Ritual

Dale Hathaway

March 8, 2020

Created: 2020-03-11 Wed 15:02

Sacred story for modern world
The Sacred Quest
Ritual – Questions
Ritual in Religious Contexts
Rites of Passage
Types of rituals
Religious Meanings of Ritual
Examples from around the world

Sacred story for modern world

it helps to form us
it helps us understand who we are in the world we live in
it motivates our actions
it connects us to the past and binds us to the future

What are some of our sacred stories?

The Sacred Quest

Lawrence S. Cunningham

John Kelsay

Chapter Five: Ritual

Ritual Defined

A ritual is a ceremonial act or a repeated stylized gesture used for specific occasions.
n.b. not necessarily "sacred"

Ritual – Questions

Give an example of a ritual that orders your interaction with others.
What is a ritual that has important meaning for you and your friends or family? Explain.
How does ritual help us to understand the ways that religion is more than a set of beliefs?
What are the best arguments for and against the following claim: “Religion begins with ritual and it remains ritual before it is anything else.”
How can ritual go wrong? What happens when it goes right?

Ritual in Religious Contexts

Ritual plays an important role in every religious tradition.
Some religions are famous for their ritual character
- Roman Catholicism
- Eastern Orthodoxy
- Tibetan Buddhism
Other religions are known for their resistance to ritual, but even these religions have certain stylized forms of behavior that are rituals
- Society of Friends (Quakers

Mythos and Ritual

common form of ritual is dramatizing sacred stories
such drama allows for participation in the creative power of the sacred
"remembering" – "acting out" – "participating in the power"
- One of the most common forms of ritual involves acting out or dramatizing religious stories.
- The conjunction of myth and ritual serves as a way for people to participate in the creative power of the sacred.
- In many tribal societies people not only remember the tribal myths but also live them and act them out.

Ritual Reenactment

tribal societies ritualize creation stories through dance and gesture
Greek traged derived from ritualized worship
modern drama derives from "Passion Plays" of the middle ages.
- In tribal societies, creation stories may be ritualized through dance and gesture at particular times of the year so that people reenact - the first deeds of gods and goddesses.
- The Greek tragedy is derived from the ritualized worship of the Dionysus.
- The modern drama derives from the acting out of the Easter story in French monasteries during the Middle Ages.

The Passover

The Passover meal is also called the seder, a Hebrew word that means “order” or “arrangement.”
Commemorates the meal eaten by the Jews as the were delivered from slavery
Retelling the story of the Exodus is central to the meal
The Passover meal is not merely a historical remembrance.

The key thing to remember is that the meal is far more than just a meal

For Jews participating in the Passover meal, there is a combination of memory, worship, and hope.
To celebrate the Passover is to become ritually one with those who first observed it before leaving Egypt.
Thus, Jews celebrate an ancient story in their tradition by reenacting the story in a highly ritualized fashion

3 min Seder

3 min. video: https://youtu.be/rfWtBpR1VzA

Passover_Seder_Dinner_at_the_White_House_2011-1000x600.jpg

Holy Communion

Holy Communion in Christianity functions in ways that are analogous to the Passover in Judaism.
The various Christian communities give diverse interpretations of the significance of communion.
However, all Christian groups agree that when they celebrate the communion meal, they are reenacting events connected with Jesus of Nazareth.

Other examples of Religious Rituals

In Shi'a Islam, the “passion plays” of the month of Muharram reenact the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala in 692 C.E.
In Shinto, the rituals performed at shrines throughout Japan reenact the conflict between the sun goddess and the god of storms
thus the participants themselves are a part of the struggle to bring order to the world

Rites of Passage

Rites of passage describe those ceremonies associated with the transitional moments in a person's life.
All religions provide rituals of some sort or another
Rituals may transformed to be for nominal believers to observe customs of tradition (e.g. weddings)

All rites of passage have three phases:

separation,
liminal, and
reintegration.

Note: - All religions provide rituals and/or theological rationales to commemorate such moments. - Even nominal believers who feel no great need to observe most of the customs of a tradition may still turn to religion for rites of passage.

Stages

Van Gennep viewed rites of passage as an essential ingredient in the rejuvenation of society because they highlight and validate changes in a person’s status. Hence, he argues that they serve to preserve social stability by easing the transition of cohorts of individuals into new statuses; in part, this transition is a social acknowledgement of aging. Furthermore, as individuals are born and age, their positions in society change. In the absence of rites of passage, he says, society would be fraught with conflict as individuals either struggle to assert new social statuses or resist these statuses. Figure 1 Diagrammatic Summary from Les Rites de Passage (diagram by author) Literal: The Territorial Passage: A frontier, an imaginary line connecting milestones marked by an element of nature or landmark, has a physically and magico-religious quality (Gennep, 1960; p. 18).A person passing through a frontier finds him or herself in a special situation for a certain length of time; they wavering between two worlds. It is this situation which is designated as a liminal transition. This symbolic and spatial area of transition may be found in a more or less pronounced form in

Types of rituals

Birth rituals
Initiation rites
in Postmodern Society?
Mourning & Death
temporal rites & celebrations

Birth Rituals

actions connected with newborns and their parents
e.g. circumcision rituals for males
baptism in some Christian communities
Hindus rites initiating the male into the duties of his caste
- Although some traditional cultures actually ritualize the moment of birth, “birth rituals” usually refer to rites connected to the newborn and its parents.
- For Jews and Muslims, circumcision initiates male children into the religious community.
- In Christian communities, baptism makes the child a member of the Christian church.
- Hindus use a ritualized feeding to initiate a male member into the duties of his caste.
- Similar meanings are given to birth rituals in the various religious traditions, even though the forms are quite diverse.
- People celebrate the safe passage of the infant from the womb into the world; they welcome him or her into the family; they give the child a name; they pay homage to the creative power of the sacred.

Rituals of Initiation

Initiation rites celebrate and symbolize "passages" e.g. childhood to adulthood
outlines of the rites sort into 3 parts
1. segregation from the larger group
2. ritual actions
3. reentry into group in the new state
- Rituals of initiation celebrate and symbolize the passage of a person from childhood into adulthood.
- While the specifics of this rite varied in different cultures, the outlines of the ceremony remained rather constant:
  - ritual segregation from the larger group and some form of testing
  - the actual ceremonies of initiation
  - reentry into the group as a recognized adult

Initiation Rites in Postmodern Society

contemporary passage into "adulthood" – ??
- In contemporary society, many young people go through a traditional rite of passage, but the “adults” are not really adults for some time after their “passage.”
- Today, the most common ritual of initiation is marriage.
- Many elements of the marriage rite hearken back to ancient rituals.

Rituals of Mourning and Death

American way of death?
ritual of the mourning process
burial rites: e.g. Taoist, Hindu, etc.

Funeral rites are intended to accomplish different ends in different cultures.
To aid the spirits of the dead to journey through the afterworld either by providing symbolic gifts for them (ancient Egyptians and native peoples of North America).
To provide living “guides” for the dead (Taoism).
To help the souls of the dead to purge sin (Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy).
- Different religious traditions ritualize the mourning process in various ways.
  - Taoist rites include an elaborate ritual involving an enactment of the soul's journey into the underworld and its rescue and delivery into heaven by ancestral spirits.
- Many burial rites symbolize the relationship of human beings to the natural world.
  - Pious Hindus in India cremate their dead and consign the ashes to the river Ganges as a sign of the never-ending cycle of life and death.

Temporal Rites and Celebrations

observance of cycles of time
hunter/gatherers and farmers the seasons
modern culture?
- The observance of cycles of time has been a central characteristic of most, if not all, historic religious traditions.
- For people who hunted, gathered, or planted, the cycle of the seasons was crucial to life. As a result, great celebrations and rituals were associated with the change of the seasons.
- Even in modern industrial societies, many of the great festivals continue to take place in conjunction with the change of the seasons.

Religious Meanings of Ritual

Ritual is so closely identified with formal worship that one can generally say that the ends of ritual are the ends of worship.
Traditionally speaking, worship promotes one of these four ends or purposes, or a combination of them:
- Adoration
- Thanksgiving
- Petition
- Penance/purification

Adoration
- Basically, adoration means acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the Sacred over the person.
- Adoration means the acknowledgment that one is not self-sufficient, but dependent.
- In religions with a personal, transcendent God, there are basic ritual gestures assumed in moments of prayer that dramatically illustrate the concept of adoration.
- In religions without a transcendent deity, the focus is on the search for enlightenment and the primary gesture of adoration is meditative.
Thanksgiving
- Because one of the basic insights of many religious traditions is that the world and all its bounty flow from the world of the sacred, it is only fitting that such traditions emphasize the need to acknowledge that gift.
- The most common form of thanksgiving is the ritual act of giving a gift. Such donations may run from the formal act of a sacrifice, to the leaving of a gift at an altar or shrine
Petition
Penance / Purification

Examples from around the world

Male initiation

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/benin_fulaniinitiation (4:34 min)
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2010/02/21/male-rites-of-passage-from-around-the-world/

Note: Benin boys move toward manhood by enduring sting of a whip

Vanuatu Land Diving (4 min)

Vanuatu Land Diving male rite of passage

Bungee jumping is for wusses… at least compared to the men who live in Vanuatu, a small island nation in the middle of the South Pacific. Here the men take place in a yearly harvest ritual called Land Diving.

Hamar Cow Jumping

hamar cow jumping photo male rite of passage

Imagine sitting down with your girlfriend's dad to ask for his daughter's hand in marriage. You're nervous. Sweat gathers on your forehead. You make small talk, but finally manage to get the question out while your voice cracks.

The dad responds, “Sure! But you'll have to jump over some cows first.”

The Ancient Spartan Helot Killing

Ancient Spartan Helot Killing male rite of passage

For ancient Spartans, becoming a soldier was the only way one could be recognized as a man. Military training began at age seven when boys would be taken from their families and placed in the Agoge system. For the next 10 years Spartan boys learned the skills necessary to become a trained killing machine.

Satere-Mawe Bullet Ant Glove

Satere-Mawe Bullet Ant Glove male rite of passage (2:27 min)

Deep in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon lives the Satere-Mawe tribe. To become a man in the Satere-Mawe, a boy must stick his hand in a glove woven with bullet ants and withstand their stings for over 10 minutes without making a noise.

Maasai Warrior Passage

Maasai Warrior boys male rite of passage (5:50 min)

The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania have a series of rites of passage that carry boys into manhood. Every 10 or 15 years a new warrior class will be initiated into the tribe. Boys between the ages of 10 and 20 are brought together from all across the country. Dozens of houses are built that will serve as the place of initiation. The night before the ceremony, the boys sleep outside in the forest. At dawn, they return to the little makeshift homestead for a day of singing and dancing. They drink a mixture of milk, cow's blood, and alcohol and eat piles and piles of meat. After the festivities, boys who are of age (12-16) are ready to be circumcised.

Mandan Hook Hanging

Mandan indians Hook Hanging male rite of passage

Native American tribes each had their own unique coming of age rituals for the men in the tribe. But few were as intense as that of the Mandans. Before his rite-of-passage, a Mandan boy fasted for 3 days to cleanse his body of impurities. Then, on the day of the ritual, elders of tribe would pierce the boy's chest, shoulder, and back muscles with large wooden splints. Ropes, which extended from the roof of a hut, were then attached to the splints, and the young man was winched up into the air, his whole body weight suspended from the ropes. Despite the pain, the boy was not to cry out in pain. While hanging in the air, more splints were hammered through his arms and legs. Skulls of his dead grandfather and other ancestors were placed on the ends of the splints.

Sambia of Papa New Guinea

Sambia Papa New Guinea male rite of passage

In the small country of Papau New Guinea, over 1,000 different culture groups exist. Among them is the Sambia tribe, a group with perhaps the most insane rite of passage into manhood in the world.

The initiation begins at age seven with the separation of the boy from the mother. The boy will spend the rest of his young life only in the presence of men in an all male hut. The gender separation is taken to such extremes that boys and women use different walking paths around the village. …

Female initiation

apache women's initiation (4:30): https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/us-apachegirl-pp at youtube: https://youtu.be/5B3Abpv0ysM
Women's Bwiti Full Initiation Ceremony in Gabon, Africa February 2013: https://youtu.be/XWnE-yoQ02I (2 min)

Note: Gabon, Africa February 2013 Women's Bwiti Initiation in Moukoumou village. This was a dancing ritual that took place after a whole night of ceremony, still going strong the following morning and through most of the day. Iboga House took staff and students to the village for a full initiation and to film a documentary about iboga.

Ritual

Dale Hathaway

March 8, 2020

Table of Contents

Sacred story for modern world

The Sacred Quest

Ritual Defined

Ritual – Questions

Ritual in Religious Contexts

Mythos and Ritual

Ritual Reenactment

The Passover

3 min Seder

Holy Communion

Other examples of Religious Rituals

Rites of Passage

Rites of Passage

Stages

Types of rituals

Birth Rituals

Rituals of Initiation

Initiation Rites in Postmodern Society

Rituals of Mourning and Death

Temporal Rites and Celebrations

Religious Meanings of Ritual

Examples from around the world

Male initiation

Female initiation