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A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World--and How It Can Save Us - Hardcover

Feiler, Bruce

 
9780593656433: A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World--and How It Can Save Us
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593656431 ISBN 13: 9780593656433
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

One of our great decoders of human connection chronicles the astonishing rise of new rituals around the world—and offers a road map for restoring togetherness with gatherings you’ll love

Since time immemorial, humans have turned to ritual to connect us in periods of change. Until today. Birth rituals and coming-of-age rituals have plummeted; fewer than half of Americans are married; only one in three is buried. “It took us ten thousand years to establish cultural norms around how we mark collective life transitions,” writes Bruce Feiler. “It took us fifty years to dismantle them.” Can this threat to society be reversed?

To find out, Feiler went on a round-the-world ritual road trip, attending—and participating in—life rituals in sixteen countries on six continents. These spectacles, some rarely seen, include a mass baptism in the Vatican, a tribal bride price negotiation in South Africa, an adolescent tooth filing in Bali, six weddings in Las Vegas, and ten funerals in Ireland.

Beyond the decline in traditional rituals, Feiler discovered that we are in the midst of a ritual renaissance that is pushing back against apathy, loneliness, and digital saturation. Fed up with top-down scripts, everyday people, from boomers to Gen Z, are reimagining collective rituals at a remarkable pace, inventing fresh ways to gather around life, love, health, and family—and forging thriving communities in the process.

As he did with Life Is in the Transitions, Feiler also collected stories of a hundred ritual designers and built a first-of-its kind database of ideas to make gatherings more effective—from creating sacred space to mediating conflict to generating “wows” that guests will talk about forever.

From a master storyteller uncovering a thrilling phenomenon hiding in plain sight, A Time to Gather is both a stirring adventure and practical manual. It’s a landmark guide to modern ritual; a tool kit for turning everyday moments into unforgettable celebrations; and an invitation to reconnect and rejoice—together.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bruce Feiler is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Walking the Bible. His three TED Talks have been viewed more than five million times, and he teaches the TED Course “How to Master Life Transitions.” A native of Savannah, Georgia, Bruce lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Linda Rottenberg, and their twin daughters.

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1.

Welcome With Joy

Circling St. Peter's Square

The front door of the Vatican is surprisingly hard to find. The Old City of Jerusalem, which is one third of a square mile, has seven entrances; Vatican City, which is half that size, has six. The one I was looking for is located just to the left of St. Peter's Basilica and just inside the two hundred eighty-four columns that make up Bernini's welcoming colonnade. Because the mother church of Catholicism is "almost like a womb," Bernini wrote, the elliptical porticoes were designed "to maternally open her arms to Catholics to confirm them in their beliefs."

But on this Sunday morning in late October, when the pope was hosting a contentious summit on women in the church and I had been invited to witness a novel approach to one of the more widely practiced life rituals in history, the entire complex seemed far less welcoming. I first had to walk through a temporary gate, then pass through security, then introduce myself to the Swiss Guard, then make my way to the parish office. The door was open, but the entrance was empty. For a few minutes I waited awkwardly.

Then someone called out my name. Instead of a prelate in cardinal-and-white finery, it was a burly man with a salt-and-pepper beard, a black friar's frock, and sandals. I reached out my hand, but he swatted it away and gave me a bear hug.

"Welcome!" Brother Agnello Stoia said. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Let's go for coffee. The baptism begins at noon."

After all that time I spent trying to get into the Vatican, Brother Agnello promptly led me out the back door and across the street to a café.


Exactly twenty-five years before this trip, I was strapped into the front seat of a car, speeding past tanks in war-torn eastern Turkey, careening around corkscrews in the Caucasus Mountains. Behind me, the Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren was punching numbers into a GPS. After several hours, he tapped on my shoulder. “Look!” Through a break in the peaks, thousands of feet higher than anything around it, was the snowcapped summit of a triangular mountain, like Mount Fuji, only taller.

"Mount Ararat!" Avner exclaimed.

It was my first glimpse of the highest spot in the Middle East, where Genesis says Noah's ark landed, and my first taste of a fundamental truth: Our most enduring cultural artifacts have a strong sense of place. Just as you can't understand the Bible without understanding its connection to holy land, you can't understand life rituals without understanding their connection to holy ground.

The first rule of life rituals is that they need sacred space. They are nonordinary acts that demand nonordinary settings. They literally take place: whether an altar, circle, pool, hill, ashram, temple, shrine, or wat. One place that has come to embody this lesson around the world is a day's drive from Mount Ararat; Avner and I visited during our journey.

Göbekli Tepe is Turkish for "potbelly hill." Located near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, at the intersection of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, this dusty crossroads has seen more than its share of storied visitors, from Lawrence of Arabia to Alexander the Great to Abraham. But the most important visitors may be the unnamed ones who came twelve thousand years ago and built one of the earliest human settlements.

Startling excavations since the 1990s have revealed twenty circular enclosures of limestone megaliths with strong echoes of Stonehenge and striking similarities to the Vatican colonnade. Some pillars are carved with animal forms, including scorpions and lions; others are covered in humanoid forms, among them torsos and hands. The site has become known as the birthplace of ritual. A million tourists now visit every year.

Before we can understand the future of ritual, we must first understand its past. That effort begins with a simple point: that ritual has a past. Ritual itself has a history. While it may be tempting to assume that humans have always gathered together and thus always agreed on how to make meaning together, the truth is more complex-and more illuminating. The history of ritual shows that we're constantly changing our views of how we mark turning points in our lives. That history can be told in four places: Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, the Château de Vincennes outside Paris, and the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Let's begin with the first.

When I began traveling around the Middle East in the 1990s, the history of civilization was told in a straightforward manner. Early humans wandered from place to place, until the agricultural revolution around 10,000 BCE, when they began to settle in one place. Cultivating agriculture gave humans free time, which in turn allowed them to tell stories, which in turn led them to build religions, which in turn inspired them to create rituals. This progression can be captured in a formula:

HUMANS → RELIGION → RITUAL

The discoveries at Göbekli Tepe almost single-handedly flipped that script, revealing that long before humans settled in one place and thousands of years before they formed organized religions, they were already practicing rituals. These fundamental human acts inspired stories, which in turn led to customs, traditions, liturgies, and laws, which in turn led to religions. The new formula looks more like this:

HUMANS → RITUAL → RELIGION

The big bang of this breakthrough occurred on December 18, 1994, when three amateur speleologists in the Ardèche valley of southern France noticed a faint draft coming from the blocked entrance of a cave. Soon, the park ranger Jean-Marie Chauvet, along with Éliette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, breached the obstruction, spelunked twenty-six feet down, and found themselves in a pitch-black, one-hundred-thousand-square-foot chamber. Late on a chilly Sunday afternoon, in what is now called the End Chamber of Chauvet, the explorers discovered an astonishing sight: hundreds of depictions of thirteen different species-leopards, bears, horses-along with elaborate images of lions hunting bison and rhinoceroses butting horns. The trio also found a child's footprint, remains of ancient hearths, and smoke stains from human gatherings.

"They were here!" Deschamps cried, referring to our ancestors thirty-five thousand years ago.

The Chauvet discovery opened the floodgates. In the next four decades, more than three hundred fifty displays of cave art were unearthed around the world, a breathtaking string of Paleolithic art galleries. Time and again, these works show detailed evidence of ritual behavior.

The ceremonial Lion Man of Germany, from thirty-eight thousand years ago, combines the limbs of a human and the head of a lion. The Python Cave of Botswana, from seventy thousand years ago, features a twenty-foot carved snake with sparkling eyes, surrounded by thirteen spearheads and a secret chamber. The Norwegian archaeologist who led the discovery calls the finding a "loud archaeological signature" of collective ritual. A Sulawesi cave in Indonesia shows evidence of rituals involving red ocher, pierced shells, and engraved jewelry dating back one hundred sixty-four thousand years-that's forty times older than the pyramids. The La Chapelle-aux-Saints cave in central France has yielded evidence of Neanderthal burial three hundred thousand years ago, before the arrival of anatomically modern humans.

Göbekli Tepe weaves these tantalizing threads into a vivid tableau of late hunter-gatherer lives brimming with ritual. The site's earliest findings suggested that the structures highest on the potbelly hill were monumental gathering places where bands of wandering people would assemble to...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593656431
ISBN 13 
9780593656433
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
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