Essay seed — from the Ari Kat 102 ingest. Not drafted; this is the argument and the spine.
Somebody dies. For about a year afterwards, in a great many societies, you could tell.
Black clothing. A band on the sleeve. A particular colour, worn for a fixed period, then changed for another.
Nobody had to ask how you were. The information was on you, and everyone adjusted without a conversation.
That system is gone almost everywhere, and it didn't shorten anyone's grief. It made grief invisible — and the person in it now spends their energy either explaining themselves or performing normality, which is work the clothing used to do for free.
1. A great deal of ritual is not causing anything. It is making states legible.
The Akan-Kemetic material has at least four instances that do nothing else: white powder marking a person as currently possessed; hired non-relative wailers announcing that a death has occurred; white bandages marking a body whose spirit has departed; a red amulet marking its wearer as protected.1
None of these is claimed to produce the state. Each renders it visible.
2. The function is coordination, and it is not decorative.
A community that can see who is in what state acts correctly toward them without inference. You don't address a possessed person as themselves. You don't treat a completed funeral as ongoing.
Without marking, every interaction requires guessing, and guessing is expensive and frequently wrong.
3. There is a gap in the middle of modern life, and it is a specific gap.
Fast states still get marked — posture, tone, gesture, all working fine.2 Permanent statuses get documents and titles.
States lasting days to months have almost nothing left. Bereavement, illness, convalescence, a marriage ending, a diagnosis, exhaustion past the point of recovery. Precisely the states where being misread does the most damage.
4. And the loss is invisible to anyone measuring what survived.
The corpus makes this point about a temple wall: Meret is on it, in rooms people photograph, and she doesn't appear in the photographs.3 Nothing was destroyed. The instruction to look was lost, and the object remained perfectly intact and perfectly unseen.
Cultural loss of this kind leaves no gap in any inventory.
We removed the marking systems as a liberation — nobody should have to advertise their private condition — and in doing so transferred the entire cost of communication onto the person least able to bear it.
The mourner now has to say they are mourning. The ill person has to explain, repeatedly, to each new party. The exhausted person has to make a case.
A marking system's real function was saving the person in the state from having to speak.