Ritual and Symbolism

With respect to religious studies rituals can be described as time-honored patterns of sacred activity rooted in the psycho -cultural consciousness of a people, wanting to link the mundane or natural reality with the divine or transnatural. By invoking the sacred and transcendent with a series of mental, physical and verbal actions these acts tend to achieve a symbolic character which confers a completely novel significance and implication to them.

As Krishna^[1] has pointed out:

“rituals transform the biological cycles which is the most fundamental of all cycles into a cultural cycle. That is why in all cultures birth and death is not just biological phenomenon but profound cultural events associated with a lot of ritual and ceremonies which transform the biological into the cultural.”

The rites and ceremonial processes which are responsible for this transformation of the natural or the casual into the cultural are closely allied to the attitude of the practitioners to time and space and to the symbolism extant in the order which they follow.

The importance of this symbolism is rightly stressed on by Mircea Eliade^[2] in following words:

“all research undertaken on a religious subject implies the study of religious symbolis. Religous symbols are capable of revealing a modality of the real or a structure of the world that is not evident on the level of immediate experience….An essential characteristic of religious symbolism is its multivalence, its capacity to express simultaneously a number of meanings whose continuity is not evident on the plane of immediate experience.”

Regarding the importance of such sacred symbology Geertz^[3] writes;

Sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos-the tone, character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood-and their world view-the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive idea of order.

For a scholar and an uninitiated I feel this is the most appropriate and fruitful entry point in any system of thought or practice. Saivite Scholars have been engaged in this process of interpretation, deduction, elucidation and explanation of various texts, rituals, myths, arts and so on yet it has remained an enigmatic area.

As Ricoeur^[4] points out;

That symbols (especially religious symbols) tend always to have a double intentionality, that is to say, a first level obvious and literal signification as well as a second level indirect and oblique signification which is opaque, analogical and characterized by an inexhaustible depth. The interpretation of the symbol or a complex of symbols is thus, never simply an exercise in translation, difficult as this is. Interpretation, rather, is an attempt to understand and give expression to the “transparency of an enigma” which any symbol or symbol complex represents.

To add to what Ricoeur says these religious symbols don”t have one particular meaning but can be interpreted variously. While dealing with such data the idea of Foucault’s floating meaning strikes us. And it is precisely this complexity which gives the religious symbol, (ritual, art or myth) its power and efficacy.

Susan Langer^[5] in her important study, Philosophy in a New Key states that:

Symbols are not proxy for their objects, but are vehicles for the conception of objects. In talking about things we have conceptions of them, not the things themselves and it is the conceptions, not the things, which symbols directly mean.

She further goes on to enumerate three types of symbols viz: Discursive symbol, Presentational symbol and Artistic symbol and being a Formalist considers the Artistic symbol to be the most significant one:

An artistic symbol-which may be product of human craftsmanship or (on a purely personal level) something in nature seen as significant form has more than discursive and presentational meaning: its form as such, as a sensory phenomenon has what I have called implicit meaning, like rite and myth, but of a more catholic sort. It has what L.A Reid called “tertiary subject matter”, beyond the reach of “primary imagination” and even the “secondary imagination” that sees metaphorically.

Her approach instantly draws a connection between the ritualistic activity, mythological exegesis and the artistic manifestation. In all traditional societies and orders myth and ritual are two central components of a religious practice. Although myth and ritual are commonly united as parts of religion, the exact relationship between them has been debatable. One of the approaches to this problem is "the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory", which holds that "myth does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual”. Eliade too subscribes to this theory which suggests myths are created to explain a certain ritual.

There is an entire gamut of scholars who believe in the ritual purposes of myths hence at once increasing the importance of ritualistic behavior. According to Frazer^[6] ,"myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have been long forgotten. The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.”

The explanation somewhere rings true, as even nowadays people follow rituals without realizing their actual import. Logical questions will yield no satisfactory answers so many a times a ritual is blindly followed to continue a tradition. Burde^[7] divides religious rituals into four categories: worship rituals, rites of passage, festive rituals and sacraments while Tachikawa and Hino^[8] divide religious activity in two kinds: That which takes as its goal the spiritual well being of the individual; and that which has the purpose of enabling the group or the society to operate smoothly (festivals, initiation rites etc.). Toshkhani^[9] concludes that whether performed with the purpose of spiritual or material well being of an individual or religious cultivation of a social group, rituals serve as a means of communicating with divine beings or transnatural powers that are believed to guide and influence the course of human actions.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Krishna Daya, “Prolegomena to Any Future Historiography of Cultures and Civilizations”,Delhi,PHISC Series,p.8

[2]:

Eliade Mircea, “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism” In The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology Ed by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M Kitagawa, University of Chicago Press, 1959 p.95

[3]:

Geertz Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System” in M Banton ed, Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, London, 1966 p.5

[4]:

Ricoeur Paul, “The Symbolism of Evil”,California, 1980 p.14-24

[5]:

Langer Susan K. “Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, p.60

[6]:

Frazer James, “The Golden Bough”,Macmillan 1922 p.477

[7]:

Burde Jayant,as quoted by S.S.Toshkhani in “Rituals of Kashmiri Pandits

[8]:

Tachikawa and Hino as quoted by S.S.Toshkhani in “Rituals of Kashmiri Pandits

[9]:

Toshkhani S.S, Rites and Rituals of Kashmiri Brahmins, Pentagon Press, Delhi, 2010 p.5