Violent Rituals In Lord Of The Flies, By William Golding

In an ideal society, there is order and peace. However, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies displays disturbing pictures of violent rituals and godless figures. As the book progresses, the boys lose themselves and their religious roots become less and less apparent. Golding shows how lack of religion leads to loss of morality and destruction of societies through symbolism of the Devil, references to the Bible, and allusions to ritualistic worship and breaking of the First Commandment.
In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses figures such as the beast and the Lord of the Flies to symbolize how the Devil leads people away from religion and closer to the destruction of others. In the book, the boys are afraid of “the beast,” which Simon believes is an imaginary terror. Later, he encounters a pig’s head on a stick that Jack left as a sacrifice for the beast and goes into a hallucinogenic state where the head talks to him. The head laughs telling Simon, “Fancy

At the start, the boys had control, and problems were an uncommon occurrence. However, with each pig that was killed, the boys lost their sense and became guided by their stomachs and their impulses rather than their heads. When a pig was slaughtered, a chant would follow and they would cry, “Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Bash him in!” or a chant of similar variation (Golding 75). What at first was a fun game, soon became something of a ritual. The boys would act out killing the pig and chant. However, the rituals, as they progressed, became much more violent and eventually resulted in the death of Simon. These rituals and their increasing violence were allusions toward breaking the first commandment through worship of idols. Each time they broke the commandment, the results of their actions grew worse, thus leading to Golding’s idea that idolization of false images leads to