The Healy Howl and the Significance of Ritual

Here’s the world’s smallest primer for a really fascinating topic in anthropology: ritual. We’ll take the “Healy Howl” tradition from Georgetown University as our case study application. Here’s a picture of a cemetery near Healy Hall, where the ritual howl happens every year on Halloween.

At Georgetown on October 31, the 1973 movie “The Exorcist,” is shown (the book that the movie came from was written by a Georgetown graduate and several scenes were filmed on campus). After, students gather at midnight to this cemetery by Healy Hall and howl at the moon “in an attempt to banish the ghosts and ghouls that haunt the campus.”

Back to anthropology. We humans love rituals, and scholars have long thought about why. Two opposing ideas come from 19th/20th century philosophers who really disagreed with each other. First, James George Frazer (d 1941), argued that human cultures generally evolve, going from ones that hold onto religion and magic (which he considered backwards) to ones that were scientific (which he considered more enlightened). From this perspective, rituals originally developed to serve a functional purpose that had been lost to time — with the Healy Howl, the purpose was to get rid of the bad spirits, and perhaps explained the origin of things or why things happen (for instance, bad luck on exams).

A different take on ritual came from Ludwig Wittgenstein (d. 1951). He thought that rituals were rather more important for symbolic and expressive purposes. Furthermore, they make sense only from the inner meaning of our lives. One might interpret the Healy Howl as an expressive group catharsis for students to let off steam from midterm exams. Baying at the moon in a cemetery might come from an inner impulse to occupy and control the frightening space that death has in our lives.

Both these thinkers contributed to understanding the role of rituals in human life. While the sorts of rituals we have developed are culture specific, it’s worth considering why we do them.