Art, stories and rituals

Traditional oral art genres can be distinguished from ordinary speech by a unique architecture that involves the use of such things as fictive details, arresting images, mnemonic devices, alliteration, and metaphor and simile. These features make the oral arts, and the messages they contain, more attractive, in the sense that they attract and hold attention, and thus more effective in influencing social behavior in the directions outlined in the narrative. Here, I discuss rituals and the connections they have with the oral arts and describe the key elements of rituals, including the incorporation of the arts -- dance, music, stories, costumes and masks -- and the acts of gifts, feasting, and sacrifice. These elements make the oral art and its message even more attractive, more memorable, and more influential. I will end this post with a discussion of simple and complex rituals and how they might be used to build and repair the social relationships that have been of fundamental importance to humans.

 

Discussions of rituals, for decades, have linked them to stories. Lord Raglan (1955:454), for example, claims that for many scholars, a myth was “simply a narrative associated with a rite.” Segal (2009:366), who writes that myth “does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual,” would agree. Early discussions of the connection between myth and ritual often centered on whether ritual was created first and myth followed, or vice versa (Davis, 1974). William Robertson Smith (1894) for example, argued that myths were derived from rituals and this was implied in an anonymous paper published in Science in 1888, which attributes the origin of myth to rituals associated with ancestor worship. As we will never answer the question of the primacy of ritual, we turn to a question that may be answerable – Why do myths and rituals so often occur together and why do they seem to be, as Malinowski (1926) argues, intricately interdependent?

 

While this entire series of posts will focus on the characteristics of myth and the intertwining of myth and ritual, to begin the discussion of the interrelationships, the claim is often made that the connection between stories, usually referred to as myths, and ritual occurs because, as Hocart (1933:223) explains, “Knowledge of the myth is essential, because it has to be recited at the ritual.” The story explains the ritual, as Raglan (1955:454) describes:

Consider the pilgrimage to Canterbury, which resulted from the murder of Becket. As the pilgrims performed the ritual of touring the cathedral and singing hymns or praying at spots connected with Becket’s life and death, the story of these was recited.

This connection between myths and rituals, Bennett, Wolin, & McAvity (1988) explain, makes them mutually reinforcing. Tomorrow - or one of these days - I will describe the characteristics of rituals.