Where are the opportunities we cannot imagine?
We have started Rite to challenge both ourselves and the world around us by feeling our way toward new futures, rather than prescribing what they should look like.
Rite Agency investigates the ritual spaces of modernity, and endeavors to develop new rites for a more gentle and vibrant society
Why rites?
Today, we find ourselves in the midst of an acute crisis of climate and resources, brought about by the notion that growth and production are sacred.
Our modern society places humanity at the center of a world brimming with inexhaustible resources, free to exploit and devastate. That worldview is no longer valid.
Because we are now in a different world.
This new reality is bewildering. The ideas, knowledge, and tools we have long relied upon to comprehend and act upon the world have become outdated or irrelevant. People now fumble for both answers and instruments to understand the world anew.
This state of affairs, or rather predicament, has led us to establish the Rite Agency. Its purpose is to discover new tools for investigating and navigating the liminal space in which we find ourselves. Moreover, we seek to cultivate more gentle instruments for societal formation. At the heart of this endeavor, we have placed the rite. From this foundation, we explore the cracks and prepare the soil.
The rite occurs in the present; it is created in the now and vanishes with the horizons of the moment. Yet, it connects us to what has been and what may come. Not through understanding, but by creating space and generating possibilities. Through the rite, we bind ourselves to one another, to the past, and to the future. Within the rite, all things exist simultaneously and are undoubtably present.
The ritual spaces in our modern society, such as commerce, law, transaction, and the like, are so ingrained in our daily lives that we have ceased to experience them as ritualistic. Instead, they appear to us as both rational and self-evident. Only now, as this order begins to unravel, can we discern the outlines of the ritual adhesive that has continuously shaped our culture’s vision of the world.
Rites and rituals possess a unique ability to create worlds. They are foundational, millennia-old means of forging and maintaining connections—between our actions and one another, our future and our history.
Thus, new worlds, too, may emerge. Just so.
