Ritual Art and Knowledge R. Williams and W. Boyd
Preface
noetic
Theories of metaphor
Theodore Jennings – a difference of analysis
Dastur Dr. Firoze M. Kotwal
Zoroaster
Yasna
Avesta
Chapter I
a) Art and Ritual
Albert Camus: art as an instrument of liberation
Victor Turner – art is transformational
Tolstoy – good art expresses right religious feeling.
‘Feelings flowing from perception of our worship to God.’ -Tolstoy
Language like structures
b) Art and Ritual as Language
Arts display power possessed by language
Paul Ricoeur
Lawrence Eugene Sullivan
c) Art and Ritual as Knowledge
Arts create and transport knowledge
Nelson Goodman, ‘Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols’
Noetic view
Art and understanding
Do rituals have a noetic function
Jennings, ‘On Ritual Knowledge’ 1982
‘ritual activity may serve as a mode of inquiry and discovery’ – Jennings
Such a theory is critical because ‘the relativistic autonomy of ritual as a symbolic structure hinges on it’.
Ritual is ‘one way in which human beings construe and construct their world’
Art and Ritual as Expression or Feeling
Art’s ability to express our feelings and mirror our emotional life
‘whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings’ – Tolstoy
‘artists can create forms symbolic of human feeling’ – Langer
‘Capture and freeze a feeling, so we can study it’.
Bruce Kapferer – i.e., his work on Sri Lankan rituals, leads sometimes to interpretation that art ‘merely’ expresses feeling
Kapferer – organization of dance gesture is a culturally recognizable modeling of emotion and feeling… a ‘feeling form’ (which is) a modelling for the reality of experience.
e) Art and Ritual and Form
Formalism is an aim of the dominant aesthetic theories of our time equal in importance to expressionism
Only aesthetically relevant feature of artwork is its intrinsic form
Significant form
It’s ‘formal features’
i.e. Painting – texture, shape, scale, line and color
Clive Bell:
‘To appreciate a work of art we need to bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shot off from human interests….the pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical, he feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from a perceived relation between them and the lives of men…’ – Clive Bell (1914:1981)
Art’s value is intrinsic value; in its presence we experience the pure delight of pattern and design
Art as ‘autonomous enterprise’
Anti-instrumentalist focus on grammar rather than meaning
Staal’s essay, ‘The Meaninglessness of Ritual’
He says:
‘A widespread, but erroneous assumption about ritual is that it consists in symbolic activities which refer to something else. It is characteristic of a ritual performance, however, that is itself contained and self-absorbed. The performers are totally immersed in their proper execution of the complete tasks, isolated in their sacred enclosure, they concentrate on correctness of act, recitation and chant. Their primary concern, if not obsession, is with rules. There are no symbolic meanings going through their minds when they are engaged in performing ritual.’ -Staal (1979: 3)
The radical hypothesis that ritual has no meaning, aim or goal.
Ritual languages often dead languages
‘Whatever value it (ritual) has is intrinsic value’, and that understanding this idea highlights the connection between ritual practice and ‘desirelessness’ as stressed for e.g. in Buddhism and Taoism’ –Staal (1979, 8-10)
He suggests ritual theory should consist primarily in describing the practice itself, and uncovering its ‘syntactical’ rules (1979, 4)
In his denial of meaning, his insistence on the intrinsic value and autonomy of ritual, and his recommendation that theorists content themselves with uncovering the grammatical rules of the practice, Staal shows himself to be the equivalent in ritual studies of the formalist in aesthetics.
Important issues
For a groundbreaking exploration of this see:
Grimes, ‘Ritual Criticism’: Case Studies in its Practice’
The complex role of criticism in ritual practice and ritual studies.
Part One
Ritual Spaces
‘….the work of art…. if it is successful, detaches itself from the rest of the world….every real work of art has a tendency to appear thus dissociated from its mundane environment. The most immediate impression it creates is one of ‘otherness’ from reality – the impression of an illusion enfolding the thing, action, statement, or a flow of sound that constitutes the work. This detachment from actuality, the ‘otherness’ that gives even a bona fide product like a building or a vase some aura of illusion, is a crucial factor, indicative of the very nature of art’.
-S. Langer ‘Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art’
‘Three Spaces in Art and Yasna Ritual’
Zoroastrian daily high liturgy, the Yasna
Components parallel the visual, performative and literary arts.
Model ‘ritual spaces’ as extension of Langer’s discussion of ‘virtual space’ in the visual arts.
What is the role of ritual language, how are the various dimensions of the ritual related, and what are some of the basic functions of liturgical performance?
The Spaces Described
Physical Space
There are at least three kinds of ‘space’ which interact with each other in an artwork such as a drama or painting.
These spaces are detectable in ritual situations as well
Most obvious one is: ‘’physical space’
The artwork as material object or physical event in the space/time continuum it inhabits.
The physical space of an artwork can be photographed, measured touched or in the case of drama, walked through, it is in the realm of real objects and events.
Drama stage, stage setting, ceramics vessel and contained volume
The physical space is the art object or event as it is ‘objectively’ not as it is ‘subjectively’ experienced.
Meaning Space
A complex dimension having to do with what the work represents or expresses, its conceptual significance and symbolic structure
e.g. events in the life of Hamlet in medieval Denmark.
The distinction between meanings and physical space is in part the familiar distinction between character and actor.
An opera – libretto, characters, music, sets overall structure meaning will typically exhibit several kinds at once.
‘Maps’ rather than additions to the territory.
As articulate sign systems semantically linked to the world in a variety of ways.
3 Virtual Space
A term borrowed from optics as well as aesthetics
This space is more difficult to talk about and may be easily overlooked. It refers to a complex and heterogeneous set of interrelated features
Examples drawn from the arts:
a) Drama – virtual space as it appears in the theater is quite to the point
‘space ‘ used in part metaphorically
In a successfully performed frame a separate ‘time-space’ is created which we experience as virtually real in its own right.
e.g. a well-acted sword-fight
we will experience the same action in the present
perceived as actual, when in fact it is counterfeit
the attentive observer capable of suspension of disbelief becomes involved in the action and thus enters ‘virtual space’
the drama may actually require ninety minutes (physical time) it may represent events during an imagined time long ago (time meant) but we may also feel that we are perceiving a series of events presently occurring over a period of several days (virtual time)
virtual space- essentially related to both physical and meaning space,
something separate from these two
Othello smothers Desdemona as if we are witness to present, real violence (virtual space) at the same time we know that it is being feigned
Renaissance Venice
Bad actors – we are thus thrown back into real time
Inept actors failed to create a virtual space
‘Booth was such a powerful actor that people fainted when Desdemona was killed by Othello’.
a ‘covert’ reference to all three spaces in one utterance.
Susanne Langer, who first called attention to ‘virtual’ aspects of the arts and carefully described them.
About dance movements, and by extension dramatic action said:
‘Gesture is ‘vital’ movement, to the one who performs it; it is known very precisely as a kinetic experience, i.e. an action and somewhat more vaguely by sight, as an effect. To others, it appears as a visible motion, but not a motion of things, sliding or waving or rolling around, it is seen and understood as vital movement’.
– Langer (1950: 79)
Marionette analogy p.19
The audience’s perception
Vital movement
The ‘sense of present real action’ i.e. sword-fight, Othello’s murderous act.
A dramatic virtual space
b) Painting
‘virtual space’ in the visual arts
The ‘original’ (more literal) application of the idea of different kinds of ‘space’
Physical space i.e. oil on canvas
A portrayal i.e. George Washington, a farm house, or colors symbolizing ‘courage’ or ‘purity’.
painting can also do several of these things at once; therefore: – ‘meaning space’
A painting can also appear to be other than a flat, paint-splattered canvas –
some colors may appear to be in front of other colors, or we lose sight of individual paint strokes in favor of an image, or painting strikes us as a rough surface when actually it is smooth.
Perceiving a visual space echoing qualities such as depth which the flat canvas does not possess
‘The Last Supper’
May appear two feet deep
So much so – tempted to look at it from side to make sure.
Chinese painting
Kanizsa 1976
Malevich’s ‘Suprematist Composition’ 1918 (Lipsey 88 : 138-39)
Rauschenberg’s ‘White Painting’ (1951)
Barnett Newman
The artwork as a thing in its own right, not a copy, (or a mere copy)
‘Why should Mondrian’s last paintings move us, whereas Utopian city plans of architects do not? Partly, no doubt, because the space of art is the ideal one of function. In it, things are not used and they never decay; one cannot walk in a painting as one walks along a street or through a building. The paintings are ‘incorruptible’. They are the real rudiments of Paradise, the building blocks of a system that has no relationship at all to our bodies, except through the ocular perception of color’ – Robert Hughes (1981: 201)
He is speaking of virtual space for it is a purely visual space
Statements having to do with visual appearance are the only appropriate one’s to make in discussing the paintings ‘virtual’ space
The three spaces thus are object, the appearance of the object, and the significance of the object as it appears
Architecture and Dance
Taj Mahal
The ‘three spaces’ can be found in any of the arts
White marble, 34 stories high rests on a darker sandstone foundation
Seems to float off ground
Consider : a ‘Chinese Dragon’ dance
Moments when it takes on a life of its own
Virtually a living dragon
The experience glimpses a reality which transcends the mundane world of physical objects
In general, a complex interaction of the kinds of space which gives the arts their power
Music
Physical space
Actual music sounds made by the musicians
Meaning space – expresses of feeling or thunderclap or birdsong
Virtual space: say Beethoven’s ‘Fifth Symphony’
We perceive a sensuous, purely auditory virtual space of the piece that structure which is delineated by the score.
J.P. Sartre’s ‘Nausea’
‘Some of These Days’
‘Someone must have scratched the record…because it makes an odd noise, and there is nothing that clutches the heart: the melody is absolutely untouched by this tiny coughing of the needle on the record. It is so far – so far behind – I understand that too: the disc is scratched and wearing out; perhaps the singer is dead…but behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness’
– Sartre (1938 , 1964: 174, 76)
Harry Haller in Hesse’s ‘Steppenwolf’ – fantasizes conversation with Mozart about a composition by Handel he heard on the radio.
Langer says i.e. that we hear music as ‘up and down’
Various patches, wavelengths, variations of vibrations
The Independence of Virtual Space
Artworks
Artworks in need of interpretation
Virtual space
Physical space
Models
Meaning space
Application to Zoroastrianism Ritual
The Yasna (worship) Ritual
Liturgy
Ahura Mazda
The holy Avestan
Manthra
Ritual activities
Sequence
Physical Space
The parvi
The hom
Barsam
Sacramental bread
A date-palm leaf
Pomegranates
Hom twigs
Hairs of a consecrated White Bull
Well water
Two priests dressed in white and priestly turbans
Fire
Morning hours when sun is in ascending
Moderate amount of sunshine
Meaning Space
A macrocosm
Larger reality
Symbolizes world
Fire represents sun
table – earth
crescent shape – the moon
‘Bountiful Immortal’
The spirit of devotion
Health and Life
White bull hairs represent – ‘good intention’
The Sun God – Avestan
Cosmic Order – Asha
Crystal sky – metallic (envisioned by Zarathustra)
Metal implements – the power of Dominion
Priest represents the ‘Lord of Wisdom’ himself – Ahura Mazda
Manthra ‘ can be cogent to the mind and compelling to the heart’ – D. Kotwal
Virtual Space
Ritual power
A new ‘matrix of significance’
Invisible ‘walls’ – ‘a particular sort of virtual phenomenon, sensory or intuition
Sights
Borders
Well-defined – two-dimensional area
Costume/mask – a dramatic effect
transforming
a ‘purifier’, powerful space
Fire – one of the most significant aspects of the ritual
Unpredictable ‘dance of forms’
Readily becomes the focus of attention
Symbol of animating principle of all that lives.
In the eyes of the faithful, this glow of fire and everything surrounding it would seem to be the presence of God’ – Kotwal
Sculptures
Utensils and tables
Impressions of powerful forms
Perfect and necessary rather than approximate and fortuitous
Oblique awareness of abstract, pure forms
What is to ‘attend’ to the ritual events
Water
Visually equal to fire in prominence
Source of health and an instrument of purification
Overflowing onto the ‘parvi’ floor
Architecture and Perspective
Resemble a Persian Rug
The Court of the ‘Lord of the Ritual’ (in Persian : Dari Mihr)
Sounds
Auditory space
Chanting , pounding and bell sounds
The ‘mutual’ attributes of music
Manthra
Two ancient languages – Avestan and Pazand
Normal telling mired with muted tight-lipped chanting
Gestures
Power of gesture
The powerful glance – between two priests
Visual bond – signifying connectiveness
Space not of actions of characters but of ‘pure’ gestures
Other Movements
Disciplined – position of humility
Yogic posture
Economy of gesture
Reduced to simplest form
Creates an environment much like that of choreographed dance
Ontology of Virtual Space
Virtual space of Zoroastrian liturgy is real
Not trying to reduce religious experience to aesthetic experience
Aesthetic dimensions of ritual power
To claim that virtual space is ‘real’ on its own terms is ….to make an ‘ontological’ statement
Virtual space = ritual power – Kotwal
Ritual performance becomes captivating, certainly mysterious part of the terrain
William Gass:
‘The world of the text is a distinct and competitive addition to reality, not a mere description of reality.’
Gass, ‘Habitations of the Word’
The Creation and Perception of Virtual Space
A matter of perception
Audience
Viewer of an artwork, listener in concert hall
A religious community in attendance at a ceremony
The orthodox Zoroastrian answer is that the audience realm comprises the realm of spiritual beings (yazads)
Present aesthetic focus is on priest’s perception of virtual space
Chapter 3
Meaning Space Explained
Map
Model
World
Virtual space
Manthric language
Sacred space
Linguistic features
Performance
Ritual language
Word sounds
A exemplification
The implements
Manifest
Goodman, ‘The Concept of Exemplification’
Tailor’s swatch
Species of reference denotation
Dog – ‘canine’ true of each dog
Grey swatch ‘exemplifies’ that color
The word ‘grey’ is ‘true of it
The relation of
‘being true’
While ‘dog’ is true of canines, ‘grey’ is true of the swatch.
Refers by being an ‘example’
Goodman’s major point is that ‘exemplification’ plays a larger role in the language of the arts than (say) in mathematical, scientific or natural languages.
Application
The Yasna
The sacred fire
Refers by ‘exemplification’
…what a sign does refer to is established by the system of concepts in which it is embedded
Fire ‘exemplifies’ Son of God, an epiphany of the Lord of Wisdom
‘strikingly’
Expressions as:
‘When Ahura Mazda, who resides in the endless light, created fire, he joined the radiance of this endless light with fire himself.’
‘exemplification is possession plus reference’ – Goodman
Also however, if possession is intrinsic, reference is not.
Hairs of White Bull
Exemplify that animal, which is in turn, symbolic of the principle of ‘good intention’
Twigs, water and priest exemplify plant kingdom
water exemplifies…generating power of pure primeval waters
high priest strives to live a righteous life so that he may exemplify purity
Microcosm, macrocosm
Performative Utterance
The Avestan Chant
Both ‘informative’ and ‘performative’ features
At beginning:
‘I unite Ahura Mazda, the Beautiful Immortals, and all other spirit beings to the liturgy.’ (Yasna iff)
Also (several times during ceremony):
‘I profess myself a Mazda-worshipper, a Zoroastrian…To Ahura Mazda, the good, rich in treasures, I ascribe all things…’ (Yasna 12 lff)
Throughout the Yasna, repeatedly utters the Avestan phrase ‘ashem vohue’ (righteousness is good) and praises good thoughts, words and deeds.
Cognitive significance
Basic belief elements
Manthra means ‘instrument of thought’
Definitions
‘I promise to do x’ p.86
Austin, J. ‘How To Do Things with Words’ (1962)
Theory expanded by John Searle (1968)
And applied to ritual studies by Wade Wheelock (1980, 1982)
Austin’s original idea:
Sentences such as ‘I promise’, ‘I bet’, ‘I write’, and ‘I do’ (marry you) are not true or false descriptions of external events or internal resoluteness, but instead constitute the ‘doing of something’ (e.g. promising, investing, marrying). Now, precisely, to make such an utterance is to perform the action in question, provided that the speaker is properly qualified and the requisite circumstances were fulfilled.
‘Misfires’ – failure to perform the act i.e. marrying when you are already married.
Abuses, misfires, felicitous or infelicitous
Application
This insight (Austin’s see above) that performative utterances are actions.
Given the requisite context, can be applied, i.e. in the manthra.
When both priests recite:
‘I invite’
It has to be correctly chanted
Both must be qualified priests and in good health
Misfires include: hairs of White Bull must be living bull or i.e , Priests were not devoted
‘it is because the recitations of the manthras requires a high degree of attentiveness that the ideal priest must strive to become ‘pahrezgar’, one whose conduct and manner are disciplined and exact, one who abstains from and avoids the superfluous and inessential.’ (Kotwal and Boyd 1977:38)
It is plausible that ‘superfluous’ and ‘inessential’ are aesthetic categories
The ‘artful’ conduct of the performance
Otherwise infelicitous
Word Sounds
1. Manthric chants
The Avestan text
Devotional
Kotwal: ‘manthras by themselves, as presented or unuttered words are dead things. They do not contain….inherent power….when abstracted from the verbal act of reciting them.’
….the manner of recitation by the priest is all important. While chanting the liturgy the priest must recite the holy with utter devotion, and attentiveness. He must concentrate and engross himself in the speech itself, not in the conceptual meanings given the Avestan words in interpretive translation.
Total concentration on the sounds
Proper voicing
Conceptual meanings not at forefront of his consciousness
Manthric speech requires surrender to the speech act itself
Repetition lulls the discursive intellect
‘The labyrinth of words…and interested ideas that foster there and become more receptive to the sound of the manthra.’ (Barrett 1979: 301-2)
Seductive lure – purely auditory
Virtual space
Such as poetry, singing and storytelling
A ‘physical ‘ event like music
Pure and mysterious
A fluid realm
Noetic function
A new ‘perceptual state’
Less convention
New insights
Shifts in meaning
2. Meaningfulness
Striking similarities between Kotwal’s and Staal’s view about ‘meaninglessness’ of ritual
Totally immersed in proper execution of complex tasks
Concentrate on recitation and chant
Intrinsic value
‘grammatical’ rules
Staal – the grammar of ritual
Other ‘formalists’
The question of the importance of ‘meaning’
Chapter 4
A System of Internal Relations
How related
Significant ways
Energy and mystery
Serves as a ‘vehicle’
A signifying sign
Intersect, inform and interact
Interrelationships
An Atomistic View
‘to the left of’ an ‘external relation’
Atomic if a whole is explained by its parts
Prescribed gestures
A separate reality
Symbolic dimensions
Ritual performance
Independently
A Holistic view
Definitions
Internal relations
Cultural content
Parts understood by appealing to whole
Secondary reality
2. Examples
Amadeus
‘too many notes’
An aesthetic necessity
In terms of the character of the composition as a whole
Wittgenstein’s view of language
Holistic
The forms of life in which the language is embedded
‘If a lion could talk….
So different from our own
Words a ‘innate ideas’ or ‘independently existing mental ‘entities’
Application
Physical space
Holistic
Cultural context
Celebration of the sacred
Liturgy, priest, performance and sacred objects
Context
The Yasna
Essentially changed if moved to a museum
‘pure place’ or ‘pawi’
high liturgy
consecrated
The ritual context
sacred space
virtual space
Linked to a larger context
The ‘appearance’ of the fire
one who can ‘properly attend’ to the fire
A requisite ‘calm’
Pure perception
Understanding
Cultural environment
Meaning space
Essentially related to virtual space
The Aveston phrase ‘ashem vohu’, or ‘righteousness is good’
A matrix
The ‘search for the sacred’
Chapter 5
Integrative Concepts
A Unifying contexts
Multi-faceted nature of ritual
Well summarized by Schechner:
‘Many rituals integrate music, dance and theatre. The display of masks and costumes, the processions….singing, dancing, storytelling, food-sharing, fire-burning, incensing, drumming and bell-ringing create an overwhelming synaesthesic environment and experience for the audience….at the same time, rituals embody cognitive systems of values that instruct and mobilize participants. These embodied values are rhythmic and cognitive, spatial and conceptual, sensuous and ideological.’ (1987: 13)
The Yasna liturgy
Physical, Virtual and Meaning spaces
S.J. Tambiah, ‘The Magical Power of Words’
Ritual ‘sequences’
Canoe building
Gardening
Malinowski
Magic – signals, inaugurates and regulates systematic work
Magic a product of man’s limitations and thoughts, of gaps in his empirical knowledge
Objectively ‘absurd’
Has a subjective ‘pragmatic rationale’ as an ‘anxiety quelled’.
The spontaneous expression of emotion with no intellectual content
Incentive to work
A ‘blue print’
Technical aesthetics
Evaluative properties
Ritual – to restructure and integrate
Setting
A discourse about the True, the Good, the Beautiful and the Sacred
a traditional view of Philosophy
Participants in action
Teaches to ‘regulate’ life
The everyday life
B. Art’s Contribution to Ritual in Artistic Means
Necessary for integrative environments
Harmonizing disparate elements of culture and expression
Aristotle’s law of contradiction
A mysterious dimension which lays beyond definition
Achievements of the highest order
2. Irreplaceability
Goodman and Jennings
Ways of world-making and ways of constituting and constructing our world
Different from sacred texts and theology
A ‘fundamental way’
An ‘amalgamation’
The Yasna Revisited: Celebrating the interconnectedness of All Good Things’
Cosmic struggle
Good and evil
Intrinsically related
An ‘interconnection’
Temporal Connection
Takes place in Time
2 1/2 hours
Past – liturgy, language , setting
Finite time – human action
A bridge – pay–forward to future period when Ahura Mazda’s power will reign supreme and when evil is defeated and ‘all is made wonderful’
(Avestan : frashegrid)
Virtual space contribute to virtual time
The ‘immense cosmic process’
2. Gestural and Physical Connections
The barsam
bundle of wires
Pazand: ‘May you be situated in strength with all righteous ones’
The hom
The well
Seamless Composition
In terms of visual virtual space
Sculptures as parts-elements, implements
Entire space as a whole (Persian Art)
Interconnectedness
Sound spaces
Chant
Pawi contained within invisible walls
4. A Message in Many Voices
Yasna
Gestural
Temporal
Visual
Auditory
Integrated
Aesthetic necessity
Unification, interrelatedness
The ‘noetic’ function of Yasna: ’participant comes to know in ways not reducible to propositional expression.’
Co-operatively engaged with the ‘creatures of good creations’
‘felt’ unity
Heart and mind
One who knows this lives in a ‘different’ world.
Part Two
Ritual Knowledge
Three companions for you
Number one: what you own
He won’t even leave the house for some danger you might be in.
He stays inside.
Number two: your good friend.
He at least comes to your funeral.
He stands and talks at the gravesite, no further.
The third companion: what you do.
Your work goes down into death to be there with you, to help.
Take deep refuge with that companion beforehand.
-Rumi
Chapter 6. Two Stances Toward Ritual Repetition
A. Introduction
1. A Debate about Repetition
Roy A. Rappaport, ‘The Obvious Aspects of Ritual’
Invariance
Invariant sequences of formal acts
Other utterances not encoded by the actors
Liturgical orders
Jennings
Ronald L. Grimes
H. Davis
Brian K. Smith
Espouse change and variation in historical rituals
Jennings, ‘Ritual Studies and Liturgical Theology’
Variance and invariance
2. Plan
Jennings, ‘On Ritual Knowledge’
Variation is key to noetic function
Kotwal – unchanging rituals
Essential to their knowledge gaining functions
Repetition of ancient unchanging ways
Sartre, ‘Nausea’
3. The Form of the Argument
the form of a ‘how possibly’ explanation
B. Jennings View of the Noetic Function of Ritual
1. Ritual and Knowledge
Ritual as ‘a means by which its participants discover who they are in the world and ‘how it is’ with the world.’ (1982: 113)
Rituals historically and cross-culturally continues to change
‘A draconic perspective on rituals together with a cross-cultural comparison of putatively identical rituals, brings to light considerable variations which cannot be accounted for by the view of actual action as sheer repetition.’ (113)
A mode of inquiry and discovery
2. Pedagogy and Repetition
Pedagogical side: variation
Traditional knowledge gained
Elsewhere and otherwise (repetition)
Sui generis noetic function of ritual is evidenced by change not by repetition
3. Action
Rituals: quest for appropriate actions
Knowledge of action
Acquired through action
Not by detached- reflective observations
Discovering how to use an axe to chop firewood, by chopping firewood
4. Knowing Through the Body
‘it is not so much that the mind embodies itself in ritual actions but rather that the body minds itself or attends through itself in ritual action’(115)
i.e. dancing – a different form of ‘knowing’ the Eucharist
5. Ritual as Paradigm
Jennings claims his model to be a paradigm (to serve as) by learning a fitting ritual act one can then apply that knowledge to areas in life outside the ritual context and seek for ‘fittingness’ in relation to all other activities
Informs
Mirrors: ontological or cosmogenic p.66
6. Confirmation/Disconfirmation
Truth or falsity of ritual action
‘The presence of something like ‘coherence’ and correspondence tests of adequacy’
A kind of aesthetic test of coherence
Does this act ‘fit’ with other acts or gestures?
‘a ritual is falsified to the extent to which it cannot serve as a paradigm for significant action outside the ritual itself and is validated on the extent to which it does function in this way.’ (119-20)
one must find ‘ways to display the correspondence of this action to diverse ways of being and acting in the world; (120)
C. Jennings On the Necessity of Change
‘If there were no variation in the ritual performance, we would have to conclude that there is here neither search nor discovery but only transmission and illustration of knowledge gained elsewhere and otherwise.’ -Theodore Jennings, ‘On Ritual Knowledge’
rituals that change regularly
i.e. something like the way new styles emerge in the history of ballet
since ballet can also be viewed as a search for fitting action.
Jennings analogy between ritual activity and scientific exploration
described by Thomas Kuhn (1962:119)
In the case of science: a paradigm will focus attention on the facts relevant to the theory, so that any mismatch between the world and the theory will likely be noticed.
This will lead to disconfirmation and emendation of some portions of the theory
Same as ritual
D. Evidence for a Contrary Position Dastur Kotwal
‘No –one has the right to change ritual. Our rituals are such that they have the backing of the ancients, the support of the scriptures, and are efficacious in furthering souls…’ -Kotwal
Jenning’s diachronic perspective
Kotwal – one of seven high priests living today (1993)
Bombay – The Wadia Atash Bahram
Arbitrary elements (Kuhn 1962)
Duty to preserve
Spiritual advancement
Rituals: useful for ‘fulfilling the aim of life’
Which is to ‘know righteousness’
Something like Popper’s picture of scientific investigation: at a given moment, the hypotheses that constitute scientific theory are merely those that have as yet to be disconfirmed.
Change vs. no change
Jennings vs. Kotwol
E. Repetition as the Essence of Ritual
Ritual repetition
Vast stretches of time
It’s just the way it is
No one has a right to change the ritual
Rituals have features similar to certain kinds of repeatable artistic performers
‘A ritual is a masterpiece’ – Kotwal
First Characteristic: the Aura of Necessity
Repetition, invariance
An aura of necessity
Elias Canetti, ‘The Conscience of Words’
One quality of myths that are handed down orally is that they are:
Repeated again and again
Not destined to change
The feeling of certainty and incontestability which myths engender
Bataille: ‘a rite is a divining of a hidden necessity’ (1954:1983:1377)
Canetti: ‘a reservoir of unquestionability’
‘free of doubt’ (244)
Meant not to change as ultimate goal
Myth is essentially unchanging
Particularly profound artworks have about them a necessary, aesthetic rightness which precludes emendation
Whole is sum of parts
Mozart, Matisse
Institutional
Internal organization of rituals
Protection or preservation
The Sacred Characteristic: The Obligation to Preserve
Commitment has to do with intention
Intention
To arrive at new knowledge
Stance, commitment, motive, intention
‘Epic of Gilgamesh’
– a ’bible’ to Canetti
‘it is man himself and how he looks at these rituals that matter’
Third Characteristic: Right repetition
‘To reach a repetition which saves, or which changes life….would it not be necessary …to reach…a choice capable of constantly beginning again.’
– Gilles Deleuze
Luis Bunuel ‘The Milky Way’
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Cinema 1’
‘Christ as person has long maintained the chance of an opening –up of the world [indicated in the film] through his varied milieu through which the pilgrims pass: but at the end, it indeed seems that all closes up again and that Christ is himself an enclosure instead of a horizon. To reach repetition which saves, or which changes life….would it not be necessary…to reach…a choice capable of constantly beginning again…?’ (132-33) – Deleuze (on Bunuel’s film about Jesus [‘The Milky Way’])
Krishnamurti – ritual as ‘mind deadening’
Freud ‘repetition, compulsive repetition part of death instinct rather than the life-affirming pleasure principle.
Janus-faced
F. The Two Stances Summarized and Contrasted
Jennings – pedagogy: transmission, paradigm, patterning by extension
Ritual action as a sui generis sense of knowledge
Opera – combination of instrumental, vocal and recited sounds plus setting costuming dramatic action, dance and narratives structures
Integration
Mantra setting
Interpretive frames such as the theological
Second stance
Priest mistakes
We must be misinterpreting his views
Pedagogical
Kotwal – i.e. merely passing on what ancients knew
Paradigm
Future actions possibly disconfirmed
Jennings – synchronous and diachronic studies
More plausible to postulate two views
Phases of stable pedagogy between intervals of creativity and disconfirmation
Chapter 7. The Noetic Function of Ritual Repetition
Rituals double role as both stabilizing horizon and lure to new insight
Zoroastrian ‘Afrinagan’ – a commonly repeated ritual – ‘blessings’
Adequacy judged by…
A. Turning to Metaphor to Understand Ritual
Two theories of metaphor
What kinds of tasks metaphors perform and how they do it.
1. Gesture as Visual Metaphor; an example:
Visual/dramatic focal point of ‘Afrinagan’ – an exchange of flowers between two priests
Intricate, graceful, pauses (deliberate)
To symbolize ‘journey of righteous soul from this world to the next’.
Self-contained action
Resemble verbal figure: ‘as if’
Theories of Metaphor: Two Poles of Ritual Language
Two views diametrically opposed:
Meaning v. no meaning
First Pole: Metaphors are Meaningful and Sometimes True
‘The power of the images is the power of seeing resemblances, a discipline important to the growth of intelligence’ -Robert Bly
‘The metaphorical use of an expression consists, on this view, of the use of that expression in other than its proper or normal sense, in some context that allows the improper, or abnormal sense to be detected…’ – Max Black
a. The Literary Tradition
Metaphors can be logically false (wolf-man) or trivially true (business is business)
Replacements for literal expression
Similes in disguise
Open-end sequences of comparison
Signify connotations rather than denotations
One term (wolf) functions as filler, selecting only a part of another term (man)
All varying theories of how metaphors convey meaning
b. Analysis
e.g. gesture/image of flower exchange
poetic images
Bly, R. ‘What the Image Can Do‘
Poem expresses a complex hidden analogy, and this analysis puts us in mind of a new or remembered connection
Marks the before un-apprehended relations of things
Brings up into consciousness a relationship that has been forgotten for centuries
‘The poet receives a permanent addition to his knowledge….The power of the image is the power of seeing resemblances, a discipline important to the growth of intelligence – Bly (1982:43)
Rilke – ‘That blind man, standing on the bridge, as gray as some abandoned empire’s boundary stone’ (1981: 95)
Man as a stone
‘gray as a stone’
Relations of the variable x
Fallen to ruin
Body weakened, domain diminished
Dominion forgotten
Persona are like societies
The notion of ‘time’ and its ravages
He himself a forgotten empire
Or the trail of hidden analogies
Encoded Ritual Images
Truth adequacy and meaning
Ritual images/metaphor
Meanings of a tradition
Pedagogy – a ritual metaphor
Repetition – convey knowledge
Open-minded, sometimes inexhaustible sources of meanings
Second Pole: Metaphors are Meaningless
‘We must give up the idea that a metaphor carries a message, that it has content and meaning.’
-D. Davidson ‘What Metaphors Mean’
A. Texturality and Traces
Post-structuralism
Derrida
Barthes
No rule guided way of distinguishing the literal from the metaphorical
Meaning is not embedded in text
Complex interplay of texts, interpretations and traces of traditional societal codes
ever-changing
Hermeneutic enterprise for reconstructing the deeper , true meaning of (say) the classical texts of the ancients or holy writ imparted by deities
Interconnection between the text and the historical situated reader
Metaphors have no meaning on their own
b. Analysis
Davidson
Appropriate or not
Wide range of adequate interpretations
Explain
Metaphorical meaning –no
i.e. Duchamp’s ‘Bicycle Wheel on a Stool’
mysterious object, open to interpretation
no special or definite metaphorical meaning already in place to be discovered
‘We must give up the idea that a metaphor carries a message, that it has a content or meaning (except of course, its literal meaning). The various theories we have been considering mistake their goal. Where they think they provide us a method for deciphering an encoded context, they already tell us (or try to tell us) something about the effects metaphors have on us. The common error is to fasten the contents of the thoughts as metaphor itself. No doubt metaphors often make us notice aspects of things we did not notice before, no doubt they bring surprising analogies and similarities to our attention. They provide a kind of lens or lattice, as Black says, through which we view the relevant phenomena, the issue does not lie here, but in the question of how the metaphor is related to what it makes us see.’ -Davidson (1978:45)
That is, words used metaphorically have no special features prior to and independent of the context in which they are used.
no metaphorical meaning in the words themselves, by themselves
…whatever we carry away from an encounter with a metaphor is the result of a cooperation between its creator , the literal meanings of the words, the context and our imagination.
no antecedent meaning rule or rules dictate the outcome of such an encounter.
Again:
‘Metaphor is the dreamwork of language, and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between a dreamer and a waker, even if they be the same person; and the act of interpretation is itself a work of the imagination. So too, understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavor as making a metaphor, and as little guided by the rules’ -(1978:31)
Metaphors are inexhaustible, although metaphors are heuristic
A creative collaboration
c. Interactive Ritual Images
Davidson
Further exploration of second stance
Repetition
Receding
Stabilizio
A ‘noetic’ function
Cannot be reduced to mere pedagogy
Beyond pedagogy
Meanings resulting from interaction between practitioner and unchanging artwork
3. The Two Poles Define a Field of Possibility
Two poles oppose each other
Also define the full range of metaphorical possibilities
Visual gestalt shifts
Recall: well-known chalice with two human faces
Looked at one way – human faces
Cannot see both simultaneously
Two equally cogent but mutually incompatible approaches to how metaphors do what they do
Together like oppositely charged sources of an electromagnetic field, they are the two poles what define the field in which metaphor has its being.
Similar contrasts when one interprets language
One penetrating (words have developed hidden meanings) and deep structure
The other view claims that meaning is generated via interacting among texts and creative interpretation.
1) The metaphor of ‘penetration’ to find true meaning.
2) Meaning exists ‘between’ the texts and the reader and is liable to constant change. The metaphor of ‘unravelling’ the multitude of intentional connections.
Some works of art and literature more freely between the two poles
Federico Garcia Lorca
Two kinds of poetic image
3) bound by laws of human logic: to construct a tower against mystery and against the elements similar to first pole – expresses analogies and contain meaning
Second kind (which Lorca values more highly) is the ‘hermetic image’
It evades the meaning of consensus reality and confronts us with indecipherable mysteries
The poem becomes a ‘self –sufficient entity without reference to any reality outside itself’
No analogical meaning and ultimately remains inexplicable
Similar to second view – (Davidson’s)
Hermetic images are without explanation and have no ‘correct’ interpretation or ‘true’ reading
Contrast the suggested meaning between these two phrases
‘a hemp of living tree trunks’
‘landscape of pulverized ambushes’
Three lessons learned:
1) some metaphors, images or similes strike one immediately as meaningful or potentially so, while others remain enigmatic without obvious metaphorical import
2) the latter, hermetic images, keep open spaces for the expression of mystery
3) Other images, like charged particles oscillating in an electron magnetic field will move between these two poles, depending on the context and our interpretations, constituting a wide range of possibilities.
By means of this polar analysis
A fuller description of the powers of figurative language
Enable us to look at a ritual image, such as the flower exchange, to see how it can be an unchanging element of transformation
C. Powers of Metaphor
It is possible to generate at least five functions of metaphors or images from the foregoing discussion
They can ’lure’ us to deeper involvement with the work or ritual, ‘focus’ our attention; convey intended messages, ‘oppose’ and settled understanding and function as a ‘potential’ source and object of further interpretation
Roland Barthes footnote p. 92
Post-structuralists ‘horizontal’ and disentanglement of text.
Bly and Davidson – conveying and potentiating
1. Luring
‘Emotional’ relationship with a metaphor, an image or a work.
Artwork or ritual intrigues, tantalizes, bewitches, or otherwise forcefully engages us
Tenth century poem by Chinese Ch’an poet Han-shan:
‘So –Han shan writes you these words
These words which no-one will believe
Honey is sweet; men love the taste,
Medicine is bitter and hard to swallow,
What soothes the feeling brings contentment
What opposes the will calls forth anger,
Yet I ask you to look at the wooden puppets
Worn out by their moment of play
On the stage!’
Han-shan (1962: 1970: 117)
First two lines introduce and challenge
‘You are not going to believe this!
A kind of ‘lure’
Enticed to read on to find surprise
Compel our attention to ourself
Draw us further in
2. Focusing
Primarily with what figurative language is about
Tendency to facilitate and maintain our attention to some particular realm of experience and concern
3. Conveying
Transmitting figurative devices which have special (Bly) non-literal meanings antecedent to interpretation
Han-Shan’s poem
Consider the puppets – presumably to shed light on what has previously been said.
Refers to how a metaphor can teach and what we can learn from it, how it can transplant understanding from one person to another
A metaphor can pattern, suggest, exemplify, bear messages, shoe forth hidden analogies, and act in concert with other metaphors to create a paradigm, and it can be evaluated as adequate or not, or even as true or false
Unpacking or mining its (metaphors) meaning
Image as horizon in sense of orienting, structuring, and stabilizing pattern
4. Opposing
Metaphorical meaning relies on the literal meaning is often logically odd or contradictory
After all, puppets are not really actors
More subtly, a figurative phase may tempt us in two contradictory directions, or may contain within it the potential for defeating or unraveling a present interpretation
Contradictory sometimes
More than one
Bly
Han –shan’s poem last two lines at least two distinct meanings
Puppets as worn-out players
We who are puppet-like
Like a worn out marionette
A kind of gesture shift from one meaning to the other
Sudden insight
The image itself does the work
A paradox
Koan
Horizons in the sense of tantalizing visions that remain beyond us.
5. Potentiating
Enter the realm of meaninglessness
Davidson
Figuration of language in sound of meaning
Clear voice
We must become inventors of meaning
Han-shan
Consider ourselves as players or of life as ‘play – like-
Poem by Saint Geraud (aka Bill Knott)
Untitled
When our hands are alone
They open, like faces
There is no shore
To their opening
(see Bly 1971:56)
Enigmatic, suggestive
Hands under mysterious condition of being alone
If it works – perhaps a specific ‘feeling’
Hands that are alone, hands that are faces, faces that open, and hands or faces that are without a shore.
Inviting to exploration and interpretation
Are our hands alone when we sleep? When they are at rest? When they come to us in dreams unattached to a body?
Hermetic – resist any one interpretation and continue to bewilder us
Potentiating this refers to the role of the figurine as subject to our interpretation, and to its potential
Limitless source of promptings appears at once as void, emptiness, luminosity
A sense of undoing, unravelling, while holding out the promise of dissolving while holding out promise of new patterns
Constructing meanings for a tantalizing mysterious image
D. Exploring Metaphor: Risks and Promises
Theories of metaphor – emphasize the meaning space over physical space and virtual space
Diagram 3 (p. 99)
A complex integration of the three spaces comprising each artistic medium(i.e. drama, music, dance, the visual and literary arts) poetic, visual and gestural ‘images’
Images – comprehensive and ‘fluid’ term
Interpreted as ‘bare’ images
In terms of this broad concept a further point can be made: subsequent discussions will show that it is not necessary to choose those examples of ritual gesture (i.e. flower exchange) what lend themselves to metaphorical interpretations.
Any virtual gesture can display the same sorts of power possessed by verbal figure.
The powers of metaphor are, to a large degree, powers of the (artistic) image, whatever kind of image it may be
The next step: interaction between practitioner and ritual
Employing the interpretive categories that have been developed.
To characterize the process of daily change brought about by living with a masterpiece.
Chapter 8
A Diary of Ritual Transformation
Acts as horizon, patterning (forming and conveying) – and providing means for the transcendence of pattern (living, opposing, potentiating)
Repeated ritual enactment
Acquisition of new knowledge
Plausible, possible
Zoroastrianism
Celebrant/practitioner ritual
Narrow focus
Generalizable
Contemporary and ephemeral
Noesis – individual’s exploration
A Novelists’ Account of Noetic Function of Repetition: Sartre’s Roquentin
Subtle opportunity for growth
Afforded by the ritual situation
Sartre’s ‘Nausea’
A series of striking descriptions of the effect on Roquentin of repeated hearings of a popular jazz recording
Journal diary
Rational reconstruction of processes
Often unconscious
Difficult to verbalize
Almost agonizing account of self –conscious account of ritual transformation
The Sartrean example as applied to the Zoroastrian Afrinigen
Roquentin’s Ritual
Diary chronicles
Descent into ‘nothingness’
Hero is nauseated by a world of brute fact of things without essence
Reeling from the confrontation with irrational existence and unable to take comfort from rational philosophy, humanism, or the consensus belief system, he moves on the edge of despair
Progressively disintegrating
His perceptions lack coherence, and what memory there is in things, persons, and events seems arbitrary and only temporarily imposed
As American tune when he goes to Bistro in evenings
Gramophone and worn record
Music already alternating as a ‘lure’
Music ‘The one I like , you know: ‘Some of These Days’ (1938:32)
Inference of ‘not any song will do’
Nightly performance like an irreplaceable ritual, exactly repeated each time it is played
Further the piece conveys certain thoughts and feelings intended by the composer
Mirror Roquentin’s lonely situation
Alienation
Serves to maintain his ‘focus’ on his ‘metaphysical’ problem of meaning.
Roquentin writes:
‘The vocal chorus will be along shortly: I like that part especially and the abrupt manner in which it throws itself forward, like a cliff against the sea. For the moment the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and once eliminated, obliterated, I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know few impressions stronger or harsh.’ (1938, 1964: 33)
Music becomes a source of similes and analogies
From the notes to frantic, compelled activity, and there to notions of necessity and sacrifice
Hint of metaphysical speculation about the necessity of human death so that something greater (the musical form in this case) may exist
Perceives underlying tension (opposition) notes as both things and signs (physical and meaning aspects of the artwork)
Part of a mechanical record (physical) a causal order without inherent sense
Express feelings
Suggest hidden analogies
Contradictions exist
1) expression signs and bare events
2) signs conveying an intended message and empty signs
Conveying, opposing, potentiating
Bly and Davidson
Relaxation and a beer a small happiness of ‘Nausea’
There is another happiness: outside there is this band of steel, the narrow duration of time the music, which transverses our time through and through, rejecting it, tearing at it with its dry little points; there is another time:
‘A few seconds more and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen, it will stop of itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born. And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop; a broken spring…how strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it, yet all can break it.’ (33-34)
In presence of another ‘opposition’
Unconsciously
The realm of ontological theory
Opposition between the ideal virtual dimension of music, the intended sequence of notes, and their less than perfect physical instantiation, between the pattern and its performance
Necessity that interests is here two contrary faces- one the causal necessity or rightness of the composition
Also the power of the artwork to create its own visual time, to exist, as it were, in a purer dimension, is part of its allure.
In the brief silence which follows, I feel strongly that there is, that something has happened.
‘Some of these days
You’ll miss me honey.’ [-]
What just happened is that Necessity has disappeared
‘When the voice was heard in the silence….I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish. Suddenly it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant. At the same time the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a waterspout. It filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am in the music….I stretched out my hand toward the beer glass….God! That is what changed, my gestures. This movement of my arm has developed like a majestic theme, it has glided along the song of the Negress. I seemed to be dancing.’ (34-35)
Precisely illustration of the pedagogic function
The music ‘informs’
And all that led me – where?
‘I listen to a Negress sing while outside roves the feeble night.’
The record stops
The piece temporarily lifts him out of his nausea
Virtual power creates a new time, space and movement
Potentiation
‘Have you had many adventures, monsieur?’
‘A few’….
‘I have never had adventure. Things have happened to me.’
‘Events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures. It isn’t a question of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something to which I cling more than all the rest – without completely realizing it. It wasn’t love. Heaven forbid, not glory, not money. It was …..I had imagined that at certain times my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little precision. There is nothing brilliant about my life now: but from time to time, for example, when they play music in the cafes, I look back and tell myself: in the old days, in London, Meknes, Tokyo, I have known great moments, I have had adventures. Now I am deprived of this. I have suddenly learned without any apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I cling so tightly.’ (53,54)
Roquentin….wonders what a real adventure would be like.
The darker side of the notes.
The possibility of real distinction between ordinary and special moments:
‘The beginning would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings, ‘I was out for a walk, it was an evening in May.’ You walk, the moon has just risen, and you feel lazy, vacant, and a little empty. And then suddenly you think: Something has happened. No matter what: a slight rustling in the shadow, a thin silhouette crossing the street. But this paltry event is not like the others: suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist and you tell yourself, ‘Something is beginning!’’
…the notes that must soon die but are to be cherished as unique, irreplaceable:
‘Yes, it’s what I wanted what I still want. I am so happy when a Negress sings: what summits would I not reach if my own life made the subject of the melody.’
‘Yes? Is that what you wanted? Well, that’s exactly what you’ve never had! (Remember you fooled yourself with words; you called the glitter of travel, the love of women, quarrels, and trinkets, adventure) and this is what you’ll never have – and no one other than yourself! But why? WHY?’ (55)
The former interpretation of the music and his life of epiphanies now reveals itself as a lie.
The ‘opposition’
A contrary conclusion
Real beginnings would be like the perfect virtual structure of the musical piece
Notes as sheer event
Notes as ideal transcendent structure
Notes as sign and source of feeling and meaning he finds:
1) a motive beneath his actions, namely the quest for real adventure
2) the falseness and impossibility of such a quest
3) beneath the quest, in constant desire for ‘real beginnings’ whatever they are
A barely formed doubt beneath the desire
Platonic form – an ideal but non-existent world
A deepening awareness
Creative interpretation
The Last Night in the Bistro
Recording not mentioned again but Roquentin till near the end
The waitress invites him to listen to the recording before he leaves for good:
…’I don’t feel too well disposed to listen to jazz. Still, I’m going to pay attention because as Madeleine says, I’m hearing it for the last time: it [the record] is very old, even too old for the provinces, l will look for it in vain in Paris.’ (232)
Still a ‘line’ after all this time
It’s ‘purity’
Its ‘depth’
He finds crucial import in the first notes of the instrumental section: they are the bearer of a message:
‘Now there is the song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: you must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally, I’d like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity. But is it my fault if the beer at the bottom of my glass is warm, if there are brown stains on the mirror, if I am not wanted…? No, they certainly can’t tell me it’s compassionate – this little jeweled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic: it spins gaily, completely self-absorbed – like a scythe has cut through the drab intimacy of this world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the thick –set man, the patronne, myself, the tables, benches, the stained mirror, the glasses, all of us abandon ourselves to existence…I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it.’ (233)
Suffering
Exemplary suffering
The notes on the saxophone
Langer’s theory that art is symbolism of human feeling: the form of music is analogous to the forms of our feeling life.
Conveys a message
‘suffer like this’
The ‘virtual’ sound
Platonic form
Physical sounds
Now fully developed in Roquentin’s remarks:
‘It [the melody ‘above’ this record] does not exist. It is even an annoyance, if I were to get up and rip the record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn’t reach it. It is beyond – always beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existants, you butt against existants devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don’t even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is.’ (233)
The ‘virtual’ melody
Perfect order devoid of compromise
Paradoxical
It ‘is’ and ‘does not exist’
Indestructible
Vulnerable
Another more fundamental level of desire for Roquentin:
‘And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted: this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts, which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone mote. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. He existed, like other people, in a world of public parks, bistros, commercial cities and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of his paintings, with the doges of Tintoretto, with Gazzoli’s Florentines, behind the pages of books, with Fabrizio del Dongo and Julien Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with the long dry laments of jazz….
I am a fool.’ (234)
This is a shattering moment of insight. The perfect moments (adventures) he has sought are impossible moments of being in the world as if it were the untarnished realm of fictional, virtual space
But the music is still weaving its spell and expressing it exhortation:
‘And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: ‘You must be like me, you must suffer in rhythm.’
The voice sings:
‘Some of these days
you’ll miss me honey’ [.] (234)
…at this point music presents itself with greater force:
‘Someone must have scratched the record at that spot because it makes an odd noise. And there is something that clutches at the heart: the melody is absolutely untouched by this tiny coughing of the needle on the record. It is so far – so far behind….behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.
The voice is silent, the disc scrapes a little , then stops’ (234-35)
Roquentin’s diary
Two movements are traceable
1) a deepening insight into himself
2) a more profound and total ‘relationship’ to the music
The process takes time
He asks Madeleine to begin the record again ‘for the last time’ while it plays he imaginatively recreates in detail the story of its composition. An American Jew in a suffocating flat wrote the piece because he needed the money.
‘That is the way it happened. That way or another way, it makes little difference. That is how it was born. It is the worn out body of this Jew with black eyebrows and which it chose to create…’ (235)
Meanwhile, the piece has arrived at the chorus:
‘She sings…so two of them are saved: the Jew and the Negress.
Saved….’
‘The Negress sings, can you justify your existence then? I feel extraordinarily intimidated…I am like a man frozen after a trek, through the snow and who suddenly comes into a warm room. I think he would stay motionless near the door, still cold, and that slow shudders would go through him.’ (236-37)
Roquentin conceives, dimly, of a new project and of going on with renewed courage.
Something has changed…
Suffer in rhythm
Suffering belongs to the world, the true rhythm belongs to that other world off form, aesthetic necessity, and invulnerability.
The union of ‘opposites’
From the time being neither plagued by contradictions nor desirous of escape to the ideal side of the opposition.
Glimpsing a possibility of integration beyond duality.
Taken the… contradiction of his life….a goal of integration rather than expression of impossible choice.
All his images are …like rhythmic suffering, images of the integration of opposites.
Music is a ‘pitiless (purified) witness’(of real world suffering….this world)
Composer’s ‘sweaty’ existence as ‘moving’ (partaking in an ideal grandeur) demands of himself that in his life, tainted by existence: be ‘justified’ ( a concept from the ideal realm of moral order)
Once again glimpses a distinction between adventure (contingent events) and ‘real adventure’, something like salvation.
This vision promises, perhaps , a ‘new beginning’ which, unlike his earlier ‘adventures’, is not counterfeit:
‘Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour… I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: ‘That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started. And I might succeed – in accepting myself.’ (238)
Further Remarks
Spiral Form: What Roquentin Has Gained
A slow growth process
A limited exposure to the ritual artwork would be useless
The ritual establishes a certain general challenge to which there are an unlimited number of responses.
Inform our thoughts and actions
A ‘real beginning’
Same old delusion returned?
Attended to life in new ways
The possibility of the integration of the ideal with the mundane realm
Roquentin’s experience: a kind of spiral.
Revisits over and over
With deeper understanding (greater)
By returning repeatedly to the same (un-amended) form.
Pedagogy
Jennings claims, ‘Repetitive phases of Ritual are pedagogical’
Knowledge (traditional knowledge) gained elsewhere and otherwise
Learned and extended (paradigmatic actions)
Only part of the story
Yes, pedagogical function: music makes more graceful Roquentin’s present experience
The blues tradition as an attempt to infuse life’s suffering with an aesthetic order that both comforts and perhaps hints at a different realm of experience; music has and ideal structure which seeks incarnation into a contingent; fleeting, and inevitably flawed performance.
The wisdom of the tradition
Passed on to ‘Sartre’s protagonist’
It should also be apparent that much of what Roquentin comes to know was not intended by the composer and the performer of the music,
A creative confrontation
His 20th century ‘angst’
Desire to escape
Lusting for a different realm
A realm of ideal literary purity,
Misconception about real adventure and true beginnings
Roquentin’s struggle
His first insight (while watching a game of cards)
Different from Jennings’s view – a divergence from his original meaning of ‘pedagogy’
For the passing on of previously gained knowledge is a misleading description of what is really the creative generation of fresh insight.
Agency
Roquentin speaks of the jazz recording as if it were an agent capable of action.
He calls the song ‘a pitiless witness’
Self-absorbed, not ‘compassionate’, he claims he ‘chose’ its composer to create it, and thereby he was ‘saved’
The recording imposes its own time on the Bistro’s customers, it interrogates and prescribes so that Roquentin feels ashamed in its presence and constrained to try to justify his life henceforth.
Roquentin’s treatment of the music as a surrogate and supernatural person, a virtual agent, is not a mere accident of his over-active imagination, but a sign of a special role that rituals can play.
Chapter 9
Application to the Zoroastrian Afrinagan
Interpretive theory of religious ritual
The noetic function of its repeated enactment
A Ritual of Blessings
A ceremony of offerings to the Lord of Wisdom (Ahuru Mazda) and his spiritual creation enhance connection between unseen realms and the physical world
Three selections from Aveston scriptures
Intoned by two ritual priests
Exchange sets of flowers, a few at a time
White robes over white garments
Seated facing each other across
A Persian carpet, partially covered with a white cloth
Between them a ritual fire
A number of silver trays containing a variety of offerings:
Sandalwood, frankincense, fruits and flowers, eggs and bread and water, sharbot, milk, and wine.
Before the ceremony – eight flowers, jasmine, marigolds, red and white roses or other fragrant flowers of the season.
Carefully laid out in two columns of three each with two below (see Appendix p.169)
Assistant priest stands to receive and to return the flowers from the chief priest in groups of one to three and in a prescribed order.
The interchange is repeated with a different set of eight blossoms during each of the three Avestan recitations.
The fire, the colorful flowers, and the trays of offerings present striking visual images: the chants, simultaneous with the exchange, contain praise for the radiance and glory of the Lord of Wisdom, and for those who practice good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.
The Flower Exchange as Visual Metaphor
Possible, even plausible that the Dastur to have gained knowledge new to the tradition
By means of procession in some ways like those evidenced by Roquentin.
Analyze gesture of flower exchange
Powers to convey
Invite interpretations
Dastur Kotwal’s comments
Luring
‘A priest trained in the tradition brings [to the ritual] an attitude which intuitively finds beauty and grace’.
– Dastur Kotwal ‘ A Guide to Zoroastrian Religion’
An image of abundance
Fecundity, ephemerality and beauty.
Gestures stand out
Articulated and simple
Pauses
Elegant, virtual power
Similar to an ideal form
i.e. Roquentin’s jazz music
an aesthetic ‘rightness’
necessity
rhythmically and visually
fitting actions
evocative images
calling for interpretation
intricate meanings
exchange of flowers
Avestan Manthra
Ahura Mazda exalted as radiant and glorious
‘I Bless’
‘the menog [invisible] and getig [visible] worlds join right here in the ritual, and you feel the benign presence of God Himself in the ceremony’ (Boyd, 1989)
Heightened moment
Exchange of flowers – a completion of a ‘circuit’
Repeated three times
‘good thoughts, good words, good deeds’.
Exist, as it were, in a purer dimension.
A ‘lure’ through its direct appeal of its images of abundance
The promised ‘depth of meaning’ supplied by the interaction of simple gesture and compel environment.
The lure of the opportunity to give sustained attention to ultimate matters.
Focusing
The focus of the whole ritual is the establishment of righteousness. Dastur Kotwal states:
‘The pious [priest] seeks throughout his life to develop a disciplined personality which keeps in constant contact with the menog reality so the righteousness may always be with him and ….prevail in all his thoughts, words, and actions.’
[Kotwal and Boyd (1977.44)]
….proclaim ‘righteousness is good’.
Three fold phrase of ‘good thoughts, good words, good deeds.’
Manthric proclamations of righteousness framed by utterances of righteousness
As Roquentin discovers
One thing to pursue an ideal and another to implement it.
The celebrant of the Afrinagan seeks to instantiate right relatedness in everyday life
Roquentin – integration of the ideal with the ordinary
…..a metaphorical frame which both guides and invites interpretation
Afrinagan is the most commonly repeated ritual in the Zoroastrian community.
A significant effect on other participants
Its continual reenactment enables it to become an instrument for unlimited transformation.
Conveying
‘The ritual unfolds itself when we go deeply into it and try to understand t thoroughly…. We understand more and more every moment…’
Dastur Kotwal
The soul’s journey from this world to the next.
The proper connection between this visible world (getig) and the invisible world (menog) realms.
Abundance, renewal and seasonal rhythms.
In Robert Bly’s terms, the metaphor:
‘brings up to consciousness forgotten analogies and marks the before apprehended relations of things’
A four term analogy
In the theological context:
The chief priest (A1) is to the assistant priest (A2) as the gesture of giving a flower (G1) is to the return gesture of receiving a flower (G2) that is A1 is to A2 as G1 is to G2.
A1 and A2 re not only priests, they can represent other individuals or groups in the community and can stand in either of two worlds
Consequently, we take either A1 or A2 to be any of the following:
A) the priest himself
B) another (named) believer
C) the historical Zoroastrian community
D) the future community
E) the world in this present time
F) the presently dead on their journey in the menog realm
G) the menog realm of guardian spirits (fravashis)
H) the source of all good creation (Ahuru Mazda)
A straightforward interchange
A larger circuit
Fire, vase and tray
A spark
As ‘transformation’
‘altered’
Circuit completion
X return as y
Generates hundreds of possible similes
Priest and community i.e. Roquentin’s jazz notes
‘be like us’ [the notes]
Suffer in rhythm:
‘You learn many things, from rituals as you go on enacting them….In a way intricacies are developed from one act to another, and you see, oh, this is like this! How wonderful it is. (Boyd 1989)
Opposing
‘When you try to understand a ritual thoroughly well, you find: that was not accurate, this was accurate.’
-Dastur Kotwal
The flower exchange also offers opposing possibilities.
Contrasts generated from the four analogies
Roquentin’s diary rich in such shifts.
Incongruency between ideal and real.
Jonathan Z. Smith’s, ‘Theory of Ritual‘ (1987)
Flower exchange not only a meaningless gesture opposed to interpretation, but an ideal form or shining event possessing virtual qualities inviting deeper awareness.
‘the principle importance of [ritual] lies in the concrete physical…activities themselves, i.e. in the ceremonial acts of the ritual [not in the interpretations of them].’
(Kotwal and Boyd 1977: 33)
Potentiating
An event, not a sign
As a bare event can also be viewed as a hermetic image which invites interpretation
The gesture: both an indecipherable mystery and an inexhaustible source of meaning
In the spirit of the right repetition
A ‘real beginning’ in Roquentin’s words
‘When you approach the ritual afresh….it is alive…You are like a phoenix, resurrected every time – out of the ashes, you grow.
(Boyd 1989)
A limited horizon
Indecipherable mystery
Lures
Engenders
Live righteously
Tradition
Contrasting approaches and applications
Repeated encounters
Spiraling circuit
Poles of meaning and mystery
Good thoughts, words, and deeds
Other Dimensions
Visual composition of the carpet and utensils
Aural effects of the manthra
A ritual handshake
Two art forms
Poetic manthric utterances
Physical movement
D. Knowledge and Truth
Unlike Jennings criterion
The true priest, whose life is dedicated to the performance of these rituals, becomes an instrument of their effectiveness, and the radiance of the holy, that divine glory which nourishes life and progress and benefits to the world and mankind, shines from him. He, like the ritual event….itself, contributes through his daily ceremonial activities, to the increase, prosperity and salvation of the world.
(Kotwal and Boyd 1977: 44)
The Dastur also hints at a criterion of falsity:
‘When you see two priests you can immediately distinguish from their very faces, that this priest is a lustrous priest, he has got glory on his face…and the other priest, he is a hypocrite…you can find from the face of the priest himself.’
(Boyd and Darrow 1982)
Knowledge gained is reflected in the amended ritual action.
Enlightened actions and countenance
‘If anything is likely to change, it is not ritual, but theology. Theology is not one and the same from scholar to scholar – so many positions…so many different views.’
(Boyd 1989)
Chapter 10 Companionable Form
A second stance distinguishable from Jennings view
Not confined to pedagogy
It is possible to acquire knowledge new to the tradition
It is necessary that one be committed to preserving the ritual unchanged
Exemplars of Virtue
Recall Aristotle’s advice to anyone who would be moral: find a moral person whom you can observe and emulate.
Ritual artworks
Subtle suggestion
Open to interrogation
Multiple interpretations
Play a role similar to Aristotle’s good person?
Rituals can both enjoin us to certain tasks and values
Invite us to discover….more adequate ways of being.
Develop these ideas by drawing from a recent work in iconology.
Search for the Right Image
W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Iconology’
Investigate the power of images (like Bly)
Images as either:
1) purely aesthetic (and thus as partially disarmed)
2) dangerous and bewitching idols from which we must try to be free
Mitchell asks if there might not be a middle ground
Totems
Midway between aesthetic objects and idols
‘Anthropology offers us an example of such an image in the notion of the totem. Totems are not idols or fetishes, not objects of worship, but ‘compassionate forms’ (to use Coleridge’s phrase) which the viewer may converse with, cajole, bully, or cast aside. They are, in Sir James Fraser’s words, ‘an imaginary brotherhood established on the footing of perfect equality between a group of people on the one side and a group of things on the other side.’ (1986: 114)
Rituals and Companions
…..a person or a community can interact with inanimate objects, events, and images – with ritual e.g., as if with companions or guides.
‘brotherhood established on the footing of equality’
Wordsworth’s concept of ‘living images of imagination’
Socrates’ notion of ‘provocative’ images which encourage fruitful contemplation of the Good and Beautiful (1986: 114)
Aristotle’s ‘good person’ extended to ritual actions
Particularly visual metaphors which command our attention, provoke our investigations, and defeat our overly cognitive and premature answers.
Rituals are in part exemplars of virtue.
Sartre’s protagonist Roquentin
Jazz music – virtually an ‘agent’ who can witness Roquentin’s actions, shame him, impose its rhythms on his gestures, and even to challenge him to justify his existence.
Can also find confirmation of the idea of ritual as agent within the Zoroastrian tradition.
For the orthodox Zoroastrians the sacred fire is the son of God, an exemplification of the divine energy that infuses the menog and getig.
The fire…..a fine example of the perception of ritual objects and events as companionable forms. Datsur Kotwal: ‘Yes, they have sustained me, and their effect will last until the end of my life’
(Boyd 1989)
Why Rituals Cannot Be Changed
Such anthropomorphic talk of companions may seem overstated, but we see it as an attempt to illuminate the complex relation between practitioner and ritual.
Ritual as benign, leading presence, can interrogate us
Questioned by us
A stern teacher
A model of purity opposing our actions and habits
An exemplification of that ideal
A virtual incarnation of the Most High
Rather than a mere sign of the sacred.
In honoring ritual companion, one honors God
Priests unwavering attention
Precise execution
Their transmitting the ritual unchanged
Why must it be repeated unchanged?
Reverence
Humility
Awe and vulnerability
The unknowable sacred
Moral commitment
To honor
The ontological priority of the ‘Most High’
The one who is invisible among ourselves
Unvarying source of Wisdom
Our perception of it
Bare event vs. interpreted event
Jennings – a more ‘amenable’ view of ritual
As an improvisational dancer is to the dance
A more process-oriented view of the reality i.e. Whiteheadian thought or the philosophy of 9th century Zoroastrian writer Mardan Farrukh (with whom Dastur Kotwal disagrees on fundamentals)
The danger of hubris
The integrity of the ritual masterpiece
Logically independent of a street
Conservative view of other facets of the tradition
Conclusion
Jennings: change is essential to the acquisition of knowledge
He employs metaphors from both science and art:
Kuhnian paradigms and experimental drama
On the other hand – invariance as key to the rituals noetic function
Commitment to invariance a necessary condition for the acquisition of knowledge
More alien i.e. to the a priori dimensions of scientific theories rather than the more easily changed empirical aspects
Within (emic) without (etic)
Emic – fitting action
Attitude of reverence
And humility
Etic – e.g. two different scientific views of the pendulum
For an Aristotelian, a pendulum is a constrained weight seeking its natural point of rest
The Newtonian view, on the other hand, – a periodic device which will remain in motion except for the interference of friction
1) intends to come to rest
2) intends to stay in motion
In Jennings’s view; the first stance
1) ritual ‘intends’ to change
2) ritual ‘intends’ to remain changeless
Brian Smith states a relevant warning about the ‘illusion’ of invariance:
‘Such an illusion, necessary for maintaining the continuity and orthodoxy of religious traditions, is not one that is appropriately reduplicated in scholarship about these traditions….’ (1989: 222)
Students of ritual
Emic and etic perspective
Deleuze 1989 : 149 -55
The challenge to characterize perceptively the practitioner’s knowledge by means of our own knowledge is common to such diverse fields as anthropology, documentary film making, history, and literary criticism.
Biases introduced by one’s paradigm
Inessential
Duty of the practitioner
i.e. how the Yasna ceremony has changed over the centuries
Jennings looks through screens of historical change, empirical disconfirmation and improvisation
Dastur Kotwal’s screen is the Zoroastrian tradition
John Wisdom:
‘Any classification system is a net spread on the blessed manifold of the individual and blinding us not to all, but to many of its varieties and continuities. A new system will do the same but not in the same ways. So that in accepting all the systems their blinding power is broken, their revealing power becomes acceptable; the individual is restored to us, not isolated as before we used language, not in a box as when language mastered us, but in ‘creation’s chorus’ (1953, 1964: 119)
Chapter 11 Summary and Concluding Methodological Remarks
In resume’…
A ritual is akin to an artistic masterpiece
An artistic masterpiece is that which rewards attention over time
Virtual power
Processes of learning and discovery
Acts as a guide
Coherence is in ritual
Complex conversation between practitioners and theorists
As performers and observers
Recapitulation
Retracing the Path: What Ritual is and What It Does:
Ritual serves extra-artistic ends from within the socio-religious milieu
Characterized ritual as a multi-dimensional artistic activity
Simultaneously employs various art forms:
From the visual to the dramatic to the literary
Physical, virtual and language-like ‘spaces’
Virtual features – virtual power
the Good, the True , the Beautiful, the Sacred
Part II – two of the possible stances the practitioner may take toward ritual practice.
Jennings, Theodore – takes ritual to be knowledge of the body, gained by means of the body (movement)
Sui generis ‘body knowledge’
Second stance – ‘invariant’ ritual practice
Developed by means of the analysis of the ritual image from the side of language
Powers of poetic images
Generated from the encounter between two theories of metaphor
Extends to other ritual images i.e. Gestural image
Makes possible the communication and creation of knowledge
Powers of metaphor
Makes use of the interplay of physical, semantic and virtual features of the various arts employed in a ritual
Morals of the Story
…a demonstration of the authors most general thesis that viewing ritual activity through the lens of aesthetic theory can be revelatory
A – Art’s Contribution to Ritual
Not a decorative addition to ritual
Necessary
Integrative and noetic
Powers of ritual are directly generated by the functioning of artistic images in the ritual
Ritual’s Contribution to Religion
Ritual not a decorative addition to religious belief and practice
Internal to the noetic function
An oscillation between the meaningful and the meaningless which enables and guides noetic exploration
invariance
Ritual repetition a central feature
Knowledge is gained because of repetition, not in spite of it
The transformative potential of even the most structured and repetitive ritual practice
Tom Driver – three basic functions of traditional ritual practice: ‘making and preserving order, fostering community and effecting transformation (1991: 7)
Driver further distinguishes between priestly (institutional) rituals from more ancient and fluid shamanistic rituals
1) control function
2) transformation takes precedent
The Two Stances; Cooperation and Confrontation
Jennings – the first stance
Doesn’t account for commitment to invariance i.e. Kotwal
Gives only a partial account of the role of repetition – i.e. mere pedagogy
The ‘contrary’ stance
Now, however and opportunity to notice ways they may interact
1) may be appropriate at different historical stages of a ritual tradition
2) same set of rituals, different stances i.e. orthodox and reformists
3) a stable invariant period may be viewed as providing both pedagogy and new knowledge
The ‘masterpiece’ analogy
Native American peyote ceremonies
Weidman and Greene, 1988
A search for fitting action
Also a search for fitting utensils, costumes, physical arrangements and iconic symbols
A coming of age ceremony
Pre – liminal
Post – liminal
Cocoon-like
A dismantling of old habits , rights, and duties and construction of the new
Turner, i.e. tended to emphasize the symbolic and dramaturgical aspects of rituals and their social function
In contrast, these authors have
1) moved away from emphasis on symbols toward virtual and physical space
2) emphasized the many different art forms involved in ritual and their interactions
3) concentration on the religious/ethical knowledge gained by the practitioner via repeated ritual practice
Jennings: ‘by and through the body’
What new knowledge can be gained
Virtual Space, Potentiation and Liminality
Arnold van Gennap (1960)
Victor Turner (1969)
Developed the notion of ritual liminality
Ritual of transition facilitate a change of social status to those partaking in the ceremony
The interplay between structure (conveying) and freedom (potentiating)
Search for a Perspicuous Meta-Language
What interpretive categories are appropriate to two different kinds of performance, ritualistic and artistic
Not employed the existing meta-language of ritual studies/anthropology or art criticism
Begun to develop a new metalanguage, an over-arching set of concepts, that as central to both ritual and art
The notion of:
1) horizon
2) complex masterpieces
3) commitment to invariance
4) physical, virtual and meaning spaces
5) two poles and five powers of metaphor
Provide the over-arching meta-language which enables us to bring together in one discussion both art and ritual
Analysis and Synthesis
The three spaces and ritual characteristics (within the second stance) are ‘internally connected’
The poles of metaphor are contrary but ‘complementary’
The five powers ‘co-operate to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge
These integrative relations are indispensable to the explanation of ritual’s noetic function and integrative power
Is ritual an instrument or an autonomous expression?
Are ritual maps or parts of the territory?
Are rituals emotive or discursive?
Does it provide new knowledge in a different form?
Is it meaningless (formal, grammatical) or meaningful (interpretive, semantic)?
The answers have all been ‘yes’.
Fritz Staal claims that rituals are meaningless and that they must be studied as events, not as signs (1979: 3)
In contrast, Victor Turner insists that ritual liminality is established by means of the symbolic structure of ritual performance (1969: 94-96)
The present study says such debate are viewed in terms of the harmonization and conflict of physical and meaning spaces via the mediation of virtual space
…expect that rituals range from those which physical and virtual aspects dominate to those dominated by theological interpretation
Neither of the one-dimensional analysis proposed by Staal and Turner is adequate by itself
Remarks on Method
Parameters of the Present Study
Philosophical (aesthetic) insights
To bear on the study of ritual
Analyses may appear to be more comprehensive than is actually intended
Philosophical Context
Not begun with a systematic metaphysics (e.g.….. Aristotle’s) deriving aesthetics from it…
And then applying those results to the analysis of ritual
Study is not ‘systematic’ n that traditional sense.
No attempt to prove the theories of Langer, Davidson and Bly are ‘true’.
Rather…borrowed freely from these theories
In this sense…approach is pluralistic rather than systematic.
Different methods and kinds of data
Ranging from fieldwork to philosophical analysis and from empirical observations to Roquentin’s fictional diary.
Prompted by the belief that in ritual studies fundamental questions of method remain open.
The Realm of Ritual
Essential characteristics
Resemblance
A family – highly diverse
One member – traditional, highly interpreted, religious rituals
Only Zoroastrian ritual practice
Limited to ‘stances’ toward ritual rather than general characteristics.
Other Aspects of Ritual yet to be Explored
Focus on ritual’s aesthetic dimension
The transcendent reference in Zoroastrian rites – Ahura Mazda
The fravishes and the Bountiful Immortals – has not been the object of this study.
Virtual and metaphorical powers
‘sacred’ space and ritual’s integrative and noetic functions
Independent of such religious/ontological issues
Some ‘intersection’ and convergence
The Yasna
Limited to the flower exchange
Gestural component
Timing and rhythm
Placement of implements
Priest’s position and movement
Senses of taste and smell
Philip Turetzky – rhythm and ‘pulse’
See also Bly (1982)
‘The Golden Bough’, Fraser
Wittgenstein (1967)
Cioffi (1981: 213) says what Wittgenstein:
‘Means that many of the Fire-festivals are intelligible as they stand, that, in their detail, or in the demeanor of their participants, they directly manifest their ‘inner character’, their relation to the idea of the sacrificial burning of a man. They strike us as….dramatizations of this idea independently of any empirical evidence that they originated in such an event’.
Repetition has important psychological effects, some of which are related to knowledge.
The realm of the unconscious
Sartre’s fictional diary
Zoroastrian rituals
Rational reconstructions of processes that guide and change the practitioner n both conscious and unconscious levels.
Collective/archetypal
Freud’s concerns regarding repetition
Therapy – ritual in i.e. ‘play’ therapy
Trauma, personal trauma
Confirmation
A considerable overlap between Kotwal’s views and the author’s
Ritual structure
Priest’s commitment
Ritual as artwork and the power of art.
Philosophy of art (i.e. Langer)
Ritual studies (notably Jennings)
The Ritual Act and the Theory of the Act
Students of ritual
Unbiased eyes
Videotaped performances
Aesthetic analyses – appropriate
Shifting From Act to Theory
A view of ritual through the lens of aesthetics has its distortions
‘shifts’
As enacted by priest
To the observer, outsider
Secondhand by means of film or description
A performative artwork
Treated as a series of visual/dramatic images
Then taken akin to poetic images or metaphors
Propositional descriptions of the significance of these poetic images
The implicit claim that such descriptions illuminate the original ritual enactment.
i.e. insight and knowledge
an obvious risk
at each juncture something may be lost or distorted…or arbitrary elements may be introduce
i.e. function of a caricature: not in spite of its distortions, but because of them.
General Limits of Theory
More general aspects of the theoretical enterprise
Michael Polanyi laments that:
‘unbridled’ lucidity can destroy our understanding of complex matters, that it can ‘efface’, meaning known on the tacit level, and that it can never bring to the fore such original meaning, he is speaking of dangers inherent in the very nature of the theory, risks which cannot be escaped though they can escape notice.’ (1966: 18) Polanyi
E. ritual gesture known by doing, not by means of the intermediary language.
In part ‘tacit knowledge’
Williams –
‘When we speak of distortion, particularly involved in abstraction, caricature or metaphor, we must be careful. For these modes of description do not work in spite of distortion: they work because of it. They belong to the class of those things which are false but illuminating, or even illuminating because false. Lichtenstein’s ‘misconstruing’s of other works (to use his words) not only result in artworks (his own), but are produced in the service of revelation.’
‘….bearing in mind recent post-modernist and deconstructionist warnings about how language makes dead that which it seeks to animate.’ (see Shaviro 1990:10)
‘Every process of formalization or idealization is founded upon the death of its object…[the] aesthetic state of purposiveness without purpose [e.g. Kant], eliminates the proximity of the objects on the one hand, and the passion of the subject on the other. Aesthetics is predicated upon death precisely to the extent that it posits the free disinterested delight of a fixed and centered subject regarding the unity of a static object…’
Power to reveal
Constant reference to limits.
Interpretation without Reductionism
Limitations of theory in general
Reductionism
From enacted ritual à ritual observed à ritual artworks à image, poetic, metaphor, interpretation.
A loss or reduction
Significance
‘rituals are artworks as persons are physical objects’
Shaviro 1990: 10 (see above)
Persons and rituals are more than objects or artworks, respectively.
Incompletely characterized in other words
Salvific rituals
Non-salvific artworks
rituals are not ‘merely’ artworks
Attending to the Gesture
Traditional suggestion is: ‘one must’ partake in ritual to understand ritual!
Both religious and political
Buddhist’s insistence on surrounding thinking with meditation and ritual practice
Marxist notion of praxis
Theorizing
On documentary film see Deleuze 1989: 147-55
Deleuze says:
‘Give me a body then; this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life. Life [in this new cinema] will no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown into the categories of life. The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of the body, its postures …..it is through the body ( and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that [this] cinema forms its alliances with the spirit with thought…’ (1989: 189)
Deleuze gives examples of key films of this type – e.g. Warhol, Antonioni and Cassavettes.
‘Characters are constituted gesture by gesture and word by word, as the film proceeds, they construct themselves, the shooting acting on them like a revelation each advancement of the film allowing them a new development in their behavior; their own duration very precisely coinciding with that of the film’ (1989: 193)
Theories of ritual
None of this effort replaces the ritual act and what makes manifest: the difference between event and word, between life and reflection.
Appendixes
Ritual description
Appendix 1
The Yasna: A Zoroastrian High Liturgy
Overview
The Yasna (‘worship’) service is the most frequently performed liturgy of the Zoroastrian fire temple. See Kotwal and Boyd 1991 for a detailed description of the Yasna liturgy.
Solemnized by two priests and is preceded by a service (the paragna) in which one of the priests assembles and consecrates the ritual materials necessary for the Yasna.
The laity sometimes witness
Essentially, however, a priestly act of worship on behalf of the whole community.
To please the exalted Lord of Wisdom Ahuru Mazda, and all Spirit beings of his good creation.
They are invited to be present at the liturgical celebration and are asked to receive the offerings and bestow their bountiful blessings.
The Yasna text, recited by memory, is divided into seventy two chapters
Within those chapters are the Gathas of Zarathustra (chapters 28-34, 43-51 and 53) which are given special reverence
The entire Avestan text, however, is considered manthric by orthodox Zoroastrians
Manthra, or sacred speech, infuses the entire consecrated area with holiness and power, in turn benefit both the physical (getig) and spiritual (menog) worlds.
Requisites for the Ceremony
Ritual area oriented towards the south and contains three low, stone tables. On the southernmost table is the fire, which is of major importance to the ritual, and is kept alive throughout the ceremony by the assistant priest
He feeds the fire pieces of sandalwood and frankincense taken from a round tray near the fire
At the other end of the ritual area is a stone platform on which the chief priest sits or stands during the liturgy
In front of the platform is the ritual table set with purified utensils
On the east side of the ritual table are two crescent moon or the horns of a bull.
Laid across the top of the stands is a bundle of twenty –one wires called barsom, which are held together by a date-palm leaf woven with a cord.
The date palm is kept freshly moistened throughout the ceremony, and the gestures of moistening barsom marks the start of the recitation of a new chapter of the Yasna text.
Next to the stands is a metal saucer of fresh goat’s milk, which is mixed with other ingredients to make a consecrated drink called hom. Other utensils o the ritual table are a mortar in which twigs are crushed to make the hom drink, a shallow bowl (next to the mortar) containing three hom twigs and a pomegranate twig, and three metal cups – one containing a parahom drink consecrated in the prefatory service; another libation water and a third, the strand’s of a bull’s hair tied to a ring. The bowl containing unleavened whet bread and a cube of clarified butter, placed on the table early in the ceremony, and is also shown in Fig. 2.
Beside the ritual table is a large metal basin of water in which a pestle and strainer are submerged. The strainer is used as a sieve for filtering the consecrated hom drink. A vase-like metal container next to the basin is used throughout the liturgy for pouring water to cleanse and purify the priest’s hands.
Preparation
The two priests must ritually cleanse themselves prior to any service, whether an inner temple liturgy like the Yasna, or an outer ceremony like the Afrinagan. They wash their hands, faces and feet, and untie and re-tie the sacred cords around their waists (padyab-kusti) while reciting established prayers appropriate for the hour and the day. Both priests wear white garments; white turbans, white organdy robes over white shirts and pants, and white veils covering their mouths and noses. The veil prevents any saliva from touching the ritual objects.
Before the chief priest enters the ritual area to loin his assistant, who has just completed the prefatory (paragna) service he proclaims: ‘righteousness is good’ (ashem vohu 1: hereafter abbreviated a.v. 1, the Arabic numeral designating the number of utterances).
Upon entering the consecrated area, he takes some sandalwood and frankincense from the round tray and offers it to the fire on a ladle while reciting the great Ahunauvar manthra eight times (designated by its first three words: yatha ahu vairyo .8 hereafter abbreviated y.a.v. 8) Dastur Kotwal’s rendering of this manthra is:
‘As Ahura Mazda is the Sovereign Lord, so is Zoroaster the spiritual Lord due to his righteousness. The gifts of the Good Mind are for those who work for Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom. He who nourishes the poor ascribes sovereignty to Ahura Mazda’.
This invocation is soon followed by an antiphonal recitation between two priests, called an exchange of baj [utterance]. The chief priest’s role as representative of the Lord of Wisdom is affirmed in this exchange, as is the creative and sustaining purpose of the Yasna liturgy.
The exchange begins with the chief priest’s addressing Ahuru Mazda as the Priest of all creation and asking the Lord of Wisdom to reveal the twenty-one words of the Ahunauvar, the most effacious manthra of the Zoroastrians.
The associated priest also asks that the Ahunawar be proclaimed the chief priest as representative of Ahura Mazda then affirms that Zarathustra; the holy and wise spiritual guide, proclaimed the Ahunawar through righteousness.
After this exchange of baj, a number of ritual actions take place, including the purification of the fire stand and the placement of the unleavened piece of bread (with its cube of clarified butter) in a saucer on the ritual table. Both priests recite in an undertone a Pazand deduction (dibacha) to the spirit being in whose honor the Yasna is being performed. It expresses the hope that this ceremony will be completed with success, and names the person, living or dead, in whose remembrance the service is being celebrated.
Pazand recitations are generally said in an undertone (bista) when their placement comes between Avestan manthra. In this way, the full-voiced (grushada) manthric recitations are essentially uninterrupted, and continuity of sacred speech maintained.
The holy power of manthra speech, in fact, is not only sustained throughout the ceremony, but also frames or encircles the liturgy, both at the beginning and at the end.
The Yasna Proper
The memorized recitation of seventy –four chapters of the Avestan Yasna begins with the invitation to Ahura Mazda, the Bountiful Immortals, and all other good spirit beings (Yasna 1). This is followed by a litany to barsom (Y.2) the bundle of metal wires which is an emblem of the whole liturgy; with it the chief priest establishes a connecting link between this getig world and the menog realm.
The major ritual actions in the early portion of the Yasna are the tasting of the sacred bread (Y.8) and the drinking of the parahom (y.1), a mixture of consecrated water with the essence of crushed hom and pomegranate twigs prepared in the prefatory service. The tasting of the sacred bread is done in honor of the spirit being Srosh, who was the first to worship the Bountiful Immortals with barsom and who dwells in the midst of the created order as Ahura Mazda’s protective and inspirational presence in both the getig and menog realms.
The drinking of the parahom mixture which follows upon a litany to the spirit being Hom (Y. 9-11) induces spiritual exhilaration and is associated in the dedicatory recitation with Zarathustra (Y.3.8), the priest and prophet of the revelation from Ahura Mazda to humankind. The chief priest’s ingesting of the sacred bread and drink, therefore, is a physical act of appropriating the invigorating power of Hom, the protective and inspirational presence of Srosh, and the revelatory insight provided by the prophet Zarathustra.
A profession of faith in these revelatory insights (Y. 12 – 13) follows. The chief priest praises the practice of good thoughts, word, and deeds and denounced all that is negative and contrary to such righteousness. Both priests commit their lives to Ahura Mazda even if it requires sacrifice of their bodies for their souls.
The theological context of this profession of faith is cosmic both in space and time. For the ritual area itself is a microcosm of the whole reality. Once consecrated, each ritual item exemplifies the presence of its corresponding Bountiful Immortal. The ritual precinct of purified stone manifests the spirit of Devotion. The consecrated water and plants and wheat bread become the actualized presence of Health and Life.
The hairs from a living white bull are the material presence of the holy power of Good Mind. The consecrated fire is the physical embodiment of the principle of Righteousness, and the metal implements, like the crystal sky which was conceived as metallic by Zarathustra, exemplified by the power of Dominion. Thus the priests are committed to a battle of universal proportions in order to conquer evil, even in the face of their own personal destruction.
Having enacted their commitment by professing their faith, and having invoked the menog powers, the priests libate the date-palm cord tied around the barsom wires with a mixture of consecrated water and goat’s milk (Y. 14 – 180. The libation exemplifies the archetypal principles of Health (water) and the Good Mind (milk) and conveys these sustaining powers to the date-palm cord. A hymn to the Lords of all the manthras follows (Y. 19-21), thus affirming in explicit sequence the power of both the ritual deed and the spoken word.
The major ritual actions in the next portion of the liturgy center in the pounding and consecration of the hom (Y. 22-27), a sacramental drink, that will contain all the ingredients of parahom plus milk, a product of the animal kingdom which exemplifies the principle of the Good Mind. In recitation and gesture, the celebrant approaches Ahura Mazda and his spiritual creation with praise of the spirit being Hom and with all the exemplary items of the ritual offering: milk, the date-plum cord, water, the iron mortar, the Gathas, sandalwood and frankincense, and the ritual fire.
Striking the mortar with the pestle and reciting the Ahunauvar manthra the chief priest pounds the twigs. In so doing, he dramatically joins the cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, each blow of the pestle smiting the invoked presence of Angra Mainyu (the evil one), the demo of wrath, and all gigantic. Wicked, and lustful demons. The fact that we humans possess the Ahunwar is again celebrated (Ahunavaiti Gatha: Y 28-34) and the manthric power of this revelation is infused into the mixture as the priest pounds the hom twigs three more times, releasing their life-giving essence.
The priests then praise the bountiful and sovereign Lord, the teacher and hearer of manthra, and the earth, water, sky and winds, fish and animals, together with the exalted spirit being Hom, who prevents disease and promotes the world (Y. 43-46). A hymn of happiness follows (a Ushtavaiti Gatha: Y.43-46), a Gathic hymn extolling the Lord of Wisdom and the happiness of the spiritual life He provides us. The prosperity and immortality of the spiritual life granted through the Bountiful Spirit (the Spenta Mainyu Gatha Y. 47 – 50), and the power of the Good Mind is proclaimed, followed by a Gathic hymn of appeal that the right governing power be brought about to sustain the good and happy life in the world ( the Vehu-Khshathra Gatha : Y 51). A prayer for blessings on all good persons and the entire creation (Y.52) precedes the final Gathic hymn of Best Wishes ( the Vahushtalshti Gatha: Y 53) which declares a blessed life to those who live honestly and reiterates the threat of a hellish life for those who prefer evil. It is the true spirit of companionship (Y.54) among honest persons that bring joy and happiness to men and women.
The five Gathas just received are celebrated (y. 55) for they are the source of wisdom and are eminently worthy of study, the very food and clothing of our souls.
Two litanies to Srosh follow (Y.56 – 57) , the first again requesting his presence here in the worship service, as it is through Srosh that Ahura Mazda’s inspiration is heard.
The second litany praises Srosh as a courageous warrior, the first who worshipped the Bountiful Immortals with barsom and the first to chant the five Gathas. The manthra of prosperity (Y. 58-59), which is to be uttered before the last judgment at the end of this time of mixture, affirms that it is the righteous who take care that the world prospers. The priest then praises the power of victory; the future Savior Soshyant, who will usher in the end-times of the period of mixture; all holy souls and guardian spirits the barsom and libation.
The final section of the Yasna consists of a further binding of the barsom with the date-palm cord, praise of fire and water, and the pouring of the consecrated hom offering into a well outside the ritual area. It begins with a recitation of the manthra of benediction (Dahamaan Afrin; Y. 60-61), which proclaims the triumph of obedience, peace, charity, humility, true speech, righteousness, and prosperity over wickedness. The powerful and pervading presence of all manthras is affirmed, dislodges Angra Mainyu and his evil creation of thieves, heretics, sorcerers, tyrants, and evil-speaking workers.
A litany to fire, the son of Ahura Mazda (Y.62) and very presence of the cosmic order is followed by a litany to the waters. (Y. 62 –Y.70), the primordial source of Health. An earnest desire is expressed that the waters accept the consecrated libation about to be offered to them. This is followed by a litany to the whole creation(Y. 71-72)
Praise of the ancient Manthras ends with a ritual handshake, during which both priests say (in the Pazand languages), ‘May you be united in strength with all righteous ones.’ The chief priest then concludes this portion of the liturgy, which takes place in the ritual precinct, by uttering a dedication to the spirit being in whose honor the Yasna is being performed. Leaving the ritual area, he proceeds to the well with his assistant to pour the libation into the well-waters, praising the whole creation that it may be strengthened.
Infusing the consecrated hom drink into the well blesses and strengthens the waters and thereby the rest of creation. Thus the purpose of the liturgy is accomplished, for the blessings of the spiritual realm have been received in the consecration of the material realms, and the good creation is strengthened to the pleasure of the exalted Lord of Wisdom. The Yasna concludes, as it began, with the manthric declaration ‘righteousness is good’ (a.v. 1).
Appendix 2
The Afrinagan of Ardafrawash:
Ceremony of Blessings Dedicated to All Holy Guardian Spirits
Overview
The Afrinagan or ‘blessings’ ceremony is one of the most commonly performed rituals in the Zoroastrian community
May be celebrated in a home garden, fire temple, or in the buildings adjoining the towers of silence.
It is usually conducted by two Zoroastrian priests, though more may participate; qualified laity are also eligible to perform it.
The half-hour ceremony essentially consists of the recitation of three selections from the Avesta over an offering of fragrant flowers, wine and fruits set before a fire.
The ritual can be solemnized in honor of any spirit being (Yazad) or beings and is celebrated in the name of either a living person or a deceased soul.
From an orthodox Zoroastrian perspective, the purpose of this ritual is to invite spiritual beings (from the menog realm) into this world (the getig realm) and offer them the essence of the consecrated food.
The spirit beings derive both pleasure and strength from these offerings. They, in turn, bestow blessings of prosperity and increase to all righteous inhabitants of both the getig and menog realms. Those persons named in the ceremony are especially blessed.
See Mod: 1922: 354-84
Haug 1878, 1978L 408-9
Drower 1956: 224 -28
Westergaard 1852 54: 318-24
Jashens – Zoroastrian public acts of worship
Requisites for Ceremony
A characteristic ritual setting is illustrated in fig. 4. On the white cloth placed over a rug are a variety of silver trays, a fire vase, a ladle, and a pair of tongs, an oil lamp, and a vase of water.
One tray contains fruits (pomegranate is always used; others may be dates, papaya, pears, apples, grapes, coconut, or dry fruits such as raisins, flowers (fragrant flowers of the season, such as roses or jasmine are sometimes supplemented with vases of gladiolas and other seasonal flowers), a vase of water, and three small glasses of milk, sharbat (a sweet lime juice) and wine.
Another tray holds sandalwood and frankincense.additional trays containing eggs and cooked sweetmeats, may also be used.
In the present example, two priests conduct the ceremony. During the first portion of the ritual, the priests sit facing each other on opposite sides of the fire vase. At other times in the ceremony, the assistant priest stands.
The tray containing the flowers and the liquid offerings is situated in front but slightly to the left of the chief priest, and touches the fire vase. The tray containing sandalwood and frankincense is to the assistant priest’s side, as are the tongs, ladle and oil lamp. The assistant priest is in charge of building and maintaining the fire throughout the ceremony.
Preparation
Prior to the celebration, the two priests ritually cleanse themselves by washing their hands, faces and feet, and untying and retying the sacred cords around their waists (padyab-kusti) while reciting established prayers appropriate for the time of day the ritual is to be celebrated. They wear white organdy robes over their white shirts and pants, priestly turbans, and veils covering their mouths and noses.
The chief priest faces east preferably or if this is not possible due to limitations of location, south or west. He never faces north.
Before the ceremony begins, the chief priest picks up eight flowers and arranges them in the following way. Two flowers are placed vertically on the cloth directly in front of him. The other six flowers are lined up horizontally in two groups of three with the blossoms facing the center.
8_ _3
7_ _4
6_ _5
Pazand Preface – Dibacha
The chief priest begins the ‘blessings’ ceremony dedicated to all holy guardian spirits by reciting a preface (dibacha) in the Pazand language, the opening line of which is: ‘with good thoughts, words and deeds – with good thinking, speaking and doing – may this dedication reach the righteous guardian spirits [ardafrawash].’ This recitation also remembers the name of the spirit being (yazad) to whom the ceremony is dedicated, the name of the person, living or dead, in whose honor the service is held, and the name(s) of the living person’(s) who commissioned the service. In addition, the priest announces the member and the names of the manthric prayers and other dedicatory formulas that will be recited n the ceremony proper. Using the tongs, the chief priest puts frankincense on the fire while remembering the name of the departed, recalling the name of Zoroaster, and reciting dedications to the guardian spirits. The assistant priest joins in the recitation of the last phrase (‘May it be successful’ or ‘amen’) of the preface as both priests bring their hands together in a ritual salutation.
First Selection of Avestan Recitations
Before the recitation of a portion of the Avestan that invokes all holy guardian spirits (ardafrawash) both priests recite several mantras and dedicatory formulas appropriate for this celebration, including eight invocations of the great Ahunawar manthra (y.a.v. 8) and three of the prayers in praise of righteousness (a.v. 3). Such manthric invocations will also be said at the conclusion of this section of the ritual as well as at the end of the ceremony itself, thereby encircling each section and the entire ritual with the power of holy manthric speech. Reciting these initial invocations is called ‘entering the baj’, and the concluding recitations are termed ‘leaving the baj’.
Both priests then recite the first selection of Avestan manthra, which is a litany to the holy guardian spirits of the just (Yashi 13: 49 – 52, 156 – 7). These righteous guardian spirits are spoken of as seeking praise, worship and sustenance, and are invited to the place of offering, their blessings are sought, and the desire is expressed that they leave satisfied. This invocation is followed by a repetition of the same threefold recitation which preceded it (a.v. 3) the assistant priest takes the ladle in his right hand. With his left hand he picks up a piece of sandalwood offering to the fire. This is done three times, one for each recitation. He then stands up and shifts the ladle to his left hand.
The chief priest picks up flower 1 with his right hand, holding it in his palm, then flower 2 between his thumb and forefinger and gives it to the assistant priest, who receives it with his right hand while standing in an attitude of respect (see Fig 5). Holding the flower upright, he recites a manthric phrase praising Ahura Mazda, the radiant and the glorious, and the chief priest also holds up his flower in a gesture of respect and both priests recite an Avestan passage which invokes blessings on the ruler of the country.
While reciting, the assistant priest touches the tip of the ladle held in his left hand to the underside of the south side of the fire-vase lid. Saying the concluding ‘amen’ phrase (‘thus may it be so’) followed by ‘I bless’ (afrinami), the two priests exchange flowers in the following way. The chief priest touches his left hand to the flower tray (which, in turn, is touching the fire-vase) and offers the assistant priest flower 1. The assistant takes the flower in his right palm and offers his own to the chief priest, who, also receives it in the palm of his right hand.
Holding the flowers, both priests recite the Avestan passage (Yasna 35:2) which speaks of the Zoroastrian’s goal of incorporating good thoughts, words and deeds into their lives. While reciting the opening phrases ‘with good thoughts, good words, good deeds, the chief priest picks up flowers 3, 4 and 5, gathering them between his thumb and first two fingers (while continuing to hold in his palm the earlier exchanged flowers). He touches the bunched flowers to the vase of water, the sharbat, and the milk and wine glasses, and then places the three flowers in the assistant priest’s open right hand, continuing to hold them there until they finish reciting the Avestan verse.
The assistant priest shifts his standing position a little to the right and touches the end of the ladle to the northern underside of the fire-vase lid. Both priests recite Yasna 35.2 a second time, and the chief priest, keeping his left hand in contact with the tray, picks up the remaining three flowers (6,7, and 8) while again reciting ‘good thoughts, words and deeds’. After touching these flowers to the liquid offerings, he offers them to the assistant priest. The assistant priest now holds seven flowers in his right hand.
The assistant priest takes the ladle in his right hand (while still holding the flowers), moves a little to his left, and holds the ladle out in front of him so that the chief priest can grasp its broad-base tip. Taking hold of the base, the chief priest touches the ladle to the top of the vase of water as they both recite in an undertone a short Pasand prayer which praises the holy guardian spirits. This prayer is followed by a recitation of one Ahunawar manthra (y.a.v. 1) during which the chief priest touches the ladle to the top of the vase of water four times, first to its east side, then south, west and north, next he touches the ladle to the tray and last, the fire-vase lid, holding it there until the manthra is concluded. These ritual gestures of contact (paywand) are repeated, only this time they both recite the manthra praising righteousness (a.v. 1) and the ladle tip is placed on the four corner directions of the water vase, i.e. northeast, southwest, southeast and northwest, forming a criss-cross pattern of movement.
At the conclusion of this manthra, the chief priest places the ladle on the sandalwood tray and gives all seven flowers to the chief priest, who receives them with both hands cupped together, encloses them in folded hands, and makes a ritual salutation to the head. He places the consecrated flowers on the flower tray. With the assistant priest still standing, both recite two Ahunawar prayers (y.a.v. 2), dedicated to the Lord of Wisdom and to all guardian spirits, and the manthra in praise of righteousness (a.v. 1). The protecting power of these manthras again frames this portion of the ritual.
Reciting in undertone a Pazand passage, which expresses the hope that the celebrants, and all whom they represent, may be united in strength and righteousness, the priests join in a ritual handshake. This is followed by an encircling recitation of the Avestan ‘Amen’ and ‘I bless’ passage, and a reiteration of Yasna 35.2. the assistant priest then sits down, marking the conclusion of the first of three Avestan selections.
Second and Third Selections of Avestan Recitations
Since our example is an Afrinagan ceremony dedicated to all righteous guardian spirits, which is usually said in honor of the deceased, most often three Avestan selections are said: the first, as we have seen, is to the guardian spirits (ardafrawash) the second to the coworkers (dahman) of the seven Bountiful Immortals; the third, to the spirit being Srosh, the pervasive presence of Wisdom’s insight and the guardian spirit of the deceased.
The ritual sequence is as before, except that for these Avestan selections, the opening Pazand prefaces are said in an undertone, one in honor of the coworker and the following the completion of that ritual cycle, another in honor of Srosh. Likewise, the number of manthras differs in each section as do the dedicatory formulas in honor of the coworkers and of Srosh.
Each cycle follows the exact sequence as before, including the recitations of framing manthras, the exchange of flowers, and the concluding ritual handshake between the priests. The Avestan selection for the coworkers is Yasna 60. 2-7, which is a prayer of benediction. It asks that in this house there be triumph of obedience over disobedience, peace over discord, charity over miserliness, humility over wickedness and that all may prosper. The Avestan selection from Srosh is Yasna 57. 1 -8, a litany praising Srosh as the first who worshipped the Bountiful Immortals, as the first to chant the five Gathas, the sacred hymns revealed to Zoroaster.
Concluding Benedictions
Upon completion of the three ritual cycles dedicated to the guardian spirits, to the co-workers, and to Srosh, three Pazand benedictory prayers (afrin) are chanted in full voice by the chief priest. These serve as the concluding prayers for the entire three-part ceremony. The first seeks the benediction of all holy guardian spirits (Afrin of Ardafrawash). In this recitation, the priest affirms his unity with his religion, extols righteousness and abjures wickedness, and prays that the soul of the deceased be in the highest heaven, the abode of Ahura Mazda, the Bountiful Immortals, and other holy persons.
The second prayer asks for the benediction of the great personages of ancient times (Afrin of Buzorgan). This Pazand recitation declares that blessings are showered on the person who has ordered the ceremony, and blessings are sought so that this person may be as righteous and auspicious as the great ancient ruler Kai Khosrow and other good Kings and persons of Iran, in this way keeping alive the name and fame of Iran.
The final prayer is to the Bountiful Immortals (Afrin of Amahraspand). All seven Bountiful Immortals, with their co-workers, are praised, and it is wished that all be united with them and their adversaries defeated. Ancient personages and fires of Iran are remembered, as well as the guardian spirit of Zoroaster. It is hoped that joy, delight, comfort, auspiciousness, prosperity, and goodness may come to the house, and that disease, sickness, discomfort, pain, and pestilence leave it.
During the last paragraph of the final prayer, the assistant priest joins in the recitation as the chief priest brings his hands together in ritual salutation. Both recite a concluding benediction praising those who have come to this ceremony or have participated in it:
‘For every step taken by you, the pious ones who have come to this celebration and who have been the participators in this celebration may the resplendent House of Song [Garothman] come forward 1200 steps to meet [you]. May merits increase for your arrival (here) and may sins be eradicated on your departure. May the terrestrial world be good and the spiritual world excellent. Finally, may righteousness increase and may the souls be fit for the House of Song. May you be righteous and may you live long.’
Thereafter, both priests recite the final manthric invocations which frame the entire ceremony (leave the baj’) – y.a. 21, a.v. 12 – and concludes with a final unit of four prayers. The first wishes for health, glory, soundness of body, spiritual wealth, children with innate wisdom, long life, and the shining and blissful paradise of the next world. The second also wishes for abundant health, the third seeks help, courage, victory and joy from Ahuru Mazda. The fourth is a Pazand prayer, seeking increase of merits and decrease of sins. This concludes the Afrinagan of Ardafrawash.
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