The Metaphysics of
Shared Ritual Spaces
&
The Contemporary Need
for Eleusinian Mystery
The Metaphysics of
Shared Ritual Spaces
Jay McDaniel
Abstract
Drawing on Whitehead's Process and Reality, we can think of rituals not as things we merely watch, but as experiences we enter. Whitehead’s eight “categories of existence” help explain what’s happening when rituals work:
Seen this way, ritual spaces are not static containers but living fields of becoming. Participants are not passive—they bring creativity, make choices, improvise, and are themselves changed over time. Rituals can heal or harm, include or exclude, transform or deform—and often do some mix of all three. At their best, they invite us to become more fully ourselves together. At their worst, they grow stale or divisive and destructive, as in rituals at political rallies. One thing for sure: process philosophy itself will grow stale, lest it find itself at home in constructive rituals of becoming.
- prehensions: shared ways of feeling and taking account of one another
- subjective forms: emotional tones that shape the experience
- actual entities (physical and mental poles): moment-by-moment participation of body and mind
- propositions: invitations or “lures” toward certain ways of feeling and belonging
- contrasts: aesthetic contrasts that generate intensity and meaning
- nexuses: concrete places where rituals happen, public matters of fact
- multiplicities: the many people, symbols, and histories involved
- eternal objects: the pure potentialities that give rituals their depth and resonance
Seen this way, ritual spaces are not static containers but living fields of becoming. Participants are not passive—they bring creativity, make choices, improvise, and are themselves changed over time. Rituals can heal or harm, include or exclude, transform or deform—and often do some mix of all three. At their best, they invite us to become more fully ourselves together. At their worst, they grow stale or divisive and destructive, as in rituals at political rallies. One thing for sure: process philosophy itself will grow stale, lest it find itself at home in constructive rituals of becoming.
The Human Need for Shared Ritual Spaces
Human beings have a deep need for shared ritual spaces—spaces that enable them to engage more fully the pre-verbal dimensions of their lives. These pre-verbal dimensions include emotions, memories, aspirations, and other forms of feeling that lie beneath the surface of their lives, sometimes at very deep levels and sometimes closer to the surface. Shared ritual spaces in which these feelings emerge take many forms: theatrical, religious, athletic, political, or familial. The rituals enacted within them likewise take many forms: rites of initiation, funerals, weddings, commemorations, shared meals, celebrations, songs, games, and other ordinary practices in which, and through which, people cultivate conviviality, belonging, a sense of shared identity, and, in some instances, profound personal transformation.
The physical side of a shared ritual space also takes many forms. They range from the dinner table in a family home, to a coffee shop or restaurant, to classrooms and office spaces, to a local park with a play area for children, to a local soccer field, to a hospital waiting room, to a church sanctuary, to a movie theater or opera house, and finally to large arenas for sporting events or rock concerts. Such spaces are constituted not only by their physical environments but also by their sensory affordances—design, lighting, acoustics, and spatial arrangement—as well as by the rituals enacted within them and the feelings that arise in the minds and hearts of those who gather there, some private and some shared. In short, such spaces are deeply relational: they include the people and their experiences, to be sure, but also the physical settings and environments, along with the rituals in which participants engage—all of which together make possible the shared ritual space itself.
Ritual as Relational Performance
The relationality of a shared ritual space is evident, among other places, in live performances on a stage or field—for example, in a rock concert or an athletic event. Here, ritual includes not only what happens on stage, with its scripts or “rules” for performance (as in a sporting event), but also the “performances” of those in the audience: where and how they sit, when they keep silence, when they make noise, clap, or otherwise participate. The physical environment itself participates in the ritual, as when the lights dim at the start of a performance or sound shifts to mark a transition. All of this shapes both private and shared feeling. Performers and audiences alike are influenced by set design, lighting, and sound; these elements are part of the umwelt—the subjectively perceived world—that constitutes the texture of their lived experience.
The Metaphysics of Shared Ritual Spaces:
Whitehead's Eight Categories of Existence
Whitehead’s eight categories of existence offer a helpful way of understanding why shared ritual spaces can be so powerful. In such spaces, people do not merely observe events; they participate in them. Rituals intensify shared prehensions—that is, ways of feeling and taking account of one another and of the surrounding environment—and they shape subjective forms, the emotional and qualitative tones of those feelings. These processes occur within actual entities, the moment-by-moment units of experience that include both physical and mental dimensions.
Ritual participation is guided by propositions, or “lures for feeling,” which are not instructions in a strict sense but invitations toward particular ways of feeling, responding, and belonging. As participants respond to these lures, contrasts emerge—between voices, gestures, memories, expectations, and emotions—generating a heightened sense of intensity and meaning. This experience is grounded in concrete nexuses: the shared physical settings and public situations in which rituals take place, such as rooms, sanctuaries, tables, stages, or fields.
Within these settings, participants become aware of multiplicities—the many individuals, bodies, objects, symbols, and histories involved—held together without being reduced to sameness. At the same time, eternal objects, understood as pure possibilities for patterns, emotions, and forms, are ingressed into the experience itself, giving it shape, depth, and resonance. In this way, shared ritual spaces become sites of intensified feeling, communal meaning, and transformative possibility.
Taken together, these categories offer a metaphysics of shared ritual spaces. They help us see that such spaces are not static containers but dynamic fields of becoming. The spaces themselves, and the participants within them, are in process, changing through time—especially as participants are shaped by repeated involvement. Participants are not passive recipients of ritual meaning. They contribute their own creativity to the process, and their moment-by-moment decisions—how they attend, respond, resist, or improvise—are integral to what makes rituals come alive and, at times, genuinely transformative.
The Extensive Continuum
To this account can also be added the idea that, with his notion of a multidimensional extensive continuum, Whitehead offers a way of thinking about how, in certain moments of participation in shared rituals, the human psyche may participate in regions or dimensions of spacetime beyond ordinary three-dimensional spatial experience. Such moments need not be understood as departures from the physical world, but as intensified modes of participation within a reality whose depth exceeds what is ordinarily perceived. In Whitehead's philosophy, there is nothing absolute about three-dimensional space.
The Divine Lure toward Creative Transformation
Alongside this, and within and beyond the participants themselves, there is a lure toward creative becoming—divine in origin—by which participants may feel beckoned both to become more fully themselves and to be transformed in ways that enrich the well-being of all who are involved and, at its best, the wider world. This divine lure is often experienced as a call toward creative transformation, through which participants grow as individuals and, at times, as communities.
Such an account can help illuminate many different kinds of rituals—religious, political, familial, tribal, artistic, and civic—as well as the wide range of spaces in which they occur. These include intimate settings such as family tables and community gatherings, as well as larger public venues such as sanctuaries, theaters, classrooms, stadiums, and public squares. In each case, the power of the ritual lies not in the space alone, nor in the script alone, but in the dynamic interplay of participants, settings, shared feelings, and creative responses unfolding through time.
Norms
Finally, any adequate account of shared ritual spaces must attend to the role of norms. Rituals are not free-floating experiences; they are structured by expectations about behavior, roles, timing, speech, movement, and affect. These norms make shared participation possible by providing stability, coordination, and a sense of orientation. At the same time, from a process-relational perspective, norms are themselves in process. They are sustained, contested, reinforced, or transformed through the very acts of participation they shape.
For this reason, rituals can be constructive, destructive, or—more commonly—mixed in their effects. When norms support mutual recognition, creativity, and care, rituals can foster healing, solidarity, and communal flourishing. When norms enforce exclusion, domination, or unreflective conformity, rituals can intensify fear, resentment, or harm. Attending to norms thus becomes ethically crucial, for it is through them that rituals either contribute to the well-being of participants and communities or undermine it.
In this context I want to speak to a particular kind of ritual that is needed in our time, namely rituals that provide opportunities for cathartic transformation through a sense of mystery. I will let the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece by my archetypal case, not necessarily for what they were, but for what they evoke in the contemporary imagination.
Human beings have a deep need for shared ritual spaces—spaces that enable them to engage more fully the pre-verbal dimensions of their lives. These pre-verbal dimensions include emotions, memories, aspirations, and other forms of feeling that lie beneath the surface of their lives, sometimes at very deep levels and sometimes closer to the surface. Shared ritual spaces in which these feelings emerge take many forms: theatrical, religious, athletic, political, or familial. The rituals enacted within them likewise take many forms: rites of initiation, funerals, weddings, commemorations, shared meals, celebrations, songs, games, and other ordinary practices in which, and through which, people cultivate conviviality, belonging, a sense of shared identity, and, in some instances, profound personal transformation.
The physical side of a shared ritual space also takes many forms. They range from the dinner table in a family home, to a coffee shop or restaurant, to classrooms and office spaces, to a local park with a play area for children, to a local soccer field, to a hospital waiting room, to a church sanctuary, to a movie theater or opera house, and finally to large arenas for sporting events or rock concerts. Such spaces are constituted not only by their physical environments but also by their sensory affordances—design, lighting, acoustics, and spatial arrangement—as well as by the rituals enacted within them and the feelings that arise in the minds and hearts of those who gather there, some private and some shared. In short, such spaces are deeply relational: they include the people and their experiences, to be sure, but also the physical settings and environments, along with the rituals in which participants engage—all of which together make possible the shared ritual space itself.
Ritual as Relational Performance
The relationality of a shared ritual space is evident, among other places, in live performances on a stage or field—for example, in a rock concert or an athletic event. Here, ritual includes not only what happens on stage, with its scripts or “rules” for performance (as in a sporting event), but also the “performances” of those in the audience: where and how they sit, when they keep silence, when they make noise, clap, or otherwise participate. The physical environment itself participates in the ritual, as when the lights dim at the start of a performance or sound shifts to mark a transition. All of this shapes both private and shared feeling. Performers and audiences alike are influenced by set design, lighting, and sound; these elements are part of the umwelt—the subjectively perceived world—that constitutes the texture of their lived experience.
The Metaphysics of Shared Ritual Spaces:
Whitehead's Eight Categories of Existence
Whitehead’s eight categories of existence offer a helpful way of understanding why shared ritual spaces can be so powerful. In such spaces, people do not merely observe events; they participate in them. Rituals intensify shared prehensions—that is, ways of feeling and taking account of one another and of the surrounding environment—and they shape subjective forms, the emotional and qualitative tones of those feelings. These processes occur within actual entities, the moment-by-moment units of experience that include both physical and mental dimensions.
Ritual participation is guided by propositions, or “lures for feeling,” which are not instructions in a strict sense but invitations toward particular ways of feeling, responding, and belonging. As participants respond to these lures, contrasts emerge—between voices, gestures, memories, expectations, and emotions—generating a heightened sense of intensity and meaning. This experience is grounded in concrete nexuses: the shared physical settings and public situations in which rituals take place, such as rooms, sanctuaries, tables, stages, or fields.
Within these settings, participants become aware of multiplicities—the many individuals, bodies, objects, symbols, and histories involved—held together without being reduced to sameness. At the same time, eternal objects, understood as pure possibilities for patterns, emotions, and forms, are ingressed into the experience itself, giving it shape, depth, and resonance. In this way, shared ritual spaces become sites of intensified feeling, communal meaning, and transformative possibility.
Taken together, these categories offer a metaphysics of shared ritual spaces. They help us see that such spaces are not static containers but dynamic fields of becoming. The spaces themselves, and the participants within them, are in process, changing through time—especially as participants are shaped by repeated involvement. Participants are not passive recipients of ritual meaning. They contribute their own creativity to the process, and their moment-by-moment decisions—how they attend, respond, resist, or improvise—are integral to what makes rituals come alive and, at times, genuinely transformative.
The Extensive Continuum
To this account can also be added the idea that, with his notion of a multidimensional extensive continuum, Whitehead offers a way of thinking about how, in certain moments of participation in shared rituals, the human psyche may participate in regions or dimensions of spacetime beyond ordinary three-dimensional spatial experience. Such moments need not be understood as departures from the physical world, but as intensified modes of participation within a reality whose depth exceeds what is ordinarily perceived. In Whitehead's philosophy, there is nothing absolute about three-dimensional space.
The Divine Lure toward Creative Transformation
Alongside this, and within and beyond the participants themselves, there is a lure toward creative becoming—divine in origin—by which participants may feel beckoned both to become more fully themselves and to be transformed in ways that enrich the well-being of all who are involved and, at its best, the wider world. This divine lure is often experienced as a call toward creative transformation, through which participants grow as individuals and, at times, as communities.
Such an account can help illuminate many different kinds of rituals—religious, political, familial, tribal, artistic, and civic—as well as the wide range of spaces in which they occur. These include intimate settings such as family tables and community gatherings, as well as larger public venues such as sanctuaries, theaters, classrooms, stadiums, and public squares. In each case, the power of the ritual lies not in the space alone, nor in the script alone, but in the dynamic interplay of participants, settings, shared feelings, and creative responses unfolding through time.
Norms
Finally, any adequate account of shared ritual spaces must attend to the role of norms. Rituals are not free-floating experiences; they are structured by expectations about behavior, roles, timing, speech, movement, and affect. These norms make shared participation possible by providing stability, coordination, and a sense of orientation. At the same time, from a process-relational perspective, norms are themselves in process. They are sustained, contested, reinforced, or transformed through the very acts of participation they shape.
For this reason, rituals can be constructive, destructive, or—more commonly—mixed in their effects. When norms support mutual recognition, creativity, and care, rituals can foster healing, solidarity, and communal flourishing. When norms enforce exclusion, domination, or unreflective conformity, rituals can intensify fear, resentment, or harm. Attending to norms thus becomes ethically crucial, for it is through them that rituals either contribute to the well-being of participants and communities or undermine it.
In this context I want to speak to a particular kind of ritual that is needed in our time, namely rituals that provide opportunities for cathartic transformation through a sense of mystery. I will let the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece by my archetypal case, not necessarily for what they were, but for what they evoke in the contemporary imagination.
The Contemporary Need
for Eleusinian Mystery
ChatGPT with help
from Jay McDaniel
The Eleusinian Mysteries as Theatrical Catharsis
The Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece offer an example of how shared ritual spaces of a theatrical kind could have a cathartic effect on participants. Initiates were drawn into a carefully choreographed sequence of processions, fasting, sacred words, ritual actions, and symbolic enactments culminating in an experience within the great hall at Eleusis—the Telesterion—and its inner sanctuary. Included in this ritual was the drinking of a certain substance, which may or may not have involved psychotropic catalysts. There, in near darkness, sacred objects were revealed, words were spoken, and dramatic gestures were performed, not to convey doctrinal teachings but to evoke a transformation of feeling. Participants were not mere spectators but co-participants in a ritual drama of loss, disorientation, and return, one that worked through symbol, atmosphere, and shared presence. The effect, according to ancient testimonies, was a form of catharsis: fear softened into reassurance, grief into meaning, and mortality itself into something that could be faced with greater trust.
Secrecy, Silence, and the Power of Non-Disclosure
Added to this cathartic effect was the strict discipline of secrecy surrounding what took place within the Telesterion. Initiates were bound by a solemn vow not to disclose what they had seen, heard, or undergone. This secrecy was not merely a matter of exclusion or control; it intensified the experience itself, marking it as set apart from ordinary life and resisting its reduction to public explanation or discourse. What was revealed was meant to be carried inward rather than spoken outward, preserved as a source of ongoing reflection, meaning, and transformation rather than converted into information for general circulation.
Why the Eleusinian Mysteries Remain Mysterious
One reason that many continue to find the Eleusinian Mysteries so mysterious is that, even today, we do not really know what happened within the Telesterion. We know that participants experienced a form of catharsis—one that enabled them to face death with less fear and to hope for a more favorable fate in the afterlife—and that they took part in a ritual enactment of the mythic return of Persephone from the underworld. Beyond these broad contours, however, the details remain elusive. What was shown, spoken, or disclosed in the inner sanctuary was never translated into public teaching or written doctrine. This enduring indeterminacy is not simply a historical loss; it is part of what gives the Mysteries their lasting power. The rites resist reduction to explanation, refusing to become a set of ideas that can be summarized, debated, or mastered. Their meaning lies not in what can be reported afterward, but in what had to be undergone—an experience that transformed how participants felt about life, loss, and death without fully clarifying itself in words.
Mystērion: The Meaning of Mystery
The very name of the Eleusinian Mysteries contributes to this mystique. The Greek term mystērion is rooted in myein, meaning “to close” or “to shut,” especially the eyes or the mouth. A mystery, in this sense, was not a puzzle to be solved but an experience entered through initiation and then guarded through silence. What mattered was not what could be disclosed afterward, but what had been seen, felt, and undergone—and then carried quietly within one’s life.
Mystery as a Lure for Feeling
Thus the very name functions for us today as what Alfred North Whitehead would call a “lure for feeling”—a beckoning into the future evoked by a memory of the past. What we are beckoned into, I suggest, is an immersion in an experience of mystery that is itself transformative and largely absent from contemporary life. Ours is an information-saturated culture that prizes transparency, explanation, and instant accessibility, often treating what cannot be made explicit as suspect or dispensable. In doing so, it neglects forms of wisdom that arise only through darkness, delay, ambiguity, and shared silence—forms of wisdom that work on feeling before they work on thought.
The Eclipse of Ritual in a Screen-Saturated Culture
Existing rituals, when they survive at all, are frequently flattened into spectacles or procedures, stripped of their power to unsettle, disorient, or remake the self. Against this backdrop, the Eleusinian name calls us toward a different mode of knowing: one that resists consumption as information, refuses full disclosure, and invites participation in experiences that change us precisely because they cannot be fully explained.
The very idea of an Eleusinian Mystery also points us toward the importance of collective rituals that occur outside the household. For many decades, television has functioned as a substitute for more fully communal experiences, especially those involving live presence—such as theater, opera, dance, and other performing arts. To be sure, television can inform, entertain, educate, and even move viewers emotionally; it can widen horizons and create shared reference points across large populations. Yet it largely privatizes experience, drawing individuals or small family units into parallel acts of consumption rather than into shared, embodied participation. This tendency has only intensified with the rise of streaming platforms and social media, which further fragment attention, personalize experience, and replace collective rhythms with algorithmically curated ones.
Recovering Shared Presence and Embodied Ritual
What is diminished in this substitution is not simply aesthetic depth, but the relational and ritual dimension itself: the felt experience of gathering with others in a common space, submitting together to shared tempos of silence, anticipation, vulnerability, and response. Read in this light, the Eleusinian legacy gestures back toward shared ritual spaces in which pre-verbal and penumbral dimensions of experience can be held collectively—spaces where transformation arises not through mediated observation or information flow, but through presence, participation, and the irreducible fact of being there together.
Where Might Eleusinian Experience Be Found Today?
If the Eleusinian Mysteries continue to function as a lure for feeling, the question becomes where, if at all, such experiences might still be found today. They may emerge, in fragmentary but genuine ways, in live artistic performance, communal music-making, and theater; in religious liturgies that preserve silence, darkness, and symbolic depth; in recovery communities where stories are shared without spectacle and transformation unfolds slowly; in pilgrimage, protest, and collective mourning; and even in certain forms of education or therapy that honor ambiguity, vulnerability, and embodied presence. None of these replicates Eleusis, nor should they. Yet each offers a shared ritual space in which people are invited not merely to observe or consume, but to undergo something together—bodily as well as emotionally—to pass, however briefly, through loss, disorientation, and return. In such spaces, posture, movement, breath, sound, stillness, and proximity to others matter; mystery is not only thought or felt, but enacted through the body itself.
A Whiteheadian Vision of Embodied Transformation
Seen through a Whiteheadian lens, this bodily dimension is not accidental but fundamental. For Whitehead, experience is not primarily a matter of clear ideas but of feeling—of prehensions that are always embodied, shaping the subjective form of a moment before they become explicit thought. Rituals, environments, and shared symbolic actions matter precisely because they work on the body as well as the mind: they attune sensation, modulate emotion, and integrate memory and anticipation in ways that make novelty possible.
The Eleusinian Mysteries exemplify this at a civilizational scale. They worked not by conveying information, but by orchestrating bodily, sensory, and affective conditions under which participants could feel differently about life and death. In this sense, Eleusis names a perennial human possibility—the possibility that wisdom arises not through transparency or explanation alone, but through shared, embodied participation in experiences that transform us at depths beyond words.
When Mystery Becomes Destructive
From a process perspective, not all experiences of mystery in collective settings are constructive. Not all experiences of personal transformation conduce to the common good. Such experiences may generate a powerful sense of belonging and identity, yet at the same time intensify a person’s capacity to draw sharp boundaries between “us” and “them.” This danger is heightened when cathartic experiences are tightly bound to secrecy and insulated from reflection, critique, or wider relational accountability. In this respect, there is genuine value in transparency. Nor should we assume that all cathartic experiences are socially beneficial: some may deepen resentment, fuel exclusion, or intensify hatred. Mystery, left to itself, is morally indeterminate. What is therefore needed is not mystery alone, but a vision of reality in which mystery is oriented toward love, sympathy, and constructive fulfillment.
Mystery and Love
This is how process philosophers understand God: not as an all-controlling power, but as the lure toward constructive becoming and beauty at work in the universe, whose most fundamental characteristic is love. It is this love-conducive sense of mystery that is so sorely needed in our time. Toward that end, it can be profoundly helpful to have a philosophical or theological perspective that articulates, with relative clarity, the claim that the nature of God is love. This, I suggest, is a central virtue of process theologies—and, more broadly, of open and relational theologies. They are not substitutes for satisfying cathartic ritual, but companions to it: interpretive frameworks that help orient powerful experiences of mystery toward compassion, inclusion, and the shared flourishing of life.
Creative Transformation
At the same time, there is a danger on the theological side—including for process theologians and open and relational theologians themselves—of assuming that cathartic transformation occurs primarily through adopting a worldview, through getting the right ideas clearly into the mind. Ideas do matter, but transformation rarely begins there. More often it begins in the heart and the body, through participation in collectively shared rituals that work beneath the level of explicit belief. People are not usually transformed simply because they assent to a theological scheme; they are transformed because they have undergone experiences—often communal and symbolic—that reorder feeling, memory, and desire. From a process perspective, transformation is not first a change in what one thinks, but a change in how one feels the world - and 'thinking' itself is a kind of feeling, a conceptual feeling, says Whitehead. Theology, at its best, does not replace such preverbal experiences; it accompanies them, helping to interpret and orient their power toward love, inclusion, and constructive becoming.
Eleusinian Mysteries
In ancient Greece, thousands of people flocked each year to join the religious rites known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. Based on the cult of the goddess of fertility Demeter and her daughter Persephone, the Mysteries were for many a profoundly moving and life-changing experience. People from all over the Greek world and beyond travelled to Eleusis for at least 800 years and the ceremonies remained a highlight of the Athenian calendar throughout that time. But what really went on in the great hall of the sanctuary at Eleusis? Why did the organisers deem it necessary to issue a strict injunction against divulging what actually took place - and what happened to some of those who broke that rule?
These are some of the questions Bridget Kendall discusses with Christy Constantakopoulou, professor in ancient history and classics at Birkbeck College, London; Esther Eidinow, professor of ancient history at Bristol University; Dr. Philippe Michel Matthey who lectures about ancient religions at Geneva University; and Dr. Julietta Steinhauer, a lecturer in Hellenistic history at University College, London.
- BBC
These are some of the questions Bridget Kendall discusses with Christy Constantakopoulou, professor in ancient history and classics at Birkbeck College, London; Esther Eidinow, professor of ancient history at Bristol University; Dr. Philippe Michel Matthey who lectures about ancient religions at Geneva University; and Dr. Julietta Steinhauer, a lecturer in Hellenistic history at University College, London.
- BBC