RITUAL DISENCHANTMENT 2 28 17 FUNCTIONS OF RITUAL

RITUAL: DISENCHANTMENT 2. 28. 17

FUNCTIONS OF RITUAL • Orients participants to space and time • Connects participants to the divine • Connects participants to a larger community • Includes the body as an instrument for religion O Brother Where Ar’t Thou Delmar’s Baptism

LIMINALITY & COMMUNITAS • Liminality • Betwixt and Between • No clear social status • Communitas • group of people who are in the same liminal state • “common generic bond” • unclear status makes • (Majority) Anti-structure liminality dangerous to community and social system • Social distinctions fall away • Why?

SIGNIFICANCE OF RITES OF PASSAGE • “Social life is a dialectical process that involved successive experience of high and low” • All cultures have successive moments of highs/lows marked by ritual • Rituals help in process that humans go through anyway

HOPI KACHINA CULT • Hopi — Native American Pueblo Tribe • Kachina • Supernatural Beings - represent aspects of natural world, not gods • Kachina Dancers • Kachina Dolls given to children • Kiva - subterranean ritual / ceremony space • Central theme of Kachina cult: “The presence of life in all objects that fill the universe. Everything has an essence or a life force, and humans must interact with these or fail to survive”

HOPI INITIATION RITUAL • What: Initiation into Kachina cult • Purpose: Reveal to children nature of the kachinas • Who: 8 -10 year olds • What happens: • Children are removed from community • Whipped by Kachinas - “payment” to receive special knowledge; device to ensure secrecy • Kachinas unmasked - members community, possibly relatives • Profound disappointment, disenchantment, discord

DISENCHANTMENT • Dual traumatic effects: • • disenchantment • altered concepts of Kachinas • profound disappointment and resentment towards elders modified behavior • excessive indulgence by their elders end • irreversible loss of naive realism

WHAT’S NEXT? • • Active members of the Kachina cult • attentive to Kachina stories • participating in religious preparation and activities Birth of religious perspective • Religious life begins as serious and reflective (adult qualities) • Motivation for seeking religious awareness

CHARACTERISTICS OF DISENCHANTMENT • Encouraging identification of the spiritual with some physical / sensual aspect of the world • Initiatory process • • • reinforces sense that the fullness of religious reality is invested in these figures and objects Concluding moments / / Threshold • Illusion dissolved • “Rites demonstrate irreversibly that things are not simply what they appear to be, that one-dimensional literalism is a childish faith that one has to grow beyond” Choice: • See the world as meaningless • Quest for fuller understanding of the world

OTHER EXAMPLES OF DISENCHANTMENT • Similarities to first members of Christian community? • Disenchantment in secular modernity?