Ritual emerged in comparative religion as a technology for regulating emotions in life crises

Evidence

It was in the context of an emerging discipline of comparative religion that anthropology developed a transcendent notion of the sacred. An interesting version of this is to be found in the work of R. R. Marett, who proposed that ritual should be regarded as having the function of regulating emotions, especially in critical situations of life, an idea that enabled him to offer a well-known anthropological definition of the sacraments: “For anthropological purposes,” he wrote, “let us define a sacrament as any rite of which the specific object is to consecrate or make sacred. More explicitly, this means any rite which by way of sanction or positive blessing invests a natural function with a supernatural authority of its own.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 150

Categorization

• DEFINE: Marett’s functionalist definition of sacrament: a rite that invests a natural function with supernatural authority.
• SHARE: For a friend into ritual theory — Marett’s deflation of sacraments to emotion-regulation in ‘mating’ and ‘dying’ is a striking contrast to doctrinal accounts.
• XREF: connects to: Religious and shamanic practices across cultures aim to dissolve the suffering subject