Unity is invisible. You can't see the thing that unifies a group of people, be it a club, a class, a nation, or any other group. And yet, just as you cannot point to a physical number 2, the unifying principalities of groups exist. Spirits have always been understood to exist in this manner, except by materialists, and we win the prize for the best materialists who have ever existed.
In the ancient world, the unifying principles were explicitly described as gods. In our modern, disenchanted way of seeing the world, we don't see unifying principles as gods, but rather abstract concepts, perhaps expressed as manifestos or ideologies or constitutions. But, the gods still exist, and the old gods also had their rules. The principalities were perceived as divine because they had a spiritual nature, spreading their unifying presence across many people, transcending time and place. Those god-kings of the ancient world who ruled vast empires were also perceived as carriers of a god, because of the unity they achieved.
To unify a group, you have to sacrifice something of individual idiosyncrasies, things that don't fit with the group. You want to achieve communion between the members and harmony with the unifying principle. This was explicitly achieved by the sacrifice of food to the god, usually grain, and on other occasions, animal sacrifice, followed by a communal meal and celebration by the group members. This is seen in the Eucharist in Christianity: it is our primary unifying ritual. Processions were also a major part of the sacrificial ritual, since they are a public expression of the group's intension, a way of staking a claim in the world. We also see this in traditional Christianity, where processions inside and outside the church take place at various times of the year. In the modern world, our primary procession is Pride marches, followed by climate and anti-racism marches. These public ritual tell you what the unifying principles of the west currently are.
The sacrifices that a group needs to make to achieve unity sometimes involve removing people from a group. There is that disruptive person in the club: their membership is terminated and they no longer have access to the group. But in the context of wider public arenas, simply ending membership is not an option. You have to resort to all-out scapegoating: identifying individuals and/or groups that are disrupting the group and eliminating them, either by imprisoning them or murdering them. We see this in Nazi Germany, where the Jews, the weak, elderly and 'unfit' were eliminated so that the ideal of a perfect Third Reich could be achieved. Today, abortions are the sacrifice we pay to achieve the ideal of a careerist, technocratic, egalitarian society - similar, actually, to ancient Carthage. We also see this desire in the hate expressed towards those who will not perfectly comply with COVID restrictions and vaccinations: those people are the reason for the disunity of society and must be forcibly made to comply.
Sacraments are a way in which people achieve union with the divine to one degree or another. Therefore, any ritual act that allows you to participate in activities restricted to a particular group is a sacrament. Citizenship is the sacrament that allows you to participate in a nation's life. Baptism is of course the entry sacrament to the Church. We see forming around us the desire to make vaccinations the entry ritual or sacrament to society.
All our modern rituals are implicit. We don't believe in gods, even most Christians. And yet, in this moment, it has become clearer that our beliefs are false. The way the world works is to some degree independent of all our modern, arbitrary opinions: the gods are still at work, ritual is inevitable, and we all long for the sacraments that give us access to the divine principalities, those things that connect us together.
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