When I was 21 I followed a boy to another state. It was the kind of crazy and courageous thing that a girl of that age does. Like my college years but without the college. The relationship fizzled by the time I was officially a resident but we remained friends and I decided to make a go far away from my comfort zone.
Like many of my friends, at that time, the guy was a pagan. Since we were still friends after the breakup, I became a part of this neo-pagan group he was starting. It was an eclectic collection of individual practitioners coming together to try out being a part of a group.
This was not the first time I was a non-believer putting myself amidst believers. I’ve always been a solitary practitioner of my atheism and, at the time, I didn’t see the point of being out. So I never exposed myself. But I wasn’t joining to be a joiner. As an atheist I’m interested in rational explanations for the fantastic. In this case, I wanted to try out paganistic rituals because of this burgeoning theory I had about religious experiences.
I’d noticed something about going to concerts and other large group experience. As I’d look around at the sea of faces, all feeling the exact same thing as myself, I’d experience this intensity of emotion. Kinda like a feedback loop. My skin would tingle with what I assume was a surge of adrenaline.
While there are many things about religion I don’t understand, if you compare going to church and worshiping to that feeling I have when I’m at a concert then I kinda get it. I understand why people would repeatedly seek out that communal experience. And, not surprisingly, there’s a name for that feeling. In 1912, the sociologist Emile Durkheim deemed it “collective effervescence.”
Now, when I talk of collective effervescence, I understand it as a bottom-up experience. I don’t consider it some sort of shared mystical energy. I think the group experience taps into my human animal in a way that intensifies feeling. Randal Collins, in 1990, further clarified Durkheim’s theory: “The model posits an emotional contagion among the persons present, for they are focusing attention on the same thing and are aware of each others focus; they become caught up in each others emotions. As a result the emotional mood becomes stronger and more dominant…”
Looking back, maybe it wasn’t fair that I was conducting a secret experiment on my friends. At the time, I just thought of it as “having an experience.” If I’m going to reject all forms of religion, I kinda want to know what I’m rejecting. I want to be an informed atheist.
So one day our little group went to this secluded area in the woods, a beautiful glade surrounded by trees, and we performed a ritual of our own making. At the time I didn’t have a name to call the feelings the ritual aroused in me. Also, I found my feelings were not the intensity that an arena of strangers inspired but I definitely felt what I now know to call collective effervescence.
There wasn’t really a point to the ritual. No magical intent. We were just doing it to do it. I guess you could call it a group activity. If you want to get all spooky about it, we were experimenting with things of the unknown…because that’s what people do when they’re trying to sort out who they want to be.
At the end of the ritual we were all laying in a circle, looking up at the night sky, and a flock of bats burst from the trees. I heard someone say, “Look.” And then, “We did that.” And then, “We brought out the bats.” This is the point I came crashing back to earth. The “we brought out the bats” line washed away any pleasure I was feeling because all I could think was, “No we didn’t.”
We’re in the woods. The sun it setting. And there were trees above our heads. Bats bursting from those trees was not even a stretch as coincidences go. While I think nature is amazing and something to be enjoyed, I don’t believe we have any power over it.
The sad truth was that I was not on the same page with the people around me. As much as I like ritual, the mysticism ruins it for me. But I didn’t just abandon the group. I gave the whole ritual thing a couple more tries and kept hanging out because they were my friends.
I think at the back of my mind I knew my time with them was temporary. After two years I was ready to go home. I’d been to the other side of the hill and saw that the grass was no greener. I was ready to go back and appreciate the comfort of the familiar.
I now know if I want to feel collective effervescence it’s better to choose a secular activity. But I’ve never really been one to chase a high, so I only go to a concert if I’m really excited about who’s playing. And I haven’t even considered trying out sports events or raves because I’d be too bored and annoyed to feel any sort of heightened feeling.
When some scientists talk about how the world is full of wonder, they bring up the really big things, like black holes, or the really little things, like quantum particles…but I think the human experience is pretty amazing. And it’s the sociological geek in me that’s excited to understand how interacting with this world can influence who I am.
Sources:
Wiki: Collective Effervescence
Rave culture and religión By Graham St. John pg 88
Caught in play: how entertainment works on you By Peter G. Stromberg pg 105
Research agendas in the sociology of emotions By Theodore D. Kemper, pg 32
Neuroanthropology and the Contemporary Culture of Entertainment
Defending the Durkheimian tradition: religion, emotion and morality By Jonathan S. Fish pg 170
Wonderful post, great story. I felt this collective effervescence at TAM8 to the point where the high took weeks to wear off (and might leave one prone to addiction to such events, much like a drug). Even smaller events with like-minded people make me feel so positive afterwards.
pssssssst- the spelling is ‘atheist’…