Purity and Danger

One way of protecting ritual from scepticism is to suppose that an enemy, within or without the community, is continually undoing its good effect.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

Death presents a challenge to any metaphysical system, but the challenge need not be squarely met... The pangolin cult suggests a meditation on the inadequacy of the categories of human thought, but only a few are invited to make it and it is not related explicitly to their experience of death.

... They would never say, 'We avoid anomalous animals because in defying the categories of our universe they arouse deep feelings of disquiet.' But on each avoided animal they would launch into disquisitions on its natural history. The full list of anomalies made clear the simple taxonomic principles being used. But the pangolin was always spoken of as the most incredible monster of all. On first hearing it sounded such a fantastic beast that I could not believe in its existence.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

Instead of being abhorred and utterly anomalous, the pangolin is eaten in solemn ceremony by its initiates who are thereby enabled to minister fertility to their kind.

...In their descriptions of the pangolin's behavior and in their attitude to its cult, Lele say things which uncannily recall passages of the Old Testament, interpreted in the Christian Tradition. Like Abraham's ram in the thicket and like Christ, the pangolin is spoken of as a voluntary victim. It is not caught, but rather it comes to the village. It is a kingly victim: the village treats its corpse as a living chief and requires the behaviour of respect for a chief on pain of future disaster. If its rituals are faithfully performed the women will conceive and animals will enter hunters' traps and fall to their arrows. The mysteries of the pangolin are sorrowful mysteries:
'Now I will enter the house of affliction,' they sing as initiates carry its corpse round the village. No more of its cult songs were told to me, except this tantalising line.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power. It is consistent with the ideas about form and formlessness...

Quoted on April 11, 2016

Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry into his new status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

So ritual focusses attention by framing; it enlivens the memory and links the present with the relevant past. In all this it aids perception.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

A contrast between interior will and exterior enactment goes deep into the history of Judaism and Christianity. Of its very nature any religion must swing between these two poles. There must be a move from internal to external religious life, if a new religion endure even a decade after its first revolutionary fervour. And finally, the hardening of the external crust becomes a scandal and provokes new revolutions.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity.

We can recognise in our own notions of dirt that we are using a kind of omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of ordered systems. It is a relative idea. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing; simularly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothing lync on chairs, out-door things in-doors; upstairs things downstairs… and so on. In short, our pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

Pharmacologists are still hard at work on Leviticus XI.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

So it has been argued that the rule of washing before eating may have given the Jews immunity in plagues. But it is one thing to point out the side benefits of ritual actions, and another thing to be content with using the by-products as a sufficient explanation. Even if some of Moses's dietary rules were hygienically beneficial it is a pity to treat him as an enlightened public health administrator, rather than as a spiritual leader.

Quoted on April 11, 2016

It may seem impossible for such a person to shake his own thought free of the protected habit-grooves of his culture. How can he turn round upon his own thought-process and contemplate its limitations? And yet if he cannot do this, how can his religion be compared with the great religions of the world?

Quoted on April 11, 2016