Effervescence

A term I keep coming back to over the course of my life is collective effervescence. You know that bubbly feeling you get at a really good concert or when the DJ at a party masterfully orchestrates the vibe? That's what Émile Durkheim would call collective effervescence. He used it as a term to explain how religious traditions all around the world maintain unity around their traditions, and what separates them from different cultures or environments they might encounter. In a sense, that's a similar vibe one would get from attending a Divine Liturgy, Roman Catholic Mass, or some contemporary low-church variant. I understand that Durkheim wanted to get to a common essence behind why people get together and perform collective rituals, but I also think there's a major problem with trying to put all of those traditions and rituals under a singular umbrella. There is that collective effervescence when people come together for a certain ritual, but the difference isn't necessarily in the…