaced by a group with the ritual of "cook your dead before eating" who would still be outperformed in the long run by a group with "hide your dead somewhere where they can't give you nasty infections". If you have never heard of a distinction between the natural and the supernatural then every learned act is a ritual and every ritual is a productive act. Sure there's a tendency to dismiss every artifact that doesn't have an obvious purpose as ritualistic in the most hand-wavy way imaginable, but it's not wrong, it's just a bit too easy perhaps.