The importance of rituals in processing the pain of grief

The importance of rituals in processing the pain of grief

Raffaella Restelli*

«Formation, Transformation,
Eternal minds in eternal recreation».
Goethe, Faust, part II, act I, scene 5

Nowadays «To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly. It is not normal to be dead»; it is greatly offensive to be dead: «Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy» (Baudrillard, 1979, p. 139).
«For contemporary culture, death is an anomaly, an unbearable inconsistency. It is not worth speculating about it, it is not part of the conceptual apparatus, it is not taken into any account by the dominant ideology, it is not comprehensible both for the natural sciences and the human sciences, it escapes the control of technique. It is the only human event which, although certain and insurmountable for everyone, is not predictable for anyone. And, therefore, it escapes not only any attempt to hypothesize when and where it will occur, but also any planning and programming project. Furthermore, death contravenes the rigid rational order which, in the light of the extraordinary successes achieved by the sciences dealing with natural phenomena, one would presume to be able to find even among human things, among the events that affect existence both on an individual and a social level» (Pieretti, 2018).

Consequently, especially in the West, failing to dominate it and bring it back within the logic of a thought that wants to clarify everything and claims to account for everything, people prefer to ignore it by relegating it to the unpredictable and mysterious events of life. But death remains in fact the most shocking desecration of the absolutes and certainties of contemporary culture, the declared enemy of its customs and fashions. For this reason, there is a tendency to remove it from consciousness and to judge reprehensible just talking about it, banishing even the external signs and rituals connected to it.
But today that the world has been hit by a silent, invisible and insidious virus identified as Sars-Co-V-2 which has already killed thousands of people, man seems to have lost his certainties, frightened and blocked by the fear of illness and above all of death: no one would have ever thought that in 2020, considering the developments in medicine in the recent decades, the healthcare personnel would even be forced to choose who to treat, given the large number of patients. Maybe in China where it all seems to have originated, or in Africa, but certainly not in Europe or America.
The pandemic is as if it were marking the end of the great dream of the modern man who now finds himself claiming the possibility of accompanying his loved ones to death and of being able to celebrate funeral rites suspended for safety reasons. Those rituals that seemed to have lost their meaning in an age marked by the very denial of the experience of death, in an age in which the elderly and the sick are increasingly entrusted to the care of hospitals or rest homes, and in fact removed from their loved ones even before their deaths, in an age in which fathers no longer make wills and no longer give their last recommendations on their deathbed gathering the family together as in an extreme, painful embrace, in an age in which there is no longer any place for death and its elaboration. The same happens for mourning, a form of behavior that our society, based on the trinomial health - youth - happiness, is no longer able to tolerate. As Ariés states, «[…] If a few formalities are maintained, and if a ceremony still marks the departure, it must remain discreet and avoid any pretext for any emotion: in France, for example, since about 1970 the long line of people offering their condolences to the family after the religious service has been eliminated. The outward manifestations of mourning are repugned and are disappearing. Dark clothes are no longer worn; one no longer dresses differently than on any other day» (Ariés, 1998, pp. 71-72).
Humanity affected by the Sars-Co-V-2 pandemic and its variants is lost and disconcerted even though scientists had long warned about the possibility of the onset of new diseases and considered the dangers of zoonoses as concrete and serious, and above all had communicated their fears related to the danger of a new virulent and highly transmissible disease certain that the Big One would be a zoonosis. As underlined in 2014 by Quammen «The next big and murderous human pandemic, the one that kills us in millions, will be caused by a new disease-new to humans, anyway. The bug that is responsible will be strange, unfamiliar, but it will not come from outer space. Odds are that the killer pathogen--most likely a virus--will spill over into humans from a nonhuman animal» (Quammen, 2014, pp. 528-530). Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity. Will it be like that again or will we all die? Nothing can be excluded, as memorably summarized by Webster «only the devil knows» (Quammen, 2014, p. 528) when and how the next influenza pandemic will occur, it is difficult to predict when or where it will appear or how severe it will be. These disease outbreaks are not simply happening to us, they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.
Nonetheless, the modern man closed in his own self-referentiality, sure he could have solutions for any eventuality, and dominate everything including life and death, has simply passed on and now finds himself unarmed, lost in a collective silence that affects everyone, a silence present at every latitude, in the world of the so-called "rich" as well as that of the so-called "poor", in big cities as well as in deserts and forests or along the coasts of seas and rivers. A silence that "takes your breath away", the same breath that fails people affected by the virus which mainly affects the respiratory system, reaching the thinnest alveolar ramifications of their lungs. A frightening analogy that requires a reflection on the relationship between the organs of the respiratory system and their subtle meaning.
«The Sanskrit word prana, “breathe” refers to the source of life, to the vitality, to the vibrant energy of every manifestation» (Eliade, 2010, p. 518). The Indian sacred texts describe the vital, rhythmic and pulsating breath as the microcosmic form of the alternation between day and night, activity and rest of cosmic time. But do we breathe, or do we receive the breath of life? If with inhalation we absorb the aerial cosmos making it ours for a moment, with exhalation we die to individual life and with the exhaled air we re-enter the great sea of everything from which we came. Each cosmic breath, as the Hindu myths narrate, expresses a creation of the cosmos and a subsequent reabsorption by Brahma according to a cycle that takes place following millenary rhythms. «If the human respiratory rhythm is a symbol of the great cosmic rhythm because it happens in a cyclical, total, without interruption way, within it it is possible to find an indefinite, almost imperceptible moment in which the expansive movement of inspiration passes almost instantaneously into the concentrating motion of exhalation» (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism). As Frigoli points out «[…] In such a moment of passage of the respiratory phases, if the meditator's consciousness were able to make that moment of rhythm transformation his own, he would consciously grasp the experience of the birth of thought and ideas, and the creative aspects of our being» (Frigoli, 2019).
In classical Greece the breath was in fact identified with the conscience, the thought and the feelings were placed in the lungs, which interacted with the heart, the blood and the vital force which refers to the vital breath that animates the very clay of our body. It is the breathing that accompanies the newborn's vigorous crying, it is the change in breathing, the shortness of breath that signals panic, or the sobs that prevent us from talking when we are distressed. Breath can spread disease, harsh words and bad smells. Everything breathes: the forest in spring, the rustling of the leaves, the swaying of the grass, the flickering of the patches of light. «The Tao is the breath that never dies. It is the Mother to all Creation» claims Tzu's Tao Te Ching (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, 2011, p. 16). «With the breath we are in contact with the world, with life itself which pours its vicissitudes into the great common reservoir from which we all draw: the air» (Frigoli, 1999, p. 147). It is not a coincidence that in all cultures the respiratory dimension, linked to the life of oxygen, is celebrated as a central point for the survival of the human spirit.
Consequently, as Resnik underlines, if the «air represents the “milk of the universe” »,  «altering this ratio means bringing out devastating anxieties of death, of "suffocation" due to the reduction of the vital respiratory space with obvious repercussions in terms of aggressive relationships with the world» (Frigoli, 2014, p. 36) which manifest themselves with respiratory and autoimmune diseases as a symptom of a sick society like the current one. As Nasr states: «In this new guise of “deity on earth”, which no longer reflects his transcendent archetype, man runs the terrible risk of being devoured by this same earth over which he seems to exercise his dominion» (Frigoli, 2014, p. 32).
From an ecobiopsychological perspective, in the world (eco) there is an order which is implicit in the evolution of the human body (bios) and in the history of his dreams and myths (psyche), but to compose that Harmonia Mundi which wants the microcosm to be analogous to the macrocosm, it is necessary to be able to intuit that, beyond the material world, man's conscience opens up to other levels of existence, dominated by the symbols and their laws. Only in this way the body and the mind, the matter and the psyche always hovering between the scientific reason and the phenomenology of the imaginary, can recover their real dimension as aspects of an archetypal reality also open to the integration of the soul. «[…] There is no doubt that in order to overcome the suffocating environment of "matter" created by the hubris of machine civilization, man must rediscover a global vision of the world and a better intimacy with nature understood as the cosmos, whose language speaks to man in an apparently new, actually ancient way» (Frigoli, 2014, pp. 31-32).
The archetype represents that unitary trait capable of grasping the totality of manifestations, overcoming the apparent divisions of separate emotions. And it is through symbolism that man can access the knowledge of the archetypal dimension that manifests itself in the simultaneity of the presence of physical facts and instinctual behaviors, as well as in mental representations that are based on the facts themselves, the outcome of which is the meaning itself of reality. In fact, even if the archetypal aspect always clearly remains the heritage of the absolute knowledge pertinent to the great laws of life, man can and is able to recover the symbolic vision within himself, that aspect of the inner experience which goes beyond what appears, aware that even just trying to grasp the complete vision of what is defined as an archetype, is a superhuman task that cannot disregard the ability to recover within itself an extremely vast and general totality, such as to allow the exploring consciousness to "seeing" as "together" what to ordinary consciousness appears fragmented into multiple experiences.
In analytical psychology, Jung summarized the relationship that exists between the archetype and the instinctual modes of behavior on the one hand, and the consequent psychic images on the other, using an analogy that recalls the light spectrum with the ultraviolet pole on the right and the infrared pole on the left of the spectrum, stating how the psychosoma as regards man and in a broad sense all reality as regards the universe, can be assimilated to the luminous spectrum. At the infrared pole in man, psychosomatic processes translate into a prevalence of somatic aspects, material facts and instinctual behaviors, while at the ultraviolet pole there is a prevalence of psychic aspects which impose themselves as "images", "representations" and thoughts. At the centre, between these two extremes, is the band of the "visible" to refer to the ordinary emotions of our psychic life.
An analogy that can be applied to all complex structures which on the one hand possess their own indisputable materiality linked to the systemic structure of the model, and on the other are also custodians of a series of psychological, social and cultural values, whose scope of study transcends the ordinary one of science.
Therefore, the analogy allowing the psyche a less fragmented understanding of the complex phenomena of nature, as a logical structure of thought, is to be considered as one of the supporting axes of the symbol, and more specifically of the dark part of the symbol itself, alongside the logical-causal criterion which instead governs the mode of functioning more specifically open to conscience. It is from this point of view that the symbol, in its functional dynamics, summarizing these two operational aspects of the psyche, comes to constitute the keystone for the study of natural phenomena and their complexity. It is no coincidence that Jung defined as "transcendent function" that operational peculiarity of the symbol which allows the psyche, composing the opposites of the conscious and the unconscious, to get to a new, more orderly and less conflictual psychic situation. «In this perspective, the archetype of the Self, which can be superimposed on the cosmic Self, a true and proper factor of order, in the totality of life in general, will be represented by that "central" aspect of the psychosomatic unit, capable of simultaneously uniting the aspects of the infrared, with the “symmetrical” of the ultraviolet, in a totality without separation» (Frigoli, 1999, pp. 118-119).
As Frigoli underlines «[…] We need to recover our identity by rebuilding a healthier relationship with the whole fabric of life» (Frigoli, 2014, p. 28). In these times of pandemic, it is more than ever necessary to think about a change in the way of conceiving man and go back to marveling at the immense scenario of creation, at the confident conviction of being able to shed light on the condition of man suspended between finite and infinite as the homo sapiens did intent on contemplating the universe to grasp its essence. The modern man, the homo faber with his passion for practical life, his complete dedication to work, his pursuit of material well-being, even going so far as to manipulate nature to better respond to his needs, can only stop and ask himself profound questions about the very meaning of life. It is the time of the homo religious, of the man in search of the meaning of life and of the world who, by coming into contact with the numinous element, that element present in all manifestations of strength and effectiveness normally perceived as belonging to an order different from the natural one, can get to live an experience mediated by the supersensible through the symbol, the ritual and the myth.
«For the historian of religions, every manifestation of the sacred is important; every rite, every myth, every belief, every divine figure reflects the experience of the sacred, and consequently implies the notions of being, of meaning, of truth. It is hard to imagine how the human spirit could function without the belief that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could manifest itself without giving meaning to human impulses and experiences. The awareness of a real and meaningful world is intimately linked to the discovery of the sacred. Through the experience of the sacred, the human spirit has grasped the difference between what is real, powerful, rich and endowed with meaning, and what is devoid of these qualities: the chaotic and dangerous flow of things, their appearances and their fortuitous and meaningless disappearances. In short, the "sacred" is an element in the structure of consciousness, and not a stage in the history of consciousness itself. At the most archaic levels of culture, living as a human being is in and of itself a religious act since food, sex life and work have a sacred value. In other words, to be – or rather to become – a man means to be “religious”.» (Eliade, 1999, p. 7). So claims Eliade who, considering the religious factor and even more the mystical one, the keystone for understanding the essence of man, in the face of scientific, technological and social progress, supports the profound value of archaic existence, stating in the introduction to his essay The Myth of the Eternal Return, «[…] The essential part of my research concerns the image that the man of archaic societies has of himself and of the place he occupies in the cosmos» (Eliade, 2018, p 6). And it is precisely by investigating the phenomenology of the sacred through its three manifestations: the ritual, the myth and the symbol, that he underlines how they can express concepts on being and non-being, not found otherwise. By comparing different traditions and texts, he manages to demonstrate the will in archaic man to return to that primordial time, when the sacred gesture was performed by gods, heroes or ancestors, emphasizing how the archetypal actions, at the basis of cosmogony, were revealed to man in a Mythical, Metahistorical Time. That leads the scholar to attribute to the symbolic repetition of cosmogony, the regeneration of time in its totality and to consider ritual repetition as a real and proper interruption of historical time which leads back to the illud tempus, to the "mythical time", in that aspiration to start a new life in a new creation by responding to the law of the cosmic cycle which always contemplates a creation, a new existence which then running out, foresees a return to chaos, as represented in all the rituals.
From an ecobiopsychological perspective that seeks to grasp in the individual-collective continuum that unique and undivided principle that manifests itself in every form when the eye of mind illuminates it, the ritual represents one of the ways of accessing the supersensitive capable of allowing the mind to conquer that cognitive space of the archetypal experience without losing the dimension of ordinary reality. Anthropologically speaking, the rite is in fact a dramatization of "guided" unconscious forces whose evocation, through the symbols that weave the plot of the rite, has the purpose of allowing the consciousness of the Ego, their "energetic mastery", with the aim of an amplification of consciousness itself. In fact, death does not affect only on a material level by plunging into hell, it also manifests itself on a spiritual level by revealing a world of light. In the elaboration of mourning, it is precisely the rites that give meaning and legitimize the life-death, death-life cycle allowing to face the loss, the lack through the preparation for the farewell, for the acceptance and for the necessary elaboration of death. The rites loaded with an arcane symbolism, allow the creation of a new order, a rebirth and meaning to the very nature of life, in the chaos and disorder caused by the shock of death, in the transition from the community of the living to that of the dead, of the ancestors, going to awaken the archetypes, the very essence of life, of being. In mourning, the ritual with all its symbolic load is therefore to be conceived as necessary to stem the psychic damage that can occur during critical transitions.
But what if, on the contrary, the consecration of the rite fails? What can be the repercussions when the pain of grief cannot be processed in absence of the funeral rite, whether you decide not to celebrate it or whether you are unable to do so? What are the consequences on the family members, in the social group of reference of the deceased and in society as a whole?
Obviously this is not an unexplored field: just think of the Ebola epidemic in Congo in 2016, which then reappeared in 2019, when the local population had difficulty in accepting the need to hospitalize their loved ones as required by the Western health procedures which claimed to remove the sick from their communities with the consequent loss of that essential contact of care and accompaniment to death, and above all could not accept the ban on celebrating funeral rites. A situation considered so serious for the population as to require the intervention of expert anthropologists. In Africa, sickness and death are in fact considered and experienced as part of life itself. Illness in some communities is still attributed to consequences of acts of witchcraft, but there is no doubt that everywhere in the world, the psyche portrays illness as a visit from a menacing stranger, as the faltering of a demonic animal or as a leak in the identity, in the image and in the self-mastery. The same term "symptom" which shares the root syn- ("with", "together") with the "symbol", evokes the concept of "putting together" a thing with its meaning, and expresses a warning and an omen: a somatic analogy of psychic conflict. As happened for the primitive men, still today the psychic experience of illness is therefore associated with a lost or stolen soul, the activation of evil spirits and ritual impurities, the violation of a taboo, the wrong relationship with a deity and a divine possession, a shamanic vocation, an initiatory process, an alchemical transmutation and a descent into hell. Illness belongs to the realm of the divinity of death and destruction and can become its anticipation.
In the Western world where rituals have long since lost their importance and depth, the contemporary culture by questioning itself about death seemed to have distanced thought and awareness of it, eliminating any sense of finiteness and fueling the illusion of the "eternal man" by always making the experience of illness and death more and more depending on the technical knowledge of medicine and externalizing death from everyday relationships. But the extraordinary nature of the pandemic event and its consequences has forced the modern man to relate to death and his own dying, strongly impacting his fragility with respect to the difficulties in containing such a serious disease and above all the anguish caused by death and its censorship. The pandemic seems to have recalled the importance of rituals understood as necessary to recognize the mystery of death and go beyond the crisis of presence allowing the pain of grief to be elaborated processing it in a constructive and transformative way to keep its memory. On the other hand, the anguish caused by death does not concern only the individual, but the whole social group of reference and in this case the whole world which, through the ritual, the representation of death itself, allows to maintain order even in West where as elsewhere, it is important to honor those who have left us.
People from all over the world have always preserved the relics of their ancestors with extreme care: earth from their native land, ritual or personal objects to mitigate the pain of those who remain alive due to separation from the deceased, but also to represent the bright and powerful essence of the person who left us. We cannot ignore the rites: in Africa, anthropologists have intervened by suggesting symbolic funeral rites if not possible to celebrate them  in presence, just as in Italy during the lock-down were proposed substitute rites such as "writing letters" in memory of the person who left or the "visualization" of the missed person to set up a story of lived experiences to be "relived" and "shared" with the reference group also using telematic channels or in presence as soon as possible. To overcome the great pain, it is always important and necessary to remember and honor our deceased loved ones who are both souls that have flown away and presences that hover, not to forget our ancestors for the materiality and the awareness they seem to possess, but at the same time for the immateriality, the peace and the introspective serenity they live in a timeless dimension. «How could we have survived if our ancestors had not carried us on their shoulders? How could we have found our way if we had not been guided by the psychic deposits that left us as marks? How could we keep the world of the natural and the supernatural in balance without their occult meditation? Arriving at the threshold of consciousness in the form of dreams and imaginations, our departed loved ones ask us questions, dispense knowledge, and peel away the layers of skin under which our personalities lurk. They come to visit us in familiar guises or as inexplicable phenomena, piquing our curiosity and urging us to action. They manifest in the form of extraordinarily intelligent and adaptable animals or human spirits. They are the stars of the night sky of our unknown being, emitting a light that is millions of billions of years old. Like the harp, the bow, the drum and prototypical instruments, they transmit the rhythms and vibrations of the cosmos and their harmony. Shrewd, mysterious, oracular, they are the legendary elders and immortals of the past, of the time of dreams, of the primordial "time out of time", and yet they continue to exert their influence on the present and the future, guiding the innate disposition of their descendants and participating in everyday life. But the ancestors are not always benevolent and generous, they also show themselves ruthless, gruesome and cruel by possessing us, soliciting us and dismembering us, the test of the labyrinth can act on the psyche like evil ghosts that criticize and make us feel ashamed. They haunt us if they feel abandoned, they upset our balance, they impose themselves as fixed ideas and fear of change and reinterpretation» (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, 2011, p. 790). As Clark claims, «they are the "keepers of the source of life"» (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, 2011, p. 790) on which our vitality, sustenance and renewal depend.
The very essence of our existence lies precisely in our propensity for transformation: psychic events with their subtle vibrations move in their immaterial sphere and interact with the body for the time it becomes the instrument of their representation. A body constantly crossed by flows of energy, an energy that must be able to flow even in the darkest moments in order not to risk undermining our body and our spirit, activating «its dance that transforms itself and transform: but everything must take place in great harmony as if its flow caressed the material structures giving everyone what needed and then passing on» (Frigoli, 2014, p. 85) «If it is true that energy can only be described through its transformations and if it is true that all that exists is a form of energy, then we can believe that the essence of our existence is precisely the transformation» (Frigoli, 2014, p. 84).

References

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*Raffaella Restelli - Scholar in the field of Human Sciences, linguist and psychologist registered with the British Psychological Society with which she actively collaborates. Graduated in Modern Languages ??and Literatures at the Catholic University of Milan and in Psychology at Newcastle University - UK. Ecobiopsychological counselor. Translator at the ANEB editorial area.