Coming together: festivals, games and rituals

Black-and-white photograph: on a road lined with trees and spectators, runners in white kit surround the one carrying the lit torch, followed by a car. — A runner carries the Olympic flame during the 1936 Olympic Games (photograph from the German Federal Archives). Bundesarchiv, unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, source

In sport, nothing seems older than the Olympic flame, lit at Olympia and carried by runners all the way to the stadium.

It seems certain to come from the Greeks and to go back two thousand five hundred years.

That is false.

Why humans come together

Every known society organises moments when the group gathers and interrupts the ordinary course of everyday life. These moments take three forms, which are often combined.

Ritual is a sequence of acts fixed in advance, performed in an agreed order because that is how things are done. Its form matters as much as its result: a birthday without candles or a wedding without an exchange of words seems incomplete, even if nothing material is missing.

Many rituals mark a passage — birth, entry into adulthood, marriage, death. Their purpose is to make a change of status public: the person is no longer quite the same afterwards, and the whole group bears witness to it.

The researcher Arnold van Gennep showed in 1909 that many of these rites follow the same three-stage structure.¹

Separation: the person is removed from their previous state, often by being physically set apart from the group.
The margin: an in-between in which they are no longer what they were and not yet what they will become. This is where what matters most happens, and it is often the most testing phase.
Incorporation: they rejoin the group, with their new status recognised by all.

A graduation ceremony, a wedding or a baptism includes all three stages. This explains why these ceremonies are so resistant to change — their setting can be altered, but not their structure.

The festival interrupts working time and brings people together on a wide scale. It is almost always pegged to an external marker: a moment in the agricultural year, a solstice, a religious date, a collective anniversary. By marking these points, festivals divide up the year and give it a shape — a point this page returns to further on.

Games and sport are voluntary activities, set apart from everything else by accepted rules and a clear end. In them we accept constraints that we would refuse elsewhere — running without going anywhere, not picking up the ball with our hands — and it is precisely this shared consent that makes the game possible. A game exists only because everyone accepts the same rules at the same moment.

These three forms are not mutually exclusive. A sporting competition includes rituals — the anthem, the flame, the medal ceremony — and is a festive occasion. It is in fact this mixture that gives these events their weight, and that explains why people instinctively believe them to be very old.

Yet many are not. A tradition may have been invented by someone, on a date that can be traced — and that is the subject of this whole page.²

A tradition less than a hundred years old

The Greeks did tend fires, and they held torch races — but at festivals in honour of certain gods. At the Olympic Games, there was never a relay.³

The chronology speaks for itself. The modern Games began in 1896, and no flame was lit. It was not until 1928, in Amsterdam, that a fire burned at the top of one of the stadium’s towers, and then 1932 in Los Angeles. But those fires were lit on site, not at Olympia, and no one carried them.⁴

The relay from Olympia was invented for the 1936 Games. Seven countries were crossed, from Greece to Germany: more than 3,000 kilometres, covered by 3,075 runners — roughly one per kilometre — in a dozen or so days.⁵

One organisational detail is delightful: the organisers had at first considered, to make it look ancient, keeping the flame in bundles of stalks of a slow-burning Mediterranean plant. They gave this up for practical reasons and had torches made — none of those available on the market was suitable.⁶

Those Games were the Games of Nazi Germany. The relay was meant to present the regime as the heir to ancient Greece. The ritual has remained; what it represents today no longer has anything to do with that.

The man who had the idea

This episode is almost never told.

The idea of the relay came from an archaeologist and sports official named Alfred Schiff. He knew the ancient texts and the images of torchbearers painted on vases: that is where he found his idea.⁷

Alfred Schiff was Jewish. He was driven from his post at a major German sports college because of his origins, a few years before the Games.

His idea was carried out in 1936. His name, however, was erased. It was the secretary-general of the organising committee who took over the idea, and it is to him that it is still most often attributed today.⁸

A note in the interest of honesty: the attribution to Schiff rests on the work of historians and on German archives. Others have claimed this idea, starting with the organiser of the Games himself.

Elsewhere, this site tells the story of six women programmers missing from the newspapers that wrote about their machine (page 9.14), or that of a woman chemist who sat a competitive examination under her initials so that no one would know she was a woman (page 9.11). The mechanism is the same, for a different reason. The question to ask of any invention is always this one: who was removed from the story, and why them?

What the nineteenth century invented, and it is not the game

Let us turn to sports.

Ball games have been played everywhere and for a very long time. In China, with cuju — “kicking the ball with the foot”. In Japan, with kemari. In Greece, in Rome. In medieval Europe, with matches involving entire villages, and extremely rough ones.

In Mesoamerica, long before all that. Archaeologists have uncovered ballcourts several thousand years old: two long banks of compacted earth framing a playing alley. Not stone — earth.

The ball itself is a technical feat. Marshy ground at El Manatí has preserved solid rubber balls more than three thousand five hundred years old, made of latex mixed with the juice of a vine to make it elastic. This game does not need to be the ancestor of anything: it has its own courts, its own ball and its own history.⁹

What nineteenth-century England brought was not the game. It was the written rule — the game is then said to be codified.

Cambridge rules around 1848. Sheffield rules in 1858. Then, in December 1863, in London, the laws of the game of the brand-new English football association — including the decision that matters most: the ban on carrying the ball in the hands. This is what separates this game from rugby.¹⁰

These rules were not one man’s idea: they are the result of decades of trial and error in schools, clubs and towns.

Why write them down? For a simple reason: each school had its own. Here you could pick up the ball and there you could not, here you could collide and there you could not, here you scored high and there low. So two schools could hardly play against each other.¹¹

That is what writing the rules was for: making a match possible between people who do not know one another.

Historical note: the museum of the international football federation points out that Chinese cuju is the oldest attested form, while writing that no case can be made that this game influenced any of the ball games codified in the nineteenth century. Neither “football comes from China” nor “football was invented in England” — parallel games, and an English codification.
And yet. In 2004, the president of that same federation publicly declared that China was the home of football, and a certificate was presented to the city of Linzi, recognised as the “cradle of the earliest forms of football”.
The museum writes one thing, the presidency declares another. The contradiction lies within the institution itself.
The difference is essential: an institution can certify whatever it likes; this reflects its policy, not what historians have established.¹²

The same invention, for the fourth time

Other pages of this encyclopaedia reveal the same recurring logic.

⚖️ A standard weight makes it possible to compare goods from one town to another.
🪙 A guaranteed coin makes it possible to trade with a stranger without weighing its metal.
📦 A box of agreed dimensions (the container) allows a lorry and a ship that have never met to hand a load over to each other.
📜 A written rule allows two teams that have never seen each other to play against each other.

Four different worlds, a single idea: agreeing in advance on a measure, in order to be able to deal with a stranger.

A festival organises time

This is what connects everything else.

A festival is not just a pleasant moment: it is a way of fixing when everyone stops together.

Among the Igbo, in south-eastern Nigeria, the week has four days that bear the names of the markets — Eke, Orie, Afọ, Nkwọ. Seven of these weeks make a month of twenty-eight days, and thirteen of these months make a year. In some Maya communities in Guatemala, a 260-day count is still kept today. The Olympic Games come round every four years, and this particular interval really is ancient: the Greeks already kept it — then the Games ceased for a very long time, until the moderns revived them in 1896.¹³

In an annual calendar, the days without school are not distributed at random. Someone, at some point, decided which ones — and it is often possible to find out when.

What the festival costs

The Olympic Games transform a city. They must also be discussed from the point of view of those who live there.

An organisation specialising in the right to housing studied several host cities and concluded that around two million people had been displaced over twenty years because of the development works — often among the poorest residents.¹⁴

One detail shows how to read these figures.

For one and the same host city, the authorities announced a few thousand displaced households, whereas the report counted more than a million people.¹⁵

They are not counting the same thing. One side counts the people who lived on the exact site of the stadiums. The other counts everyone who had to leave because of works linked to the Games: beautification of the city, roads, hotels — going back several years, sometimes to before the city had even been chosen.

One last point changes the significance of the figure. Almost all of this total comes from just two cities, Seoul and Beijing. Elsewhere, displaced people number in the hundreds or thousands, not in the millions.¹⁶

So the figure does not say “the Games displace two million people”. It says: when a state can evict without oversight, the Games give it the opportunity and the pretext. It is not the same claim, and the second is better supported than the first.

Note 1

L'expression « rites de passage » remonte à l'ouvrage d' Arnold Van Gennep qui, paru en 1909, porte ce titre. […] Dans la diversité des faits qui l'intéressaient, Van Gennep a repéré l'existence d'une structure tripartite et de fonctions communes. Il a montré, en effet, que tous s'organisent selon une séquence constante en trois temps, qui distingue à l'intérieur d'un même rituel : une phase de séparation vis-à-vis du groupe ; une phase de mise en marge (ou « liminale ») ; une phase de réintégration ( ou « agrégation ») au sein du groupe, dans une nouvelle situation sociale.

The expression “rites of passage” goes back to the book by Arnold Van Gennep which, published in 1909, bears that title. […] Within the diversity of the facts that interested him, Van Gennep identified the existence of a tripartite structure and of common functions. He showed, indeed, that they are all organised according to a constant three-stage sequence, which distinguishes within one and the same ritual: a phase of separation from the group; a phase of being set at the margin (or “liminal” phase); a phase of reintegration (or “aggregation”) into the group, in a new social situation.

Encyclopædia Universalis, “Rites de passage”, article en ligne