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while recovering essential components ol New Testament Christianity and turning them to church-reforming effect, had failed to order their religious insights in a holistic theological system. They had neglected, not least, to correlate their fundamental teaching on justification by faith aione with the biblical teaching on the kingdom of God. Thus they left the impression that Christianity is primarily a religion of personal redemption from sin, and not equally one of corporate ethical activity directed to the moral reconstruction of society. Viewed in respect of its formal theological productions, therefore, the Protestant Reformation was unfinished.
Ritschl contended, moreover, that post-Reformation Protestantism had continued and heightened the "theological atrophy" of the Reformation era, leading to serious "deformations" of authentic biblical-Reformation Christianity—as evidenced, for example, in the intellec-tualism (neoscholasticism) of Protestant orthodoxy, in the emergence within the Lutheran and Reformed churches of a "half-Catholic" mysticism, in the sectarianism and "otherworldliness" of Pietism, in the ratiom alism ("natural religion") and eudaemonism ("self-justification") of Enlightenment theology, and in the flight from the historical Christian revelation in Hegelian speculation. To be sure, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher had given significant impulses for the reconstruction of Protestant theology on the basis of Reformation religion, but their gains had soon been surrendered by their epigones.
Ritschl took it as his own vocational task, therefore, to effect a true re-formation of Protestant theology by recovering the reformers' religious root ideas through critical-historical scholarship and by articulating these ideas, with the aid of constructs supplied by Kant and Schleiermacher, in a "homogeneous" theological system. Thereby, he believed, the unfinished Reformation would be brought to theological completion; classical Protestant Christianity would be vindicated before its cultured despisers and its newly resurgent Roman Catholic foes; and the Reformation's epoch-making significance, including its immediate relevance for the modern world, would be displayed, all with the result that a debilitated Protestantism would at last be purged of "alien growths" and so would attain "maturity."
The main themes of Ritschl's doctrinal system are presented in the third volume of Justification and Reconciliation. God, for the sake of Christ, freely pardons sinful humanity ("justification"), thereby overcoming the sinner's fear, mistrust, alienation, and enervating consciousness of guilt, and thus making possible the individual's entrance into a new, confident relationship to God as Father ("reconciliation"). This relationship is
verified, first, in the religious virtues of trust in God's providential guidance of the world, patience, humility, and prayer (whereby the believer attains "spiritual lordship over the world" and the vindication of the unique worth of spirit, or (he "order of persons," vis-ä-vis nature, or the "order of things"); and, second, in the moral virtues of fidelity in one's secular vocation and active love for the neighbor (whereby the kingdom of God, or "moral society of nations," is ultimately to be realized). Ritschl claimed that this doctrine was faithful to the biblical-Reformation heritage because it centered entirely on God's self-revelation as loving Father in Jesus Christ ("history")—a revelation mediated to individuals solely by and within the community of believers ("church"), and appropriated solely through lively personal trust ("faith"). This doctrine, therefore, entailed the explicit repudiation of all "disinterested" knowledge of God, metaphysieal speculation, "natura! theology," ahistorical mysticism, monastic-ascetic piety ("flight from the world"), ethical quietism, and unchurchly individualism.
From about 1920 to 1960 Ritschl's theology suffered an almost total eclipse. The leading representatives of the then-dominant Protestant neoorthodoxy, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, charged Ritschl (and Ritschlianism) with egregious departures from classical Christianity, including religious subjectivism, moralism, capitulation to the cultural Zeitgeist, and, in sum, a return to the anlhropocentrism of Enlightenment religion in its "chastened" (antimetaphysical) Kantian form. Since the 1960s, however, there has been a noteworthy Ritschl renaissance, which has defended Ritschl before his neoorthodox detractors by eschewing "criticism by catchwords," by relating his total theological program to its immediate historical context, and by taking seriously his claim to have constructed his system on biblical and Reformation foundations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The only biography of Riischi is that by his son, Otto, Albrecht Ritschls Leben, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1892-1896), Otto Ritschl also edited his father's Gesammelte Aufsätze, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1893-1896). There are English translations of volumes 1 and 3 of Ritschl's magnum opus: A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, translated from the first edition by John S. Black (Edinburgh, 1872), and The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, translated from the third edition by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (1900; reprint, Clifton, N.J., 1966). Ritschl's "Prolegomena" to The History of Pietism, Theology and Metaphysics, and Instruction in the Christian Religion have been translated by Philip J. Hefner in Albrecht Ritschl: Three Essays
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(Philadelphia, 1972)—the best place to begin tor the first-time reader of Ritschl. Valuable older studies are A. E. 'Garvic's The Ritschlian Theology, Critical and Constructive, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1902), and Gösta Hök's Die elliptische Theologie Albrecht Ritschls: Nach Ursprung und innerem Zusammenhang (Uppsala, 1942). The fullest expositions of Ritschl's relationship to Reformation thought arc my Ritschl and Luther: A Fresh Perspective on Albrecht Ritschl's Theology in the Light of His Luther Study (Nashville, 1974), which includes a translation of Ritschl's important "Festival Address on the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Martin Luther" (1883); and "Albrecht Ritschl and the Unfinished Reformation," Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980): 337-372. Four pathbreaking studies of Ritschl's theological system, offered as "correctives" to neoor-thodox criticisms, are Philip J. Hefner's Faith and the Vitalities of History: A Theological Study Based on the Work of Albrecht Ritschl (New York, 1966), Rolf Schäfers Ritschl: Grundlinien eines fast verschollenen dogmatischen Systems {Tübingen, 1968), David L. Mueller's An Introduction to the Theology of Albrecht Ritschl (Philadelphia, 1969), and James Richmond's Ritschl: A Reappraisal (London, 1978).
Davjd W. Lotz
KiTĹIÄL. Although it would seem to be a simple matter to define ritual, few terms in the study of religion have been explained and applied in more confusing ways. For example, Edmund Leach, a contemporary cultural anthropologist, after notingthe general disagreement among anthropological theorists, suggested that the term ritual should be applied to all "culturally defined sets of behavior," that is, to the symbolical dimension of human behavior as such, regardless of its explicit religious, social, or other content (Leach, 1968, p. 524). Thus we could presumably discuss the ritual significance of scientific experimental procedures, for example. For Leach, such behavior should be regarded as a form of social communication or a code of information and analyzed in terms of its "grammar." Ritual is treated as a cognitive category.
Only slightly less vast a definition, but one that covers a very different set of phenomena, is implied by the common use of the term ritual to label religion as such, as in "the ritual view of life" or "ritual man in Africa," the title of an article by Robert Horton (reprinted in Lessa and Vogt, 1979). Many modern theories of religion are in fact primarily theories of ritual, and study of the literature on either topic would introduce us to the other.
Another very broad but commonly encountered usage is the one favored by, for example, psychoanalytic theory, in which notably nonrational or formalized symbolic behavior of any kind is distinguished as "ritual,"
as distinct from pragmatic, clearly ends-directed behavior that is rationally linked to empirical goals. Here "ritual" is often contrasted to "science" and even to common sense. Without much further ado, religious rituals can even be equated with neurotic compulsions, and its symbols to psychological complexes or genetically linked archetypes. Sociologists and anthropologists who favor such a contrast between ritualistic and rational behavior are usually interested in ritual's so-ciocultura! functions, in which religious values shrink to social affirmations. (Some social anthropologists distinguish between "ritual"—stylized repetitious behavior that is explicitly religious—and "ceremony," which is merely social even in explicit meaning.) [See Ceremony.] According to these theorists, the manilest religious content of ritual masks its more basic, "latent" social goals. However, there are anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, who are interested in the explicit religious meaning of ritual symbolisms and who point out that ritual acts do endow culturally important cosmological conceptions and values with persuasive emotive force, thus unifying individual participants into a genuine community. Here ritual is viewed sociologically, to be sure, but in terms ol its existential import and explicit meanings rather than its purely cognitive grammar, its psychological dynamics, or its merely social reference.
Such an approach comes closest to that adopted by most scholars in the history and phenomenology ol religions. According to Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, for example, ritual arises from and celebrates the encounter with the "numinous," or "sacred," the mysterious; reality that is always manifested as of a wholly dilferent order from ordinary or "natural" realities. Religious, persons seek to live in continual contact with those realities and to flee or to transform the inconsequential banality of ordinary life, thus giving rise to the repetitions and "archetypal nostalgias" of ritual. In this approach, there is the attempt to define ritual by its actual intention or focus.. This intentionality molds the formal symbolisms and repetitions of ritual at their origins, so that when the rituals are repeated, the experience of holiness can be more or less fully reappropriated fey new participants^
For our purposes, we shall understand as "ritual" those conscious and voluntary, repetitious and stylized symbolic bodily actions that are centered on cosmic structures and/or sacred presences. (Verbal behavior such as chant, song, and prayer are of course included in the category of bodily actions.) The conscious and voluntary aspects of ritual rule out the inclusion of personal habits or neurotic compulsions in this definition,
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as does the stress on a transcendent focus (as Freud has shown, neurotic obsessions refer back to infantile traumas and represent contorted efforts of the self to communicate with itself: the focus of neurotic compulsion is the self)-
Even more fundamentally, ritual is intentional bodily engagement in the paradigmatic forms and relationships of reality. As such, ritual brings not only the body but also that body's social and cultural identity to the encounter with the transcendental realm. By conforming to models or paradigms that refer to the primordial past and that can be shared by many people, ritual also enables each person to transcend the individual self, and thus it can link many people together into enduring and true forms of community. As a result, ritual draws into itself every aspect of human life, and almost every discipline of the social sciences and humanities has something to say about it. I shall begin this analysis of ritual, however, with an attempt to articulate its manifest religious orientation and how this gives rise to repetitious behaviors. After that I shall turn to other approaches that highlight the latent factors in ritual, such as its personal or social value. In this way I shall be able to review the major theoretical approaches to ritual. The Religious Meaning of Ritual. Ritual appears in all religions and societies, even those that are nominally antiritualistic. Although it is common to contrast "ritualism" with "deeper spirituality" and mysticism, we find ritual especially stressed in mystical groups (Zen monasteries, Süfi orders, Jewish mystical communities, Hindu yogic ashrams, etc.); in such groups ritual often expands to fill every moment of daily life. The body is. evidently more important in religious experience thaa is often thought..
Ritual centers on the body, and if we would understand ritual we shall ,haye to take the body seriously as a vehicle for religious experience^ It is evident that without a body we would have ho awareness of a worio! at all,. The infant builds up an understanding of the world out of sensory-motor experience, and as Jean Pia-get and Sigmund Freud, among others, have shown, this understanding underlies and sustains our adult experience of space, time, number, and personal identity. The self is first of all a bodily self. As a result, physical experiences and actions engage consciousness more immediately and irresistibly, and bestow a much stronger sense of reality, than any merely mental philosophy or affirmation of faith. Much ritual symbolism draws on the simplest and most intense sensory experiences, such as eating, sexuality, and pain. Such experiences have been repeated so often or so intimately by the body that they have become primary forms of bodily awareness. In ritual, they are transformed into symbolic experi-
ences of the divine, and even into the form of the cosmic drama itself. We may therefore speak of a "prestige of the body" in ritual. In the bodily gesture, the chant, dance, and stride of participants, primordial presences are made actual again, time is renewed, and the universe is regenerated.
Ritual is more than merely symbolic action, it is hieratic. Almost all human activity is symbolic, even the most "rationally" pragmatic. People would never trouble to fix cars if cars had no cultural value; even scientific experiments would be meaningless without a tacit reference to a specific kind of world and society that validates such activities. However, ritual underlines and makes emphatic its symbolic intention. Hence the stylized manner of ritual: the special clothes, the altered manner of speech, the distinctive places and times. But above all, behavior is repetitive and consciously follows a model. Repetition, after all, is a natural way for the body to proclaim, enact, and experience the choice of true as opposed to false things and ways, and to dwell self-consciously in determinative model realities, in the "holy."
The use of model roles and identities is crucial to ritual. As Mircea Eliade has shown, ritual is shaped by archetypes, by the "first gestures" and dramas from the beginning of time, which must be represented again in the ritual and reexperienced by the participants. It is easy to stress the imaginative and mythic aspect of these dramas, and to ignore their significance specifically as bodily enactments. In ritual, people voluntarily submit to their bodily existence and assume very specific roles with highly patterned rules—rules and roles that conform the self to all others who have embodied these "typical" roles in the past. To contact reality, in short, the conscious self must sacrifice its individual autonomy, its freedom in fantasy to "be" anything.
The self is not utterly unique and self-generated, and it cannot control life as it wishes. This is no doubt one of the deepest reasons for the common resentment of ritual: it locates and imprisons us in a particular reality whose consequences can no longer be avoided. The power of ritual is wryly indicated by stories about the bride left abandoned at the altar: in the specificity of the wedding ritual and its implications, the singular and immortal youth who exulted in the eternity of romantic dreams must become merely one of many mortals who have passed this way before. The autonomous and infinitely free self is transformed ritually into "groom" (remorselessly implying the series "father," "grandfather," and dead "ancestor"). The ritual makes him take his place in the cycle of the generations. Thus it signifies human limitation, and even death. He becomes what he had always undeniably been, a bodily,
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mortal being. Through ritual, the self is discovered as a public, externa! reality, which can be known' only through perspectives mediated by others and especially by transcendent others: the self is something already determined and presented, which can be understood above all and most truly in the ritual act itself. In these actions and encounters the primal beings provide the model and the source of life. The ritual participants must submit to those deeper realities. They must will their own bodies into identities and movements that stem from the ancestral past. They must be humble.
We can call this essential preliminary movement of the self "recentering": there is in a kind of standing outside of oneself, a taking up of the position of the divine "other" and acting on its behalf that is expressed explicitly as a personal submission to it and that is experienced directly as a submersion of the personal will in the divine will. The ritual comes from the ancients and was a gift from the divine; to repeat it means to receive their stamp upon the self and to make their world one's own.
In a wide-ranging study of native religions, Adolf E. Jensen (1963) has defended the thesis that the various epochs of human history have been characterized by distinctive visions of the universe. Although the details and applications of these visions vary enormously from society to society and era to era, the basic visions themselves are not numerous. Early agriculture, for example, was made culturally possible by a certain way of seeing the world and understanding life, death, and humanity, a way that transformed the "burial" of the root or seed, its "rebirth" (or "resurrection") as a plant, and its "murderous" harvesting as food into a kind of mystery, a compelling and salvific vision. The first seer to whom the divine revealed itself in this way must have had a shattering experience. Here, according to Jensen, is the fundamental origin of the rituals of the early agriculturalists: these rituals arose to induct neophytes into the mystery and to enable full initiates to reexperience the shattering revelations of the primal reality. The participants remember the creative acts that made them what they are, and thus they are able to dwell in a world that has meaning. Farming itself becomes not only possible, but necessary.
Eliade (1959) terms these primal, constitutive encounters with the sacred hierophanies (self-disclosures of the holy) and kratophanies (revelations of overwhelming power). [See Hierophany.] It is the underlying purpose of rituals to recall and renew such experiences of reality. These powerful visions—which are usually devoted to the mythic origins of the universe or to those aspects of the creation that hold special consequence for mankind, but which are preserved within the sacred
field of ritual enactment—provide a focus and Irame-work for living in the "profane" world of everyday activity. They even sanctify this activity, and so rescue it from the terror of inconsequentialiiy and rneaningless-ness. However, ordinary life, with its egoisms, pressures, and attractions, constantly threatens to erode a wider sense of reality. Crises arise that make the challenge acute. The regular enactment of rituals renews the experiential focus on the sacred. In the recentering. process, the overall meaning of life and the reality oi transcendental powers are again made paramount over: merely egoistic or social concerns. The ordering that ritual effects can even be directly healing, inasmuch as many physical ailments have a significant psychosomatic component, and social crises are above all crises in accommodating individuals or groups to each other and to cultural norms.
There is a tendency among phenomenologists ot religion concerned with ritual to emphasize the personal encounter with divine beings as the locus of ritual experience. Rudolf Otto, in his influential The Idea of the Holy (first published in 1917), was explicitly guided by Christian (and specifically Lutheran) assumptions when he described the holy, or "numinous," this way. However, there are many religions in which the focus of ritual is mostly or entirely impersonal, or in which there are no prayers or sacrifices made to divine beings. Rather, ritual action consists in repeating the primal deeds oi beings not now actively present. It is the deeds, not the persons, that are important. Most Australian Aboriginal ritual fits in this category; a striking parallel can be found in the teachings of the ritual texts of late Vedic Hinduism. The Šatapatha Bmhmaua, for example, states repeatedly that the priests are to perform the sacrifices because this is what the gods themselves did to create the world; in fact, it is by performing these rites that the gods became gods and immortal. There-1 fore the priests re-create the world when they repeat certain actions, and all who participate in the sacrifice become gods and immortal as well.
In this view, the dynamic of reality is sacrificial; it is renewed only through sacrifice and attained only by those who sacrifice. Through sacrifice one becomes equal to the gods, or even their master, since they too depend on sacrifice. In later Hinduism, there developed a philosophy of ritual, the Pürva Mimänisä (also called the Karma Mimämsä), which in some versions was explicitly atheistic: the process underlying (he universe was a ritual process repeated in and sustained by Brah-manic ritual performances alone. However, (he enactment of the duties {dharma) appropriate to one's caste, sex, and age is also a form of this ritual world maintenance, especially if done with the fully conscious inlen-
s
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tion of sustaining the impersonal ritual order of the universe. We may call this a structural rather than a personal focus to ritual action. The aim of such ritual is to enact and perhaps even regenerate the structure of reality, the deep structure that consists of a certain pattern of relationships and their dynamic regeneration. It can even be argued that this structural focus is the real or deeper one in most rituals directed to personal beings, for commonly those personal beings are addressed in ritual in order to assure the proper changing of the seasons, the fertility of the fields, the restoration of health, prosperity in business and everyday affairs, or perhaps more profoundly the general preservation of social tranquillity and universal harmony.
We need not expect to find that ritual emerges first as the result of a personal experience of encounter with a divinity, although traditional cultures often explain their rituals in this fashion. We also find rituals taking shape in conformity with a general sense of what is right and fitting to do in the context of a given situation. This structural sense of what is "right and fitting" may well lack much precision, at least on the conscious level, but despite this a preconscious (or "unconscious") awareness of the nature of the world and the way in which it relates to the ritual situation may operate to determine ritual details with great exactitude. Monographs on particular ritual systems often illustrate this vividly.
As Bruce Kapferer (1983) has shown for exorcism rituals in Sri Lanka, the details of cult can only be understood in terms of the general sense of life, and the overall existential environment, of ritual participants, although they may not be able to explain these details and simply accept them as "traditional." In fact, participants insensibly adapt rituals to specific situations, personal experiences, and training. James W. Fernandez (1982) has given us an astonishingly rich analysis of the symbolic coherence of an African religious movement that shows how conscious thought and prereflective experience interact to produce ritual behavior. At times, the conscious component may be very high: Stanley J. Tambiah's (1970) description of spirit cults in Thailand necessarily involves a discussion of Buddhist metaphysics at certain points, but even here most of the structure of the ritual conforms to unspoken but vividly present folk realities.
One of the most telling instances of the influence of a general sense of the "right and fitting" on ritual behavior, however, is described in W. Lloyd Warner's classic study of Memorial Day and other rituals in a New England community, The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959). Warner describes how the celebration of the holiday was planned and car-
ried out one spring. Many people were involved; in fact almost ail groups in the community were represented. Many random factors and issues intervened, but the result can be regarded as a crystallization of the American ethos as it existed at that time and place. We have here neither the calculated imposition of ritualized ideology on underclasses by an authoritarian, hypocritical elite nor solitary ecstatic encounters with sacred beings used as models for community cult (two current theories of the origin of ritual). Instead, we find the voluntary community enactment of a felt reality, which in turn makes the common dream an actuality, at least in the festival itself. The felt reality is also a dream, an ideal, for it consists of those experienced values that at the deepest level guide members of the community, and in terms of which thev understand and, on occasion even cnticize each othet and themsches
Shame and death in ritual This phenomenon of cut icism and especially ol self cuticism is an essential pat t of tituat It is pat t of the recentenng that has alreadv been mentioned a self ttanstoimation that is ntcessaiv if thcie is to be an\ hope of escaping peisonal fantasies and encountenng authentic realities outside the self Foi icahn which the self longs foi as a secme grounding at the same time must include other things and beings which in turn must condition and limit the self. Encounters with these other presences will be chaotic and destructive, however, unless some harmonious and stable mode of interaction is discovered. In ritual, the bodily self enacts the true and enduring forms of relationships within a cosmic order that has a constructive place for the self. But this enactment must begin with an acceptance of personal limitation. So we commonly find that ritual sequences may begin with explicit declarations of persona) flaw, shame, or guilt existing in the participants or in their world that it will be the task of the ritual to assuage or nullify. The "flaw" need not be narrowly moral, of course: it may only be, for example, that a youngster is growing into an adult without yet knowing or assuming adult responsibilities and roles. If this willful autonomy were to continue, or to become common, the sanctified social order would cease; therefore, initiation is necessary to rectify the disharmony introduced by the child-adult.
Rituals cluster especially around those primary real= ities (such as sexuality, death, strife, and failure) that, force us to face our personal limits and our merely rel-, ative existence. In many Indo-European and Semitic languages the very word for "shame" felt before the opposite sex (especially in regard to their sexual organs) is the same as that for "respect" before the elderly, the rulers, the dead, and the gods; it is also the word for "ritual awe." Thisjdeeply felt "shame-awe" provides us
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with the proper stance and poise to accept out-mere relativity and our limits, and thereby to restore harmony to our world. Beginning with a shamed sense of flaw and submission, one comes in the course of the ritual to perceive the self from the perspective of the holy. From this perspective and this transcendental center, one wills the ritual actions until the identification of wills results in making the ritual one's voluntary, autonomous, and bodily enactment of truth. Although ritual commonly begins in duty or submission, it generally ends in voluntary and even joyful affirmation. In this way, the dread and the enchantment that R. R. Marett and Rudolf Otto found to be two aspects of the experience of the sacred articulate also the actual structure of most ritual sequences, which begin in disequilibrium and end in harmony after confession, submission, purification sacrifice, or other ritual strategies.
Connected with this is what might be called the ritual barter of immortalities. In ritual, one inevitably and implicitly wills one's own death, since one lakes on a merely partial identity as "man" or "woman," "elder" or "youth," the identity of an actual finite self existing within boundaries and under obligations, defined through relationships with others and destined to die. It is therefore both as a kind of palliative and as a necessary consequence of the search for reality that rituals of initiation, the New Year, and so on place such stress on immortality and mythic eternity. The consolation for accepting one's death is the awareness that through this one attains to another kind of eternity, as part of a larger cosmic reality. The seeming eternity of one's immediate desires and wishes are given up for an eternity mediated through the divine order, which certainly endures beyond all individuals and embodies the "otherness" that limits us.
There should be nothing surprising in this intimate mixture of personal need and ruthless objectivity, for i ltual as such is constituted by the longing to place the self in enduring contact with absolute or source realities This necessanly lequtres a relationship compounded ot both self and othet, of heteronomy and autonomy. (It would therefoie be incorrect to identify ritual action with heteronomy, as Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and others have done.) W. Brede Kris-tensen, the Dutch phenomenologist of religions, refers to this connection of self and other as the fundamental "compact," "agreement," or "covenant," "man's Law of life" that underlies all rituals, for in them humanity and the divine bind themselves together to sustain a unified and stable order of the universe.
Space and time in ritual. Through ritual, then, the self is inducted into the necessary forms of space and time, and these forms are disclosed as harmonious with
the body. The space and time ol ritual are organic experiences. Time, for example, waxes and wanes; like organisms if can grow and decay, and must be regenerated. [See Sacred Time.] Time has neither static-eternity nor monotonous regularity but the rhythms of the body, even if it embraces the universe. Yearly festivals mark the moments in the "life" of the year, from birth through fertility to death. The rites of passage, including birth, initiation, marriage, and death, translate the patterns of time into the individual life cycle, giving the chief transitions of every life the authentic resonance of the sacred. Even the minor moments of ritual, ignored by participants, render an architecture in time in which the girders are ceremonial gestures, the rhythms of chant, the turn, and the stride.
Space, as well, is drawn into the ritual field of correspondences and boundaries and is given a shape that hospitably welcomes the body. [See Sacred Space.] The cosmos is revealed as a house and a temple, and, reflex-ively, the personal and physical house and temple are disclosed as the cosmos made immanent. The mountain is the "throne" of the gods, the heavens their "chamber"; the shaman's drum is his "horse," by which he ecstatically mounts through the "roof" of heaven. The Brahmanic altar is shaped in the form of a woman in order to tempt the gods to approach the sacrificial place. And if the center of the universe is brought symbolically into our midst, so too is the beginning of creation, which we can then ritually repeat in our central shrines. Ritual makes all of this immediately and bodily present. The universe itself may be embodied in the participants, so that the marriage of king and queen may at once simulate and stimulate the marriage of heaven and earth, and the slaying of slaves may accomplish the overthrow of chaos.. The elementary sensory-motor experiences of up and down, in and out, and left and right, rudimentary though we may think ihem, are utilized in ritual, often in astonishingly systematic lash-ion, showing to what degree ritual is a meditation on the final and basic experiences of the body, an attempt to discover deeper meanings in them. Left and right symbolisms, for example, are everywhere in the world correlated through ritual equivalences and oppositions between male and female, day and night, order and disorder, the sun and moon, and other basic elements in experience. Robert Hertz, who first noted that rituals worldwide share" these left and right symbolisms, sug^ gested that they were rooted in the general human experience of skill and mastery in the right hand and relative weakness and clumsiness in the left, which then served to characterize and give order to a wide range of other experiences and perceptions (see essays in Need-ham, 1973). Ernst Cassirer (1955, pp. 83ff.) has shown
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how specific bodily organizations of experience of other sorts, especially of space, time, number, and self, are ritually integrated into cosmological enactments.
Certainly ritual definitively breaks up the homogeneity of space and establishes places in it for humanity. The body itself is a common model for the universe. Puranic descriptions of the universe develop this idea in astonishing detail, in schemes that are often reproduced -, in Hindu temples and iconography. The Hindu temple has a waist, trunk, and head. In Nepal, Buddhist stupas often have two eyes painted on the dome and are topped with a small parasol, just as the Buddha himself used to have. Such ritual symbolisms make such actions as moving through the temple a journey through the various heavens and lend shape to meditation as well. The yogin may practice visualizing his body as the temple-universe, finding within it all the gods and heavens. It is common even in folk religions to find ritual identification of the cardinal points with the four limbs, and the center of the world identified as an omphalos, or umbilicus, which may be located at the center of one's village or enshrined as the goal of religious pilgrimage. In every example, the religious motivation is to establish necessary links between the body and the world, to make these links "natural" in the very fabric of things, to make secure continuities that give the self access to transcendent and sacred life.
A major strategy employed by ritual to achieve this goal is simply to reenact with the participants' own bodies the primeval or constitutive acts by which the cosmos came into being. Mircea Eliade, who has devoted many studies to this almost universal trait in ritual, has called it "the myth of the eternal return." To exist truly is to remember, and even more to reenact, the foundational events; to forget is to dissolve the world in chaos. By repeating the primordial deeds of the gods, human beings become as the gods, posturing out their will and establishing their divine world. Precisely as bodily beings, and through the body, they enter eternity and "become" the transcendent others who control their lives. The personal distancing of the self from the self mentioned earlier permits this ritual ecstasy, which perhaps achieves its most extreme form in trances of possession or mystical union, when the sense of self is entirely blotted out. [See Ecstasy.] However, the ritual dialectic of self and other much more usually seeks to retain the full consciousness of both in reciprocal harmony. New Year's festivals, initiations, funerals, and coronations all show this passion for the abiding dynamic process, the eternal form of the universe.
When, in the Finnish epic Kalevala, Väinämöinen, the shaman hero, wishes to heal himself of a wound caused
by an iron weapon, he ritually chants the myth of the first creation of iron and so is able to reverse and negate the impure and wrong unfolding of time (Kalevala, rune 9). The first act of Columbus when he set foot on the soil of the New World was to hold a religious service, praying to God and drawing this new and alien territory into the same universe of dedication that contained God, sovereign rulers, and Spain. The terra incognita thus became a domesticated Spanish territory.
These two instances show the prayerfulness of "magic," and the magic of prayer. Väinämöinen's chant was also prayerful, for it was grounded in submission to foundational realities and mysteries. The very need for comprehensive accuracy in the wording of the myth recital obviously signifies the necessity of complete obedience to a sacred and powerful reality that is formal in nature. Of course, faith in this chant is also faith in those divinities named in it, who made iron and who, by transmitting the chant, created it. And, for his part, Columbus followed archetypal forms in his petition to the sacred beings who made the entire world and this new land as well, and he even transformed the entire service into a kind of legal statement of territorial appropriation, so that personal prayer followed the logic of a deeper impersonal and "magical" transubstantia-tion of the land. Like Väinämöinen, he overcame anomaly through a cosmological recitation. Such reflections show the emptiness of distinctions between religious and magical rituals and, even more importantly, alert us to the two basic modes of the sacred, impersonal archetypal form and personal sacred presence. Archetypal form consists of cosmological structures that shape a divine order and may be renewed through ritual reenact-ments. [See Archetypes.] Sacred beings must be ritually invoked and acknowledged. As the instances of Väinämöinen and Columbus show, the two modes of the sacred often occur together in the same rite and can inspire the same sense of awe and personal submission.
The symbolic Integrations of ritual. Religious ritual is evidently not a simple or infantile manifestation but is based on a kind of final summing-up of, acknowledgement of, and submission to reality. Ritual engages all levels of experience and weaves them together. It has often been noted, for example, that ritual symbolisms often center on such elementary acts as eating and sex. From this strong emphasis, in fact, Freudian psychoanalysis was able to draw evidence for its hypothesis that religion consists of sublimated or projected sexual hungers and symbols. Other theorists (in the modern period, most notably those emphasizing totemism and the Myth and Ritual school) deduced from the importance of food and eating in ritual that rituals were eco-
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nomic in origin and concerned with magical or proto-scientific control of the food supply. However, not only in the areas of sexuality and eating (two of the most rudimentary of bodily experiences), but also elsewhere, ritual makes use of activities that are familiar and deeply intimate, that when engaged in involve the body very strongly, or that have been repeated so often that they take on a habitual, automatic nature. The power that ritual has to make these acts conscious and, simultaneously, to bring them into relationship with central religious realities is a major part of its attraction and fascination. In effect, ritual sacramentalizes the sensory-motor sphere by lifting it into the sphere of the ultimate, while the energy of elemental awareness is reshaped and drawn into the support of the structures of clear consciousness and ultimate concerns. The secular is transformed by the sacred. [See Sacrament.]
The process can be observed in terms of particular ritual symbols. Each symbol is multivalent: it refers to many things, which may not be clearly present to consciousness but which exist in a kind of preconscious halo around it. Victor Turner,,in a number of richly detailed studies, has emphasized a bipolar structure to ihis multivalency of ritual symbols:, they are often drawn from sensory experience and passion (the "orec-tic" pole) and are made to represent social ideals (the "ideological" pole). So, as he shows, initiation rituals among the Ndembu of Zambia are structured around ideologically defined natural symbols (colors, plant species, etc.), which in the course of traumatic ordeals work deeply into the consciousness of candidates, reshaping their self-conception and view of the world and_ society. In the same way, Ndembu "cults of affliction." turn painfully destructive impulses and social tension, and even mental and physical illness, into affirmative communal experiences. We can elaborate this analysis further: a single symbol can draw on orectic sensual urges; can implicitly relate to a larger cognitive and dispositional structure that organizes all sensory experience into a coherent perception of the natural world; can be part of a ritual used by a participant to advance his own ego-centered utilitarian aims; can embody the social values of the actual group and perhaps even indicate the group identity; can be seen to point to wider sociocultural and ideological issues; and, finally, can be directed to transcendental spiritual beings or cosmological structures. This sixfold layering of symbolic meaning may be generally characterized as relating to the body's organic world, the social world, and the cosmological or transcendental realm.^he ego's concerns connect the first and second, while ideological and broadly ecological issues connect the second and third, produc-
ing five levels of general symbolic significance that are unified in ritual enactments.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual. The various levels of symbolic reference in ritual help us to understand the applicability of many disciplines and theories to ritual. These can be seen as applying to one or another aspect or level of ritual action, although obviously this applicability also suggests that any one theory or discipline in itself cannot claim sole truth and must be supplemented and corrected by other approaches. For example, Freudian theory has helped us to see the relevance of organic processes in the development of personality, from infancy to the organization of behavior in adults. Freud was the first to show in detail just how, through sublimation, repression, projection, and other transformations, bodily symbolisms can be expanded in dreams, art, language, and ritual into entire cosmological dramas. Freud also showed how each organic symbolism organizes increasingly wider ranges of experience within it. This expansive tendency of each symbol, which we can call its imperialistic tendency to organize all experience around itself, brings it into competition with other symbols and even with conscious thought. However, as Volney Gay has recently shown, Freud's own restriction of meaningful n ess to this organic level alone, and even solely to sexual complexes, and his general antipathy to religion, led him to suggest that religion and ritual are infantile and to equate the latter with regressive neurotic compulsions.
The operations by which bodily symbols are organized into coherent general dispositional structures of perception have been illuminated by the work of such psychologists as Jean Piaget, Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan, and C. G. Jung, each in his own way enlarging our understanding. Ernst Cassirer's philosophically sophisticated analysis of how cognition comes to organize space, time, and identity, enacting paradigms of these in ritual, may almost be taken as a philosophical phenomenology supplementing Mircea Eliade's researches and detailed demonstrations. Such studies enhance but also correct the often highlv speculative approach of Jungian psycholog\ to ritual symbolism. Of great importance is the work of structuralist anthropology, a field founded by Claude Lévi-Strauss and dedicated to the analysis of cognitive organization in cultural creations. According to this theory, rituals, myths, and other aspects of culture are structured cognitively, by processes resembling binary computer operations. These mental oparations lie finally outside of all meaning and simply reflect an autonomous cognitive drive toward order. Lévi-Strauss suggests in some of his works that each culture works out a tight and utterly
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consistent logic in its rituals and myths; elsewhere that, coherence can only be found on a regional and even % global scale, particular cultures exemplifying only partial and unconscious cognitive: unifications. It must be added that Léví-Strauss (1979) finds rituál far more incoherent than myth, due largely to ritual's explicitly r|j ligióús and emotive focus^ However, other structural anthropologists have shown astonishingly coherent organizations of symbols in even the slightest details of ritual; action becomes a coded text or hidden language conveying information; áVp'iít"tKe"''sbciaT"äiid^čulrurfl' Universe pí the performers^The actual meaning of the ritual to the actors may be considered irrelevant.
Critics of this approach have suggested that ritual may not be concerned after all with the cognitive classification of things but may instead relate to others of the six levels we have distinguished in ritual symbolic reference. Fredrick Barth.points out that, as the media of social interaction, relatively unsystematic and incoherent symbolic networks may be sufficient or even especially desirable. He describes a Melanesian culture in which ritual symbols have only loose chains of analog? ical associations, varying from individual to individual and only imperfectly worked together. Since these met: aphors and symbols by their very looseness underlie at some point or another every participant's experience, they can be variously meaningfulto all and serve to bring them together. More generally, a purely cognitive approach ignores the possibility that ritual may be concerned above all with the cultivation of a basic stance on life, involving the recentering that I have earlier discussed. As Gilbert Lewis, has suggested, rituals may even emphasize precisely the illogic and incoherence of symbols in an effort to capture the paradox, mystery, and transcendental reality of the sacred. Even more basically, if possible, the multivalence of symbols necessarily insures their ultimate formal incoherence, since the relational meanings often accrete to a symbol by experienced conjunction, not logic, and the "imperialism" of symbols makes each incompatible at some points with others. Particular rituals may achieve a unified meaning by making one symbolism dominant, using the rich though submerged associations of subordinate symbols simply to contribute to the sense of depth and authenticity of the rite.
The value of ritual to the ego world of rational calculation and social manipulation and interaction has been emphasized by a number of theorists. Some cultures and religions make such an approach easier than others; for example, as Emily Ahern has emphasized, in Chinese religions the heavenly spirits and gods are ranked in a bureaucratic hierarchy that is a transcendental continuation of earthly Chinese society and gov-
ernment. Prayers, offerings, and modes of address can therefore be interpreted in an almost wholly social and manipulative mode, if one is so inclined. Much of the debate about the "rationality" of ritual among anthropologists, referred to earlier, applies to this level of ritual meaning as well. These discussions have revived the viewpoints of E. B. Tylor, James G. Frazer, and others from the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century that ritual was in its origins a pragmatic attempt to control nature, a rational even if scientifically ill-founded activity. Such theorists as Adolf Jensen and Robin Horton go on to make a distinction between "expressive" and "instrumental," or manipulative, aspects of ritual; the former relates to faith and is authentically religious, while the latter is said to be materialistic, pragmatic, and inauthentic. But such viewpoints not only ignore the recentering process underlying even the most utilitarian ritual; they have difficulty accounting for the fact that in many religions it is precisely the pragmatic application of cult that directly expresses the faith that the springs of reality flow forth in the actualities of human existence and that reality is benevolently concerned with human needs. There is no separation of spirit and flesh in such religions, and the aim of religion is to sanctify life. Still, in the multileveled significance of ritual symbolisms, rational ego-oriented calculations have a role.
So do social and political calculations, conscious or otherwise, for these act as a necessary check on a population of competing egos and permit a community to exist. The recentering that ritual forces on the ego, as in initiations, provides an intersubjective, social confirmation of reality necessary even for the individual ego, if it is to participate in a world it cannot wholly control. Inner structures of awareness are thus shared with others, and a community is created that has legitimacy to the degree that it is anchored in transcendental cosmo-logical realities. Thus we find that in all religions ritual has enormous sociálvalue. Society can enhance itself,, by fusing transcendental symbolisms with its own5 norms, and ritual can be quite functional in overcoming; tensions and divisions in the community (in this way sublimating violence).
This was quite powerfully brought out by the French sociologist Emile P.urkhejm jn The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). Societies image themselves in their ritual symbols, he maintained; the "sacred" is the essential social idea. Religion is not for Durkheim (as it was for Otto) about abnormal personal states, but about normal social and natural life: the rainfall, the crops,, good hunting, good health, children, and social continuity. Even relationships to particular spiritual beings are cast in terms of this deeper, more normative, struc-
i
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tural and cosmological orientation. In effect, Durkheim brought to the attention of researchers á mode of the sacred they had ignored until then, the structural áňŮ cosmological mode,. But he saw it chiefly in terms of social groupings and values; even individual spiritual beings symbolized the group or its relations with other groups. The community is re-created at times of initia-' tion and festival;
Such ideas were developed into "functionalist" anthropology in the Anglo-Saxon countries under the leadership of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Ma-linowski. The organic interconnections between social values and rituals were demonstrated by this approach in many striking studies. Taboos, for example, do not so much arise from individual fears or longings as they do from the social purpose of identifying to participants the proper sentiments to feel in particular situations. Groups are identified by the rites they practice, roles within the group are differentiated (a special necessity in small-scale societies, in which roles overlap and daily interaction may be filled with personal antipathies and preferences), and tensions resolved by the community feeling engendered by the rites. The functionalists taught their contemporaries that even the most bizarre or apparently harmful practices (e.g., witchcraft and sorcery, painful initiatory ordeals, ritual head-hunting) might be socially constructive. But the genuinely needed tolerance that characterizes their work has recently been criticized as static, ahistorical, a priori, and Panglossian.
That ritual symbolisms may correspond to a society's economic and political forces and relate to historical changes in these forces as well has been a theme of recent Marxist anthropology. Whereas functionalists tended to limit their concern to the ideological structures elaborated by particular societies and often more or less consciously recognized by participants, Marxist analysis locates itself at a more comparative and materialistic level: the more extreme theorists, for example, argue in the vein of Enlightenment critics of religion that ritual consists of systematic falsehoods designed by ruling circles to justify their exploitation of the underprivileged (e.g., see Bloch, 1977). In any case, ritual is about political power or economic forces.
Recent studies have extended our insight into the integrative power of ritual to include a culture's relationship to its larger natural environment. Cine of:;tlje mosts striking demonstrations of this ecological function of ritual, in which ritual acts as a: central control on a wide range of forces, is Roy A. Rappaport's description of the pig festival of the Tsembaga of Papua New ., Guinea (Rappaport, in Lessa and Vogt, 1979)-Warfare, human fertility rates, land-occupation densities, protein
supply during crises, wild pig marauders, and many other factors are kept in balance by this festival, truly bringing the Tsembaga into harmony with the ecological forces affecting their lives and even their survival. Once again, and from an unexpected perspective, we find a multiform unity between self and other, expressive and instrumental elements in ritual.
The Types of Ritual. Two basic approaches to the classification of ritual may be found in the literature on the subject, which we may call the functional-enumer-ative and the structural-analytical. The first has the attraction of seeming inductive, empirically firm, and precise: one simply notes down each kind of ritual behavior as one finds it, defining it by its function or explicit use. The result is usually a long and imposing list. Each item on the list is a special case to be explained separately. It is usually not noticed that rituals of different levels of generality are mixed together. For example, Crawford Howell Toy, in his Introduction to the History of Religion (1913), in an admittedly "not exhaustive list," presents the principal forms of early ceremonies as follows: emotional and dramatic (religious dances and plays, processions, circumambulations); decorative and curative; economic (hunting and farming rites, dietary rules, rainmaking); apotropaic (averting or expelling evil spirits or influences); puberty and initiation; marriage, birth, burial, purification arid consecration; and periodic and seasonal. In a separate chapter he considers "totemism" (a supposed cult belonging to a specific cultural-historical epoch) and taboo (a universal ritual type), and in a third chapter "magic" (a general way of using rites) and divination (a specific kind of ritual). Toy's approach is often informative, but haphazard.
More systematic is the functional classification offered by Anthony F. C. Wallace (1966): He distinguishes between technological rituals aimed at the control of nonhuman nature (divination, "intensification" rites to increase food supply, protective rites to avert misfortune); therapy and antitherapy rituals affecting humans (curing rites and rites with injurious ends, like witchcraft and sorcery); ideology rituals directed to the control of social groups and values (passage rites of the life cycle and territorial movement, "social intensification" rites to renew group solidarity, like Sunday services, arbitrary ceremonial obligations, like taboos, and rebellion rites, which allow catharsis); salvation rituals enabling individuals to cope with personal difficulties (possession rites, shamanic rites, mystic riles, and expiation rites); and, finally, revitalization rituals designed to cure societal difficulties and identity crises, such as millenarian movements.,
This classification system is clearly much more use-
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ful. However, its functional precision is not entirely adequate, since a single ritual may in actual performance belong to several or even all of these classes: for instance, Easter in a medieval Polish village was a technological ritual {as a spring festival and as a protective rite); offered therapy to ill believers and antitherapy to nonparticipants, like Jews; was an ideology ritual that renewed group solidarity and included arbitrary ceremonial obligations; and was a salvation and, on occasion, even a revitalization ritual.
Such overlap is almost impossible to avoid in classifications of ritual, due to the integrative thrust and mul-tileveled nature of ritual. The main criterion in distinguishing rituals should perhaps be the overall intention or emphasis of the performers: thus we can say that Easter has in a general way moved historically from a revitalization ritual to a salvation ritual in the early church, and thereafter to a technological and therapy ritual in the Middle Ages, and finally to an ideology ritual at the present time. But if that is so, the external forms of the ritual do not necessarily help us to classify it, nor do they always correspond to a specific function. To put the matter a little differently, function is at base a structural matter and depends on context.
We may supplement Wallace's classification, then, with a structural one. Two of the founding classics of the modern study of religion suggest a starting point. Emile Durkheim, in his study of religion mentioned above, divided all rites into positive and negative kindg. By negative rituals he meant taboos, whose purpose, he said, was to separate the sácred from the profane, preserving the transcendence of the former and the evenj-day normality of the latter^ positive rituals chiefly included sacrificial rites, in the course of which the sacred and profane realms were brought together and the ordinary life of performers was infused with the ideal and, the normative. The cultic life of religion moves continually between these two phases, maintaining and regenerating the stable universal order. .
Sigmund Freud also distinguished similar basic types of ritual in his Totem and Taboo (1913). By "totem" Freud referred to the totemic sacrifice that, according to him, reenacted the primordial parricide.
Generalizing from these two classics, we may say .that., all rituals may be divided into those whose purpose is to maintain distinctions within a divine order and those .-whose purpose is to bridge divisions and effect transformations, renewing that order when it is threatened by" internal or external change. These two traits, of structure maintenance and transformation, must exist in any system if it is to endure in a stable fashion, integrating change into itself without altering its basic form. Although both Durkheim and Freud saw structure main-
tenance in a negathe light and in terms of taboos, it is evident that positive injunctions are also important and, indeed, that negative prohibitions often have a very positive intention. I shall therefore call rituals of this kind "confirmatory iituals," for in them the basic boundaries and internal spaces of the divine order are confirmed without change, while rituals that bridge divisions and regenerate the structure I shall call "transformátory rituals "
Confírmatory rituals. Both confirmatory and transformátory rituals act by centering the will in transcendental sources, that is, they anchor the immediate order in a realm that transcends it. As we shall see, these orders may nest hierarchically within each other: reverence to clan ancestors helps to establish the clan within the cosmos, but larger human groupings may need to center themselves in more inclusive realities. This suggests that the order that is being affirmed is to a certain degree situational and relative, and that it therefore may contain a certain amount of overlap, incoherence, and contradiction. These are existential realities, not logical postulates, as we have seen, although certain religions do indeed work out their inner structures with remarkable clarity.
Confirmatory rituals do not include only taboos, although this is the category that has been most thoroughly discussed. Positive injunctions are merely the other side of taboos, so that in some cases stress on one or the other aspect is merely a matter of temperament. Greetings of a religious nature, blessings, prayers of affirmation, and rituals of meditation that stress the sustained perception of transcendental meanings present in ordinary experience are further instances of confirmatory rituals. For example, observant Jews have traditionally been accustomed to recite blessings focused on God on every occasion of everyday life, from the time of rising in the morning to going to bed at night, on meeting strangers, friends, wise persons or individuals remarkable in any way, witnessing or hearing of strange occurrences, encountering good news or bad, seeing a beautiful tree or tasting a new fruit, and so forth. As religious Jews come to see all of life as an opportunity to dwell in God's presence, so do Buddhist monks discover the void within all events, analyzing every perception, thought, and event in terms of yogic categories and sünyatä. Such practices ritualize consciousness, and are especially important for mystical groups of almost all world religions.
Such practices express a more general attribute of ritual: it acts as a frame to awareness. Recognizing within the fluid continuum of ordinary occurrences a specific way of directing one's behavior immediately removes one from a complete immersion in mere activity. It cre-
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ates   self-conscious   choice   of  behavior,   so   that   one chooses this way, not that; actions referring to a larger meaning or presence, not actions merely referring to self. As George Albert Coe remarked in The Psychology of Religion (Chicago, 1917), prayer "is a way of getting one's  self together,  of mobilizing  and  concentrating one's dispersed capacities, of begetting the confidence that tends toward victory over difficulties. It produces in a distracted mind the repose that is power. It freshens a mind deadened by routine. It reveals new truth, because the mind is made more elastic and more capable of sustained attention" (pp. 312—313). This power of confirmatory rituals is shared with transformátory rituals. However, confirmatory rituals tend to be more abbreviated, because their aim is to direct the performer into the world in a certain way and not simply to transform the performer. If such rites were drawn out and emphasized in themselves, they would have a contrary effect: the symbolic references within the rituals themselves would become the subject of concentration, replacing the focus on the ordinary field of activity. The internal nesting of symbols would displace banal realities, isolate the performers, and reveal a world of transcendental truths outside of common experience. This is what transformátory rituals do. Thus such rituals as" taboo and sacrifice are closely related to each other, varying modes of the experience of liminality.
The framing power of ritual acts to shape consciousness  itself and  in confirmatory rituals sustains  that modified consciousness as an enduring thing, producing the specific kind of self-consciousness and worldview aimed at by the particular religion. This power of ritual over consciousness creates cultural realities and so even from an empirical viewpoint actually produces changes in   the   environment.   Godfrey   Lienhardt   (1961)   has shown how such processes operate in detail among the Dinka of the southern Sudan; when a tardy herdsman, hurrying home before the sun falls, stops to tie a knot in a tuft of grass, he not only concentrates his mind but he actually modifies his reality, and this action as a whole has objective results. No Dinka supposes that commonsense efforts are actually replaced by such acts; such efforts are still needed, but a "slant" or framework of reality has been generated that facilitates activity. As Clifford Geertz has put it, ritual is both a "model of" and a "model for" reality (Geertz, in Lessa and Vogt, 1979), or, to use Martin Heidegger's term, ritual defines a "project," a way of entering into existence and bodily seizing it. Sherry Ortner (1978) has shown how key symbols operate ritually in this way among the Buddhist Sherpas of Nepal, sustaining pervasive moods or dispositional orientations to life and generating characteristic choices of behavior among the performers.
Striking advances have been made in recent years in our understanding of taboos. Decades ago it was common to regard taboos as.superstitious, even infantile fear responses designed to ward off the sacred or perhaps lacking even that semirational goal. [See Taboo.] As recently as 1958, Jean Cazeneuve argued at length that taboos and purifications are intended to reject the sacred and to create an autonomous human sphere in which transcendence is an"impurity." With this view, Cazeneuve was building on Durkheim's important insight that taboos act to distinguish and thus to preserve both the sacred and the profane. However, more recent studies lead one to question whether there is any really profane sphere bereft of sacred quality and significance in   most   premodern   religious   systems.   As   Steiner showed, the profane was not to be understood as the "secular" in those systems, but simply as the common and everyday, as distinguished from the special quality of specifically transcendental things. Thus the profane could have sacred value. It is striking that the word qadosh ("holy") and its derivatives, such as lehitqadesh ("to make holy, to sanctify"), are used much more often in the Pentateuch about activities and things in this world and even the human sphere than they are about God. The first use of the root in the Bible is in regard to God making the Sabbath day holy (Gn. 2:3). The taboos of biblical Judaism describe ways of dwelling with God and not of keeping away from him: "You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy" (Lv. 19:2). In effect, the taboos permit the sacred to be diffused in a controlled way through the entire world, building up a divine order rather than destroying it, as would occur if the shattering holiness of God were totally unveiled. (This important meaning of qadosh was entirely overlooked by Rudolf Otto in his The Idea of the Holy, leading to an unfortunate disregard for the cosmoiogical and structural aspect oi the sacred and a considerable distortion of the spirituality of the religions he described.)
Taboos not only surround sacred persons, places, and times, so as to preserve the intensity and specialness of these against the encroaching banality of ordinary life, but they also delineate the shifting frameworks of holiness that follow a person through life, at one time defining the sacred path for one to walk as a youth, at another time the path of the newly initiated, the married person, the elder, and so on. Different things are "sacred" to a person as he or she passes through the stages of life, and different things are "profane." Arnold van Gennep (1960) called this the "pivoting of the sacred" and concluded from it that the sacred is not an absolute Quality, but a relative one. Taboos mark out these stages and confine the individual in them. For example,
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among the Aborigines of the northern Flinders Range in southern Australia, women and uninitiated males are not permitted to approach the areas set aside for men's initiations. These areas, I was told, were sacred and therefore taboo to women and young boys. But as novices the boys are led to those grounds, and henceforth they are allowed to go there: the taboo is lifted.
Taboos also define the enduring gradations in a continuum of sacrality. Among the Adnjamathanha people just mentioned, for example, anyone could go to the burial grounds, but certain things had to be done before entering them, and the only time that people could visit was in the late afternoon. As was mentioned, the men's sacred grounds were more taboo, with women and uninitiated men forbidden at all times; however, these grounds were divided into two parts, one near to the ordinary camp (which women could approach) and another in a remote part of the bush that was tabooed even to initiated men, except at times of special ceremonies. Taboos on food, noise, and even the things one carried differed according to which place one wished to visit. Taboos therefore can distinguish the more sacred from the less sacred, A striking account of the social impact of such taboos for Hindu society and caste was made by Edward B. Harper (1964): caste hierarchies are preserved by strict taboos governing personal relations, eating habits, marriage, and much else. These taboos are phrased in terms of purity and pollution. A brahman priest, after careful purifications, may serve the divinity in the temple, washing the divine image, changing its clothes, and offering food and flowers. The priest may thus "take the dirt" of the divinity, eating the offered food, carrying off the "dirty" clothes, and so on. Other castes are renewed by "taking the dirt" of the priest, and the process continues down to the outcastes who sweep, launder, and do other "impure" tasks for everyone. In this way the divine energy flows through the entire caste system, sustaining all of its gradations. The specific taboos thus have as their basic aim the preservation of the entire divine order, which is tacitly present at each observance. By keeping ten paces from the priest, one sustains the world.
Taboos also distinguish different species of the sacred from each other. Among the Adnjamathanha, as among most Australian Aboriginal peoples, the entire society was divided into totemic clans and divisions. Each clan had certain taboos to observe in regard to their own totem, which were not obligatory for other totems. For example, a clan would not hunt their own totem even though there was no taboo on eating it as there was among some other tribes. The entire society was symbolically divided in half, and each moiety had its own totems and its own special taboos. These taboos also
controlled relationships between the two moieties, that is, they were not only directed to the natural world but structured the social world as well.
Finally, taboos act to distinguish fundamentally different modes of the sacred from each other, such as male sacrality and female sacrality, each gender having its own food prohibitions, its own tabooed activities, its special ceremonial centers tabooed to the other, and so on. The "pure" and the "impure" is another such pair of opposing modes. The "impure" often has the dangerous quality of being formless or anomalous and therefore threatening to the structures of the divine order. Death, for example, is often considered "impure" for this reason, even though it is also a form of the sacred, and so will be surrounded by taboos. What may be called positive and negative sacrality (e.g., "good" and "evil") are also distinguished by taboo. Positive liminality builds up the divine order, while negative liminality destroys it.
■'■/ To summarize, confirmatory rituals such as taboos serve as framing devices that (1) bring the transcendental and ordinary realms into relationship while preserving each, (2) define and create, through the pivoting of the taboos and other rites, the transitory grades, stages, and roles of life, (3) fix the enduring gradations and divisions of social space (as in the caste system) and physical space (as in the various grounds and areas of the Adnjamathanha region), (4) distinguish the various species of the sacred from each other (as in Australian Aboriginal totemism), and (5) contrast the polar modes of the sacred (male-female, pure-impure, positive-negative).
Transformátory rituals. If confirmatory rituals sanctify the distinctions and boundaries that structure the cosmos (and therefore cluster especially around liminal points to preserve and define differences), transformátory rituals serve to bridge the various departments and divisions thus established, regenerating the cosmos in whole or in part when it is threatened by change. These rituals arise in response to anomaly, fault, disequilibrium, and decay, and they have as their aim the restoration of harmony and ideal patterns. Re-centering is their essential dynamic. They all accomplish this in basically the same way, in accordance with a sacrificial logic: (1) the disturbing element is disconnected from its surroundings, by literal spatial dislocation, if possible; (2) it is brought directly into contact with the transcendental source or master in the sacred, which dissolves it and reforms it—this is the time of flux, outside of ordinary structures; and (3) the reshaped element is relocated in the divine order. These rites often separate out from the disturbing element or situation those positive  potentially  integrative  factors  that can  be  re-
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shaped into a constructive part of the divine order and the negative disintegrative factors that must be located in some peripheral and bounded part of the cosmos, where they belong.
We may further loosely distinguish between transitional rituals, which place the disturbing element in a new location in the divine order (e.g., through initiation, the child enters the adult sphere; in funerals the living person is acknowledged as fully dead, perhaps as an ancestor, etc.), and restorative rituals, which return the regenerated element to its previous place in the whole. Examples of transitional rituals include "rite§vof passage" (birth, initiation, marriage, mortuary rites), calendrical rites.(seasonal and other regularly enacted rites, sometimes called rites of intensification), consecration rituals (founding a new village, accepting a stranger into the community, sanctifying a house, etc.), and conversionary ritualsjpenitential practices, rituals inducing radical personal change or ecstasy, and conversions as such). Restorative rituals include purifications, healing rites (which generally attempt to reintegrate the ailing organ or patient into a state of harmony with the body or community), divination, and crisis^ rites. Millenarian or revitalization movements exhibit both restorative and transitional features in different proportions in different movements, often combining themes from life cycle, calendrical, and conversionary rituals, and from all forms of restorative rituals as well. This is not surprising, since in these movements the struggle for a divine order becomes all-embracing and desperate. Depending on the emphasis, then, the rites common to these movements may be put in either the restorative or the transitional categories, as intensified forms of conversionary rites, or as vaster crisis rites.
In any case, we can only speak of general emphasis rather than sharp distinctions between the two subcategories of transformative rites. In most religions, for example, when New Year or harvest ceremonies are celebrated they both renew the annual cycle and restore the primordial form of things. Theodor H. Gaster (1961) has suggested that the seasonal rites of ancient Near Eastern religions sustained a "topocosm," the world as an organic whole. Reviving the world when it decayed, these renewals reenacted the ideal forms of the creation myths, so that their transitions were essentially restorative.- .
The liminal phase. Arnold van Gennep (1960), in his clássič'stúdý of "rites of passage" (even the terms are his), emphasized that the crucial phase of these rites is. the middle, liminal, or threshold phase, during which one is outside of ordinary life and exposed more directly, to the sacred^The transcendental and transformative power of the liminal is indicated ritually in many char-
acteristic symbolisms. Often we find "rituals of reversal," in which ordinary behavior is turned upside down: people might don the clothes of the other sex or indulge obligatorily in orgiastic or "mad" behavior (although ordinary life may be very restrained—thus the Carnival in several Mediterranean societies); the powerful may be humiliated and the weak may purge resentments. (The king of the Swazi was ritually slapped and the people acted out rebellious behavior during their harvest festivals; ordinarily modest and retiring Hindu women douse men with ochred water during the riotous Holí festival; children in the guise of monster beings threaten adults and extort sweets from them during American celebrations of Halloween). There is a certain sense of commnnitas, as Victor Turner (1969) puts it: the participants feel joined together in a unity that lies outside of ordinary social structures and that expresses the prior flux and even formlessness out of which those structures have emerged. Yet the exaggerated reversal of roles and behaviors serves to emphasize the goodness of social structures, which are returned to with a sense of refreshment after the liminal period; in the liminal rites themselves, as many anthropological studies have stressed, we may find the ideal roles of a society and the ideal patterns of the universe enacted with particular emphasis and clarity, although these patterns and roles may have become obscured by the personal interactions, forgetfulness, and above all the confusion of overlapping roles that occur in small-scale communities. However, in sectarian movements or otherworldly religions in more complex civilizations, this communitas and its contrast to ordinary life can be understood as access to an antithetical realm of the spirit denied to those in general society. In any case, the liminal period is "betwixt and between" and is appropriately the time for the triumph of monstrous and anomalous things, for inverted and extreme behaviors, for ecstasies, paradoxes, and the abnormal. The increased closeness to the primordial flux may be represented in masked dances, initiative rituals centering on devouring monsters, and the entry of transcendental beings and forces into the sacred area. The ritual follows the archetypal patterns laid down when these things were first done in the beginning by the ancestors and gods, or it obeys the teachings then given by the divine beings. For all is not formless and utter flux: there is a sacred form that communitas takes, which is that of the pristine dynamic that defines and sustains reality. Participants are unified by this common form, even if they each have different roles within its hierarchies.
The triumph of liminality is also demonstrated by distortions of ordinary sensory things. The body image is altered, for example; decorations cover the body,
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scarifications are made, distinctive clothes are worn, movement is severely restricted or is contorted, parts of the body are removed, or things are stuck into the flesh in painful ordeals. Distinctive treatment of the hair is a common indication of liminal status. Operations are also performed on nonhuman things (animals, plants, newly consecrated houses, sacred rocks, etc.) to indicate the dominance in them of spiritual meaning over perceptual or physical facticity. The self-sustaining integrity of merely perceptual experience is shattered, to be transformed by the authentic realities of the "ideal." The ability of the self to define reality on its own terms is thereby shaken, and it is forced to submit to the central and defining force of the transcendental other. Even the self is defined by the other, sustained by it, and required to acknowledge it. This is the essential point of sacrifice as such, the enactment of which takes so many forms in transformátory rituals.
Sacrifice. A great deal has been written about sacrifice, and often there has been an attempt to explain all forms of it in terms of one application or use of it (gifts given to a deity so as to obligate him to the giver, communion, etc.). [See Sacrifice.] Long lists of types of sacrifice based on their uses have been compiled. However, almost every actual instance can be shown to involve many of these functions. E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1956),. in a celebrated analysis of sacrifice among the Nuer of the southern Sudan, was able to list no less than fourteen different ideas simultaneously present in those rites: communion, gift, apotropaic rite, bargain, exchange, ransom, elimination, expulsion, purification, expiation, propitiation, substitution, abnegation, and homage. He asserted, nevertheless, that the central meaning was substitution: all that is oneself already belongs to the transcendental presences and powers, which is explicitly acknowledged in the sacrifice by giving back to the divine some part of what defines the self or symbolizes it. Phenomenological studies of religion agree with this anthropological analysis or extend it further, stating that one offers back to the divine what is thus acknowledged as already belonging to it, including the entire world one uses and dwells in. All of these views confirm that sacrifice consists above all in actively re-centering the self and its entire world and renouncing personal autonomy. One is experientially and cognitively placed in a divine order, in which the merely physical or perceptual sensual connections of phenomena are broken and the transcendentally centered meaning is made to dominate.
The French sociologists Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss showed that sacrifice served to bring into a mediated relationship a human group and the sacred powers that affected it, via manipulation of a victim who
through consecration or general usage symbolically embodied or substituted for the group or some aspect of it (e.g., the scapegoat above all embodies the sins or flaws of the group, which are then expelled with him). By the conclusion of the rites, the victim might be taken up entirely into the sacred realm, or returned to the human group and shared among them. The first option, removal of the mediatory victim, desacralizes the community, expelling a surplus of perhaps baleful sacred power from the group and in any case preserving the separation of sacred and profane, while the second option, return of the now-transformed victim to the group, exemplifies the tendency to sacralize the community and establishes a mediated continuity with the divine. Luc de Heusch has called these the "conjunctive" and "disjunctive" powers of sacrifice.
However, as Kristensen (1961) has shown, the victim often symbolizes the god who receives it rather than the group that offers it. Water was sacrificed to Osiris, who was the Nile; wild animals were offered to Artemis, Mistress of the Wild; dogs were given to Hecate, for both were of the underworld. And even enemies of the divinity may be sacrificed to the god, demonstrating his power over everything. Everything is made to center on the sacred pivot of life.
J. H. M. Beattie (1980) notes that some theories of sacrifice emphasize the power and divinity of the recipient of sacrificial offerings (as in the gift theory of E. B. Ty-lor), while others emphasize the dynamic interchange of energies involved and even underline impersonal structures (as in the approach of James G. Frazer). Beattie classifies all sacrifices into four basic types, derived from the aim or focus of the participants: (1) sacrifice to maintain or gain close contact with spiritual beings, (2) sacrifice to separate the sacrificers from those beings, (3) sacrifice to gain access to or control of dynamic impersonal modes of liminality, and (4) sacrifice to separate such forces from the sacrificer or the person for whom the sacrifice is enacted. Such a schema can be applied only very loosely, however; impersonal and personal elements usually coexist, as, for example, in the Roman Catholic Mass, where personal prayers are part of the essential sacramental transformations that are effective regardless of personal intentions. Similarly, conjunctive and disjunctive motifs usually occur together. For example, in Hebrew sacrifice certain parts of the victim's body, including its blood, were removed and given to God before the flesh could be shared among the communicants and eaten. It would not be correct to assume from this that the blood was a form of negative liminality, to be expelled from the community in a purgative rite; quite simply, the essence of everything, in this case the blood or "life," belongs to God. Kristensen
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again helps us in distinguishing predominantly positive sacrificial rites of sanctification from sacrifices with the predominantly negative aim of causing a misfortune to cease.
Sacrifice is often literally present in transformátory rituals, but it need not be. It may be symbolically enacted in other ways. W. E. H. Stanner (1966) has shown in a detailed structural analysis of the initiation rites of the Murinbaia Aborigines of northern Australia that the treatment of the novice precisely follows the dynamic of sacrifice—although this community, like almost all Australian Aboriginal societies, has no explicitly sacrificial rituals. Similar parallels to sacrifice have been noted in the treatment of the death and replacement of divine kings in Africa. Some religions do without literal sacrifice altogether, having sublimated the notion into the entire ritual system. Thus the rabbis consoled themselves after the fall of the Temple in 70 ce that prayer, charity, and good deeds would fully replace the sacrifices offered there; so too Protestant Christianity has generally abandoned sacrifices.
In any case, the essential dynamic of sacrifice is symbolical and spiritual. It operates within a world in which everything is a metaphor for the divine life. As a result, even religions with a great stress on sacrifice need not make use of bloody immolations (with which sacrifices seem to be associated in the common mind). The favored offerings in Hinduism are clarified butter and flowers. The Nuer are quite content to symbolize cattle with cucumbers in their sacrifices.
Cross-cultural and Historical Variations. Religions can clearly differ significantly in their reliance on ritual, the kinds of ritual preferred, and the purposes of ritual in general. The major variations are still being vigorously debated. Maurice Bloch (1977), arguing from a Marxist anthropological perspective, claims that the. more institutionalized hierarchies a society has, the more ritual there is, especially of the "eternal return" type, which repeats past events. This is because rituals are highly limited codes of information that can be easily manipulated by the holders of power to falsify the sense of reality of the exploited classes; therefore ritual legitimates social inequality and must be greatest in those societies that are the most politically differentiated. However, American society, for example, is.., highly differentiated politically but tends to be anti-ritualistic and has little ritualism, whereas the Australian Aborigines devote a great deal of their time to ritual reenacfments of events in the ancestral Dreaming. Max Gluckman (1965), on the other hand, has suggested that rituals are necessary in relatively undifferentiated societies to distinguish roles that tend to blur and overlap in everyday life, while in more complex societies
role specialization is so advanced that ritual definitions of social structure are no longer needed. Ritual is therefore reduced to temple and priestly cult, while the rest of society is increasingly secularized. [See Secularization.]
A more ambitious and detailed historical schema is offered by Robert Bellah, an American sociologist (see his essay in Lessa and Vogt, 1972). He distinguishes a "primitive" stage of religion (erroneously identified with the Australian Aborigines) in which ritual is the continual reenactment of ancestral deeds, with all things supposedly so fused that no external or self-conscious perspective is possible; an "archaic" stage (found among most native cultures) in which worship, prayer, and sacrifice first appear, the result of a widening gap between humanity and divinity; a "historic" stage in which for the first time the gap between the sacred and profane is so great and society so complex that rituals stress salvation from the world rather than inclusion in it, and in which a religious elite emerges separate from the political elite to administer the otherworldly rites and specialize in or embody religious ideals; and finally, "early modern" and "modern" stages of religion (identified with Western culture) in which salvation is democratized and ritual is extended into the whole of life, made subjective, and finally dissolved in secularism (cf. Bellah's article, reprinted in Lessa and Vogt, 1972). Although instructive, such vast generalizations suggest that due caution is required.
Mary Douglas (1970) has tried to characterize lbe variations that can be found within religions at almost any level of complexity, without essaying sweeping historical syntheses. Cosmologies vary according to whether they tend to stress clear-cui rules and principles underlying the universe and society or the absence of such rules; they also vary in the identification of true being as located in a group or in the individual person apart from the group. These two polarities combine to produce four basic cosmologies. (1) Groups with a strong sense of rules ("grid") and of group identify tend to be highly ritualized, with fairly elaborate rites to demarcate the various sectors of the cosmology and with rich and dense symbolisms that thus define sin and sacramental salvation. These religions see the material and spiritual worlds as interfused. (2) Groups with very weak "grid" and weak sense of group identity, on the other hand, tend to have quite abstract ritual symbols, and indeed little use for ritual as such; here, what ritual exists is oriented toward personal states of ecstasy or aesthetic display. An instance might be contemporary counterculture communities. (3) Societies with weak "grid" but strong group identity tend to see salvation as obtained by belonging to the group; ritual stresses "we-
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them" polarities, which, because not rationalized in any coherent structure of principles or rules, tend toward strongly emotive fear of the "them" as evil persons or groups outside of any comprehensible order. Ritual is often used for self-purgation or for counter-witchcraft, and within the group ritual is used to stress ecstatic subjective states of communitas and to reenact the formation of the group. There may be an otherwordly, salvation-oriented type of cult, as in early Christianity. Sectarian movements are not uncommonly of this type. (4) Cultures or individuals with a strong sense of "grid" but weak on group identity characteristically produce ritual that services personal goals. In many Melanesian societies of this sort, ritual is used mainly to increase personal powers and to defeat personal enemies, to make one's own fields prosper, and so on. If the "grid" is understood in a moral sense, one may have a stoic outlook—cool, impersonal, and indifferent to society, but at the same time personally demanding. Variations of these four basic types can be found on every level of cultural complexity, and this is not a historical scheme as is Bellah's.
The use of ritual in modern cultures varies considerably. However, we can make a number of paradoxical assertions. First, antirituahsm is quite strong in many circles, due to a number of factors. Ritual is oriented toward equilibrium and stability, but the modern period is a time of rapid change even in religious institutions. Ritual draws upon shared bodily experiences, which it uses to delineate a common cosmos; however, life experiences are highly varied today, and there is little agreement on the larger cosmos either. Religious institutions as such "do" very little in a scientistic, secularized world. Subjective and private experience is considered the realm of the spiritual, but it is often asserted that the sacred has never been so remote from actual human life. Yet the search for authentic realities continues, and when these are found, rituals reassert themselves. Industrialized Western societies spontaneously generate ritual and so do militantly antiritu-alistic Communist societies.
Much of the current debate about the impact of secularism on religion is really about the forms, intensity, and purpose of ritual in modern life. We cannot review the literature on secularism here. But it can be said that this literature has shown that the extent of ritual practice in Western and communist societies is much greater and more diverse than statistics on church attendance might suggest. Especially when we take into account the structural or cosmological focus of much religious ritual, it becomes evident that many community and national festivities are genuinely religious in nature.
W. Lloyd Warner's study of community ritual in "Yankee City," mentioned earlier, bears this out. In recent decades much has been written about "civil religion" in the United States and elsewhere. Robert Bocock, in a study of ritual in modern England (1973), has suggested that another form of ritualism in modern life can be termed "aesthetic" ritual. It is found in dance halls, art galleries, and sports stadiums, and its purpose is to orchestrate sensual and aesthetic experience of a personal nature. However, more obviously religious are ritual practices derived from new religious movements and personal cults, which offer the individual spiritual enhancement or attunement to the world: meditational practices, theosophical study groups, even many of the personal therapy groups that have assumed cultic form.
Within the Communist world, ritualism in the traditional religions has generally been condemned, yet new rituals have evolved to integrate people into the Marxist society and worldview. As Christel Lane (1981) and Christopher A. P. Binns (1979-1980) have documented, most aspects of life are now ritualized by the Soviet state. Within Communist China, where the desire to create a new world has taken, if anything, an even more intense form than in the Soviet Union, there has evolved a ritual of personal transformation and self-purgation, the "struggle sessions," whose aim is that of "revolutionary immortality" (the terms are Robert Jay Lifton's): the penitent seeks to strip away all personal willfulness or self-centered thinking and to merge his or her will with the "will of the People," which is synonymous with the inexorable, impersonal will of the universe. We see here a form of the ritual barter of immortalities no less intepse than that called for by the classical Brahmanic sacrifice.
[For discussion of specific forms of ritual, see Worship and Cultic Life; Seasonal Ceremonies; and Rites of Passage.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY References
Ahern, Emily M. Chinese Ritual and Politics. Cambridge, 1981.
Barth, Fredrick. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea, New Haven, 1975.
Beattie, J. H. M. "On Understanding Sacrifice." In Sacrifice, edited by M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes. New York, 1980.
Binns, Christopher A. P. "The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Development of the Soviet Ceremonial System." Man, n.s. 14 (December 1979): 585-606; n.s. 15 (March 1980): 170-187.
Bloch, Maurice. "The Past and Present in the Present." Man, n.s. 12 (August 1977): 278-292.
Bocock, Robert. Ritual in Industrial Society: A Sociological Analysis of Ritualism in Modem England. London, 1973.
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Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic^Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought. New Haven, 1955.
Cazeneuve, Jean. Les rites et la condition humaine. Paris, 1958.
Douglas, Mary. Parity and Danger. New York, 1966.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols. New York, 1970.
Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915). New York, Í965.
Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York, 1954.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York, 1959.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Nuer Religion. Oxford, 1956.
Fernandez, James W. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton, N.J., 1982.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. New York, 1918.
Gaster, Theodor H. Thespis. New York, 1950.
Gay, Volney Patrick. Freud on Ritual. Missoula, Mont., 1979.
Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. Chicago, 1960.
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, 1977.
Gluckman, Max. "Les rites de passage." In Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations, edited by Max Gluckman, pp. 1-52. Manchester, 1962.
Gluckman, Max. Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society. Chicago, 1965.
Harper, Edward B. "Ritual Pollution as an Integrator of Caste and Religion." In Religion in South Asia, edited by Edward B. Harper. Seattle, 1964.
Horton, Robin. "A Definition of Religion, and Its U ses." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 90 (I960): 201-226.
Horton, Robin. "African Traditional Thought and Western Science." In Rationality, edited by Bryan Wilson. Oxford, 1970.
Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Chicago, 1964.
Jenson, Adolf E. Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. Chicago, 1963.
Kapferer, Bruce. A Celebration of Demons. Bloomington, Ind., 1983.
Kristensen, W. Brede. The Meaning of Religion. The Hague, 1960.
Lane, Christel. The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society: The Soviet Case. Cambridge, 1981.
Leach, Edmund R. "Ritual." In International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Sills, vol. 13. New York, 1968.
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General Works. Most good introductions to cultural anthropology have one or more chapters devoted to ritual and religion. An excellent one-hundred page overview unusual in that it draws upon both anthropological and religious studies is by W. Richard Comstock in a volume edited by him, Religion and Man; An Introduction (New York, 1971). The overview is separately printed as The Study of Religion and Primitive Religions (New York, 1972); the bibliography is very useful. The various editions of Reader in Comparative Religion, edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (see "References" above) provide a continuously updated anthology and survey of anthropological research on ritual. The bibliographies are especially full, and one of them offers an annotated listing of the best monographs on the religions of particular native cultures. Also very useful are the three volumes edited by John Middleton anthologizing anthropological articles: Gods and Rituals (Garden City, N.Y"., 1967), Myth and Cosmos (Garden City, N.Y., 1967). and finally Magic, Witchcraft and Curing {Garden City, N.Y., 1967).
For a historical survey of theories about religion and ritual since classical antiquity, especially strong on the nineteenth century and European schools, see Jan de Vries's The Study of Religion: A Historical Approach (New York, í 967). Robert Low-ie's The History of Ethnological Theory (New York, 1937) and E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965) are among the more penetrating anthropological accounts.
I have emphasized anthropology thus far. A good instance of how Freudian psychology can treat ritual structures in an illuminating way is Géza Róheim's The Eternal Ones of the Dream (New York, 1945). The work deals with central Australian Aboriginal rituals. Erik Erikson's psychoanalytic Childhood and Society (New York, 1950) shows the connection between ritual and games. Jean Piaget has reflected on the role and meaning of games in the psychological development of children in numerous books, such as his Plays, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (New York, 1961); many of his observations have a bearing on ritual. However, the classic study of