Analects 3.11

Here Confucius points to the palm of his hand and tells us that one who understands the di sacrifice "could handle the world as if he had it right here." The commentary on analect 3.10 mentions that the "di sacrifice was a special type of ancestor sacrifice, directed toward the ultimate progenitor of one's ancestral line." The details on how to perform it and by whom it was to be performed are something that had been largely forgotten by the time of the Zhou dynasty, which partially makes sense of Confucius' comment that there is a power that stems from understanding the rite. However, this does not completely explain it; there are still several questions that remain. What is it about sacrificing to one's roots that gives one political power? How are we to take understanding the ritual? Is this a form of knowledge or is it something else? Is the goal of ritual to reorder the individual person or does it have a mimetic effect that simultaneously reorders the entire society? Confucius often speaks as if the rituals he's describing have mystical, almost liturgical significance and yet he is decidedly agnostic when it comes to the question of spirits and the supernatural. Does this mean that his concern with ritual is purely pragmatic, like a lot of his ethical statements would seem to indicate, or does he believe that there is something more going on?