Farewell and new beginning: The Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Rites of Passage 3658399503, 9783658399504

Table of contents :
Preface
Thanks
Contents
Part I: Departure
1: Retrospective and New Approach: From 1997 to 2020
2: Religious Traditional Rituals Today
3: Research Questions
4: Benefits of this Work
5: Disciplinary Location
6: Location of the Work Within the Scientific Quality Criteria
Part II: Exploration of Resources
7: Coffee and Salt: A Scientific-Theoretical Positioning of Relevant Conceptualizations
8: Psychological Terms in the Research Field
8.1 My Father’s Ashes: Symbol and Metaphor
8.2 The Garden of Images: Religion as a System of Metaphors
8.3 Rituals as Metaphorical Actions
8.4 Linear and Cyclical Rituals
8.5 Examples of the Metaphorical Structure of Rituals
8.6 Beyond Action: A Psychosocial Definition of Rituals
8.7 The Place at the Border: A Psychosocial Definition of Transitional Rituals
8.8 Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals: An Overview
8.9 Related Terms to Ritual and Their Discriminatory Power to Ritual
9: Religious Practice Today: An Assessment of the Current Situation
9.1 Religious Practice Today
9.2 Atheism and Religious Participation Today
9.3 Religious Practice in Ritual Yesterday and Today
9.4 Transitional Transitional Rituals Today
Part III: Empirical Explorations
10: The Qualitative Methodology: Scientific Justification
10.1 Methodological Positioning of the Chosen Instruments
10.2 The Qualitative Method in the Context of Constructivism
10.3 Interview Forms: What Effect Do Different Standardizations Have?
10.4 The Role of Language in Qualitative Methods
10.5 Justification of the Method by Means of the Quality Criteria
10.6 Ethical Precautions During Interviews
11: The Interviews: Preliminary Work
11.1 The Narrative, Non-directive Interview
11.2 Competencies of the Interviewer
11.3 Forms of Recording and Transcriptionxx
11.4 Selection and Acquisition of Interview Partners
11.5 Implementation Along the Interview Guide
11.6 Evaluation Procedure Chosen
11.7 Case Descriptions
Part IV: The Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals
12: The Visible Psychosocial Agents
12.1 The Role of the Initiator
12.2 The Role of the Liturgist
12.3 The Festive Community
13: Overview of the Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals
14: Transitional Rituals as Architects of Experienced Reality
14.1 Overview
14.2 Transitional Rituals Structure Reality
14.3 Sense and Sensuality: Transitional Rituals Make Reality Communicable
14.4 The Normative Power of the Factual: Rituals as a Framework of Normality
14.5 Rituals: A Celebration for Life – Transitional Rituals Stage the Non-Ordinary
14.6 “When We Fight Our Nature”: Transitional Rituals Control Feelings and Actions
14.7 Music as a Motor for Controlling Feelings and Actions
14.8 The Importance of Narration in Transitional Rituals
15: Transitional Rituals as Mediators and Stabilizers of Individual and Social Identity
15.1 Identity or the Art of Building a Mobile
15.2 Identity and Ritual
15.3 Transitional Rituals as Construction Scripts for Promoting Coherence
15.4 Biography and Ritual
16: Transitional Rituals for Group Initiation and Group Bonding
16.1 Overview: The Social Context
16.2 Transitional Rituals as Social Initiation Processes
16.3 Group Bonding
16.4 Opportunities and Risks of Initiation Processes Today
17: Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals Using the Example of Death and Dying
17.1 Dying and Death Today
17.2 Dying
17.3 Burial
18: Psychological Suggestions for the Design of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals: A Survey
Part V: Summary and Conclusion
19: Summary
20: Open Questions, Limits of This Work
21: Correspondances Vivantes: Social Challenges Today in the Context of Rites of Passage
Bibliography

Citation preview

Kathrin Rothenberg-Elder

Farewell and new beginning The Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Rites of Passage

Farewell and new beginning

Kathrin Rothenberg-Elder

Farewell and new beginning The Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Rites of Passage

Kathrin Rothenberg-Elder Psychologie DIPLOMA Private Hochschulgesellschaft mb Bad Sooden-Allendorf, Germany Editorial Contact  Marija Kojic

ISBN 978-3-658-39950-4    ISBN 978-3-658-39951-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 1998, 2023 This book is a translation of the original German edition „Abschied und Neubeginn“ by RothenbergElder, Kathrin, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH in 2021. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Dedicated to my brother Dr. Axel Siebert. His joie de vivre and his commitment to beautiful celebrations are a wonderful sign of his love for life, and his desire to make life beautiful for others, which is so highly respected. In this, he is always an unattainable role model and inspiration for me. “The entire world is a narrow bridge. But the main thing is not to fear” (liturgical hymn “Kol Haolam Kulo”, Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava in Pasternak 1994, p. 220).

Preface

Before starting, a little help: If you only have half an hour, I advise you to go to the last chapter, the summary and conclusion. If you only have an hour, it is best to focus on the fourth part, the main substantive part of this book. If you only have two hours, it is best to combine the first two parts with the fifth part and skip the methods chapter. I cannot and will not claim to have stringently selected every reference for its effect or usefulness to this work. Some books are old favourites of mine, others I also read out of more general curiosity with rather loose connections to the research project. However, I evaluated the position of each reference by cross-­ referencing. One work I have copiously copied from as a rights holder because it is the pre-release version of this edition is: Kiss, K. (later: Kiss-Elder, then Rothenberg-Elder) (1999) Abschied und Neubeginn, Stuttgart: Centaurus. Interviews from the 2020 series will be provided upon request. For Bible passages, I resorted to Luther 1912 via the platform https://www. bibel-­online.net/, in the choice of terms to the Latinized Greek terms such as “Deut” for Deuteronomy, as a middle ground between the simplistic counts “1st Moses”, etc., and the Jewish terms unfamiliar to many. Which professions and target groups can benefit from this book? I wrote this book for everyone, because for everyone life thresholds are relevant, some of them also obligatory, that concerns, to the memory, the death of loved ones as well as the own death.

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Preface

I hope to provide assistance and suggestions, especially to my colleagues in the humanities and social sciences who work with, reflect on, and shape departures and new beginnings with individuals and social groups, including the all-important question of the wise accompaniment of social transformation. I look forward to thinking further together. Cologne / Germany, Deutschland

Kathrin Rothenberg-Elder

Thanks

Thank you notes, as I’ve detailed here, are a part of many, if not all, threshold rituals. Thanks to… of my family, next to my brother (see above) especially to my husband Rafi and to my children, especially also to my daughters Charlotte, Liv and Helene, Victoria in Memoriam and my stepson Jonathan for their willingness to discuss my issues with me again and again, and their perseverance in doing so, even if sometimes their eyes or mine fell shut in the process or were not even open yet, to my father, in whose last weeks of life I rediscovered and resumed this work. As a psychoanalyst and atheist with strong Christian roots, he taught me much about the functionality and dysfunctionality of religion. Ilka, Finnja, Keren and Pamela for showing and explaining their tattoos. Prof. Dr. Eberhard Hausschildt for his generous mentoring over decades in phases of scientific confusion, Rafet Öztürk for the manifold explanations from an expert’s and user’s point of view. Without his support, I would not have been able to consider Muslim interview partners in this work. To all my interviewees for their openness and willingness to give their stories and time. Mr. Huch, a little wooden dragon that hung over my desk while I was still working on my doctorate and has been my faithful and patient companion to this day.

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Contents

Part I Departure   1 1 Retrospective and New Approach: From 1997 to 2020�������������������������  3 2 Religious Traditional Rituals Today�������������������������������������������������������  9 3 Research Questions���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13 4 Benefits of this Work ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 19 5 Disciplinary Location������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 25 6 Location of the Work Within the Scientific Quality Criteria��������������� 31

Part II Exploration of Resources  37 7 Coffee  and Salt: A Scientific-­Theoretical Positioning of Relevant Conceptualizations����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 39 8 Psychological Terms in the Research Field ������������������������������������������� 41 9 Religious Practice Today: An Assessment of the Current Situation��������� 81

Part III Empirical Explorations  99 10 The Qualitative Methodology: Scientific Justification �������������������������101 11 The Interviews: Preliminary Work���������������������������������������������������������117

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Contents

Part IV The Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals 143 12 The Visible Psychosocial Agents�������������������������������������������������������������145 13 Overview  of the Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������153 14 Transitional Rituals as Architects of Experienced Reality�������������������163 15 Transitional  Rituals as Mediators and Stabilizers of Individual and Social Identity�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������185 16 Transitional Rituals for Group Initiation and Group Bonding�����������205 17 Religiously  Traditional Transitional Rituals Using the Example of Death and Dying�������������������������������������������������������������������227 18 Psychological  Suggestions for the Design of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals: A Survey �������������������������������������������243

Part V Summary and Conclusion 247 19 Summary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������249 20 Open Questions, Limits of This Work ���������������������������������������������������255 21 Correspondances Vivantes: Social Challenges Today in the Context of Rites of Passage�����������������������������������������������������������259 Bibliography �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������269

Part I Departure

[...] for there is no place /that does not see you. You must change your life. (Rainer Maria Rilke, early summer 1908, Paris)

1

Retrospective and New Approach: From 1997 to 2020

Both goodbyes and new beginnings are an essential part of being human. In the turn of the year 2018/2019, after an abstinence of more than 20 years, I thought again about a work on religious transitional rituals. In 1995–1997 I had done a doctorate on this in the field of social psychology. When I started working on transitional rituals in Munich in 1995, the world seemed to be somehow in order – in order. Although people were already talking about tinker religions back then, the world actually still seemed to be sorted quite neatly into Protestant and Catholic believers in Munich, the city where I was living and talking to all my interview partners at the time. The main focus of my first paper on transitional rituals was “on the tasks that rituals fulfil or can fulfil from a (socio-) psychosocial perspective, the subjective meaning space of rituals actually engaged, from the inside perspective of the interview partners’ narration and experience.” (Kiss, 1997, p. 20). At that time, I limited myself to rituals carried out by the official church in Northern Europe, and there to transitional rituals. In the interviews, I was quite open to interview partners fantasizing about transitional rituals for rather hypothetical situations or rituals, such as divorce rituals. In the winter semester of 2018/2019, I taught a course to Master’s students on biological, psychosocial aspects of health and illness. In an effort to start the course with something existential and truly meaningful, I based the first sequence of this course around the topic of death and dying. One of my students convincingly introduced religious structures into this topic. In addition, I was intensively caring for my dying father during the time, and meanwhile my curiosity about the research project reawakened.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_1

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1  Retrospective and New Approach: From 1997 to 2020

When I redesigned this research paper at the beginning of 2019, both my horizon of experience and the religious landscape in Germany had changed seriously. In 1997, I had not experienced a single funeral of a close person myself. My grandfather had died a few months after completing my doctoral thesis; he was the first close relative I, who was already 30 at the time, had to bury. Twenty years later I had married, had given birth to four children and had to bury one again. Several relatives and friends in my immediate circle had also died. Starting in 2014, I worked as a photographer on several series on the Old Testament as the common narrative basis of the monotheistic religions. In doing so, I followed the strictest rules of the prohibition of illustration according to the first commandment, so that the works could be set up and were presented in a synagogue, a mosque as well as various churches, also internationally in England and Poland. In the meantime I had close professional as well as private contacts with Muslims and Jews, including my husband, who built up the liberal Jewish community in Cologne. Many of its members also became my friends. My curiosity about scientific research on atheism had also grown, and later became an important resource for interviewing my interlocutors. When I redesigned this research at the beginning of 2019, it was clear to me that a lot had changed in the social landscape of Germany in the meantime, among other things we had apparently become more interreligious as a society, possibly also more irreligious. The Protestant and Catholic state churches had continued to shrink, Judaism had grown in Germany, Islam had also, and much more strongly than Judaism, established itself further in Germany. And: There were more people who did not belong to a religious community institutionalized by a state treaty, vulgo: atheists. In the beginning, the personal motivation was the interest in making the collective form of transitional rituals comprehensible. Apparently, at least historically, they had an obligatory character: if you were born, you had to be baptized or were sometimes drastically disadvantaged. If you had sex with each other, you had to get married, etc. I wanted to understand why people submit to such rules, what the meaning of these rules would be (or whether a psychosocial meaning could be found behind them at all) and thus find a new approach to understanding and the dynamics of traditional transitional rituals, and, if necessary, to reinterpret them from a psychosocial point of view, as has been done again and again since the beginning of social science ritual research. I was interested in both the scientifically motivated arguments and the description of ritual participants. As Soeffner puts it, “One must master the rituals if one does not want to be mastered by them; one must know the meaning if one wants to mean something with their help.” (Soeffner, 1992, p. 185; cf. ders. 1989, p. 42).

1  Retrospective and New Approach: From 1997 to 2020

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The issue here is what makes sense, what meaning and possibilities for action we have beyond the theological framework of justification for these forms (cf. ibid.). And perhaps, if necessary be, to cry out: But the emperor is naked! (according to a popular slogan in a fairytale of Anderson). I worked on my dissertation and thus the first wave of this research project between August 1995 and March 1997, i.e. within 19 months. The second wave as a research project, in the meantime I was a professor of psychology at the private university Diploma, I worked out from January 2019 to September 2020, so within 22 months. In the process, I reviewed the old research findings including, of course, the literature base used, some books I also reread and with new eyes, such as two Turner books, one by Green and one by Willis. It was very satisfying to study the thoughts of these authors again with a broadened perspective. I added new knowledge and newer literature discursively, and also read books close to application (such as Brudereck, 2018), and sometimes more esoteric, to gain more insight into the diversity of application. Some of these had a theoretical, empirical, and some had extremely useful practical approaches, such as Kaiser. Out of perhaps somewhat excessive curiosity, I also read many works of fiction, mostly novels, that revolved around ritual as a core motif, such as “The Ritual of Water” by Sáenz in 2017. Here, too, it is evident that the fascination with the formulaic ritual extends into our own time and has clearly not disappeared. To this end, I expanded the originally Christian perspective of the interviews to include Muslim, Jewish, and atheist interviews. In what follows, I will refer to both series as the 1997 series and the 2020 series, respectively, even though the 1997 series stretched from 1995 to 1997, and the 2020 series stretched from 2019 to 2020. When I refer to “today,” I mean 2020, never 1997, for better understanding. I have chosen the term rites of passage for the title in order to be a bit more comprehensible, in the text both terms, rites of passage as well as transitional rites, are used synonymously for the same phenomena, whereas I consider transitional rites to be the better metaphorical description of the phenomenon. Life is full of transitions. From work to leisure from leisure to sleep, family time to self time. Skills grow and diminish. We get stronger and weaker. We are constantly starting something and stopping something. Our relationships, even the important coordinates of crucial relationships in our lives, are constantly changing. We constantly have new experiences with each other and with ourselves. Partly those are secondhand experiences, a book we read that impresses us, a movie, a clip, a lecture, or a chance encounter somewhere in the park. And then something new begins again, or something new is initiated. And we’re in the ­middle

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1  Retrospective and New Approach: From 1997 to 2020

of a transition again. We fall in love, go through this initial period of the relationship more or less quickly into living together, maybe get married, maybe have a child, we leave old roles and find ourselves in new roles, sometimes we just test ourselves in roles, trying out life together during a holiday with a partner, looking after friends’ children, and considering ourselves in this role, then in the middle of our everyday life we learn of a death or the beginning of a dying and are somewhere else again, are in the middle of a transition again. And all of these transitions need to be addressed, shaped, processed, and integrated into our lives in some way. When my father, with advanced dementia, suddenly from one day to the next ate very little and no longer got up from his bed, we entered a special time of indeterminate duration, suddenly our lives were determined by visitation plans, emergency plans for the case of the onset of the acute dying phase, the children and the household and the work were organized around it, accessibility was tightened. And then, when he died, everything had to be sorted anew, the old plans no longer applied, but with the freedom I had gained, there was also a great vulnerability, of which I was not sure whether it would only settle in me for a few weeks or longer. And then this painful acclimatization step by step to another life without him…. To manage these constant transitions, we need help in order not to get completely out of step and at the same time to keep adapting our pace to our growing or declining competences. And the risky opportunities associated with these often indeterminate changes. We have to activate forces, divide forces, or can also change the pace again in times of latency, of muse, draw strength again, absorb emptiness within us, which can then be shaped again, and lead to new changes, transitionals, processes of transformation. Regardless of the belief in a God, a more or less conscious, more or less elaborate network of religious, spiritual convictions, traditional structures always come into view. If we have decided on a relationship for life, a wedding is an obvious structure to mark this event. This accumulating certainty in a cumulating transition can then be shared with friends and relatives, shaped, lived through and ultimately ended, leading to a new everyday life. As Heiner Keupp already wrote in the first edition of my research paper in 1997: “Rituals are usually regarded as remnants of traditional living space in the discourses of modernization in the social sciences.” (Keupp in Kiss, 1997, p. 1) and yet: they have not completely disappeared. Perhaps rituals do have a deeper meaning in our life, and “organise a socio-cultural framework for the “deficient being” human being, which enables and secures the ability to act in the first place”. (Keupp in Kiss, 1997, p. 1) Since a predetermined and obligatory framework can no longer be found in the context of religion, rituals, including transitional rituals, “increas-

1  Retrospective and New Approach: From 1997 to 2020

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ingly require an individually designed framework of meaning and significance […]” (Keupp in Kiss, 1997, p. 2). According to Greek myth, Zeus divided the first man “in half to weaken him. Since then, man has been a symbol of longing for his other half, for a healing wholeness. Thus bringing together in Greek is called symbállein. Ritual is also a symbolic practice, a practice of symbállein, in that it brings people together and produces an alliance, a wholeness, a community. The symbolic as a medium of community is visibly disappearing today. De-symbolization and de-ritualization are mutually dependent.” (Han, 2019, p. 14). It is therefore in no way the concern of this work to examine or question the theological, eschatological truth content of traditional religious transitional rituals. And even if certain religiously traditional forms make psychological sense, this in no way contradicts their religious meaning. The fact that rituals can also make psychological sense outside their theological intention does not disavow their theological meaning, it does not deny it, this for the last clarification in this matter. Let’s finally get started. Just one more thing: Even if it is still a bit unfamiliar for some, it is counter-gendered here. It seems useful to me to really keep both genders in mind as agents and persons.

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Religious Traditional Rituals Today

Even today, rituals have not disappeared from our everyday lives. However, many of these symbolic ritual acts are so self-evident to us that they are often not explicitly thematized; they persist openly, but sometimes also subcutaneously (cf. Schibilsky & Völzke, 1993, p. 33; Zulehner, 1979, p. 43). Even if our present seems partly de-ritualized, no longer as splendidly pompous, no longer as slow and deliberate as our, from our perspective, often slower prehistory, it is difficult to be right about whether less symbolic actions actually happen in our time, or whether they do not rather take place covertly – for example, the economic rituals of “autumn shopping”, “annual holidays”, cleaning, fitness, etc. – or whether they do not take place more covertly. If today rituals are celebrated in a supposedly authentic and original way, they are in fact celebrated in an originalist way, in a more or less conscious nostalgically transfigured recollection of a supposedly better past (cf. Sennett, 2015, p.  291). Religious forms have always developed in contestation with the culture of life surrounding them, the resources surrounding them, and the forms and practices already in place. That these disputes about the right ritual are and were often conducted with considerable brutality is well known. Religious traditional forms, in contrast to, for example, nationalistic forms for believers or the orthodoxy of the respective community, can be traced back to a divine origin, thus they are not simply changed so quickly, there are large, central, ultimately absolute ideas behind them for those involved (cf. Sennett, 2015, p. 274). But even such a central Christian ritual as that of baptism was of course not just suddenly there. It draws on common practices, for example, the purification rituals of Judaism. Also the today usual undogmatically fixed context of princely transitional rituals again baptism has not been handed down unbroken – becomes for the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_2

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question of the age of baptism the rights and duties arising from it and similar basic conditions. To see the actual achievement of a religious traditional ritual in its undoubted origin would, in my opinion, on the one hand drastically reduce the number of the ritual form and then refer the significance of its eschatological function, the experience of salvation so important for the faithful, almost exclusively to the form – and thus trivialize its central, transcendental functions. One can therefore, without weakening the importance of the religious context, speak of religious traditional rather than original religious transitional rituals (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 145). As I said, rituals are reinvented again and again, even so-called original rituals are rather to be regarded as originalist rituals. Take candles in churches and temples, for example: they have long since ceased to be necessary for illumination, but they continue to be used, thus becoming a metaphor of historical and sensory continuity. Whichrituals really makes sense rationally? And what of it is to be understood rather metaphorically? What does meaning mean at all? What experiences are linked to sense experience? (If we were from Mars or even from a completely different human culture, we would probably immediately notice the ritual connotation of many of our actions – just as we would immediately recognize the painting of the Maori or other “primitive peoples” as something extraordinary with a clear ritual connotation). As an approach to an assessment of the meaning of rituals in our present and to the initial exploration of the topic, it was therefore helpful at times to adopt an ethnomethodological stance, i.e. to transform myself into a Martian, so to speak. Or, to put it a little less bombastically: the ability to marvel was always central to me here. Our former wealth of institutionalized rituals has thereby melted down to a few, at least when seen from the outside – thus everyday religious rituals such as blessing or the table prayer, a matter of course 100 years ago, have declined. Only at the “great frontiers” (cf. Luther1, 1992, p. 45 f.) do rituals still come into the light of day, and only on such occasions are they evidently still used. Despite a possibly progressing secularization, religiously handed down rituals often last longer than the actual ideological background  – as is well known, even atheists sometimes wish for a Christian funeral, even parents with weak church ties often have their children baptized, church weddings are still popular movie topoi. And what still takes some getting used to for Christians – the idea that one can perform one’s old rituals even if one is not (any longer) a believer in God – has long been a reality for  Here is not meant Martin Luther, but Henning Luther, 1947–1991, professor of practical theology. 1

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many Jews today: the separation of belief in God and the performance of traditional rituals, in which, as a rule, explicit reference is made to a belief in God. Religious institutions still play a major role at the thresholds of life which they celebrate, there the church partly still holds remnants of significance, while in practical life it has long since become meaningless for most (cf. Hitzler, 1996, p. 275). What Hitzler formulated there in 1996 is more than 20 years later in my opinion more valid than ever. As is well known, religious institutions, especially the churches in this country, are increasingly losing their monopoly on rituals (I will come back to this later): One does not necessarily need to fall back on an official church any more in order to make a life event memorable, even to the outside world. If someone may still get married in church, he may no longer have his child baptized. He may decide the mark his divorce in a meditation ritual, celebrate the end of his therapy with a recovery ritual, and finally have the funeral of his parents arranged by a particularly sensitive and original funeral home. Even today people let themselves be taken over for weeks or months by planning and arranging the celebration of a certain event such as a couple’s union or a birth, the death of a person – they let it cost something to make a funeral, a wedding, a baptism “worthy”, “appropriate to the event”. Figures about how much people today let such rituals cost would be interesting, but were not available despite my research. However, it seems plausible to me: the effort that people go to for the sake of a ritual, especially a transitional ritual, is still enormous today, even in our culture. Sometimes I find that frightening, but then again touching. Because isn’t much for what we spend resources irrational? The genres of ritual action (cf. Soeffner, 1992, p. 11) have become more flexible and ambiguous. A baptism, for example, can be seen as a ritual of beginning, which records a new phase of life for the child and its family, marks new priorities and leads to the evaluation of the lifestyle of the parents, possibly of its grandparents. Or as a farewell to freedom before the family phase. A similar network of effects can be identified for any other transitional ritual. Possibly we are all dialectical beings, and develop often dialectically between various pairs of opposites, between parting and new beginnings, activity and rest, between sexuality and abstinence, between homogeneity and differentiation, between equality and inequality – etc. (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, pp. 97, 105).

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Research Questions

The tendency to rituals seems to be innate to humans but also to some animal species: “for rituals are found everywhere and in all societies.” (Michaels in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 13; cf. id. 2011, p. 11) But beyond sentimental and, in the context of religious rituals, religious gain, do they benefit? What might the benefits be? In the first sequence with my research on rituals, where I focused entirely on Christian transitional rituals, I emphasized that it is actually not very important whether the Christian transitional rituals under discussion are really of purely Christian origin. We all learned from each other, and the forms and the elements used in the process are similar without any copyright infringement, so to speak. In this sequence, in which I have broadened the research and focus of the research to include Jewish and Muslim as well as atheist perspectives, this question arises even less. With all efforts to avoid possible blurring risks, it seems important to me not to focus only on the four walls of life that have been handed down to us today (birth, growing up, couple bonding, death), but to keep an eye on other transitional situations for which there were apparently rituals in the past, some of which have either been forgotten or are known only to a few today: Relationship rituals such as friendship and guest rituals, protection rituals such as the topping-out ceremony when building a house, elaborate rituals for farewells and new beginnings such as death rituals and rituals on the occasion of ordination and the start of a profession. As Zulehner puts it, and in my opinion this is still valid today: “There is […] no doubt that besides these three important walls of life (birth, marriage, death) there is a multitude of other “normative” and accidental worlds of life.” (Zulehner, 1976, p. 145). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_3

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Life transitions are apparently ritually celebrated in every culture, although the social, legal and practical consequences and, very understandably, the manner in which they are ritually staged differ, sometimes considerably. The basic question is: What psychosocial effects do religious traditional transitional rituals have? This question is set against the backdrop of an approach in which rituals are fundamentally regarded as psychoactive. Against the background that the term ritual is used inflationary and often rather intuitive: How can we define rituals psychosocially? It continues to be a novel topic in this depth of questioning, which has been studied from many sides and surprisingly little in connection with different approaches of psychology as well as other humanities and social sciences and theology(s). This was true in 1997 and continues to be true in 2020. My aim is to make a psychosocial contribution to the theorizing of rituals, especially transitional rituals. In doing so, it is clear that theory building and further development also are often time-bound (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 149). My hypothesis is that rituals can nevertheless have their place in our secular world. The target persons of the explorations and analyses are adults, even if reports from their childhood and adolescence and, if reported, the childhood and adolescence of their children are included. The aim of this work was and is to reconsider the role of rituals and our relationship to them, as Breuer suggests (cf. ders. in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 3). Ultimately, this question also refers to a very fundamental issue, namely the importance of the formal in our lives, as, for example, my interview partner Markus emphasizes (cf. Markus Z. 175 f.). I have focused my research on addressing transitions that have to do with a legal change in the subject’s position. For example, a 14-year-old teenager (around Bar/ Bad Mitzvah or Confirmations in the Catholic and Protestant practise actually has different rights than he or she had as a 13-year-old. A married couple is subject of different social laws than they were still as an unmarried couple, and a mourner has partial access to their close relative’s estate, their inheritance, upon their death, and thus loses their connection to the deceased in terms of social law. Rites of passage, as the term implies, settle at transitions. The focus of my research is on existential transitions, such as birth, coming of age, the beginning of a lifelong partnership, dying, death, and mourning. In other words, ritual framing of existential events that bring about changes not only for the person himself, but also for his environment. Religions are one of the important institutions that provide such rites of passage. Basically, my aim in this book is to work out the psychosocial effects that religious traditional transitional rituals may still have today by means of the research literature and non-directive interviews. On the one hand, transitional rituals are

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possibly an expression of the architecture of experienced reality, possibly standing at interfaces and points of change of individual as well as social identity. This also involves questions of the exciting process of how we establish social normality within the changes of life. The occasion around a transitional ritual is on the one hand normative, and on the other hand more or less unique in the individual biography. Traditionally as well as today, transitional rituals mark the important against the unimportant, as the research literature reviewed and my interview partners from both series also prove. Today more than ever they mark the entry into elective communities, which are by no means as indissoluble as they used to be. I pondered for months whether the term function was right for my work. Surprisingly, it was only in the middle of the rewrite that it occurred to me that I had not defined this term at all in 1997: I had never thought about the concept of function, which is, after all, prominent in the title. After all, the original title of my dissertation is “Goodbye and New Beginnings. The Function of Christian Transitional Rituals.” Surprisingly also all of my supervisors and editors had missed this mistake. When I finally researched the concept of function in 2019, it plausibly turned out that a psychological function, according to the renowned psychology dictionary Dorsch, is an “activity, v. a., directed toward the attainment of a special purpose.” (ibid., retrieved 11/26/19). Spektrum.de also has an article on this, but it doesn’t explain anything (ibid., retrieved 11/26/19). They talk about taxonomies without explaining the term, (taxonomies are simply classification into certain categories). Here again a bombastic term was used to complicate an actually meager definition. The Springer Onlinelexikon writes nothing about the keyword function, but at least functional: “Functional is the term used to describe the overall effect of media when it is positive and desirable.” (ibid., retrieved 11/26/19). This term is decidedly borrowed from media psychology, if stripped of this specification, we would speak of the overall effect of … being “positive and desired.” (ibid.) Mintzel writes: “Function […] denotes the task that a social phenomenon isolated in the research process (for example, an action, a role, an institution, a system) performs for the constitution, position, change, or […] resolution of another social phenomenon of lower […], equal […], but usually higher […] organizational complexity.” (ders. in Endruweit & Trommsdorff, 1989, p. 220). The concept of function turned out to be too narrow even on superficial research. Many years ago I once read that as a scientist one should start the morning by discarding one’s favorite theses, and when I noticed this mistake I had to grin and then replaced function by “effect”. Because in my work I don’t assume that transitional rituals have a “function”, in the sense that they are really performed intentionally for a particular psychic purpose, but I assume that they have an effect.

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Loosely based on the bon mot: real is what works. This concept is more open, it does not necessarily involve a rational decision, a rational conscious purpose, but only assumes that something happens transcendentally, so to speak, apart from the concrete actions. Even if rituals do not have an instrumental effect, they do have an effect, their effects clearly go beyond the instrumental. “People often imitate others without quite understanding what an action serves, that is, how it leads to the goal. It is precisely this opacity – the elusive function – that is also part of ritualized behavior. The relationship between action and goal, if one is conveyed at all, seems arbitrary or capricious.” (Whitehouse in Spectrum of Science, 2011, p. 57) She goes on to say that people are quite clear about what they are performing a ritual for. And it is clear to them that a ritual consists of symbolic units. So here function and effect go hand in hand. The functioning of a particular ritual does not necessarily prove itself during a ritual – it can also take effect before the actual ritual and also after a ritual, pre- or post festum. The period of time into which such after-effects can be expected cannot, in my opinion, be defined broadly enough, at least potentially: an imminent confirmation can certainly take effect years before the actual consummation, the expected wedding ritual is known to cause even little girls to put together small coins “for the bride’s shoes” at a time when neither the future partner, nor the later shoe size or even sexual orientation are known. A good sermon or ritual at a wedding may give a burnt-out relationship the necessary resource years later to weather a crisis, a good funeral make it easier to come to terms with one’s own finitude. A well-designed and successful confirmation ritual can be experienced in retrospect as insufficient, a “perfect” wedding, where “everything” was right, can still be remembered years later as incomplete, too formal, inauthentic. It therefore seems important to me to include both short-term and long-term effects in the following considerations. Effects of rituals are always possible, not mandatory effects – when experiencing the effects of a ritual, the context in which it takes place and its individual performance play a role. Although many potential effects are inherent in rituals, only very few rituals are actually implemented. The main focus of my consideration was thus on the tasks that rituals fulfil or can fulfil from a psychosocial point of view, the subjective space of meaning of actual or fantasised rituals, from the inner perspective of the narration and after-­ experience of the interview partners. My focus was on what experiential qualities were inherent in transitional rituals for people of this time, what impact this experience had or could have on their lives. I was particularly interested in whether or what psychosocial needs people might be fulfilling in the context of ritual acts. Religiously handed down: by this I mean here some form rituals which have not been invented now, but which obviously refer to already existing forms. For

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example, baptism, the circumcision of boys, weddings, etc. I have chosen a ­relatively neutral word here, in which it is decidedly not about a pure tradition that is laid down in liturgical manuals etc., but about those forms that are obviously used several times and in part also quite erroneous and incomplete, which are legitimized and realized in situ by a religious representative. The limits of this work, however, are determined by the limits of experienced culture. The central starting point is ethnographic, which I will come back to in a moment (cf. Willis, 2000). Here, for example, cultures are not understood as islands but as interconnections. My focus was specifically on transitional rituals, i.e. rituals that take place at life’s turning points. These seem particularly relevant to me because both social systems and inner worlds may change visibly here. How is the religious ritual framing of farewell and new beginning experienced today? What needs for transitional rituals are there beyond existing religious rites of passage? What role can ritualistic acts play in coping with status changes? What role can ritualistic acts play in coping with farewells? Do (transitional) rituals possibly enable participation, such as at Christmas, where no one has to think about whether to come or not – just shows up? In this context, transitional rituals always play a new role, especially in the question of ‘coming of age’. According to my conception, caesuras are basically always there to gain new competences in new living conditions and thus also new maturity, i.e. to regain a voice. This is also marked by the fact that, parallel to these rituals of change, we also repeatedly enter into new legal relationships – and have new rights and duties – for example, as an adolescent, new rights and duties concerning self-determination over one’s own body; when we marry, new rights and duties towards our partner; when a relative die, a new position within the family and an associated right of inheritance as a close relative. The question is, how does a child enter the family, how does he get to know his uncles aunts and cousins and develop a stable relationship with them? How are two family relationships connected to each other, for example, through the marriage of the children, maintained? And how is someone taken out of that community and then resorted the rest of the community? How does it happen in traditionally Christian, or traditionally Jewish, or Muslim contexts? There is also the question of how rituals are experienced in memory, how lasting transitional rituals are. In any case, it is well known – and this is a commonplace in psychology – that memory does not reflect the experience in the same way. How foreign or familiar are funeral rituals for Christians at a distance who maintain a more formal church affiliation, for example, and how do they manage to cope with the manifold upsets in the context of a death, a bereavement and then the

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funeral and mourning period? Who supports them and who is available to support them by default? Just two generations ago this was not a question. The system of religiously handed down rituals was alive and well in Germany. Quite different today. What will happen to society if religious erosions continue and are not replaced by something? How will people rejoice, mourn, and take the step into maturity? Who will accompany them in all their adventures, all the changes and vicissitudes of life? And how can a society endure and have a future if possibly these three basic conditions of joy, mourning, responsibility are no longer adequately accompanied? One of my core questions was thus: How can I connect the question of religious rituals of change with social change as a whole? The core intention of this work is to document processes of change and to show approaches to their control. For me, there is also the question of the role of religious practice for the social transformation that is generally seen as necessary. Could it be that religiosity, or more simply formulated religious practice without an unconditional belief in God, could lead one to live one’s life in a more reflective, frugal and thus environmentally saving way? Again and again religious leaders emphasize the role of religiosity in the preservation of creation. Could religion – possibly as useless to an atheist as art is to others – have an effect independent of a belief in God in conveying these values and anchoring them in people’s everyday lives? And one last question: how can this topic be located in disciplinary terms? Let’s start with this.

4

Benefits of this Work

In this research work, the following objectives are pursued: • On the one hand, it is a repetition of the literature research and interviews from 1997, • to this end, these interviews were extended to include the target groups of Jewish, Muslim and non-religious affiliation, • and in doing so, a stocktaking in the sense of also looking at the development between 1997 and 2020, i.e. almost exactly one generation, was carried out, • In addition to an evaluation in categories, the individual interview partners were also presented in case descriptions in the sense of a heuristic, holistic understanding approach, • in doing so, hints are also given on the significance of religious traditions in general in our lived culture. This paper aims to make plausible the complex usefulness of rituals by explaining the complex usefulness of religiously traditional threshold rituals. On my travels through the religious landscape of Germany and the manifold manifestations of religious practice, I have met many people who had a deep and profound understanding, be it of their own socialized religious tradition, be it of the religious traditions of other traditions. But I have also encountered a great deal of stupidity, a great deal of half-knowledge, which in my opinion prepares the ground for dangerous stereotypes and thus ultimately for xenophobia. We need to keep learning, all of us. Just because many of us may no longer believe in God, or belong to a particular religious institution, many of us continue to practice religiously traditional forms. And most importantly, we also witness the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_4

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religious practice of others. As citizens, I believe we also have an important civic oversight function over the practices of the religious communities that surround us. But in order to be able to exercise this, dialogue and knowledge building is essential. This work is intended to contribute to this and to continue to foster curiosity, interest and dialogue and to create a basis for this. Especially in the lectures with childhood educators and future social workers I noticed the necessity of professionals to understand religious ties beyond stereotypes and to provide competences beyond an often very endeavoured half-­ knowledge to understand people with different cultural and religious socialisation and practice. In my opinion, this is also important for the preservation and maintenance of social peace. Accompanying people at life events, also through rituals, can in principle be seen as a service to the community, as happens in Jewish theology, for example. It is considered a “mitzvah”, a Hebrew term that describes an intermediate duty, a good day, a commandment. The exploration of religiously traditional rites of passage offers a good approach. In addition: The lifeworld approach of this work is useful overall, it is resource-­oriented. In addition: Thresholds, not only through deaths, are important moments of crisis and risky opportunities, which in case of doubt, to put it succinctly, end up at the table of a social worker or childhood educator. Threshold rituals mark processes of change, our personal and social kairoi. According to my perspective, religiously handed down rituals are a great resource. If we give them up or change them “just like that” without reflection, we risk losing them. In my mind, the performance of a cult does not necessarily have to be linked to a specific belief in God. But rather with a kind of narration that goes from hand to hand, from generation to generation, as it says in Deut. 6, 4 – 7. I will come back to this, and just want to emphasize here: Therein lies a learning value and an application perspective of this work. It could be that the dynamic processes in our multicultural1 society will become more resilient if we gain a greater understanding of religiosity. In the research project the religion-sensitive handling of religiosity of others in all its diversity is fanned out and explained. The results obtained can promote the understanding of our multicultural society, they can enrich the interreligious work of functionaries, but also the work in kindergartens, in psychotherapeutic practices etc. These  I clearly prefer this term to “transcultural” or “intercultural” because it emphasizes the diversity of positions. The state of research in cultural studies is transcultural models. These are preferred to the notion of intercultural models because intercultural models involve a notion of culture that sees culture as fixed entities. However, this no longer corresponds to the notions of culture today. 1

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­ ndings can also be used for the work of childhood educators, school educators, fi and other educational professionals. They can become fruitful for educational activities in child, youth and adult education. In addition, this work can make contributions to professional death and bereavement care. Furthermore, with this work I want to give impulses for the accompaniment and structuring of social transformation processes in general. The aim of the work is to offer approaches for interreligious dialogue and thus to promote social cohesion. In psychology, too, rituals only play a very pointed role, for example in the field of clinical psychology. In my opinion, however, these special structures of action are very helpful for prevention and for understanding biopsychosocial, salutogenetic relationships. In this sense, rituals are, so to speak, part of our psychosocial immune system. (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 22). Rituals, in my view, are used as guiding structures of action so that health is maintained, both in the individual realm, as the health of the individual, and in the collective realm, the health of the collective. It is transitions that threaten this health. Religious rites of passage also serve as examples and metaphors for individual and social processes of change. In the extremely hot summer of 2018, I experienced the factuality of climate change for the first time. It had long been taking place outside my front door, part of my life and my if not taken seriously experience. Was there a way to connect one theme of transformation to the other? In the end, it is also about giving ideas for handouts for processes of change, which in my opinion are existential for us. It is about taking religiously traditional threshold rituals as an example and using them as a learning field in order to understand, tolerate and use diversity. It is about understanding the plurality of our society as a resource and giving it more space. So it is about a fundamental deepened psychological understanding about the psychological dynamics of transformation processes. Psychologists accompany people in transitions in different ways, whether as social psychologists, as school psychologists, as clinical psychologists, etc. In the process, religious elements also come into play time and again by individual persons. It is about embedding farewells in a context of meaning that helps with psychological as well as social processing. Threshold rituals can be starting points for the creation of meaning. This knowledge is interesting for psychologists of all applied disciplines: for the human resources manager who helps to shape the transitions of employees, for the clinical psychologist, etc. Threshold rituals with their emotionality, in which they accompany us emotionally through processes of change that are inevitable, that shape us, and whose overcoming is also existential for us as individuals as well as a group, can provide an example of how we are well accompanied through these various processes of

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change. Rituals can serve to synchronize groups. Rituals create community and accompany changes in the community. They north us as individuals in a community towards common goals. In doing so, a reflection on the effect of religiously traditional forms per se was unavoidable. As an empirical basis I used the Religion Monitor of the Bertelsmann Foundation 2017, whereby their data is essentially self-reported data. They write, “Religions can have high integrative effects. They provide spaces of communion, reinforce with their recurring rituals the trust in a basic order that sustains the world, convey with their teachings and narratives the belief in a deeper meaning that lies behind all the horrors of life, and fill believers with hopes for an afterlife of abundance and justice.” (Religion Monitor, 2017, p. 46). How do we maintain and develop community? What is the source of salutogenesis, do religiously traditional forms have a share in it, do we all have to learn to pray again now, although we may no longer or only vaguely believe in a higher being? What does social peace mean? Not killing only or nurturing? In my opinion, my research project could also be useful for companies, since farewells and new beginnings are always a company issue. For example, the question of how to deal with deaths in the immediate vicinity of employees. The potential for grievance in such situations is enormous. And in my opinion, employees will also get through their time of mourning better if the right words and gestures are found. The question would be whether I can gain data on company needs in this area with your help, for example through information interviews with some employees, and you in return have knowledge on how to do it and what the needs of your employees are in such cases. The following gaps in knowledge should also be closed: To better understand the experience of religion or rites of passage originally performed under religious guidance and to be able to better weigh their significance also in an interreligious context. Why is this important? Many people in secularised Northern Europe do not realise that rituals in the sense of symbolic, emotion-conveying actions also have a meaning today. In the course of the universally stated erosion of established religions, rituals also no longer seem to make sense. At the same time, religions seem to be the only really serious source for the ritual accompaniment of existential transitions – birth, maturation, death. Handicraft rituals are often experienced as too arbitrary, too personal, not binding enough to the community. Here a dilemma arises for the individual as well as for groups and societies. The aim of my research is to localize the psychologically significant interfaces of this dilemma and to make them tangible, and thus to find starting points for how professionals can deal with

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them and which support options could perhaps result from the targeted use or the targeted provision of such rituals. For a long time – since they were very widespread – religions were seen as a guarantor of social cohesion and the following of social rules along indoctrinated values, which were later reflected and made their own, and the transmission of these values to the next generation (cf. Religion Monitor, 2017, e.g. p. 54 ff.). The roots of health science, medicine and the precursors of psychology, especially clinical psychology, also lie in ritual. Rituals were probably the first healing procedures – and in some societies they still are today, see for example the magnificent and detailed description of the Isoma ritual by Turner (1969/1989, pp. 17– 42). Religious communities today also know blessings, image prayers, etc. Probably why they interest me so much. And fascinate me until today. At the same time, knowledge of them also seems to me to be extremely useful and important for today’s questions and need for action, for example, a transformation of our society. We know everything we need for this transformation, at least most of it, and certainly enough to begin to tackle it. And yet we hesitate. Rituals are ancient forms against procrastination. To set up this project in such a way that it shows socially relevant results is of great concern to me. The results obtained can promote both the understanding of our intercultural multicultural society, they can enrich the interreligious work of functionaries, but also the work in kindergartens, in psychotherapeutic practices, etc. In addition, this work can make contributions to professional care for the dying and mourning. Generally, a growing religious diversity and pluralization of lifestyles – compared to one and two generations before – is stated. What effects this will have, whether it will lead to a stronger compression of social networks or rather to an amorphization of social contexts, is predicted differently (cf. Religion Monitor, 2017, p. 46). If certain self-evident things, also in the narration, as we used to see them in religion, are no longer effective, and that is the source of social conflicts. It may be that the dynamic processes in our multicultural society become more resilient as we gain a greater understanding of the psychosocial dynamics of religiosity.

5

Disciplinary Location

Dealing with symbols is an art that we as humans have always developed further (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 14). Accordingly, religiously traditional traditional rituals have manifold disciplinary perspectives; rituals, for example, traditionally play a role in the discussion of ethnology, in theology of course, in sociology, etc. (cf. Michaels, 2013). In accordance with their cultural and individual, also economic significance, rituals are to some extent a well-studied field. However, a continuous discussion that would be interdisciplinary networked does not exist. And this against “the background of the enormous vitality and diversity of rituals and ritual discourses” (Brosius et al., 2013, p. 9), which to a certain extent has developed parallel to a public discussion in which rituals are often regarded as rigid and monotonous or almost unessential and unimportant. An interdisciplinary approach is very helpful here. Material can be found • of course in ethnology, here e.g. van Gennep (1908/1960), Turner (1969/1989), and Willis (c. 2000), who in the meantime has perhaps been cited somewhat inflationarily. • in theology, especially in the practical theology of, for example, Luther (H., not M., 1992) and Zinser (2010), • in the historical sciences, such as research by the historian Stollberg-Rilinger (2013). Among them, too, it has long been a consensus that the effects of religiously traditional rituals go beyond what is ascribed to them theologically and eschatologically; this is then taken up about a generation later by De Botton and also Zuckerman, Galen & Pasquale. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_5

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For example • in philosophy, such as Nussbaum’s thoughts on political emotions (2016) or Sloterdijk (2009), • also in sociology, such as in Soeffner (1989, 1992) and Sennett (2015), • to this I include thoughts by Staub-Bernasconi on the triple mandate of social work (extended: of the social sciences, cf. for instance Lutz, 2020), • and of course psychology, such classics as Freud, Erikson, Keupp and others (I’ll come back to this in a moment). What canonized, generally accepted knowledge is there about rituals? How can I establish links? For me, this is also about making unexploited potential more visible. Nevertheless, this work is not a multi- or interdisciplinary one. As a psychologist, I am reluctant to degrade other disciplines too freely to auxiliary sciences of psychology by borrowing from them. Nevertheless, this work is of course multidisciplinary in its approach, since explicit theories of rituals are not found in psychology, even though psychosocial approaches toward rituals are repeatedly discussed in the discipline. Religion has been a recurring theme in psychology, ever since Allport and the religious orientation scale he developed (cf. Darvyri et al., 2014), yet I have sometimes come close to agreeing with William James’s indignant exclamation, “That ugly little science! Everything one would like to know lies outside it!” (James in Görres, 1986, p. 21) Even the recent publication by Frey (2018) does not systematically address a psychological definition of ritual and religion, nor does it systematically address psychological effects of ritual. In the literature, individual aspects of psychosocial effects are discussed again and again, but an overarching theoretical framework still does not exist – this was just as true in 1997 as it is in 2020. The psychosocial knowledge that I draw on here is widely scattered • Psychosocial approaches to ritual research are most likely to be found in clinical psychology, for example in Freud’s remarks on compulsive acts and mass psychology (cf. Freud, 1978, 1921, pp. 61 f., 1927 and 1930, pp. 191 f.) and in C. G. Jung (cf. Grün, 1997, pp. 31 f.), • in recent clinical psychology, for example, in Schellenbaum, 1992, originally a theologian, and Moser, 1993, p. 191), • in educational psychology, especially in the discussion of game theories, • in marginal areas of the psychology of perception and action, furthermore,

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• also in my own field, social psychology, there especially in the branch that opens strongly to sociology (for example Soeffner, 1989, 1992). The social sciences were especially important for me where it was a matter of analyzing religiously traditional traditional rituals against the backdrop of today and a modern understanding of identity (cf. Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1994; Bilden & Keupp, 2006). The psychosocial foundation of my research is ultimately the connection of rituals with a modern approach toward identity, as it was developed by my old doctoral supervisor, Keupp (1992). To this end, the explanations around Antonovsky’s (1997) SOC (sense of coherence) model are significant. And finally, explanations of empowerment and resilience (cf. for example Storch & Tschacher 2014). I recalled the theologian and psychotherapist Peter Schellenbaum: “Psychology becomes creative by looking at areas that have not yet been related […] with a single unifying gaze.” (ders. 1992, p. 61) Social psychology is very well suited as an approach for such a creative psychology: It is like a rock jutting far out into the sea of other sciences – and fortunately, in my experience, it is a field where there is relatively little fear of contact or tension of competence with other disciplines. That is why I have decidedly chosen the term psychosocial here. I do not wish to diminish either the social or the psychological in the research project, nor does it seem appropriate to me to limit the research to one of the two disciplines. At the same time, on the one hand, this choice of term spans the range of topics that are essential to me here; on the other hand, it is a deliberate bow to the findings of the social sciences such as social work, for which this approach is, I hope, also helpful (I will return to this in a moment). In the formation of the theoretical setting, I fell back on models that had already proven helpful in part in 1997: And then I curiously looked beyond my own nose – the result is the deepening about dying and death in Chap. 17: This is also owed to the fact that traditionally here transmissions leave deeper traces historically (cf. Archäologisches Landesmuseum Brandenburg, 2020). Helpful in both practical and methodological terms were the works of Kübler-Ross (1971/2012), a find I came across through my family and students at the same time. Phenomenology was an important accompanying mindset and attitude for this work: What happens when and how in which order? Who does what when? With phenomenology, the doctrine of appearances, we try to open up the world of experience of others by concretely holding on to what is, to the appearances we can observe, and naturally documenting these observations (cf. Flick, 1995, p. 165 f.). In my opinion, phenomenology is particularly well suited as a method for penetrating processes of change such as thresholds of life because it focuses on the

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5  Disciplinary Location

i­mmanent part of actions, including actions attributed as rituals. Even though the individual as well as the social construction of lifeworlds is an important key for understanding the role of rituals, we must not forget the immanent parts of ritual actions, but start with them in order not to get lost immediately in diffuse spaces of meaning. I will explain later why this immanence part is so important. Very different forms, moreover, may well be based on similar structures. And vice versa: even if rituals show a certain phenomenological similarity, their effects need by no means be identical or concern the same psychosocial class of effects. Blessings, for example, can sometimes have a separating, sometimes a unifying effect (cf. Lévi-­ Strauss, 1962, p. 92 f.), sometimes stabilize identity, sometimes the group. But it should be noted that “For all phenomena it is true that the phenomenal about them has a latent background or subsoil that is not absorbed in their phenomenality.” (Blumenberg, 2013, p. 213) Even (phenomenological) descriptions do not mean that we would thereby produce immediacy, for which we often thirst so much in our (scientific) desire for knowledge (cf. Blumenberg, 2013, p. 42 f.). Even if we view the world through the lens of appearances, we view it only in one aspect, and not completely. We must remain aware of this. The aim is to decipher reality and the order that is visible behind social constructions of reality for those involved (cf. Flick, 1995, p. 123). The ethnomethodological perspective is helpful for this: ethnography can be defined quite generally as the description of ethnic groups or of life worlds (cf. Lüders in Flick, p. 389). Ethnography requires a flexible research strategy, since acting in the field cannot be completely planned in advance (cf. Bergmann in Flick, p. 118 ff., Lüders in Flick, p. 393, Ohlbrecht in Flick, 1995, p. 659.) I am a bit of a Green Man, I try not to take anything for granted. This is how I explain it to my interview partners several times later: I’m a bit of a greenie, I try not to take anything for granted, so maybe I ask a bit of a silly question. (In the interview with Martha, Z. 262 f.) in Islam I feel particularly ignorant, please forgive even trivial questions. (In the interview with Erva, Z. 22)

The conception of humanity of this current is extremely helpful for my research purpose: “Ethnomethodology […] assumes that people, i.e. in principle first of all […] social actors who are strangers to each other (“ethno-”), regardless of which culture they come from, construct their everyday world reality according to certain methodical practices (“methodo-”) in a rule-guided and always meaningful way in order to communicate about social situations, to overcome strangeness, and thus to

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produce reality and cope with everyday life.” (Kruse, 2014, p. 27) In ethnographic interviews, the researcher aims to explore attitudes, values or everyday routines of the interviewees (cf. Kaiser, 2014, p. 2): “By disciplined avoidance of overly self-­ conscious appearances, we create a space in which we can gain insight into other people’s lives […].” (Sennett, 2015, p. 41) In this context, this understanding of others is also, I will come back to this in a moment, a meaningful quality criterion. The effect that certain traditional rituals have cannot simply be translated into another culture. In contrast to my doctoral research, I no longer limited myself here to purely Christian rituals, but explicitly included Jewish, Muslim and atheist perspectives  – in other words, the religious currents that are particularly strong in Germany or have particularly strong regional roots – such as Judaism, which in numerical terms no longer plays a relevant role in Germany today, but which plays an indispensable role in our cultural history. Here it is also a matter of giving greater recognition to Muslim perspectives and the contribution of Muslim culture to our cultural-religious practice. And, of course, to a growing group of the inheritors of these monotheistic cultures including the religiously traditional elements: The atheists. Why it is not, however, is to find in the “rites of others […] models for our own behaviour, but [it is, my insertion] to sharpen our understanding of the underlying problems and thus also of the diversity and otherness of their various cultural solutions.” (Assmann in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 22) Religion and culture continue to be strongly conflated, as my Muslim interviewee Erva points out several times in the interview: When you are brought up so culturally religious. (Erva, Z. 158)

Part of the difficulty of this research was that rituals are situated very differently in the religions, that they require different things. For example: faith or non-faith. This creates the danger that in some cases one compares things that cannot be compared with each other in this way. For example, the historically and institutionally very differently developed religiosity and just the institutional foundation, which differs very strongly in part, also the interaction with the region in the differently developing cults and also the position of the different cults. I have therefore refrained here from drawing conclusions too quickly and have preferred to leave certain aspects side by side instead of interweaving them. In my opinion, it can be assumed that the handling of life events is subject to cultural differences. In this respect, a culturally logical consideration of the field is always useful, not, however, in the form of new stereotyping, such as “Islam”, “Judaism”, but rather in a cultural and historical sensitivity when considering both

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the theoretical material and the material obtained through the case studies. Finally, it should be borne in mind that rituals, like all cultural products, have not only one effect, but are multicultural and multifunctional in nature (cf. Lévi-Strauss, 1962, p. 80). Also historically, for example, in metaphorical forms of Christianity that decidedly borrow from Judaism (for example, the ritual meal at Easter) or the other way around (the Jewish Hanukkah to the Christian Christmas). It has, I confess, outraged me where professional publications have been silent about this intertwined root of intercultural learning (for example, Frey, 2018). To this end, the question of a suitable empirical instrument quickly arose at the beginning of the new research project. Given the state of the art, which draws from the various disciplines, philosophy, theology, psychology, it is not possible to generate representative and generally valid research. Statistical-quantitative methods were thus excluded. The focus was primarily on qualitative methods involving biographical interviews with laypersons and experts, which emphasize the individual and social construction of social reality. Thus, this thesis basically follows a qualitative-­deductive approach. As an interview method I used non-directive biographical interview and case studies to convey “compassion”. A great role model for me here is Kübler-Ross, who in my opinion has developed an exemplary mastery of this method; I will return to this in the methodological section.

6

Location of the Work Within the Scientific Quality Criteria

Let’s play scientific limbo, so to speak, with the discussion of scientific qualitycriteria. Recently, a young medical student asked me about the quality criteria of scientific research; she remembered objectivity and validity, but not reliability. I had to grin. Because on the one hand, these three criteria are the ones that are drilled into you very early in your scientific socialization, but on the other hand, this triad is also highly misleading and incomplete. First of all, there is a misunderstanding: In the discourse on the theory of science, it has been known for a long time that the apparent king’s criterion, objectivity, can only be generated with very great efforts, such as double-blind studies. Many quantitative studies are also too small or thematically unsuitable for this approach. Basically, in my opinion, this criterion is rightly discredited for the humanities and social sciences as dangerous, absurd, misleading.1 According to the premises of constructivism, there can be no objectivity in research (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 55). Gümüşay writes: “Curiosity is not equal to curiosity. Category is not equal to category. It is the belief in absoluteness that makes the difference. It is the belief in absolutes that robs the object of curiosity of its humanity.” And then she elaborates that this universalizing ambition is in opposition to the perspective consciousness, according to the idea (after Nietzsche) “that only perspective seeing is possible, not objective – and that “objectivity” can only be approached through the use of numerous perspectives. To impose one’s own perspective on others is a “ridiculous  And I keep reading that this line of discussion also exists in the natural sciences, but I don’t want to interfere with my colleagues there. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_6

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immodesty”.” (Gümüşay, 2020, p. 140 f.) When the desire for objectivity is conflated with the desire for a defined reality, it becomes even more dangerous, because in insisting on one reality, one reality, we either take the reality of others less seriously or even subjugate it (cf. Gümüşay, 2020, p.  153) Or, to paraphrase Maturana, “When one person explains to another what is real, the latter in effect demands its subordination.” (Maturana after Gümüşay, 2020, p. 153). Of course, the striving for objectivity in the sense of standardization is legitimate. Wanting to produce supra-individual research results is important in science, also in our humanities and social sciences. In many cases, however, I think it makes more sense to control the human factor, which could reduce the scope of our research to a purely subjective, more or less successful narrative, by means of a high level of discursive reflexivity instead of a dressed-up pseudo-objectivity. In contrast, the two other classical quality criteria, reliability and validity, can be usefully achieved by means of an instrumentarium of further quality criteria, which are usually unjustly overshadowed by the discourse on scientificity. So let me fan out the picture a bit by means of the quality criteria that are traditionally discussed in research papers with a qualitative-empirical part like this one, but which, in my opinion, can also be helpful for the quantitative approaches: In 2010, Mayring calls for the following five quality criteria for qualitative research: Procedure documentation: This includes the disclosure of the (theoretical) preliminary understanding, the description and justification of the methodological procedure and individual steps of data collection and evaluation. Each of these steps must be described and justified. This also includes reflecting on the problems with the chosen approach and disclosing and reflecting on limitations or research pragmatic decisions. Outsiders must be able to understand exactly how the researcher acted. Since every research is also to some extent a research story, it is important to me in this work to present thoughts in a narrative and comprehensible way, and thus in turn also to fulfil the quality criterion of reliability. Interpretation substantiation with arguments: As a rule, Mayring states that “interpretations must not be set, but must be justified by argument” (Mayring, 2010, p. 145). Interpretations should be conclusive and logical breaks must be explained. Of particular importance is the search for alternative interpretations. Proximity to the subject: Proximity to the subject or to the research process is considered Mayring’s (Mayring, 2010) central criterion. It stands for the fact that proximity in the qualitative research process is primarily established

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through proximity to the everyday life of the researched subjects. Proximity to the object was ensured here, among other things, through decades of practice. Communicative validation: I find this a very sympathetic criterion, which means validating thoughts of others or oneself through conversation. From a methodological-­empirical point of view, however, this criterion can only be used in a limited way depending on the context, as I will discuss later in the empirical part. Triangulation: It is advisable to consider the object of research from at least two different perspectives. This can include, for example, two researchers, two theories, two data bases, two methods. This is based on Denzin’s (1989) hypothesis that the quality of research can be improved by combining several analytical processes. Again briefly following Mayring, 2010: procedural documentation, interpretive validation with arguments, proximity to the object, communicative validation, triangulation. According to Helfferich, 2011, p. 79, four quality criteria of qualitative research are: communication, openness, strangeness and reflexivity: Communication represents the core quality of scientific research. On the one hand, the entire research process is determined and inspired by many conversations and the simultaneous examination of the relevant research literature; later, in the empirical part, communication is condensed in the sense of the research interest. Openness: throughout the research process, it is important to remain open to different lines of reasoning about the research interest, and to everyday experiences, including lateral thoughts that first land on a piece of paper during the writing process, and then lead to new research or a new thought (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 633). Without this curiosity, no relevance can be established, so that this annoying question in the research process: what’s the point? is always to be welcomed as a productive challenge. This is always about alienating the field of research and gaining a new perspective on it with a certain distance. Wherever I was able to witness transitions, I consciously put myself in an attitude of strangeness, not unlike the white coat that I find so ridiculous among psychologists. When this strangeness is done from an attitude of humility rather than superiority (as I perceive the white coats to be), this strangeness can actually make the research process more valid as a criterion of quality.

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Reflexivity is again important as a constant companion, on the one hand to generate trustworthiness, reliability and on the other hand to make the research process more valid. Again briefly after Helfferich, 2011, p. 79: communication, openness, strangeness and reflexivity. Kruse (2014) mentions three pillars of qualitative social research: Connecting with other fields of understanding (the german term ‘Fremdverstehen’ seems here hard to translate), i.e. that what we hear in qualitative data collection, that other-understanding systems of meaning and relevance, are always evaluated to some extent against the background of the respective own system of meaning and relevance; see Helferich’s remarks above. Indexicality – meaning that meaning and systems of relevance exist in sign form, and that these signs can each be interpreted in very different ways – this indexicality was fostered by the multi-faith approach. Process validity – an essential moment of qualitative research is the process and not so much directed at the result, which can also, we know the research on the facilitated information intake of information that suits us, be falsified in a self-­ fulfilling prophecy and by socially desirable responses of the interview partners (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 59 f.). Again briefly following Kruse, 2014: Connecting with other fields of understanding, indexicality, process validity. Steinke lists the following quality criteria of qualitative research in Flick, 2017 (cf. ibid., 2017, p. 324 ff.): Intersubjective comprehensibility: In principle, the data obtained should be intersubjectively comprehensible. An important step in this process is the documentation of the researcher’s prior understanding, the chosen empirical method, the sources of information and their receipt, and the criteria that the work should meet. Indication of the research process: why do research at all? I will come back to this question again and again. Empirical anchoring: the referred theories and conclusions should be anchored in the data, including the self-generated data. This is done by the empirical anchoring through the variety of the chosen method portfolio incl. the empirical part.

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Limitation: No research paper is valid without limits As a researcher, where do I see the limitations of my research? These are explained in detail in the final ­section. Coherence: “The theory developed in the research process should be internally consistent.” (Steinke in Flick, 1995, p. 330) I find this criterion the most difficult, since we can of course craft coherence; as scholars we are often so trained in argumentation that we can demonstrate artificial coherence very easily and convincingly. Which is tempting, I argue against a decided, sporting, as it were, detection of incoherence. Relevance: Is/was the research question really relevant, did the research result really contribute to further theory building, do the research results stimulate problem solving, are the results generalizable and the presentation of the theory transparent enough? Reflective subjectivity: reflective subjectivity is part of the approach to this research, which I have to keep pushing myself to do because my quantitative reflexes oppose it. As researchers, we observe ourselves, examine personal assumptions in terms of how they may impact on the research process, in this sense, after much deliberation as to whether this was appropriate, I have also included personally reflective narratives in the research process. Again briefly following Steinke, 2017: intersubjective comprehensibility, indication of the research process, empirical anchoring, limitation, coherence, relevance, reflected subjectivity. To summarize: Helfferich, 2011: Communication, openness, strangeness and reflexivity. Mayring 2010: procedural documentation, securing interpretation with arguments, proximity to the subject, communicative validation, triangulation. Kruse, 2014 Connecting with other fields of understanding, indexicality, process validity. Steinke 2017: intersubjective comprehensibility, indication of the research process, empirical anchoring, limitation, coherence, relevance, reflected subjectivity. I have left these criteria here as a kind of matrix in their diversity in order to also use subtle shades of different quality criteria to further the goodness of my research process.

Part II Exploration of Resources

7

Coffee and Salt: A Scientific-­Theoretical Positioning of Relevant Conceptualizations

Terminological efforts are considered central as a sign of scientificity. Terminology is about making something tangible, for example in this context of scientific analysis. In this context, it is striking that new fields of research are also repeatedly opened up on the basis of terms, the intangible is made tangible (cf. Donath, 2015, p. 117). “Classifications, like other scientific terms, prove their usefulness by the insights that are gained with them.” (Zinser, 2010, p. 152). To me, this sounds a bit like the Muslim custom of handing the groom coffee with salt at the betrothal (I will return to this in the chapter on types of religiously transmitted threshold rituals): Terminological endeavors are grounded in the pleasures and possibilities of language, and the great difficulties that the use of language invariably entails. Every definition, according to Spinoza, also delimits; the light on the named casts shadows on the unnamed. He who defines, distinguishes. He who defines, sets boundaries. And this is important because it is through language that we focus on what is to be explored. He who defines determines the framework of what can be thought and thus also, at least to some extent, the direction in which further thought will take place in the future. He determines the horizon. This concerns both second-degree definitions, definitions of terms, and first-­ degree definitions, definitions of a particular state of affairs: “The way we interpret […] words may quite significantly affect what we think about the symbolic manipulative forms or genres occurring in the types of society under consideration here.” (Turner, 1982, p. 44). Terms and definitions are interrelated. Terms show which section of social reality we consider relevant. Many terms that are in themselves excellently defined scientifically – possibly even to the extent that there is consensus on them – seep into everyday language and thus, in a feedback process, also change their scientific © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_7

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meaning in the long term. This leads, for example, to the fact that definitions via the etymology of a term seem to be easy means of definition – one only had to reach for the corresponding handbook or start a corresponding online search – but in fact often turn out to be highly complicated and highly risky methods of definition. An example: the concept of religion. We will see briefly below that this term is not clearly defined, both in everyday language and scientifically. I am not simply fabulating here. This moment is central to the rest of this research: the attempt at an all-­ encompassing, literally Catholic definition is tempting, but such definitions cut off facets that can be thought about further. No pluralistic society without pluralistic definitions.

8

Psychological Terms in the Research Field

8.1 My Father’s Ashes: Symbol and Metaphor Metaphor refreshes the mind; but it also needs refreshing by the mind. (Blumenberg, 2013, p. 258)

In order to understand the world of religiously traditional rituals, we must detach ourselves from the everyday understanding and take a closer look at the underlying structure. The following story is actually told very quickly: Our lives are characterized by metaphors, we are often not aware of these metaphors in our everyday use, which is why it is also important to reflect on them again and again, they also show up especially in rituals. Now the longer version: Among the many attempts to describe the nature of “the” human being, for example as a working, laughing, knowing or social être humaine, there is also a concept that is important for understanding the meaning of rituals: the concept of the human being as an animal symbolicum, the animal that can create and use symbols (cf. Lorenzer, 1981, p. 23; Eco, 1973, p. 108). Culture and cultures, like language, are bound to signs and thus to symbols and to metaphors (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 17). This is because metaphors provide us with basic systems of orientation (cf. Blumenberg, 2013, p. 19). They are not purely ornamental. Let us now first briefly summarize the definitions of symbol and metaphor at the basic level, the current Duden definitions: Latin symbolum < Greek sýmbolon = (identifying) sign, actually = joined together; after the identifying sign agreed upon between different persons, consisting of frag© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_8

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8  Psychological Terms in the Research Field ments (e.g., of a ring) which, when joined together, make a whole, to: symbállein = to throw together; to join together, to: sýn = together and bállein = to throw. (Duden, retrieved 09/01/2020)

And on metaphor: “(especially used as a stylistic device) linguistic expression in which a word (a group of words) is transferred from its actual context of meaning to another without a direct comparison clarifying the relationship between the ­signified and the signified; figurative transfer (e.g. the creative head of the project) […] Latin metaphora < Greek metaphorá, to: metaphérein = to carry elsewhere” (Duden, retrieved 01.09.2020). The term symbol does not go far enough for me here, the term metaphor is much more appropriate. There are always at least • the designated, the content, the agents etc. and • the signifying, such as language, images, etc., • in addition, the connection between the two, which can be more or less transparent or mysterious – at least in the case of metaphor, while in the case of symbol there is a fixed connection (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 15), Willis is only one of many references for this structure, Eco has also done some very fundamental work on this (cf. Eco, 1973). When I speak of “my father’s ashes”, for instance, I can mean the cremated remains of his body, or the ashes of his cigars. This ambiguity can happen unintentionally and accidentally, because ‘it just came to me’, or because I use it intentionally, as a somewhat drastic (and thus hopefully memorable) demonstration of the ambiguity of the play between concept and signified, as here in the title. However, with all these often very clever publications there is m E again and again the problem that they actually use symbol in the sense of the concept of metaphor, as a non-coercive meaning, in which what is there, and what we think of it, what it stands for us, is always variable in no form coercive. Turner distinguishes in communication theory syntax, as the formal relations to each other, semantics, that is the relation to extra-linguistic phenomena, and pragmatics, the relation of signs to their users (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 29). Also in his remarks, as is so often the case, the concept of symbol and the concept of metaphor are mixed. As soon as something that is composed of two parts carries meaning, although it does not do so in the execution as purely designated, it is, in my opinion, a metaphor.

8.1 My Father’s Ashes: Symbol and Metaphor

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Metaphors, along this line of thought (Turner, in the following quotation, wrongly uses the term symbols, in my opinion), are both sensually perceptible signals, carriers of meaning, and as such “quite essentially involved in the manifold variability of living, consciously, emotionally, and volitionally behaving human beings, who use these symbols not only to order the universe they inhabit, but also to make creative use of the disorder […].” (Turner, 1982, p. 32). It is in this space that experience takes place, which is actually always metaphorically overformed (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 2011) and at the same time deeply sunk into our bodies, where concepts such as embodiment or embodiment become important (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 11). This constructs and becomes meaningful living space. And in this space we create metaphors. The preoccupation with religiously traditional rites of passage raises the question of the extent to which our lives are in themselves metaphorically shaped. What in our lives is pure reality, so to speak, and what has a symbolic component? In the book Living in Metaphors, authors Lakoff & Johnson posit that we fundamentally move and live in metaphorical contexts, and this symbolism can hardly be avoided. It must be factored in. In rites of passage that make visible a certain threshold that can last for months or years, this metaphorical symbolism plays a major role. (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 2011). Basically, it is important to realize that almost everything in our lives has a (potentially) metaphorical component. An essential part of our socialization seems to consist in making use of the symbols and metaphors of our culture, which the specific social and cultural context provides (cf. Congar, 1964, p. 71 f.). Boff describes in his Little Doctrine of the Sacraments how the last cigarette butt his father smoked, which was such a powerful image of his committed and deeply religious character, becomes a kind of metaphorical sacramental image (cf. Boff, 1976, p. 27 ff.). When I think of my father’s cigars, I have quite different images in my mind, such as hours of torturous car rides during which my father smoked without regard for us children – if I revolted, my father in turn became aggressive. But that too is an image associated with my father’s cigars – and that marks the metaphorical – ambiguous and ambiguous – component of the image: my father’s cigarettes as a symbol of his wonderful thoughtfulness. Metaphors can be seen here as a convention that is realized on three levels: • It is understandable to any of the initiated (transparency criterion), • something takes place (immanence criterion), • and what happens has a meaning for the initiated that goes beyond the concrete action (transcendence criterion).

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Corresponding to this, Reible lists four dimensions: physical, psychological, social and spiritual (cf. Reible in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 98). I deliberately leave out the spiritual component. It is always important to keep in mind: Metaphor relations are always optional, never obligatory. One of the essential characteristics of rituals is transparency, in addition to immanence and transcendence. We will come back to this later in the definition of ritual according to Boff. Interestingly, in Stollberg-Rilinger’s remarks on ­communication as a whole, these levels of meaning are mirrored: m. E. these factors are mirrored: “Communication does not function like sending a ready-made message from A to B, as the older understanding of communication oriented to the telegraph model suggests. Rather, communication is a two-way relationship between at least two participants. An act of communication occurs when three things happen at the same time: firstly, when information is expressed, secondly, when it is meant as a communication by one party and thirdly, when it is understood as a communication by the other party. Understanding here, however, does not at all mean that one ascribes exactly the same meaning to the communication as the other means. Whether this is the case is certainly mutually beyond perception. Understanding here means first of all only that the one exhibits the utterance of the other as a communication at all, which is shown by the fact that he reacts at the time with further communication” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 198). Some metaphors seem to wear out with prolonged use. That’s what I’m writing now, and what I really mean is: let’s think about it further. Let us observe, also ourselves. A world without metaphors – and thus also without rituals – is inconceivable. It is part of our condition humaine, which we cannot escape. As soon as we have a sign, we charge it with meaning. The initially unsymbolic clothing of reformatory professors thus became, for example, the metaphorically charged Protestant pastor’s garb, a youth movement became a style of dress and then a “philosophy of life” that is afflicted with all kinds of changing connotations, drinking tea at a certain time becomes a relationship ritual, etc. “We do not live in a time of committed anti-ritualism […]. Rather, we move in an inscrutable dualism that can be exemplified by two extreme forms: a) the alteration of an ancestral rite by naïve inflationary ritualism.” (Soeffner, 1992, p. 103).

8.2 The Garden of Images: Religion as a System of Metaphors

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8.2 The Garden of Images: Religion as a System of Metaphors As much as I appreciate definitions of religion from, say, the spiritual perspective of various religions, for this paper I use a phenomenological definition, that is, one oriented toward the manifestations of religion. What happens? What do we feel and think? De Botton writes, “Religion is first and foremost a symbol of all that is beyond our imagination, and it seeks to teach us that it is to our advantage to realize our wretchedness” (De Botton, 2013, p. 196). Well, actually De Botton certainly did not mean a symbol as clearly and necessarily belonging together, but a metaphor. Religion can be understood in this sociological context as a system of metaphors. As Dürkheim put it, “For something to gain religious significance, only two conditions are necessary: it must be simple and repeatable” (Count Dürkheim, 1966, p. 17). His definitions already tie the concept of religion to actions and forms of action. Sloterdijk also does this in what I find a refreshing and plausible way. He writes: “[there is] no ‘religion’ and no ‘religions’ […], but only misunderstood spiritual systems of practice, whether these are practiced in collectives  – conventionally: church, ordo, umma, sangha1 – or in personalized versions – in interplay with the ‘own God’ with whom the citizens of modernity privately insure themselves. Thus the tiresome distinction between ‘true religion’ and superstition becomes irrelevant. There are only systems of practice more or less capable of propagation, more or less worthy of propagation. The false opposition between believers and non-­ believers also falls away and is replaced by the distinction between practitioners and unpractised or otherwise practising.” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 12) These systems of practice are physical, as well as psychological and social (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 23). I am not referring here to the difference between imaginistic and book religions, to which Whitehose ascribes a greater propensity to doctrine. Ethnologically, I can neither prove nor disprove it; from my experience, the question of the ideology- of religious practice is not just a matter of written fixation – even oral transmission can be doctrinaire – but a question of the society surrounding it, and here especially the rigidity or flexibility of dynamics and change. Are changes outside the system punished or are they allowed within a certain framework?

 Emphasis added by Sloterdijk.

1

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In ritual, these forms of exercise represent a specific code with which experiences can be transported particularly well. It is important to be aware that they are exercises, that as a form of life we are always practitioners (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 229). Fromm writes: “Religion, both in its life and in its rituals, speaks a different language from that of our everyday life, namely a symbolic one. The essence of the same consists in the fact that inner experiences are expressed in an emotional or mental way, as if they were sensual experiences.” (Fromm, 1985, p. 99). Religion here has the function of the form-giver, and the transporter of experiences. It is forms that make certain experiences experienceable, for example when people meet in a religious context – usually in the context of a celebration, a so-called Kasualie. In this context, Brasch also points to the root word relegere (to treat with care): religion in this context is seen as “an expression of fear and reverence, respect for the sacred, and the punctual performance of rites.” (Brasch, 1968, p.  402) ­Theologian Friedrichs goes so far as to define religion entirely in terms of its associated symbol system: “By religion I mean a cultural symbol system that performs interpretation of world and self with the claim of ultimate relevance and validity” (Friedrich, 1996, p. 467). The theologian Friedrichs goes much further: He defines religion entirely in terms of its symbolic system: “By religion I understand a cultural symbolic system that interprets the world and itself with the claim of ultimate relevance and validity”. (Friedrich, 1996, p. 467) But of course religion cannot be reduced to its form; to many, especially those who are theologically situated, the very idea is stange that something as numinous, sacred and mysterious as religion should be essentially mediated by earthly forms or even co-exist with them (cf. Kimball in van Gennep, 1908/1960, p. IX; id. p. 14). For most lay people, however, religion is visible precisely or in part almost exclusively in its forms. The pastoral theologian Zulehner points to the strange and repeatedly noted paradox “that while many ‘do not believe,’ they nevertheless act as if they did believe” (Zulehner, 1976, p. 213). This observation is also confirmed by my interviewees in 1997 as in 2020: Even when the content of the religious community becomes questionable, there apparently remains a need for the form, as a given context or religious act (cf. Barz, 1995, p. 24; van Dülmen, 1989, p. 217; Franke, 1974/1988, p. 100) The metaphorical meaning of the acts is not necessarily revealed (unlike symbols, see the discussion of both terms in the previous chapter). We do not necessarily have an idea of why we wear a white dress, light birthday candles, etc., yet it seems to belong. Rational understanding is not necessary for rituals to work (cf. Willis, 1981):

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I find rituals, well for me, it’s a bit of a pity, even such other rituals, so this recurring, like once a year with the family to go on vacation somewhere and what then maybe also gets such a momentum, that’s very nice, but actually we do not ham that, so there I think my wife would also immediately open. Also, well, maybe it’s a ritual, this candle in front of the Buddha at breakfast or something, but… So if it’s not, it’s not bad. (Karl Z. 29 ff.)

Zinser writes: “The concept of religion is to be unfolded historically; it is not possible to state what the essence of religion – transcendental or substantial or conceived independently of human history and society – is. Unlike the objects of natural science, religion is not simply an external object, but an appearance that has a self-understanding of itself. This self-understanding of religion is to be taken as a basis for every determination of religion. A scientist of religion will not simply be able to take over this self-interpretation, but he must also not disregard it. Without knowledge of self-interpretation, many religious acts are hardly distinguishable from other, non-religious ones […]” (Zinser, 2010, p. 66). Zinser writes further: “[…] Actually all terms of religious studies [are] disputed and unclear. With unclear terms one cannot come to an agreement – neither in science, nor in social disputes, nor in inter-religious and social discussions. In religious studies, however, agreement and clarity has hardly been reached on any term; even the concept of religion and the subject matter of religious studies is the subject of such dispute that some recommend that discussion of it be discontinued” (Zinser, 2010, p. 282). Pollack & Müller also struggle with the problem in the Religion Monitor. How to gain knowledge about religion or religiosity if the terms are only insufficiently defined? They write: “Accordingly, religiosity is to be understood as a multidimensional phenomenon, following Charles Glock (1954, 1962), whereby characteristics for practice, belief and identity are considered here […]. This also involves looking beyond purely descriptive statements for characteristic patterns and determinants, such as the influence of religious socialization, social situation, or even the denominational background of the respondents. Cult, liturgy, threshold rituals/ rites de passage/rites of passage” (Pollack & Müller, 2013, p. 10). A good working definition is provided by Sloterdijk. He conceives religiosity as “a form of hermeneutic mobility […] and a trainable quantity […].” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 46) This exercise refers, among other things, to one of our core systems of communication: communication via metaphors and symbols (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 2011): Religion becomes interesting for psychology primarily as a subjective phenomenon, independent of the claim to truth (cf. Congar, 1964, p.  78; Freud, 1978, p. 197 f.). Essential here is the concept of religious bricolage, which has been cir-

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culating in professional articles for some time. This metaphor does not refer to the “scientific hobbyist” alone, but describes in general the process in which a concept is socially and individually constructed  – a classic phenomenon of modernity. Religion, as will become apparent in the following, is obviously constructed and lived according to individual topoi. Membership in a religious community provides the form that is individually and creatively filled and framed with content. For clarification, a comparison of the practice of religion according to the church ideal with self-statements of some of my interview partners. On the one hand, the image of the good Christian or good Jew continues to be determined by the religious communities, but important mediators are increasingly the media, which are replacing old multipliers such as hymn books and holy scriptures as mediators of the normative image. Basically, the type of religious practice close to the church, described as stable formal membership in a religious community, participation in its circadian festivals in the course of the year, adherence to the given laws and norms, as well as the practice of individual piety, is found less and less in Christianity. As in the case of my interviewee Doris. In contrast, when parents and/or partners are religious, this seems to influence children (see Zuckerman et al., 2016). This is also supported by my interviewees, for example, from the 2020 series, Thomas and Doris as atheists, Karl who lives his father’s religiosity, Martha who would like to follow her family’s big celebrations or Joshua who follows his wife’s family tradition. The interviews generally reveal very individual, biography-specific patterns of religious lifestyle. This is also consistent with the everyday experience that today there is no longer “the” Christian, Muslim, Jew or atheist, but that religion is individually constructed in the course of modern identity constructions (cf. Hitzler, 1996). Independent of the formal affiliation to a religious community people construct their frame of meaning and orientation. They construct, at most inspired by their religious community, their own religion with very individual, spiritual, and also eschatological ideas. The religious basic material, which is conveyed by family, church and social socialization, is in my impression very freely interpreted. The resulting religious practice appears to be a creative self-interpretation, as my interviews show. In this respect, Fromm’s idea of religion as an “emotional matrix”, as a “human reality that stands behind a system of thought”, also seems central to me. (Fromm, 1985, p. 58). Regardless of the question of the existence of an absolute religion, religion thus becomes a social phenomenon. Just as we construct our social reality (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1970; Oerter, 1993, p. 309), we also construct our religion as a part of the social and individual systems of reference in which we move:

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“For the religious system in particular, social interpretation is therefore no longer based on religion, but on a complex of system/environment relations in the environment of the religious system that make religion possible” (Luhmann, 1990, p. 248; cf. Stephenson, 1995, p. 93). Are the traditional religions and rites as incomprehensible today to the non-­ religious or to those who are members of a religious community but do not practice, as the religion of foreign peoples once was? In everyday life we find a great shyness to talk about religious practice, at least and especially when we have the idea or certainty that the other person is not religious. Three construction complexes seem to me to be of particular importance: • Religion as a socially mediated system of meaning and values • Religion as an out of the ordinary experience • Religion as a metaphorical system. After Han: • The sign is the signifier. • The meaning is the signifier. (cf. Han, 2019, p. 76) But this distinction is extremely error-prone – only a meager n in between, and thus error-prone. Importantly, “Even ritual signs cannot be assigned a definite meaning.” (Han, 2019, p. 77) This is because ritual signs are metaphorical. But religion cannot, of course, be reduced to its metaphorical or immanent form. The more intellectual understanding of religion passes by the understanding of religion of many, to whom religion becomes visible just or even almost exclusively in its forms. Already in 1976 the pastoral theologian Zulehner points to the paradox “that many “do not believe” but nevertheless act as if they believed.” (Zulehner, 1976, p. 213) this observation is also confirmed by my interview partners. In this process, religion is not imposed on people, but is realized in interaction and thus reflection: “The scientist of religion must thematize in the process of self-­ understanding and interpretation, which takes place between cultural cults and myths up to theological and philosophical, in some recent cases even religious-­ scientific interpretations of religion. This means looking at religion and its history as a process of reflection, and specifically as a process of reflection by people in which they continually reshape their lives.” (Zinser, 2010, p. 69).

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8.3 Rituals as Metaphorical Actions A ritual is a sacred interruption. The catching of breath in the everyday. The possible turning point in the always-so-on. The moment for wonder in the anyway. (Brudereck, 2018, p. 49)

Rituals are one of the forms of realization of religion. They are sign-like actions with no immediate practical purpose in everyday life. Ritual actions are not directly purpose-bound or aimed at an efficiency that can be defined in any way. I’m not making a wake as an opportunity so that everyone can eat again, for instance. “Rituals are a challenge to the postmodern, literary approach to culture and its text-­ fixated conservative sympathizers in the planning realm of academic enterprises. Rituals seem easy to translate into texts because they follow, or seem to follow, certain schemata and yet ostensibly elude high-cultural ratiocination.” (Hauschild, 2008, p. 19). The term ritual is sometimes used in an inflationary manner, for example as a purely recurring structure. And it is not always explained. For example in the book “155 Rituals and Phase Transitions” by Feldmann (2000). There it does appear in the title and then again unexplained in a small sequence (Feldmann, 2000, p. 10), but I confess I have wondered why the rituals are in the title without being described in the book. In contrast, the book “1000 Rituals for the Elementary School” by Kaiser (2017) is quite different. It goes into a very decided definition of ritual before then going into practical work. Now, rituals obviously continue to be in vogue. But an understanding of what they are is always to be found anew and made explicit. “Rituals are “conceptually regarded as nightmares”” writes Hauschild (2008, p. 21, the core quotation is from Köpping et al., 2006) Zinser also emphasizes in 2010 that one cannot actually define the term rituals, except in the rather global form that ritual is movement (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 138). Ritual as movement? That sounds good. We can try again along Zinser’s lines for a kind of ex negativo definition: Rites are not part of everyday action, (Zinser, 2010, p. 139)? But that’s not true. At least not for everyday religiosity. Let’s try it anyway. First with some questions: If a child wants a story every night, is that a ritual? If someone throws china at the wall in anger, is it a ritual? If we still go shopping in the spring when our closets are well stocked, is that a ritual? When we eat without being hungry? When we travel without being curious? Rituals are simultaneously in time, in the middle of the moment, and outside of time (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 96).

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Is there even a life outside of rituals? This is precisely a question that is always the subject of controversy (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 2011): “We are constantly engaged in performing ritualized acts: starting with the daily rituals […] to the rarer occasions […]; and not forgetting the solemn church ceremonies […]. All these rituals are recurring, structured actions, some of which are prescribed in detail, some of which are performed more consciously than others, some of which arise spontaneously. Each ritual is a recurring, coherently structured, and self-contained part of our experience. By performing ritualized actions, we add structure and significance to our activities, and we simultaneously reduce chaos and inconsistency in our actions. In our terminology, a ritual is something like an experienced gestalt, that is, a coherent sequence of actions structured by the natural dimensions of our experience. Religious rituals are characteristically metaphorical kinds of activities that generally form metonymies: Objects in the real world stand for entities in the world defined by the concept system of religion” (Lakoff & Johnson, 2011, p. 267). Is the whole of life a ritual, from the seemingly ritualistic concealment of pregnancy until the third month to the abandonment of the grave after 30 years, from the morning coffee to the setting of the alarm clock before going to sleep, although one has long since woken up by oneself? Is there a life outside of form, whereby even formlessness bears ritualistic traits and scholars expose even punks as a highly ritualistic society (cf. Soeffner, 1989)? Are rituals inessential or essential, optional or obligatory components of religion? Does religion exist without rituals? We come back to the initial question: what is a ritual at all? At what point, for example, does the act of giving money become a ritual? When the recipient does not need the money at all? Can one already call it a ritual act to fill out a check for a donation? Is drug use a ritual, as Szasz claims (cf. Szasz, 1974)? In contrast to everyday actions, which are also used repeatedly in a structured way, rituals necessarily contain “certain cultural signs of order” (Brosius et  al., 2013, p. 13). Rituals have a metaphorical structure that is accessible to understanding, even in key points: Understanding can be defined as the shared negotiation of meaning, this is necessary in all cases where dialogue happens between ‘strangers’, foreign in experience, different cultural backgrounds, gender, etc. (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 2011, p. 264). We are constantly engaged in performing ritualized acts: from the daily rituals […] to the rarer occasions […]; and not to forget the solemn ecclesiastical ceremonies […]. All these rituals are recurring, structured actions, some of which are prescribed in detail, some of which are performed more consciously than others, some of which arise spontaneously. Each ritual is a recurring, coherently structured, and self-­ contained part of our experience. By performing ritualized actions, we add structure and significance to our activities, and we simultaneously reduce chaos and inconsis-

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8  Psychological Terms in the Research Field tency in our actions. In our terminology, a ritual is something like an experienced gestalt, that is, a coherent sequence of actions structured by the natural dimensions of our experience. Religious rituals are characteristically metaphorical kinds of activities that generally form metonymies: Objects in the real world stand for entities in the world defined by the conceptual system of religion. (Lakoff & Johnson, 2011, p. 267)

Rituals can thus be viewed as “symbolic, expressive, experiential, performative, and communicative events” (Brosius et al., 2013, p. 11). One can often get lost here in a forest of metaphors, as described by the poet Charles Baudelaire (cf. the latter in Landoff & Luzi, 1950, p. 418). Like religion, rituals – regardless of their functionality and truth content – are creatures, or to put it less pathetically – constructions of human beings. The time of their first use is sometimes historically well, usually poorly attested, also they are or were more or less continuously in use, suspected of abuse, or historically, theologically, and psychologically unsuspected, the latter, however, is likely to apply to only a few r­ ituals. At first everything seems rather chaotic, but then we find that something does follow rules, and is functional in some way. In this sense, I base this work on a dynamic understanding of rituals. According to this conception, rituals are metaphorical patterns of action that change. Both the actions and the metaphorical interpretation. Essential grids have always been provided by predetermined forms, practices, symbols and rituals (cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 4). Man obviously experiences his environment to a decisive degree as being who interprets interpreting signs. Or, as a sign theorist say: “Man, it has been said, is a symbolic being, and in this sense not only the language of words, but culture as a whole, rites, institution, social relations, customs, etc., are nothing but symbolic forms […] into which he puts his experience in order to make it interchangeable: one endows humanity when one endows society; but one ends up endowing society when one exchanges signs. Through the sign, man detaches himself from raw perception, from the experience of hic et nunc, and abstracts” (Eco, 1973, p. 103). Hauschild argues along similar lines, but from a distinctly ethnographic perspective: “Rituals are sequenced forms of human action, marked as significant and subsequently regarded as ordered and/or ordered in advance. Rhythmically, they parallel the lived time of life, whether as chaotic liminality, as boundary experience, as internal attunement, or as social action that in turn communicates with biological or earth-historical rhythms and events” (Hauschild, 2008, p. 23). In order to make change tangible and manageable, we obviously need iconographic formalisms, metaphors: Iconography at death like in-memoriam notices, iconography of the family at Christmas, for example. Without images, there is no

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ritual. “Ritual theory opens our eyes to those institutional structures that are not rationally planned and set down as written abstract norms […]. Rituals are always both structure and event at the same time. […] Ritual studies draws attention from the content to the form of action and creates a view that the form is part of the thing itself  – in the words of media theory: that the medium itself is a message. […] Ritual studies sharpens the view of the ubiquitous importance of the symbolic and guards against understanding human action solely as instrumental” (Stollberg-­ Rilinger, 2013, p. 244; in which Sloterdijk agrees with her – cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 13). According to Küpper-Popp, rituals are symbols in actions – along my previous remarks, I consider them as metaphors in action (cf. Küpper-Popp in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 20; cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 4). The metaphorical meanings in rituals can change a lot, there is no fixed as it were lexical system where the same thing always means the same thing. A white cloth can symbolize a corpse, but it can also be a wedding dress. A candle can mean remembrance or realization or new beginning, pain or joy (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 45). Stollberg-Rillinger explains that the term ritual is not a historical source concept, but a modern analytical concept that was coined by religious studies around 1900 and then taken up by ethnology, for example (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, pp. 15, 17 ff.). Central researchers and initiators of ritual studies were Durkheim, who came across rituals when he, as a sociologist, thought about the cohesion of groups (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 23), van Gennep, who “became formative for the structural understanding of rituals” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 23), and Turner, who further developed these schemes, with special emphasis on the intermediate state in rituals, the “betwixt and between” “[…] as a state of anti-structure that temporarily suspends all social structure” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 24 f.). Douglas then focused primarily on symbolic-ritual forms (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 26), while Geertz was then “concerned with understanding dynamic communicatively deep processes” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 27) in rituals, Bourdieu enriched ritual research, for example, with the perspective on the extent to which rituals metaphorically stabilize social inequality (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 29). Rituals are thus metaphors. This also makes them communicable. “Ritualized acts are an integral part of the empirical basis for the metaphorical systems in our culture. A culture without ritual is not possible” (Lakoff & Johnson, 2011, p. 268; cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 3). This also resolves the question of whether religiously traditional rituals can nevertheless be effective for atheists, who undoubtedly have their difficulties with the factor of transcendence. If we understand transcendence not as an inevitable

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reference to a particular belief in God, but as the space between the thing or action and its metaphorical representation, atheism is not a factor for the non-­effectiveness of even religiously traditional rituals (cf. Sennett, 2015, p. 358). At this point, at least, it should be emphasized that no metaphor or symbol is in itself value-free, nor is it received value-free, as my atheist interview partner Thomas rightly points out in my opinion: that creates order, but that also creates space for prejudices and stereotypes and that willingly, I rather want to … counteract that. (Thomas, line 823)

Rituals are thus metaphors. This also makes them communicable. “Ritualized acts are an integral part of the empirical basis for the metaphorical systems in our culture. A culture without ritual is not possible.” (Lakoff & Johnson, 2011, p. 268) And, even incomplete, defective metaphors can have an effect: Here the question is what actually constitutes this efficacy; a general distinction is made between the postulated, intended effect and the operational, actual effect (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 201). There is also the question of whether an improperly performed ritual can also have an effect. She gives the following consideration: “Even an improperly performed ritual can be effective if all circumstances are unproblematic and no one thinks of challenging it.” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 202) “Rituals are ubiquitous and powerful, even today.” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p.  7). Stollberg-­ Rilinger describes this using the example of Obama’s inauguration, where there was a minor error in the oath. Although the correct wording of the oath and the traditional position of the words are actually unimportant for the work of the president, the ritual, in order to ensure its validity, was repeated the next day (Stollberg-­ Rilinger, 2013). Rituals are, of course, never completely controllable; missteps, mishaps, transgressions, and conflicts over, for example, who should or should not actually be invited are commonplace. The view of this is exciting, but so complex and dependent on so many factors, including very strong local ones, that no conclusive answer can actually be given. It is useful to distinguish additionally between instrumental and metaphorical-­ expressive effects of rituals along the basic psychosocial theory of action: • An instrumental action has a definite end, is a means to a definite end. • A metaphorical-expressive action expresses something, creates meaning. The meaning is fulfilled in the action itself, no further purpose is necessary. (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 134)

8.4 Linear and Cyclical Rituals

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Metaphorical-expressive acts are essentially involved in generating collective identities as well, or in accompanying the change of collective identities – this is documented, for example, by rituals around the French Revolution  – they are a means by which people become aware of their (new) identity (cf. Stollberg-­ Rilinger, 2013, p. 174).

8.4 Linear and Cyclical Rituals Temporality, time-boundness and what rituals do with time can be an approach to distinguishing them. Time at least seems to be still preserved in its everyday self-­ evidence: time is so convincing and so omnipresent in the life of everyone and of course also of social scientists, it is all the time important as an essential condition of our being human, and although we constantly take it better understandable, it is still a meaningful aspect, because it is the central structuring means in our lives (cf. Luckmann, 1991, p. 152). On the other hand, this seemingly secure ground soon becomes a double bottom, the ground more uncertain, as soon as one starts to deal with concepts of time. It soon becomes apparent how variable notions of time are across different cultural, historical and social contexts. Basically we distinguish between • circadian (alternative spelling: circadian, also called circular) rituals and • rituals that we can call linear, because they settle linearly on the path of a person’s life, are sacramental, give an indelible imprint. Alternative designation: rituals of passage, rituals of transition or transformative rituals, and various more equal designations in German and French. In the latter, the transformations, the processes of change in this linear path of life are in the foreground. Time is consequently one of the essential distinguishing features of rituals. Distinguishable are everyday time, which primarily means the routines of daily life, and lifetime, which, at least in the West, we experience here in a linear way (cf. Schibilsky & Völzke, 1993, p. 73). Rituals refer both to linear time, for example within the progressive course of a person’s life, and to circular times within a calendar year, a week and a day, that is, in each case circular periods of time that are made plausible by natural processes, the beginning of a day with the rising of the sun, repeating seasons, certain phases of the moon. Circular time orders thereby entwine our life course in very different forms and with very different intensity. Important linear stations can be cyclized in commemorative days, and at the same time, in these cyclically recurring events, a review of

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the elapsed linear time is often made, for example in birth and death anniversaries. Every event, then, has linear and cyclical content – cyclicality and linearity are by no means opposed to legal properties. They are mutually dependent and merge into each other. According to this model, the order of the rituals can be imagined as a double helix, which slowly circles around life, intertwined in itself. Distinguishable are, following Turner and his interpreter Ivanov (cf. Ivanov, 1993; Turner, 1969/1989, p. 161): Cyclical rituals • of individual time: –– microcyclical rituals, such as morning prayer –– macrocyclical rituals, such as birthdays • the collective time –– microcyclical rituals, such as weekly church services –– macrocyclical rituals, such as Olympics Linear rituals • of individual time: –– rituals that conform to the system, such as marriage –– system-stabilizing rituals after a disturbance, such as funerals • the collective time –– rituals that conform to the system, such as state alliances –– system-stabilizing rituals after a disturbance, such as a natural disaster To this end, rituals take place in various religious, national, socio-cultural, local, regional and age-specific contexts (cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 9).

8.5 Examples of the Metaphorical Structure of Rituals What metaphorical components are part of the ritual? First example: graduation ceremony While writing this updated paper, I attended my oldest’s high school prom and a younger daughter’s public report card ceremony a year later, two transitional rituals that raised questions and shed light on aspects that had previously eluded me. So here, as a demonstration of the metaphorical:

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The term alone: “public proclamation of credentials”! Here a change of status is publicly proclaimed and thus metaphorically made visible. To this end: space. Every ritual also has a spatial component, which can be highly metaphorically charged, even if it is in the virtual (cf. Aron, 1996, p. 212). The spaces of the testimonies were also special spaces, used exclusively for special events. Churches, baptisteries, the chuppah, the wedding canopy of the Jews, funeral or mourning halls are all spaces that partly only have the purpose of spatially marking the passage. In rituals like these, the boredom of the witnesses also seems, we can say, at least to be accepted. In general, transitional rituals are always interspersed with long waiting periods until the tempo picks up and “something happens” again. Waiting times are one of the factors that, in my opinion, are not avoided because they are part of it. The theme echoes again and again in threshold rituals or is ­inserted into the liturgy (cf. Brudereck, 2018, p. 60). A friend once had a phrase for this that I found very apt: Make time. Part of a ritual is also to spend money irrationally, so to speak. Expensive drinks, clothes that you wear only once or only a little are signs of the irreplaceable, the meaningfulness of the ritual. It is not ‘everyday business’. To the ritual belongs necessarily some sort of public community. At least when the status within the community changes. This means that all those affected by the change in status of the ritual participant should be present. In the case of a graduation ball or any other certificate ceremony: the graduates, the parents and siblings, and the teachers. I wondered what happens when ritual is denied. Does it really feel different? I remember not being at a good friend’s funeral (because I gave birth to twins 2 days before). I always regretted not making it happen somehow, but later helped design his tombstone. In addition, this festive community is also visible to passers-by, through particularly smartly dressed participants of the festive community in the vicinity of the school. By a crowd dressed in black in front of a church. Passers-by also become witnesses here that something is happening. When one of my youngest daughters graduated at the at least temporary end of the in Corona era, it was such a joy to walk to school with her in formal dresses. These clothes were neither practical nor will they ever be worn often – part of the metaphorical scenario and purposeful waste, too. Photographs, the documentation, the presentation belongs necessarily to the ritual. Just as the priest in the circadian ritual displays the consecrated host for all to see, so too the graduate is made especially visible. He or she is the one whose status is essential. In this, the visible documentary act itself is significant; it reinforces the sense of (to some extent) public significance.

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Second example: Notary visit My notary once said during one of our encounters, “You go to the notary to realize the significance of the moment.” (Ruessmann, 2019, in personal conversation) So a visit to a notary is a good occasion to explain the metaphorical components of a ritual. For transitional rituals settle exactly there: it is about becoming clear in a certain point of the significance of the moment. A moment that, of course, is not only exhausted in this one, but has a whole history. So you visit a notary, for example, to sign a document. After ringing the bell in the house, you enter the office of the notary after a buzzing sound. You are greeted with a handshake by the assistant, she helps you out of your coat, then you are led into the notary’s reception room. When prompted, you sit down, avoiding the head end of the table. Your attention is quite high, and when a short time later the notary enters through the open door, you rise, shake hands first with his assistant and then with him, and at the same time settle down with him in the seat you have chosen. At the same time, the notary chooses the chair at the head end. What happens in the process? Even with such a simple greeting ritual, it becomes clear that many of the steps from outside the notary’s precinct to inside the notary’s reception room are of a metaphorical nature, serving, for example, to secure this transition. However, these steps are by no means practical. On the contrary, it is now well known that shaking hands is rather risky from a purely health point of view (as is well known, this was also the case before Corona). But it serves to shape the transition. In the same way, it is visible in this process who holds which status. Although it is not at all necessary for someone to help you out of your coat, it is a courtesy gesture to show that you are welcome and that you will not be immediately evicted from the notary’s precincts. In the reception room, you are not assigned a seat, and although you can choose between several, you are clear to avoid the seat at the head, traditionally the seat of the highest status person and host. It is completely nonsensical for you to stand when the notary enters the room, but at the same time it is a gesture of deference and respect that adds trustworthiness to the situation and to you. By making this gesture, you are demonstrating that you know what is appropriate, and by making the gesture of greeting together, you are also slowing down the process, which allows for further warming up in this transition. You shake hands with the woman first, then the notary. If it were two men, you would probably be more likely to shake hands with the more senior, the notary, first. Then you sit down at the same time, synchronized with each other, and that completes this transition from outer to inner. We do not stand up to stand up, we do it for transcendent reasons. It is a ritual: it contains immanent elements, that is, what happens, such as standing up, sitting

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down, shaking hands, etc. The actions are transparent for the participants. To this end, the actions are transparent to those involved: when we shake hands we know why we are doing it, that is part of the greeting. Of course, we don’t necessarily know the cultural-historical background of shaking hands, but in itself we are clear why we are doing it and why it’s our turn right now. To this end, it is obvious in the situation and clear to those involved that it is an action that is not grounded in its pure purpose, but has an overarching, transcendent meaning.

8.6 Beyond Action: A Psychosocial Definition of Rituals Rituals are a kind of culturally shaped, psychosocial commodity (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 55). Psychologically, rituals can be conceptualized as lived experiences within the context of metaphorical, structured, and repeatable actions (cf. Barber-­Kersovan & Rösing, 1993, p. 136; Eisenberg, 1990, p. 61; Kaiser, 2017, p. 5; Turner, 1982, p. 127 f.; Willis, 2000, p. xiv) that are performed consciously “even if unconscious parts are operative in them” (Brosius et al., 2013, p. 13). In a psychological perspective, the focus is on the process character and dynamics of rituals (cf. Brosius et al., 2013, p. 15). This is in contrast to, for example, a theological perspective, in which the focus is on the connection to a specific eschatology, or cultural studies, in which a historical-cultural perspective may be foregrounded. According to Duden, the term eschatology refers to the “doctrine or totality of religious ideas about the last things, i.e. about the final fate of the individual and the world” (Duden, 2020), which I quote here because otherwise the discussion would get out of hand. Non-compliance with rituals is sometimes sanctioned (cf. Barber-Kersovan & Rösing, 1993, p.  136; Fromm, 1993, p.  96). In classical theory, we assume that rituals trigger certain feelings. But this, according to Stollberg-Rilinger, is not the core of rituals. It is precisely the other way around, “what is outwardly visibly shown and reciprocally observed.” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 12). In addition to the concrete action, rituals always have meaning beyond the concrete action, i.e. they have a symbolic or metaphorical component through which the event is communicated (cf. Buckland, 1995, p. 215). A ritual is thus necessarily linked to an act of communication of cultural knowledge (cf. Förster in Endruweit & Trommsdorff, 1989, p. 546). In rituals, cultural ideas, the cultural matrix of a social setting are communicated and in some cases made communicable in the first place (cf. Luhmann, 1990, p. 8, Winkler in EAT, 1996). Rituals do not necessarily need a spiritual or mystical superstructure. But according to Turner’s definition, they necessarily need a transcendental superstruc-

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ture, that is, that their action is more than the concrete action. These rituals take place in an action-specific framework that makes it clear to the outside world that a change in the level of meaning is taking place here, for example through a particular dressing ritual, through a change of place, etc. (cf. Ambos & Weinhold in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 95). So one can for instance drink a cup of milk because one is thirsty, but one can also drink it with a ritual superstructure in the context of a ritual, where this cup of milk is perhaps the first welcome in the parental home after a long absence – Boff illustrated this very nicely in his small sacramental doctrine of 1976 (cf. Boff, 1976) – But this definition is not shared by all – for Turner for instance the idea of the working of supernatural powers belongs necessarily to the ritual (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 126). In my opinion it is an open question whether even in decidedly religious rituals a reference to this spirituality or a specific belief in God is necessary – and this will have to be answered differently depending on the religion (cf. Rabbi Verzhbovska in a personal conversation 09.01.2022). Also my interview partners of the first series 1995–1997 as well as of the second series 2020 show that even in religious threshold rituals religious experience does not take place everywhere and this absence is not necessarily experienced as a shortcoming (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 64). It also remains open to me whether existential perspectives are necessarily addressed in ritual, as described by Jappe 1993, for example (cf. Jappe, 1993, p. 150). Rituals can, but do not have to be connected with physical actions. Often, however, acts of clothing and hygiene (shaving, washing) are associated with them, at least in metaphorical form – for example, the ritual bath in Judaism, baptism in Christianity, ablutions before prayer in Islam (cf. van Gennep, 1908/1960, p. 99). Soeffner writes: “[…] since our actions as well as our experience can charge everything with meaning and significance that seems to be important to us in the respective concrete situation, in principle all elements of action or experience can also be provided with certain aspects of significance. Symbols are specific representatives of such aspects of meaning. Thus it comes about that – contrary to what our symbol dictionaries suggest – in principle everything can become a symbol or an element of symbolic action, provided that the agent declares it accordingly within the communication situation […].” (Soeffner, 1992, p. 63). Under certain circumstances, the superordinate meaning can also only become visible when this “habit” is discarded. Soeffner thus thinks in the same direction as the Catholic theologian Boff, who in a very differentiated view basically attributed sacramental potency to every “thing on God’s earth” (Boff, 1976, p. 44 f.). Stollberg-Rilinger’s four-part definition of rituals is also interesting: according to her, a ritual consists of

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• Standardization and repetition: Rituals are characterized by a standardized external form, thus rituals are expectable and recognizable, and they reduce the complexity pressure of the environment, • character of performance: Rituals are marked temporally, spatially and socially; there are, for example, certain speech formulas, certain sequences, under a certain direction, • imagery in the sense of metaphoricity (awful word, I know, but I couldn’t think of a more suitable one): rituals refer to a larger order context of a community, have a communicative character, and convey their values in a predominantly non-verbal form. At the same time, rituals are “in many respects diffuse, vague and ambiguous” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 11), • performativity: Rituals represent and draw a line between before and after, they create a caesura, structure time. (after Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, pp. 9–12). Zinser’s structural definition of rituals is also helpful: “Rituals are 1. fixed or prescribed actions or sequences of actions, with or without text, in which the performance of the action is preceded by 2. be ascribed meaning beyond their instrumental purpose or even against it. The determination is not 3. given by the biological constitution of man, but it can be based on it. 4. A fundamental characteristic of rites is that they are repeated unchanged, or we are told they are unchanged. 5. Ritual actions are more or less distinct from everyday actions. 6. In order to determine whether a rite is religious or secular, it is first necessary to ask about the self-image of the person performing the rite and his or her recognition by the social environment. 7. Since rites are often recorded unchanged over long periods of time – in their basic constituents – multiple layers of meaning must be reckoned with in any interpretation.” (Zinser, 2010, p. 139) Sennett again lists three building blocks of ritual: • Repetition, thus patterns of experience and embodiments form what we often refer to with the scientific term embodiment (the fact that Sennett uses the term embodiments exclusively could be due to the translation), • metaphorical character, rituals transform objects, body movements, words, etc. into metaphors,

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• expression – Rituals have an expressive character. (cf. Sennett, 2015, p. 127 ff.) Frey and Mayr write in 2018, “Behaviors can be called ritual as soon as they take place on specific occasions and have a meaning that goes beyond the action itself [they refer here to Schindler, 2004].” (Frey and Mayr in Frey, 2018, p. 3) but here, in my opinion, the authors miss a very important point: rituals must become immanent, grounded in the representational, in the real sensory world. In the following definition I orient myself essentially on the characteristics described by Boff • Immanence, • transparency and • transcendence (cf. Boff, 1976, p. 39 f.; Paul, 1990, p. 232). Here it is interesting to compare the definitions of Stollberg-Rilinger, Zinser and Sennett with Boff’s definition of it: • Boff’s immanence factor refers to performativity and expression, biological facet, embodiment, and standardization and repetition, • the transparency factor refers to the performance character, the distinction from everyday life, and basic comprehensibility, • the transcendence factor refers to metaphoricity and self-understanding. Michels’ behavioral definition is also interesting here: here, rituals are conceived as part of a general theory of action in its behavioral four-part definition (cf. Michaels in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 6 ff): • Embodiment – rituals presuppose acting persons, and actions, • formality: since rituals consist of standardized, partly stereotypically repeated actions, this excludes one-off arbitrary actions, which, however, as Kuckelkorn, 2020 shows, can certainly become a ritual, • exaggeration/ modality: Rituals refer to something higher, they sometimes evoke larger contexts such as tradition, etc., • transformation: changing rituals, such as the legal status of a couple getting married, or dying. In this, Michaels partly mirrors Boff’s tripartite definition. It matters more with rituals, as Michaels rightly says, to do them right than to consider why one is doing

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them. The authorship of the act is essentially eliminated (cf. Michaels in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 10). With this functionally appropriate definition, I avoid recourse to concrete effects and, at the same time, associate an all too socially – or proclamation-led, and even more so anthropology-drawing definition, which, in my opinion, restricts the perspective on the psychosocial effect and the dynamics of rituals too much. Following Sloterdijk, rituals are forms of individual and social practice (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 14). Most of the threshold rituals are thereby family rituals, family rituals in general, including circadian, have a “central importance for the family community and the development of the individual. They create order, generate a sense of community, and reinforce feelings of belonging and reliability. At the same time, they establish a balance between stability and change in the family and provide a framework for the dynamics between family members in which they can develop a social identity. […] Such rituals enact family traditions and patterns of interaction and express collectively shared symbolic knowledge. Through them, the family represents itself and consolidates its internal order.” (Wulf in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 20) Family rituals thus represent social practices. As a reminder, metaphors are, at any rate according to Turner, social and cultural dynamic systems (cf. Turner, 1982, p.  31). Metaphors are both sensuously perceptible signals, carriers of meaning, and as such “quite essentially involved in the manifold variability of living, consciously, emotionally, and volitionally behaving human beings who use these symbols not only to order the universe they inhabit, but also to make creative use of the disorder […]” (Turner, 1982, p. 32). Sensory signals: Immanence Carriers of meaning: transparency and transcendence. Thus, three components crystallize for a psychosocial definition of ritual: Transparency: elaborated code with the character of a sign, which conveys content and is open to interpretation – even if it may not be directly understood by those involved in the ritual; immanence: a concrete action (in a psychosocial perspective this includes thinking); transcendence: the ritual action contains a superior meaning that transcends immanence).

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Over time, understanding (transparency) can change, of course, but without an understanding in the sense of “what to do” the ritual is no longer performed. Rituals only live when they are understood, when it is clear at least to the important agents of the ritual what is happening or what is to be done. One of the essential carriers of rituals are presumably understood iconographic patterns, each of which can change. For example, the iconography of a white wedding dress, a christening gown, the iconography of festivity. What is understood as appropriate and what is not? How should a young mother, a young father, an adolescent who has come of age present himself, how should his hairstyle look “right”? Tomorrow is Ascension Day, Father’s Day. No one in my family knows what to do religiously – but everyone knows that outside men go out together, and for the children, that they do “something”, depending on regional, family tradition, for or with their fathers. Even with Christmas, there are a few core motifs that make Christmas “the Christmas”. Transcendence: How can ritual actions be clearly distinguished from everyday actions? Through their nonsensicalness, which refers to transcendence. Is the metaphor of rituals universal? Interpretations that rituals are a kind of language, which at the same time somehow contains certain basic ritual vocabulary, could suggest this – but in the end I think this discussion is idle, because on the one hand our mutual knowledge is too small for such an apodictic statement, and on the other hand the question then arises what we actually mean by such universality, and what we concretely do with it. Moreover, such an approach could, in my opinion, narrow the perspective too much (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 195). Another interesting question I find is when people decide for a ritual. For example, for a ritualized mourning tattoo (cf. Hartig & Oeft-Geffarth, 2016, n.d.). Do they decide unconsciously or consciously? And are you clear which metaphors mean what to them? We can see from the birthday candles that this is not necessarily the case. If we approach the metaphorics of birthday candles – have you ever tried that? – then one could certainly see a memento mori in them, each candle for the transience of one’s own life. But few of us are aware of that. Metaphors as well as metaphorical actions such as rituals settle at places in life where language is insufficient, or inadequate (cf. Hartig & Oeft-Geffarth, 2016, n.d.). In such situations, we look for ways of expression (cf. Hartig & Oeft-­Geffarth, 2016), and find them in sign-like actions. Rituals are thus to be understood as a kind of language, especially given the general view that ritual actions are innate. However, rituals are often clearly more ambiguous than linguistic expressions, this is the general consensus in ritual research (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 199). The boundaries between ritual and everyday life are sometimes fluid, for example when the death candle is lit in a dying process lasting several weeks, which

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may already be partially ritualized, and the temporal rhythms shift once again. Singer states a similar flow in the case of the boundaries, between the ritual and the compulsive (cf. Singer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 19)- however, since I am not a clinician, I will leave this topic out of this work.

8.7 The Place at the Border: A Psychosocial Definition of Transitional Rituals What is the transition? The transition is the place at the border (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 69) This place is both destructive and constructive, disorderly, in that it breaks through old orders, as well as ordering (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 73). In a fiction text, the dystopia Dry, I find the description: “[…] feels […] to me as if the world has been torn in two, and we are traveling on the seam of the rift – the gap between what was and what will be.” (Shusterman & Shusterman, 2019, p. 297) When we talk about rites of passage, we must first consider what transitions are meant, or what transitions themselves are. M. E. we are talking about incisive events that are essentially unrevocable, like a rupture or a rift. It is about irrevocable bonds or changes. Even today, thresholds have something indelible, something of an injury whose traces remain for a lifetime – such as parenthood (cf. Donath, 2015, p. 138), maturation, a period or a whole life with a partner, the death of parents, etc. What is the transition? What characterizes it? How can you pinpoint the point of the threshold? I asked my Muslim interviewee Erva about this for the first fast: When did you start fasting, and when is the getting special? […] what is the point? Oh, fasting, so the beginning… Well, with me it was like this, that my big brother had already fasted once, then I saw for the first time, aha, as a child, you don’t notice that the parents don’t eat, but… With the siblings it’s just different, not eating, that starts early, that you noticed that the siblings are fasting, and then you tried it out.,…. I’ll put it this way, the first time I fasted really well was when I was eight or nine years old. Wow! ok So then there was no real time where it started, you still have a bit of fun with it, with the family that the table is set and afterwards …. It was fun,… You feel it that you are also grateful… (Erva, line 161–176)

The essential reference on the subject of threshold rituals continues to be the Dutchman van Gennep, since his model is not only ethnologically applicable to traditional societies outside our cultural circle, as seen in Turner’s work, for example, but also to phenomena of the Western world and of the human life cycle as

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a whole – from the procreation of a human being to physical and social death together (cf. van Gennep, 1908/1960). There are two definitional tracks for transitional rituals according to van ­Gennep: • a separation phase, followed by a threshold phase, followed by an affiliation phase, here the focus is on the social argument; • a preliminal phase, a liminal phase, a postliminal phase, a spatio-temporal metaphor (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 159). It turns out that a transitional ritual is an architectural metaphor and the space is very significant in transitions, also in the demarcation from other spaces, sacred and profane is clearly marked in the threshold ritual. What is striking is that in the interview with a Catholic architect, for example, neither my interlocutor nor I notice it. The point is to seek a bridge: these are also bridges that are not completely unimportant for me. (Karl, Z. 334)

Turner’s three-phase model of a transitional ritual, then, looks like this: • Separation phase: separation rites to detach from an old state, often metaphorical shaving or undressing, sometimes destruction rituals with fire etc., preliminal rites, • transitional phase: thresholds and rites of passage, transnational status, no role, social disappearance, also often metaphorical in the clothes, no status, no individuality, discontinuity, anti-order, special mostly neutralizing or de-­ individualizing clothes, uniformity, often loss of the old name or passengers harmlessness, structural invisibility, anonymity, liminal rites, • Affiliation phase: reintegration, rites of affiliation for integration into a new state, visibility, metaphorical reclothing, postliminal rites. (cf. Paul, 1990, p. 231 Röttger-Rössler in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 38; van Gennep, 1908/1960). Along these three phases we speak of three subjective levels of ritualized life: • mentalization, as a primarily cognitive mental involvement, • affect activation, as emotional overexcitement due to physical and psychological stress,

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• the attachment, which is connected with an acclimatisation to the new place or living conditions (cf. Röttger-Rössler in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 39). Psychologically, first in the first phase it is a rupture, in the next phase it is the crisis, that is, the actual transition, and in the next it leads to crisis management, both individually and collectively (see Turner, 1982, p. 171): “crises occur in transitional phases, and transitional phases are prone to crisis.” (Kast, 2000, p. 29). In the middle we are invisible, a quality that is characteristic of transitional rituals or transitional beings (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p.  102). I remember a course participant who, when asked about her heart’s desire, said to her own surprise that she would like to be invisible for a few months. Although she was warmly devoted to her surroundings, this was an idea of great liberation for her. Mourners in the first year of mourning, the white dress of the candidates, for example, the candidates for the priesthood, for a wedding, etc. There are times when we become invisible along religiously traditional procedures, or rather, this invisibility in the threshold helps us to cross it. The term threshold ritual is thus a term that marks a boundary. “No place is more creative than the place on the boundary.” writes Peter Schellenbaum (1992, p. 72). The threshold situation of growing up, a divorce, a crisis of values, a death. Incidentally, the old superstition that stumbling brings bad luck also points to the significance of the threshold situation. Stumbling is thus regarded as a sign of approaching misfortune and as a warning of fate (cf. Brasch, 1968, p. 25 ff.). One can also stumble at thresholds, one can fail at them. These phases guarantee a kind of orderly transition in a time that is also sometimes out of joint (cf. Röttger-Rössler in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 39). Zinser defines rites along themes dealt with, • for example, cults that relate to the relationship between people (i.e. social cults) or cults that relate to questions of individual life (as individual cults) and cults that relate to the relationship between man and external nature; • then he distinguishes cults according to time, i.e. regularly performed cults, transitional periods and crisis rituals, • and then rituals which are differentiated according to participation, i.e. whether they are family festivals or festivals of the primary group, such as a couple, neighbourhood or town festivals etc., festivals of the whole society, or also festivals of certain organisations or special organisations not based on kinship, which are either within a society or transcend society, such as rituals of freemasons etc.,

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• and then, according to Zinser, rites can be distinguished according to the places and according to the performers (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 150 f.). In some cases, transitional rituals are nested and intertwined. For example, saying goodbye to old significant others and joining the new circle of significant others may overlap with probation and purification rites, ancestor rites, and prospective rites. In addition, linear transitional rituals are cyclized, for example through memoration days. Thus the memory of the birth of a child lives on in its birthday celebrations, wedding, death, confirmation and confirmation anniversaries cyclically recall a unique event, whereby according to our decimal system above all every tenth year has significance. Calendar days that are neutral in themselves thus acquire a special face, in that they are honored, sacralized, sanctified by the commemoration of a linear event. In a special way, the circumstance is taken into account that after such an event a fundamental change of life, a profound change of direction has taken place. But whether the concept of a transition ritual is really to be applied only to such change or also to other, smaller thresholds is debatable: “Although van Gennep wanted to see the term rites of passage applied both to rituals accompanying the change of social status of an individual as well as a group of people, and to those accompanying the seasonal changes affecting an entire society […] the term rites of passage was then used almost exclusively in connection with these rituals of life crises. I […] hold that almost all kinds of rites exhibit the course form of a transition” (Turner, 1982, p. 34). But even if many circular rituals do indeed have linear features, and many linear rituals have circular features, a broad interpretation of the threshold concept is problematic. It is an equalizer that makes thinking about ritual unnecessarily spongy, at least in the case of my question. Van Gennep’s model of rituals of passage runs the risk of creating unnecessary vagueness, since it can be applied to almost any everyday situation, which is what makes it appealing. It can be observed both in the small everyday rituals and in the major turning points in life. So the same question arises again and again: What is a transitional ritual anyway? Or: What is a transitional situation? A definition is further complicated by the fact that not all thresholds have the same inner quality as they may seem from the outside. One wedding is not like all, the motivation for it, the dynamics between the couple as well as between the couple and the family can be extremely varied. So there is a great temptation here, depending on one’s interest in knowledge, to declare one threshold situation a turning point in life, while ignoring the other. It is therefore important, at least as a working aid, to define a setting of rules according

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to which we decide whether we are really dealing with a threshold ritual. I consider the following characteristics to be particularly central: 1. The event has an irreversible or hardly reversible character within individual time, such as birth and birth/baptism, marriage, death. The event either takes place in-time within the framework of biographically planned or foreseeable junctures, such as the birth of a child in an existing relationship, death after a long life, or has occurred as a result of external events or disturbances, such as in the case of a serious illness. Here, however, it must be emphasized that the significance is not simply determined by the event, but by the evaluation of the event by everyone. (cf. Luther, 1992, p. 219); 2. The event is thus accompanied by a significant restructuring of both the actual people affected by the event and significant others (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1970) and is therefore relevant to socialization (preliminal risk); 3. The event constructs status shifts, which for Turner are also essential characteristics of threshold rituals, and therefore places high demands on the addressee of the ritual and significant others (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 35) (liminal risk); 4. The event therefore contains the generally known risk of a defective or incomplete socialization event (postliminal risk).

8.8 Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals: An Overview A transition is exactly that – a passage to something new. […] And when your term is up, when you leave […] on that very last day, you’re left in many ways to find yourself all over again. (Obama, 2018, p. 418)

Transitions are in principle critical situations: “Rituals bridge precisely the “neuralgic points” in the life of an individual as well as society as a whole […].” (Dücker, 2007 in Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p.  13) Transitional rituals refer to a change, for instance of geographical location (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 36), state, statute, etc. (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 94). A transitional ritual often takes place in an unusual, otherwise unused place. For example, the baptistery in churches, or the main room of the synagogue at the first reading from the Torah scroll, or at least the ritualand has access to a spatial part previously denied him, such as standing before the bima, the table on which the Torah is placed, at the bar mitzvah. In transitional rituals, we mark these transgressions (cf. Han, 2019, p. 33) – of our reality, often also of our possibilities. Through transitional rituals, we make something public.

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Usually, this publication is about biographical events that we consider desirable or inevitable. In the narratives of the peoples I interviewedand through the research findings, the following religiously traditional transitional rituals emerged: • • • •

Birth, sexual maturity or coming of age, engagement or wedding, illness, dying and death.

Rituals around birth: in Judaism it is mainly the circumcision of boys that is celebrated, in more modern interpretations there is also a welcoming of female children, as my Jewish interview partner Miri describes: There’s just this issue of babynaming, or this superordinate concept, and I found that to be very nice, so she has the…. friend who did it, she really got the neighbourhood and the friends of the second child and the mothers or the parents of it and other children from the toddlers’ group, I think the child was already a bit older there, about a year and then my friend did a baby naming ceremony, and I found that totally beautiful, and of course the girl sat there on her blanket and didn’t notice much, but the love that overflowed there, she already noticed it. (Miri, line 255 ff.)

In the German mainstream of Catholic and Protestant Christianity, defined by the state treaties, i.e. that they are integrated into the church tax system, there is infant baptism. In Islam, there is ritual naming for newborns of both sexes. In modern German atheism, there are individual welcoming rituals, such as a feast. Rituals around birth provide structure for the immediate post-birth period, especially the conscious marking and publicizing of the change in status from dyad to triad or extension by another child. It gives the opportunity, in a situation that is at least publicly feasible, to show and legitimize the child as belonging to the family through the presence of the parents and siblings (if any). Important persons or those who are to become important for the child can be asked to do so here and be designated in the relationship, for example, as godparents but also as other companions in the second row, so to speak. It is easy to see how transitional rituals generally revolve around the theme of desired events: This concerns rituals around the birth of a child in our continuing pronative culture, where having children is considered socially desirable. The child is introduced into or welcomed by a society to be defined in some festive way. This happens partly – there are no figures for this – in the form of a festivity, which partly has symbolic-metaphorical elements. In part, these welcomes are based on

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traditionally religious forms, such as baptism, or circumcision in Judaism (circumcision in Islam follows the tradition in Islam a few years later until shortly before puberty). Miscarriages, on the other hand, do not concern it, although some try to do so (for an account of this, see Brudereck, 2018, p. 58). The choice of religious tradition is made from the religious tradition of one or both parents. Where, for example, the religious tradition does not provide a form for a sex, as there is no equivalent for girls for a circumcision of boys, or the male circumcision is regarded as something not desirable by the parents, alternative forms such as the welcoming of a girl with a blessing are sometimes practiced. Often this is also associated with the naming or public proclamation of the child’s name. With rituals of maturation or coming of age, a moral and religious independence of the child is documented and an expansion of its rights. In Judaism, young people read from the Torah for the first time with the bad (for girls) or bar (for boys) mitzvah and interpret it independently for the first time in public. In liberal Judaism, this is then still allowed for young women, but in Orthodox Judaism or the so-called Unity congregations, the last time they are allowed to do this is in front of the congregation. This gives the young person the right to now be called to the Torah. In the Christian context, he is now allowed to hold the office of godparent and also to serve as a presbyter. In the Catholic tradition, there is communion before puberty, and confirmation around puberty or later, with communion being obligatory and confirmation increasingly perceived as optional. In the Protestant tradition, the rite of maturation is celebrated by the confirmation. In all three religious streams, these transitional rituals are associated with a change in rights and duties; they mark religious and moral maturity. In Islam, religious and moral maturity is marked by participation in the annual fasting period. Circumcision of boys is performed by default, but the date is individual. It is celebrated very differently culturally, and also positioned differently in terms of age. The donning of a headscarf, described by both Muslim interviewees as optional anyway, is not highlighted with a festival or ceremony. It is not tied to a certain age or, for example, the onset of the first menstrual period, even though it is often considered desirable from that point on. Here there is a variety of different currents, views, discourses. Atheism: adolescence is linked in several ways to a change of law. This concerns, for example, self-determination over one’s own body and also moral responsibility. As is known, there was the youth consecration in the former German Democratic Republic, also in some circles attempts are made to organize for example private rituals for the onset of menstruation, but these have not made it into a broad public in Germany.

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Rites of passage lead to a child growing into the responsibilities of adult life, often with new rights and duties. Often this preparation is structured by the religious institution and made public in a final ceremony with a larger in the larger circle. Thus the change of status is known to a larger circle. First social leadership tasks can be taken over in this way. Engagement and marriage: in all four directions discussed here there are formalized and public transitional rituals, each of which is connected with a change of law. In Judaism, in Christianity as well as in atheism, the betrothal plays, if at all, only a private role. In Islam it is connected with a legal act with an imman. Weddings have different legal consequences, and are also arranged differently according to origin. This can be seen, for example, in the anecdote of Tarik, my Muslim interview partner, when he has to drink coffee with salt on the occasion of the engagement in order to symbolically prove his steadfastness and his willingness to survive difficult times with his future wife (Gümüşay also reports on this, cf. Gümüşay, 2020, p. 147). Legal changes are also associated with the marriages. Here, too, a renaming occurs through the gift of a new name, at least traditionally to the woman. In dying and in the following funeral, the change of the legal status of the person is documented and made public. The solemnity of this initiates the change of the violated family structures. The situation is different with divorce rituals, which, in contrast to Christianity, certainly have a ritualistic form in Judaism as well as in Islam – a circumstance of which my interview partners in the 2020 series are aware. Here, too, it is ultimately a matter of reordering the changing social system. Does the marriage ceremony establish sequential or existential ties until death do you part? What if the life partner becomes a life partner only for a sequence? Rituals are notoriously unavailable for such cases in our Christian tradition. Even a generation after the first sequence of my research, it can be seen that there is a stigma attached to divorce. Although research findings show otherwise, divorce seems to be an undesirable event to be avoided under actually almost all circumstances and is thus ideologically and also religiously handed down. Yet divorce rituals are always up for discussion in religious communities. Especially since marriages are becoming increasingly vulnerable. At the latest since the abolition of the principle of guilt in divorces in Germany in the 1970s, not only the feasibility of a good marriage or partnership is under discussion, but at the same time the possibility of a good separation or divorce, which puts as little additional strain as possible on partners and especially their children, and could accompany processes of change in a supporting and regulating way. Although divorces are critical life events, they have long been part of the reality of many

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people’s lives and have thus become a standard, a possible variable in the course of life (cf. Wallerstein et al., 2002, 1994, p. 184). We know what to do when we marry and start a family. But when a marriage fails, we are still often helpless. Divorce is a family crisis from which, to this day, no normative assistance can be expected from society (cf. Wallerstein et al., 2002, p. 171 f.). Divorce rituals are thus lacking despite high divorce rates. This does not mean, however, that there is no need for them or that there is no meaningful use for them (cf. van Gennep, 1908/1960). Separation rituals could thereby give essential expression to the storm of feelings and at the same time normalize and control them. Strong feelings could be acted out in a controlled way. However, of course, no one should be drawn into an obligatory divorce ritual, as is still the case in Israel 2020, for example, through the compulsion of a divorce before the rabbinical court. Here, the conscious perception of a conclusion and a new beginning that lies therein could also support the psychosocial process of change. In my 1995–1997 interviews, the question of a divorce ritual often resonated with the view that “what cannot be must not be,” and thus a very undesirable event would not be made noteworthy and legitimate, and perhaps even attractive, by a Christian ritual. According to these views, people should not celebrate realities that are not intended by a religious community. What remains questionable to me is what becomes of those undesirable realities that are denied a construction aid by a ritual. Non-denominational providers such as divorce mediators fill gaps there today (cf. Moser, 1993, p. 180 f.). Rituals Around Illness, Dying and Death  An illness is a critical life event that cannot be planned. Yet it is a standard in human life. In all five currents there are sign-like actions to promote the well-being of the patients and the relatives. For example, rituals of blessing, rituals of tenderness such as hand holding, etc. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam there are formalized rituals and procedures for dying and the care of the dying. In atheism, the actions are individualized. In all five currents, there are formalized rituals and procedures for the dead that contain metaphorical elements. This concerns the handling of the corpse, the dressing for example, the final care of the corpse by burial or cremation, and the involvement of clergy and relatives or a wider public. Formalized structures are available for all four monotheistic faiths; in atheism, the actions are individualized. A death is an event that can be expected, though often not desired. A death is often and usually not considered culpable, it is not considered a defeat, and it is not regarded as a mistake. The same applies to the ideologies of birth, maturation and marriage.

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Rituals around death provide structure, for example, for the transition from the announcement of an imminent death, the dying, the handling of the corpse, the funeral. They also provide structures for mourning afterwards. No one wants, when a loved one is dying, to already be dealing with organizing and structuring the ceremonies around dying, death and mourning, religions have a set of liturgical structures where people don’t even have to make a decision because the religion does it for them. This seems to me to be one of the great difficulties of modernity today, that when we lose touch with a religion, we have to keep reinventing these structures at and for critical life events, even though we may not be well able to do so purely psychologically at the moment. At the same time, the demand for authenticity will be particularly high in the case of self-designed rituals, because these are, so to speak, tailor-made for the deceased. This is difficult in itself, because surviving children, for example, can sometimes have very different ideas about the deceased. Coordination processes are a major source of conflict here. And a source of possible failure. In addition, it must not be forgotten how many people die without friends and family and thus this last journey cannot be carried out in solemnity. In all the currents discussed, everyday rituals, rituals in the annual cycle and rituals at certain transitions in life are interwoven. Example: the sacrificial tradition in Islam2 at Ramadan and at certain transitions of life, which also appears again and again in the conversation with my Muslim interview partner Erva (cf. Erva, e.g. 65, 306, 448) It should be pointed out that several points in the threshold rituals, such as the sacrificial commandment, are commandments that possibly also have a certain psychological function in the course of a threshold ritual, such as that of exoneration. This also includes the common vigil, the spending of time together in presence. There are also very strong regional and cultural differences for all these currents – one example is the different procedures in Islam for burial. Socialising into a religious cult also has a strong cultural component; it is about socialising into religion, as Erva repeatedly emphasises, but it is also about socialising into culture: “I come from Turkish frame” “it is actually a cultural factor in our country” “When you are brought up so culturally religious.” (Erva, Z. 95, 100, 158)

An interesting element in transitional rituals is the exchange of gifts (cf. Stollberg-­ Rilinger, 2013, p. 139).

 I was wondering if this might mean that the gap between rich and poor is smaller than in, say, Christian contexts. 2

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Here, from the 1997 research paper, the sacramental understanding of threshold rituals continues to be important to me – as an indelible, if relatable, imprint. Even if I have now included in the research work 2020, also Muslim, atheist and Jewish perspectives, this definition originating from the theological nevertheless seems to me appropriate for the psychological dynamics of sacraments and the factual effect in biographies.

8.9 Related Terms to Ritual and Their Discriminatory Power to Ritual One of the difficulties of defining the concept of ritual is that many terms, such as ceremony, sacrament, rite, ritual, obviously denote one thing: an action, however designed, with often, but not necessarily, religious overtones. For better orientation I have sorted the following glossary alphabetically: Customs have a much fuzzier definition than even the concept of ritual, here there is always a struggle over the meaning of the action (cf., Kiss, 1997, p. 67), it tends to emerge that customs are less charged with at least transcendent expectations than rituals. Conceptually, then, the question is how we possibly distinguish customs from rituals, such as customs around thresholds of life or even in death. I think that the transcendence factor is an important element here. An event, unlike a ritual “exhibits a very different time structure” (Han, 2019, p. 53), it is more random, arbitrary, and most importantly, non-binding: “Rituals and celebrations, however, are anything but eventual and non-binding” (Han, 2019, p. 53). Other related terms to ritual are festival and celebration, although neither necessarily follows a certain structure; rituals contain elements of festivals, but not every festival contains a ritual. And not every ritual, not even every threshold ritual, is celebrated as a feast, as my interviewee Markus, for example, reports when recounting his communion – and emphasizes that the significance for religious socialization clearly goes beyond the threshold ritual or the feast: “That was not a celebration for us at that time. So, later confirmation also not, that was not so festive in this way family not, that… But I must say to my Catholic socialization, belong a lot of things more […].” (Markus Z. 68 ff.) A term from Christianity is Kasualie in German, mostly translated as occasional services, which is close to our transitional rituals: “The term Kasualien comes from the Latin word casus, which means “cases”. The Protestant Church in Germany refers to services celebrated on the occasion of important stages in people’s lives as Kasualien: Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage and Funerals. […] But

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also on the other occasions, the focus is on God’s blessing for people. Blessing means: God accompanies people in their lives. […] Baptisms, confirmations, marriages and funerals are among the official acts of the church. Other biographically oriented acts of blessing, such as school enrollment, birthdays, confirmation or marriage anniversaries, also belong to the chasuals. In the Protestant church, only people are blessed, not buildings or machines.” (EKD, 2020) In order to deal with the phenomenon of threshold rituals independently of a theology, I have refrained from using this term here. Cults are, according to Zinser, acts of the human spirit, and of consciousness, and therefore also highly relevant to society as a whole beyond the religious precincts, the precincts in which they actually take place (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 149) For the sake of completeness, it should also be pointed out that a cult also partly describes a publicly regulated worship service. An exciting demarcation is that of the ritual versus the work of art: “Works of art are special cases from the overall representative symbols of the “things” of this world as carriers of meaning. They are, in the abundance of man-made objects, those which have no other purpose than that of acting as carriers of meaning, of transporting social patterns into individuals in order to answer, produce, change, and organize their personality-internal designs” (Lorenzer, 1981, p.  30  f.). Interactions can, of course, be works of art – happenings have shown us this (cf. Jappe, 1993). According to this view, then, rituals can be called an art form, just as worthy of attention and just as worthy of documentation as other representational works of art created in religious contexts (cf. Willis, 2000, p. xiv). “Like art, religion lives only when it is performed, that is, when its rituals ‘work well’. If one wants to castrate religion or make it infertile, one must first of all stop its generative and regenerative processes. For religion is not only a cognitive system, does not consist only of a set of beliefs, but is above all meaningful experience and experienced meaning. In ritual one relives events or, through the alchemy of their frames and symbols, re-experiences semiogenetic events, the deeds and words of prophets and saints-or, in their absence, myths and sacred epics.” (Turner, 1982, p. 138). According to Stollberg-Rillinger, liturgy means the set of rules for acts of worship (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 15). According to Kirsch, Rock and Schmidt, liturgy is understood to be “the totality of acts of worship that basically follow a sequence of fixed formulas. Although liturgical phenomena represent a prominent object of study within ritual research, liturgy has not yet been able to establish itself as a common category of analysis” (ibid. in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 62). Since rituals and media are closely interwoven, since rituals also involve communication events, the term mediality is interesting. It refers to “the way in which

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different media condition the communicative and structuring actions of actors with regard to the production, circulation and reception of rituals.” (Brosius & Heidbrink in Brosius et  al., 2013, p.  77) This is also interesting insofar as the Internet or ­virtuality have become a natural part of religiously traditional transitional rituals today, for example in the dissemination of wedding pictures via Facebook, participation in a baptism or a funeral through livestream, digital altars, etc. (cf. Brosius et al., 2013, p. 83). In my experience, it should be noted that here there are very great differences in liturgical skill and in the link between presence ritual and virtual medialization, i.e. blended forms, and that here further knowledge building of the performers and an involving instruction of the participants are certainly useful. The term myth denotes “a multifaceted narrative whose content transcends the boundaries of everyday experience, which can be traced neither to a single author nor to a precisely datable origin.” (Harth in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 109) Incidentally, the same applies to rituals; rarely does anyone raise their hand and say: I invented this ritual. Myths and rituals are often closely interwoven. Ritualization refers to “the totality of those pre-ritual dynamic-creative processes of action that are interest-led and intended to transition from an arbitrary, unmarked segment of everyday social life to a programmatically marked order.” (Dücker in Brosius et  al., 2013 p.  152) Visualization can thus form preliminary stages to rituals, but are per se not yet rituals, because something is still missing in these fugues, often not immanence, which is already there very early, but partly an awareness of the metaphorical depth of one’s own actions, for example. Ritual critique describes the process of evaluating a ritual, which is a necessary part of maintaining the ritual, an important part of constancy as well as adaptation or the degree of adaptation to new circumstances (cf. Grimes & Hüsken in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 158) Even though I list it here for the sake of completeness, I do not think the term is very manageable because it often evokes other associations, such as the idea that rituals in themselves are to be criticized as a form. The term rite initially only means custom and usage and does not necessarily have to transport religious content or refer to it (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 138). Basically, if we look back at the last two centuries, the term ritual is used much more frequently, and the term rite recedes (cf. Quack in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 197). Ritual or rite – the question is whether we need a sharp distinction between the two terms. The scholarly literature shows an incoherent use of both terms. Even though, at the latest since Bühler, attempts have been made again and again to contrast the two (cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 14). In my opinion, it is always important to pay attention in individual cases to which scholar means what by speaking of either rite or ritual. In 1997 I broke it down much more, and still came to the same conclusion (cf., Kiss, 1997, p. 66).

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Since this work is psychosocial and not theological but at best transreligious, we do not need to discuss the concept of sacrament in depth here. A classical and, in my opinion, easily manageable definition is that of an indelible imprint (cf. Boff, 1976). How do ritual and custom differ? According to Lamnek in Endruweit and Trommsdorff (1989), a custom is an action determined against the background of moral ideas that is repeated (cf. Endruweit & Trommsdorff, 1989, p. 108). Harré’s remarks on the question of moral conceptions and cooperation are interesting here. Custom is here situated on the level of convention, it is not moral behaviour, but it preserves certain moral conventions. This also means that a violation of a particular custom is not called a violation of a particular moral principle Custom here is to be seen as a conventional rule, the violation of which is ignored rather than punished (cf. Harré, 2018, p. 145, from p. 136). “Games also have a ritual character.” (Kaiser, 2017, p. 13) and are repeatedly used in rituals, but in part they lack, in my opinion, the strong metaphorical connotation that I consider indispensable for the existence of a ritual. In fact, both the ritual at stake are peculiar to its at least ostensible purposelessness. The scholarly discourse here is also torn and inconsistent, at this point I would just like to point out that both ritual and play seem to be close relatives, if only for the reason that both, especially when comparing threshold ritual and play, are often about negotiating and sometimes shifting hierarchies (cf., Kiss, 1997, p. 67). The boundaries between ritual and play are accordingly fluid according to Oerter (cf. Oerter, 1993, p. 304 f.). Theatre and ritual are related, as Turner points out in his 1982 publication. However: “Unlike theatre, ritual does not distinguish between audience and performers.” (Turner, 1982, p.  178) Nevertheless, both forms of representation are related and to some extent merge (cf. Sennett, 2015, p. 197). DuBois & Jungaberle also state that rituals “-unlike theatre- rely on a certain amount of downplaying.” (ibid. In Brosius et al., 2013, p. 52), i.e. on the fact that unlike theatre, in which emotions are allowed to boil up and this boiling up is fuelled, in ritual emotions tend to be banished. Incidentally, in Turner, 1982 one finds an interesting example of a theatrical reproduction of a Ndemu ritual by students and Turner himself, in which a volunteer on the occasion of the remembered loss of a dear older relative is made the structural person of this relative in the ritual and also the accompanying and observing further group members are connected in a metaphorical unity (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 151).

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Tradition – a term very closely related to customs, in the plural “denotes the attitudes that develop in a culture, the norms and rules of thought and action, and shape a certain ‘atmosphere of worldview’”. (Kamphausen in Endruweit & Trommsdorff, 1989, p. 763). By conveying meaning, a ritual can be transformative, in contrast to a ceremony, which is indicative and, according to Stollberg-Rilinger, confirmatory (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 14; Turner, 1982, p. 68).

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Religious Practice Today: An Assessment of the Current Situation

9.1 Religious Practice Today Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, he is one LORD. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, thou shalt take to thine heart, and shalt commit them unto thy children, and shalt speak of them, when thou sittest in thine house, or when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, or when thou risest up; and thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be a memorial unto thee before thine eyes; and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and upon the gates. (Deut 6:4–9)

In contrast to the earlier research (cf. Kiss, 1997, p.  78 ff.), I refrain here from presenting the landscapes of religious communities in Germany today, in the spring of 2020. From an anthropological-social psychological perspective, Sennett, for example, has written quite a bit about this (cf. Sennett, 2015, e.g. p. 348 f.). What is clear is that Muslim communities are more visible and have more members than a generation ago. In my opinion, we can also assume an increase in Jewish practitioners. As I am about to complete this research project in the summer of 2020, I read that church departures rose sharply in 2019, with the state Christian churches losing 500,000 members that year (see KSTA, 2020). “In 2060, there will still be nine million members of the Protestant and Catholic churches in southern Germany, according to the forecast. Compared to 2017, this would be a decline of about 46 percent of the members. For Germany as a whole, a decline of 49 percent to 22.7

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_9

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million members of the two largest religious communities is forecast by 2060.” (Statista, 2019). Religion is only apparently a coherent entity. And: religions have long since ceased to have cosmological interpretive sovereignty. The Bertelsmann Religion Monitor makes it clear that the erosion of religiosity in our society has been going on since the 1960s. For religiosity in the sense of the performance of cults is passed on through experience. That is how rituals are learned. As it is already written in the so-called Jewish creed (Deut 6, 4–7). In general, different sides speak of the decline of the Christian people’s churches (cf. Püttmann, 2010, p.  51)  – only this, while the membership numbers in the Muslim communities and also in the Jewish ones in Germany presumably continue to increase. It can be assumed that certain types of religiosity were also historically critically received in the families, for example Judaism, which was covered up in many families during the Third Reich, as I know from personal accounts. Here documents were partly destroyed, and a history and the family tradition partly falsified in order to protect the family. With less religiosity in society, the experience that everyone can have with religious rituals is decreasing  – fewer and fewer people witness death rituals, baptisms, weddings, etc. Families and therefore family celebrations have become smaller – baptisms, weddings and funerals no longer fill the churches, rarely is the whole congregation present. With the decrease of ritual contacts, the uncertainty grows at the same time, how one should behave towards the event and also towards the ritual. Since, as far as rituals are concerned, we witness, for example, a religious funeral, a church wedding, etc., less and less often, this learning from the model diminishes. (cf. Harré, 2018, p. 47). Religious practice is partly contrastive to the surrounding culture, including ideologies that are often not explicit. Not only in the ritual itself, but also in general, there is today, in my observation, a great contradiction between the normative, collectivizing rituals and, on the other hand, a great individualization. Relatively firmly formed forms such as rituals appear in our liberal society today as remnants of paternalistic culture, as an attempt to restrain us through an authoritarian institution: “According to the liberal worldview, it should be left to the conscience of the individual [what he does when and what rules he observes], without the community having to interfere.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 73). Religious practice is part of the surrounding ideology, which also has questions of desirability and undesirability, and when there is a need for a ritually accompanied reordering. For example, one could certainly imagine rituals for children moving out, because they then also receive a different legal status, and a new phase of

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life begins for them. Even though I asked each of my interview partners about new imaginable rituals, it was not answered positively once. Püttmann speaks of a spiritual depletion in the religious reduction of our religious practice (cf. ders. Püttmann, 2010, p. 25). But what can the term spiritual encompass? Have we indeed “reached the end point of secularization” today, as Hauschild suggests (Hauschild, 2008, p.  87)? If we use a broader concept of ­secularization, which means not only the separation between religious institutions and the state, but above all the turning away of most members of that state from a continuous religious practice, this is not so easy to say. The Christian state churches continue to lose members, there is no question about that. There are no numbers for institutionalized Islam and the institutionalized streams of Judaism. But what I do share is, “The need for people to practice religion seems unchanged. Religious fields are modernizing, but only in a few areas of the world are they declining in social prestige to the extent they are in today’s Central Europe.” (Hauschild, 2008, p. 98). There still seems to be a need for religious practice and religiously traditional forms. Vopel and Weigl write in the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Religion Monitor 2013: “There is widespread agreement among scholars that it has become increasingly difficult for traditional religious institutions to reach people and to function as norm-setting authorities.” (in Pollack & Müller, 2013, p. 8). Observers disagree as to whether spirituality, religiosity, religious practice have only shifted to non-­ institutional forms or whether this topic area has fundamentally lost importance for people – at least in Germany (cf. ibid.). Here are a few figures: “Only one in five [in the old German states] say that they are “fairly” or “very” religious; the number of those who consider themselves “not very” or “not at all” religious, on the other hand, is almost twice as high at 35%. In the East, the ratio shifts even more clearly in favor of the “not very” or “not at all” religious (12% to 72%). […]The data indicate that there can be no talk of a “spiritual revolution” (Heelas/Woodhead 2005): Compared with the values on religiosity, even fewer respondents rate themselves as “fairly” or “very” spiritual, namely 13% (2008: 12%) in the West and just 6% (2008: 4%) in the East. In contrast, 59% (2008: 62%) in the West and 77% (2008: 81%) in the East consider themselves “not very” or “not at all” spiritual.” (Pollack & Müller, 2013, p. 11 f.) Those who look at original religious transitional rituals must therefore also look at the state of religion in our cultural environment and internationally: the Religion Monitor assumes that religion is currently experiencing a loss of importance from generation to generation (cf. Pollack & Müller, 2013, p. 14). The findings prove an eroding religious socialization (cf. Pollack & Müller, 2013, p. 15) – in our case this also concerns the passing on of both circadian and transitionaltransitional rituals:

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“Lack of religious experience and religious knowledge that is no longer available thus quite obviously lead to the fact that for many people a life without religion appears to be quite self-evident. Against this background, it thus seems rather unlikely that there will be a renaissance of religion in its traditional form in the near future.” (Pollack & Müller, 2013, p. 16). A few more figures: “Of Catholics, 64% tend to agree with the statement that religion is an important part of their lives (“rather important” or “very important”), among Protestants the figure is 58%. Of those who feel they belong to an Islamic denomination, 30% say they attend Friday prayers at least once a month […]. In terms of religious self-assessment and the question of the importance of religion as an area of life, however, Muslims clearly outperform Catholics: almost 40% of them classify themselves as “very” or “fairly” religious and almost 90% consider religion to be “rather” or “very” important. Non-denominational respondents score very low on all three characteristics, indicating how strongly religiosity in Germany is still tied to the institution of the church, at least in its traditional form.” (Pollack & Müller, 2013, p. 18). It is striking that Christian and Muslim as well as Jewish institutions clearly differ from each other in their regionality. If for the rest of the faithful it is still the case that they are assigned to a certain district, and ideally live and perform their religiousness there in everyday life as well as in the great rites of passage, this is not the case for Muslims as well as for Jews. Even if for Jews by the Sabbath commandment the synagogue should at least theoretically really be within walking distance, it is nevertheless factually in the Diaspora so that Jews go to the synagogue where they see their own religious convictions and their own religious practice best reflected. For Jews, this is inflamed above all by the question of whether or not women are allowed to read from the Torah or how far they are included in the liturgy of the service as equal partners. Muslims, too, do not necessarily go to the mosque of their neighbourhood, but they choose a place of prayer in which, as with the Jews, they find kindred spirits in their convictions and their religious practice. Only among the religious or also among atheists? Apparently, religious people like institution find it difficult to say goodbye to old religious ideas: “Some new-­ religious entrepreneurs would like to put the shut-down metaphysical production facilities back into operation overnight, as if a mere recession had been put behind them.” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 13) A closer look reveals that actually in atheism lies the solution to the problems of the erosion of religious institutions:

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9.2 Atheism and Religious Participation Today Even if there were no God, religion would still be sacred and divine. (Baudelaire, 1966 / 1995, p. 7)

Even back in my dissertation, I would have liked to have included more atheists in the discourse, as I understand religious narratives to be a shared cultural heritage. Terms around atheism are discussed in Zuckerman et al. here: Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 14 ff. Another term: secularism (cf. Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 24) – I leave out the discussion around this term here. To clear up a fundamental misunderstanding from the outset: rationalism, enlightenment thinking and atheism do not necessarily belong together. Even someone who may not believe in miracles or life after death can still live unrealistically, not factually (cf. Zuckerman et al., 2016, pp. 18, 55). The enlightenment helped us break the power of institutionalized religion, but people who have discarded certain religious beliefs are not necessarily more science-oriented because of it (cf. Han in Reclam., 2017, p. 288). To this end, I think it is important to note: “The wisdom of religions belongs to all humanity, including the most rational among us, and it deserves to be selectively revisited even by the greatest opponents of all things supernatural. Religions are, on the whole, too useful, effective, and intelligent to be left to believers alone.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 301). Religions and religious rituals also deserve attention for atheism because they have deeply permeated the world and our cultures (cf. De Botton, 2013, p.  18). Religious practice and atheism are not contradictory. “The error of modern atheism has been to overlook the fact that many aspects of a religion remain relevant even when its central tenets are not accepted. It is only when we no longer feel that we must either submit to it completely or reject it wholesale that we are able to discover religions as a treasure trove of innumerable sophisticated concepts by means of which we can attempt to alleviate one of the most persistent and acute ills and ills of secular life.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 13). It was extremely difficult to find anything on the subject of atheism and religion. For the Bertelsmann Monitor, atheism apparently continues to be something that is understood as the opposite of religion and religious practice. For Püttmann, atheism is something that involves the erosion of so-called Christian values, and it is only a matter of time, he says, when these ritual values, which for him are so to speak state-supporting, will disappear as a result of increasing atheism. In many analyses of religious practice, a certain sadness resonates that the decay of reli-

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gious practice is at the same time linked to an erosion of our value system – for example in Püttmann (ibid., 2010, p. 13). But this would mean, according to De Botton, taking religion seriously in excess, so to speak, and thus admitting, according to De Botton, that God existed at some point (cf. De Botton, 2013, p. 79 f.). And Kübler Ross says: atheists are people who “firmly believe that there is no God.” (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 108) Which I disagree with. As I pointed out earlier in the chapter on religion as a metaphorical system, the question of belief in God is obsolete at the latest when we understand religions as systems of practice (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 12). In general: To speak of “the atheists” is nonsense, because there are not THE atheists. So here is the question of what we call atheists in the context of the research question. In talking to Efrad Galed and her partner, he points out that most are not atheist after all, because that would require a religious effort, but rather agnostic or disinterested. The question arises to me here whether an emphatically metaphysical society has possibly been replaced by a physical society. Not only forms of atheism, as Zuckerman et al. emphasize – but of course also forms of religion always reflect the social, historical, cultural contexts in which they emerge. (cf. Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 31). This raises the fundamental question of whether religious and areligious positions can actually be sharply distinguished from each other at all – which in my opinion Zuckerman et al. rightly deny (cf. ibid., Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 77). How many atheists are there worldwide? Estimates range from the conservative estimates of Zuckerman – here it would be 7.5–11.5% of the global population – to the WIN- Gallup International survey, which estimated the global population of atheists at 23% in 2012. Differences never certainly arise only from the presumed increases between 2007 and 2012, but from the different approaches to what atheists are now (see Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 33). In the context of this research, I have taken purely the institutional membership or non-membership in a religious community as an atheism criterion, but in parallel also asked sympathies to other ideological directions, and this of course not only among atheists, but also among those who hold a membership in a religious association. This was because, along the lines of De Botton and Sloterdijk, I can assume that religious rituals are, on the one hand, accessible to religious people; in fact, an atheist cannot have his children baptised, he needs formal membership of a church to do so, and in Judaism it is even the case that certain rituals, such as marriage, can only be performed if both are Jews. So institutional membership is important for the accessibility of certain religious rites of passage. Atheism is in no way opposed to religious practice. “Ritual behavior is arguably more salient than belief.” (Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 37) Abandoning customs and

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rituals that we associate with religion because they take place in the context of religion, such as marriage and death, is useless according to De Botton. Firstly, because these customs have also often been adopted by other religion, such as the Easter ritual, and then because even someone who does not believe in the promise of eternal life, for example, can still benefit from death rituals (cf. De Botton, 2013, p.  14  f.). “Atheists face the challenge of how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions that lay claim to them even though they do not really own them.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 15). Even an atheist can celebrate Christmas, get married ceremoniously, or welcome a new child in ceremonial reverence with a sense of joy and emotion. Atheists, moreover, can have a need for spiritual fulfillment without at the same time being believers. Even for an atheist, the binding power of religious rituals is evident, and when such religious structures are lived out in authentic ways in the family, they are perceived in part at least as family resources. Religiosity and explicit atheism are not mutually exclusive. Religiosity and the performance of religious cults seem to be, with a certain soul resonance, thus quite a reality of life of people, possibly also a personal resource. Here I was and am concerned with re-examining the value of rituals in processes of change and, if necessary, pointing them out. Also, in the case of atheism, it is important to note that beyond any seduction to a particular religious current, belief in a supreme being or in a decidedly personalized God is obviously subject to individual fluctuations in the life course, at least for many. For this research work, it is above all important that the belief in a certain higher power and religion, in the context of my work: the performance of religiously traditional rituals are not unconditionally linked (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 15). We experience secularism and religiosity as opposites, but this is specifically valid for the northern hemisphere. So the idea that religion and atheism are opposites are ideas of our culture, our Western culture, which cannot be transferred to Eastern culture in this way. The fact is, however, that religiosity and atheism can combine in people’s lives, atheists can have a religious practice without seeming inauthentic, and quite a few believers have no religious practice. Zuckerman et al. show this with many examples (cf. Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 51). In this context, the connection to a religious practice obviously varies greatly depending on personality and religious community, on family tradition and family resources. As Rabbi Natalia Verzhbovska once told me in a personal conversation in January 2020, belief in God is not a central condition for performing rituals in liberal Judaism, for example, because it can fluctuate greatly in the course of a biography. Interestingly, God-belief does not play a role in my interviews either. The focus is on religious practice, and the interviewees stay there. Not once in these interviews referred on God-belief, but a lot to family or cultural traditions.

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“Real faith” is a popular argument when a ritual does or does not work. It is seen here as an essential prerequisite for efficacy effects. Whoever put this idea into the world – today, as is well known, it plays an important role in the research of placebo effects  – since these days the faith argument has made further career as a general justification especially for apparently psychic mechanisms whose mode of action is inexplicable. This also applies to the effectiveness of rituals. But today rituals have hardly any confessional character. They are hardly perceived any more as a religious confession or as making a religious commitment public. A few years ago, when I asked my Jewish stepson and his Christian-socialized, atheist partner if they would continue to celebrate Passover after our deaths, my stepson was silent at first, but his partner immediately answered affirmative. Almost all of our six children and currently three children-in-law are not God believers, they rarely practice religion of their own accord. As far as I can access, only one in this generation prays regularly, nor do they seek out contact with other believers of their own accord. The only one of our children who has married so far did so in a self-constructed Judeo-Christian wedding, but is not religious himself. At the same time, our children’s affinity for our religious tradition and compliance is high. It would be tantamount to a revolt if we did away with regular Shabbat dinners. In our family, Christian traditions mixed with atheistic traditions mixed with Jewish traditions, plus the sometimes religiously tinged traditions of Israeli culture, German culture, and US culture. In addition, we often celebrate the traditional breaking of the fast with our Muslim friends at least once during Ramadan. One of my daughters completed this fast several times on her own impulse and without any belief in God for weeks. For her, I think it’s a way of understanding what her often Muslim friends and peers are going through. Yes, most are atheists, for the joy of our religiously handed down rituals that is obviously irrelevant. The performance of rituals can also promote understanding of another religious practice. We are then guests. But that is what we usually are. It is a form of practice, to refer again to Sloterdijk’s thoughts (cf. ders. Sloterdijk, 2009). “Western intellectuals tend to overestimate the influence of scripture and writings on life.” (Hauschild, 2008, p. 42) – in my opinion this also applies to the influence of belief in God on a religious practice. Rituals are effective even without belief in God. The accessibility of religiously handed down rituals can only be worse. For me this means that we basically have to make clear to ourselves that we are often guests, that there is a fluent transition between being part of the group and being a guest, and that it is basically something desirable to join the ranks of other religions also as their outsider, to celebrate with them, even if one does not quite understand the liturgy.

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9.3 Religious Practice in Ritual Yesterday and Today The recourse to history is exciting in that rituals were apparently developed early in human history (cf. Archäologisches Landesmuseum Brandenburg, 2020). Religion and ritual, especially what they signify, are ancient. They cannot be separated from our history as humanity (cf. Luhmann, 1990, p.  110). With the first traces of humans, we also find strange signs that at least suggest the presence of religion and ritual. The art historian Elisabeth Jappe writes: “Action as a form of expression for an idea, be it a religious, a social, an artistic one – in short, for an outlook on life – is as old as human culture. Rituals and rites have existed long before humans left the first permanent visual traces of their cultural activity.” (Jappe, 1993, p. 9) Now this statement is to be seen as theory rather than empirically proven fact, but it becomes plausible in light of the fact that there is no culture that would not possess this curious element: sign-like actions, without immediate practical meaning (of course I am open to falsification). Human history, and the artifacts we have left behind in the course of that history, are full of variously interpretable metaphorical acts. This long history simultaneously presents a significant challenge in the study of ritual (cf. Heiler, 1918, p. 90). At the same time, the meaning of a ritual such as Christmas or a wedding ritual has changed again and again throughout history. Its institutional, religious or social significance, the individual and, if applicable, life-­historical relevance of a ritual was and is subject to manifold changes in the course of history. We see this also in the way Muslim women decide whether or not to wear a headscarf. Here, too, the framework of justifications is always very diverse, which for me is evidence of how individually constructed these justifications are. This does not speak against the decision, it only marks it as an individual optional and not obligatory one (then it would not be a free decision either). There is an interesting moment here during the interview with my Muslim interlocutor Tarik. When I ask him if there is a certain time when a growing woman puts on the headscarf, he says: No, there is not, so as I said, from puberty, that is, but not that a woman with a headscarf is good woman, better Muslim woman, and another woman without a headscarf is a worse woman and not good Muslim woman, that is not the case, but the headscarf is a decision of a Muslim woman, a voluntary decision whether she wants to go along with this commandment… and whether to fulfill this commandment or not. (Tarek Z. 225 ff.) Okay, and that’s a voluntary decision as to when that’s on. This will not be celebrated then? Nor is it, as I understand it, highlighted in any way publicly?

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9  Religious Practice Today: An Assessment of the Current Situation No, no such emphasis, celebrations are not there, so the individual should make a decision, voluntary decision and say…. Hello, I am now ready, and also mature to take my religion seriously and to follow my religious duties. (Tarek Z. 225 ff.)

According to his reasoning, which I can very well understand, a standardized ceremony would lead to a situation where it would be difficult to make a free decision, I will come back to this later. But are religiously traditional rituals still relevant to the lives of people in Northern Europe today? Haven’t we all long since become secularized? Luckmann wrote about this as early as 1973: “There is hardly anything that has been so often pronounced dead as religion.” (Luckmann, 1973, p. XI). And there is also hardly anything that has been declared dead as often as the religiously traditional ritual. In fact, like other metaphorical traditional acts, religiously traditional rituals can be seen to undergo strong fluctuations in meaning. The Reformation with its associated iconoclasm is undoubtedly a historically important date, as is the Enlightenment and the ensuing secularization (cf. van Dülmen, 1989, p. 213). The rationalization of the living world, which has been progressing since that time, deprives actions such as “meaningless rituals” of their basis of existence – at least this is one possible argumentation. But this argumentation has several weaknesses: it seems to be a consensus that our culture today is more rational than, for example, our culture 100 years ago, nevertheless, one cannot speak of a “rational life” today either, our decisions are, as has been proven manifold in psychology, not rationally based in many areas. I will come back to this. The Third Reich, with its obscurantist abuse of ritual, is considered by many to be a latter-day death knell. It is well known that obscurantist forms of government such as oligarchies, dictatorships, etc. tend to use explicitly strong feelings for their propaganda. This includes sign-like acts with a lot of PomS. The effect of these forms of propaganda is partly still feared today, so much so that certain propaganda films of the Third Reich in Germany are sometimes only shown in public by pre-­ selected audiences not.1 Anti-ritualists also argue that rituals, which were abused as tools of mass violation in the Third Reich, for example, have become generally obscure as a result. Any forms that are not immediately rationally accessible and reflective about are now considered potentially dangerous. Yet this argument is vulnerable to attack, as a focus on rituals as magically highly pushed perpetrator tools too easily eclipses other significant factors. Also, in my view, the myth of the magical power of ritualistic acts makes it too easy for those involved to declare themselves seduced and  As I experienced as a member of the Film Museum in the 19 nineties in Munich.

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thus excused-and thus blocks thinking about their own destructive potentials. That rituals can be instruments of power is not at all to be disputed here – no doubt they can be instruments of power – but rituals do not die simply by being declared dead. This can also be well demonstrated by the second modern death date of rituals, the student unrest of the 1968s. It is a date that at least the alt-1968s like to take as a cut-off date, as I was able to notice in the 1990s at a conference of the Protestant Academy in Tutzing on the topic of rituals, and which is also often referred to in the literature. In the course of the conference, I increasingly gained the impression that the supposedly ritual-free 1968s had become a historical myth. With the “mustiness under the gowns,” the argument went, rituals were also to be abolished as a tool of the establishment and propaganda. The ethnologist Mary Douglas also states in 1974 that rituals are no longer popular, but are often under the general suspicion of obscurantism (cf. Douglas, 1974, p.  11). I cannot agree with this. Where old traditional rituals die, other sign-like acts often form informally. Neither secularism nor the disappearance of membership in churches leads to a decrease in signifying acts. In this context rituals can also be seen as services of the religious communities to their members, as services in the truest sense of the word (cf. Marku Z. 486 f.). It shows itself manifold in non-rational actions, which for instance settle in the haze of the economization of our life world, status symbols  – actually they are status metaphors in my opinion  – resp. their acquisition at certain turns of life, various ritualistic wasting of resources prove this for me. The same applies to an appearance that is not called youth cult for nothing. Various cosmetic, surgical measures can certainly be evaluated in the context of these non-rational symbolic actions. Even though our society has become more complex today, it has not become more rational. However, the complexity of our social forms may make rituals less visible because they take place in small groups and are not legitimized and handed down by one of the large institutions such as the churches. In this diversification of our lives, rituals do indeed come under a pressure of plausibility; overarching, consensual patterns of order no longer exist in part, or at best exist in a milieu-specific manner. Yet the more our society diversifies, the greater the need for security in fixed, standardized forms such as rituals. Turner already wrote: “When ritual disappears as a dominant genre, it often dies, giving birth – comparable to a woman giving birth to several children – to ritualized offspring, including the many performative arts.” (Turner, 1982, p. 126). How do we actually learn? By observing, imitating and participating – this is what we know from ritual research, that is, from research into the question of how people learn new rituals or are initiated into existing ones (cf. Harré, 2018, p. 47). Whether it is this fundamental participation that ultimately enables a free decision

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for or against a religious practice system, to speak with Sloterdijk (cf. ders. Sloterdijk, 2009), is discussed differently, also by users. Many of these elements we cannot even explain. Why we do it is because we experienced it ourselves as children or adults, and because we imitated what we experienced. It can be seen, for example, in the question of whether one should have a child baptized or not. Should one not do it, so that later, as a young person of religious age, he or she can make a decision for him or herself? Or should one bring up a child religiously, so that it later, if necessary, knows what it is deciding against? My evangelical interview partner sees it this way: Why did you have her baptized? Because [her husband] is very religious, very attached to the Catholic Church…. to the Catholic Church. And I definitely wanted them [her daughters] to get to know that, ne, and I thought, then they can decide sometime, ne. (Victoria Z. 33 ff.)

At the same time, “[rituals] […] are not static, but constantly develop out of themselves. [… Most rituals develop in small steps over years or generation. People change them without noticing. At some point, it seems as if they come from more urgent times.” (Sennett, 2015, p. 125) But, as I said, rituals are always being reinvented; even so-called original rituals tend to be considered originalist rituals. Take candles in churches and temples, for example: they have long since ceased to be necessary for illumination, but they continue to be used, thus becoming metaphors of an apparently historical and sensory continuity. I assume that religion, apart from the question of whether they are divine inspirations or messages, God-set rules, that rituals are also always narratively mediated and thus newly constructed. It’s like a silent post game. What we no longer know, we partially complete. Precisely because learning always happens in the context of our culture, our particular situation, etc., and because the transmission of knowledge of certain melodies, certain procedures, for example, is never completely without gaps, there are always certain parts of narrative in the transmission and concrete practice of a particular ritual, and also in the understanding of the underlying metaphor. Thus, for these reasons, I refer in this work to a dynamic concept of religion that takes a look at religious practice as a religiously handed-down practice in relation to rites of passage. Today in particular, rituals are caught in the tension between individualism and collectivism, which on the one hand one believes to have been discarded, at least in the democratic societies of the northern hemisphere, where so much is possible, and where, according to many analyses, there is nevertheless apparently a great tendency towards uniformity, towards the same way of dressing, the same ­lifestyles,

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consumer habits, etc. For Sennett, the term individualism “stands for a social lack, a lack of ritual.” (Sennett, 2015, p. 374) And yet, this is another way of looking at current developments, in everyday social life, the importance of rituals is apparently increasing, especially in religious and para-religious subcultures (cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 18). What is actually true really cannot be said with certainty and reliability; as is well known, there is no register of rituals, and they also do not leave secure and unambiguous traces on the Internet, but in my opinion the diversity of the lines of argumentation shows that there is not one clear tendency.

9.4 Transitional Transitional Rituals Today But Jesus said unto him, If thou couldst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. (Mark 9:23)

Religion and rituals apparently played a major role in earlier times (cf. Sachße, 2002, p. 79). Can their loss of importance be explained by the onset of secularization in Northern Europe? By the fact that we can now explain many things to ourselves, and in former times, before science, so few? The meaning of rituals today cannot be clearly grasped. Their meaning is given in the subjective, conjunctive realm. Whether and in what form and to what extent one makes use of a religious transitional ritual as an orientation aid in one’s life is increasingly the responsibility of the individual. It no longer has to be. But it can be. Parents can, but no longer must, have their child baptized. Unlike in the past, such an omission has little or no negative consequences for the child anymore, no doubt due in part to the increasing diversity of religions in many schools. Also, the timing of baptism has long been correctable: some have their child baptized soon after birth, others wait until the time when they trust their child to make its own decision or it simply “fits” overall. In our still quite Christian leading culture, on the other hand, first communion and protestant confirmation are determined by the school lessons – it is difficult for a young person to opt out, and there is no question of a free yes to the ritual. This is due not only to the institutional, relatively rigid framework of this age-group ritual, but also to the fact that young people at this age are strongly dependent on significant others of the family and the age group. A change towards greater voluntariness would always have to push the age limit so far up that few effects can be expected from social dependence – or would have to individualize it straight away, as interviewee Bernhard suggested from the first wave of interviews (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 134).

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Since there are too few Jews in our cultural area, the bad or bar mitzvah does not play a role as an age group ritual here in Germany, at best in Jewish schools, but due to the expected specific clientele at these schools, it did not seem advisable to me to win my interview partners from this environment, apart from the fact that the target group would then have had to be young people, not adults. Transitional rituals in adolescence in Islam do not exist as an age-standardized decision, but it can be assumed that Muslim pupils certainly exchange with each other and, if necessary, also copy styles and thereby learn. Weddings, the adult ritual, on the other hand, is largely taxable – no one is obligated to marry religiously – the same goes for a religious burial. However, with the burial in a Jewish cemetery(steep) is definitely a certain form obligatory to see. Here, however, there is strong variation depending on the individual legislation of the municipalities and thus the possible freedoms. By no means all who participate in rituals believe in the dogmatic background in which they are rooted and from which they were theologically founded. The old metaphorical bridge in transitional rituals is increasingly breaking down, because the knowledge of its metaphorical meaning is increasingly diminished. But this in itself was rarely a problem for people, new history was then simply made out of it, metaphorically meant things can be given a new interpretation. It is known that people are very inventive to experience their world as coherent and comprehensible. A theological motivation based on a presumed salvation function or an active desire to confess are rare among my religious interview partners of the series 1997 like 2020 (in which I also conducted two interviews with atheists). Here the religious motivation becomes similarly diffuse as in the anecdote of Solomon, who understands and confesses himself as an atheist, but keeps to the religious rules, because he does not know whether he is right (cf. Görres, 1986, p. 128). This is also visible in the interviews of the 1997 series (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 197 f.) It is true that the ritual does not take place in a value-free space, the individual value background can be diffuse from a religious point of view, but this does not have to speak against the strength of the commitment, for example, to a person in a marriage or even a funeral. This is important because the fit of a ritual may be decided precisely at this interface: the more a ritual conforms to one’s own attitudes, or the more skillfully an initiand of a specific ritual fits it into his own value and world view, the more likely a ritual becomes a positive experience. Belief in God, even a positive attitude towards the religious institution that liturgically conducts the ritual, is not necessarily necessary in this context. In this sense it is possibly not faith but rather a positive attitude of expectation and attitude to the ritual action that is essentially involved in the effectiveness of a religiously handed down

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ritual. Equally, however, expectations that are too high can prevent the experience of the individual ritual. These may be expectations conveyed by religious ­communities, for example for a wedding, but at the same time these expectations are obviously also influenced by mass media. An interesting aspect of individualization is described by my Catholic interview partner Martha: Did you later have your kids go through that, did you do both that, communion and confirmation as well? What was that like? So when I became a little more aware of these things, I resisted giving them both communion …. into this rut. Okay. And then I said, no, we’ll do it differently, we’ll do it more individually, the two of them made it easy for me, […]. (Martha Z. 207 ff.)

It is obvious that individualisation also leads to the need for individual rituals. It should not be ignored that the public significance of life transitionals may have been greater in the past than today. For example, marriage as the actual change of status from adolescent to adult. This was at the same time associated with a number of powers  – or the political function of wedding rituals (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 64 f.). When we participate in rituals, we are, in a sense, wasting our time. Celebration is, in a sense, a waste of time. Or is it? From my perspective, rituals are a great resource. We are and remain people in transition. If we possibly secure the rituals that accompany these passages and transitions, if we give up these rituals or change them “just like that” without reflection, we risk losing them. In my opinion, we have believed for far too long that a belief in God is necessary for a religious practice. In my mind, performing a cult doesn’t necessarily have to be linked to a faith or a specific god belief. But rather with a kind of narration that goes from hand to hand from generation to generation, as it is stated in the already quoted passage from Deut. 6, 4–7. In religious communities in which a confession does not immediately have fiscal consequences through a state treaty of the religious institutions, people may find it easier to continue to see themselves as members or at least descendants of a certain religious tradition and culture without immediately practicing or asking themselves about the depth of their own faith in God. This probably makes it much easier to participate again as well. Belief in God and the continuation of religious tradition are not necessarily connected, as I have already explained. Even today, we still have specific expectations and demands of certain transitionals of life, or of how people are to behave at certain turning points in their lives,

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or even as guests and witnesses (cf. Donath, 2015, p.  155). A wedding is to be celebrated joyfully, a funeral at least until the corpse or ashes are finally taken care of, in a sad mood, a baptism is to make us happy, likewise a circumcision, often we find here that “cannot be what must not be” (Donath, 2015, p. 144). Again and again we say goodbye, again and again we are forced to do so or we also wish for a new beginning. Depending on what is a particular issue in our particular culture, whether there are many farewells, for example, because it is a changing people, whether sedentariness is important, whether births are rather rare, etc., rituals are positioned very differently (cf. Röttger-Rössler in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 37). Religiously traditional transitional rituals are still alive in the consciousness and actions of many. To the great mass of, say, semi-distant Christians, they even seem to be the essential bond that connects them to their church – so apparently they still “make sense” to the majority of religious practitioners. Are transitional rituals perhaps an important unique selling point of religious communities? To this end, the respective politics of the religious institution is certainly also related to the credibility of its rituals. The legitimacy crisis of classical rituals has intensified since 1997. Where theological justification no longer fits into the world view of the users, individualistic construction comes in, which only strengthens the power of a ritual if the framework is still credible – even if the new framework of meaning rarely corresponds to theologically correct patterns. It is apparent from my conversations with clergy that the Christian performance of rites of passage is on the decline. This concerns all three traditional life turning points: birth, maturation, pair bonding and death. It is difficult to say whether in the field of Jewish religious practice in Germany their comparable transitional rituals of circumcision, maturation – here, therefore, Bar or Bad Mitzvot – marriage and Jewish funeral rituals are on the retreat. A quantitative statement about religious practice in Germany cannot be made in any form within the framework of my work, and there are no reliable data on this. The same applies to the Muslim area. The extent to which people who are not active in any religious community participate in certain religiously traditional transitional rituals cannot be said as a quantitatively reliable statement either; there is a lack of data on this, and it would also be extremely difficult to generate them. With the idea that these numbers would then become outdated quite quickly anyway. It is therefore still necessary to find a qualitative hermeneutic approach here. In the reflexive modern age, in which presumably more decision alternatives come from that point of view of the Northern European as well, there is an increasing need for an individually designed framework of meaning and significance. Everyone is more and more obliged to decide, to act and to justify individually.

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This also applies to the choice of a religiously traditional transitional ritual as a framework for a particular life situation. Since there are so many forms that can be ­chosen, these forms are no longer protected by an overarching consensus framework today. Through multidimensional parts of justification and motivation of different degrees of processing and abstraction the classical religiously traditional rituals seem to be supported in a theologically perhaps problematic, but in fact individually obviously very functional framework (cf. EKD, 1993, p. 42) – as long as there are enough role models. Especially where contents become ambivalent, uncertain or invalid, the individual is challenged to independently justify participation in ritual practices. What is striking here is the narrative plausibility structure of the rituals achieved. It should be borne in mind that rituals, like all narrated behaviour in general, are overdetermined – the reason for practising them as well as for rejecting them is often unclear to the individual himself (cf. Brasch, 1968, p. 21; Pascal o. J./1956, p. 127). To this end. Not everyone seems to need a ritual to overcome transitionals. Some support it, some do not, with religious institutional ties also present. Today, religiously traditional transitional rituals no longer exist without competition. As expected, one therefore often finds new attempts of justification in the interviews. What was formerly and contestedly self-understandable that one married in church, had one’s children baptized, etc., today even in marriage interviews the pastor asks about the motive for making use of a certain ritual (cf. Oettinger in Albertz, 1988, p. 57 f.). The ultimate, cardinal why – if it exists – remains thereby in the dark. Ritual is dead? Long live the ritual.

Part III Empirical Explorations

The fountain of all knowledge is felt experience. (Akhavan, 2017, p. 69)

The Qualitative Methodology: Scientific Justification

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10.1 Methodological Positioning of the Chosen Instruments The methodological positioning of a topic is known to have a significant influence on its further exploration and not least on the development of a theory (cf. Schachtner in Keupp, 1992, p. 278). However, the way in which a research field is explored is highly controversial and is often taken across the board as a touchstone for the plausibility of all results – even those that obviously cannot be derived from the chosen method. The paradigm dispute between quantitative and qualitative methods is far from over. A frequent accusation against the qualitative method: selective plausibility (cf. Flick, 1995, p. 239). This term describes that one can only illustrate theses with one’s data material, but not prove them. A frequent accusation against the quantitative method, on the other hand, is that it artificially creates significance by using a large sample. It is also said that many calculation methods are difficult or impossible for the layperson to understand. Fortunately, larger research projects are increasingly resorting to a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The basic question for this work is: Which method is most appropriate for the question addressed here? When the Turners, Victor Turner and his wife, began researching rituals, they traveled to the tribe he wanted to study, the Ndembu, and learned their language there. Turner attended various rites and rituals at the chief’s invitation. However, “To observe people performing stylized gestures and singing the mysterious songs of ritual drama is one thing; to arrive at an adequate understanding of what the movements and words meant to them is quite another.” (Turner, 1969/1989, p. 14). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_10

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He evaluated his observations and the notes of others, for this he conducted a series of interviews. He generated the quality characteristic reliability through the coherence of various statements. When he had the impression that he was no longer getting anywhere with the chief’s statements, they moved to a more distant village where they could merge more closely with the village community. With a truly participant observation, he continued to learn. Although his methods were first the classical categorization and classifications, later they were mainly an understanding of processes, essentially through participant observation and exegesis (cf. Schomburg-Scherff in Turner, 1969/1989, pp. 198, 14 ff.). As a researcher, too, I am a kind of tourist. I go to a country with the intention of exploring it, parts of it or the whole country, for years or just a few weeks, equipped with guidebooks and theories and judgments, or from the inside, through the inhabitants of the country themselves, as one tries to do in the personal inside perspective. Especially with the specific subject matter of this work, it is worthwhile to include the layman’s world of experience substantially: “[…] ceremonies needed to be examined in their entirety and in the social setting in which they were found.” (Kimball in van Gennep, 1908/1960, p. vif) It is necessary to keep in mind what people experience, feel and think in everyday life, and how they justify their actions. It must be kept in mind that lay people often use certain rituals intuitively, like other forms of action, and, when questioned, probably often respond with ad hoc invented practical explanations: “But even to the more persistent observer of everyday rituals no more than a few traces of reference are revealed unless he engages in a detailed individual case reconstruction.” (Soeffner, 1992, p. 12). Qualitative data is key to “discovering connections and understanding the world.” (Mau, 2017, p. 20) Quantitative methods also require translation work, the translation work of “representing phenomena, properties, or nature of an issue […] in a general, abstract, and universally connectable language [that of mathematics].” (Mau, 2017, p. 27) And further: “Numbers offer an answer – often very convincing – to our needs for objectification, factuality, and rationalization.” (Mau, 2017, p. 29) However, “Quantification always means a reduction of multicolored reality to a limited number of indicators and sometimes works against diversity.” (Mau, 2017, p. 227). Qualitative research is particularly attractive to some because there is no need to calculate, no complicated arithmetic operations. But it is also popular in a competence-­oriented way because it often seems to make people and their circumstances much more visible than pure numbers can. This means that qualitative research often seems to promote empathy, a real understanding of certain psychosocial facts (cf. Flick et al. p. 17 f.).

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The objectifying view of quantitative methods is insufficient as an exclusive exploratory tool, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Qualitative research is now used in such a broad spectrum of disciplines and subjects that its presentation and development have become very obscure and confusing in places. Also, as there are various developments in, for example, the writing of case studies, in expert interviews, or in the question of how to approach interviews in general. Although qualitative research was not as accepted as quantitative research for many years, it is now firmly established and has become part of the scientific mainstream. (Cf. Flick et al. p. 14). A very fundamental step in quantitative methodology is the formulation of hypotheses. There is a great deal of discourse on the question of the role of hypotheses in qualitative research, which is sparked, among other things, by the fact that in the qualitative approach, of course, the researcher does not enter into the research as a tabula rasa, but does indeed have prior knowledge that could also be formulated as hypotheses. (cf. Meinefeld in Flick p. 266 f.). There is thus a fine line between presuppositions and hypotheses. In qualitative methodology, hypotheses are therefore in themselves rather rejected as a concept because, according to qualitative ideas, they speak for a bias and thus for a narrowing of the perspective. According to this way of thinking, open questions should be asked instead of hypotheses. In the meantime, there is also a consensus among theologians and non-­ theologians that theological and other theories about the quality of rituals by no means coincide with the experience of those who participate in them (cf. Zulehner, 1976). Who experiences the first Holy Communion as God’s experience? Who still has the impression of dining at the Lord’s table for the first time at his confirmation? The authorial perspective, since it presumably only very inadequately captures such subjective elements, can hardly do justice to the object: “A symbol cannot simply be viewed. One must experience it in its expressiveness. A tourist goes into a church differently from one who wants to pray or worship.” (Steiner, 1977, p. 19) Willis also emphasizes the importance of qualitative data for culturally transmitted actions, the importance of observation, interview, and informal interaction by means of which we can better decipher the meanings and values attached to particular activities (cf. Willis, 2000, p. xiii). Qualitative methods include • specific quality criteria of qualitative methods, including approaches, images of people, etc.,

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• Methods of data collection include the whole range of different interview forms, but also case studies, phenomenological procedures, the collection of artefacts, films, photographs, and also • the specific analysis of such qualitative material, including clustering methods, triangulation, and at this point also mixed methods, • then the interpretation, i.e. the process in which findings actually become usable. No method can replace research or the examination of the relevant research literature. Expert interviews in particular are unfortunately predestined for such misunderstandings (cf. Kaiser, 2014, p.V). Quantitative methods aim to make constructs quantifiable for operationalisation, while qualitative research approaches shed light on the interrelationships between constructs (cf. Manstead, 2007). In addition, qualitative research aims to highlight the specifics of individual cases and to include individual person’s perspectives, expectations and experiences (cf. Manstead, 2007). In the design of the research work it is clear that it is a deductive approach, in which conclusions are drawn from individual cases or individual statements to overall statements. A central characteristic of qualitative research is always the appropriateness of the methods to the subject matter, i.e., as researchers we must always apply this criterion to our respective research decisions and make it transparent in each case why we choose which research method for which research question, and why the chosen research method is appropriate to the subject matter (cf. Flick, 1995, p. 22). In doing so, we often see the danger with qualitative methods that the research goes in the direction of ‘anecdote collection’, that the approach is journalistic and not oriented towards findings. In order not to misuse interviews as a mere collection of anecdotes, I flanked them with comprehensive source research. Qualitative research approaches still have the reputation in Germany of not being taken seriously, of being journalistic, not really scientific. Yet their structures are just as highly developed, they are intensively discussed, and their quality criteria are transparent. This research is about promoting qualitative approaches as well, ideally to promote knowledge of the qualitative portfolio of scientific tools among the public as well. The qualitative approach is also a legitimate scientific approach, has to submit to the same strict standards of scientificity as quantitative research and is just as usable as a tool for gaining knowledge. In order to adequately represent the diversity of the field, I decided to use a research portfolio with a qualitative focus. In both the 1997 and 2020 series, I chose,

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in addition to the authorial perspective of the reception of the existing research literature • guideline-based biographical interviews and • short case descriptions (I had not done this in 1997) as a method. Non-directive interviews and case studies belong methodologically to qualitative research. The aim was to learn something about the psychosocial meaning and effect of rites of passage in a topic-focused manner along the biographical experiences of the interviewees. The interviews conducted within the framework of this research work were therefore the main source of description. In addition, the partly already quoted scientists from the same, related or also other fields.

10.2 The Qualitative Method in the Context of Constructivism Basically, we can distinguish between two types of proximity to data, • on the one hand, the proximity to the collected source data, the observational data, the original statements of interview partners, • on the other hand, the closeness to the data that arises due to the analysis of the source data material, in the context of case studies, for example (cf. Schmieder in Kruse, 2014, p. 577). Data collection is never a goal in itself; data collection serves a certain interest in knowledge or the answering of certain research questions. And, if necessary, it is also constructively distorted by this interest in knowledge. Flick lists the following basic assumptions of qualitative research: • In principle, social reality is understood as the result of jointly produced meaning and contexts, essentially in interaction, • this common world is produced every day, i.e. also again and again, • Although people live in different life situations, the details of which can in part be determined objectively, such as income, education, etc., they interpret their life circumstances differently in terms of meaning, • reality becomes “interactively produced and subjectively meaningful […].” (Flick, 1995, p. 20 f.)

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Qualitative research approaches point to the constructed nature of our psychological and social reality. Thus, even if they deal with prospective topics such as the desired manner of one’s own death, they are always reconstructive or constructive, but they do not describe the experience itself, not the feeling itself, but are always self-invented descriptions, to put it clearly. That these descriptions are based on experiences that have actually taken place, or are based on actual intentions when it comes to prospective questions, is equally beyond doubt for me. But in order to be able to classify the results, it is important to realize that the chosen method does not strive to find ‘the’ truth or the connections, that it is a multi-stranded search for subjective connections, subjective emphases, subjective significances. It is obvious that there cannot be ‘the’ context, ‘the’ result. Flick (cf. Flick, 1995, p. 155) explains constructivism as a triad: • the conception of terms and knowledge that interacts with • the world of experience: the natural and social environment, events and activities, and the • interpretation, the understanding of the attribution of meaning Qualitative methods can, but do not have to be constructive; fundamentally, qualitative research consists of a comprehensive and detailed, descriptive analysis of always sensible social reality or social reality assumed to be sensible (after Kruse, 2014, p. 25). Qualitative research consequently has a certain attitude towards reality – and cognitive processes: “This attitude is based on a high sensitivity with regard to the construction and reconstruction of reality in the qualitative research process.” (Kruse, 2014, p. 145) Reflexivity thus has a very high priority in the design and implementation of qualitative research (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 205 f.). Qualitative interviews – and beyond that all empirical research methods – do not map ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, but complex communication processes in which ‘data’ are produced in the first place. It is about the interactive production or negotiation of communicative meaning that is jointly produced. (Kruse, 2014, p. 298 f.)

As the Federal Constitutional Court wrote in 1994: “The question of scientificity cannot be answered according to the criteria of “right” or “wrong”, because scientific activity is always incomplete and can be refuted by new research results.” (B BVerfG, 1994–1 BvR 434/87 – para. (1–76)). In order to limit perceptual losses, one could thus try to adopt as acultural a perspective as possible and view the object of research from this perspective. But:

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“Everyone is simultaneously the object of observation and the observer. Only an ideal, unreal observer would, of course, be able to form a true picture of objective reality.” (Schulze, 1995, p. 226) As helpful as it might be to make an exploration of the subject with the distance of an outsider – it is an illusion. Even an observer cannot completely avoid interaction with the research field – even if one would strive to do so. For, to quote Schulze once again: “A social scientist is also a subject. To say that he objectifies something can only mean that he subjectively assimilates something coming from outside. He too engages in nothing but the construction of his own world. However […] he can try to objectify himself (as any person thinking about himself can do) in order to organize his representation in such a way that the object domain is as isomorphic as possible with the highest possible probability.” (Schulze, 1995, p. 241). According to Kruse, qualitative interview research can be used to get closer to the constructed reality of a group or an individual, this is especially true when the conversations are recorded rather than recorded (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 53). The essential basis of this work are interviews. But what are interviews? Actually, interviews are something like stories. I have had stories told to me all the time. The results of the interviews I present here are to be seen from this point of view, since they are themselves narrative constructions of events, that is, they do not describe the events themselves as they are experienced. Events that in some cases took place years or decades ago, or have never taken place – such as the question of one’s own death. Moreover, these narratives are more or less elaborated from case to case – depending, for example, on how often an event has been recounted. It can be assumed that certain events are retold much more often than others. For example, a wedding is probably talked about more than a confirmation. Factors such as social desirability, the reflection on a later particularly successful or failed marriage, apparently, as in the interview with Karl, the relationship to his father, especially during his death, the relationship to Mark’s own children (both passages will be quoted later) certainly also play a role. Basically, it only seems possible to understand the categories of other persons in relation to one’s own categories, the knowledge of other persons against the background of one’s own knowledge (cf. Meinefeld in Flick p. 271). The process of reality generation is in principle not completed, just as we continue to interact and communicate as long as we live (cf. Flick p. 122). Thus, the question of the truth of the data obtained arises again. At the same time, it is precisely curiosity and the desire for knowledge that, in my opinion, constitute a decisive moment of exploration for scientists, who miss out on a great deal simply because of their role and their decades-long habits of perception: “For the philosopher [and not only the philosopher, AdV], nothing at

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all is certain for professional reasons. He has the duty to obtain a maximum of clarity about what is – taken absolutely – what the man in the street takes for reality and knowledge.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p. 2). The auctorial perspective as researcher is also opposed by the argument that transitional rituals in particular are only revealed to those who follow them believingly (cf. Sartory 1987, p. 9) The most prominent moment in exploration and theory extraction is therefore the personal inner perspective. What experiences have people had with religiously traditional transitional rituals? These experiences were essential for me in the psychosocial interpretation of religiously traditional rituals today. In doing so, methodologically speaking, I will not set out in search of a historically correct truth, nor, to use an expression by Willis, in search of the historical skins of rituals (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 10), but rather I am in search of the narrative significance of my interlocutors, that is, the significance of their experience and, above all, of the retelling of their lives – in the awareness that the retelling can only partially correspond to what they have experienced, since it has been narratively reshaped (cf. Sacks, 2015, p. 129).

10.3 Interview Forms: What Effect Do Different Standardizations Have? The decision as to which interview form is appropriate depends on how the state of the research is assessed and what the aim of the qualitative exploration is. Different qualitative interview forms differ particularly with regard to the degree of structuring of the interview situation, with regard to the focus of the research interest and with regard to the role of the interviewer and the degrees of freedom granted to the interviewee in answering (cf. Kaiser, 2014, p. 3). As is generally known, a distinction can be made between the degree of standardisation of the interviews, between highly standardised semi-standardised and non-standardised interviews (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 203 f.). Standards refer to fixed questions to which the interviewee can respond with fixed answers, possibly accompanied by an “other” category. The following variants of qualitative interviews are listed (cf. Hopf in Flick, 1995, p. 351 ff.): • Structure – or dilemma – interviews as partially standardized interviews to capture moving subjects,

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• Focused interviews are determined by the focus on a predefined topic of conversation, • narrative interviews, in which the main aim is to get the interviewee to tell his or her story; they are usually structured only by leading questions. Standardizations lead to a quick comparability of the data obtained through the interviews. Interviews are often evaluated using codes that are defined in advance. In this case, coding refers to key words, i.e. one considers beforehand which categories one would like to explore in the interview, defines these verbally and conceptually, and then evaluates the transcribed interview on the basis of these key words – the codes. This allows for a good comparability between different interviews. We are trying, to use a map metaphor attributed to the economist Joan Robinson, to make our map really a map and not a landscape, in order to achieve a certain economy of research through a certain standardisation. This also entails that this approach must be transparent. As much as reliability as a methodological quality in qualitative procedures is labelled as unrealisable and not suitable for the system, this greatest possible reliability is highly desirable in terms of research control and transparency and verifiability of research results. On the other hand, standardisation prevents or reduces the interviewee’s own speech production and can thus reduce the validity of the data obtained. The interviewer does not actually need to listen in this situation in order to maintain the conversation (after all, everything is being recorded). It is a rather objectifying situation, which at the same time can lead to the interview partner experiencing himself as a research object. It is amazing how much value we as humans place on being incomparable, unique, on the one hand, and on the other hand often insist in our methodology that we create comparability and standardization. Partly at the cost of avoiding real (shared) reflection and then, at worst, generating half-knowledge or sham knowledge. Thus, “the fabrication of thoughts while talking” (von Kleist, 1805) is prevented: This magic moment, which is so productive for conversations, and so surprising and exciting, and this dynamic finds no room in standardized questions…. Standardized interviews tend to produce standardized answers. In a non-standardised or semi-standardised interview, there will be significantly more room for exploration, let’s let the interviewees tell as much as possible, explain their world – this attitude will later also be important for the evaluation of interviews (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 326 ff.). Nondirective interviews are characterized

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by the fact that comparatively open questions reveal experiences and knowledge that are within the personal, individual sphere of experience of the interviewee. Interviews always have a biographical context, they always also refer to systems of knowledge and relevance that are biographically enacted, such as when I acquired a certain professional competence, when certain events happened in my life, etc. (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 318). “The narrative interview (Schütze 1983) [is] compared to the expert interview […] more interested in narrative presentation of biographical phases and outcomes from the interviewee’s life.” (Kaiser, 2014, p. 2). The standardization/categorization must be done at a later stage, after the data have been presented. In addition, it can be assumed that in this process the investigator is learning, i.e. that the first interview is in no way like the third or fourth interview. And so again they are not comparable. The settings are also standardised differently: Interviews take place in very different settings. They can be asked in the form of written questionnaires, they can be asked interactively in a chat, they can be conducted by telephone, by video telephony, and in presence. The interview partners are prepared by a previously arranged appointment with him or are made interview participants unprepared, for example in street interviews. They are usually recorded via audio or video. In presence, they are conducted somewhat either in a neutral place, such as a café or a public library, or in the precinct of you or the precinct of the interview partner – for example, in your or his office or living room. Those who receive you in their private rooms thus allow a considerable insight into privacy.

10.4 The Role of Language in Qualitative Methods Qualitative methods are essentially based on the use of language as a mediator of meaning. This means that we do not create meaning purely through observations or, say, medical data, but that we are already dealing with a linguistic of meaning content in an interview or a language-bound case study. A critique of language is therefore essential. Language is open, inventive, improvisatory; it is rich in ambiguity and variety of meaning. This creates great freedom in spoken language, provides almost infinite flexibility and adaptability, but also makes it prone to error. In rituals, it is precisely the symbolically expressive component of language that is essential. At the same time, the patterns of action in rituals are themselves to be regarded as a kind of language; this is the general consensus within ritual research (cf. Stollberg-­ Rilinger, 2013, p. 194).

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Let us reflect briefly on the significance of what has been said. It must be kept in mind that we are dealing with remembered experiences, not with descriptions of the experiences themselves. Here we have a retrospective construction and, if necessary, also a re-evaluation. The description of these experiences is also dependent on the linguistic flexibility of the interview partners, both at the moment and in principle. Interestingly, memories then become so present in interviews that the tense repeatedly jumps from a past tense to the present tense, this was a very frequent phenomenon in my interviews – when I check this for the 2020 series, I actually find that this jump is detectable in most interviews. My observation is that this leap of visualization arises particularly in very intense memories. This can be seen, for example, in a passage by my interviewee Doris, as she reports on the discovery of her serious cancer illness; I have marked the tenses here in bold: I have, I have somehow so I was at the gynecologist and then he has determined, there is something strange in the breast, and then he says that with such a mammography yes mammography not, but ultrasound, that does not look like m breast cancer that what that is he would not know, should go to the breast center and then I’m marched there XXstreet and then said the doctor said then somehow she could not make a picture of it, whether I had n accident yes? Yes, I say, at that point I fell on something […]. (Doris Z. 328 ff.)

And here’s another very striking time jump: So I found something like that just touching. (Karl Z. 112)

It is a classic example of how events are actualized in memory, so that here the interviewee prefers the present tense to the past tense. With the problem that everything we gain through such qualitative interviews are second-hand narratives, we are dealing with the problem of foreign understanding, we are thus in the middle of a kind of transference, in a communicative space with the interview partner, in which his feelings but also our feelings resonate, which we must make transparent and which we must secure, for example, through intersubjective procedures (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 462 f.; s. a. ders. p. 469). To put it more simply: in case of doubt, one takes notes in the transcription; a reflection directly following the actual interview is also essential. I now explain the chosen portfolio of methods in front of the discussed quality criteria:

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10.5 Justification of the Method by Means of the Quality Criteria “Every interview” situation is at the same time also a communication situation through which the “researcher [can] find access to the person’s system.” (Helfferich, 2011, p. 79).

In the following, a justification of the chosen instruments from the perspective of the previously discussed quality criteria, here especially tailored to qualitative research: I have already discussed the criterion of objectivity before. When conducting interviews in general, it is always important to bear in mind that an interview is conducted between two people in a dyad, and that there can be differences in status in this dyad, that the participants can come from different socio-­cultural milieus, that there can be differences in age and, of course, also differences in gender, different levels of experience, different use of language, from which all kinds of misunderstandings can arise – whereby, of course, the misunderstandings that are not recognised are particularly serious. In principle, the principle of openness is important in interviews  – for this I consider it central, for example, not to lead in a nondirective (1) interview, but to allow oneself to be led essentially, to put one’s own system of relevance, one’s own values aside, not to make any offers of interpretation and not to suggest any prefabricated answers to the interview partner, not to use questions or stimuli or to use stimulus words that are intended to achieve certain effects, to grant the interviewee a monologic right to speak and to evoke pure narratives and to support the further telling of the story without giving direction and thereby to support the interviewee in bringing his or her relevance system, his or her network of meanings to fruition (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 261). In principle, the following applies: results of analysis – i.e. “interpretative conclusions […] must be strictly related to the existing text material, i.e. developed from the existing text material and consistently found in it.” (Kruse, 2014, p. 633). Along Mayring, 2010: Procedure documentation: it is important to me to disclose my procedure here in the empirical part of this work. This includes the disclosure of the (theoretical) preliminary understanding, the description and justification of the methodological approach and individual steps of data collection and analysis. Procedural documentation is a self-evident part of the interview documentation and the

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transparency of the literature sources used and combined with each other; the same applies to the. Interpretation validation with arguments: Interpretations were secured with arguments for the entire research process from pre-understanding to evaluation. Proximity to the subject: This quality criterion thus underlines the intention of qualitative research to start with concrete social problems and to establish an open and equal working relationship with the interview partners. Communicative validation: This criterion refers to the fact that the results and their interpretation must be discussed with the respondents. Here it becomes clear that the researched person has a greater importance in qualitative research than in all other research directions. They are considered to be competent. The criterion is complemented by objective hermeneutics, which aims to clarify unconscious rules for the researched. This was done, among other things, through constant dialogue with others and multiple reading loops of the interviews. As the chosen method is a comparative qualitative methodology in which the focus is on the individual experience of the individuals, it did not seem right to discuss my insights gained in the literature review and in the discussion with other experts with the interview partners against the background of their experiences; this would have led to a kind of discursive matching that would have brought the gift of their narratives into unnecessary competition and categorisation by the scientific orders. Triangulation: In the working structure of this research project, I processed the interviews in blocks so that triangulating reference was facilitated. Along Helfferich, 2011, p. 79: The communication situation is essential in the context of a qualitative study. The social competence of the interview partner and the establishment of trustworthiness seem to be important so that the interview partner really opens up and, in the end, can really reach the reflection phase along the lines of the old sentence about the production of thoughts while talking. On the second principle, the principle of openness: In accordance with the principle of openness, subjects are given sufficient space to verbally unfold their own values and relevance systems. On the part of the interviewer, it is a matter of suspending theoretical prior knowledge and preconceived opinions in order to be able to concentrate on the statements and the train of thought of the interview partners. The principle of restraint and the renunciation of communicative steering of the conversation and the flow of speech of the interview partners is also important.

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Foreign understanding: As an attitude, strangeness is very productive (especially because I actually enter strange worlds). This strangeness and the non-­ understanding of the interview partner’s world are important preconditions for understanding the interview partner as a universe of his or her own, for example, in accordance with the principles of ethnographic research. The fourth criterion is the principle of reflexivity, which means that the interviewer constantly reflects critically on his or her own conversational methods and behaviour. Here, the interviewer’s conversational behaviour is also to be understood as a kind of work in progress, in which the interviewer learns more and more about himself and constantly sharpens and adapts his behaviour in the sense of the other principles. All four principles are closely connected and interact with each other. These principles apply not only to the acquisition of material, i.e. the actual process of interview or observation, but they also apply to the evaluation and interpretation of the material. Along Kruse, 2014: Foreign understanding, see above. Indexicality: (what a term – do you have to look it up all the time, too?) is secured by data triangulation à la Mayring. The question here is how foreign meaning can be explored by means of qualitative interviews, Process validity: In my opinion, in interview situations, it is above all the trust, patience and interest shown towards everything said that promotes this process validity, also through the process documentation. Process validity also contributes to intersubjective comprehensibility à la Flick. Steinke lists the following quality criteria of qualitative research in Flick, 2017 (cf. ibid., 2017, p. 324 ff.): intersubjective comprehensibility: in principle, the data obtained should be intersubjectively comprehensible, which of course also applies to the process of data generation. An important step in the empirical phase is the documentation of the survey methods and the survey context, the transcription rules, the data, and the evaluation methods. Indication of the research process: the indication of the research process did not happen here, but of course at the very beginning of this thesis. To this end, here specifically for the empirical part: why did I choose the qualitative approach? Are these methods really appropriate, are the transcription rules used appropriate? In this empirical part I answer these questions.

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Empirical anchoring: the theories and conclusions reached should be anchored in the data, including the data obtained by the researchers themselves. What happens explicitly and transparently here. Limitation: No research paper is valid indefinitely. I make this clear in between and especially in the final chapter. Coherence: I have already explained this before – it makes sense to keep an eye on the smoothness or roughness of the data material. In my opinion, cracks are to be disclosed and not to be smoothed out argumentatively in the sense of coherence. Relevance: The narratives of the interview partners describe very important, partly existential moments in their lives, insofar it is very easy to establish relevance in this context. Reflective subjectivity: I reflected on my performance as an interviewer both in a pilot interview and successively in the interviews conducted as well as in the subsequent commenting processes. Such reflective comments on the interview process account for at least one fifth of the comments, in my estimation. Was I clear? I hope so.

10.6 Ethical Precautions During Interviews Interviews can have serious consequences for the interviewees. For example, they can lead to retraumatization if sensitive topics are addressed and stop signals from the interviewees are not adequately heeded. Example: Interview with an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor. I meet the woman, a psychologically obviously stable, life-affirming lady, albeit fragile in health, in the context of palliative care. In conversation she first expresses the wish to preserve her very eventful life for posterity in biographical interviews. As a 13-year-­ old, she was interned for 6 months in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later, according to her own statements, as a Romanian she became a victim of the Romanian secret service several times. Even when she emigrated to Germany, she was subjected to persecution by this secret service. A biographical interview, requested by her, could lead to a relieving balance in the context of palliative care. In the end, I decide against it, because she emphasizes several times in preliminary talks that she actually does not want to remember so precisely, because both the Holocaust and life under communism were very painful times for her. Because of this self-statement, I have to assume that there is a risk of re-traumatization and I abandon the project.

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To this end: on the one hand, language is necessary for constant reflection, but on the other hand, it can have a very critical function when those who continue to practice religiously feel compelled to present their own impulses to the outside world: “So I wonder how a person can still remain spiritual if they have to continually rationalize, explain and defend their spirituality.” (Gümüşay, 2020, p. 76, cf. p. 75) Nondirective interviews here allow reflections on the one hand, but do not force them through an overly intense staccato of questions. Basically, all requirements regarding ethics and, in the context, data protection were fulfilled in this research project. This includes the principle of informed consent, as well as the principle of averting possible harm to interview partners. This could be, for example, as described above, due to trauma caused by reported experiences in the context of dying and funerals. I constantly and consistently observed adherence to the principle of non-harm at every stage of the research process. (cf. Hopf in Flick, 1995, p. 596).

The Interviews: Preliminary Work

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11.1 The Narrative, Non-directive Interview As a middle course between in-depth and broad exploration of the topic, I chose a semi-standardized nondirective interview with structuring guiding questions. On the one hand, the chosen method allows an overview of different forms of experience, on the other hand, it also provides enough details to make the interviewees visible as individuals beyond my research question. I thus developed my topic by combining both perspectives, linking the auctorial external perspective by reviewing existing studies and theories and my own theoretical reflection with the personal internal perspective of the interviews. The chosen interview form is a nondirective in-depth interview, which is comparatively rarely described in the literature. According to the Springer-Lexicon 2020, an in-depth interview is “a non-standardised interview with the aim of clarifying unconscious processes and motives of the interviewee.” (ibid.), according to Spektrum also 2020 somewhat more detailed “a non-directive, qualitative interview lasting 1–3 hours in the form of a personal conversation with the aim of increasing the willingness to give evidence by creating a trusting atmosphere and thus gaining deeper insights into the object of investigation, especially when investigating phenomena that are difficult to record (motives, attitudes); can also be useful semi-structured on the basis of a specific list of topics (interview guide), especially for expert interviews. Problems: comparability of interviews, recording (logging), evaluation and interpretation. Field of application e.g. in advertising psychology, to get a complete picture of the origin, meaning and function of experiences and behaviour of consumers and recipients. The interviewee should describe in his own words everything that comes to his mind in connection with a subject.” (ibid.)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_11

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The point here was the representation of complexity, not its reduction. The aim was to designate a kind of complex map of how transitional rituals that dock onto religious practice are perceived and practiced today. In doing so, it is clear that emotional maps are much more complex than rituals in their fixed liturgy, their fixed orders might suggest at first glance. In the presentation of the results, quotes from the interviews take up space again and again (cf. Donath, 2015, p. 26) in order to capture the different voices of how rituals are experienced, to give them space. In this interview form, it would in itself be possible for me to also come into play with my experiences when interview partners ask about them directly (cf. Donath, 2015, p. 22), but that did not happen in this context. It makes sense to establish an affinity with the interview partner as a research partner in the sense of the quality criterion of proximity. At the same time, the criterion of foreign understanding applies, i.e. understanding the interview partner as a foreign world a priori. Affinities such as shared hobbies and interests are helpful, but of course they can always be created artificially by cultivating an affirmative style of conversation. From the time when I was training improvisational theatre, I remember an exercise in which a conversation couple once affirmed each other’s statements, then denied them, and it turned out that an affirmative conversation style generated significantly more conversation, while a negative one quickly brought a conversation to a standstill. Affinities such as shared hobbies and values, etc., also involve a certain risk, however, because it is easier to slip into chit-chat, which is not the goal here, but at best a means of relaxing the other person and thus promoting the flow of conversation in terms of the interest in knowledge. There are two points of criticism of the narrative interview: the structures that are formed are not necessarily the structures that actually take effect inside, and: the connection between consciousness, memory and action is already extremely vague in the psychosocial literature, there is a danger of subsequent constructions (cf. Rosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal in Flick, p. 458 ff.). We have to face this possible falsification moment in principle, and keep it in mind in a relativizing way when observing and analyzing the results. In many aspects, the nondirective interview is similar to the process that happens in reflective listening. Here it is a matter of giving the other person as much space as possible within a certain, previously defined time (cf. Aron, 1996, p. 160 f.). The nondirective method is thus a technique of conducting a conversation. The interview partners essentially determine the course of the conversation, while I as the interviewer only intervene marginally with my leading questions. Sometimes I even refrain from adhering to the sequence of questions I have set – depending on the direction the interviewee has chosen to take the conversation. Of course, the

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way the conversation is conducted influences the amount and type of what is told. Sympathy and antipathy towards my interlocutors and what they told, respective moods, feelings of pleasure and displeasure undoubtedly influence the course of the conversation. Other interlocutors test my patience by their digressions, even if no antipathy clouds the interaction with them. In such situations I notice very strongly that as an interviewer I am not a meticulously recording research apparatus, but am always acting as a person myself – this must be included in the process of data generation.

11.2 Competencies of the Interviewer In summary and by way of introduction, here are the guidelines for formulation, competencies of the interviewer and possible mistakes (after Hussy et al., 2010, p. 229 ff): Guidelines for formulating the questions: • • • • • •

no yes/no questions one question at a time no suggestive questions no double negatives not too many why-questions (why-questions create pressure to justify!) Adapt questions to the way of expression of the respondents

Competencies of the interviewer • • • • • • •

be good at asking questions Create a feel-good atmosphere be able to communicate nonverbally listen up Structuring conversations Recognize and skillfully resolve disturbances non-invasive control of the conversation

Mistakes made by inexperienced interviewers: • strict adherence to the guidelines • pauseophobia • Impatience

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• Change from interview to consultation In semi-standardised interviews and above all in non-directive, non-standardised interviews, an essential competence of the interviewer is to initiate the flow of the conversation and to stimulate it in the further course of the conversation and, depending on the research question, also to steer it. This is also essentially a matter of relinquishing control over the thematic settings. In my opinion, it is essential to be able to listen well, to make room for it. By listening, we allow the interviewee to fill these spaces with his experiences, his individual perspectives. So it’s about creating a setting where the interviewee trusts us enough to give us the gift of their experience. Remember, even when the conversation is being recorded, your listening attitude is essential to the success of the interview, to the richness of the accounts. One of my essential teachers was my paternal grandfather, to whom this first research paper was also dedicated. My grandfather told a lot of stories, but the most precious, the most precious stories he told only if you really opened yourself to his stories. That took a lot of time. But it was always worth it. I would sit with him for hours on his little balcony and listen to him. For this work, the interviews of Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012 were an important model. To make it quite clear at this point: interviews do not only have the purpose of pure knowledge interest, they are an act of care, they play a role in anamnesis, but also in the basic care in conversation, whether this is a conversation fresh from pastoral care, a preliminary conversation for a therapy, or simply a devoted listening between friends or partners. At its core, an interview contains above all the element of listening, of respectful open attention, in which the interviewer steps back and the interviewee is allowed to bring up everything, and so that thoughts (along the lines of von Kleist, whom I have already mentioned) can be refined. As Kübler Ross puts it: “Our interview helped her [the interviewee] in several ways: she was allowed to be herself, hostile and demanding, without being condemned because of it or having to fear that I felt the environment personally attacked.” (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 108) and further a few pages later, “Preparatory pain hardly needs words; here it is much more a matter of being silent about it and assuring with a gesture that one knows and shares the pain.” (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 116). Interviews are initiated. Here mostly because of your research interest. Non-­ invasive control of the conversation is an art. You keep your subject in mind, and develop the conversation during the interview, while listening. Basically, a learning attitude of the interviewer is very important in the interview. We don’t ask: what do we want to find out? But rather: What can we learn? Thus, we do not treat our interview partner as an object to be studied, but as a subject, as a partner in our

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r­esearch process (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 285). In such an interview, the primary interpretive authority rests with the interviewee. It is his material. As an interviewer, I take myself very much back. I don’t look at the clock, and when I move, for example change the position of my arms or my legs, I try not to make any noise. I naturally avoided personal comments and comparisons with my own experiences. The narrative space was solely at the disposal of the interview partners. At the same time, it seems very important to me to resonate with the narratives of the interviewees. In my opinion, my own emotional emotion through the stories is not a contradiction to the scientific process; on the contrary, it can establish a certain trustworthiness. In interviews, the question of the prior knowledge of the interview partners always arises – as it does in many research settings. Prior knowledge can be very desirable in the form of a possible depth of reflection, but it can also be an absolute hindrance if the knowledge is distorted far too much, so to speak, towards social desirability, for example. At first, I considered conducting the interviews virtually, but decided on the face-to-face encounter as a much more intensive situation in which I could also pay attention to quiet body language signals in order to further support the narrative flow of the interview partner. The interviews took place at my home or at the interviewee’s home. Due to Corona, the last two interviews – which I had fought for a long time – took place by telephone. Whereas during my first research project I had been on last-name terms with most of my interviewees, 2020, I was now on first-name terms with most of them, even if they were more distant acquaintances. The customs had simply changed. One of the basic skills of successful interviews is good questions. Good questions for non-standard interviews are open questions. For example: tell us about your childhood. Describe your professional situation. And not: why are you unhappy in your job? The opening situation is also important. Only if it is successful will the interview partner open up to you (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 291). Example: You are asking someone about their childhood during wartime. In the first question it is important to be open. So, for example: Describe your childhood. What was everyday life like for you? What was life like with your parents and grandparents? If your interviewee then describes bomb attacks, for example, you can ask the question: How did you experience these attacks? If he or she describes real fear afterwards, you can ask: What were you particularly afraid of? How did this fear manifest itself? Kübler Ross’ interviews with the dying are very revealing. She is proven to be a real master of qualitative interviews. It is also known (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012) that she regularly put her interview technique up for discussion and thus fulfilled

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one of the quality criteria of qualitative research, constant reflection. Nevertheless, even her interviews are not perfect. This can be seen, for example, in the following passage: Patient: You want to know how I’m adjusting to dying? Doctor: Yes. You have already partly answered the question when you said that you did not want to be left alone and that in a crisis, be it pain or some other stress, you asked for someone to stand by you. The second is the pain you are dealing with. If you have to die, you want a death without struggle, without pain and loneliness. (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 95)

The paraphrasing of the doctor happens with the doctor’s own words. But this is critically. It is important to leave the interview partner in the context of his own terms, his own choice of words, wherever possible. In addition, the doctor paraphrases for a relatively long time, which can cause the interview to stall because the interviewee’s flow of thought can be disrupted. Paraphrasing is therefore only ever a stopgap solution. A way out can be formulated as follows: “You mean …” This encourages the interview partner to take up the topic again or to make it more comprehensible, and stimulates the conclusion of the conversation. The following passage from the same interview is also instructive: Doctor: with this you are saying exactly what we have been trying to find out for a year. You have clearly put into words what we wanted to know. (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 99)

Here the doctor makes it clear that there is an interest in knowledge in a very specific direction. However, this is to be seen very critically. Interview partners should in no case be encouraged to react and answer in the sense of the interviewers’ hypotheses. An example of a similarly tendentious paraphrasing can also be found in Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 211. During an interview, a variety of disturbances can occur. For example: the interview partner becomes sad. The interviewee touches on a topic that is still unclear to him or her and difficult to verbalise. The interviewee is irritated. The interviewee tries to answer the questions for you in the way he or she fantasizes. The interviewee loses the thread. In my opinion, it is important to face the intensity of the interview situation and at the same time, metaphorically speaking, to remain in the shadows, as invisible as possible. Even if the interview was initiated because of your research interest, it is the thoughts, is the story of the interviewee. Here it must be clear that any evaluations of the interview partner’s utterance from your side must be refrained from.

11.3 Forms of Recording and Transcriptionxx

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To maintain this competence, breaks can be useful. Remember not to make pauses too long, if necessary, to continue to maintain the flow of thought. As a rule of thumb, I suggest 10 s breaks. For the interviewer, it is a matter of using the “given moment” (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 167), the moment in the conversation when the interviewee is ready to open up to critical questions if necessary. It is very important to pay attention to verbal signals of the interview partner on the one hand, but above all also to non-­ verbal signals. This means pauses, para-linguistic expressions, turning away, etc. An important moment in the beginning of the first contact is to present the research project to the future interview partner. On the one hand, it is important to tell something so that the interview partner also knows whether the interview is interesting for him, he might be suitable as an interview partner, on the other hand, the interview partner should also not be informed too much, so that he does not think too much about the research project in advance and then presents rather prefabricated or stereotypical reflections (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 255). Conducting good qualitative interviews is an art. Anyone who wants to use interviews as a research method should definitely train these skills beforehand. This also means conducting test interviews again and again and reflecting on the way one conducts interviews, ideally also under collegial supervision. It should be noted that test interviews also take place in the confidential space of the interview and are therefore subject to data protection.

11.3 Forms of Recording and Transcriptionxx The interviews were recorded as audio and kept protected with ach password. They werecompletely transcribed except of the introductory stabilized part. In the process, body language or para-linguistic utterances were also documented (cf. Kowal & O’Connell in Flick, p.  437  f.; Kruse, 2014, p.  341  f.), because, in principle, wordless messages also have a high significance. It makes sense to make these visible in the transcript of the interview if possible (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 208). Basically, I transcribed word for word, plus phonetic signs such as “Mhm”, laughter etc.. Where the conversation had a rhythm that deviated from the normal flow of words, I used the usual punctuation marks that are also used in other texts with particular relevance to the rhythm of speech, such as poems – for example, exclamation marks or question marks. In the postscript, the protocol after the interview, factors such as the atmosphere of the conversation, the state of mind, the relationship between the interview

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p­ artner and the interviewer, the course of the conversation, interactions, special features, conspicuous topics and disturbances were recorded according to the rules of the art (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 278).

11.4 Selection and Acquisition of Interview Partners At the beginning of the research project, I considered conducting decidedly separate expert interviews with my own interview manual. In doing so, I focused primarily on people who, in my opinion, knew a lot about religions and rites of passage. I was also particularly interested in learning and thinking about tattoos as a possible accompaniment to transitions. However, a brief insightful phone interview with an experienced tattoo artist in 2019 convinced me that many tattoos today are done more for lifestyle reasons – this is also suggested by Han (cf. Han, 2019, p. 29), and it would therefore be critical to include them in a paper on rites of passage. It was not until the beginning of 2020 that I did find a book on so-called mourning tattoos, in which tattoos are presented as forms of shaping transition and coping with grief and are brought to life in several interviews (cf. Hartig & Oeft-­Geffarth, 2016). In the end, I decided against formal expert interviews because of a very incoherent selection situation. However, in the run-up to the in-depth interviews I conducted several, partly informal, informational interviews, among others with Eberhard Hausschildt, professor of practical theology in Bonn, my old mentor still from the times of my doctorate, with Efrat Galed, professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Düsseldorf and her partner, management consultant and Buddhist monk of many years, with Rafet Öztürk from the interreligious dialogue of the ditib, Cologne, an old and very valued acquaintance, and Hanife Tosun, a friend and deputy chairwoman of iKult e. V., a Muslim cultural association. But also with family members such as my children and stepchildren, with whom there were sometimes very lively and controversial discussions, and with my husband Rafi Rothenberg, who helped to build up the liberal Jewish community in Cologne and was its chairman at the time of my 2019/2020 research project, as well as its rabbi Natalia Verzhbovska. For my nondirective interviews, I selected • a man and a woman each • from all three great monotheistic currents, Protestant and Catholic Church (I did not specify here to which decided direction they should belong, whether they should be members of one of the great state churches), Judaism, Islam. • and atheists.

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There were certain biographical factors that played a role in the selection of interviewees: If possible, but not necessarily, they should have children. I included a homosexual interview partner, because she could also have children. For this purpose, I selected interview partners who were over 50. I assumed that subjects were likely to have largely detached themselves from socialisation dependencies such as the family or peer group from this age onwards, and to have experienced various life events such as funerals, the birth of children, and so on. I could therefore assume some experience of transitional rituals, whether as guest or participant, in my interviewees – a point I had not considered from my first interviews in 1997, and which often led to interviewees talking about things they could never actually have experienced, such as funerals. In retrospect, this was certainly due to the fact that I was only 30 at the time of the series in 1997, and had neither experienced deaths nor had children even in my immediate circle, nor had I had any experience with them as an adult, either familiarly or among friends. I did not set an upper age limit in either series. Basically, I excluded people with acute severe chronic mental illness and acute physical illness because they would have undoubtedly changed the perspective. Interviewees were not allowed to have been treated as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital in the last year. And: Membership in the religious group they represent should already have existed for at least 20 years. This is especially important for the Jewish area, where there are very many converts. My interview partners should have a fluent command of the German language. Potential interview partners should have spent the majority of their lives in Germany. I therefore set this transitions in order to ensure socialization within the German cultural sphere. The Rhenish culture is quite different from the Munich style, the city where I lived during the time of my PhD, but in my opinion this did not affect the interviews. In order not to have the local cultural differences resonate as disturbing variables, I decided to acquire the interview partners exclusively from a Cologne-Bonn area. In my opinion, this region is in many ways typical of living conditions in Germany. All three monotheistic currents are represented there. This local restriction avoided disturbances caused by a changed environment, for example, if one interview partner lived in the south of Germany and another from the north. The question arose as to which stream the respective representatives should belong to, or whether I should make a pre-selection. As a representative of the Jewish perspective, I deliberately chose once an Orthodox and then a liberal

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i­nterlocutor. At the same time, it should be take in account, that even formally liberal Jews or formally Orthodox Jews each occupy an individual position within the diverse spectrum of Jewish faith, also in the personal shaping of his/her religious life. From a methodological point of view, it is important to bear in mind that people’s behaviour changes depending on the context in which they themselves live their faith. Jews of the Diaspora live differently religiously than Jews in Israel. In the Diaspora they are also very much dependent on existing religious communities, i.e. what they find locally. This can fit more or less well with their own world views, but certainly also interacts with them. Of course, this also applies to Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and atheist perspectives. My initial acquisition efforts were directed at social media and the wider circle of acquaintances. Ideally, I would have preferred to interview only interview partners who were strangers to me. However, this preference was not consistently enforced as I had first hoped. I suspect that people outside of, say, a counselling context, through whom one might have been able to acquire interview partners, and possibly reinforced by a wider tabooing of religions, did not have the confidence and willingness to agree to such an interview. With some of those who eventually agreed to do so, I was connected prior to the interview by years or months of contact at least half-distance, where the difference between friendship and acquaintance is ultimately one of degree. With one interviewee in the 1997 series, a friendship developed after the interview that lasted until her death in 2017. I found atheists very easily via a neighbourhood network. I also had to use this to find other Protestant and Catholic interview partners. As expected, it was difficult to find Jewish interview partners. The search for Muslim interview partners was extremely difficult. Although I have a good also Muslim network in Cologne, and besides the forms like online calls I also left various other calls in supermarkets etc., it took several months until I found interview partners. I’m not sure what the reason for this is, perhaps as a group that struggles a lot with stereotypes they still keep a relatively low profile. This is certainly true for Jews as well. One must not forget that there are experiences of anti-Semitism in almost all Jewish families, and a certain for my point of viewunderstandable distrust of outsiders. Especially in these contexts, it was important to gain trustworthiness, in which interlocutors could open up. Through my long-standing contacts and friendships with Jews, Muslims and atheists I fortunately had a pragmatic knowledge of their religious ways of life, which helped me in this. And in a very practical way it helped me to ask what I thought were the right questions in the interview with this group.

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11.5 Implementation Along the Interview Guide The interviews were conducted according to an interview guide, which, however, as is usual in nondirective interviews, was not conducted according to a fixed question and answer scheme, but left room for spontaneous questions and also changes in the course of the conversation, whereby the essential questions from the interview guide were all dealt with and could also be dealt with. It would also be conceivable to break off the interview if the interview partners were briefly very emotionally moved by memories of strong emotional events, which was sometimes the case during the interviews, but never led to a break-off of the interview.xx. The 2020 series interviews were all conducted in parallel in a trusting, distraction-­free atmosphere between summer 2019 to spring 2020. They lasted between 45  min to just over an hour. They took place in the different moods but comparable settings, except for the last two which had to take place virtually due to the Corona crisis. Central to this was a trusting space, with the interviewees being able to choose between my studio or their own space. Five of the interviewees chose my premises, the interview of one interviewee took place in her living room, those of two other interviewees in their business premises, and I met another interviewee in a café near him. Although I had specified a certain order of questions, I deviated from it in part depending on the course of the interview and the material provided. In my opinion, the questions have proven themselves and I only had to make minor changes to the 1997 series. In this respect, one omission on my part is certainly that I did not ask in the documentary whether the interviewees grew up in Germany or not. Only once did I ask this question of a Muslim interviewee – although I myself grew up partly abroad, and know from my own experience how much such things can shape one’s own world view. In retrospect, I think it would have been right to ask all interviewees this question. Unlike the earlier version of the interview, I focused my questions exclusively on issues of transitions and their religious framing, rather than religious practice per se, an area on which I had asked several questions in the first version of the interview. In the new version, I focused on questions of experience, and action. And their retrospective interpretation by the interviewee himself. The documentation was done by an audio recording, which was completely transcribed after the protocol questions. The formulated questions, hereafter set in 10 p. like the interview interjections here in the text, were always asked orally and therefore sometimes deviated slightly from the written specification.xx.

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Introduction Thank you for taking the time to interview me about my research project. In this research project I would like to gain insights into transitions in life and their framing through religious rituals. I did not want to limit my interviewees by using terms that were too narrow. Therefore, in 1997 I rejected here to insert the term “ritual” and chose instead the more neutral, further but also more diffuse term religious acts. In 2019, religious rituals had long since become part of social practice, to the extent that I could now use it. For example, weddings, the introduction of a young person into the community, and also funeral rituals. I would like to know from you what experiences you have had in your life with transiitional rituals, especially religious ones, and how you have experienced and are experiencing participation in religious transiitional rituals of certain religious things. It is important to note that there are no right and wrong answers. Particularly in a field as enriched with knowledge as, in the broadest sense, religious studies, in which there is also a great deal of specialist literature in the popular sphere, I wanted to signal clearly to my interview partners that it was not a question of asking for factual information, but really of exploring their experiences. I will now ask you several questions. If you have not understood a question, I will be happy to repeat it. If I have formulated a question in a way that is misleading, please tell me and I will explain it in more detail. You don’t need to be afraid that anyone will find out about the content of our conversation – of course I will respect your anonymity, i.e. I will not publish your name or any other private data. Of course, you can refuse to answer any question without giving any reason! Some of the questions touch on frightening or unpleasant memories, such as the question about one’s own funeral. In addition, rituals are always, as public as they are, also a very intimate area. My interview partners should be allowed to set boundaries at any time without any shyness, even if none of my interviewees made use of this in 2019 (in 1997, there were still one in twelve). All data that I obtain through the interview will only be used anonymously in the research work. The data will be stored password-protected on an external storage medium to ensure the protection of your privacy and the transparency of the research project. Data protection requirements were even more virulent in the 2020 series than they had been in 1997. After all, the Internet makes it very easy for us to publish

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familiar material and make it traceable to the interviewee. That is why I made a point of pointing this out. Before the actual interview, do you have any questions about our meeting now, or my handling of the content and results of this conversation? To begin our conversation, I need some information for the record. Protocol Issues This phase is especially important as a warm-up phase: Year of birth, education (without periods, any you can think of, current occupation/ volunteer position): Living in a relationship – partnership, number, sex and age of children. Are you or have you been a member of a religious community? When? Why? Are you additionally active in one or more religious groups – also informally? If applicable, which one? Do you count yourself – independent of your membership – to a certain religious-­ ideological direction? Why and when did you leave, if applicable? These questions were also important in order to find out whether the interviewees had any experience of rituals at all in the local area. Some of my interviewees had a certain distance to their nominal affiliation to a religious community. Especially the relationship of such participants to the traditions of their religious community could become very interesting. It also later proved to be a good indication of how interlocutors construct their religious frame of reference. Interview Questions What life events have you experienced as a religious celebration? Please describe your experiences with them. I was only able to use such a fuzzy concept as that of a religious festival because I then brought concrete examples into the field. Examples: Maturation/entry of the interviewee himself into adolescence or the adult world according to the rituals of his religion, engagement/wedding/partnering, birth of a child, (communion, confirmation/confirmation), for what reason?, non-life-threatening, severely limiting illness, life-threatening illness, dying, death, mourning, funeral of a close relative or friend, (re-)entry into a religious community. Now followed the free phase of the interview: What do you remember? What happened? What did you experience?

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If you have decided the religious framing itself: Why? What was your motivation for doing so? If you did not commit these events in a religious setting – did you commit in another setting? How? Do you wish to die or be buried in a religious setting yourself? How? Why or why not? Is there any difference for you in terms of life events between a religious or non-­ religious framing? Please think of cases where you have experienced both, for example a civil and a religious wedding – or a secular and a religious funeral – what were the differences or similarities for you and why? In what situations or circumstances would they be more likely to choose a religious festival, and in what circumstances a non-religious one? How important is the presence of others to you in the celebratory framing of life events? Who should, we should not be there? Can you think of any other life events for yourself that you would find meaningful to frame religiously? Why? Do you have any ideas about how? Think for example of moving out of the parental home, the decision to marry or move in together as partners, divorce, graduation from school, completion of training or studies, acquisition of an academic degree such as a doctorate, retirement or the like? More recent or new rituals at life turns such as that of a divorce could be considered here in the following. Can you think of anything else we didn’t consider during our conversation?

Final Protocol Questions Do you have religious symbols or images hanging in your home? Do you have T-shirts, a car or bicycle in which you display your religious position? Do you have a Bible – Koran at home? Why do you have them (there)? What do they mean to you? In conclusion, what role does religion and religious practice play in your life? Was there a turning point where religion perhaps became more important or less important? From these questions I hoped to provide a summary opportunity in which interviewees could reflect on their religious world one last time in this conversation and engage in conversation with me about their religious practice.

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Certainly my interviewees, their feelings and attitudes towards a particular ritual were influenced by the interview situation. In this context, the interview was apparently experienced by my interviewees in part as a decidedly unusual opportunity to reflect biographically along the transiitional experiences, especially since the core topics, religion and religious practice, illness, dying and death are rather taboo.

11.6 Evaluation Procedure Chosen Qualitative content analysis is usually used as a qualitative evaluation method (cf. Kuckartz, 2018, pp.  123–142). The term “content analysis” suggests a self-­ contained procedure with consensus among the researchers. However, this is not the case. Qualitative content analysis describes a very incoherent procedure for which there is no fixed set of rules that is generally accepted across the different disciplines of psychology or at least would receive the appreciation of a controversy in the field. In the meantime, there are many different variants, each also with different ideas, often researchers choose a discourse-like content analysis (cf. Kaiser, 2014, p. 90). A content analysis is concerned with structuring the text material, and with highlighting passages that are essential to the content; it should also elaborate the various bodies of knowledge (cf. Kaiser, 2014, p. 91). According to Lamnek, 2010 (pp. 367–369), qualitative content analysis goes through four phases • • • •

Transcription Individual analysis comparative analysis Control phase

I have developed a deep distrust of supposedly explicit (i.e. more explicit than the above) evaluation procedures in the qualitative procedures (I cannot say much about the quantitative procedures here from my own experience, I have done substantially qualitative research). Let me illustrate with an example. According to Mayring, 2010, the core of qualitative data analysis is a six-stage procedure: • central is the category for the analysis – it is either developed in the course of data collection, but there are certain hypotheses about the central category, because along the central question already refers to a later categorization;

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• a systematic approach with clearly defined algorithms for the individual steps is central to the transparency of the data acquisition process; • now the material is extracted; • all material is classified and categorized; • for this purpose, certain predetermined techniques of category formation, such as Grounded Theory, are used; • there is an essentially understanding, hermeneutically oriented reflection on the material and also on the process of data collection, including the special dynamics of interaction; • this also concerns a critical reflection on the achievement of the qualitative quality criteria and the over inclusive from the process of over the planning of the procedure to its conclusion in the interpretation including coding procedure (cf. Mayring, 2010, p. 36). The word ‘encode’ presupposes a mechanistic process. In this I find the term encoding too strong and at the same time too weak a word for a process that is essentially a synthetic, partly intuitive one. And this is nothing honorable or violates any research honor or any imperative of transparency, etc. Often, in effect, different coding processes are used. If we code, the evaluation consists of sifting and matching the material of the main categories. Coding, it is important to note, is not a mechanical process. Rather, it is already an interpretive process. One of the dangers of coding is the fragmentation of the data material and a kind of artificial alienation, which cannot necessarily be avoided even by so-called open coding. If, for example, we as researchers “break up” or “dissect” the data material, then the question is how far the material transported by the interview partner or in a case study framework is not thereby also broken up, fragmented, and thus ultimately destroyed (cf. Kruse, 2014, p. 380). In the evaluation of qualitative material, it is a matter of reflectively establishing proximity to the data, of comparing what one reads and understands there with the findings from the literature research, of identifying novelties in the sense of foreign understanding, of marking what is conspicuous and unusual, I decided against qualitative content analysis (cf. Mayring, 2010) because I found it too static, and I also did not resort to grounded theory (cf. Strauss & Corbin, 1996) as I did in the 1997 series. Whereby, in the interest of transparency, I should mention here that I did not in fact resort to this structure, made famous by Straus & Corbin, in 1997 either, but only used it as evidence for my own approach, and did not adhere to the static evaluation structure of Grounded Theory in any

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form. It was precisely the primacy of transparency/intersubjective comprehensibility that led me, after critically reflecting on the 1997 series, to abandon a mock evaluation through coded content analysis. In the 1997 series, I did claim to myself that I had evaluated the material in a category-guided manner according to Strauss & Corbin’s Grounded Theory, but in fact I proceeded in exactly the same way as I do today. And in my opinion that was the right thing to do, I should only have disclosed it to myself, and thus to others. I remember with great gratitude the participation in the doctoral seminar under Prof. Heiner Keupp, in the course of my dissertation in 1997, who in his seminar often encouraged us doctoral students “to do your own thinking”. But how do you succeed in “doing your own thinking”? For me, it can best be described as a kind of meditation on the subject. Using and being accompanied by artistic works by others as well as my own artistic productions was very helpful in this, and I am very happy that Martha Nussbaum set out the justification of art as a means of knowledge, even for science, in her 2016 book Political Emotions (cf. ibid.). Yes, I thought a lot about what my interviewees had told me, and of course I read the interviews several times. M. In my opinion, we essentially evaluate our qualitative material intuitively, and there is nothing to be said against that. On the basis of a verbatim transcription, for example, we extract certain parts that appeal to us and add them to our body of thought. If you have conducted an interview, and then also transcribed it, you look forward to the evaluation. We often begin by summarizing and paraphrasing what we have gleaned from the interview. Kruse clearly warns against these strategies, because summaries inadmissibly reduce data material and these deductive methods, as inevitable omissions, already contain an interpretation that does not become transparent as under the title summary. The same applies to paraphrasing; paraphrasing means distancing oneself from the data material and thus also depersonalizing it – something that, according to Kruse, also runs counter to the actual cognitive process (cf. ders. 2014, p. 372 ff.). I would indeed be careful when it comes to paraphrasing terms of the interview partners by other terms, so it can come to serious you partly not even conscious content distortions (cf. Kaiser, 2014, p. 100). The transcriptions were marked and annotated by me along the main categories of the research work, also in several passes. The aim of the evaluation was to identify essential motives that the interview partners told. It is important to take what the interview partners tell seriously, but often the knowledge and experience of interview partners is not accepted if it is not within the framework of conformity, or at least the expectation of the interview (cf. Donath, 2015, p. 188).

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In our process of reflection, we must always ask ourselves the question: what is interpretation? Bude describes interpretation as an art  – it represents a kind of “praxisexperimental theorizing”. Here it is about the art of using coincidences and “enduring undecidability” (Bude in Flick, p. 570). Later he writes: “Here lies the real difference between art and science: the art form of the novella does not alter the science form of the history of illness. For it is not a matter of the case itself, but of insight into the course of a psychopathological mechanism.” (Bude in Flick, p. 577) This applies not only to clinical research, but also, of course, to general basic research etc. A decisive moment of the evaluation is the slowing down as a basic principle of the interpretation process, just when you want to finish your work, it is important to alienate self-evident things again and to advance over them to the actual contents of the won data. I used the data material • illustrating and contrasting the definition of the concept of ritual and the description of religiously traditional transiitional rituals, and • constructive for the construction of central concepts, for the reconstruction of individual worlds of experience and for the psychosocial analysis of the described transiitional rituals. In addition, I always tried to keep in mind that several meanings may well be condensed in the same form (cf. Ivanov, 1993, p.  227). According to Turner, three works on meaning can be identified: • exegetical meanings – immediate output of the interview: what does the informant say and explain? • operational meanings – structural interpretation of the interview – meaning arising directly from the context of action, functional meaning, effect meaning; • positional or contextual meanings: In-depth interpretation of the interviews in the individual case: exploration and interpretation of the interdependency web. In this process, the quality criteria according to Flick, intersubjective comprehensibility, explicitness, indication of the research process, empirical anchoring of the theories obtained in the research literature, and of course also and especially the representation of limitation as well as relevance: and reflected subjectivity are observed and fulfilled, as already presented (cf. Flick, 2017, p. 324 ff.).

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11.7 Case Descriptions Overview: Atheists: Thomas, born 1965: 8850 words. Doris, born 1944: 6629 words. Catholics: Martha, born 1944: 6276 words. Karl, born 1956: 5609 words. Protestants: Victoria, born 1954: 4573 words. Markus, born 1950: 6733 words. Jews: Joshua, born 1952: 2612 words. Miri, born 1963: 3394 words. Muslim: Tarek, born 1965, 4780 words. Erva, born 1986, 6006 words. Both of my atheist interlocutors are distinguished by their experience of grave loss and experience of death: Thomas lost his wife to illness a few years ago, Doris suffered a life-threatening illness a few years ago but has recovered. Thomas, born in 1965, widowed, with a teenage daughter, is a management consultant in the middle of his career. He is a highly reflective and very talkative man. Thomas is not someone who stands on the corner with “God is dead!” signs, his relationship to his religion of origin, he comes from a free church family of origin, is indifferent after a conscious and decisive distancing as far as a possible membership in a religious institution is concerned and seems not to have been touched by the experience of his wife’s dying. Later I notice: in the whole course of the interview he only talks about his own religious socialisation and his religious position, but never about that of his partner. He encounters institutionalizations with clear mistrust: Why institutionalize what love has given us? (Thomas, lines 85–86),

On the other hand, he speaks at the “feast” they held in public at the restaurant to celebrate the birth of their daughter,

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as an institutionalized … party (Thomas, line 58).

His focus is on the perception of his own responsibility also in life transiitionals, especially also towards his daughter, and a strong hedonistic inclination, which is expressed in a great joy in celebrations. He leads a very individual and apparently self-responsible and self-designed life, which includes a view of his responsibility to the culture around him. He is variously networked in communities and among friends, but reports little in the way of family bonding experiences. He loves and enjoys festivals, he likes to celebrate with great commitment, but religiously traditional transiitional rituals, despite all the joy of festivals, and all the commitment to make events festive themselves, are foreign to him, and apparently always have been. They have no meaning for him. Doris, born 1944, is single and retired. She has not received any significant religious socialisation and apparently does not experience this as a loss: her religion of origin seems personally insignificant to her. She describes her life as always very involved and committed, as a life of repeated individual departures. She is heavily involved in refugee work and obviously has a high tolerance for ambiguity, apparently finding it exciting to work with religious refugees. In this respect, she reports with great respect, warmth and wit about her contact with a Muslim protégé whom she supports in combining Ramadan and school: Then this year I said, you’re doing your Realschule degree there, and you’re not going to the Central Mosque, we’ll do it differently. We study here, then you go to the mosque in Nippes, and breaking the fast is with me, because you also somehow do not eat right, and your breakfast is also somehow not right, and I prescribe to you all what you have to have for breakfast, because they also do not drink namely, that must then be no roll with jam. Bananas, eggs, cheese, that’s important, what lasts in the morning, and in the evening we eat really well, you come to break the fast, you come here and then we break the fast and then you go home and sleep, he also did that. (Doris Z. 514 ff.)

This reminds me of Sloterdijk’s notion of religion as exercise (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 12) – exercise leaders, as one sees here, can be people who are not at home in religion. This warm irony also informs the narrative about her own illness. Apparently she feels she has had enough, and has had enough. Religiously traditional rituals apparently have no meaning for her, not even biographically, if at all then contrastively, as she recounts her very unadorned wedding, for example, wittily and in clear distinction from other rituals; after all, she knows what a classical wedding looks like. At the same time, a beautiful grave is definitely important to her, as it had been to her mother. She resorts to some forms of religiously tradi-

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tional transiitional rituals and faces others with great respect if also partial incomprehension. Her decision for or against certain forms seems very autonomous. To my Catholic interviewees: Martha, born 1944, is a retired teacher who taught Catholic religion and German. She lives with her husband in a middle-class area of Cologne. She is religiously very interested, also towards other religions, her son-in-law is a practicing Muslim. Her two children are grown up, the relationship with her daughter had broken off at the time of the interview, her son, however, has a cordial, though apparently not entirely continuous, relationship with his grandparents. She has a very close relationship with her son, who also has a strong religious interest. She herself is Catholic, but practices the religious rituals only in private, and rarely goes to a church service. Her husband is an atheist and apparently always has been, but is friendly towards his wife’s religiosity. Martha comes from a large family, and her descriptions are full of tales of great family celebrations, which were also always along the life transiitionals of its members: Well, we used to be a very big family. (Martha Z. 105)

But today these celebrations are memories, a link to the former bond obviously does not succeed only through the porous relationship with her daughter, who also used to share her passion for religion and also practiced it for a long time. The earlier controversial relationship with pastors has apparently become nothing more than a memory. In the interview one gets the impression that she is very friendly and almost sentimental towards the old times with the religious celebrations, for example for her communion, weddings and funerals. Also, as a teacher, rites of passage of students saying goodbye were very important to her. Today, however, she seems to lack the resources for religiously traditional forms, especially the one essential resource: other people who would celebrate with her, and would be close to her. Karl, born 1956, is an architect on the verge of retirement. He lives with his wife, they have three grown-up children with whom contact is obviously intimate. Karl is very conscious of the given forms and of what he himself has designed in his life. His religiosity is decidedly family-based, he consciously refers to the religiosity of his parents in the foundation of his own religiosity, but he is also very independent and yet seems somewhat lost in sections: […] basically you don’t really belong anywhere […]. (Karl Z. 380)

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Karl does not practice in any religious community. He sympathizes with Buddhism and is obviously advanced in his meditation training. Central to the interview is the description of his father’s death and funeral, which seems to have been a creative joint effort with both his siblings and his son. It becomes clear how much this transiitional ritual has connected the different generations with each other, and how much identity-forming power from the loving confrontation with his father still has an effect today. […] well, I sometimes thought that was the only man who really understood me, so also in the in the unspoken or simply from the nature, the similarity, the nature. (Karl Z. 163 ff.)

Karl is involved in volunteer work, a form of meaningfulness that also gives him a perspective beyond retirement age. Now to the two evangelical interviewees: Victoria, Jg 1954 is a retired bookseller. She lives with her husband, a practicing Catholic, and their almost grown grandson. She is a volunteer in the palliative care field. She is a distinctly independent-minded woman who recounts the stages of her life with wit and warmth. For example, the account of her wedding: We got…. We got married in [foreign city], and that was… Six weeks after we arrived there, and that was total nonsense actually, but somehow it happened. And we also invited friends and parents, but of course that was a very small circle and then we collected everything that we otherwise, who we knew there, they were all invited and then we had a reception room in a very very nice hotel that we did! And everything that goes with it. (Victoria Z. 309–313)

M. In my opinion, she shows that she has a clear idea of how something like this should or should not be done. Religious rituals are obviously not very important to her. She seems to perform them more out of love for her husband. She shows a great distrust of any form of group dynamic in which she herself is no longer in control, reporting a failed example of such a group dynamic in the religious sphere. Her religious needs seem to be completely met by running along in her husband’s Catholic religious practice. In this, she places a high value on community in her life, but she reflects on it and then makes very conscious choices about particular communities. From my perspective, she would be a perfect candidate for modern rituals in that regard. Victoria made very independent, self-responsible decisions for certain activities.

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Markus, born 1950, is a retired lawyer and lives with his wife. He has two grown-up daughters. Mark was socialized Catholic, and even considered becoming a priest for some time. He describes the pomp and pageantry of religious ceremonies with great relish. Mark converted from Catholicism to Protestantism in young adulthood because his wife and he no longer saw their home there. His wife, who had been married before, could not have married again in Catholicism, something that was apparently so important to both of them that they made this existential decision together. Mark here strongly emphasizes the connection between cultural and religious tradition and enjoyment: So that’s what I can say about it, so I had earlier I’ll come back to the aspect of pomp, so that the pictorial, the colorful, that already gives me something, like other people say like what, Catholic Church is supposed to have something against sensuality you just look at them, yes? You can’t miss it! Especially in the festive rites, especially in the cathedral area, so I always enjoyed it, I still enjoy it today, when I say when a pope has died, we have experienced that several times now, then we see again for days in one piece this splendor of colors! How everyone runs around… That may seem strange to you, but the so-called cardinal’s trace, ne, that causes something with me. (Markus Z. 396 ff.)

His connection with his daughters is loose and sometimes conflictual. For example, he was not present at the baptism of his grandson. However, the connection to his family of origin and his still living mother is very strong. Christmas is a fixed point as the occasion when the family comes together again. He seems to experience his religious biography as very self-determined: And I experienced all that very consciously and intentionally. (Markus Z. 44, cf. Z. 604 ff.)

Here the question arises whether the control of action plays a role in his later commitment to a particular religious community. In retrospect, he seems to regard his activities in the Catholic Church with a certain pride, although he was actively involved in shaping the Protestant Church. He has apparently reduced his commitment in the meantime for reasons of capacity, as if he had had enough of all of them: I’ve had enough church services. (Mark Z. 683 f.)

Now to my two Jewish interviewees: With Joshua, born in 1952, I had the impression, even more than with my Jewish interlocutor, that it was very important to know something about the culture

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and the liturgy. Through my Jewish surname it was evidently clear to him that I was moving in this area. Anyway, he spoke Yiddish in parts, or used phrases like “I’m sure you know that.” Joshua is a very fun-loving merchant on the verge of retirement. He practices the prayers of his religion daily according to the strict mode and is a member of a Jewish unity congregation. The essential motivator and ­socialization guardian here seems to be his wife, who comes from a Jewish Orthodox family and dominates him in this regard in a tradition often depicted in jokes in Judaism: [So] I have been integrated through Judaism through my wife […]. (Joshua Z. 46)

They have been married for over 40 years. She is also a long-time religious leader in her community. Joshua and his wife also live their religion along life’s transiitionals through their large circle of family and friends. They are very closely connected to their community. Their children are grown but seem to maintain close contact with their parents, which then seems to carry on to the generation of grandchildren. Joshua gives a humorous and anecdotal account of his life, including his religiousness, which apparently has a strong identity-forming character for him and also binds him to the family. The execution of his religion has remained stable and community-founding in the course of his life, and in doing so he certainly falls back on stereotypes within the narrative culture of his religion, such as his role as a woman-dominated man, which is always mentioned with mischievousness. Miri, born in 1963, is still fully employed on the other side of 50. She lives with her wife and without children, in good contact with the liberal Jewish community of which she is a member, and apparently a large circle of friends. Miri comes from a secular household in which religion gained importance only after her own socialization. Whether this is for religious or other reasons is difficult to say. In Judaism, this reticence can always be triggered by a deeply rooted justified fear of anti-­ Semitic attacks. Miri describes her socialization and development in Judaism as a very independent and individual process, in which she also orientates herself to given forms. Her involvement within various groups of Judaism, including feminism, obviously plays a major role in this. […] how were you socialized into Judaism? Through the feminist movement in Berlin in the nineties, so as I told you before, I started to deal intensively with Judaism in the nineties and in Berlin there were a lot of Jews and there I celebrated my first Passover festival, a large community. (Miri Z. 38–43)

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I find it a very beautiful story that her entry into her beloved Judaism is related to a festival. Her descriptions seem self-determined and highly reflective. They seem like accounts of a long journey. Central to our conversation is the account of her life-threatening illness and recovery period. She is a volunteer with the Chevre Kaddisha, a volunteer group of community members outside of Israel that cares for the sick, the dying, and also the ritual care of the dead, and reflects on these experiences, including her own transience. Finally, to my Muslim interviewees: Tarik, born 1965, is a deeply devout Muslim who has been traditionally socialized and continues this traditional socialization and practice in his life. He is fully employed, and married. They have four adult children, some of whom are already married. Tarik has been very reflective of his faith and religious practice including the political component. For him, religion and also religious practice are essential guidelines in his life, and he seeks and is interested in fellowship with other religious people, but without relativizing his own point of view in any way. For him, religious practice is an important guiding star, against the background of which he also reflects on his everyday actions and adjusts them where necessary. An important role religious practice and religion play in my life, that is the religious duties and prayers and scriptures and commandments are like road signs for me. And tells me, you’re not supposed to go 120 now, you’re only supposed to go 30, or you’re supposed to go walking speed now. They rule my life, so to speak, as if I’m going to be a good person. (Tarek Z. 613–615)

Erva, born 1986, lives with her husband and two children. She is a religious and practicing Muslim: I am a bit of a religious person. (Erva Z. 69)

She is also strongly rooted in her country of origin, Turkey. She is very aware of the intertwining of religious practice and culture of origin. She describes her participation in transiitional rituals as very much community-building and often enjoyable celebrations. For her, religious practice seems to be an indispensable and important part of her life. She also describes that it is sometimes quite difficult for her to combine professional and family involvement with a religious practice that is satisfying for her. Across the interviews, a certain erosion of the families of origin is repeatedly apparent, in which the relationship with the adult children in particular is some-

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times portrayed as very loose, non-committal and sometimes also very conflictual, while they report with joy and pleasure on the bond in the older generation, for example Markus and Martha. As Mark puts it almost as a slogan: “It’s all a bit very complicated.” (Mark Z. 238) This erosion is consistently described as unwanted and shameful. Incidentally, there is no great change here compared to the 1997 series; even then there were many cases of eroded families. Those who seem to be able to ­maintain family or quasi-family resources seem to be able to compensate for the loss of parents, whether through death or conflict, through circles of friends.

Part IV The Psychosocial Effects of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals

The Visible Psychosocial Agents

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Let us first explore the important agents of a transitional ritual psychosocially:

12.1 The Role of the Initiator Making an event public seems important. For example, my atheist interviewee Thomas describes the banquet to welcome his daughter as a publicly celebrated feast (line 58) or the big party involving the neighbours when he and his partner moved in together (line 104). My (Catholic) interview partner Markus also emphasizes how important this publicity was at his wedding (cf. Markus, line 201 f.). Only for the group of those with strong religious ties are rituals still important foils for faith and certainty of faith. This becomes visible in the 2020 series, especially among the Muslim interviewees: […] I am a bit of a religious person, I just want my child to make some kind of […] …. chants like that, some kind of sensuality and with prayers for the child, that it just arrives healthy in the world, that it has a good life, success, etc., for that there is already a small ceremony that you can do, but you don’t have to, no, that you always prefer everything like that, also has a lot to do with tradition, and how you yourself are a bit inclined, yes. (Laughs). (Erva Z. 69 ff.)

And later, to justify their religious marriage: and since we both come from the religious circle, we had, decided for a religious ceremony […]. (Erva Z. 202 f.)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_12

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Here it is clear that she is explaining a tradition that she herself is only now becoming successively aware of at this moment, so to speak. Transitional rituals offer the possibility of self-confession, and thus of consciously experienced freedom. The potential effect of a transitional ritual can possibly only unfold if its participation, especially of the initiand or, in the case of small children, of their parents, is voluntary – this is emphasized several times by my interview partners of the 1997 series, especially in the discussion about new rituals (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 199). In our society, self-determination is also an important element with regard to the performance of rituals, the obligation to perform rituals decreases – this is also reflected in the interviews of the series 2020 (cf. Joshua Z. 36, Thoma, Z. 64 ff.). The decision for new rituals can liberate, can increase the scope of freedom and thus the individual space of meaning (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 36). In fact, it is probably safe to assume that a ritual today is only claimed when there is a corresponding need and relatedness – however diffuse and however unspeakable this may be. As Green writes, “Ritual is ultimately about what I feel like doing, what would do me good.” (Green 1993, p. 63) Few will still passively ‘suffer’ a ritual, such as when a partner insists on a religious wedding. The initiate or, as Turner calls him, the transitional person or being, the novice, is usually in the transitional stage “without possessions, structural status, privileges, material pleasures of various kinds, and often without clothes himself” (Turner, 1969/1989, p.  109; cf. ibid., p.  101). His sexuality is often regimented during the period of transition. But his gender can still be factually – in the temporary nakedness of those being circumcised – and socially visible and meaningful. My Muslim interviewee Erva is the only one of my interviewees to describe a gender-segregated welcoming party for her child. It is not mentioned in any of the other interviews, but she explains it very kindly and plausibly. And here again it becomes clear how important it is to construct interviews in a gender-conscious way: I actually did it [the welcome party] at both, at the first it was mixed, at the second it was only among the women, because the women have a different antenna, the men are always a bit rational, the women need the decorated version […]. (Erva Z. 80 ff.)

Novices are often isolated from the surrounding community – detachment as the first step of the rite of passage – and live for a time “outside the normative social structure.” (Turner, 1982, p. 39) – outside, but accompanied:

12.2 The Role of the Liturgist

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12.2 The Role of the Liturgist Liturgists are the actual ritual makers, those who prepare and perform the rituals, yet the term ritual maker is hardly used (cf. Gengnagel & Schwedler in Brosius, Michaels, Schrode 2013, p. 165). So we remain with the term liturgist. Is a relationship with the liturgist beyond a mere service relationship important for a successful ritual, as emphasized by the EKD in 1993 (cf. EKD, Norbert 93, p. 44)? This is echoed in the 1997 series as well as in 2020 (cf. Martha Z. 332 ff.): The liturgist creates a personal connection from the ritual to the life of the one whose life is actually framed. Thus the ritual comes alive – it is then really the ritual of the person concerned, his confirmation, confirmation, bar or bad mitzvah, her wedding, the funeral of her mother or his father. Often this emphasises individualisation and its role the importance of individualisation through, for example, personal intercessions and generally an individualised design of the proceedings or the symbols and metaphors used, this is as true of my atheist interlocutors as it is of the religious ones. “I think of baptisms and weddings in my kin. Of the stale words and the stiff rites imposed on the celebrants without explanation. Where the baptized or bride and groom seem like extras in a play that had nothing to do with them.” (Lerch & Schrom (2017), p. 20). Today’s liturgist finds himself or herself walking a tightrope between milieus and also between his or her own convictions and attitudes. He or she is also probably more dependent than in the past on finding an individual position and making it credible – this becomes visible, for example, in the question of dress: a liturgist who neglects the question of dress will unnecessarily weaken the power of the ritual he leads: “In the companies the boss says: on Fridays you may come casually. But above the Pope is only God, and I don’t believe HE sticks his hand through the clouds and says, Wojtyla, put on those corduroy pants and that nice Norwegian sweater, then proclaim my word to the pagans.” Even The Heathens wouldn’t take him seriously like that. “Church, stick to your little dress.” Individualists are known to have their difficulties with this. As emblematization, however, the Norwegian sweater is quite suitable, where it is a trademark, a part of the corporate identity of the pastor or the direction he represents, such as informal dress as a representative of the church from below. Here is an example of my Catholic interview partner Karl: So the eldest, for example, also did shamanic baptisms, on the Rhine, […] with a shaman from the Eifel, when I must say, first of all, I think it’s great, I’m the curious one, I had a few days, it was a girl, I had a few days before that, I somehow leafed through a book and there was this legendary photo of Anita Eckberg at the Trevi Fountain, you

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surely know it[….] I thought that’s the baptism, that’s the epitome of baptism, I photographed it, yes, pulled it off, and thought, that’s your personal baptism picture, I have to hand it out, that’s your personal contribution to the baptism. I came there […] and then I met the [shaman] for the first time and and, then we talked, and then I said, I also contributed something, I brought a little bit. And she looked at the picture and winced, yes! So that was for her, she was downright out of the concept, because of this, that was way too much femininity, way too much worldliness, too much eroticism, way too much I don’t know,,, yes? […], She was frightened, yes? She said, if you do that, then we’ll do it at the very end, then you can distribute it at the very end, and I already thought, what are these rules of the game here? And then the whole procedure was also like that, there, that doesn’t reach me at all, yes. So you see, basically you don’t really belong anywhere, at least I didn’t belong there either. And that’s always just a question of whether it’s dramatic or whether you say that’s just the way it is. Young man, then drive down, it doesn’t have to be the Trevi Fountain. If you think, in the Christian sense, then this water gush with this femininity, this naturalness also has a spiritual component, of course. So for me it had. (Karl Z. 360 ff.)

The liturgist, that is, the one who leads the service or, in our context, the transitional ritual, does not necessarily have to be a clergyman. He is the mediator between different worlds through which the initiate passes, he accompanies in the transitional situation on the brink. He has experience with this, but only himself between the worlds. The liturgist has a special dress, at least during the ritual, which de-individualizes him, often even causing his gender to disappear to the point of neutrality (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 42). But in any case he plays an important role in a successful ritual (cf. Nocke in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p.  109), including his personal authenticity, as the interview with my Protestant interlocutor Markus shows: Nay, on the contrary, the confirmation of my elder daughter led to a deep rift between the parson, that was a different one from the one with whom S. between the pastor and me, I have to say, because I found the celebration unsuccessful, the church celebration, that was largely left to a young deacon who was, I’ll say, a little too flippant for me, a little too relaxed, and that somehow lost its form, The children all liked him, he was a type who also played theatre, he had then founded a theatre company, so not only church services, that was all positive, but the church service had too little form and dignity for me, and I attach importance to that. (Markus Z. 271 ff.; cf. ders. Z. 436 ff.; cf. Karl Z.)

And here’s my Catholic interviewee, Karl: […] something like that was always very important to me, I always linked it to the people […]. (Karl Z. 341)

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In the context of a transitional ritual, the liturgist represents the religious institution that is responsible for the religiously traditional transitional ritual. A pastor, a priest, a prayer leader in Judaism, the Iman in Islam…. Moreover, it is known that at least he knows and guarantees the course of the transitional ritual. He directs the perspective of the festive community, he is the one who currently gives initial structure to one another and thus also stabilizes it. He is the guardian and ferryman at the boundary (cf. Freud 1921, p.  113). Interestingly, Deege tells of her choir called Ferrywomen, which supports people in situations of grief (cf. Deege in Küpper-­Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 213 f.). Ferrywomen, I like that picture. A few weeks after my second daughter died, I traveled to Amsterdam with my husband and her older sister, who was just two at the time. Everywhere I looked I saw ferrymen on the banks of the canals, Charon with his boat, and my dead child at his feet. It was hard to bear. There are strong differences, also between Catholicism and Protestantism, concerning the role of the liturgist in the ritual: The service is self-sufficient, the rite is self-sufficient, it consists in the fact that a priest uses this rite. It is by this that it has its existence and its meaning. Period. In the Protestant Church it is different, if no one came, it would have no meaning, because it is the proclamation of the Word for the congregation, because it is the establishment of a community […]. (Mark Z. 152)

In addition, the relationship of the festive community to the liturgist does not always make sense, and has become ambivalent. Is it a mere community of service? Is some kind of magical power attributed to him? In case of doubt, the addressees of the ritual are in danger of neglecting their own work of reflection in favor of a regressive bondage and, in which essentially the liturgist or clergyman is supposed to do the thinking work, as interviews in 1997 suggest (cf. Kiss. 1997 p. 186). This must be clear – even in the so-called tinkering rituals there are concepts, and also orthodoxies, which can develop, that is, ideas about the right or wrong ways of doing something.

12.3 The Festive Community Basically: The community in a ritual serves to accompany those affected. Regardless of whether one agrees with the type of celebration or the occasion of the celebration or not. It is this basic kind of support, which of course becomes especially visible in rituals around dying and death – this is exactly what my atheist interview partner Doris describes when she describes that she accompanies her

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mother to her father’s grave, even if it means nothing to her herself (cf. Doris Z. 157 ff.). And: As a festive community, different people get used to being together again. Without doing anything, without producing anything, simply to the community, and that it is at least mostly endurable (cf. Sennett, 2015, p. 362). The festive community is essential to the success of a ritual. Transitional rituals in particular are inconceivable without the presence of personally significant, significant others – neither in the concrete, nor in the general sense: rituals are only alive in a group for so long, they are only practiced for so long, as long as this particular group is able to live its social reality in competition with other offers of reality (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p. 178) The social reality, the persuasive power in the sense of the normative power of the factual of a ritual is essentially fed by the people who make it important with their presence. Only the festive society guarantees that what is celebrated becomes real or at least has a real effect: “In order, however, for the […] typification [of a habitualized action] to occur, there must be a permanent social situation into which the habitualized activities of two or more persons can fit.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p. 61). Only the coincidence of habitualized actions with the presence of personally relevant people lead to an action becoming a significant event worthy of inclusion in socially recognized reality and narration: “The smaller the circle of people who jointly consider a certain aspect of reality to be normal, the lower the degree of collectivity of models of reality […].” (Schulze, 1995, p. 228). At the same time, Berger & Peter Luckmann’s explanations make it clear why there is such a high potential for mortification when an invitee does not show up for a transitional ritual, or when someone who previously considered himself a member of the close circle was not invited to a transitional ritual. Think of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, in which an uninvited fairy becomes so angry at being rejected that she wishes Sleeping Beauty dead: The king invited not only his relatives, friends, and acquaintances, but also the wise women, so that they might be favorable to the child. There were thirteen of them in his kingdom, but because he had only twelve golden plates for them to eat from, one of them had to stay at home. The feast was celebrated with all splendour, and when it was over the wise women presented the child with their miraculous gifts: one with virtue, another with beauty, the third with wealth, and so with all that is to be desired in the world. When eleven had just done their spells, suddenly the thirteenth entered. She wanted to take revenge for not being invited […]. (Brüder Grimm o. D.)

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By not attending, one can also make an event disappear; by not inviting a person, one can make that person disappear from a narrower circle. The circle of those invited to a ritual simultaneously redefines and evaluates on the circle of group members or significant others: “The disparity in meaning between the significant others and the ‘chorus’ becomes most apparent when one imagines occasions of nonconfirmation.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p.  162) The significant guests must be clearly identifiable; indeed, they are often highlighted by, say, seating arrangements. Or by the fact that they are invited to the preliminal or postliminal rituals – this also became visible in the interviews of the 1997 series (cf. Kiss 1997, p.  188  f.). A successful selection of genuinely relevant reference persons essentially determines the authenticity and the experience of significance in the transitional ritual. This became clear both in the 1997 series (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 188) and in 2020, as described, for example, by my Muslim interviewee Erva on the occasion of the naming of her son: As soon as you have the name of the child, you should not hesitate and then the name of the child is called three times in the ear with the Islamic call, so that you say that the child takes his name. […] that was also done with my boys. Who made this? That was my father, on both boys. I think. It’s such a point of honor, isn’t it? Yes, also partly, that is then of course carried out male, so the uncle or the grandpa, so the head of the family a bit. (Erva Z. 30 ff.)

Transitional rituals offer here the possibility to realize honor. However, Erva means what she describes here as “naturally masculine” as “non-questioningly masculine” in my opinion. Of course, it is not the quantity of as many people present as possible that matters, but the right selection of personally significant people  – something that may be lost in the social pressure of the event. After all, who will honestly answer the question of who is particularly important to him, if it becomes so visible, and one has to accept conflicts in the social environment, at a time when one is already in the midst of change and thus more vulnerable or at least busier than usual? The effect of a ritual is therefore weakened or even experienced negatively if the community of ritual participants is not experienced as significant and related to the event. There the ritual participant remains a distanced spectator. And where the

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community is experienced as dissonant, contradicting one’s own attitudes, the experience is blocked. Where, on the other hand, real community is experienced, there is, as Turner describes it, an ‘influx of power’: “[…] a well-performed ritual undoubtedly has capacity for change insofar as it implies an influx of power into the everyday situation; and performing well implies the being affected together of the majority of participants in the self-distancing flow of ritual events.” (Turner, 1982, p. 137). This description coincides with the experience of the interviewee Jorgos from the 1997 series, who is both frightened and fascinated by the sense of community thus generated (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 190).

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For starters, two quotes from Whitehouse: So why do we have rituals? For one thing, ritualized actions are deeply rooted in our psyche and its evolution. There is a close connection between such behavior and our tendency to imitate people we trust. Second, rituals have a crucial influence on group formation.[…] Rituals, then, are by no means simply a vestige of biological evolution, but one of its most elaborate products-and a driving force for sociocultural evolution. (Whitehouse in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 62) […] apparently natural selection has set up the human brain for this [rituals]. But in order to understand the importance of rituals for human societies, we must also look at socio-cultural evolutionary processes. For rituals affect not only the survival chances of individuals, but also the persistence of cultural systems because they promote group cohesion and identity formation. (Whitehouse in Spectrum of Science, 2011, in Spectrum of Science, p. 57)

Rituals are a part of how we learn by imitation, they are an element of group formation. They are one of the tools how both an individual and a group and even whole cultures survive. This chapter focuses on the psychosocial effects of religiously traditional transitional rituals, with a view to what we can learn in principle for religiously traditional transitional rituals and also religiously traditional rituals in general in the question of effect: • religious sentiment, as Willis (cf. Willis, 1981) calls it, may not have the strong meaning that religious communities see in them; • this meaning is not to be presupposed, and plays psychosocially no or at least a lesser role in the functional use of a ritual; © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_13

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transitional rituals are about the official recognition of special events; Transitional rituals offer on the one hand standardized possibilities which can be creatively modified at the same time; they give the sense of order in which an event is marked by a ritual.

In my opinion, all rituals – and transitional rituals in particular – have psychofunctional commonalities. After reviewing the research literature, rituals essentially fulfil the following psychosocial functions: • they create order in the deep layer, they create for people according to depth-­ psychological interpretation the possibility to integrate experience into their own self on the one hand, but also to structure it through categorization, they give offers of interpretation, and thus provide for subjectively experienced security and order not only on the level of consciousness, but also on the automated level of action • they enable a controlled handling of feelings – on the one hand through space for expression, and then again for a structural ending of these feelings when the ritual continues; • Rituals reduce fear, structures create security even in unknown terrain, in a situation where you don’t know how you will react, the next step is always visible, they structure into the fog; • they create behavioural security, it is clear to everyone what has to be done, nothing has to be considered or negotiated or decided anymore, this stabilises the individual as well as the group; (cf. Fischedick in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p.  25  f.; Grün, 1997, p.  23; Hirsmüller & Schöer in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 77; Willis, 1981). Rituals fundamentally serve order (cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 19). The order of a society, the order of life. This is especially true when this order is being rebuilt – that is, constantly. This is where transitional rituals come into play as rituals of insertion, conversion, and dressing. In the case of transitional rituals, it is obvious that those involved in the ritual not only wear particularly ceremonial clothing that is expensive in comparison to everyday clothing, the clothing that fits the ritual also neutralizes and standardizes the ritual participant, even if in some cases its own accents are set. Let us add the list of the psychologically highly versed theologian Grün. According to Grün, Christian rituals work on the level of twelve characteristic features (cf. Brudereck, 2018; Grün, 1997, p. 145 ff.):

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• • • • •

• • • • • • •

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Play – rituals are in themselves purposeless games, celebration – rituals celebrate our lives, creativity – rituals involve imagination and creativity and give expression, freedom – rituals lead to the experience of inner freedom and are an expression of it, they stabilize against external pressure, identity and lust for life – rituals strengthen the experience of identity and convey the lust for life (Green mentions both factors, identity and lust for life in one point), silence – rituals create spaces for silence, aesthetics – rituals are beautiful, order – rituals structure (the individual biography, a group, a society), connection – rituals create connection, healing – rituals create or facilitate a healthy lifestyle, meaning – ituals create meaning, “priesthood” (p. 150) According to Grün, rituals are priestly action in the sense of a mediator between man and God.

We also find our basic psychosocial themes mirrored here. But how does a ritual work? For example, through mechanisms such as attentional direction, coherent, consistent demands for action and clear feedback, and by rituals setting a clear framework for controlled loss of control as well as providing a structure for an automated progression towards a decided goal (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 89 ff.). The metaphor of the river is more often used here, where the river is the set framework, and the water is the feelings and systemic processes between people that intermingle. All transitional rituals are status passages. Status changes have a priori something completely immature, because the ritual land looks the same before and after. In the time of the ritual, change crystallizes. This also becomes apparent in the kind of seating arrangement or positioning, for example, when people stand, kneel or sit. Who sits with whom, where does it change? For example, when a married woman no longer sits next to her parents, but with her husband. When after a death the new head of the family sits for the first time in the place of the deceased. Sometimes these places are also formalistically kept free for a while. The essential thing is: this always involves at least two people, and at least usually involves the change of status of two people: The child born and his parents, the person who died and his survivors, etc. Rituals thereby also negotiate and order domination and status (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 86 ff.). Rituals change. Not only the social status, but also the perception of the individual (cf. Röttger-Rössler in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 38).

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Of course, rituals cannot completely structure everything, nor do they represent overarching automatisms that function at all times, but they certainly lay a tether across the thin ice of life (cf. Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 221). Let’s take a wedding as an example. It is obvious that we are talking about a status passage. But is it really true? Is it really, or when does it really happen that a couple changes in status to their parents or to their neighbors? Or when does a teenager come of age? It’s clear that a teenager feels different somehow than they did as a child. But when that is hard to time exactly. It is something intangible that becomes immanent, say, through a ritual of passage. “Repetition gives the stored memory a new context, which triggers structural changes in the brain. The neural processing involved in repetition could provide the biological basis for linking the present, the past, and the future. For rituals, this would mean that through them new experiences can be linked to earlier ones  – including those of previous generations  – and passed on to subsequent generations.” (Michaels in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 13). Rituals require us to have episodic memory (cf. Monyer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 42). This means, in part, that we must have well internalized certain sequences of actions; in doing so, episodic and procedural memory also work hand in hand in rituals (cf. Monyer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 42). “We are always looking for new things, of course, because that is exciting. But we then want to anchor the new in the old, because the old gives insecurity. If we celebrate a festival in the same way as our ancestors did 100 years ago, then we are in the here and now, but also connected to the past through the ritual. This, however, requires memory.” (Monyer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 45). In addition: actions change through memory, this dynamic also plays a role in rituals and in the question of what validity the retellings have. On the other hand, if one were to survey the experience of a ritual during the ritual by means of questionnaires within the ritual, these would possibly have a meaning as a snapshot, but the memory of a ritual, especially a transitional ritual, is so much more important than the concrete experience in a ritual (cf. Monyer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 44). An important characteristic of rituals is the predetermined sequence of events. At the same time, this is a kind of expectation management, because at least the initiates know when it is their turn to do what, and what is involved so that a transition can really be completed. Transitional rituals are thus, to a certain extent, recipes or, to put it more delicately, algorithms for transitions (cf. De Botton, 2013, p. 277). They are part of the instrumentarium that humans make use of in order to survive: “Thanks to the leapfrogging efficiency of these devices, the living being actively engages with its potential death-bringers and opposes them with its bodily capacity for overcoming the deadly.” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 20).

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Rituals thus lower our stress because we don’t have to worry about what to do next in that situation. We can surrender to the flow of the rituals. Religious rituals seem to be a source of flow (cf. Harré, 2018, p. 36). In rituals something intangible is realized and embodied, takes shape (cf. Nocke in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p.  115; on this Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 220). Part of the effects of rituals, which usually have collective origins, or are at least repetitive, is, as far as collective rituals are concerned, to suppress individual forms of behavior as far as possible and to offer a clear structure for action (cf. Michaels in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p.  11) Rituals, through their formalization, allow control of stronger, possibly harmful feelings such as aggression (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 145). A special feature of rituals in the religious context is that religions offer vessels and structures for vulnerability, as is particularly evident between transitions (cf. De Botton, 2013, p. 173). Rituals at the turns of life can signify a kind of portioned shock processing, “and one may at least raise the doubt whether ritualized processing is not a more effective procedure than processing by thought alone, if only because the cultus takes place collectively and publicly, whereas without one the descendants are usually left alone with their thoughts and feelings.” (Zinser, 2010, p. 144). And: Strong feelings make for strong memories (cf. Whitehouse in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 59). These also seem to promote and entail a particularly strong group cohesion (cf. Whitehouse in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 60). Zinser writes in 2010 that rituals and cults do not have an objective, nature-given, or transcendent meaning, but this does not preclude rites from having a meaning ascribed to them by the participant. The narration of this meaning is not necessarily theologically correct, it is rather a post festum justification. Participants no longer necessarily have to be able to perform the rituals (cf. ibid.). I can only confirm this: the beginnings of our patchwork family’s bond started at the funeral of a friend of my now husband and me. This is where our children first met. Of course, it wasn’t intentional; our friend died unexpectedly. All of the children were at that funeral to support us, my later husband and me. Today, this has become a kind of founding myth in the collective memory of our patchwork family. Through rituals, feelings are made concrete, they are made immanent, such as the concepts of responsibility and loyalty, of status and power, and also the change of status, the concept of belonging, and also the change of belonging, but also something like justice fairness, reparation (cf. Singer in Spektrum der ­Wissenschaft 2011, p. 18 f.). Rituals make social realities tangible, they make them real in the

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first place (cf. Singer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p.  18). Rituals make them visible (cf. ibid., p. 16). This becomes particularly visible in dying and death: Grief, you share that, and those who accompany you in good times also accompany you in hard times, it is here before… A few years ago a young man unfortunately died of cancer and the mourning hall was full to the last seat until outside, because it was so inconceivable that this young man died, that you then stand by the parents and the family, that is also this Shiva sitting, because you know that, there we have been every evening there, and and. (Joshua Z. 174 ff.)

Through a ritual, the intangible becomes tangible, especially in the community of those who document a kind of normality of change Rituals support the reorganization of relationships resulting from a change. The psychosocial place where transitional rituals are found provides an insight into the psychosocial effect of religiously traditional transitional rituals: Transitional rituals are used where structurally a further development of a person or a group is to be expected, for instance in the context of role shifting or the expected fluctuation of group members, i.e., their induction or discharge. With each development, the flexibility tolerance and change tolerance of the individual as well as the collective is required. This can have productive consequences in terms of opening up new life possibilities (the third, postliminal phase in van Gennep’s model), or it can leave an individual or the group permanently destabilized in a state of limbo before the boundary. Rituals support groups: “Rites collectively regulate conflicts between persons and social groups in a binding way, they create sociality and communication and mediate people not only in conflict situations but also on other occasions. Rites and cults are not exhausted in regulating conflicts. Rites provide a framework and the conditions under which people relate to each other (…).” (Zinser, 2010, p. 145) Example: apologies serve in ritual to enable people to trust each other again after the apology, to resume respectful dealings with each other after a rupture (cf. Nussbaum, 2017, p. 27). “Han speaks of the inability to conclude in a ritual-free society. Rituals start something, but they also lead to the termination of a certain state in the postliminal phase.” (Han, 2019, p. 38)

Here the fundamental question arises: when does a change begin and when is a change complete? Life worlds in particular are distinctive points at which existential shifts that are equally promising and risky can occur as a result of the birth of a child, the onset of puberty, a new partner or the choice of a new form of partnership, or the death of a person. Apparently, people have created transitional rituals

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for these sensitive periods of development and have modified them over the centuries, i.e. at those points where a dynamisation of development, of the course of life, of psychological and physical development is to be assumed. The idea suggests itself that transitional rituals can have an important psychosocial effect in this context. They seem to secure the passage like pilots, they are like bridges that span from one shore of life to the next. Theologically formulated: they are tools of transcendence, of crossing (cf. De Botton, 2013; EAT, 1996; Sartory, 1987, p. 59; Soeffner, 1989; Waardenburg 1996, p. 23; Zulehner, 1979, p. 72). And this not only in the original theological sense of a border crossing towards God (cf. Boff, 1976, p. 38 f.), but also as a means of psychic and social border crossing towards another area of life and another being, or as Soeffner puts it: “Symbols are marks of border crossing; not barriers, but corridors from one sector to another; not protective walls of inclusion or exclusion, but bridgeheads  – also  – into foreign territories. They mark lifeworld ‘transcendences’, border crossings from one individual to another, from one style of experience to another […] from one ‘status passage’ to another […].” (Soeffner 1992, p. 72). In such a passage, opportunities and risks are in unstable balance. On the one hand, upheavals destabilize the equilibrium of a person or a group; on the other hand, a successfully mastered upheaval is certainly capable of re-evaluating structures and changing them constructively. Transitional rituals are apparently used in such situations as stabilizers that slow down the dynamics of a situation and secure it against excessive fluctuations. They clearly cushion the effects of such fluctuations and promote renewed stabilisation. With rituals in general, and with rituals of transition in particular, we “consciously move out of the old into the new.” (Brudereck, 2018, p. 19). My Muslim interviewee Tarek is an example of how a certain regularity only imposes itself on him in the reflection of the conversation: There is no hard and fast rule, but you should […]. (Tarek Z. 124)

Here it seems as if he only becomes aware of the regularity in the conversation. Rituals legitimize us into certain areas of life and certain functions (cf. Stollberg-­ Rilinger, 2013, p. 124 f.). Throughout all transformations, transitional rituals mark caesurae in our lives and make the changes in our lives visible – to ourselves, but also to others. Often, such transformations are also associated with a change in the community of care – for example, in a marriage, or through the removal of a provider in the psychological contract in the case of a death.

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Life events at transitions are individual and collective learning opportunities. Ritual support in such transitions is about making an experience that is often intangible at first, such as the conclusion of an intended lifelong union through marriage, such as the coming of age of a child into adolescence, tangible, experiential (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 193). The process of detachment plays a role not only in the case of the dying, but also in transitions in general. As Kübler Ross points out, for three- to five-year-olds, for example, death is not yet a permanent state, but a temporary one; death is then frequently personalised at primary school age as, for example, “the Grim Reaper”, and only nine- to ten-year-old children develop, according to Kübler-Ross, a realistic conception of the irrevocable nature of death. Every transition also contains the element of saying goodbye to what one is leaving behind (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 195) – in rituals it is the first phase of the ritual. The rebuilding phase after a completed transition, the reorganization can take several months or years – like the mourning period for the bereaved. In this rebuilding phase it is still the case that support is needed – both for the person making the transition and for the environment. This, of course, becomes particularly visible at death (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 205). Fundamentally, transitions are about providing or making available support for both relatives and the person who has to make the transition (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, e.g. p. 138). Thus, at the stage when the dying person is able to consent to his or her impending death is no longer problematic for the dying person himself or herself, but the family often needs support at this stage (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, pp. 138, 193, 198). In my analysis of religiously traditional transitional rituals, I have concentrated in the following on three essential functional areas, which are discussed again and again in the literature – and which follow one of the most comprehensive models from the health sciences, the biopsychosocial model: Transitional Rituals as Architects of Experienced Reality On the basis of essential thoughts of constructivism, I discuss here the reality-­ shaping and reality-stabilizing effect of religiously handed-down transitional rituals on the one hand for reducing complexity and on the other hand for securing the connection to reality and thus as active trust work in the social worlds in and between which we move in the course of our lives. Transitional Rituals as Mediators of Individual and Social Identity The focus of discussion here is the extent to which religiously traditional transitional rituals have or can have a stabilizing or cementing effect in the area of

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i­dentity and the group. This becomes interesting especially against the background of a changed understanding of identity, which is based on a flexible model of identity. Psychosocial Conditions of the Mode of Action of Transitional Rituals Psychologically relevant conditions can be identified for each of the thematized psychosocial areas of effect, which in a certain way are often the prerequisite for their dynamics or their effect, or under which they work particularly well. Are there certain conditions of the physical, psychological and psychosocial environment, or certain structural features, which are essentially involved in whether a ritual succeeds or fails? Every stage of life is a new beginning of being in the world.

Transitional Rituals as Architects of Experienced Reality

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14.1 Overview We are incredibly easily distracted from our own lives. We spend an inordinate amount of time on unimportant decisions and a relatively small amount of time on important ones; we constantly misprioritize. We cognitively distort what happens to us. Important decisions, such as who to live with, are often made more casually than buying a new bike to or preparing for a vacation. This is how Kahneman and Tversky described it in Prospect Theory, later developed further by Kahneman after Tversky’s death (cf. Fischer et al., 2013, p. 34 f; Kahneman 2016). Transitional rituals help us not to lose sight of what is important. But how are caesuras transferred from experience to experience? The five moments that characterize experience according to Dithley are also helpful in this question (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 18 f.): • “every experience has a perceptual core […].” (ibid., 1982, p. 18) • Experience is linked to images of past experiences, • however, past experiences only evoke reactions if the feelings associated with them can be realized anew in the literal sense, • and it is only through the re-experience that meaning is created, • an experience is not complete until it has been expressed, communicated to another in an understandable way. When we look at the role of the sensual in ritual, we find a threefold intertwined structure:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_14

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• On the one hand, the sensual secures the experience of the event in the first place, • the sensual thus ensures linguization and later memory, and thus biographical visibility, • and since it can or will be an event that also occurs in the future (birth and death, for instance, are without alternative as long as mankind exists), these sensual elements also secure the bridge to the future. Transitional rituals are about understanding that I am witnessing my own life. In this context, the place at the border is often a concrete place; transitional rituals take place on one or more stages that are prepared according to certain standards. In this way, the intangible becomes tangible and thus also shareable, as I will explain in the chapter on the social component of transitional rituals. This sensuality can come into the world by chance. For example, Kuckelkorn (ibid., 2020) describes how a woman stumbles in front of a grave and kneels down. This was not an intentional act here, but an accidental one. But the surrounding guests see it as a signal and kneel down as well. Partly this sensual coincidence, also the coincidental idea, is then charged with meaning and handed down. While I’m thinking about it, I remember the tradition of the very pregnant women in our family painting their toenails red shortly before giving birth. I ask one of my daughters, who just happens to step into my thoughts, or rather into the kitchen, if she remembers this story, she answers in the affirmative, and points out that she and her sisters will continue this in the same way. And not only that, she tells me that she has often told this story to friends, and that they have also decided to paint their nails red when they are very pregnant. And who knows, maybe you, dear reader, will also make the same resolution or do the same. That’s how traditions are born.

14.2 Transitional Rituals Structure Reality Interesting here is the factor that Storch et al. describe as embodiment, the embodiment of experience (cf. ibid., 2014). Sennett and Polit also point to this (cf. Polit in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 215 ff.; Sennett, 2015, pp. 267, 358). What does this embodiment mean psychologically? “Rituals are embodiment processes and body enactments. The valid order and values of a community are experienced and solidified bodily. They are inscribed on the body, incorporated, i.e., bodily internalized. In this way, rituals simply produce bodily knowledge and memory, a bodily identity, a bodily connectedness. The ritual community is a body. The community

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as such has an inherent bodily dimension.” (Han, 2019, p.  20; cf. Willis, 2000, p. 35). Rituals are above all a question of the representation of states or of changes of state. It is a matter of making something visible or revealing it, and this in the form of a metaphor or a chain of metaphors that is perceptible to the senses and that is interwoven into a purposeful structure of action. (cf. Sloterdijk, 2009, p.  311; Turner, 1969/1989, p. 31). Often it is about looking in the first place. Rituals are a form of directing attention. Rituals help us not to postpone looking, which can be painful, for too long; there is only a certain window of time, certain precious opportunities, in which we have to take steps in life in order to adjust to them, and which would otherwise pass. Rituals are thus part of an artificial social reality. This can also be seen in one aspect of transitional rituals that cannot be ignored: its documentation: important things in our lives are documented pictorially. This is the case in the interview with Martha, for example, which often deals with the photos of her father’s funeral, or the photo that was taken at her communion: […] there are beautiful pictures with wreaths, Schiller curls […]. (Martha Z. 171)

An example of the realization function through photographs is also shown in the story of my atheist interviewee Doris, who, when she loses her hair due to chemotherapy, photographs herself bald in all possible positions and shares them with friends, which is indeed a significant step in transitionals, the sharing function and thus a kind of contagious realization: The [wig saleswoman] said somehow, yes, if we shave off the hair now, do you want to turn around? And I say: Turn around where? Well, that you don’t have to look in the mirror when we do that! And I say: No, I want to see that! […] I went home with the bald head and took selfies with the … with so…. Apps with which you can edit photos, I made punk things out of it. (Doris Z. 407 ff.)

At the same time, this passage seems like a kind of private yet shared recovery ritual. Through the photographs taken on the occasion, the changed order of the family is documented An interesting perspective on the effects of images in rituals is also shown in the aforementioned book Trauertatoos (Hartig & Oeft-Geffarth, 2016). The nature of such a recovery ritual is also visible in the case of my Jewish interview partner Miri – it sets a milestone, it shows and concludes: After my illness, and I don’t know if this is part of the big topic of rites of passage, but she told me at the time that there is a possibility after an illness… to do a ritual

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that you go to the mikvah [a ritual immersion bath] and afterwards give blessings to yourself or together with the rabbi, special blessings. I can give them to you again… It’s about the thoughts that one has survived this and that it’s over now. So the illness is over now and that you can, so to speak, I felt it like a new beginning. I also really had the feeling afterwards, that is now finally over, that was now already also after the whole treatment, that was… Longer time ago, and I felt that as very positive. (Mir Z. 218 ff.)

It reminds me a lot of how the midwives washed me after the births of my daughters. Even though these washes were probably not medically necessary in the way they were, or could have been done by someone other than the midwives, I experienced them as a good conclusion to the births themselves. One of the basic assumptions of constructivism is that our reality only becomes relevant as a subjective experience; this has already been discussed several times in this work. This applies to social, societal, but also psychological reality – that is, to those parts of reality that are not purely exhausted in immanence, in being-there (cf. Boff 1976, p. 12). Reality – as self-evident as it is to us – thus only becomes relevant and legible to us (cf. Luhmann, 1990, pp. 14 f. and 18) when we succeed in structuring the amorphous mush of stimuli that surrounds us, in giving it form and a name. However, every form simultaneously influences the way in which our reality, the stimuli to which we are exposed, is received and reacted to. In this process, forms represent a kind of perceptual-psychological foil through which the individual perceives his environment. Only then does the real become real – in a form that can be utilized and used by us. This form is given to reality primarily through grids through which we filter stimuli – that is, through selection. Only then does what we call reality become significant for us, only then can we draw essential stimuli from a confusingly large quantity of stimuli. This selection performance is not only biologically imperative for the individual to be able to move safely in his environment (cf. Czikszentmihalyi in Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, pp. 31 and 33), but above all psychologically as an essential factor that guarantees a certain confidence in the experienced world and thus its walkability (cf. Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p. 109; Soeffner, 1989, p. 37). Thus, for example, a multitude of daily contacts and possible relationships with a wide variety of psychological, economic, erotic, familial and historical shades become “strangers”, “friends”, “acquaintances”, “lovers”, etc. The psychological and cognitive burden is thus significantly reduced through ambiguity reduction – albeit, it should always be borne in mind, at the price of a certain loss of perceptual and thus sensory and life possibilities. Rituals cut paths through the jungle of stim-

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uli, information and perceptual offers. They structure reality – and help to determine it. Structuring grids are obviously provided individually as well as socially and institutionally – many people apparently develop individual rituals that essentially determine their “culture of life” and secure everyday life (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 47 f.). Thus my Protestant interviewee Victoria describes how her dismissal was not celebrated by and with her employer, but she certainly celebrated it: Oh yes, I resigned, that is, I quit, and then of course there was no celebration for me (laughs). … You should actually celebrate! I celebrated with… two or three colleagues, a customer and his parents, […] we opened a bottle of red wine, we smoked, …. (laughs), we talked, […] I got presents Jaa! (Victoria Z. 384 ff.)

Your thought process is clear, “actually” a termination is not an event worth celebrating. And yet it seems logical, even a unilateral farewell, even a unilaterally initiated divorce, etc., can certainly be a reason for a celebration (I hope my brother agrees with me here), and it becomes clear in the following that my interviewee has made a celebration out of it. In addition, this passage contains another exciting aspect: that of gifts. Reports about gifts can also be found with my Catholic interviewee Martha or my Muslim interviewee Tarek (cf. Martha line 176 ff.; Tarek line 360 ff.). Rituals are special times in which wastefulness and drunkenness, in the broadest sense, are permitted. They are festive orders in which it is also allowed to go over the top in a controlled way. If rituals are ordered, a clear order with relatively little variation is at the same time one of the first prerequisites for their functioning (cf. van Gennep, 1908/1960, p. 88 f.). This can be seen, for example, in the ritual of the children’s bedtime story and the low transitional of tolerance that the children have for violations of this ritual (is this really a ritual? Yes, because it takes place immanently, has transcendent-metaphorical structures – transition to sleep, last parental attention of the day – and is transparent in its transcendent meaning). The same is true of institutionalized rituals such as transitional rituals  – it is precisely in the case of sign acts that the broadest possible sign control is important, since it can be badly excluded from perception. Altered signs would apparently be too easily perceived as shifting or reinforcing meaning, like a thunderstorm at a wedding ceremony or, as one of my 1997 series interviewees recounted, a bird at a funeral (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 138). The order of institutionalized rituals-and thus implicitly also their order-creating effect-is therefore usually strictly controlled and protected institutionally. Their procedures are often set down in writing in ritual books.

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Institutionalized rituals do not structure objectively, of course, but out of the context in which they are transmitted and demanded (cf. Pries in Brosius et  al., 2013, p. 210). According to their distribution, they are able to control construction processes both at the micro level of the individual and at the macro level of society (cf. Beck-Gernsheim in Keupp 1992, p. 193; Turner 1969/1989, p. 125 f.). In this context, microcosm and macrocosm seem to correspond to each other in a fascinating way: “The control and monitoring apparatus in society corresponds to the control apparatus that is formed in the soul household of the individual.” (Elias, 1979, p. 327 f.) Berger & Luckmann also point out that society as a social system with cultural forms, a specific history and dynamics, intervenes in a controlling way in the individual’s construction of reality (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1970). Rituals also fulfil this function insofar as they direct attention and thus also make it more difficult to perceive more unpleasant, problematic realities (cf. Luhmann, 1990, p. 13). Rituals, then, not only facilitate the perception of reality – in a sense, they can also negate reality through non-observance: They select realities. They thus not only shape reality, but also control it, or in some cases create the preconditions for such elaborate reality control in the first place (cf. Faschinger, 1995, p. 100; Turner, 1969/1989, p. 29). With this grid of what is real for us, rituals influence not only our image, but our actions in this constructed reality. Like any cultural form, rituals thus represent a kind of grid that co-constructs reality. Rituals are thus not only situated in a particular context, they simultaneously construct a context in which they push certain signs into the foreground or background. This context has a familiar name: Normality.

14.3 Sense and Sensuality: Transitional Rituals Make Reality Communicable All that is real is nothing but signs. (Boff, 1976, p. 10)

The ritualistic is shown in the floating concentration inwards and outwards. The kippa, the religious headgear of the Jews, seems to constantly slip off the head of the person in front, what place is the rabbi in the prayer book?, The cantor raises his voice and sings faster and faster. Sun falls through stained glass windows, smell of incense urgently on the nose, the organ rushes, then the choir is silent, there is something clammy in the church, candles glow from the niches. The carpet

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is soft, light falls through the high stained glass windows, the prayer leader is a little hoarse today, it is good to finally be able to pray in the new building. Everywhere sensuality. Here and there: words. In a ritual, everything is immediate. It is the complete spectacle, 3-D, with audience participation and full of choices: “Ritual behavior […] is an orchestration of symbolic actions and objects in all sensory codes – the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory […].” (Turner, 1982, p. 174). The meaningfulness of a ritual, however, obviously does not necessarily contradict the spiritual content, the material does not necessarily contradict the immaterial, but can rather refer to it (cf. Boff, 1976, p. 47) and make it present (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 15). This idea of Augustine’s fundamentally shaped the occidental understanding of segments – as visible signs that symbolically refer to another reality, but at the same time contain it (cf. Kühn in Drehsen et al., 1988, p. 1110). Metaphorical signs represent a kind of sensory language, they ‘read’ the environment, above all those parts of psychic and social reality that would otherwise be beyond reading or comprehension: “An essential feature of a symbol thus consists in the fact that it points beyond itself to a reality that does not appear immediately accessible, is absent. […] The symbol is not only an indication, but obviously it also represents the other reality, which is not accessible, makes it present.” (Wegentast 1991, p. 12). Saint-Exupery already stated: “The essential is invisible to the eyes. “(Saint-­ Exupery, 1946, p. 52). But what is essential to you is often not always “meaningful”, like the wonderful story of my evangelical interview partner Victoria, who moves abroad because that is the place where her US-American partner and she can live without getting married – and then marries him after six weeks in London – you will find an excerpt in the case descriptions (cf. Victoria Z. 333 ff.). Signs and actions promote the ‘representativity of the unthought’ (cf. Foucault, 1995, p.  434). By constructing and structuring the subjectively experienced and ‘socially correct’ reality, rituals provide ciphers, codes, through which the individual experiences ‘his’ reality as if in a frame (cf. Boff, 1976, p. 9; Stephenson, 1995, p. 86; Tarkowskij, 1988, p. 22). The alternation of different stimulus environments and stimulus modalities (seeing and hearing, hearing alone, seeing alone, tasting and smelling) certainly has a favourable effect as an essential element of the effectiveness of rituals. Through the process of presentation, “a primordial inference, inherent in perception, succeeds from a present to a non-present.” (Soeffner 1992, p. 68) It is about memory, which is essentially sensorially evoked, through which the visualization of situations that are not present at the moment succeeds. It is even about situations

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that did not take place in one’s own lifetime, about the connection to the generations before. Metaphors in rituals do not abstract, they concretize and embody, as I have already discussed. They bring things and contexts out of the space of the unspeakable into the tangible and sayable – precisely because they communicate and are perceived more directly than language. Here we find the paradox that it is precisely non-verbal signs that promote verbalisation or the ability to verbalise. It is easier to talk about a wedding than about the decision and the complicated paths that led to the idea of wanting to stay together with a certain partner for life. Sacred rituals are often mentioned in literature as ‘placeholders for the invisible’, they give an external form to spiritual and social processes that might otherwise be overlooked in their significance – this is true in both the theological and psychosocial sense (cf. Boff, 1976, pp. 32 and 38 f.; Foucault, 1995, p. 434). This is also reflected in the reports of my interview partners from both series (for example Markus Z. 161), Especially the sometimes somewhat euphoric emphasis on the rationalizable religious practice, the language church, the word service of the Protestants as well as the emphasis on the importance of rationalizations and justifications to the outside, as it obviously drives many religious communities today in a kind of pressure to justify themselves, seems to me problematic there: “Sacraments open a space of vividly concrete experience of the divine for the one who brings himself fully into this space, as the human being who is, exposes himself to what happens there.” (Sartory, 1987, cover). The rationalism of the words seems stodgy, the message difficult to convey purely through the head. Thus the priest Grün reports how Protestant parents desired a Catholic baptism from him because the Protestant practice seemed too dreary and insignificant to him (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 118). The sensual communicative effect of transitional rituals is apparently quite appreciated across denominational boundaries.

14.4 The Normative Power of the Factual: Rituals as a Framework of Normality Normality “is” not simply, it is constructed individually and socially. After all, normality is rarely about an actual numerical norm with certain previously consensually defined deviations that continue to count as normality, but rather about the subjective as well as collective perceived or also determined normality. Social practices such as rituals intervene in this process in a controlling way – they are, as it were, modules of action that have solidified into practices, which map reality and

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thus make it accessible – within the framework of the construction of social realities, they provide for “a common space of experience and action within which one can do nothing wrong and in which solutions to problems are mastered by recourse to known solutions to problems (however ineffective these may be in detail) and are thus incorporated into the realm of normality.” (Soeffner, 1989, p. 17). With the creation of this “socially correct” space (cf. Schulze, 1995, p. 227), other, potential spaces are pushed into the background. On the one hand, a ritual only becomes visible through a certain framework, on the other hand, certain contents are emphasized through a ritual (cf. Adelmann & Wetzel in Brosius et  al., 2013, p. 183). Only that event is accentuated in an institutional framework which the mediating system – for example the church – wants to have accentuated, highlighted, perceived, cemented, where it is a welcome, system-conforming or at least system-neutral reality. What lies outside of preformed ideas of normality has a much more difficult time. This is suggested by the statements of the interview partners of the first series from 1997 (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 140). In the German society of 2019/2020, this was only still an issue when it came to the question of taboo: Rituals help to transform individual constructions into collectives. In doing so, they help in the construction of a shared reality, which can then serve as a working hypothesis for further development. Rituals thus create certain real arrangements that facilitate the exclusion of certain aspects of reality that are perceived as marginal, threatening or ambivalent (cf. van Dülmen, 1989, p. 206). This is evident, for example, in the discussion of gay marriage ceremonies in the 1997 series: only the person or persons who accepted gay marriage ceremonies generally accepted the reality of homosexual life (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 140). Someone who denies a certain way of life, a certain lifestyle, will also deny a ritual to it, such as divorce. Religious rituals can have an unproductive, repressive effect here – bridges become barriers, openings are closed with borders that set clear limits to the wavering, since ‘what cannot be, must not be’, as the saying goes. What does not fit into the prevailing social or individual system of values or permitted events is not celebrated with a ritual and basically not with a festival. This is confirmed, for example, by the low ritual capacity of divorce in the Christian sphere, or the transition to unemployment (cf. Doehlemann, 1996, p. 21). And yet both events have long been part of socially accepted normality, part of our reality. Although collective fates, they are still apparently experienced more as individual events; this was true at least for the last turn of the millennium (cf. Bilden in Bilden & Keupp, 2006, p. 23). Normality is additionally consolidated through the production and marking of anti-normality, both individually and socially (cf. Soeffner, 1992, p. 165). However, the call for appropriate rituals for the bulky, the undesirable, the tabooed is also heard again and again. Transitionals – in cultures, ideas about what a successful life

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should look like are handed down in transitional rituals. “In the process, moving forward in the right rhythm is often linked to rules of feeling that dictate what the “right feelings” are to be at each milestone.” (Donath, 2015, p. 41) This may involve suppressing parts “that contradict general systems and norms.” (Donath, 2015, p. 47). I find Helga Nowottny’s approach interesting here. She pleads for “the creation of new spaces of time in which the vicissitudes can occur […] [in order] to restore to life that dimension which would then allow it to perceive and accept its discontinuities, its folds, arcs and fissures, to expect and celebrate its beginning and its end”. (Nowottny 1993, p.  141) Rituals here can potentially provide honoring spaces of possibility that have long existed in an everyday practice. Where normality changes, new forms are created when the old ones no longer suffice, or new connotations of meaning are given to old rituals in a kind of economy of forms – in this process, existing rituals apparently represent a kind of vocabulary stock that can repeatedly become carriers of new content to celebrate the extra-ordinary.

14.5 Rituals: A Celebration for Life – Transitional Rituals Stage the Non-Ordinary A festival is about celebrating life. As my interviewee Erva describes it: […] the women need the decorated version […] so there’s already like to make a little festivity. (Erva, line 84, 97–98)

But what is now the opposite of the everyday – is it the non-everyday? How is it the meaning? And from what does this meaning arise? How do we grasp the quality of significant steps, and aren’t they actually just the simple sum of all the little decisions we might have made before, all the little signs? In the case of birth and death it is still visible, because it really is something that is also physically irrevocable. But what about the decision to live with a certain person for life? Or just not anymore? Of course that also has a physical effect, you move, your household changes. Something happens physically, but often so much more internally. Rituals create grids, they mark certain aspects of reality. As my atheist interview partner Thomas puts it: That’s a ritual, that’s an event, and… Those are also starting or ending points of something, that’s how you can bring things to an end. […] Then there’s not only a bottle of champagne, then there’s also a good meal and we look back and are happy, let’s see, lessons learned. (Thomas, Z. 622 ff.)

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Transitional rituals act like spotlights that shine certain moments out of the life of a person or a group. In our culture, this function – in contrast to 1997, when I first conducted this research – is no longer monopolized by the Christian churches or even religious communities with a state treaty. In my opinion, this is due on the one hand to the growing religious diversity in Germany, but on the other hand also to the continuing loss of importance of the Christian churches. Festivals and celebrations interrupt the constant, uniform passage of time. They structure personal and communal life, order and shape time: “The great rituals of the past were characterized by a special order of time. While they were taking place, ordinary time or ‘working time’ was temporarily suspended; such rituals were really an interruption of work, and ordinary life rested until their time was up.” (North 1970, p. 243; cf. Saint-Exupery, 1946, p. 51; Willis, 2000, p. 21). Time structures rituals – and rituals structure our sense of time. Both in the large structure, life, and in the small, in the course of a year, in the flow of the week – their rhythmicity is deeply woven into our culture (cf. Seibt, 1983, p. 158 f.). Rituals create a different order of time outside that of everyday life, transitional rituals especially stage the special times in life. As Marquardt puts it: To live one’s life, that is with men his daily life. To distance oneself from one’s life: that is the feast in man. (Marquardt, 1994, p. 60)

Rituals, especially transitional rituals, are thus reliable markers of the non-­ordinary. The need for such ritual non-everyday occurrences seems to have grown rather than to have decreased, as might have been expected with advancing secularization. People obviously continue to have a need to honor their lives in celebrations, as my Protestant interview partner Mark describes it several times (cf. Mark, Z. 303 ff.). Here, for him, the factor of pageantry also decisively comes into play (cf. ibid.). If we approach rituals phenomenologically, ostentation is noticeable in many rituals, this visible waste of resources. This seems to reinforce the sense of “we”, and thus to play an important tool in the resolution of conflicts and, if necessary, a reorganization of social systems (cf. Sommer in Spektrum der Wissenschaf 2011, p. 28). Wasting is an essential part of the ritual. The waste of things that are very expensive to produce, things that only a few and rarely can afford, etc., can also lead to a mutual armament in social systems (cf. Sommer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 30). This is particularly visible in our high aestheticization of wedding rituals. Nowhere does a life event have such communicative power as in such a marked ‘high time’ in a setting that even the insensitive must perceive as extra-ordinary. Yet

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religious institutions, as ritual-mediating institutions, are now not the only ones that ritually mark life events. In institutions such as our courtrooms, too, the ­extra-­ordinary has often been deliberately celebrated, presumably since the emergence of jurisdiction, and a factual-user-functional quality has taken a back seat to a psychosocial one  – the medium is the message.1 Careful staging can also be found in the elaborate, polished shows at concerts and corporations; it can be found in the architectural staging of offices with their unfamiliar acoustics, with their uniforms, the “secret knowledge” in forms and the unnecessarily low transparency of their processes. We find similar strategies in doctors through high-transitional practice architecture, dress, the demonstratively sterile atmosphere, and the exclusive, exclusionary language that shields internal communication from the uninitiated. Often, one usually perceives this rite of passage at best as a slight chill, a shudder; the ritual quality of such enactments is rarely realized. My Catholic interview partners also report on it with relish: […] so I have to say, the rituals, so also the power that comes from it, for example with the incense as an altar boy with the thurible, I found that great, ne or on the vestments, also the chants, great, you can find that of course elsewhere, for example in the Orthodox Church, and that are also all so for me are the signs that the person also believes in something special, turns to something special. (Karl,Z. 403 ff.; cf. Martha Z. 105)

Transitional rituals offer a kind of “moratorium on everyday life” (Marquardt, 1994, p. 66 f.) and thus apparently fulfil a central need of many people (cf. Ständer, 1994, p. 32). One of the usual strategies of staging structuring non-everyday life consists in aestheticizing and normalizing the transitional of life in the form of a festive ritual. Music, which is a popular means of sacralization in many cultures, played a major role (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 58) – we will return to this in a moment. Special emblematization also seems important, such as the dress worn only on special occasions or even only on that one day. People, some of whom one meets only on such special emblems, additionally emphasize the importance: The space also determines this sacralizing effect of the staging. There is a lack of statistical data on who visits which rituals when and for what reason. However, it can be assumed that at least non-religious people visit churches outside of the visit for the sake of architectural value only on festival sides, i.e. often transitional rituals, or annual festivals celebrated together with the family, such as Christmas (cf. EKD, 2019). The rich sacral architecture of all religions speaks for the impor McLuhan’s famous phrase.

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tance of space in this regard. In this context, Boff speaks, for example, of the “sacrament of the home” as a particularly important “dense sacrament” (Boff, 1976, p. 69, cf. p. 68 f.; Stephenson, 1995, p. 26 f.). My interview partners are also aware of the importance of space, in the 1997 series (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 145) as in the 2020 series (cf. Karl Z. 319). Bernhard from the 1997 series emphasizes the non-everyday, the glittering vertigo of being out of the ordinary. As little as possible should remind us of everyday life. The non-everyday, in a certain sense unfamiliarity of the situation in which the initiator finds himself, is thus mirrored and potentiated in the non-everyday of the room and its interior design, the special acoustics and the special light: The ritual staging of a transitional ritual is thus a highly complex, sensual arrangement with which we honour special times in our lives and consciously assign them a prominent place (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 35). Transitional rituals thus contribute to the splendour, to our culture of life (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 33). Life thus visibly consists, as Michael Ende once put it, not only of “scissor clatter and soap scum” (Ende 1973, p. 59), but also gains added value externally. This added value is reinforced by an overtly non-rational, wasteful quality to the processes and their playful, action- rather than goal-oriented orientation. It is precisely through the apparent uselessness of the ritual action (nothing is produced, no economic values are gained) that transitional rituals mark the rare moments of the non-ordinary. This is also mirrored in the interviews of the 1997 series (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 146) and 2020.

14.6 “When We Fight Our Nature”: Transitional Rituals Control Feelings and Actions Feelings are important to survive. Feelings point us to pain limits, feelings regulate groups, they moderate change. Feelings are not the change itself, but they moderate and mark changes. Rituals are always emotional experiences. Ritual action is often embedded in the experience of shared pleasure, rituals give the justification for a celebration, the justification for waste, I have already mentioned this here several times (cf. Sennett, 2015, p. 18). The context of the ritual is significant beyond its quality as an aesthetic stimulus. Via the non-ordinary, ritual staging also guides emotions and actions. The idea that artificial forms might be tools of emotion and action control is as old in scientific psychology as psychoanalysis. In the study of compulsive behavior, for instance, it has been taken up by many humanists since LeBon and especially by psychoanalysts since Freud. The essential basic idea here – whether seen from a

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psychosocial or psychopathological perspective – is that rituals achieve their psychoactive effect primarily by channeling affects through certain artificial, ­non-­rational actions (cf. Fromm, 1985, p. 95; Oerter, 1993, p. 16). Basically, I think that these mechanisms are also effective because people in the ritual are not particularly receptive to rational contents due to the excitement of the celebration (or their individual arousal), so that the emotional parts are to be weighted significantly higher. Rituals thus tame us and our nature. “The ritual creates […] a balance between one’s own ego and that of others. It is a controlled and often aesthetically moving purification process. Within a clearly delimited period of time, we are allowed to act out our egocentric desires and urges in order to simultaneously subdue them and thus, in the long run, bring about and ensure the harmony and thus the survival of the group.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 59). “When We Fight Our Nature”, in German: “Wenn einem die Natur kommt” to take up this well-known bon mot from Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, society responds with a ritual. Rituals and spontaneous actions have an interesting intersection  – many rituals have obviously been developed or borrowed from spontaneous actions (I have already addressed this, here is just the repetition): Whoever spontaneously throws china, or whoever does so in the context of a bachelor party, whoever ruffles his hair and tears his clothes at a deathbed, or whoever does so ritually in the context of prescribed mourning gestures – spontaneous emotional expression is obviously channeled in a ritual and thus included in the circle of possible or even desirable actions and thus rewarded as an adequate action, classically according to the pattern of operant conditioning. A canalization and aestheticization of spontaneous actions into a ritual can also be found in performance art (cf. Jappe, 1993). Let us stay for a moment with the idea of rituals as tools of action control within society: By paying attention, certain emotions are rewarded; by not paying attention, by not celebrating, by looking the other way, certain emotions are outlawed. Rituals are thus “meaningful means of mobilizing, channeling, and controlling strong emotions such as hatred, fear, affection, and suffering.” (Turner, 1969/1989, p. 47; cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 4). In this sense, transitional rituals have long been suspect as catalysts of drive. “Whoever is afraid of love makes it a marriage” allegedly already polemicized Robert Musil.2 Freud wrote in 1978: Its technique [of religion] consists in depressing the value of life and in delusionally distorting the picture of the real world, which has as its prerequisite the intimidation of intelligence.” (Freud 1978, p. 216) Transitional rituals channel potentials, but in doing so they also cur I found this apt quote in my quote collection, which I’ve kept since I was a teenager, but in researching 2020 I couldn’t find any evidence that it was actually by Musil. 2

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tail abilities, suppress life possibilities: “Rites are so concretized in their execution that expressive and instrumental (quite consciously manipulative!) functions merge and mutually support each other.” (Luhmann, 1990, p.  109; cf. Luther, 1992, p. 220). In this sense, rituals serve as a sign system that only allows the expression of certain feelings and, on the other hand, suppresses others and robs them of their reality (cf. Jung, 1991, p. 21; Sennett, 2015, pp. 33, 207). Rituals serve to normalize feelings  – first something is done, something is thought in ritual readings, thereby feelings are generated in terms of behavioral-cognitive mechanisms and above all, this is very important in terms of rituals, socially normalized. This is part of what Sennett calls the “civilizing power of ritual” (ibid. 2015, p. 207). And at the same time it is an ambivalent process. Reinterpretations and splitting off of influences otherwise noticed or evaluated as harmful can be observed, for example, at funerals: through a farewell ritual, a situation that is painful in itself is turned into a celebration of the “beautiful corpse”, the birth of a child – by no means always a joyful event, my children decidedly excepted – is reinterpreted through a celebration into a thoroughly beautiful new beginning. Rituals, as mediators of separation and demarcation, also actively serve to cope with emotional crises (cf. van Dülmen, 1989, p. 206) – at the same time repressively, by suppressing a possibly productive social and psychic dynamic. However, rituals do not only guide emotions, but also intervene to control actions, they define the framework of alternative actions (cf. Barber-Kersovan & Rösing, 1993, p. 140). Humans need this framework in order to find decision paths in the confusing multiplicity of alternative actions: Rituals transform possibilities into determinacies (cf. Douglas, 1974, p. 69; Luhmann, 1990, p. 167; Luther, 1992, p. 220; Oerter, 1993, pp. 18 and 305; Turner, 1982, p. 89). Emotion and action-guiding effects therefore do not always have a productive effect in the ritual in the sense of further personality development. An ill-­considered ritual can also prematurely block a development and artificially cement an inherently dynamic structure (cf. Buckland, 1995, p. 220; Josuttis in Fahlbusch, 1983, p. 289). Options for action are hidden here in favour of an often deceptive security – this does not meet the demands of our time. Rituals thus become tools of regression instead of progression – bridges are obstructed with barriers. It is precisely these “many paths” that are a characteristic of our enlightened culture, in which we allow ourselves, as well as our children and our environment, to make independent biographical decisions outside the traditional context. I am what I do, I feel what I do. By doing something, I publicly stand up for this decision at the same time as the celebrated turn of life. Society provides me with patterns of experience that suggest to me how I should feel in this situation.

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Soeffner also points to the close interconnection of action and interpretation: “Patterns of action represent patterns of interpretation, and patterns of interpretation in turn generate patterns of action.” (Soeffner, 1989, p. 18) However, a certain certain certainty of action, a certain home in one’s own cultural codes, a knowledge of what one has to do, is a prerequisite for this. Rituals condense life decisions, at least in the case of confirmation rituals such as a bar/bath mitzvah, confirmation, confirmation, participation in the Ramadan fast, into an individual confirmation of one’s own religious and partly also cultural identity. And this partly also to a very specific day, in which the decision, the affiliation for example to the Jewish or Muslim religion is made public. And this vice versa: a young person who refuses confirmation may remain in the church for a few more years, but it is rather unlikely that he will find his way back into religious participation if the parents or caregivers do not stringently model this for him. This is suggested by Zuckerman et al. in their analyses of the genesis of atheism or religious participation (cf. Zuckerman et al., 2016, p. 90 ff.), and this is also shown by the references of my interview partners to the religiosity of their parents, for example Erva: I meant with us it’s like … If you’re brought up so culturally religious, then …. Then the point is there where you know that…. (Erva, Z. 155 f.; cf. Tarek Z. 149)

The control of feelings can be seen, for example, in rituals of love: “Rituals of love are usually noticed by others when they deviate from one’s own norm.” (Brosius in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 76) This applies, for example, to bride robbery, to paying off the bride, or, viewed from the Christian context, to circumcision rituals, etc. It is interesting to note that despite all the individuality felt, love expression adheres to certain formulas “Today, it is above all the so-called mass media that are instrumental in giving temporal and spatial framings to relationships and feelings at the greatest[…] In fact, romantic love cannot be constantly present and recreated; because that requires a lot of energy and investment. Therefore, it needs a choreography for those special moments in which it is awakened, confirmed or renewed. Thus, in the flow of everyday life, private islands of staged togetherness are created with pre-set standards, the spaces of consumption and leisure take place and thus represent at the same time public expressions[…] An […] example of the staging of love in public space concerns the material culture of expressions of love. Not only in Europe, but also elsewhere, lovers hang locks bearing their initials on bridges, hoping that the power of the symbol will carry their love through crises.” (Brosius in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 76 f.) And then Brosius builds a

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bridge from love to reconciliation as a means of maintaining, of keeping love healthy: “Rituals of reconciliation can also be understood as examples of the ­framing of feelings of love.[…] Here it becomes clear that rituals of love precisely also serve to display the capacity to love in a broader context. It is not only about a silent proof of love, but at the same time about the ability to express the feelings at the right time, at the right place – often in public space – and in the right way.” (Brosius in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 77) She cites Valentine’s Day as an example  – Mark also tells of a Valentine’s Day service for lovers (cf. Mark Z. 623 f.). To quote Brosius once again: “As all the findings described show, rituals of love develop a momentum of their own that one cannot escape. In the interplay of solidification and change, a great feeling seeks its place again and again. Sometimes the ritual provides support in the process.” (Brosius in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 79). In doing so, rituals also outline the space of choices: It is not a question of whether or not I will remain attached to a friend for life, but whether or not I will remain attached to a sexual partner for life. The course of friendship is not shaped by a possible decision of marriage or other commitment ritual, which is publicly celebrated in a variety of ways. (Yet such friendship rituals can also be found in many cultures). In our multi-religious culture in the context of a secular state such as Germany, a person can try paths outside the official, in a sense well-lit paths, because there are many paths; in cultures in which, partly in interaction with a non-­ secular state, fewer alternatives for action are open in the literal sense of the metaphor, this is quite different, as can be seen from reports from Orthodox settings, as Deborah Feldmann, for example, showed in her autobiography “Unorthodox” (cf. Feldmann, 2017). Rituals thereby motivate change, to continue to act, in the end to continue to live: Even when rituals appear outwardly joyful, like the Jewish bar/bad mitzvah celebration, it is a form “in which attempts are made to alleviate inner tensions.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 60): “The ritual is in fact a kind of compensation, a moment of transformation by which the giving up of something is swallowed and the bitter pill sweetened.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 60). As Ernst Jandl wrote in the poem “many ways”: many paths cross within me and I always go several streets at the same time. I’m poor. but it seems to me I’d be rich.

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if, among these, would be a way out. many paths cross within me and I always go several streets at the same time. I’m poor. but it seems to me I would be poorer if, among these, would be a way out. (Jandl n.d.)

14.7 Music as a Motor for Controlling Feelings and Actions Due to its psychoactive effect, music seems to be a particularly proven tool of directing and increasing emotions. It changes, supports and stabilizes attitudes and feelings. It supports group and sub-group identity beyond the moment – it is one of the easiest ways to individualise a ritual by choosing your individual music to go with it. Paul Willis investigated this in field studies in England in the 1970s, for example, and as part of his research also described several times how music was used among the hippies as a kind of self-therapy for crises and depressive upset: “There was evidence that music [among the hippies] had a decisive effect on certain basic attitudes and their affirmation. […] Music was also apparently able to influence feeling and emotions. People who had depression or were in personal crisis often turned strongly to music. Very typical of these periods was also a withdrawal from the community: where people could not help, however, the “sound” often succeeded. Music apparently engaged and expressed the shattered emotional life in a way that words could not.” (Willis, 1981, p. 204 f.) Turner is also interested in the hippie phenomenon. He sees in them evidence of the ecstasy of spontaneous communitas that animates an important fringe of society (see Turner, 1969/1989, pp. 121, 135). And music is one of the motors of this. According to Turner, the term ‘communitas’ denotes an extra- or meta-­structural modality of social relations (according to Turner, 1969/1989, p. 7). This is about the issue of socialization, the emotional experience of community. It is about an extremely strong, yet temporary form of relationship between persons, a phenomenon that Buber also already described (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, pp. 124 ff., 133). There are two forms: crisis communitas and withdrawal communitas (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 148 f.).

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This mechanism is often found in everyday life, it is similar to the coping attempts of a stressed employee who listens to heavy metal on the way home, or the woman who can only really give into her heartbreak with the appropriate music. The boundary between fruitful, healing or unproductive and repressive effects is fluid here – in my opinion, the same applies to emotion control in transitional rituals. Rituals also provide the framework for the revelation of feelings (cf. Brosius in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 78). But not only the music has significance for the emotional guiding power of a ritual. A special quality is given to silence in music, to silence, to the absence of stimuli as an essential element of order in many rituals – it is not for nothing that one also speaks of “consecrated silence”. The poet Jabès writes: “A room is filled with various sounds ordered by silence.” (Jabès 1989, p. 141) Silence creates space for reorientation and change of perspective. Basically, silence is mentioned as an essential element in many religious and spiritual publications as well as used liturgically. Singing seems to be one of the central elements in the ritual. As Sennett explained, making music together leads to synchronization (cf. Sennett, 2015). This can be seen in many church services, whether institutional or private, even on the Sabbath. Even people who do not normally sing, who are not trained to sing, sing on such occasions. Rituals could thus also serve to synchronize groups. Rituals create community and accompany changes in the community. They north us as individuals into a community, towards common goals. An important element of this foundation and reorganization of community could again be music, especially actively played music (cf. Sennett, 2015). An interesting example of the use of music in the context of rituals in hospice work can be found, for example, by Henn in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010) For music too, it should be said at least here at this point, like a ritual, provides structure in a situation that seems more chaotic (cf. ibid., on this Deege in the same publication). This also happens through an apparent waste product of ritual: stories.

14.8 The Importance of Narration in Transitional Rituals Rituals are […] narrative processes that do not allow for acceleration. (Han, 2019, p. 22)

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I have often spoken here of the importance of narratives for the perceived meaning of events. The importance of life-history narratives is now securely in the sights of scholars. Powerful “truths” are the narrative truths, the stories we tell each other and ourselves  – the stories we constantly recategorize and improve. Narratives are ­often seen as an essential factor in coping with and processing a life event. Thus, turning points become meaningful patterns of orientation; this is also true of religious narratives. But what do these religious orientation patterns actually mean? “By a religious orientation pattern I mean the meaningful linking of the cognitive, moral-practical and symbolic-expressive traits inherent in any life practice references to the world.” (Hartmann in Wohlrab Sahr 1992, p. 247) In other words, to put it more bluntly, it is about the establishment of coherence (which I will discuss in a moment). Rituals also order space and time through narratives: “They make a deep experience of order possible.” (Han, 2019, p. 45) Narratives significantly enhance perception and at the same time evaluate it in the process – they shape subsequent corrections in the experiential picture. The more often a person tells something, the more often they simultaneously have the opportunity to process the content of what they have told and to fit it into what they have experienced before and especially after. Important stabilizers of constituted biography can thus be narratives that often take on anecdotal features – this became clear again and again and almost consistently in all interviews – in each of the 2020 series there was laughter. That which the individual takes as the occasion of a transitional ritual, which the individual solemnizes, supported by the society that surrounds him, will preferably be that which is later remembered, a hook for narratives and stories: “[…] Meaning [arises] from memory, from (knowledge of) the past […] and [constitutes] the connection between past and present […]” (Turner, 1982, p.  119) A ritual thus becomes part of a myth that can be revitalized and further processed in narrative sequences. The narrative attraction is probably partly due to the fact that it anchors a life-­ historical event at a particular point in time, and partly due to the pomp and splendour and pageantry that transitional rituals exude on the rest of life. Celebrations make life beautiful. Transitional rituals with their event character and thus their high narrative potential thus promote a processing of the life event through the high memory value, the subsequent narratives, which also facilitate a classification in the previous biography. Including, if necessary, narrative reinterpretations: A wedding ceremony is thus possibly re-evaluated after the divorce into a rigid ceremony that lacked real gaiety, a baptism is highly stylized into a great social event It must always be taken into account that rituals in memory, like every mem-

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ory, present themselves differently than what actually happened in the station (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p.  211). Our narratives are always retellings. It would also be interesting to investigate to what extent, for example, a conversion changes the narrative connotation of, say, a first communion or confirmation. The convert among my interview partners, in any case, does not report this, but continues to report a great fascination and a joy in remembering the pomp of his old church, Catholicism: In the cathedral [I got to know] an additional component, namely: splendour. […] I personally witnessed the 20th anniversary of the priesthood of Cardinal Frings. I was involved as a choirboy, and from the organ loft we could of course see everything, and when you see, I can still see it today, how the cardinals present as guests enter the cathedral, and each of them drags a meter-long train behind him, so at that time, if that means anything to you, they all still wore Kappa Magna, that is, the large robe with train and buckled shoes. And a lot of pleats, too… Yes, exactly, and velvet and silk in the truest sense, of course I experienced that in the cathedral. And also this strong hierarchy, also such a high mass, pontifical mass, the high mass in Cologne Cathedral, in which I participated every Sunday and in all pontifical masses, which were of course strongly centered on the so-called celebrant. […] There were dozens of clergy in the choir room and at the altar, including the seminary, and the whole thing was strongly centered on one person. It was always like that from the lineup, the celebrant was always in the middle, etc., etc., so that was…. But I think rites are significant, I must say, […]. (Mark, lines 107–129)

That is exactly what rituals do, they bring about strong feelings so that the events of the past are still present in the present. In that respect, they are memory aids for important transitions, which now concerns rites of passage. In many families, moreover, transitional rituals are the only points of encounter with the wider family; usually, on the occasion of a ritual, one has seen each other for the last time, experienced something together for the last time, which has now possibly already become part of the collective narratives of this group. At celebrations on the occasion of transitional rituals, people tell a lot of stories. The narrative power grows stronger the more people participate in a ritual. This narrative effect in turn reinforces and secures the long-term effect of the ritual – as explicit or implicit witnesses, those present can later recall the course and character of the ritual (cf. Moser, 1993, p. 194). These narratives also reinforce the significance of the event that was the occasion of the ritual – the event has become something ‘talked about’. Many significant others, many guests are thus beneficial in a transitional ritual in that they reinforce the narrative potential of the event, this is evident in the 1997 series interviews (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 192) as 2020.

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Narration reinforces the effect of transitional rituals – with them it is also decided how long a certain life culture survives: “Whether or not these memories (of families, villages, peoples, even entire cultural circles) remain alive depends on the existence of a narrative culture in a community of people. In this context, it becomes clear that a living process of tradition includes people who tell stories.” (Domay, 1994, p. 182) Narratives can also take on ritualistic traits in families, ensuring the existence of the community and confirming the common origin again and again: “Since [man] has a language, he can finally form a whole universe of symbols within which he has relationship with his past, with things, with other people […].” (Foucault, 1995, p. 421). Thus, even in times of high mobility, family identity, roots and a kind of sense of home can be preserved or reconstituted through the creation and maintenance of family or subgroup narratives.

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When I was in the final stages of proofreading this part of my research paper in March 1997, the whole main part fluttered into individual splinters so close to submission. I remember how I painstakingly wrote down all the relevant terms on individual pieces of paper and connected them to form a kind of banana skirt, which then became my main part. It was carnival time, so it was fitting. Bizarrely, the same thing happened in 2020, though this time it was summer and carnival was relatively far away even by Cologne standards, where carnival starts pulsating in the city as early as October. Again, the main concepts splintered for me. To this day, I find it extremely difficult to superordinate or subordinate individual terms such as identity and biography, standardization and individuality. In the following I try to proceed nevertheless as neatly and as sharply as possible.

15.1 Identity or the Art of Building a Mobile “When the Lord shall ask me in the hereafter: Meir, why did you not become Moses? – Then will I say, Lord, because I am but Meir. And if he shall further ask me: Meir, why did you not become Ben Akiva? – I will say likewise, Lord, because I am Meir. But if he asks, “Meir, why did you not become Meir? – what will I answer?” (Huber quoted from Barz, 1995, p. 27)

Identity development seems to be a crucial factor in rituals. As Blumenberg writes, “The identity of imprinting is the very subject of a cultural history.” (Blumenberg 2013, p.  16) In my work I draw on both identity models by Heiner Keupp and Amatya Sen and the Sense of Coherence model by Aaron Antonovsky. This inter© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_15

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weaves classical psychological approaches such as Antonovsky’s with more modern approaches. Before I discuss the interaction between transitional rituals and identity, a complicated question arises: What phenomenon, what experience denotes “identity”? What is it that interacts with transitional rituals at all, and how? Or, as the oddball Lewis Caroll put it into the mouth of a caterpillar, “Who…are you?” (Carroll, 1863/1985, p. 64) Who are we, and how do we become here? De Botton, like many, assumes “that we […] have a precious, childlike, reliable core that we should cherish on our grueling journey through life.” (De Botton, 2013, p. 115) Is the wish here the father of the thought? In an attempt to explain the construction, composition and growth of identity, beautiful images have been created such as that of identity as a tree or even as a patchwork quilt (cf. Bilden & Keupp, 2006; Hitzler, 1996). The concept conceives identity, the, as it used to be called, personality of a person (but a demarcation between identity and personality remains scientifically missing until today) not as a closed or stable whole, but as a dynamic structure with different patches or patches. The structure that emerges in this way resembles a patchwork quilt. In the many years I have been thinking about it, however, a mobile seems to me to be the better metaphor, since it is multidimensional: as a delicate, vulnerable, colorful or homogeneous structure, made of standardized or very individual parts, linked with visible and invisible threads, with moving and rather rigid parts of understandable, sharing enigmatic dynamics. This identity mobile is constantly being supplemented, reconstructed and linked anew. This has entered science as the concept of lifelong development. In the process, the mobile often only apparently rests in a more or less stable equilibrium – in fact, it is in constant, often imperceptible motion: if identity changes – and it actually does so constantly  – it becomes dynamic, the figure, imperceptibly or suddenly, in strong shocks – gets out of balance. And it can, of course, become hopelessly entangled. Be it that the parts have shifted in relation to each other, be it that new parts have grown together or old parts have been torn away or have imperceptibly fallen off, be it through internal processes or external influences. Most of the changes happen imperceptibly – hardly visible in the slight, constant movement of the figure. Other changes set the mobile into strong vibrations, perhaps so strong that it takes a long time and protracted changes to achieve a new equilibrium – this is probably decided by the flexibility tolerance and resilience (a term that was not yet generally known for this in the 1997 series) of the mobile: if it is too rigid or if the weights prove to be too large or too disproportionate, it may break. And of course, this mobile is always interacting with other mobiles, and it is not always easy to see a single identity as separate from the whole. Imagine a room full

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of mobiles. Of course, as individuals we try to make our identity visible to others, to make it distinguishable, and to make it clear again and again to ourselves and to others that we as individuals are not just part of the whole, in constant confrontation with the cultural imprints and in the cultural context in which we move and in that, despite all attempts to make ourselves distinguishable from others, we nevertheless also want to classify ourselves and make and make ourselves visibly belong (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 4). In 2020, as I work again on this part of my research project, my gaze goes from my desk to the ceiling of my studio. For years I have had various often self-made mobiles hanging there. All this time, my fascination with mobiles has remained the same, for a whole generation, including a small wooden dragon that has been hanging directly above my computer ever since, and which is now flirting with my granddaughter. The identity mobile is characterized by a complicated dynamic with a constantly shifting and thus naturally also in principle and factually endangered balance. What is important is that changes cannot be prevented; it is precisely tolerance and openness to the environment that secures the form itself – which as a form is never complete, never finished. Or, as the Protestant theologian Henning Luther puts it: Identity always remains a fragment. Luther also resists – for theological reasons – a conception of identity that propagates identity as a determinable, stable entity (cf. Luther, 1992, p. 160 f.). From a rigid form of the ‘high bourgeois ideal of personality’ (Keupp in Bilden and Keupp 2006, p. 64) of a fixed identity, the tendency is towards an understanding of identity with multiple elements, in which the individual becomes, or at least can become, a “sovereign and creative producer of himself” (ibid.). A rigid pattern becomes a colourful form with a variety of design possibilities and flexibility with critical, vulnerable areas and areas of high resilience. Change must be possible: Is there anything like a turning point in your life where maybe something like… religious manifestations were more important than usual? Sometimes it’s like saying that. When it was for me I experienced 9 11 [he pronounces English] in Germany[…] That was very very important for me always in life, so from then on it was really very very clear to me what extremism… misanthropy… Life without love, without confidence under the aspect of tolerance can lead to very bad things. That was very important for me and I experienced that here in Germany as well. The second thing that is very very important for me, this Corona crisis in which we are not allowed to enter our mosque, our area. […] Then I thought again how important it is that we should protect everything that has been entrusted to us, not only the Holy Scriptures, but nature and everything that we see in our environment, experience in our lives, have

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encountered, and will encounter, will still experience, is very worthy of protection, and that we should hold all these things very high, deal very carefully with these things, […]. (Tarek Z. 556 ff.)

The philosopher Sen already described an overly homogeneous identity as an “identity trap” (in his 2007 book of the same name), there he described a completely homogeneous identity as a virtual construct and pleaded, in his use of language, for allowing multiple identities that would be there anyway, such as the identity as a passionate tinkerer, father, psychotherapist, and bicycle freak. I see these “identities” more as identity parts in an interconnected dynamic that makes these parts whole, but the difference in our views seems ultimately gradual to me. Flexibility seems to be essential for the construction and maintenance of identity in order to be able to “arrange sequences, to establish meaningful relationships between them” (Nowottny 1993, p. 43), to link seams in a sustainable way and to support them with a social network that is appropriate to the fit (cf. Berger in Keupp and Bilden 1989, p. 136). New parts must be meaningfully tied to old ones (cf. Nowottny 1993, p. 43). One has changed and yet remained the same. Identity is supposed to grow without completely losing the sense of coherence, of self-­ assurance. Today, more than ever, this is a risky opportunity that places high demands on the competence of each individual, who must shape his or her mobile because old construction plans are no longer there or have lost their validity. The meaning of identity or individual aspects of identity is co-determined by the possibilities of linguistic expression, by the forms that are available for the expression of certain parts of identity (cf. Hahn in Wohlrab-Sahr 1992, pp. 131 and 138). Those who are unable to describe newly acquired identity aspects to the outside world find it much more difficult to integrate them into their identity mobile: I am (also) what I can express. And then we change again. All our lives, like Odysseus, we go on adventures, get lost, find ourselves again, win, fail. The occurrence of critical life events is either potential – like divorce or illness – or normative, like coming to terms with one’s own finitude. Critical life events can occur at an expected time, such as moving out of the parental home between 20 and 25, or at a socially unusual, not directly expected time, such as the death of a parent in adolescence or a teenage pregnancy. Every developmental step in which identity is changed, expanded or reconstructed is – whether in or out of time – essentially connected with a crisis. Their occurrence always means both opportunity and risk for every individual – the quality of the confrontation with critical life events essentially determines the construction and stabilization of our identity: “For all of us, however, transitional phases of

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nakedness, in which we shape a further step toward ourselves, are vital.” ­(Schellenbaum, 1992, p. 279) In the transitional ritual, society and individuality are renegotiated; this is especially true in the context of a status passage (cf. Turner, 1982, p. 68). Identity evaluations are imposed on everyone again and again, be it out of inner values, be it in the course of a partial loss of identity in the context of a role diffusion or role change in critical life events. The course of the crisis obviously depends to a large extent on the individual and collective coping patterns and tools that are available in such a case  – especially rituals that are religiously handed down and thus proven and known can provide such coping reserves. It is about perceiving pain in its meaning, perceiving joy in its meaning, and it is also about an exercise in dealing with helplessness, with weakness, with powerlessness (cf. Gruen, 1987, p. 29). We must not forget that we as humans are always at the mercy of this overwhelming feeling of helplessness, of lack of control, of loss of control. Be it through other people, through strokes of fate and through coincidences, through our own vulnerability anchored in our being. Rituals are part of the management of this vulnerability, an attempt to bring the uncontrollable under its own control after all, by shaping it (cf. Bell, 2011, p. 124; Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 21): as a ceremony at the beginning of a life, in the manifold changes during a life and at the end of a life.

15.2 Identity and Ritual According to Willis, the work with metaphors plays a major role in the handling, the striving for coherence in the connection of fragments of identity into a whole (cf. Willis, 2000, p. 69). It is precisely at the dynamic interfaces of different identity aspects and roles, in a sense at the interfaces of our identity mobile, that transitional rituals also settle. They are considered significant in order for the person to find himself in his identity (cf. Erikson after Grün, 1997, p. 40). Transitional rituals secure these “transitions […] as a special area of qualitatively own order” (Luther, 1992, p. 218). Where such borderline experiences are made, where old structures change, break away, the need for religion is high (cf. De Botton, 2013; EKD, 1993 and 2019; Luther, 1992, p. 244). Depending on the context, this can be interpreted as an anxiously repressive and deindividualizing adherence to stabilizing, preformed rescue models, or as a relatively self-confident strategy to tap into resources in moments of crisis. In this context, a constant evaluation of these rescue models is important. To pick up on a popular metaphor by Buckminster Fuller, the architect,

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which he explained in his wonderful 1969 book “Operating Instructions for ­Spaceship Earth,” “If you find yourself on a sinking ship that all the lifeboats have already abandoned, a drifting piano lid to keep you afloat is a welcome lifesaver. But that doesn’t mean that the design of piano covers would be the best design for life preservers.” (Fuller 1998, p. 10). In part, these “life rings”, whose functionality will be discussed further, represent the religiously traditional transitional rituals. Consciously performed, they allow, among other things, a kind of controlled loss of control, which can give courage to really deal with the event instead of covering it up or repressing it, as unfortunately often enough happens (cf. Grün, 1997, pp. 138, 140, 142). Rituals are thus used to absorb or at least channel the destabilizing potential of such transitional phases in order to then ultimately ensure connectivity to a next phase of life in order to manage this anti-order (cf. Luther, 1992, p. 220; van Gennep, 1908/1960, p. 21). A successful ritual of passage can therefore not be about avoiding any movement or even cementing the initiator and his social environment in the old state and letting them emerge from the transitional state as unchanged as possible (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 26). In the ideal case, a reflectively designed ritual can, on the one hand, reveal the potential for change and, on the other hand, provide stabilizing protection for the vulnerability of the addressee within the moving intermediate phase. If one avoids such transitional phases, this can have destructive consequences for further identity work. In this sense, religiously traditional transitional rituals are on the one hand invitations to individual growth – in growth itself then special tools for existential breaks of all kinds  – at least they can be (cf. Waardenburg 1996, p. 23). From a phase of diffusion, of disorientation, of life opening, they lead again into the more stable, more closed postliminal phase. After overcoming critical life events, they guide life into new directions. Transitional rituals thus serve both the perception of risk and its control. Transitional rituals in particular can strengthen the awareness that one’s own identity and the identity of others is changing and growing. Transitional rituals can reveal potential for action: “They embody ‘path-breaking’ energy patterns. In crisis and danger, they unlock life potential.” (Schellenbaum, 1992, p. 86) Transitional rituals, as an act of turning towards, increase the attention of those involved and the self-attention of the person directly affected – through a ritual marking, attention to a significant event is usually sufficiently secured. They are signals that make people aware of changes in direction and, after breaks, also mark the need for action. The motive of change in connection with transitional rituals is strongly emphasized by my interviewees in the 1997 series (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 164). They are apparently

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valued as marking and stylizing devices from a wide variety of perspectives and motivations. This is also evident in the interviews of the 2020 series. In this context, the perception of a risk can also facilitate its control – it is not for nothing that practitioners such as pastors and other chaplains therefore repeatedly consider the extent to which they should, for example, confirm faith in the institution of marriage beyond doubt in the marriage ceremony, or the extent to which critical undertones could strengthen a marriage precisely by facilitating the perception of the possible failure of this event and thus hopefully efforts to prevent this failure. In principle, transitional rituals need not harmonize life’s contradictions; they can certainly address them explicitly and in the protected public setting of a ritual (cf. Albertz 1988; Böhm in Wohlrab-Sahr 1992, p. 196). But this, too, requires a kind of critical distance on the part of the corresponding religious pastor or liturgist – the will and the competence to give room to doubts and to deal with these doubts productively. With this courage to contradict, a smooth ceremony again becomes a piece of authentic life that does not need to negate contradictions and vulnerabilities: In this context, risk perception also significantly facilitates the perception of (self-)responsibilities. The very act of becoming aware through a ritual makes it easier for agents to take greater responsibility for their own lives, as statements in the 1997 series suggest (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 164). For some, a ritual seems to open up access to their own perception of a critical situation and thus to the potential for action that lies beyond: Once again, it becomes clear how important the role of transitional rituals as language can be in view of the phenomenon that life-deciding events in particular are apparently located right at the border of the ability to speak, and are difficult to communicate subjectively in an appropriate manner. Yet it is precisely the communicability of an event that seems to play an essential role in its coping – this is found again and again in the literature (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 31). By directing attention to the event, a ritual makes the threat or the pain or the joy tangible and thus helps to break out of a kind of paralysis or holy shiver and to become capable of action again and ultimately to re-enter everyday life. A transitional ritual thus takes on, as already explained, the effect of a reality manager in the sense of a change agent. The immanence of something transcendent such as love, farewell, or even the miracle of parenthood is of pragmatic value, independent of a belief in God. Transitional rituals can thus help us to consciously enter one stage and consciously end another, and thus create perspectives for new paths in life. They help to constitute new reality structures, as I explained in the previous chapter. They

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increase the bond of trust in a new reality after a phase of diffusion, i.e. the liminal phase according to the van Gennepian model. To secure the new structure, so that the bridge-building into a new life-world succeeds, at the same time a continuous connection to reality seems to be important, which is so endangered especially in crises and ruptures: where a crisis-like event is so obvious that even good repressors have to perceive it, a certain person is simply no longer there, or no longer comes home, the house is no longer standing, the trust in the experienced reality, the personality-stabilizing effect of everyday life is lost. In such crises, in which social reality seems to dissolve, transitional rituals secure a residual trust in reality and thus often also a decisive minimum of self-confidence (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p. 167, Gutnic in Stäblein, 1993, pp. 225–266). But in our time they presumably only fulfil this effect in the sense of a productive, expanding bond if they flexibly stabilise – not cement, but constitute elastic bonds that are also flexible for change. “If anything, the power of religious rituals is still powerful today, especially in the celebrations of life’s turning points – in baptisms, weddings, and funerals. […] But something like this only happens where one is allowed to fill the celebrations of the turn of life honestly and explicitly with one’s own content.” (Lerch & Schrom (2017), p. 20) In turn, it becomes critical where they suppress the intensity and dynamics of a socially undesirable crisis. They can also become critical life events themselves where their staging is unsuccessful; this is known, for example, from failed death and funeral rituals (cf. Kuckelkorn, 2020). To summarize: A transitional ritual as an extra-ordinary sign act signals the special significance of the situation it frames. Already through the effort, time and attention associated with the alignment of the transitional ritual, everyone is aware that something of extra-ordinary significance, and thus with a certain risk value, is happening. Only with the perception of a crisis can one become active, seek patterns of interpretation, secure identities, rebuild the mobile without it tearing apart.

15.3 Transitional Rituals as Construction Scripts for Promoting Coherence Religion give moments that would normally remain insignificant, purely accidental and private, a solemn framework that promises permanence and is related to an external natural phenomenon. They give substance to our inner dimensions-the very parts of us that romanticism prefers not to impose restrictions on for fear that these might rob us of our authenticity. (De Botton, 2013, p. 285)

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What constitutes this authenticity? Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence model is helpful here, which I do not want to discuss in detail here because it is very easy to research. The model essentially describes conditions for a psychosocially healthy life. According to this model, coherence is a core quality of a healthy life, which is generated by three factors: Manageability, Understandability, Meaningfulness (see for example Antonovsky, 1997). It is important to note that this coherence is exclusively experienced coherence, not absolute coherence (should my readers still expect such a thing at this point of my remarks). Rituals stabilize life. Rituals are in life what things are in space. (cf. Han, 2019, p. 11) By means of coherence experience, rituals anchor the major life turns in biography. Transitional rituals thus promote coherence and thus they are closely linked to our ability to keep ourselves healthy (cf. Kern in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 52). They give life turns a fixed historical-biographical place, even though pre- and post-development are undoubtedly much more decisive for the success of this life turn. Life transition rituals help in life planning because they make visible a changed status also through changed religious status as confirmed, after Bar/Bad Mitzvah, as married or divorced, etc., through the time and money involved, through dress, and the involvement of an uncommon institution and significant others. These different steps also mark different steps in our coming of age. Formulated as an attempt: in life we do not only have to deal with coming of age as a two-step system either coming of age or not coming of age, but accompany through different phases of coming of age, and transitional rituals can help us with this. This is somewhat visible in dressing and transition rituals in professions. In this way, life also acquires a structure in retrospect and in the attempt to imagine one’s own future. The life event becomes an important pivotal point in a life, like Doris and Miri’s own cancer in the 2020 series. Rituals can create meaning, this is in the tradition of the thoughts of C. G. Jung (cf. Grün, 1997, p.  34). The structuring power of rituals also creates security in borderline situations. Just in such contexts a kind of vacuum of meaning arises systematically, in which religion or religious practice traditionally becomes relevant again for many people. Theologically formulated: “At these junctures of human existence (meal, birth, entry into adulthood, life-threatening illness, sexual communion and procreation), people in their corporeality are confronted with the question of the ultimate meaning of their humanity. Therefore, these situations became the occasion for a symbolic action that promises and conveys salvation to human beings in their concrete human bodily constitution [I intentionally skip the following emphasis on Christianity]. and conveys salvation, in which his humanity

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in all its stages shines forth as accepted and meaningful by God.” (Schilson in Ruh et al., 1986, p. 408). Religious sign acts help significantly to build a bridge where abysses open up in life. The construction of meaning provides these abysses with an interpretive framework and thereby cushions their destructive potential. Independent of a decided belief in God. Transitional rituals, however, are not only repressively functional as a buffer and substitute for meaning, but can also be a means of identity renewal in a change of our identity, in that they help to integrate existential events more deeply into the personality. Rituals as rationally meaningless acts lend precisely for this reason the power to resist a “capitulation to meaninglessness through meaning inflation” (Soeffner 1992, p.  75). The paradox of ritual embeds events with a gap in meaning in a framework  – the anti-structure of rituals apparently challenges and renews the structure of everyday life (cf. Kramer in Streck, 1987, p. 181 f.). The marking by a celebration is apparently mostly intuitively experienced as meaningful, since in itself only something within the socially set canon of reality is honoured in such a way. Here, especially the interviews with the atheists of the series 2020 are interesting. The importance of sustainable (not necessarily rational) plausibility structures, even in extreme situations, is shown by Bettelheim, for example (cf. ders. 1980b, 80 f.; EKD, 1993, p. 20 f.). The patterns of interpretation do not have to be constructed individually, but the individual can fall back on already existing patterns: “There are […] – through the ritual forms and the interpretations supplied – patterns of interpretation made available which keep the potential crisis of the transition limited and identify it as the consummation of a supra-individual process.” (Wohlrab-Sahr 1992, p. 10). Again I recall van Gennep: rituals break up, lead through a phase of no man’s land, of disorientation and diffusion, and then stabilize: many transitional rituals are obviously about re-securing and re-adjusting a disturbed equilibrium, about weighing up the relevant event, accepting it for oneself and combining it into a ranking, into a meaningful pattern, or inserting it into existing patterns (cf. Fillipetti and Trotereau 1978, p. 236). As Schellenbaum points out, in religious rituals both aspects, coming to terms with the past and making sense of the new, are connected with each other, for example in farewell rituals around dying, death and burial, the often literal burial of the old, and the new beginning of the social system with the immediately following funeral (cf. Friesen 1996; Schellenbaum, 1989, p. 88). Rings such as wedding rings or the double ring of widows and widowers are subsequent signs of the changed or expanded identity after the actual ritual, are their metaphor. Thus, it is also visible to the outside world that something so essential has changed in a person’s life that

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in the future they will wear a ring like an added body part. The same applies to metaphorical shortening or binding of head hair. The transitional state is at the same time the death of an old and the birth of a new person, in which the ‘old ­person’ says goodbye to old habits, an old environment. As a ‘new person’ we can then take possession of a new, changed environment. The postliminal part of the transitional ritual creates perspectives again, it allows for a good growth of old identity parts. Today, however, the life potential opened up by the change can – as I have already pointed out – only be used if the connections are elastic enough to be able to exist in the flexibilisation within the framework of reflexive modernity. Today, bonds must guarantee room for tolerance; kneadable bonds prove to be more stable than those that are firmly cemented in their form. Signs and actions, especially the great rituals to the life worlds, can be used as traditional models supporting when identity is changed. In moments of danger of diffusion they support the construction and the stable situation of a person’s identity – even if one otherwise perhaps “has nothing more to do with religious communities” – increasingly the Christian and Muslim model, according to which belief in God is a mandatory part of religious practice, seems to be a discontinued model, here it seems to me advisable that Christian and Muslim religious communities also rethink questions of membership. Transitional rituals, however, seem to be able to fulfil their effect independently of age and class, as Paul Willis’ observation of the “motorcycle boys” showed: “In these particular moments of crisis, the “motorcycle boys” turned to the church not out of religious sentiment, but in order to mark the event, which was important to them, with official recognition. In contrast to the usual everyday attitude, the motorcycle death required its own ritualized solemn expression. […] People turned to the church, all its trappings and rituals, because they offered ready-made possibilities for creative appropriation and modification and, in addition, a generally accepted way of giving meaning to an event […] it did not matter that one did not understand the church rituals – one could not have understood them anyway, as the church would have liked, and they were filled with new meaning from outside anyway. What mattered was the sense of presence, the sense of order, the sense of marking a decisive event of the time.” (Willis, 1981, p. 86) The event in its meaning is consolidated and essentially co-determined both by immediate participation as the addressee of the ritual, and by the participation of significant others who witness the transitional situation with their presence. In addition, corresponding anniversaries such as wedding anniversaries, death anniversaries, confirmation anniversaries, etc. (which are no longer celebrated as much today as they used to be) remind us of the event and thus anchor it even more deeply in the biography.

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In addition to the classical religiously traditional transitional rituals and everyday rituals, the market of psycho-techniques is booming, new rituals try on the one hand to fulfill the need for adapted transitional rituals (cf. Ahn, Miczek, Zotter in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 120), advertise on the other hand, and this is partly the problem, with the old promises of salvation and bliss and ultimately attribution of meaning (cf. Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). But it is questionable whether these new brooms really always sweep better. The ‘blessings’of capitalism are now taking over the tasks of the clergy. Their help in acute crisis situations (‘buy something!’) is as fragile as the ritual of indulgences (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 29). As often as the burnt-out power of these modern crisis managers and their norm attraction has been castigated, their rituals continue to be indigenous to our society (cf. Schneidewind, 2018). If we spare ourselves reflection on our own strategies of individual crisis management, it is only at the price of renewed dependencies (cf. North 1970, pp. 242, 331; Schellenbaum, 1992, p. 156).

15.4 Biography and Ritual Religiously correct biographies are presented, for example, in the Bible, theological and pastoral writings, also in hymn books, above all: in the transitional rituals of religion. Many religious rituals have at the same time been founded within the framework of biographical myths (cf. Eliade, 1954/1989, p. 23). They essentially convey scripts of societally conforming ought-biographies (cf. Oerter, 1993, p. 306). In the selection of celebration values, they refer to the canon of socially and individually significant life events and thus at the same time to the canon of values on which they are based. Every society also produces ideas of the ideal life course with its myths. All ideological institutions with paradigmatic power, such as capitalism or communism, rationalism, Christianity, etc., have each created their ideal life courses and disseminated them through the media (cf. Han, 2019, p. 55) – as is well known, this is going better than ever today. But in their effects on communization they are very different – while (both following Han) religion promotes communization, capitalism fragments it (cf. Han, 2019, p. 55). One of the basic questions of psychology is how a person becomes an individual with individual characteristics and an individual biography. The question is how people cope with their lives and the associated life crises and integrate them into their biography (cf. Luckmann, 1991, p. 170; Keupp, 1992, p. 7; Soeffner, 1992, p. 35).

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The essential leitmotif in the construction of biographies in reflexive modernity also seems to be a pool of normal or ideal biographies, albeit variable, which are provided by the media. These normal biographies do not represent an ideal life course, but rather a kind of socially correct module from which a socially accepted biography can be constructed (cf. Keupp in Bilden & Keupp, 2006, p. 63). With their help, paradigms of normality are essentially conveyed, orienting the creation of an individual biography: “At the individual level, models of reality influence the construction of identity. They are decisively involved in the subjective definition of what is appropriate and desirable, for example with regard to consumption, everyday aesthetics, career, social contacts.” (Schulze, 1995, p. 229). Biographical schemata are socially and culturally mediated above all by the frequency of normative events that are the occasion of transitional rituals. Thus, ritually constituted biography is secured by the factual cyclization of linear rituals: our wedding – an isolated case, but routine in the context of the generation. Routine that is manageable, understandable, and then makes sense in life. Painful partings due to deaths – all this has been there before. Like one’s father, one will be buried someday, perhaps even in the same place. For the individual it remains an individual experience, but society is practiced in dealing with the passage of life (cf. Sartory, 1987, p. 15). Thus society becomes a rope team of members who help each other over life’s transitionals. This is also shown by statements of my interview partners in the series 1997 (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 155) and 2020: Transitional rituals can thus become important once again as balance rituals at the end of a constituted biography at the transitional, the great transcendence between life and death, as again described by my interview partners in the 1997 (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 155) and 2020 series. They cannot solve the problem of death, but they can at least give a final meaning in life (cf. Kuckelkorn, 2020). Transitional rituals are about understanding who we are now, or are becoming. As someone who is on the transitional, as a witnessing part of the celebratory community, and as a liturgist or mentor of that transitional. Transitional rituals form and stabilize biography. Transitional rituals emphasize certain phases of life and allow others to fade clearly into the background through disregard. Only that event is worth celebrating which has a place in the social or individual ideas of a successful biography. In the question of the introduction of gay marriage, for example, this was discussed in Germany for decades. The political discussion here was not at all about denying tax breaks to homosexuals, but about the question of what is socially accepted. In this way, a model of an ideal, successful life emerges, to a certain extent, according to which the individual can shape his or her life. Transitional rituals thus clock the rough structure of a biography, but each person must then in turn tailor them to his or her individual needs,

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and individual situation (cf. Luckmann, 1991, p. 161). Transitional rituals thus set biographical perspectives towards which the individual can live, mediated by the social environment that exemplifies these ideal life courses. They consolidate the linear structure of a life, provide for a before and an after (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1962, p. 273) – and thus simultaneously structure time and the turning of time. Transitional rituals thus become, to quote the theologian Karl Rahner as representative of many others, “a formative power of real life” (Rahner, 1977, p.  54; cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p. 106 f.; Luther, 1992, p. 219 f.; Ständer 1994, p. 37; Wohlrab-­ Sahr, 1992, p. 9). This aspect also resonates in the interviews of the 1997 series – even where it is rejected (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 154). The possibilities for individualisation have grown exponentially in the modern age – an abundance of possibilities beckons, threatens, offers itself to almost every age group. Biographies have become highly individualized – individuals now have a multitude of potential biographies of choice (cf. Doehlemann, 1996, T. 30; cf. Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1994, p. 205 f.) at their disposal. Each and every one of us continues to be increasingly dependent on planning his or her own life and shaping it in a way that is attuned to rapidly changing external and internal factors of influence. It is less and less possible to speak of a normal biography or norm biography. The fixed stations in life of earlier generations have dissolved. They step out of the original canon of linear predetermined developmental tasks, as it was also described in the early days of psychology. The flexibilisation does not allow for a prognosis of the life plan, nor does it define a clear and unambiguously successful biography (cf. Koch 1999, p. 89). Transitions are also becoming more flexible in terms of time – the sociologist Hitzler coined the appropriate term “multi-optional (time) bastion existence” for this phenomenon (Hitzler, 1996, p. 279). There is still a statistical, but no longer a social norm for the right time of a certain transition: socially, many points in time are becoming possible, including the omission of life stations that used to be important for social standing (such as bourgeois marriage and family). Moreover, these stations in life have less and less of a normative effect. They can be revised more easily than in the past, and the increase in life expectancy leaves more time for a wide variety of life stages in changing order and including possible repetitions. This applies, it must be said, above all to rich northern Europe and rich people worldwide. Here, everyone becomes the architect of his own biography – with all the advantages and all the disadvantages, all the opportunities and all the risks. Euphoria is not appropriate here – the fact that everyone has to work out their own biography “by no means means means that everyone can do whatever they want. Nor does it mean that everyone is equally well off. […] But everyone has to play along, has to

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build his or her own existence – and increasingly without some reliable g­ uidance. […] In no human society has there ever been such a choice of material, ideal and also emotional offers for practically every individual”. (Hitzler, 1996, p. 279 f.) Those who cannot or do not want to do this shaping work, which is so necessary today, quickly fall through the social grid. Culture and the surrounding society serve as a grid, and this grid also consists today in reflection and interpretative appropriation of our idea of our own successful or failed biography – beyond rational and truly individual consideration (cf. Schibilsky & Völzke, 1993, p. 25). It fits in with this that it is well known in psychology that, as I explained in the chapter before, we spend comparatively little time on major decisions in our lives, while we spend a relatively large amount of time on what are actually relatively banal decisions (cf. Kahneman 2016). Today, hardly anyone likes to have their biography and life choices dictated to them by an institutionalized canon of life. The goal is no longer the norm biography, but the individual biography, even if this naturally leads to typifications. A suspicious questioning of the underlying motivation would make the work more difficult, but will perhaps in the long run lead to the fact that really only those make use of religiously traditional rituals who have an inner need for it that goes beyond framing an event, whether beautiful or sad – no matter who ‘does the party service’. In conservative circles, religiously traditional transitional rituals are apparently most likely to be used. However, the biography-guiding effects of religiously traditional rituals are becoming weaker with the individualization of biographies, and the pressure on the individual to construct his or her biography, and to construct it wisely and successfully, is increasing. Even today, rituals can show paths through the jungle of possible biographies, but with an increase and pluralization of relevant stations in life, the traditional canon of religiously transmitted transitional rituals is in need of supplementation, since it covers the network of actually relevant stations in life more and more inadequately. Nevertheless, in my interviews in 2020, few were willing to fantasize about further transitional rituals beyond the known ones. Some of my interview partners succeeded, due to their high ritual competence, in drawing exactly what they needed from the religiously traditional stock of forms and integrating it transformatively into their life relations. In this situation the theologian Felmy proposes to reinterpret old transitional rituals in the service of new life situations and to fill them with new contents (cf. Felmy in EAT, 1996). Apparently, especially old forms are often so plastic that they can be well adapted to new needs, as Paul Willis showed in his study of rockers (cf.

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Willis, 1981, p. 86). Even today, many turn to old rituals out of a sense of inner coherence – it makes it easier to frame a life event with something tried and tested. Rituals refer on the one hand individually to a biographical past, and on the other hand to a collective past, because they stand in a certain tradition, and at the same time to the present, because they celebrate an event in the present. In them, memory and the present resonate together. The event is placed in the context of one’s own personal life story as well as in a broader social context, as I explained earlier in the question of experienced coherence. An interesting element here are gifts, which not only have material value, but can also sink into one’s own biography as a memory of the event and of the giver. A particularly touching narrative here is that of my atheist interview partner Thomas, in which he describes how his dying partner chooses a piano for her daughter as a final gift: And that was sort of Claudia’s legacy, her last act was still, […]. (Thomas Z. 694)

Rituals can potentially have an intrapsychic effect, for example in the area of conflict resolution, biography and identity, and, of course, also an interpsychic effect in an existing group situation and as an after-effect in future group situations. At the same time, a ritual can have very different effects on different initiates and have a different significance. For example, if young people experience the same confirmation, one of them may feel mature and adult, while the other may experience an identity crisis. Each experienced ritual influences the experience of the next like a foil. A successful wedding may set such high standards that the next one disappoints as being too unspectacular. An unprepared clergyman at a funeral, for example, can also lead to serious disappointment, which may have a negative effect on the entire form. Also, not all people react the same way to a particular ritual, so it is probably also a matter of personality. Depending on socialization, spaces of experience, and not least the celebrators of the rituals, the liturgists, rituals are experienced differently, as I already described in the section on liturgists…. Life history seems to be an important factor in the preference or rejection of ritual form. Luise’s biography from the 1997 series is an example of this, as is Ruth from the same series (ibid.). Of course, the reception of ritual is also contextual, depending on the discourse also perceived by the public, as exemplified by my atheist interviewee Doris from series 2020 (cf. Doris Z. 71). She certainly places her own indifference to religious rituals in the context of the student movement of 1968. However, extreme situations and even violation by religious institutions do not necessarily seem to produce anti-ritualists – this is also evident in the inter-

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views of series 2020. Again and again interview partners report about violations, clergy who are not empathetic or disinterested etc. (cf. Doris Z. 71). But this, ­interestingly, is never a reason for my interviewees to abandon a ritual or to remove themselves from it as guests. Just as my two atheist interviewees, by the way, never report any injuries that would have led to leaving. Some of my interview partners, who are also religiously and institutionally bound, encounter rituals with great disinterest, such as Viktoria from the series 2020, others obviously live strongly in rituals, such as Markus, who converted to Protestantism, and interestingly also Peter, a converted Protestant from the series 1997. Why? Why does a ritual seem a meaningful tool for shaping and securing their lives to one, but not to another? Why do some embrace it, while others reject it? “Real, however, is what works.” (Jung, 1991, p.  127) was formulated so succinctly by C.  G. Jung. But why do religiously traditional transitional rituals work for one initiate and not for another? Superficially, the observation could be justified historically. Anyone like Luise, from the 1997 series, who barely survived the Third Reich in hiding, has little to gain from formalisms such as rituals, was my first thesis when reviewing the material obtained from 1997. In view of her circumstances, it seems understandable that forms lose meaning, appear ridiculous and escapist (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 198). We know surprisingly little about how ritualized behavior develops in the life history of individuals.[…] In most cultural traditions, social learning still occurs much more informally [than we otherwise imagine]. It is much more unguided, through observation, participation, and practice.[…] Presumably such learning succeeds only because of our strong urge to imitate, whether or not the individual sees the point of what he or she is doing. […] The function of much of the cultural knowledge acquired in socialization may be opaque to most. […] There are many benefits to the transmission of culture through imitation. (Whitehouse in Spectrum of Science 2011, p. 57)

I found an attractive explanatory approach for type-related preferences in Schulze (cf. ders. 1995). His milieu theory seems to me to be extremely helpful. With the help of various parameters he essentially describes different micro-milieus and micro-cultures into which our society has pluralized and segregated itself and in each of which, which becomes interesting for the discussion of rituals, other values and need structures have developed (cf. Soeffner in EAT, 1996). But what seemed plausible to me in 1997 seems too rigid today, in 2020. To be able to define milieus in a clear-cut way on the basis of certain categories no longer does justice to plural modern approaches to identity, as they have also been discussed here.

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Not everyone seems to need a ritual to overcome transitions. Some support it, some do not, with religious institutional ties also present, as Victoria, one of my interviewees 2020. If reality becomes too oppressive, artificial reality in the form of rituals or art or play no longer seems to have any justification – just think of the old saying that after Auschwitz, for example, it would have become pointless to write poetry. But this at least does not seem to be a consistent tendency. Extreme situations in our biography seem to lead us neither to rituals nor away from them. There are examples of rituals helping us to cope with extreme situations – collective mourning and memorial rituals come to mind. Sometimes it is precisely the experience of an extreme situation that seems to be the reason, or at least the trigger, for turning more strongly to stabilisers such as rituals. Extreme situations thus do not necessarily weaken the attraction of rituals. This can be illustrated by observations made by Bettelheim in concentration camps, who describes how it was precisely there that rituals became essential for survival for many (cf. Bettelheim, 1980). Rituals can apparently have a stabilizing effect as an element of order in situations of external or internal entropy, according to interviews from the 1997 series (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 199). At the same time, the network of needs out of which someone makes use of rituals, or also turns more strongly to religiously traditional rituals, as Miri describes it for her subsequent Jewish socialization, is very different. […] why were you socialized into Judaism? Through the feminist movement in Berlin in the nineties, so as I told before, I started to deal intensively with Judaism in the nineties and in Berlin there were a lot of Jews and there I celebrated my first Passover, a big community and then there was this movement Beit devora… […] This is a feminist and Jewish movement from the nineties, originating in Berlin, but it encompasses European feminist Judaism, they hold congresses every few years, I think they have their 70th congress now. Congress and thereby very active also in feminist work and also as a photographer I accompanied that very much, and then when I moved to Cologne, I found myself first in the Jewish Forum and then to [the liberal Jewish community]… and participated there in the […] holidays. (Miri Z. 39)

Religiously traditional transitional rituals are still in demand today as milestones by which one can orientate oneself in the progression of one’s own life, but significantly less than in the past, along the lines of the declining memberships in the Christian churches, for example. For the Jewish area as well as for the Muslim area there are no figures, here in Germany the religious institutions are also not so centralized that really generally valid statements could be made. It is interesting to

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note that in the 2020 series, communion, confirmation and the baptism of their children were still a matter of course for older people, but they then reported baptising their grandchildren much less frequently. It is questionable why certain rituals are still in individual or institutional use today, while others are not. Death ­rituals and home preservation are out of fashion today. Baptisms, to some extent, have not. Celebrations that had a very high value just two generations ago, communion, confirmation are today along my interview partners rather celebrated as smaller family celebrations in a narrow circle, if at all. Where are the transitional rituals of youth? If religion is important to us, how do we safe religious practice for the next generation? I sit on the balcony in the morning light and write. When we buried my father at the beginning of this research cycle, my brother and I did so decidedly in a long, non-religious ceremony to honor our father, atheist at heart. No religious song was sung, no prayer was said aloud. To include such elements anyway would have been tantamount to a grave violation of what my father held dear throughout his life. It was the best funeral I have ever experienced, solemn, dignified, pointing to new horizons. In the meantime, the media, especially of course the Internet, certainly have more normality-constituting power than, for example, religious communities, as was already noted in 1997 in this series. The rituals that are disseminated in the mass media and the life plans they convey are just as widespread and largely unchallenged as the rituals of the church may have been in the past (cf. Grün, 1997, p.  29). Today, in my view, ideal lifestyles are co-constituted more by the great myths of our time than by religious communities: for example, motorized individual transport (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p. 149) or the institutions of the market economy with transitional stations such as the first credit card, the acquisition of property, etc. (cf. here Widlok in p. 149). (cf. here Widlok in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 170, who ibid. describes the proximity of economy to ritual) In this context, life concepts of medicine also come into view: “[…] To the extent that medical values have replaced religious values, medical rituals [have] replaced religious rituals […].” (Szasz, 1974, p. 47). Such alternative modules are just as problematic as the idea of the institution of marriage as an institution of procreation. The atheist Lorenzer warns already in 1981: “The reconstruction of the socialization agency church in the aggiornamento as a post-helped ‘rationalization’ of religious life plans is thus not as innocent as a mere formal consideration seemed to suggest.” (Lorenzer, 1981, p. 109) Alternatives to religious institutions are no more value-neutral than religious institutions, and by no means necessarily more moral, more individual, more valuable. The very tran-

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sitional rituals that guide biography are always in tension with the society that makes use of them. Including the ideologies circulating in society. It is the quality of their use that determines the ethical and social value of a ritual. Transitional rituals seem to cope well with changes in context and meaning: “This ambiguity [of metaphors by my definition, of symbols in the source text] accommodates the plurality of human life stories and allows for broad possibilities of identification.” (Grabner-Heider 1991, p. 37) Just how robust our old religiously traditional transitional rituals are is evidenced throughout the interview by my interviewee Bernhard from the 1997 series (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 157), and also by my interviewees from the 2020 series. Creative attempts at design and interpretation, however, include the danger of arbitrary relativism-and that can probably damage a ritual more profoundly than a ritual that has perhaps remained somewhat unimaginative in its old-fashioned context.

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Once customs have become entrenched, they are capable of so influencing the world of the imagination that one accepts them as indispensable […] Man can only live in a web of customs, in a structure of customs, if he is not to feel left cold and lonely, even if he does not follow the customs at all, or not always. This is very strange. (Rosendorfer, 1986, p. 239 f.)

16.1 Overview: The Social Context The basic point to be made is this: Human socialization is both dangerous and without alternative. What do we do in this situation? Parties. Intuitively, this is a bit weird for me, but also logical. Similar to previous chapters on the interplay of transitional rituals and identity – one of the core topics of social psychology – I am now interested as a typical social psychological question in how groups live today (in the context of religious transitional rituals)…. How do they come into being, how are entrances and exits regulated, and by what, what weakens, what strengthens them, how do they create unity internally, how do they demarcate themselves externally (cf. Keupp, 1992, p. 7)? When do they fit into the macrosystem surrounding them particularly well, and when do they not, how do they die? Or are they potentially immortal like a bee colony that keeps renewing itself with new members from within itself? On the basis of these questions, I discuss whether and what effect religiously traditional transitional rituals have and can have in the current social context. For they are still in use, there is even a semblance of a certain tendency towards reritualization in our society – with a similar migration and trivialization of the religious © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_16

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context for many. This has not changed between 1997 and 2020. What effects do they fulfill in our time? In which time do we live at all? During the lockdown in the corona epidemic beginning in the spring and summer of 2020 (as I correct the flags for this book in January 2021, we are in a third, tightened lockdown) public celebrations fall away, the public school graduations, the neighborhood weddings, the big backyard parties, the baptisms or weddings in restaurants and banquet halls that flow out into the street, the festively dressed groups of people in city centers. All these festivities suddenly cease to take place, and with them disappears for that time a piece of the festivity of life altogether. I never thought they would be a part of life for me, nor that I would notice their absence so strongly. Fischedick lists the following three social functions of rituals (cf. Fischedick in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 28 f.): • Rituals create solidarity, they create community, • Rituals stabilize community, • and rituals maintain and guard a flexibility margin in case of changes. Rituals are primarily about relationship, relationship to others, to oneself, and to what some call higher powers, and what I would like to define here psychologically as that over which one has no or only limited influence (cf. Bell, 2011, p. 124). A kind of residual category, so to speak. Rituals serve social peace (cf. Bell, 2011, p. 124). Transitional rituals create and regulate intimacy. Rituals seem to play a role in the evolution of socio-cultural systems, i.e. our societies. “But why do transitional situations and roles almost everywhere in the world ascribe magico-religious properties? Or why are they considered dangerous, inauspicious, or contaminating to persons, objects, events, and relationships that have not been ritually integrated into transitional existence? The reason, I think, is that all manifestations of communitas, viewed from the perspective of those interested in maintaining structure, appear as dangerous and anarchic, and therefore must be constrained by regulations and prohibitions” (Turner, 1969/1989, p. 107). We know: Rituals can enhance emotional connection in a community (cf. Whitehouse in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 58). People need the experience of community. As humans, we tend to engage in collaborative efforts (cf. Whitehouse in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 57). This has ensured our survival. For our life and for our survival, for our human development, cooperation is fundamental (cf. Sennett, 2015, pp. 27, 64).This is especially true in crisis, as they happen or are at least to be expected in the context of transitional rituals (cf. Sennett, 2015,

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p.  202). Fundamental to our lives is also that groups are always rebuilding and groups are dying. We go to school and leave our class group after a few years. We connect as a couple, and then one partner dies or one breaks up. Both building and breaking down social networks is risky, and it happens all the time. Basically, like Turner (see Schomburg-Scherff in Turner, 1969/1989, p. 200), I question what society actually is. Is it a harmoniously integrated system, or is it rather a conflictual process? “Every person lives in a world social encounter that brings him into direct or indirect contact with other people” (Goffmann, 1986, p. 10). This may sound trite now, but nevertheless it is important not to simply take our social lives for granted. In this regard, “mutual recognition of behavioral strategies […] has an important stabilizing effect on encounters” (Goffmann, 1986, p. 17). Encounters are intrinsically risky among humans, and we need a certain regularity, which means recognizing that for the other party’s behavior not to be constantly involved in conflictual encounters. These encounters are often about status negotiations and status shifts, which are summed up and accumulated in the moment of a ritual. At the same time, transitional rituals also provide a kind of compensation, as can be seen in the ritual of formalised thank-you speeches, the forgiveness and apology moments. Gratitude, the request for forgiveness, the reflective conclusion of a sequence play a major role in this respect in order to achieve change without destabilising the social system (cf. Goffmann, 1986, p. 26 ff.). They are often an essential part of transitional rituals and also fundamentally common in rituals, such as the annual Day of Atonement of the Jews or Thanksgiving (cf. Brudereck, 2018, p. 83). […] one makes then already that one already one hour before, that then those, which would like to take leave, come again past, i.e. then also one says yes also, so that the soul can have its peace, that one is in the clear, yes? If one has, for example, mutually, I don’t know what’s wrong, you can often, once again, so to speak, in the clear, and hope and pray, ask for forgiveness, so to speak.” “[…] especially death is such a point where just a lot of religion comes into play again, you have then all the time, Koran recitations, supplications, that you ask for forgiveness, that you are in the clear, that you come to terms with the deceased […] (Erva Z. 352 ff. and 388 ff.).

In this process, of course, feelings play a role, but interestingly, in the ritual feelings are not evoked so much, above all they are given a controlled space for these feelings (cf. Goffmann, 1986, p. 29). It would be extraordinarily difficult to produce pain, comfort etc. correctly and to the minute safely, giving the space with a possibility of variance is much easier. This is on the one hand a regulation of society, but also the self-regulation of individuals (cf. Goffmann, 1986, p. 52).

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The ritual order is thus a strategy of societies to survive adjustments (cf. Goffmann, 1986, p. 50). In part, these rituals are not necessarily explicit, they are not necessarily recognized as such even by the participants, only that they are important, in part indispensable (cf. Kaiser, 2017, p. 11). Here, it is not so much a matter of negotiating facts, but of negotiating ideas, which are essentially protected and further developed through certain communication strategies (cf. Goffmann, 1986, p. 51). Basically, our social life, “even in its seemingly quiet moments, is characteristically rich in social drama. It is as if each of us has a ‘war face’ and a ‘peace face,’ we are programmed for cooperation but prepared for conflict. Social drama represents the original form of conflict that endures through all time” (Turner, 1982, p. 14). Rituals are one form of this representation and control. Transitional rituals take place at the moment when a new group emerges or when the group undergoes a serious transformation. They have therefore not only a social function for the individual, but above all also for the group or for the competing groups: In transitional rituals we find a social matrix structure: • • • •

we celebrate in a religiously traditional way, we celebrate family traditions, we celebrate partly in the traditions of our gender. we celebrate in a culturally and nationally traditional way, as my interviewee Erva describes it, for example, in light of the question of framing circumcision:

“I come from a Turkish background […]” (Z. 97 f.) “with us Turks it is often like this” (Z. 264)

These socializers control each other at a festival. If my family demands that I wear boxer shorts to a wedding, I can refuse with the authority of traditional religion. By the legal system, the family is also taken out of its private capsule and controlled in rituals, in my opinion, quite rightly. Even if your family means a lot to you, you don’t have to go along with everything. If my religion requires me to seriously injure myself or be seriously injured during an initiation into adulthood, then the legislature can prevent that, as it does with genital mutilation, for example. If the tradition of my gender requires me to relinquish certain civil rights after a change of status, then I can demand them as part of my affiliation with a particular state. Even if I am religious, I don’t have to go along with everything.

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Yet these systems are in constant negotiation with each other, as we see, for example, in the debate about the circumcision of Jewish boys. Here in Germany, the legislator has given religion priority over the right of male children to self-­ determination over their own bodies, as my Jewish interviewee Joshua is well aware (Joshua Z. 261; Miri Z. 278 ff.), but he too gives the “bodily integrity of the child” (ibid.) a lower priority than following a religious rule on group membership. Quite in contrast to Miri: Because I think that’s a… an assault that can’t be consented to voluntarily, and I do think that’s a so… I’m for a sexual right of self-determination and…. I would… Well, I’m actually completely against it, I don’t want children to have to go through such an experience at that age, I think they can decide then when they are older… (Miri Z. 278)

Social realities are concretized, sensualized through rituals • • • • •

such as the concepts of responsibility and fidelity in wedding ceremonies, status and power in welcoming rituals and appointment ceremonies, change of status, for example, through initiation rituals and funeral ceremonies, belonging, for example, through circumcision and baptism ceremonies, justice, fairness and debt relief, for example, through ritualized court proceedings or even notarial procedures, • the powerful and our powerlessness through sacrifices and penitential ceremonies. (cf. Singer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 18 f.). Our perceptions consist of “extraordinarily complex, constructive processes based on a wealth of implicit prior knowledge.” (Singer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p.  15)  – even though we often take this perception for ‘the truth’. “Rituals are necessary to link social realities, which can only be experienced indirectly, with the sensually perceptible world […]. Accordingly, only rituals make these realities generally graspable and binding” (Singer in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 2011, p. 15). At the same time, religiously traditional transitional rituals today document a certain equality of all people before God – at least in Germany everyone can be baptized and buried religiously, regardless of social status, origin, or financial means. Even those who no longer have any relatives and die poor are buried with a prayer of their religion, if their religiosity is documented. A couple who wish to be married according to their religious traditions can do so, at least within the framework of religious laws. I emphasize this so explicitly here because that is not open

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to the many mixed-religious couples with it, depending on their religion, unless they negotiate something privately. That transitional rituals are open to all is not the case, both historically and in international perspective, and this has painfully documented their inequality time and again (cf. Brudereck, 2018, p. 28 and her wonderful comments on Valentine’s Day), as experienced by the American poet Steinbeck in his early novella “The Pearl” (1947), in which a poor couple is denied marriage in church. My interview partners Mark and Joshua also emphasize this aspect (cf. Mark Z. 535): O. k. I. e., you didn’t have a bar mitzvah at all? Yes, I did, but it wasn’t a… it wasn’t a big story, my parents were rather poor, and it wasn’t celebrated. (Joshua Z. 52 ff., cf. his, Z. 150)

The concept of risky opportunities has meanwhile become an established term, as a designation also for the dynamics that the social system of our time holds in store for the individual as well as the group (cf. Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1994, p. 115 f.; Keupp in ibid., p. 337 f.): Instead of compulsory communities, communities of choice emerge – one no longer remains attached to a specific context throughout one’s life, but can also change. The role models become more diffuse on the one hand, but at the same time more interchangeable. Bonds become more variable, roles more blurred, strata fragment into milieus and scenes (cf. Bilden in Bilden & Keupp, 2006, p. 22).With the decline of traditional stabilizers, we also find at the same time a great longing for them, which expresses itself on the one hand in a return to the old forms, and on the other hand in the search for new forms of socialization. Transitional rituals are about understanding who I am now or am becoming, I also experience who others are and are becoming. I witness my own life and the lives of others in its developments marked as essential and honored by a celebration.

16.2 Transitional Rituals as Social Initiation Processes Rituals create and confirm bonds. Socialization refers to “the process by which an individual is incorporated into a social group by recognizing and assimilating the norms that apply in that social group, especially the role expectations directed at the individual as the holder of a particular position, the skills required to fulfill those norms and expectations, and

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the values and beliefs belonging to the culture of the group” (Schibilsky & Volzke, 1993, p. 83). In the meantime, it has become apparent that socialisation processes are by no means over when a person has outgrown adolescence. In the sense of the concept of lifelong development or at least the ability of a person to develop as an “open system” (cf. Bilden in Bilden & Keupp, 2006, p. 41), socialisation is also a lifelong process (cf. Keupp in Bilden & Keupp, 2006, p. 61). Everyone is repeatedly and sometimes in parallel initiand into different roles and states of being in the course of his or her life. The pressure of socialisation does not end with adulthood – our milieus and roles through which we pass in the course of life are too diverse and too little fixed for that. Whereas the role of mother of adult children was probably relatively fixed in the past, it is now a flexible model with many possibilities for shaping it. Traditionally, ideological carrier systems such as family, school and religious community are cited as important determinants of socialisation. And this is where rituals come into play, for example at school enrolment: […] where a stage of life begins, yes, where you have to get used to other times to other people who have to tell you something, to the structure school is important, and something like that is important, also to celebrate, to bring that so to speak initiation-­ wise on a good way […]. (Thomas Z. 688 ff.) ….one of the great psychological difficulties is, after all, to experience dissonance and not to finish things, and for that a ritual is of course a great vehicle, I’ll say, I won’t necessarily call it a ritual for that reason, but to put in small start or end points, that can be a celebration, that can be… a gesture. (Thomas Z. 715)

Everything we gain, we gain in these “secondhand shops of socialization, upbringing, tradition” (Soeffner, 1992, p.  77), prefabricated, preformed, connoted with values, provided with a history and a field of meaning – even if we can increasingly choose from a rich menu of alternatives. The socializing, group-integrating power of religious communities apparently draws substantially from the forms and practices they use: religions function in “rituals and other schemes of action […] as ‘socialization systems’ […] of ‘control’ and direction of ‘life conduct’ as well as ‘control of social relations’” (Ebertz in Wohlrab Sahr, 1992, p. 57). Of course, elements of social control are also present in ritual. In this context, rituals appear both as mediators and as reinforcers of socialization that conforms to society. In this context, churches as religious institutions seem to become increasingly unimportant as socialization agencies (cf. Fromm, 1941/1983, p. 245). This presumably does not apply to Islam; for Judaism no assessment can be given in my opinion. What accompanied earlier generations

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as a matter of course, what was an important factor in the life of the individual and the collective surrounding him, seems today obviously to have sunk to private insignificance. Essential access to the social impact of transitional rituals is provided by an analysis of the dynamics of socialisation. Forms that the individual finds, the situational context, the historical and current interaction networks, the prevailing system form a “socio-historical a priori” (Luckmann, 1991), which does not completely determine the various phases of individual socialization, but largely figures them out. The interaction space of the respective concrete everyday life is thereby – socializing – simultaneously continuously changed by the socialized individual in feedback processes (cf. van Dülmen, 1989, p. 12 f.). Transitional rituals, as bridgekeepers of important life steps, are also involved in socialization. In a sense, they map a life into different landscapes – and also signal which area one is currently in. The analysis of their dynamics can thus help at least a little to untangle the tangle of the most diverse socializers: The life-accompanying, life-guiding transitional rituals of religious institutions continue to be used, albeit increasingly less so. At the interfaces between one stage of life and another, they have long ceased to hold an exclusive position, but they still hold a prominent interface. Thus we are presented with the paradoxical picture that the official canon of values of the Christian denominations in particular is less and less supported by its members, but its transitional rituals are still used. As I quoted Paul Willis earlier with his ethnographic explorations of rockers – at the breaking points of life, religiously traditional transitional rituals, which in contrast to individual handicraft rituals still bring with them a certain residual familiarity, are still in demand. Within the framework of such socialization processes, rituals initiate and promote, for example, gendering processes, i.e. processes in which a person develops a social gender, as one of the central motifs of many initiation rituals. This is still not completely out of sight in our culture, the churches and synagogues and mosques are places where the dynamics and the relationship of the sexes to each other are formally regulated and controlled, furthermore (cf. Parsons, 1969 quoted in Lorenzer, 1981, p. 142). Transitional rituals, on the one hand, promote the departure from an old life pattern and the entrance into a socialization step – for example, the departure from childhood and the entrance into the pubertal maturity phase, secure the initiate and the circle of other important ones during the liminal state of suspension – today, for example, at least potentially in the preparation time for the rituals of maturity – and guide them out of the state of suspension again afterwards – in the past, for exam-

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ple, through the fixed end of mourning periods. Transitional rituals thus form a bridge from one role to another, and ensure that an initiate moves safely from one role to another (cf. van Gennep, 1908/1960, p. 3), thus reducing the risk that someone will err in the linear phase. Transitionals are occasions for more or less public festivities, for public banquets, for celebrations that spill out beyond one’s own home, for rich festive communities, which then sometimes also constitute new bonds, as my atheist interview partner describes several times: Yes, but since then we’ve also had a great house community, so that it wasn’t even just the apartment that was closed off, but that at that time the five parties who lived there were from that day on – were namely also all invited, were namely a good house community, that was good, and that was also formative for the start here in xx. (Thomas Z. 114 ff., cf. also Z. 58, 104)

Transitional rituals thus promote our becoming human as social beings, but partly at the price of an insufficiently exploited individualization. This may be at least one possible explanation for why many of the old rituals are no longer in use – in a strong individualization of parent-child relationships, for example, a standardized farewell to children into adulthood is no longer appropriate; against the background of the diversification of possible, socially accepted premarital relationships, a standardized engagement time seems antiquated to many. Nevertheless, modules of the old transitional rituals are increasingly resorted to – their symbols – rings, bridal veil, baptismal gown and border – continue to be cultivated. Baptismal gown, confirmation suit, wedding dress, death dress  – on-­ dress, on-dress, on-dress (I have already discussed this here several times) – in all cultures they are clear signs of the new socialisation step and thus of the new role, in which the change of identity between one stage of life and the next is actually made visible (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 162 f.). In such sign acts, rituals prevent role diffusions and thus defuse socialization problems – at least they could, as the interviewee Erika from the 1997 series (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 173) and my interviewee Martha from the 2020 series emphasize: Did that time, was a wedding still something totally changing in your life? Or the religious thing, how important was the religious thing to you? Yes, also important, also important, but as I said, it was more, son festival just. […] It was also important. …. […] It was also important, when I think back… it was just a new phase of life… you were really responsible for yourself. Then the family no longer had such importance, even if we were always very close as a family […]. (Martha Z. 362 ff.)

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Uncertainties are thereby mitigated, or, in another perspective, decision spaces are also clouded, so that ‘the one’ path is visible: “The transitionals of the individual life cycle – birth, sexual maturity, entry into adulthood, death – are surrounded in all societies by rituals that banish the associated uncertainties, structure the life of the individual, insert it into the supra-individual order of the community, and thereby reproduce it in turn anew each time” (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 55). As pre-, meta-, and post-familial secondary socialization tools, transitional rituals provide pre-formed patterns of interpretation and action after role change that reliably signal to the group what has changed and how the change is to be understood. After the transition is complete, the new role is additionally consolidated by fixed types of expectations. The society, the group, the milieu now expects the individual to “conform his behavior to traditional norms and standards which bind all holders of social positions into a system of such position” (Turner, 1969/1989, p. 94 f.). Transitional rituals thus stabilise the initiate in his new role – he knows how he now has to conduct himself in his newly defined role, the others know how they now have to behave towards him or what changes in behaviour might be desirable. Transitional rituals thus order and stabilize the changed relationship of the initiate to the circle of significant others after the role passage. The group has time to get used to the changed status, the changed role of the initiate. At the same time, some legal acts are associated with it – such as a change in legal status. A ritual is also relevant to the group in the case of the death of a person: even here the relationship between the dead person and the bereaved – in addition the bereaved in the group dynamics changed by the death  – must be reordered (cf. Böhm in Wohlrab-Sahr, 1992, p. 189). Not only status and role shifts within the network, but also additions and departures must finally be processed. Participation in such rituals still expresses social conformity today, demonstrating loyalty to the family, for example (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 59). This does not have to result in a ‘deprivation of freedom’ with the help of a renewed fixation, but can certainly also lead to liberation from dependencies: “The aim of transitional rituals was not, however, as we might assume today, to wear down the initiates until they became willing subjects of an existing social order. Transitional rituals served primarily to liberate people from dependencies, whether, in the case of ‘puberty rituals,’ from their family of origin, or, in the case of vocation rituals, from vanity, ambition, and comfort, that is, the experience of naked, independent existence” (Schellenbaum, 1992, p.  274). Although I do not fully share Schellenbaum’s idealism: Whether a specific ritual has a cementing or stabilizing effect lies more than ever in the context of the ritual, including the motivation of the initiand and the psychosocial framework.

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Processes that are more on the periphery of the actual ritual can also have a deepening effect on socialisation, rituals such as sponsorship or the baptismal font renewal as a process of reassurance (this is how it was described in two interviews in the 1997 series, cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 174). This becomes visible when, for example, baptism is consciously used by the celebrants to give the congregation the opportunity for baptismal renewal, or couples remember their relationship history in the context of a wedding celebration, the guest at a bar mitzvah is perhaps called to the Torah for the first time since his or her own, etc. Socialization processes today are carried by many alternative institutions. Where religious institutions do not socialize, other institutions, military, occupation, digital community, etc. socialize. The decline of religious institutional socialization often leads to an influx of unofficial, usually more uncontrolled socializers: “While the processes of individualization dissolve socially predetermined biographies into self-produced ones, institutional dependence and standardization simultaneously progress: a new, contradictory form of socialization of individuals emerges” (Bilden in Bilden & Keupp, 2006, p. 23). The most diverse socialization forms a network of directly and indirectly mediated socialization, in which direct causal relationships must remain hopeless to trace: “The individual process of civilization, like the social one, still takes place to a large extent blindly” (Elias, 1979, p. 332; cf. Scheler in Congar, 1964, p. 22). The obscurantist potential of socialization has often been described. I will spare myself repeating the arguments here. What is clear is that only an effortfully reflective approach to socializers and their alternatives can prevent such an abuse of power (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 30).

16.3 Group Bonding Families and transitional rituals are intimately related because families go through multiple processes of change in which disengagement, attachment, dismissal, and welcome play important roles. As my atheist interview partner Thomas describes it: And we have our rituals, but they’re more…. different kind of, I don’t know… we really put a lot of time into having certain…. periods of time to ourselves. When [daughter] is in bed, I almost always read to her, meanwhile she sometimes reads to me. And that’s nice, that’s really quality time. …. (Z. 332 f.)

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And later he describes the institutionalized regular trips with his old friend that serve to regularly update and maintain the relationship: At least once a year we meet for three days and pull out, and that is institutionalized for us a time out, and we talk about what is important to us […]. (Thomas Z. 642 f.)

This is where rituals provide something very essential: Windows of time. Windows of time to live the relationship apart from functionalities, windows of time to celebrate the relationship, not just manage it. At this point, my interviews offer me a kind of useful insights on the side, because these journeys are parts of the cyclical rituals of their friendship, do not actually belong to my topic, but are still very exciting and instructive. In the context of role change, status change or the fluctuation of group members, the stability of a group is always threatened. With a greater diversification of the social environment, religiously traditional group ties are also becoming more and more vulnerable in our country, and their superstructure of meaning and values are often no longer capable of consensus. This is also evident among my interview partners in the 2020 series: But I think rites are significant, I have to say, so I’m not in the sense I’m not up to speed with my times maybe, um. For what? Yeah, that’s not fashionable anymore. But what do you consider them significant for? Yes, for orientation. Yes, I think that also a rite establishes commonality, yes? Everything is problematic when there is a lack of understanding, and of abilities, I don’t mean intellectual abilities now, but because the rite is so, as if sealed off. (Markus Z. 129 ff.)

An essential factor for the protection of a unifying context seems to be the lived unity under a metaphor: through metaphors rituals link smaller groups (for example families) to larger ethnic or cultural unities – this idea from mass psychology was already taken up by Freud (cf. Freud, 1921, p. 81; Soeffner in EAT, 1996). Transitional rituals have a group-stabilizing effect in this respect  – they help to “interpret reality in a certain way” (Mitchell, 1995, p. 268) within a group by providing notions of normality (cf. Douglas, 1974, p. 59; Grün, 1997, p. 67). In the metaphor used, essential group valuation and group norms present themselves. In the context of metaphorical actions, not only the individual event is sanctioned, but at the same time the underlying value matrix that makes the event worthy of sanction in the first place. Here, important group values are expressed, evaluated and confirmed (cf. Barz, 1995, p. 20; Paul, 1990, p. 46). In the institution

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and use of specific transitional rituals, what is relevant to the social order of a group is revealed: ‘In ritual people express what moves them most, and since it is a more conventional and obligatory form of expression, it is in ritual that group values are revealed.’ “I see in the study of ritual the key to understanding the inner constitution of human societies” (Wilson quoted in Turner, 1969/1989, p. 13). Rituals, then, are on the one hand lived attitudes about which there is consensus in the group: “The symbol contains the possibility of comprehensive communion, realized through the believing gesture, beyond all conceptual to articulation. That is why the simple faithful can pass over the whole tradition, even if they are quite ignorant as to the terms and subtleties of dogmatics” (Congar, 1964, p.  71 f.). However, with the dwindling of cross-milieu symbols, this effect is threatened: “One of the serious problems of our time is the dwindling of connectedness through common symbols” (Douglas, 1974, p. 11). Group values are disintegrating, under the form the content has disappeared – at the same time new practices with ritual or even quasi-ritual connotations are emerging in milieus. But this does not overcome the division of a society into societies. And this problem, which was already apparent in 1997, has become even more acute in 2020. Of course, the reasons for this do not lie purely in the disappearance of rituals that are shared and carried across groups, of course. But rituals that could be shared by all could weld societies together again (cf. Nussbaum, 2016). This becomes visible, for example, in Joshua, my Jewish interview partner (cf. Joshua Z. 122). On the other hand, even without a common conviction, the group can be maintained through common practice and survive lean times (cf. Mitchell, 1995, p. 268). According to Luckmann, rituals, including transitional rituals, serve above all to synchronise interaction and thus ultimately to make the survival of the group more likely (cf. ders. 1991, p. 61; Nowottny, 1993, p. 32 f.). This also happens through basal common actions. Example: singing together, as I have already explained. The creation of a common social time, for example through festivals, the shared non-everyday, thus seems to be fundamental for the constitution and stabilization of a group: because the experience of the rhythms of synchronized time helps to share experiences and narratives and thus to synchronize general experiences. Synchronized time, and the interaction it inevitably entails, is a prerequisite for any group or its continued existence. (cf. Luckmann, 1991, p. 155). The same actions in a standardized context alone are capable of promoting group feeling and thus the continuance of the group – this is becoming increasingly explosive in times of high fluctuation and diversification: “Increasingly, family membership is based not on blood ties, physical proximity, and shared allegiance to occupations and careers […] but on ritual events that bring people together, often from great distances” (Mitchell, 1995, p. 267). This is true of cyclical rituals such as Christmas, but also

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of weddings and funerals, where many children and in-laws experience the whole kin for the first time. This is how one describes Muslim interviewee Tarek about the first steps into his arranged marriage: So yet marriage is very important in Islam, they say you don’t just get married to the one woman, but also at the same time you form a kinship with all the family members of the woman, but also vice versa as well. That’s why it’s very important, especially with the longevity of marriage, that families get along with each other, that the parents of girls and of boys, also daughters…. This is also called like-minded, so to speak… Same level, same layer what do I know, so what do I know scientifically. (Tarek Z. 305 ff.)

Of course, the family has a very different meaning for each individual. Linear rituals repeatedly set the social clock, creating a common time for group members with many proper times (cf. Nowottny, 1993). Han uses this term differently, proper time as common time of the group, but comes to the same conclusions (cf. Han, 2019, p. 45). It is precisely in their cyclical repetition that transitional rituals as a group norm also become effective in shaping individual biography: “Thanks to the ritual, the ‘detached’ past of the myth […] disposes of the ‘connected’ past that unites the dead and the living across the generations” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962, p. 273). However, social time always implies a corset into which the individual is forced. There is room for individuality, a time of one’s own, an individual biography only in exceptional cases (cf. Soeffner, 1992, p. 35). I think this is also true today – only the standardization of life courses is less recognizable due to the diversification of the social environment. Transitional rituals cushion systemic ambivalences and an exacerbation of group crises (cf. Iwanow, 1993, p. 225; Szasz, 1974, p. 36), they mediate between competition and cooperation (cf. Sennett, 2015, p. 132), and thus have an important function for status regulation. Even seemingly ‘hollow rituals’, ‘meaningless formalisms’ have an important function in this time: “Rationalism and – more recently – the 1968 movement expose many rituals as meaningless and purposeless, i.e., rites were viewed from the perspective of yield, success and functionality. […] What was overlooked, however, was their emotional content. To channel despair, to strengthen group feeling, to counteract the enervating passive waiting and monotony of everyday life” (Friesen, 1996). Remember when you might have been doing all sorts of nonsense with siblings, friends, or family, and having a gorgeous time in that shared nonsense? This shows the power of sharing itself, and especially of sharing nonsense. Because sharing

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something, time, touch, or certain rationally meaningless action is one of the central means of group bonding. When we lose that, we lose some of our emotionality in groups. This bond is particularly interesting when it involves people who are not bound to us by legal or biological ties, such as friends. The importance of the presence of friends during transitional rituals is described explicitly in several interviews (for example in the interviews with Tarek Z. 397 ff.; Thomas Z. 106 ff. and Miri Z. 397), to name just a few examples. These passages prove for me the importance of friendships as self-acquired resources, and this is of course again a story that, to spin it adequately further, unfortunately lacks space here. This sharing can be small marginal rituals, such as when someone, in the context of a transitional ritual, aims for a table reserved in the name of a group or family in a restaurant, and then identifies himself as a member of this group, or also as a member of a certain festive company through appropriate festive clothing; when a funeral party dresses in mourning pennants or a wedding party dresses in bridal pennants, etc. This is not the case with many transitional rituals. It is not for nothing that many transitional rituals pay attention to such small markings. With a uniform presentation to the outside, one has created something like a basic corporate identity. Above my desk hangs a small toy airplane, a seaplane, in yellow. When our father died, my brother spray-painted a whole box of little toy models like that yellow, so they would be the color of one of our father’s beloved airplanes. All the mourners got one of those planes at the end of the service. I see it on friends and family members homes during visits. And in these moments I realize that we shared a central moment in my biography. Thus, transitional rituals are able to span the gap between personal and individual paradigms. During a transitional ritual, the individuality of at least the significant others, but sometimes also that of the actual addressees of the ritual, is usually completely forgotten. Not his status and role, but his little tics and idiosyncrasies. A kind of castle peace prevails, in which the individual is perceived at best in his function, but not in his possibly fit-problematic individuality. This facilitates the adoption and transmission of certain group values. Experiences of dissonance and experiences are re-evaluated if necessary. Transitional rituals thereby serve in a certain way as a substitute for plausibility: “[…] social arrangements [are] legitimized by linking the present with the ‘sacred past’” (Mitchell, 1995, p. 68). The pressure of plausibility is reduced, group positions are less open to attack and thus more stable: “Religions speak with absolute authority, and they express this not only with words but also with symbols and territories, rites and festivals – that is, rationally and emotionally. […] Religion is

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able to create a home of trust, faith, certainty, ego-strength, security and hope through common symbols, rituals, experiences, goals: a spiritual community and home” (Küng, 1992, p. 298). Now Küng is undoubtedly also arguing pro domo, he is a Catholic theologian, and for him it is absolutely desirable that his religion fulfill such a function. But at least as a foil of expectations his remarks are still interesting. What can religion do? That is far too big and far too general a question. So, in the context of my work, what can religious practices do in a social context? It is precisely in their misleading, hiding, reality-distorting effect that transitional rituals as the cement of dysfunctional families have been repeatedly thematized by writers such as Thomas Bernhard (cf. Heiler, 1918, p. 407; Moser, 1993, 24 f.). The group-binding power of rituals is always ambivalent – here a differentiated, for instance ethnographic view is helpful. Neither a rigorous condemnation as mass psychological tools, nor their glorification as magical means to create community, does them justice (cf. Grün, 1997, p.  91). The question of the value of marking and safeguarding is always posed to the individual in each case. Rituals can be new ways of bonding, especially in the attachment-critical modern age. But the way in which such bonds are dealt with, their respective use, is highly individual: one person may want to cement bonds that have become insecure by means of a ritual and eliminate his latent insecurity through such a fact-creating act, while another sees in the course of reflexive modernity the chance for a more independent, possibly freer way of dealing with rituals. In the 2020 series, no one told of having been forced into a particular ritual, although it can be assumed that for those who experienced their childhood in the 1950s, 1960s, this must certainly have been the case to some extent. But all of them report a decidedly free decision and often also very individual rituals. The public character of the rituals is important here  – a transitional ritual is potentially always a large event at which many people from the close circle are present. Making something public is an important means of controlling it and not letting it drift into the uncontrollable. Spoken words make the content of what is said official-as one 2019 cinema title put it, “The spoken word counts” (Çatak & Mohl, 2019; cf. Bach, 1990, pp. 9–24). “Strong drives and emotions linked to human physiology, especially procreation, are stripped of their antisocial quality in ritual and linked to components of the normative order. This is thus enriched with borrowed vitality, making what Durkheim calls the ‘obligatory’ desirable. Symbols are both the result and the initiator of this process and summarize its features” (Turner, 1969/1989, p. 56). In a sense, homo socialis is constantly guarded, controlled, reconstructed by means of such practices (cf. Soeffner in EAT, 1996; Willis, 1981, p. 241).

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Even the self-presentation of a group in a uniform form in demarcation to the outside can stabilize it. Traditions and rituals as part of this tradition secure not only individual, but above all collective identity: “Research finding […] show that even people caught up in rapid social change carried over many aspects of their process of adaptation to changes” (Luckmann, 1991, p. 168; cf. Freud, 1921, p. 81; Stephenson, 1995, p.  37). Controlled, measured communication with dissenters can be an important way of assuring one’s own group identity. It is certainly a way, especially in the context of views, “to reassure oneself of certain of one’s own attitudes, assumptions, and meaning” (Willis, 1981, p. 156). Not only controlled contact, but also controlled avoidance of contact can contrastingly bind a group together, at least for a while: “The dark skin, the foreign customs, the strange food, all testify to a very different way of understanding life, a very different way of being-in-the-world. Too close a contact or too empathetic an attempt to understand would have infected them (the motorcycle guys) in such a way that they would have adopted some of these foreign definitions into their own way of life. In a sense, this would have undermined the permanence of their own world” (Willis, 1981, p. 54). Certain avoidance strategies and fears of contact from believers to non-believers, from Christians to Christians in semi-distance can be explained by such mechanisms. Rituals thus secure the permanence of one’s own world. The fear of otherness secures so-being. Group identity is not only created by attribution, but essentially also in the negation, of the so not, of the “we are not …”. It increases the group bonding by creating a protected, exclusive knowledge space to which others have no access – just think of the secret societies. Even seemingly meaningless sign acts that strangers to the group do not understand can have this purpose, as I just explained with my remarks on the meaning of nonsense. After all, the point is not that this knowledge would be useful in any way, but merely that it exists. This process is somewhat reminiscent of the secret language that some children develop to demarcate their world from that of adults – even if the contents are rather unspectacular (though I can only speak to this as a former member of the Frolic Gang). Thus, certain rituals strengthen group bonding for the sole reason: “because members of other cultures see no meaning in them” (Douglas, 1974, p. 62). An ethnologist’s joke is also instructive in terms of group delimitation through so-called meaningless rituals: There is the story of the soldier who visited the grave of a former comrade in a foreign land to decorate it with flowers. On his way he met a native who wanted to bring a bowl of rice to the grave of his ancestor. The soldier stopped him and tried to make him understand the absurdity of what he was doing: ‘When do you think,’ he asked, ‘your ancestors will come out of the grave to eat this?’ ‘At the same time that your friend comes out to smell the flowers.’ (Brasch, 1968, p. 73)

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Even today, such actions are found in groups in order to seal themselves off from the outside world by using exclusive signs that are incomprehensible to the outside world  – almost every growing generation (I suspect every generation) develops new signs and sign actions. Take, for example, the complicated and apparently ever-changing handshakes of youth culture today. Intelligibility is not necessarily a factor here. Even the outdated Christian rituals are no longer understandable to many Christian socialized people today – who are becoming fewer and fewer. The psychosocial factors that accompany them become major guiding factors in their effectiveness.

16.4 Opportunities and Risks of Initiation Processes Today We all live provisionally […] one lives only once, and this once we live provisionally, waiting in vain for the day when true life is to begin. Thus the years pass, and perhaps we shall die without ever having lived. […] One must say: enough. From today. (Silone, 1955/1984, p. 42)

In this work I have spoken about rituals of maturation such as communion, confirmation, bar or bad mitzvah. What needs to be made clear here is that once a ritual of maturity has begun, it is difficult to end it again with all the group dynamics if the initiator perhaps has doubts in the middle of it and wants to go more slowly than the group. And in my opinion, this is true for all rites of passage – we don’t just stop in the middle, whether it’s a baptism, a wedding or a funeral. In fact, this coincides with my experiences with the confirmation in the Protestant church, into which I was socialized as a teenager. In this process, I was very disturbed at the time that although a yes was the goal, I was not given an official opportunity to decide against it at any moment of this process, especially not at the cumulative ceremony. Thus, at that time, the decision in favour also seemed to me to be inauthentic. Focusing in the here and now of transitional rituals always contains the danger of living beyond it, of the wrong or too quickly made decision in peer pressure. Hardly anyone will come out of the closet in confirmation class, for example – if he even realizes that he is simply not yet ready with his yes to faith, for me that was a formative experience. Hardly anyone will postpone an already planned wedding, when everything is already prepared (and paid for), because of a flare-up of insecurity. Rituals can have both happy and unhappy dynamics in this regard  – happy

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because they counteract the fear of jumping over the transitional with a kind of inevitable flow – it’s just not easy to jump off a transitional ritual that’s starting up – unhappy where there’s pressure, where there’s cementing and de-­flexibilization. Just as hasty cementing can be repressive and unproductive, a lack of forms can lead to the avoidance of life steps and developments: “All traditional societies were aware of the danger that people could enter adult status without being truly adult, that is, without taking responsibility for themselves and the community. For this reason they wound initiation rituals” (Schellenbaum, 1992, p.  273). Freedom of choice, or the illusion of freedom of choice, also appears prominently in most of the interviews in the 1997 series (see Kiss, 1997, p. 176). Undoubtedly, it carries opportunities and risks. One no longer wants to be forced into something – where pressure is exerted, rituals become suspect. Regardless of any freedom of choice, there is also today a certain compulsion to socialization – simply by the fact that we as human beings are always also social people and pass through different worlds in the course of our lives. In this context, religiously transmitted socialization always also means a certain amount of socialization pressure; this becomes visible in interviews of the 1997 series (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 176), while at least among the interviewees of the 2020 series this pressure apparently no longer exists. A later laborious liberation, as I was told by my Orthodox religiously educated father and his youngest brother, seems to be no longer an issue in the majority in Germany. The risk lies in the fact that the ‘freedom of’ perhaps is still learned, to the freedom to however on the competences, the pressure from the outside or also the desire are missing. Nobody has to learn today to live a couple relationship, he can also remain single, nobody has to become mother, father, accompany the dying of his parents. This gains explosive force today, for example, in view of the increasing number of nest-hoppers who live with their parents even in their late twenties – a tendency that was already noted in 1997 and has remained the same in 2020 – or those who cannot detach themselves from a close person even years after his or her death. They seem like prisoners in the indifferent second phase of transitional rituals, but even whether this is so is hard to say for sure de facto. For the fact that groups, roles and identities have become more individual and variable, successful socialization can hardly be stated with certainty. It has become more difficult, both for the individual and for the community, to determine what constitutes successful socialization and when it may be fragmentary or a failure. For example, it is increasingly difficult to define when someone is truly an adult, as different maturation processes have shifted into one another. Even a 50-year-old can still complete an education today – if you want to, you can still start a new life at 70, thanks to the significant increase in life expectancy. Second or third marriages, truncated and stepfamilies continue to be far more com-

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mon than templates from the mass media, not least the templates in our heads, suggest to us – even if the mass media have apparently reacted to this. An ­interesting phenomenon here are hen parties, where it is well known that this transitional is sometimes celebrated quite excessively at the preliminal stage, before the border. The proliferation of ‘love locks’ on bridges, as we also find here in Cologne on one of our main bridges, is also evidence of the desire to nevertheless ascribe and secure an eternity to a form of life whose fragility is generally known, with a seemingly indissoluble or difficult-to-dissolve metaphor. Socialisation problems are increasingly appearing at transitionals that did not exist in the past. Especially due to the individualization of life courses, it seems to be more difficult than ever for the individual to find sustainable, living bridges between past and future, between one stage of life and another, but also between oneself and other people. The pugnacious “Enough. From today on.” Silones is harder today than ever before. Thus, especially today, socialization has apparently become a process that rarely succeeds completely: “The church relationship established by baptism and passed on in church socialization is not continued unbroken beyond confirmation the following decisive biographical changes in youth” (EKD, 1993, p. 50). I found an important thought on this in Sachße: “Is there a need for rituals at the border from childhood to sexual maturity, which is no longer exhaustively fulfilled with communion, confirmation and youth consecration, so that young people develop forms of autoinitiation?” (Bürgin, 1991, in Sachsse in Sachsse & Herbold, 2016, p. 7) He refers here to the accumulation of self-injurious acts at the boundary between childhood and adolescence, and to the observation that in many cultures injuries such as self-injury are ritually employed precisely at this place. (Re-)socialization processes are likely to become increasingly important where exclusively meant rituals of uniquely meant life transitionals become variable, repeatable life models. Our relationship to our own biographical progress and achievements will possibly continue to become, and more strongly, a kind of on-off relationship in which the perceived coherence of the life model becomes more fragile. The socialization into the Christian churches appears again and again fragile and relatable with my interview partners from 2020, a tendency that was already visible in the 1997 series (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 179 f.). The congregational orientation of Christianity can here possibly lead to further break-offs in the case of an already very fragile connection. Apart from the socialization so also a resocialization would be desirable for instance in the context of relocations. Since the bond to religion is obviously already fragile, it is probably further endangered by the high geographical and social mobility; this can be seen, for example, in the case of my

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interviewee Viktoria, who, although socialized as a Protestant, essentially follows the religious practice of her husband, who practices Catholicism, without, however, interestingly enough, leaving her church. Since congregations can also provide communities, it seems to me, moreover, against the background of this perspective, important that the religious communities make further efforts to bind their members, some of whom are also lonely, as it becomes visible with Martha, to their church and thus also to care for them. “In much the same way that the universalism of communities is used as a bonding agent as much against the partialization of the individual as against the anonymity of functional and public role action, mass rituals close the dangerous gap between subjective-personal and collective meaning. In the ritual of the public arrangement, closeness and equality of feeling is suggested. In the ‘private sphere’, on the other hand, in the expression of the subjective, it apprenders the collective sense” (Soeffner, 1992, p. 130; cf. Douglas, 1974, p. 123). Transitional rituals safe the group dynamics of a group against an undesired dynamization, which, left unchecked, could lead to the breakup of the group in the medium or long term.

Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals Using the Example of Death and Dying

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17.1 Dying and Death Today Rather than societies for freezing the dead, we should establish societies for discussing the issues of death and dying, encouraging dialogue on these issues, and helping the dying to live with less anxiety until they die. (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 290)

A certain onset liturgy always faces the question of the time of onset of this liturgy. In the following I refrain from a medical definition of death; in principle death is understood as the physical end of life or also the not only temporary extinction of any expression of life (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 238). Death is, next to birth, an existential interruption of life, which, in contrast to births, often does not happen prepared, but for the affected dying as well as relatives happens partly unexpectedly, upsets plans, and makes new ones necessary. That is the special thing about dying situations. Marriages are planned, circumcisions etc., even with births it is clear in our society that they happen comparatively safely within a radius of 4 weeks, but decidedly not death, and even funerals, because they follow and can only be planned to a limited extent: […] so I always claim the first and the last things of life, birth death are actually incomprehensible, that is a mystery […]. (Markus Z. 345 f.)

In part, they are incomprehensible because, as Kübler-Ross writes, “We […] are subconsciously convinced at the deepest bottom of our hearts that we ourselves cannot possibly be struck by death” (Kübler-Ross, 1971/2012, p. 28). Or is it different for you? I actually have a very hard time imagining that. The Museum of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_17

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Sepulchral Culture writes: “All epochs and cultures show that death affects not only the dead, but above all the living. For science, this means that all subjects and fields of research that deal with people and life also have points of contact with death, parting, or finitude” (ibid., 2020). To quote Zinser in addition, “All religions have unfolded more or less elaborate ideas about what to hope for and fear after physical death. They have linked this conception to a host of actions to be ­performed and adhered to by the survivors. Many religions have also established teachings and instructions with which to prepare for death and the afterlife. In philosophy, there is always the suggestion that to philosophize is to learn to die” (Zinser, 2010, p. 257, he writes in the footnote that the latter thought probably first appeared in Plato’s Phaidon). My Muslim interviewee Tarek puts it particularly touchingly in the following words: So when you bring… This experience that you have finished life on this side, then a new era begins. (Tarek, Z. 409 f.)

In this context, rituals can be experienced as unique, which nevertheless have very great cross-cultural similarities, for example the ritual described by Erva as typically Muslim in dealing with the corpse, which could also have been taken from a Jewish description: So, yes, of course, with us it’s like this, the funeral and also the death is a bit different with us, with us the corpse is not brought to [unintelligible], then it is immediately … cleaned, washed, ritually there is then a washing, where one … At the washing then once again supplications for the redemption of the soul, so to speak, gives and also so that the soul finds its peace, and then the corpse is packed in white cloths, and laid in the earth […]. (Erva Z. 319 ff.)

Also interesting here are the comments of my Muslim interview partner Tarek on ritual ablutions: […] the ritual ablution before prayer, where you clean all the sense organs one by one, then there is an ablution after the marital relationship, that is, sexual intercourse, and then an ablution after the man has died. (Tarek Z. 415 ff.)

There is no more collective than individual event like birth and death. And unlike rituals of maturity, for example, it affects a large number of people at this moment: “Compensating the fear of the emptiness of the afterlife with myths corresponds to the gap that death tears in the surviving society, which consequently threatens its vital coherence” (Harth in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 113). Therefore, when we look at dying and death from the perspective of the effects of transitional rituals, we are

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dealing on the one hand with the dying and then the dead, but above all with the relatives. As Gawande writes in his great book Being mortal: “The only way death it’s not meaningless as to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror” (Gawande, 2015, p. 127). It should be noted that it is the setting that matters, from the notification of a death to the leaving of the final event. What is important here  – and of some ­learning value for other transitions and transitional rituals – is that these also intertwine. From the point of view of the immediate bereaved, for example: Planning the structure, in some cases before the death, card design, determining the party (to which event who), funeral selection, finding speakers/clergy, …. Successful forms of farewell seem rare, disappointments frequent. As my atheist interview partner Thomas tells about a pastor’s failed funeral speech: She did it in such a way that afterwards everyone thought it was strange that not even [his daughter’s name] appeared in the speech, not even I appeared, but other things were important, as it turned out afterwards, she had misplaced three slips of paper and did not have them with her… […]. (Thomas Z. 374 ff.)

This seems to me to be a very drastic mistake. In my opinion, these disappointments are all the more serious the rarer the primary contacts with the underlying life events and rituals become (I did not find any valid quantitative surveys on this for the cultural area in focus, so it remains an assessment based on qualitative data). My father worked for some time as a forensic pathologist and it is said, but no one can confirm this anymore, that he transported body parts in the trunk of our family car from time to time, but maybe he just wanted to scare us children. Later, again a tale that no one can verify anymore, during our travels through Africa, there were more often dead bodies lying on the side of the road. I remember feeling a great fear towards dead bodies as a child and teenager. I never walked down a street where there was a hearse. Taylor writes: “For this is one of the most lamentable consequences of our reluctance to talk about death. We have lost our common rituals and our common language of dying, and so we must either improvise or resort to tradition, which we are extremely ambivalent about. By this I mean especially people like me who are not believers” (Taylor, 2017). What is certain is that the death contacts of today’s people have become rarer compared to the previous generation (cf. Zulehner, 1976, p. 202) – and with it the practice in dealing with the event – this tendency is unbroken. Safe behavioural strategies are lacking: “If, however, a death occurs in the life of such a ‘death-inexperienced person’, then in many cases no approovedbehaviour is available to him. This creates a great deal of uncertainty. […] Also in the inter-

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pretation of death the ideological pluralistic society in people hardly comes seriously to the aid. Rather, many interpretations of death exist competitively side by side today” (Zulehner, 1976, pp. 203 and 208). It is well known that experiences of dying, death and funerals, for example, are steadily declining in European countries (cf. Zulehner, 1976). The same might be true for other rituals in the context of life turns. The events become smaller, the number of guests shrinks. Not everyone can afford a ritual with many guests, and many families also live too far apart to ensure the presence of all significant others – demographic effects are likely to play a role here, as are changing, individualised social norms and values about a “proper” wedding or a “good” funeral. In this context, death contacts apparently also facilitate reflection on one’s own transience, as is clear from Mark’s narratives (cf. Mark Z. 367 f.). The topics of dying, death and transience are hidden. What used to be self-­ understood, to develop a sensual feeling for death and transience in the course of one’s own life through the most diverse contacts with death, to accompany the dying of one’s parents, to do it at the open coffin of one’s neighbour, to carry a coffin through a neighbourhood to the cemetery, not shamefully but for everyone to see, to organise and accompany funeral processions even for the unpopular, these ways of honouring death and the dead have almost completely disappeared, and are only revived by some undertakers in the meantime. Undertakers like Christoph Kuckelkorn in Cologne are to be thanked for a funeral culture that has been adapted to today’s needs (cf. ibid. 2020). Since visible death has become too rare, the voyeurism to get something of it seems to have become rather stronger. For example, car accidents. People love to be witnesses. Our times simply deny death, and in doing so they deny a fundamental aspect of our lives. Instead of allowing the awareness that we must suffer and die to become one of the strongest drives for life, the basis for human solidarity, and an experience without which joy and enthusiasm lack intensity and depth, man finds himself forced to repress this experience. But as is always the case with repressions, the repressed elements that one gets out of one’s sight do not cease to exist with it. Thus the fear of death leads an illegitimate existence among us. It remains alive even if we try to deny it, but because it has been repressed, it remains sterile. (Fromm, 1941/1983, p. 211)

It is not public death that is made taboo, but individual, personal death. Or, as Keller puts it: “Today it is easier to talk about other things that were once taboo, such as sexual matters. Today, on the other hand, it is embarrassing to talk about death, at least in such a way that it affects one of the interlocutors. That is considered indecent” (Keller, 1986, p. 67). We have learned to live with death in the me-

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dia; it has become something commonplace without any particular emotional value. Witnessing is also significant in rituals surrounding dying and death. The seriousness and significance of the situation can be experienced, for example, through the involvement of witnesses at the time of dying and then finally at the final placement of the mortal remains. Especially when it comes to dying and death, we find very strong multicultural elements today. Possibly the dying person is a Christian, but his children are Jews or atheists. Hospice societies have been experiencing this development for a long time. Especially when dealing with death and dying it becomes clear that we need other people. As interview partners of Kübler Ross put it about a friend of a dying person: “He knows that I need people” (Kübler Ross, 1971/2012, p. 98).

17.2 Dying Dying is, of course, a highly individual and in its individuality not completely predictable process. Sloterdijk writes: “The most severe test for the new subject …] is death, since it constitutes the instance that pushes people most strongly into passivity” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 315). Despite the phases of dying that have become known, for example, through Kübler Ross, in the predictable dying process decisions are made from day to day and moment to moment, in interaction with the available wishes, possibilities, resources, as my atheist interview partner Thomas describes it about the dying of his partner: Nah. That was… that was not her wish from the beginning to go to an institution, she wanted to stay at home. (Z. 157 f.)

Not everyone is comfortable planning their final time, even if it may be predictable due to illness. The phases of death according to Kübler Ross: Kübler Ross divides the phases of death into: • • • • •

Phase One: Denial and Isolation Phase two: Anger Phase three: Negotiation Phase four: Depression Phase five: Consent

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• (cf. Kübler Ross, 1971/2012) In doing so, she makes it clear that not all phases are (have to be) run through one after the other like a fixed cow, as the dying process, after all, simply cannot be particularly controlled, at least if it is not terminated prematurely beforehand by suicide or outside interference. I find it interesting that Kübler Ross treats the trial phase (p. 111) so briefly. In the phase of depression, the sick person prepares himself for the imminent loss, both of the things that surround him and, concretely, of his own life (cf. Kübler Ross, 1971/2012, p. 116). In the phase of consent, above all the family needs more help than the dying person himself (cf. Kübler Ross, 1971/2012, p. 138). The dying even of the next of kin is – in complete contrast to earlier times – mostly withdrawn from us. And even if someone is present at the actual dying, death often has something surreal in the atmosphere of the hospital. Beyond all questions of taste, it should be noted that an individualistic dying situation also seems to require an individualistic dying ritual. But this design is again a process of negotiation between relatives, doctors, nurses, clergy, if necessary. Thus my Protestant interview partner Victoria describes the very different ideas of her sister and her in the dying of her father, who in turn, because he was unconscious, could not be asked any more: No, so when the doctor, when we agreed with the doctor that the father was dying, then my sister unleashed a bit of actionism and had immediately a cassette player of classical music therefore and… All that kind of thing… And then the sister left and… The cassette player stayed off… And…. No, we didn’t do that, except that I was there, talked to him and nursed him a bit. (Victoria Z. 148 ff.)

Or, as Rilke poetically put it: O Lord, grant to each his own death. The dying that goes out of that life, in it he had love, sense and need. (Rilke, 1966, p. 31)

Much has been written, and certainly not too much, about how people die and how to make it easier for them. And how to deal with fear. In this context, rituals also come into view, as they can provide people who could no longer act on their own, whether as dying people or also accompanying relatives and professionals, with a structure that can stabilise the system or those involved again (cf. Henn in KüpperPopp & Lamp 2010, p. 100). Rituals here create a sense of familiarity in this some-

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times very unfamiliar situations, such as the first experienced death (cf. Grünling in Publik Forum 2011, p. 3). This is how my Catholic interview partner Martha describes it: […] and then we had put her on a rubber bed in the hospital, and Udo and I were just married, and then the priest came and… she thought it was beautiful! No, the last rites, no, she thought it was good. (Martha Z. 601 ff.)

I find the perspective exciting, since with the last rites it is clear that one is possibly going to die, and can still be so okay. In the report, it seems almost relieving. Perhaps it is again a matter of setting signs, of making tangible such a numinous process as the transition from life to death. Of course, this does not only concern the dying, but also their relatives, who are faced with the difficult task of even understanding that someone is dying here: […] then I saw that a woman… was in intensive care, but the family members don’t want her to go, they want to continue, she looks very much alive, the children the husband… stay with her and pray, the doctor and senior physician and chief physician said that she is already dead, so she is finally dead, after three examinations, […] and then you have to let her go, so to speak […]. (Tarek Z. 476 ff.)

Here, as later with the funeral, it is a matter of realizing in which process one is at the moment. So you should say goodbye to the dead person personally, that’s very very important[…] before you die, you have to say goodbye to the body too. […] so if my parents or grandparents him something… Comes or if they…. Sick in bed, and the time has arrived, then they report, then when they die you have to fly there. So, and then say goodbye. That is very important. (Tarek, Z. 549–550)

In this process, goodbyes must be said, and since the timing of the dying process is beyond one’s control, no matter how ready one is in this situation, one must say goodbye, and those who die should, if possible, inform the survivors, thus facilitating the perception of this opportunity. I also find very touching here my atheist interviewee Doris’ description of how she draws her dead father: But I went there with a drawing pad and then I drew him and then I… put the picture somewhere in a folder and then that was somehow, you can maybe say a form of processing by looking at him again so very carefully. (Doris Z. 128 ff.)

Miri also describes how meaningful the encounter with her mother’s corpse would have been for her:

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Well, I didn’t realise until afterwards that it was important to see the person again, but… At that moment I was actually busy grieving, also processing the shock, because nobody had expected it… (Miri Z. 368 ff.)

17.3 Burial When a person is dead, the body must be cared for in some way. Burial today in Germany: on the one hand, this means that the number of cremations has increased significantly. There are according to my research. no official figures, but various sources also on statisticians and the reports of undertakers point to it (see statista, 2020). The monotheistic rituals surrounding death and burial are, however, designed for burial in the ground, in which the last view of the coffin or the corpse is connected with a ritual farewell, which is not followed in a few weeks or so by the actual care of the remains as in an urn burial. How we react to this in our mourning processes unfortunately remains unclear, but it seems important to me to at least point out a system change here. Fiction often describes beautiful rituals around the complex of themes of dying, death and burial, or, more ambivalently, at least mythicizes them well. Silone, for example, in his novel “Bread and Wine” uniquely combines the grief of an old winegrower over the death of his son with a Eucharistic-like funeral ritual: ‘It was he,’ he said, ‘who helped me to see, to reap, to thresh, and to grind the grain of which this bread is made. Take it and eat, it is his bread.’ Other guests entered. The father filled the glasses and said: ‘It was he who helped me prune and sulphur the vines and harvest the grapes from which this wine comes. Drink: it is his wine.’ The men ate and drank, some of them dipping the bread in the wine. (Silone, 1955/1984, p. 309)

It is probably easier to produce a successful form of farewell fictionally than actually. But one point here is also interesting for our religiously traditional transitional rituals: the connection of a meal with the farewell to a dead person, which I think is common in actually all cultures. My Muslim interviewee Erva describes it like this: Yes, so after the funeral of course food is distributed, … And with us even so that seven days after then just someone has died, every evening after the evening prayer then once again… So has a kind of Koran recitation, where people come, times food

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distributed, ne, […] after 40 days one makes a big ceremony to with Koran recitation and so food donations […]. (Erva Z. 404 ff.)

Here the sacrifice is in the foreground, which is interesting in so far as it does not happen at this point in the Christian as well as in the Jewish and atheistic context. Zulehner (cf. ders. 1976, p. 211 f.) shows with the enumeration of conceivable functions of a funeral ritual at the same time the wide range between possibilities and the general practice: • • • • • •

Specification of the goal – detachment of the mourners from the deceased controlled, protected release of emotions Fear reduction Assurance of the new status for the deceased and the survivors Announcement of the new status of the deceased and the survivors Reintegration into the group.

As Amery writes: “Death is more than death: the funeral feast that triggers it is the great cleansing that the living perform to remove the dirt of death” (Amery, 1976, p. 111). It is an everyday experience that in this process a funeral does not always help in saying goodbye. After death, the body itself is disposed of as quickly as possible. The almost complete disappearance of death and transience from our everyday lives can also be seen in the low number of home revelations. My interview partner Karl makes a clear exception here with the corpse of his father: And then we left him in the house…] So three or four days, so also with the children, Did you fix him up? We said goodbye…. Yeah, but not substantially, no, not substantially. So sure, somehow a white robe, but not now so altar-like or so prepared. (clears throat) yes, then it went so far, yes you can do that of course, that’s also allowed, nevertheless, comes of course sooner or later also a corpse smell, I say that now quite… Quite blatant, which doesn’t bother me personally, only it was then so, when he was then picked up by the funeral home, then… Were the already somewhat piqued to have to deal with it, I found that then of course from so decidedly weak, well, never mind, then the funeral was…. Why did you decide to leave him at home so long? […] is a good question… Because we didn’t sit around it all the time and sing and pray or anything, but… We always decided from day to day and thought, no, this is the place where he lived, we’ll just leave him there for a while. So you didn’t approach the undertaker about death right away? But we did, but we said we didn’t want him picked up immediately, so in fact, you can leave the dead with you for 3, 4 days or even longer, if I know correctly, today they do that, these funerals, these ritually supporting ceremonies, even institutes that

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do that, with all the trimmings, that wasn’t our cup of tea, we kept it so private only […]. (Karl Z. 119ff.)

My Jewish interviewee Miri also describes how the concrete encounter and interaction with a corpse can be comforting – even when it is not connected to one. Miri, as I mentioned earlier in the case descriptions, is a member of the Chevre Kaddisha, a volunteer, community-based organization that cares for the sick, dying, and dead. She describes it this way: So of course it’s difficult, especially the first time it’s difficult to be confronted with a dead body that you also touch so intensively and that you come into contact with, but the more I… But the more I got involved, I realized that it’s great that someone is close to you, to know that someone from the community goes this last way with you, and not some company, an anonymous person, and then I imagined what it would be like when it comes to me, and someone from the community is there to do it with me, and that comforted me very much, and then I had the feeling, so… I know why I’m doing this. Okay. Why exactly? Because of this intimacy, because, how should I put it… Because I found it comforting or beautiful that people from my extended circle… do this ritual with me as women. […]and I just find that a totally beautiful ritual that you… This…. This…. This washing and this dressing and this getting ready for the funeral…. Yes, with these asked and with these…. In this sense then performs. (Miri Z. 135 ff.)

In this way, the washing as a transitional ritual can also prepare the participants for their own dying. And this is important: in our personal dealings with death and the beloved corpse, we are often helpless. Many traditional mourning rituals are no longer in use today, although they probably psychologically facilitate the mourning process (cf. Podhradsky, 1967, p. 387; Zulehner, 1976, p. 229). In recent decades, a counter-movement has now begun, almost a boom. Funeral directors who have more than just plain funerals on their agenda are being consulted more and more often, conferences are being held, working groups. However, one makes it too easy for oneself if one assumes that a successful funeral depends only on a ritual that is as elaborate as possible, a successful form, as interviews from the 1997 series already showed (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 123). To this end, here too the interview sequences from 1997 and 2019/2020 are consistent, the funeral of relatives may be very important to one, but one’s own funeral not too much (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 123). However, this also raises the question of whether the lack of vision for one’s own funeral is because one is actually indifferent to one’s own funeral, or from a possibly greater reluctance to think about one’s own death.

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Already in my series of interviews in 1997, a great deal of perplexity is evident in the interviews: Could you imagine a church funeral for yourself? M: Do you have to have thought about it at 30? – I don’t know, I’ve never witnessed funerals, like I said, I don’t even know how that goes. But I can imagine, kind of like that. (Mike, 4/10–13 according to Kiss, 1997, p. 102)

And Karl from the 2020 series: How far – this question is of course one of those that you don’t have to answer – how do you yourself, do you yourself have ideas about dying, death, burial as far as you are concerned, is that important to you? […] I’d have to think about it, that doesn’t even affect me now in my lifetime. (Karl Z. 232)

People have very different perspectives on something like transience. There is a great variety of different attitudes and a very different emotional or rational imprint in thinking about one’s own death and burial (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 125 ff.). Our ideas are thereby shaped both by our own experiences of past funerals and by second-­ hand experiences, for example, through cinematic or literary representations, as was already evident in my first series of interviews in 1997 (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 127). “Since there is no herb found here against death – man is mortal after all – this problem will continue to exist and many people, since the information of science and philosophy is little comforting and reassuring, will seek answers in religions” (Zinser, 2010, p. 258). As far as is known, burial and mourning rituals have played a role since the beginning of humankind (cf. Zinser, 2010, p.  142 following): “Holding the dead of cultic memory allows death, this fear-inducing scandalon, to be transformed for the living from an experience into an experience” (Zinser, 2010, p. 144). The place of burial is more or less important, but always to be decided. What if there is no place like a grave, where you can go. (Victoria Z. 288)

…and walk away? In July 2020 Büge writes that the funeral culture has changed noticeably and sustainably in recent years. On the one hand, this concerns the focus on sustainability or the environment, but also, in this course, an individualization of burial, including clothing, etc.. This is also visible in many of the comments made by my

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interviewees in the 2020 series: both Thomas and Doris emphasise how important it is for them to have an authentic gravestone for their deceased loved one: I never did it like the others, never bought any ready-made arrangements, but everything was always specially prepared […]. (Doris Z. 303 ff.)

This individualization happens partly also by example, this my Catholic interview partner Martha describes (see Martha Z. 669 f.). In addition, there are increasingly virtual parts, for example through a transmission as a livestream. The wishes of the relatives and of the deceased are in the foreground, not so much religious requirements, which are increasingly taking a back seat (cf. Büge, 2020, p. 01). For this, many details have to be negotiated in the meantime. And this in a situation in which compromises are often difficult or seem psychologically impossible: It was a great struggle, a need to assert oneself even against individuals, … Because…, I said, I won’t discuss that with you, you can do it, then I’ll stay out of it, but I won’t do that, I’m not looking for a compromise now, because that means rather that no one will like it… (Thomas Z. 427 ff.)

But a successful process can then be very satisfying: So far I’m very reconciled with myself that I pulled it off like that… with Hanna, that was good. (Thomas Z. 454 f.)

Rituals around death mark the caesura, which do not leave the change that has occurred and its processing to chance, not purely to a rational force, individual or group, but control and accompany it (cf. Assmann in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 17): Are the dead only dead when the bereaved let them die, when there is no photo, no shrine, no grave to remember them by (cf. Michaels in Assmannm et al., 2005, p. 11)? This is how it is thematized here, for example, in the cinema film Coco. In memory, in transgenerational processes, the dead live on in us. It is a question of what metaphorical forms of expression a culture finds to give expression to this symbiosis between death and life, to make death and living on plausible (cf. Assmann in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 18). In the case of my Jewish interview partner, the independent combination of different cultural elements becomes visible in the narrative about her mother’s burial: When my mother died, …. Was that so that she… That… she wished…. To have a Jewish funeral actually, but completely contradictory…. But, in her parents’ grave, in a Christian cemetery, because…. Well, her mother had converted, […] And she had

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already before on her gravestone, so her father was a sculptor, she has then in the Jewish home for the elderly in X so participated in a ceramics course over several years, there produced many ceramic things, and has itself Jewish symbols… pottery has and then on the gravestone of our so this grave…[…] she put them on the gravestone of our grave […] without us knowing, she did it all for herself and, which is not possible at all in Judaism, she let herself be burned […] But she wanted us, her family, to say a Kaddish …[…] Whereby I was actually the only one who knew how to do it properly and who really wanted to have it done…. She had wished in her will that I would make sure that a Kaddish would be prayed at the grave. Did she want the wash too? No, that was really very contradictory because one is not really compatible with the other, but then we followed her wish and I got my atheist and communist and I don’t know what other relatives to… pray the Kaddish with us, and in the community where she lived, that is, in the Jewish old people’s home, there is also a small synagogue and friends of hers prayed the Kaddish together with us again when she died […]. (Miri Z. 311)

Miri is aware that certain of her mother’s wishes do not conform to the rules of her religion, and she is also aware that, even if one remains within the Jewish cosmos, the observance of the rituals is not only irregular – the burning, for example – but also incomplete, in that the mother has dispensed with ablution. Here we see the high level of individualization today, in which those with a high level of ritual competence, as in Miri’s case, achieve a high level of fit in the farewell, in which, at least in the present case, the festive congregation is also involved, taken along. This is a classic example of craft religion. Since many of us tend to move in semi-­ distance to the original religion or to the new religion, there is always the question of what we know at all, because we can only wish for what we know or what is very decidedly brought to us from the outside. What actually are celebrations? Is there really such a thing – a celebration of the dead? It has long been known that the care of the dead is above all also about the living and their orderly continuation of life (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 66). In this context, they also contain a political function, because they relate to the order of the surviving society (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 69). And what is grief? Michaels writes: “In a cultural economic sense, mourning is one of the costs of social bonds.” (Michaels in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 8) On the one hand, we need attachment existentially; on the other hand, if it is dissolved at the latest by death, we risk instability that endangers us as individuals and as a community. That after is highly significant. For “all people experience that the physical death of a relative or friend does not end their relationship with the dead. They remember them and the dead continue to play a part in their thoughts. Even if they

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are physically removed from view by burial or other means, they remain present in their thoughts and imaginations and have an afterlife in the survivors themselves: the dead continue to exist in the memories of the survivors, in their deeds and works. This requires the survivors to deal with or comment on them. This it especially true when the survivors have had an affective relationship […] with the dead” (Zinser, 2010, p. 238 f.). And further Zinser: “Every death raises emotional problems for the survivors, they have to detach their feelings of love and hate from the dead. For this purpose, religions have created rites of passage to return the bereaved to everyday life. Likewise, arrangements must be made in the succession of the deceased’s duties and social positions, and what happens to the dead person’s property must be regulated. This very understandably also depends on the conception associated with the death.” (Zinser 2010, p. 269) – some of which must first be negotiated with other mourners (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 145). For the relationship to death and the dead is usually always ambivalent (cf. Assmann in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 27). We are glad that suffering comes to an end, and we are sad, we liked someone but found everything rather conflictual between us, etc. (cf. Assmann in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 29): “The relationship between the living and the dead, apart from the prominent memory figures that have entered cultural memory, is not a permanent state, but a process that takes place in different stages: stages of mourning on the part of the living, stages in status transformation on the part of the dead” (Assmann in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 30). Coping with grief seems to be marked in part by particularly extra-ordinary actions and thus also manageable for people. An example of this are the aforementioned mourning tattoos, which are apparently also frequently done by people who never thought of getting a tattoo before (cf. Hartig & Oeft-Geffarth, 2016, n.d.). The symbolic outward appearance in a kind of “biography in the form of a picture” is an essential element (cf. Hartig & Oeft-Geffarth, 2016, n.d.). The point is that with the tattoo, the deceased are always a part of life. Even if it is a tattoo that is invisible to the public (cf. Hartig & Oeft-Geffarth, 2016, n.d.). With the tattoo as “a wound that one consciously acquires” (Hartig and Oeft-Geffarth 2016, n.d.), mourners integrate grief into their own continuity; it is part of their coherence system (cf. box in Hartig & Oeft-Geffarth, 2016, n.d.). And apparently as such surprisingly stable: “The tattoo is a part of me. It has not lost its meaning in all these years. I don’t regret a day that I did it” (anonymous interviewee in Hartig & Oeft-­Geffarth, 2016, n.d.). The loss remains visible. And that is intentional. The publication by Küpper-Popp and Lamp (2010) on rituals and metaphors in hospice work is also interesting here. For example, they describe how rituals make sense in the transition between hospital and hospice, because here it is a matter of integrating this phase, in which one was still in hospital and the direct perspective

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on one’s own death did not yet exist, into one’s life on the one hand, and on the other hand also of concluding and accepting the new phase, which directly heralds the last phase of life (Reible in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 92). Michaels writes: “Nothing is better for grief than ritual – nothing is more inappropriate for grief than ritual” (Michaels in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 7). For on the one hand, ritual offers “support in a groundless situation” (ibid.). On the other hand, especially a ritual around death and dying can also be very inauthentic, inappropriate, too colourless for the occasion. There is a wide range between the potential effectiveness of a good funeral ritual and the actual effect of often insensitive and hectic funerals. This may become important especially when customary forms seem strange or are forgotten, or when in an interreligious community good ways are sought that include as many as possible (cf. EGB, n.d., p. 1430 f.). It must be fundamentally clear that most of our transitional rituals today are mixed religions. On the one hand, this can lead to a certain exaggeration, so that we want to make it particularly clear, but it can also lead to a dilution of the original ritual. In any case, it requires explanation in such contexts. Accordingly, also because dying and death have become a problem in our secularized society, the calls for new rituals do not cease (cf. Michaels in Assmann et al., 2005, pp. 11, 13). Incidentally, this was already the case during the research for the series in 1997. This raises the following challenge: “The traditional transition of mourning into continued ritualized grieving processes contrasts with the modern instantaneousness of death, the exitus” (Michaels in Assmann et al., 2005, p. 9). For people who have lost faith in life after death, the idea of death as a transition, as many cultures mark it theologically and thus then also metaphorically, is not plausible (cf. Assmann et al., 2005). Death is an essential lesson for the survivors and, as the last developmental task, the last critical event, it also has essential significance for the dying. We find this view confirmed in many publications, for example by the undertaker Kuckelkorn, the psychologist Yalom or also the doctor Kübler-Ross. Death is, as Kuckelkorn puts it in the title of his book, your last big appointment. Or, as Bettelheim puts it, it “is […] in a strangely dialectical way death itself that gives life its deepest, its unique meaning” (Bettelheim, 1980, p. 13).

Psychological Suggestions for the Design of Religiously Traditional Transitional Rituals: A Survey

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I think / I am blessed in the way I understand people to mean it: having / good fortune. But this is where faith messes with my clean concept, / because practicing Christians don’t believe blessings come / / out the clear blue sky. So here’s God again, all up in the Kool-Aid […]. (Burroughs n.d.)

Let me now briefly make psychological suggestions for the design of religiously traditional transitional rituals along the transitions discussed. The effect of rituals takes place on so many levels that it requires a great deal of complexity management to grasp at least some fixed points. What constitutes this so desired blessing, this so longed-for sanctification through a “divine” ritual (with or without quotation marks)? My focus was only on the psychosocial effects, and only on transitional rituals, so that made things a little easier. Fundamentally, we must be clear at this point: Belief in God, even if it exists in principle, is a fluctuating feeling, and even if it does not exist at all and never does, religiously traditional transitional rituals can nevertheless make psychosocial sense for those involved. Initiates who are not God-believers can, in my opinion, still participate in religiously traditional transitional rituals with profit. Belief in God is only one (possible, not necessary) aspect of many in their performance. Finally, religious culture also represents a part of our cultural heritage, which we may appropriate and use through its performance. The mix between the change in legal status and the ritual is a critical moment, however, and this is evident in the very first ritual, the welcoming of newborns: For example, baptism, which results in membership of the appropriate church, and the psychosocial effect of the child being greeted by relatives and friends, of parents receiving support, and of a sibling receiving honoured attention if

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_18

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a­ ppropriate. Not every parent, who may come from mixed religious backgrounds, may be able to bring themselves to such a religious transitional ritual. Moreover, there are not only parents, but sometimes only fathers, or one father, two mothers, or only one, etc. A lack of commitment on the part of one of the “main leaders” (parents, mothers, fathers, etc.) can lead to the fact that the one who has been persuaded, so to speak, experiences the event as inauthentic and not suitable for him; it is then no longer his celebration. In my opinion, this moment should be avoided at all costs. A non-religious welcoming feast does not, of course, theologically replace the baptism or circumcision of Jewish boys or the Muslim ritual of blessing naming – but then, I promised at the outset to stay out of such discussions. It can, however, psychosocially replace those moments. The ritual can be made up for later – the festive introduction of the child into the circle of family and friends cannot. In any case, in my opinion, the honouring of the child and the parents must not be omitted, in this respect I would always plead for a celebration, in which the participants of the celebration are then also are given the opportunity to say a (perhaps religious) blessing. In Judaism and Islam, I believe that the circumcision of boys in infancy or childhood must be allowed to continue to be discussed critically. Especially against the background that in the German legal system it contradicts the self-determination of the child over his own body. A solution for Judaism could be the meanwhile established Jewish welcome rituals for girls, which are connected with the announcement of the name and have a religious character (Miri reported about this in the series 2020). Such welcoming rituals in a religious context can also become possible for boys, in my opinion. In Islam such welcoming ceremonies already exist for both sexes. In my observation, the public discussion is dominated by the fact that a state ban on circumcision interferes with the religious right of self-­ determination of Jews and Muslims. Nevertheless, I consider the right to bodily integrity and bodily self-determination to be of higher value, and I strongly advocate offering alternatives in this context as religious communities. Rituals of coming of age: the fact that communion, protestant and catholic confirmations are necessarily linked to a confession makes these rituals critical in a time of wavering faith in God, and I think that declining numbers prove this. In Judaism, as in Islam, the situation is, in my observation, much less critical. At the bad or bar mitzvah, young people are allowed to read from and interpret the Torah for the first time; the extent to which girls are allowed to participate depends on the degree of Orthodoxy. In this way, the young people do not necessarily document a rock-solid belief in God, but consciously place themselves in the community of mature and adult people. There is nothing at all psychologically wrong with this.

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For the Torah is part of the collective narrative, and belongs to all and may be used as a resource by all, if possible with appropriate instruction. I also consider the first self-responsible fast in Islam to be a wise and meaningful exercise both individually and collectively. Here, too, the conscious entry into the community of the mature is a desirable step, and the respect that a young person experiences through this step in the collective. What I find particularly noteworthy is that the young people are allowed to choose this moment for themselves. We need clever ways of celebrating the maturity of adolescents. I am not sure that secondary schools have enough power to do this with their graduation ceremonies. A risk is also posed by what Sachsse calls autoinitiation, such as self-injury, or the first, and strikingly public, drinking in the circle of other adolescents (cf. Sachsse in Sachsse & Herbold, 2016, p. 7; Willis, 1981). Families may, of course, develop their own rituals and traditions here. Given that ritual competence is probably not one of the main skills of many, it is a pity that so many are then again not celebrated to whom celebration is due. Couple commitment/engagement/wedding: It is important to have a time to decide before entering into a long-term relationship. Faithful Muslims do this with an engagement in public among their families and friends. In the reports about the engagement of my Muslim interview partner Tarek, I found elements that seem to me to be quite meaningful and resource-oriented in our society today. In my opinion, important decisions have to be thought through and reflected upon wisely before they are made; forms of engagement, if they are used, can certainly mean such a testing situation, and an exercise in productive partnership. Celebrating the beginning of the trial publicly seems to me to make sense at least for those partners who share the ideal of monogamous indissoluble relationships. The cyclization of wedding anniversaries can additionally be used for a targeted reflection and readjustment of the relationship. In my opinion, many opportunities are still being missed here. Divorce: In the religions I am discussing here, only Judaism and Islam have divorce rituals. In my opinion, these need to be modernized in non-secular states and supplemented by secular alternatives (but I am not really concerned with this discussion here). In their present form, I consider them to be outdated, since they do not take gender justice into account, and are obviously often experienced as humiliation and coercion by those involved. In contrast, a religiously supported or co-supported divorce ritual could enable productive effects of reconciliation and consciously stepping onto a new level of relationship, especially for couples with children who remain connected despite childbirth. Some couples in this process of change use mediation, which can provide a starting point for modern divorce rituals in which each can say to the other at the end: Go in peace.

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We find rituals around illness and recovery in all of the discussed religious traditions, these are in my opinion much too little common today, although they obviously do the sick and recovering good, Here (hospital) chaplains and (hospital) psychologists can really take on an important task, not only in the palliative context. Miri and Doris from my series 2020 have reported on this, one with a recovery ritual accompanied by the rabbi, the other with a self-designed ritual, I have also quoted them in the context of this work. Dying and death: there is still much potential here, to quote a friend’s expression. However, I see that clergy and funeral directors are increasingly exploring creative avenues, and I am particularly enthusiastic about this when it is done against a background of a helper as a bereavement counsellor. When the anniversary of my father’s death comes around in January, I will meet up with my family again on the old restaurant ship where we celebrated the wake two years ago. It will already be dark in the afternoon, we will look into the darkness at the river and think of him, and then talk again about something completely different, mundane and trivial perhaps. And life, after a brief pause, will go on.

Part V Summary and Conclusion

Mercy should be at the center of all rituals. Love should ground and shape all rituals. (Brudereck, 2018, p. 66)

Summary

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Finally, I turn to a kind of literary farewell ritual, the summary. The Ritual is dead? Long live the ritual. So it was said at the beginning. As a social psychologist, I am essentially concerned with processes of social change and the problems that can arise as a result. Rituals are far from being forms without meaning, as Frits Staal put it in 1989 (after Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 200). Rituals serve to sanctify existence. They provide evidence of the community of values in which we find ourselves. What a human being is, is essentially also defined by rituals. How precious a human being is regarded, whether he or she is already a human being as a foetus or still a human being as a corpse, whether or when he or she can have a vote as a living person, whether he or she can assume responsibility, etc., these questions of human status are essentially negotiated by rituals of passage, and thus they help to determine what a human being actually is. In our time, the ground on which the individual stands has become shaky. It has become partly ridiculous to speak of truth, at least in the singular (cf. Neiman 2013). Modernity has become reflexive modernity, which allows the individual in our cultural sphere more freedom than ever before in human history, and in which the empowerment of freedom has become one of the central virtues – I noted this already in 1997, and it remains valid in 2020 (cf. Kiss 1997, p. 205). Today, at the latest from late coming-of-age rituals such as Confirmation, the decision to engage in a particular transitional ritual is an autonomous one, by adult subjects, and there is no compulsory obligation to them. Those who do not marry religiously, those who do not have their relatives buried religiously, may lose a reputation in their circle of friends and family, but not completing a threshold ritual does not become

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_19

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an existential threat for them. That in itself is a positive thing. Our lives, at least the lives of many in the northern hemisphere, have become more complex in accordance with the multiplication of elective worlds – a state of affairs that makes massive demands on the ability to tolerate ambiguity. Yet our time in particular has preserved a strangely tender fondness for much that is old – we live in a modern, but at the same time museum-like, originalist culture, attracted to the seemingly original. This applies not only to objects, but increasingly also to cultural practices, with which some people seek to protect themselves from the pull of time. This work should also provide inspiration for interreligious dialogue: “It is interesting that an attitude of openness towards the religions of the world is promoted by contacts with people who are religious. For Germany, the more contacts with religious people and the more contacts with people with a religious affiliation that differs from one’s own religious identity, the greater the openness to religions.” (Pollack & Müller, 2013. p. 45). Practices – regardless of whether one encounters them as rituals, ceremonies, compulsive acts  – are often, if one looks behind the underlying structures and above all at what happens within their framework, more than their intrinsic value. It seems to belong to us, despite all attempts to get rid of it and lead us into a new enlightenment. Whether there is a condition humaine, to choose the French term, without it is difficult to say, but it seems unlikely to me. This work, based on the 1997 series and on a re-run of the 2019–2020 interviews, aimed to psychologically screen religiously traditional practices. Essentially, I drew on rituals that are native or have become native again in our culture, such as Judaism and Islam, and of course Christianity, the research basis of the 1997 series. As old as these practices are – especially in a religious context – their terms are often nebulous. The term religion or religious practice has become iridescent and has not been spared from the constructivism of our time. In order to screen the field, I have not only used the term transitional rituals or transitions in the research and interviews, but have made it explicit in several pages as religious practice at the turns of life etc. And framed it with science definitions as a second degree construction. The creation of the concept of ritual involved an inverse process of finding, among many competing terms, which is again too ideologically loaded, like the term sacrament, nor too general, like religious practice. I based the definition of transitional rituals essentially on ethnological or ethnographic and, indeed, phenomenological approaches. Most of us have freed ourselves in the meantime from the shackles that religiously traditional t transitional rituals used to mean for people, and can still mean

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today in orthodox contexts. It is up to each person whether or not he or she, as an initiate, makes use of a ritual religious framing of his or her thresholds in life. Yet, surprisingly, religiously traditional threshold rituals continue to be an integral part of the reality of many people’s lives. “Participants may just state that these rites were already performed by their fathers; some may think of a service as a way to show off their new suit, or that cults are a place where many people gather and one can go on a bridal or groomsmen’s show; or when do you go to a service to maintain credit, or because rites and cults are a place of social gathering. Or one may simply promise oneself entertainment, detachments from the daily monotony, and brief freedom from work.” (Zinser, 2010, p. 137). However, it is seldom possible to speak of a concretely religious motivation – most of them conceive of the ritual in a very individual, creative framework of justification; literally ideological interpretations from the perspective of a belief in God are rare. Belief in God does not seem to be a necessary condition for the performance of rituals in general. Surprisingly, this is also rarely mentioned in the description of rituals around dying and death, as explained several times in the context of this book. The experience of religious transitional rituals seems to be essentially linked to the specific introduction, the individual design of the ritual and a personal possibility of reference. Whether their religiously intended anchoring still holds today in the sense of the religious communities, seems however questionable in view of the results of the interviews and also the evaluation of the research literature. In my opinion, this non-ideological framework of meaning does not represent a loss of significance; on the contrary, it places rituals in our society on a completely different and also more secure basis: The performance of religiously and thus also transgenerationally handed down rituals binds us both to the past and to the future, and this leads, according to Antonovsky, to a stronger experience of coherence, which can have a protective effect in our lives, across all biographical restructuring processes. A core question of this work was therefore also: How do individuals and our society go through changes and developments, and what help can or are rituals in this process, how far do rituals come into play at all? Rituals are auxiliary architects of social reality and always also work out of the worldview and the legitimized social context to which they owe their emergence or continued existence. Not all major changes in a person’s life are thematized, but essentially socially accepted ones – or ones accepted in the respective social microcosm. Thus the order of threshold rituals simultaneously conveys an idea of ideal, successful lives. Rituals can be seen here as an attempt to standardize the individ-

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ual biography in conformity with society. However, their biography-guiding effect is on the one hand increasingly weakened by the pluralization of biographies in reflexive modernity, and on the other hand also demanded precisely for this reason. Against this background the commitment of religious people to use transitional rituals also for other critical or potentially critical life events or other situations of farewell and new beginning – loss of the job, for instance, moving out of the children, sterilization or completion of the menopause etc.  – is to be understood. Transitional rituals can span bridges over abysses of farewell, they can be solidified or plastic. They move along the fine line between cementation and flexibility-­ tolerant stabilization. Threshold rituals involve the risk of splitting off threatening or unpleasant segments of reality. At the same time, they offer the chance, through the provision of stabilizers and public recognition, to shape freely chosen markers of one’s own life with the help of this form and to open up to new horizons of life. Threshold rituals can facilitate our lifelong multiple socialization processes from one façon d’être to the next. How do rituals evolve in changing family forms? I have given hints in this research, mainly thanks to the narratives of my interviewees, this topic is worth exploring further. Rituals are part of the memory of society (cf. Pries in Brosius et  al., 2013, p. 208). Transitional rituals have an essential effect here in the finding, fixing, stack isolation of roles and role change; as group kit they can give groups the necessary stability in times of flexibilisation to survive a change transformed but not broken. The effect of a ritual is multifactorial. The basis of my interreligious experiment was: Rituals are always ambiguous, even in their performance (cf. Walsdorf in Brosius et al., 2013, p. 85). Do rituals only work if they are performed correctly (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p.  201)? And what does correct mean in this context? When do rituals fail (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 211)? The actual target person and the surrounding social network traditionally play a major role, whereby those present as narrative multipliers of the ritual can contribute to its deeper biographical anchoring. The fit of a transitional ritual to a highly individually experienced life event is all the greater, the better the participant succeeds in skilfully and competently using scope in the individual staging. This becomes visible, for example, in the imaginative yet serious design of modern mourning rituals (cf. Kuckelkorn, 2020). The effects that rituals have from a psychosocial and biographical perspective cannot simply be translated into other contexts of meaning. Whether a person falls back on a religiously traditional ritual to overcome a crisis, a transition in life, or to frame a particular life event, however, seems to depend essentially on the connota-

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tion of the context (such as ‘religious community’) and the threshold itself. The extent to which life-historical factors lead to the formation of a ritual preference remains unclear. It can be assumed that biographical aspects in conjunction with milieu ties contribute significantly to whether a specific ritual, a specific type of ritual enactment and rituals in general are desired and actively used as resources in one’s life. It remains to repeat: Each demonstrated effect of a ritual can always remain only one of many possible and plausible ones, never the only possible one.

Open Questions, Limits of This Work

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The limits of this work are determined by the limits of experienced culture. The work on the topic was, negatively formulated, characterized by a deliberate skipping of competing appealing questions: • I would have enjoyed being able to go into the historical roots of individual threshold rituals or strategic or metaphorical elements of threshold rituals. But that would have required a multi-volume work, as I understand today, 2020, there is no science-based current survey of the currents accessible to us today and their historical roots including a breakdown of elements handed down both culturally and religiously, and then one that addresses various oral or written traditions. Incidentally, I also refrained from attempting such an analysis because it is no longer present to most users of such threshold rituals, if it ever was. But then, I just said that I keep my hands off historical comparisons. • I have not addressed the dialogue of cultures in this paper, as Hauschild does, for example, on the topic of rituals of violence (cf. Hauschild, 2008). It is a subject that would deserved more space. • I have not discussed the role of arousal potentials and arousal conduction in ritual. This is partly because I am not a biopsychologist. On the neurobiology of ritual, you might want to read on here: Monyer in Spectrum of Science 2011, pp. 42–46. • On the exciting question of the use of hallucinogens in rituals, read on here: Jungaberle in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, pp. 64–69. • The connection between values and the reception of ritual is appealing, but it clearly leads too far here, also in view of the multi-layered discourses on values.

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• mental disorders that arise from contact with religious institutions also in connection with rituals, or in the context of which rituals are instrumentalized, for example, in the sense of compulsive acts, I did not consider in 1997 or 2020. It is, of course, an important issue. Whether depression actually does not occur in a society determined by rituals, as Han thinks it does (cf. Han, 2019, p. 23), is something I can neither refute nor prove in this way. But it seems to me rather too far-fetched. That rituals can reinforce a person’s compulsive structure seems plausible to me (cf. Green, 1993, pp. 21, 48). There was no room to verify this here. • I find the question of the role of food intake and general meals in rituals exciting, but I did not specifically address it in the first paper either, although the topic is undoubtedly tempting, for example as “the bodily-sensual experience as a transcultural space of possibility” (Klos, 2016, p. 102). Sweets, for example, always seem to play a major role in celebrations – no celebration without dessert. Is there some physiological component at play, is it about securing the energy supply of the participants? Often a ritual is concluded with sweets – for example, after his first Torah reading the candidate is traditionally pelted with sweets (cf. Miri lines 96 f.), a custom that we also know from a completely different area, the carnival. In my opinion, this also becomes interesting in the discussion about eating disorders. A deepening of this topic would unfortunately lead too far. • I have not included dedicated gender rituals, i.e. rituals for women specifically or for men, in the study, as they are not dominant in the threshold rituals discussed. Only in the fanning out of circumcision in Judaism and Islam have I discussed them in passing. They are described, for example, in everyday life by the special issue of Publik-Forum, 2017 (cf. ibid.). • In this work I have only included the propagandistic, manipulative function of religious institutions with a side glance. But the religious landscape of all five ideological currents is too complex for me to be able to go into it here within the framework of this work. That they exist structurally, partly institutionally legitimized, is beyond doubt for me. • It would have been interesting to include social strata in the question of the effect of transitional rituals, as Willis (cf. e.g. ders. 2000) did, but unfortunately this also led too far. • Religiously traditional rituals are also at least instrumentalized in the context of armed conflicts, but they do not stand decidedly for a monotheistic or atheistic current. That is why I have not explicitly addressed them in the context of this work. Here you can find something about rituals in the context of war: (Han, 2019, pp. 85–92).

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• Knowledge transfer also bears ritual traits to some extent, and thus also playful ones (cf. Han, 2019, p. 93). I have not gone further into such rituals here – tomorrow, when I hold the next workshop, I will think about this further. • Without a doubt, journeys can have strong ritual connotations, such as pilgrimages in the context of overcoming life’s thresholds, the wanderings of craftsmen or the almost ritualistic longer journeys of school leavers. In my opinion, these journeys not only serve to get to know something new, to switch off from the stress of a final exam, etc., they can also serve to shape the upcoming detachment from the parental home. After my first sequence in 1997, I briefly toyed with the idea of expanding on this theme. Maybe this is one of the stories I still have to tell.

Correspondances Vivantes: Social Challenges Today in the Context of Rites of Passage

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And these words which I command thee this day thou shalt take to heart, and shalt inculcate them in thy children, and shalt speak of them when thou sittest in thine house, or when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, or when thou risest up. (Deut 6:6–7)

I also see the existence of religiously transmitted transitional rituals as a question and decision for us, the transmitting collective: Do we want to remember? Do we want to pass it on? Zinser describes that rites are criticized today because of their inexpediency, unreasonableness and lack of freedom, at least the religious rituals. But today in postmodernity this can in my opinion no longer apply, since religion is only one of the many options (cf. Zinser, 2010, p. 141). Criticism of rituals is also ignited by the fact that people’s living conditions change and thus the fit to the specific cult is no longer given or causes friction losses: “Individually, criticism of the cult has always been exercised, because for individuals cults represent fixed courses of action to which they must submit and which they try to circumvent through manipulation and other means for their interests. So they also tend to experience domination by the past and other powers at it. And this domination is regularly realized by certain group function and all too often exploited for partial interests” (Zinser, 2010, p. 148). There is already early in the Old Testament this call to preserve and pass on the past. Transitional rituals are a part of it. But we always need to critically question what we pass on, or whether it is not time to put certain things from the past, values, ways of life ad acta and develop something new.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 K. Rothenberg-Elder, Farewell and new beginning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39951-1_21

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Religious institutions as stewards or preservers of religiously traditional transitional rituals deserve our critical attention again and again in their, yes, quasi-god-­ given power, no matter how ancient or ‘sacred’ they seem. “Postmodern thought began with a refined and processual view of culture, but in its expansion sometimes turned out to be a variety of culturalist claims to totality” (Hauschild, 2008, p. 14). Suffering from religion and its institutions should not be underestimated; my interview partners repeatedly report irritations and injuries of religious functionaries (cf. for example Martha Z. 399 ff.). Transitional rituals as part of social practices are no longer consumed unreflectively by the initiators or potential initiates, fortunately. Furthermore, and at the latest since the 1968s, the meaning of institutionalized rituals in particular has been intensely debated in Germany time and again; rituals can also be used obscurantistically. Ritual celebrations are and have never been innocent either. They are never value-free. As politician Harald Schulz told me in a discussion at the end of my research, “Customs do not absolve us from reflection” (Schulz, 2020, in a personal conversation). One of the aims of this research work was to contribute to this. Rituals, which are located at the turns of life, transport the values and ideologies of a society. There is a consensus that power structures are also incorporated into the individual through rituals (cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, 2013, p. 50). In our society, it is still assumed that there is a “natural way of life” that one has to follow (cf. Donath, 2015, p. 212), transitional rituals prove this. What we find good and what we do not, when we should mourn or rejoice. Again and again, these ideologies, the values, the very justifications on the basis of which we have also been brought up, need to be examined, we need to critically question “the webs of stereotypes and conformism” (Tirtza in Donath, 2015, p. 315), the euphemisms, and also what our society considers natural or just not: marriage, circumcision, not celebrating divorces, etc. The argument: this is how we have always done it! is sometimes difficult to refute. In order to do so, we also have to critically reflect on our traditional patterns of “heteronormativity” (Donath, 2015, p. 214), such as ideas that motherhood is good, that a monogamous relationships that last until death do us part is good, that death is to be mourned and not celebrated, and so on. Rituals, as parts of our social reality, seem to be able to influence such processes. By prescribing templates, they influence the framework of what can be perceived and construct notions of normality in which they illuminate certain aspects of life and hide others. Freely adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: “and you can’t see those in the dark”. An often used argument in the discourse about the meaning of rituals is that these forms would have become empty in the context of social and individual secularization, forms without content. This is shown by the interviews from the 1997

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series (cf. Kiss, 1997, p. 202). The critical point, however, seems to me not to be the question of whether or not individual traditionally religiously handed down rituals would generally have their justification, but the question of the quality of the relationship to religiously handed down tradition in general: “Tradition, although human life is unthinkable without it, can degenerate into its own caricature. This happens when it loses reference to its origin, when it is no longer understood and is alienated from the present.” (Stubenrauch, 1996, p. 478) This is still true today. In a world in which fewer and fewer people maintain a continuous institutionally anchored religious practice (cf. Zuckerman et al., 2016), fewer and fewer people model for their children how to master certain transitions. One of our most important learning techniques, learning by example and imitation, is thus lost to traditional religious transitional rituals. This risks losing to the next generation the treasure trove of resources of coping skills that are culturally inherent in religiously transmitted transitional rituals. This is an immense cultural, social and psychological loss. If we succeeded in actually living religiously traditional rituals beyond a belief in God, we could keep this treasure. That is very much to be wished. The warmth of a baptism that binds guests into a community for the protection of a child – the bad aftertaste of a wedding full of hollow words and loveless downplayed formalisms. Upbeat, repressive mass rituals-individual unions full of life. The protective hands of a priest at a confession – worshippers dropping to their knees and pounding the “mea culpa” on their chests. A light in the dark  – my grandmother blessing me into life. It is necessary to celebrate the diversity of rituals. Do rituals become obsolete? Again and again. When the bases of experience change, these rites can become unreasonable and untrustworthy. “Cults are, so to speak, the result of a thought process that contains the experiences of several generations and holds on to these forms once they have been found, that is, it breaks down the thought process” (Zinser, 2010, p. 147). There is a risk in this if a society continues such rituals without reflection. In my opinion, this becomes visible in wedding rituals. Of course, it is clear that many of the few ties will formally fail. To promise eternity here is, in my opinion, implausible. This imprint is not indelible, and it can be repeated. It would be the same with funerals if we succeeded in bringing the dead back to life. Even then this transitional ritual would no longer have its finality, and a continuation of the old ritual in its old form and old intention would be absurd. There may be moments when society has to face change even in its basic ritual structures. Thus, it is necessary to repeatedly “maintain a balance between preserving and developing” (Kaiser, 2017, p. 35).

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Traditional rituals only come alive where the ancient forms enter into a connection with today: “The ‘now’ must be brought into the constellation with the ‘has been’ so that the past stories can speak today” (Ebach, 1987, p. 148). Boff also warns, “The sacrament can degenerate into the sacramental […]. If faith […] remains without practical consequences, the is pure ideology and changes nothing in life” (Boff, 1976, p. 111; cf. Green, 1993, p. 107). Rituals still have their justification as metaphorical practices, but only in their critical reflection and without too much ballast: “We make beautiful processions and services with glorious vestments. But that must not be the main thing” (Bauernfeind, quoted after zur Bonsen, 1995). Form without content has no value – but this content we must increasingly invent and flesh out for ourselves. For the line between a meaningful, good ritual and a blocking, bad one is narrow and must be determined again and again: “That enthusiasm can be abused says nothing against the inflammability of the heart” (Sartory, 1987 p. 121). This also applies to rituals: if they are supposed to ‘inflame’, this enthusiasm is per se value-­ free – they only acquire a value through the system surrounding and controlling them, such as a religious community or a state system (cf. Soeffner in EAT, 1996): ‘We always live in symbols, but we only live in them reasonably securely if we know how to replace the world of immediacy with that of mediocrity – and vice versa: to control reason by symbol and symbol by the interpretation of reason’ (Soeffner, 1992, p.  79). To control would mean also to exercise a part of self-­ responsibility – and not only as liturgist, but also as addressee (cf. Waardenburg, 1996, p. 10 f.) As skeptical as I have become about the dance around the sacred cow of Protestant ideology – precisely self-responsibility – Waardenburg’s hint nevertheless seems valuable to me: without a doubt, even as an initiate or as part of the festive community of an initiate, one can use the ceremony meaningfully for oneself in order to fill the ruptures in one’s own life with beauty and thus honor them as the memorable events that they are. This, however, requires a certain ritual competence that hardly anyone can pull out of their sleeves. The fact that today the understanding of religiously traditional rites of passage has diminished does not in any way speak against their use, it only means that in order to create transparency as a liturgist one must build more bridges (cf. Reible in Küpper-Popp & Lamp, 2010, p. 97). Transitional rituals, when used reflectively, can be living connections, “correspondances vivantes,” between provinces of people, life, and meaning. Whether a ritual succeeds in this sense today seems to me to depend increasingly on individual factors-such as the nature of the relationship with and skill of the liturgist, the relationship of the principal addressee to the accompanying guests, and the ritual competence of all three parties. A liturgist who does not properly conduct a ritual spoils the ritual. The principal addressee who

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stumbles through his own transitional ritual makes the intended security of the transition a dubious enterprise. Guests who don’t sing along or resonate properly prevent a truly celebratory ritual: “We need imagination to celebrate the ancient rituals in a way that reaches us today. This cannot be achieved in the Church by constantly commenting on liturgical rites, but only by celebrating them in such a way that people are directly reached by them. It is not a matter of always inventing new rituals, but of celebrating the old rituals in such a way and understanding them in such a way that they are right for us” (Green, 1993, p. 39). When staging old and new rituals, the respective ritual competence and tolerance or the expectations of the participants must always be taken into account in addition to the control of form and content. Rituals cannot be resuscitated in a rush, but require a careful reanimation in which it can be shown whether their revival makes sense and is desirable in the long run. Such a debate does not have to be of an existential character and institutionally accompanied, but can have playful features, through “a slightly modified form of ritual communication, which makes it easier for the ritual stranger to participate in the ritual” (Paul, 1990, p. 157). Religions, or religious beliefs, or beliefs at all, offer significant potential for conflict and are capable of disrupting or even contributing to the disintegration of communities, families, etc. This is the concern of quite a few analysts and politicians, and it is a rhetorical argument for extreme political alignments. To this end, the divisive potential of beliefs should not be underestimated. It is important to be aware of the ambivalent resource of convictions, or in their realization, also in communally borne rituals. In the future, it will continue to be interesting to observe the effect of digitalization on rituals and also to explore them psychosocially. Even and especially in the digitalized world, ritual-like structures have been established from the beginning and in part traditional transitional rituals can be shaped (cf. Ahn & Miczek in Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2011, p. 70 ff.). This applies on the one hand to the abundant instructions for rituals that can be found on the Internet. It also applies to the easy accessibility of observed rituals through film sequences on YouTube, for example. But it also applies to religious rituals in worship. For example, in the lockdown of the Corona Crisis in March and April 2020, funerals were at times only allowed to be attended by a very small number of people, but livestreams were used to admit a wider number of viewers and, more broadly, relatives. In my view, it is likely that these digitised aspects will continue to play a role. I think it is likely that at a wedding, for example, those who do not want to or cannot be present in real life will increasingly be connected virtually. The technical possibilities of singing together, for example, will presumably also continue to grow as a result of higher transmission speeds.

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For Passover 2020, in the middle of the lockdown, under normal conditions at least our children in Germany would have traveled to us in Cologne. But that was not possible due to the contact ban. Instead, we held our traditional feast as a Zoom conference with all the children, and also ate with them, including one daughter who was in Iceland at the time, and another who was living in the United States at the time, plus close relatives from Israel at times. We as a family know that in future years we will add a digitized component to our family celebrations. It is likely that our rituals, or our access to rituals, will have to be modernized in order to continue to be available to those who need them in a new secular, trans-­ religious society. And to “work.” Religions, I agree with Sloterdijk, are systems of practice. As such, they create important possibilities (cf. Bell, 2011, p.  155, but unlike me, he refers only to Christianity). Our society is fragmenting more and more into micro-milieus that demand permanent attention – overarching rituals can significantly reduce this fragmentation and the resulting increased pressure on attention through the constant task of classifying this or that person here or there. The increase in freedom of design -becomes at the same time the necessity to develop design competence (cf. Keupp in Bilden and Keupp 2006, p. 69). Successful participation in rituals requires mastery of a common repertoire and rules of behavior (cf. Barber-Kersovan & Rösing, 1993, p. 141; Berger & Luckmann, 1970, p. 43) – at least the minimal: How do I dress, when do I speak or sing, where do I move, do I stand or sit. In case of doubt, this can also be learned by imitation during a ritual, but a certain basic knowledge leads to an increase in security. An individual connotation and interpretation of a ritual, a freer ritual staging requires liturgical skill, so that freedom of expression is used well, which in my opinion results from this new design. What would a world look like in which transitional rituals were not there, in which neither birth, nor coming of age, nor partnerships, nor death were really celebrated? In fact, we seem to be approaching such a society to some extent. That is, what happens when the great festivals are no longer celebrated? Or do we just celebrate other festivals? What is the occasion for our festivals? And does the occasion for a festival always have to be a significant one, and does it always have to be a positive one? Can’t we also make a celebration for something sad? When do we look at each other and say to each other: now it is time to celebrate? Only our stock of knowledge constitutes a ritual as a ritual that we know and can interpret correctly. Only through this does a confidence in the correctness and conformity of one’s own actions arise. The more variable society and marketable rituals are, the more the ritual competence of the one who does not renounce such forms becomes necessary, whether as a guest or as the addressee of a ritual. For this very reason, I consider the strengthening of ritualistic competence to be a high

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goal. We must learn again how to celebrate life in general and our lives in particular. Culture can be one of the most precious elements of human coexistence. Transitional rituals are also part of this. At the same time, it is right and sensible to question our ritual constructions. This applies to religion as well as, in my opinion, to the concept of nations. Their rituals and ritualisms also seem to be eroding, here too the identity as “German” etc. is becoming fragile, and thus the solidarity of the collective is endangered. If we perceive religiously traditional rituals only in their folkloristic functions, they are endangered (cf. Hauschild, 2008, p. 176). If we do not counteract the fragmentation of society through the loss of binding rituals (cf. Schomburg-Scherff in Turner, 1969/1989, p. 106) we are endangered. If we lose them in their three factors of immanence, transparency and transcendence, we lose an important part of our culture (cf. Grün, 1997, p. 14). And this too: “In our Godless world there is a lack of rituals that would gently put us back in our place” (De Botton, 2013, p. 196). Our ability to change has saved our species. Today we are again faced with important needs for change. We are once again living as humanity in an apocalyptic time. When I read about apocalyptic communitas in Turner, I think of my experiences in various communities in the climate movement. We “Fridays” are also forming apocalyptic communities. Rituals show the dynamics of such change, how change can work without a person leaving society. Understanding the dynamics of transitional rituals helps us to give impulses for necessary changes today. This also applies to the fact that tradition is invented again and again, old things are dusted off or more or less strangely preserved and then revived, but of course it is then not the same because the times are no longer the same (cf. Wolf, 2020, p.  20). The question of how we regulate community, how we regulate we-ness, will be one of survival. Our survival as humanity depends existentially on our skill in the group. And here again Turner’s question is relevant: How can we live community? Manage community (cf. Turner, 1969/1989, p. 147)? As Brudereck puts it, “A new beginning must be possible” (Brudereck, 2018, p. 12). In my opinion, transitional rituals and rituals as a whole also deserve attention, which are otherwise perhaps considered more rational forms, such as capitalist rituals of shopping at seasons or at certain turns of life. The dressing on the occasion of certain life transitionals is also carried out in religiously handed down rituals. At the same time, religious rituals are legitimized by the capitalization of our lives and thus their immigration into Christian rituals. And here I see a great need for enlightenment. A normality in which waste of resources is an essential part of a transitional ritual needs to be questioned today in light of our resource scarcity,

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our greater resource consciousness, and the resulting climate crisis and environmental damage as well as social harm. The same is true of the underlying constructions of reality and identity. Not only do people of lesser means continue to be partially excluded by the “obligation” of ritual pomp and use, that is one thing (cf. Brudereck, 2018, p. 28; Steinbeck, 1947 / 2009). But where this use and pageantry legitimizes the exploitation of our resources and pollution of our earth through its inclusion in ritual, we must stop now. Today we must rethink and readjust the measure and nature of waste, even ecologically. Am I only if I can afford to live beyond my means and the limits of what is sustainable for our planet? Really now (to quote one of my daughters)? In my opinion, we are faced with the following two necessities for change, which also affect the management of rituals: • Diversity in equilibrium – restructuring of society towards a much more multi-­ religious and multi-cultural society with the danger of popularism and racism – one of the antidotes would be the creation of authentic meeting spaces, experience of the resilience of social systems: Religiously traditional rituals and rituals in general represent reserves of cultural traditions, partly in decided geographical spaces – Hauschild has, in my opinion, rightly introduced the term reserve from economics into the social sciences (cf. Hauschild, 2008, p. 217 f.). Art, like rituals, can thereby “test possibilities for establishing, dissolving, and reflecting on communities in and through performance” (Fischer-Lichte in Turner, 1982, p. xxiii). • Play with resources and moderation: Moderation of consumption etc. thus also acting maturely and sustainably in the face of climate change, sustainable festivals  – “They are ritual forms that, like politeness, make possible not only a beautiful interpersonal interaction, but also a beautiful, gentle interaction with things” (Han, 2019, p. 12). Rituals here may well be part of the dissolution of the ideology of economic determinism (cf. Widlok in Brosius et  al., 2013, p. 173). It remains a lifelong task to create living connections between old and new parts of a biography, or, in social contexts such as a family, the biographies of its members. It remains a lifelong task to build bridges between the future and the past, “from one person to another”, as an old bridge builder longs for in a wonderful story, who never built “the real bridges” (cf. Steinwart in Domay, 1994, p. 49). Rituals, transitional rituals, even religiously traditional ones, can be one of the many instruments of our culture to establish such living connections. Where the world of the individual fragments, and the ability to establish coherence becomes an important

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c­ reative achievement of individuals as well as groups. This is the great risk, the great opportunity of religiously traditional transitional rituals today. Certain life worlds are indelible imprints, whether that is defined sacramentally or theologically. Again and again something happens that is not reversible. The unexpected good is possible, as is the unexpected crisis. It is a matter of making room for the improbable in oneself (after Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 44). to sound out the tension between parting and new beginnings, and to find ways of enduring these partings and, beyond the partings, of contending for and living on new beginnings. Nothing will change in this regard. I remember sparkling dinners with my father, who otherwise lived so modestly. Whenever something particularly bad or particularly good happened in life, he would say. Go have diner! Have a good time! I pay! I still hold to that to this day, when there are dark times to get through, and when there are good things to celebrate, like finishing this work on a sunny autumn morning. Time to wake up my daughter and take her out to breakfast.

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