PART TWO—
THE SPIRITUAL QUEST IN RITUAL AND MYTH

Chapter Five—
Ritual as Affirmation and Transformation

If the spiritual quest is a fundamental human activity rooted in biology, psychology, and language, it will find expression throughout the world and throughout the ages in the supremely important acts and stories embodied in religious rituals and myths. But the rich diversity of human cultures suggests that the quest must be understood as much through the shifting forms it has taken in different times and places as through the common impulse to which these multifarious expressions bear witness. The widely variant cultural refractions of the quest are essential properties of a creatively self-transformative process irreducible to a single fixed paradigm, and this wealth of particular and ever-changing expressions must be fully taken into account.

Ancestor Worship and the Backward Movement of Time

Even in rigidly repetitive ritual celebrations of traditional order we have found a potential for variation and change. Such elaborate ceremonials nevertheless remain, like the "ancestor worship" with which they are often connected, oriented more toward perpetuation of an immutable past than toward the exploration of an indeterminate future essential to the spiritual quest.

In few areas has ritual been more elaborate than in southwestern North America. Among the Navajo, Kluckhohn and Leighton write (234), divinities themselves must "bow to the compulsion of ritual formulas" embodied in intricate "chantways" frequently lasting many days: Nightway and Mountainway, Windway and Waterway, Red Antway and Enemyway, to name but a few, and the Blessingway that underlies them

all. By meticulous performance of hundreds of songs, daily drawing and erasure of sand paintings in strict accord with traditional designs, offering of food and prayer sticks, and repeated ritual purification, Navajo chanters labor to restore health and "good hope" to their tribe and to perpetuate the continually threatened harmony of their world.

The chanter undergoes a rigorous apprenticeship and seldom masters more than one or two chants; the eminent Hosteen Klah studied twenty-six years before acting, at age forty-nine, as principal chanter of his first Yeibichai or Nightway ceremony (Newcomb, 112–18). Great importance is given to detailed correctness—"if one word of the prayer . . . is missed, it is worthless and destroys its whole effect" (Haile, 123)^[1] —and to outside observers the slow rhythmic dances sometimes seem monotonous or indistinguishable. The patterned invariance and formulaic control of these rites—the duly summoned divinity "is compelled to attend" (Reichard 1939, ix)—led Kluckhohn (1942, 101) to view ritual as "an obsessive repetitive activity" intended to attain "the maximum of fixity" (105) in an unpredictable world.

Navajo ceremonies are performed at no set times but whenever occasion (most commonly sickness) requires. Until recent centuries the sheepherding Navajo, like their Apache kin, were nomadic hunters; it is in the long-settled agricultural Pueblos that formalized ritual attained its fullest development in America north of Mexico. Among the Hopi, Zuñi, and others, a fixed annual cycle of ceremonies unrolls with the regularity of the seasons, aimed primarily at promoting not individual healing but fertility of the land. In ritual the submersion of individual in collective, ideally invariant existence characteristic of Pueblo life reaches its apex; in Zuñi, Bunzel writes (1932, 492), "The efficacy of a formula depends upon its absolutely correct repetition," and any departure from established practice causes "great perturbation." Nothing is left to chance or is subject to change.

Such rituals, affirming the rightness of what has been and sustaining the continuity of an immutable social and natural order, seem the perfect expression of Bergson's first source of religion, the inertial pull toward repose. To this extent Benedict would appear to have been justified in characterizing the Pueblo tribes (1934, 78–80) as "Apollonian" in their commitment to tradition. Their characteristic eschewal of excess, as Benedict portrayed it (with major omissions), is evident not only in the stately regularity of their ceremonies but in their supposed aversion to intoxication and their temperate offerings of feathered prayer sticks

[1] Cf. Matthews, 24: "an error made in singing a song may be fatal to the efficacy of a ceremony. In no case is an important mistake tolerated, and in some cases the error of a single syllable works an irreparable injury."

and maize (rather than slaughtered beasts and human captives) to the gods who periodically dwell among them and fuse with them in the sacred dance of the kachinas.

Another contributor to communal conservatism in Pueblo society, as in many others, is the "worship of the dead," which Bunzel (1932, 483) calls "the foundation of all Zuñi ritual." There is "no ancestor worship in the restricted sense" in Zuñi, since "a man prays to the ancestors, not to his own ancestors" (510); but the influence of these deified predecessors (whom one is destined to join) in upholding ancient customs is everywhere. Present authority is rooted in what lies behind, not before it, so that significant human action perpetuates the past rather than striving to go beyond it in quest of an imperfectly envisaged future.

Ancestor worship, for Radcliffe-Brown, most fully realized the social function of a religious cult, namely (1952, 157) "to regulate, maintain, and transmit from one generation to another sentiments on which the constitution of a society depends." In sub-Saharan Africa, above all, British structural anthropologists who followed Radcliffe-Brown's lead have emphasized the function of ritual as an affirmation of social values.^[2] Generally speaking, Fortes suggests (1976, 2), where ancestors are worshiped, not merely commemorated, "the medium of relationship with them takes the form of ritual"; conversely, among African peoples like the Nilotic Nuer or the Congo Pygmies where ritual is less developed, ancestor worship is frequently absent or marginal. In much of West Africa ancestral rituals have been central in promoting tribal cohesion. Among the Tallensi of Ghana, for example, ancestor worship, Fortes writes (1959, 19), "is the religious counterpart of their social order, hallowing it, investing it with a value that transcends mundane interests and providing for them the categories of thought and belief by means of which they direct and interpret their lives and actions."

Thus although ancestor worship "does not comprise the whole of any people's religious system" (Fortes 1976, 3), it is frequently—in tribal West Africa as in traditional China and Japan or ancient Rome—of central importance. The African villager may simultaneously worship spirits of forest and stream, of the earth and its crops, of animals wild and domestic, and pay homage to a High God such as Allah or Christ; but these divinities may be disturbingly distant or menacingly inaccessible even when well disposed (as who can know?). The ancestors, on the contrary, as continuing members of a lineage, are more familiar even when angered, as any family member can be; they may therefore reassuringly

[2] See Fortes 1970, 260–78. As long ago as 1871 Tylor (201) noted that "on the continent of Africa, manes-worship [ancestor worship] appears with extremest definiteness and strength."

mediate between human and extrahuman. As the living-dead, they "occupy the ontological position between spirits and men," Mbiti writes (90), and speak the language of both.

Nor is ancestor worship simply a generalized cult of the dead, since the religious status of an ancestor is normally achieved by a select few, mainly men of high social standing. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, to become a benevolent ancestor, "a man has to live well, die well, and leave behind good children who will accord him proper funeral rites and continue to keep in touch with him by means of offerings and prayer" (Awolalu, 55). Full membership in this powerful community is sometimes postponed until successive obsequies have been performed and years, even generations, have passed; it is the culmination of a long and selective cursus honorum commencing with death. Two categories of ancestral spirits are often distinguished, as among the Nsukka Igbo of Nigeria (Shelton, 92), one of nameless generalized ancestors, another of those remembered by name; as a rule these groups are stages in a sequence leading eventually, as the individual ancestor is forgotten, to an increasingly impersonal and authoritative spiritual status (cf. Mbiti, 32–34). The extent to which such a process is thought to culminate in a condition comparable to that of divinities, and deserving of equal worship, varies greatly; it leads in any case to the highest spiritual condition a human being born in these times can achieve.^[3]

In contrast to tribes, such as the Apache and many others, in which fear of the dead man prompts destruction of his possessions and avoidance of his name, the mortuary rites of many West African peoples not only separate the potentially dangerous spirit of the dead from the corpse but reintegrate it into the family, in which it becomes, en route to ancestorhood, an ever more honored if less personal presence. In some societies periodic ceremonies for the ancestors culminate in great annual or biannual festivals (often coinciding with agricultural rites), accompanied by sacrifices, songs and dances, and sometimes—as among the Yoruba—by masked impersonations of eminent ancestral spirits. Where ritual is most elaborately developed, as among the Dogon of Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) and Mali, or in Dahomey (Benin), homage is paid not only to forebears of individual lineages but to mythical progenitors of the tribe as a whole. And where hierarchical social classes and royalty prevail, as among the Ashanti of Ghana, only deceased lineage heads

[3] The continuity between living elders and ancestors and subordination of the latter to extrahuman spirits have led some writers, such as Idowu (192), to reject the term "ancestor worship"; others, such as Awolalu (63–65), find it appropriate. The very, inconsistency of African beliefs would seem (as Messenger suggests, 67) to justify use of the term, with the caveat that different forms and degrees of veneration are suited to different kinds of spirits. See also Kopytoff; Brain; and Barber, 742–43, n. 15.

receive offerings and prayers from their successors (Fortes 1969, 189). Here ancestor worship ipso facto affirms the eternal legitimacy of existing institutions.

Among the Tallensi, as described by Fortes, the ancestors demand conformity to established moral values and fulfillment of social obligations, above all to one's parents; "the critical fact is that the individual has no choice" (1959, 40). All religion binds together those who share its practices, but ancestor worship most specifically binds the living to the dead and unborn in a generational solidarity that appears to preclude all change. "The ancestors, like public opinion," Gluckman remarks (1963, 74), "are always on the side of 'corporateness,'" and since in tribal life, as Mbiti observes (141), the individual "cannot exist alone except corporately," the ancestors become the guarantors not of a particular form of existence, a culture or way of life only, but of existence itself. Whatever particular form it may take, ancestor worship presupposes obligation of living descendants to the dead and deference to their supernaturally sanctioned authority—the pietas , as Fortes calls it, that continues the filial duty owed by children to living parents. Only by being first son and then father, and faithfully playing both roles as tradition prescribes, can a man of piety eventually hope to attain the culminating goal of spiritual union with the hierarchy of ancestors who begot him. So great is the prestige of the past, indeed, that it alone can be thought of as future.

Ancestor worship thus presupposes a conception of time fundamentally different from our accustomed notion of a linear forward movement. According to Mbiti (21–23), traditional African time has a long past and virtually no future; it "moves 'backward' rather than 'forward'; and people set their minds not on future things, but on what has taken place" (23). The Swahili Sasa , or "Micro-Time," the immediate present and its experiential extensions into the near future and recent past, is. surrounded by the overlapping "Macro-Time" of Zamani , the "ocean of time" that is neither after nor before (28). Sasa is "the period of conscious living. . . . Zamani is the period of the myth" (29). Like history itself in these traditional societies, the individual moves slowly "backward" toward those who begot him, and death is "a process which removes a person gradually from the Sasa period to the Zamani" (32) in which the living-dead finally achieve the collective immortality of mythical ancestral spirits.

In such societies, Field writes of the Gã of Ghana (1937, 196–97), "The dead are always watching to see that the living preserve what their forefathers established." The ancestral Zamani provides an unchanging archetype of human behavior always valid for every member of the tribe. The order given from the beginning, often by a mythical founder, and

embodied in the ancestors is the only conceivable order. Saint Augustine's restless search for spiritual repose in God "is something unknown in African traditional religious life" (Mbiti, 87), since the tribal African feels no need to seek what he already has: the transcendent validation of his existence which continuity with the ancestors, and through them with the gods, unstintingly gives.

Melanesia, along with Micronesia and Polynesia, is another region where forms of ancestor worship, comparable to those of Africa, have arisen. Where everything depends on supernatural ancestral forces, "the religious quest is essentially," as Read remarks of the Gahuku of highland New Guinea (115), "a search for this power, an effort to tap it and control it, to discover its source, and to enlist its aid" through mastery of ritual. Again the present moves toward absorption by the encompassing atemporal past; among the Kanakas of New Caledonia some old men are called ancestral spirits while still living, since their wisdom participates, Leenhardt writes (34), in the wisdom of ancestors and gods, whom they will soon definitively join. Here there can be no forward progression in time, for the past is continually being revived in the present. Even in tribes where short-lived ghosts never attain the prestige of true ancestors, and lack the good fortune of the Trobriand baloma spirits who slough off their outworn skin to be reincarnated in living wombs (Malinowski, 216), the future can only be envisaged as the past, since everyone living will become what his forebears have been. The open future of the spiritual quest would seem all but unknown in societies so strictly determined by eternal recurrence of the past.

The locus classicus of Melanesian ancestor worship is the Solomon Islands, for here, Codrington remarked in 1891 (125), spirits of nonhuman origin, prominent elsewhere in Melanesia, have almost no place, and supernatural power, mana , passes after death from powerful living men to their ghosts. Recent studies have largely confirmed Codrington's observations. The highest achievement of the living is to make themselves, through ritual appropriation of mana , as like as possible to the ancestral dead who are its source and whom some among them will soon rejoin. Among the Kwaio of Malaita, most populous of the Solomons, where all adult men and women become ancestral spirits, "the system . . . 'originated from the ancestors' and it is the duty of humans to follow ancient rules, not modify them" (Keesing 1982b, 210). Similarly among the Polynesian Maori of New Zealand, "to do the right thing is to follow the ancestors" (Johansen, 172). Significant innovation can only be a lapse from ancestral ways.

Pre-eminent among the right things bequeathed by the ancestors is ritual, to which correct performance is normally essential. Among the Tikopia, whose elaborate "Work of the Gods" Firth meticulously chron-

icled, ancestral ritual sanctioned a divinely instituted status quo, and ancestor worship, as in other highly stratified aristocratic societies of traditional Polynesia, was basically—like its counterparts in Ashanti or Dahomey—a cult of office-holders amounting, Firth remarks (1967a, 76), to "bureaucratic ancestralism." In Oceania as in Africa, or indeed ancient China, Rome, or Japan, ancestor worship is generally characteristic rather of settled agricultural than of nomadic hunting societies, and rituals to honor the ancestors often merge (as in Tikopia) with those intended to increase fertility of the crops. Among hunters and gatherers, the ancestors commonly honored are not the dead of recent generations and their anonymous forebears but the mythological founders and progenitors of the tribe at the beginning of time. Thus all legends in the Andaman Islands, Radcliffe-Brown writes (1922, 190–91), deal with the doings of the primal ancestors, mostly named after animal species.

Nowhere was the bond between the present and a mythological past stronger than in aboriginal Australia, where age-old sacred traditions tied tribes of hunters as closely to their local habitat as agricultural settlement tied people elsewhere. In many tribes the founding ancestors are continually present in the unchanging landscape through which the tribe repeatedly moves, embodied in the totem species whose name they share and in the sacred ceremonial articles (called tjurunga by the Aranda) which they have bequeathed from the distant past to the present. Everything of value to human society issued, like human society itself, from their hands, and since that time there has truly been nothing new under the sun.

Between that ancestral "Dream Time" (the Aranda altjiringa ) and the present there is no unbroken connection such as that provided by the receding genealogies of some African and Melanesian peoples, no fading line of progenitors bridging the gap between then and now, but rather, as Maddock suggests (109), "a metaphysical discontinuity, a duality between men and powers." Since the Dream Time, human existence has been a pale shadow of the legendary past, "a dependent life which is conceived," Stanner writes of the northern Murinbata (n.d., 39–40), "as having taken a wrongful turning at the beginning, a turn such that the good of life is now inseparably connected with suffering," suggesting "some kind of 'immemorial misdirection' in human affairs," with no chance that living men can ever recover, much less surpass, the condition they have irretrievably lost.

Irretrievably, but not completely; for the Dream Time is not really past but lingers on in countless forms for the people of a lesser day. The ancestors never die but continue to inhabit the tribal landscape and the sacred objects. Among many Australian tribes the living are believed to reincarnate, and hence perpetually recycle, components at least of the

ever-present ancestors; thus the Aranda child is assigned the totem not of his mother or father but of the ancestor thought to inhabit the spot where his mother first became aware of her pregnancy. It is the ancestor's "spirit child" that grows within her, engendered when she crossed his ancient tracks or passed near a sacred hill or spring or lay down by some long lost and buried tjurunga . Through his initiation at the time of puberty, Eliade remarks (1971, 58), "the novice discovers that he has already been here , in the beginning," and that the present itself is a shadowy reincarnation of a past that is always with him. Similar initiations into the mysteries of ancestral tradition were virtually universal in aboriginal Australia, even where belief in reincarnation was absent; and those few who passed through further initiations to become "medicine men" approached still more nearly to the potent ancestral status which none could now fully achieve.

Just as Australian initiation ceremonies identify each new generation with the ancestors of long ago, rites for the increase of plant and animal species associated with them are an attempt "to maintain the regular" (Elkin 1954, 205), to banish novelty from the predictable round of existence. Through ritual, Berndt observes (1974, 1 : 15), postulants seek to ensure that the ancestors' "vital life-giving power . . . is brought to bear on the affairs of men." But when this power is attainable only by repeating what others have always done, and men think of themselves as "passive recipients" of traditions eternally re-enacted in ritual, there will be no counterweight to the sacred past, no incentive to innovation, no human possibility other than following footsteps immemorially misdirected since the fabled ancestors vanished in propria persona from the tribal lands. Among the Aranda, even one who knew and admired them as intimately as Strehlow remarks (1947, 6, 35), "tradition and the tyranny of the old men in the religious and cultural sphere have effectually stifled all creative impulse. . . . The chants, the legends, and the ceremonies which we record today mark the consummation of the creative efforts of a distant, long-past age. . . . Nothing that the ancestors have done can ever be bettered by later craftsmen. In this respect, too, as in all others, it is unfortunately true that central Australia sleeps heavily under the all-oppressive night-shadow of tradition."

The Ritualization of Change and Conflict

To the extent that religious ritual is an invariant commemoration of ancestrally hallowed tradition, there can be no future that is not an imperfect repetition of a timeless past lying ahead no less than behind; no individual departure from collective paradigms of behavior; no creativity that does not re-enact what has already been. There can be nothing

to seek because everything of value has once and for all been long ago found.

Such a conception of ritual, however, overlooks the crucial role of conflict and change. A one-sided emphasis on affirmation of communal stability in tribal societies marks the views of Durkheim (deeply influenced by Spencer and Gillen's accounts of Aranda religion) and of Radcliffe-Brown and the British structuralists, or functionalists, who followed him. (In its neglect or denial of change French structuralist anthropology outdoes its empirically restrained British counterpart.) Hallpike, drawing on his studies of such dissimilar peoples as the Konso of Ethiopia and the Tauade of Papua New Guinea, is among those who have vigorously contested blanket claims that ritual serves to increase social solidarity, which he considers "the product of day-to-day relations, not of occasional ceremonies" (1972, 331). In his view, the functionalist model of human society, like that of behaviorist psychology, systematically ignores "the creative and the imaginative" and regards man and society "as essentially robot mechanisms, bundles of stimulus-response reflexes" (1977, 252). Functionalist arguments are reductive, circular, and devoid of significant content, "yet without such concepts, that of 'function' itself becomes meaningless" (281; cf. 1979, 41–65).

Whatever their sins of misplaced emphasis may have been in the eyes of a subsequent generation, however, the distinguished line of British social anthropologists from Radcliffe-Brown through Firth and Evans-Pritchard, Gluckman and Fortes, to the early Turner was by no means blind to the problematic aspects of "structure" and "function," or to the ubiquity of conflict and change. The Durkheimian exaltation of social solidarity was never uncritically accepted—"The Nuer conception of God," Evans-Pritchard wrote (1956, 320), "cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the social order"^[4] —and van Gennep's emphasis on transformative rites of passage was a continuous influence on functionalist thought, cautiously commended by such orthodox representatives as Gluckman and Fortes, until it became dominant in the "liminality" of Turner (cf. Gluckman 1962; Turner 1969, 166).

Thus although they focus on rituals thought to perpetuate an ancestrally sanctioned order, these anthropologists recognized that change is essential to that order even when overtly denied. The Tikopia Work of the Gods, whose "adaptive and even creative function" Firth stressed (1967b, 23), ceased to exist when it ceased to adapt and create, for no living ritual can affirm an order belonging solely to the past. And despite

[4] Over a quarter century earlier, he had asserted (1929, 22) that "it is one of the aims of social anthropology to interpret all differences in the form of a typical social institution," such as magic, "by reference to difference in social structure."

their belief "that the structure of the world and life was fixed once-for-all at a remote time in the past" (Stanner n.d., 151), the Australian Murinbata "welcomed change insofar as it would fit the forms of permanence" and thereby "attained stability but avoided inertia" (168). The distinction is crucial: the stability promoted by ritual is not an inertial inheritance but a continually renewed endeavor. Indeed, the stake the dead are thought to have in the future persistence of society, Fortes writes (1976, 6), paradoxically "gives ancestor worship a future orientation, rather than . . . a fixation on the past." Even this apparently backward-looking practice thus requires a ceaseless labor, in which living and dead are both implicated, to achieve a transcendent condition no longer given, as in the mythic age, but only attainable in a future potentially one with the supertemporal past. The transcendent Zamani of the long dead and the not yet born must be sustained by continuous effort in the Sasa which is here and now.

Such rituals affirm not simply the stability of society but the incessant activity necessary to achieve it. But to focus on the formalized rites of such traditional tribes as the Zuñi, Tallensi, Tikopia, and Aranda—as the tradition stemming from Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown has done—grants a falsely privileged status to the fixed, repetitive, and invariant aspects of ritual compatible with a conservative social system which the ritual is thought to uphold. A fuller picture must take into account more disruptive dimensions, indicative of irrationality and conflict as well as of social cohesion.

The stately calendrical rituals of the Zuñi appear to support Benedict's claim (1934, 87) that these sober Apollonians "do not seek or value excess," but other rites greatly alter this picture. Frank Cushing, the first outsider to give an extended account of Zuñi life, describes (73–74) a Knife Dance at which he was threatened as a sacrificial "Navajo" by two Zuñi dancers who then accepted a yellow dog in his place, bludgeoned it to death and disemboweled it in a scene "too disgusting for description"—a scene he likens to Aztec war ceremonies or the animal sacrifices of "the savages of the far North-west," the very "Dionysian" peoples whom Benedict later categorically contrasted to the Zuñi. No less discordant with the Apollonian image is Matilda Stevenson's description (437) of the ritual eating of human excrement, in an "acme of depravity," by the Zuñi Galaxy Fraternity, after which "they bite off the heads of living mice, and chew them, tear dogs limb from limb, eat the intestines and fight over the liver like hungry wolves."^[5] In these rituals, and others

[5] Cf. Bourke's account (1920) of the "vile ceremonial" he saw in 1881 as Cushing's guest: "The dancers swallowed great draughts [of human urine], smacked their lips, and, amid the roaring merriment of the spectators remarked that it was very, very good."

Though legerdemain, Curtis suggests (17: 147), may have substituted more palatable nutrients for "excrement" and "urine," the exaltation of excess nevertheless remained.

where initiates thrust glowing brands down their throats, scourged themselves with cactus thorns, and swallowed swords, there is more than a pinch of Dionysus in the Apollonian stew—and a healthy reminder that highly coherent patterns of culture are as much imposed as extrapolated by the observer.

Far from merely ministering to prurient curiosity about the strange ways of "savages," awareness of such seemingly aberrant practices reintroduces into an excessively schematized picture the element of contradiction lacking so long as ritual was viewed as a fail-safe mechanism for the maintenance of dominant social values. Nor are ritualized outbursts of violence so alien as they might seem to the putative orderliness of primitive agricultural society. We conventionally think of "man the hunter" as aggressively savage, the brute Neanderthal of popular fantasy, and associate the pastoral or rural life (having more recently lost it) with serenity and peace, the Apollonian virtues of Benedict's homogenized Zuñi. But the opposite view is at least as likely, and in recent ethnographical literature (as in ancient myth) hunter-gatherers like the Congo Pygmies, Kalahari Bushmen, Australian aborigines, and California acorn-gatherers who live "naturally" off the land and celebrate in religious festivities their oneness with fellow-creatures of forest or bush whom they hunt yet revere, have been wistfully viewed as saving remnants or reproachful reminders of a harmonious and even "affluent" primordial way of life long endangered and now on the verge of extinction.

According to Turnbull, who elsewhere (1962, 92) extols the "molimo" ceremony in which the BaMbuti pygmies celebrate their "intimate communion" with their god the forest, not hunters but agriculturalists have been most aggressive toward a hostile "natural" world against which strenuous efforts to mold their environment have pitted them. The submissively adaptive hunter "accepts the world as he finds it and does not attempt to control or dominate it," Turnbull contends (1976, 14–15), substituting, perhaps, one stereotype for another. In contrast, African cultivating societies, in Turnbull's schematic view, are "much more dominating, aggressive, and at times even hostile," for now "the very earth is attacked with a hoe, reshaped and reformed and forced to produce crops determined by man."

From this viewpoint, the momentous worldwide change from a hunting way of life in harmony with nature to an agricultural one in conflict with the always encroaching wild has been seen as promoting not only social stratification and its attendant tensions but a more violent rela-

tion between human and superhuman, reflected in animal and human sacrifices that often represent—as Frazer's Golden Bough lavishly attests—the slaying of a deity. Killing is especially glorified, Adolf Jensen asserts (163), not by hunters but by root-crop cultivators, the chief practitioners of head-hunting and cannibalism; and among these tropical cultivators the central myth (91–93) is of a primal time brought to an end when its dominant beings, in plant or animal form, kill the deities who created the existing order. With the end of primal time mortal life replaces immortality, and crop plants arise from the deity's body, "so that the eating of the plants is, in fact, an eating of the deity." The ceremonial eating of fruit or sacrificial animals representing the deity, and their "drastic replacement" by cannibalism, actualize the primal event (in which ancestor worship has its origin) through dramatic cult reenactment.

Hypothetical though his speculations remain, Jensen's discussion highlights dimensions of ritual slighted (no doubt in revulsion from the lax generalizations of Frazer) by functionalist anthropologists. Ritual is not solely a homeostatic mechanism for bringing society into equilibrium through affirmation of its underlying values, a mass yea-saying to things as they are, but also a cathartic outlet for irrational fears and desires reflecting primordial realities of life and death from which all our carefully structured institutions offer imperfect shelter. And ancestor worship, as its frequent association with sacrifice makes clear, pertains not only to kinship systems but to blood and fertility and denial of ubiquitous death. In a society like the Zuñi, where collective ritual is systematized to "Apollonian" extremes, the flagrant excesses of the secret fraternities challenge communal coercion and introduce a margin of freedom into a culturally patterned existence that might otherwise seem more nearly automatism than life, or the life of bees rather than of men.

In this "society of strong repressions," Bunzel notes (1932, 521n) with a shrewdness lacking in Benedict's later account, delight in the antics of clowns springs from a "sense of release in vicarious participations in the forbidden." Nor is the "Dionysian" blood-lust found by Jensen among root-crop cultivators of New Guinea and Indonesia entirely foreign to these stately worshipers of the maize and the rain. In the masked impersonation of Zuñi dancers, "with its atmosphere of the sinister and dangerous," Bunzel finds hints (846–47) of human sacrifice just below the surface of impersonations symbolically representing "the extirpated fact." Be that as it may, the stability of this (as of any) society is not simply a datum to which its constituents passively subscribe on ceremonial occasions but a perpetually endangered creation of their incessant endeavors.

In Africa, too, ancestral ritual affirms not only a fixed social order but

the uncertainty and change that attend it. The fact that blood sacririces—including, in recent times, human sacrifices—are often made to ancestors concerned with the fertility of the earth suggests that the orderly continuity of living and dead, far from being automatic, has sometimes exacted a price beyond the normal expectations of filial piety. In the nineteenth-century West African kingdom of Dahomey, not only were human victims sacrificed to the royal ancestors at the annual "customs," and many more, including scores of wives, at a king's funeral, but a male and female slave of the king's are said to have been sacrificed each morning "to thank his ancestors for having permitted him to awaken to a new day on earth" (Herskovits 1938, 2:53). In this hierarchy of interlinked obligations buttressed by ancestral tradition, the coercive will of the gods known as Fá, or Fate, is offset by the contrary force of Da, "the mobile, sentient quality in all things that have life" (2:201), a divinity who incarnates "movement, flexibility, sinuousness, fortune" (2:255). And a way out is offered, as in many mythologies of the world, from the rigid mandates of divine and human authority by a celestial trickster, Legbá, whose capricious favor can overturn the dictates of Fate (2: 295).

Like the religiously sanctioned clown of the Pueblos, whose reversal of norms offers release from conventional conduct, the African trickster affirms that control by gods and ancestors over human conduct extends only so far; unpredictable disruptions of order remain beyond their reach. Thus Ture, the trickster of the Central African Azande, "is a monster of depravity," liar, cheat, lecher, murderer, and braggart, an "utterly selfish person," Evans-Pritchard writes (1967, 28–29), who is still a hero because he "does what he pleases, what in their hearts they would like to do themselves . . . What Ture does is the opposite of all that is moral; and it is all of us who are Ture." In this lawless realm of saturnalian wish-fulfillment, whatever gods or ancestors may be looking on, in indignation or amusement, have no recourse but silence; for they will not be attended.

Saturnalian reversal of social norms characterizes not only legends but ritualized conduct in many regions of the world. Even apart from everyday "joking relationships," in which individuals insult others (mainly their in-laws) in socially acceptable ways (Radcliffe-Brown 1952, 90–116), ceremonial occasions may permit exchange of abuse and even blows between opposing groups (usually men and women) or, like the Roman Saturnalia, sanction temporary suspension of customary moral prohibitions. The verbal taunts, or flyting matches, are sometimes made in good spirit, as in the Wubwang'u twinship ritual of the Ndembu (Turner 1969, 78–79), where men and women belittle each other's sexual prowess and extol their own in a "buoyant and aggressively jovial" atmosphere. But sometimes hostilities run deeper: among the Gahuku

of New Guinea, furious assault of male oppressors by women armed with "stones and lethal pieces of wood, an occasional axe, and even a few bows and arrows . . . convinced me," a bruised male observer reports (Read, 136), "that the ritual expression of hostility and separation teetered on the edge of virtual disaster."

Witchcraft, the Wild, and Initiatory Transformation

Such open flouting of traditional norms is limited to specially designated occasions. So too are the rituals of protest or rebellion discussed by Gluckman, such as the Zulu agricultural rite in which young girls formerly donned men's clothing and shields, then went naked and sang lewd songs while men and boys hid inside their huts (1963, 110–36), or the Swazi incwala ceremony in which the king's subjects openly proclaimed their hatred of his rule (1966, 109–36). A far more menacing reversal of values is embodied by the witch, widely believed in tribal Africa as elsewhere in the world to pose a continuous threat to individual well-being from a realm in which moral and social norms have no sway. African witchcraft (in contrast to sorcery, which works through magic and medicines) is a psychic substance that transcends social control and ancestral authority (see Evans-Pritchard 1937, 21; M. Wilson, 92; Middleton 1960, 245–48). Witches are "innately wicked people who work harm against others . . . by virtue of the possession of mysterious powers unknown and unavailable to ordinary people; it is this," Middleton and Winter comment (8), "which sets them apart" and makes them so feared.

Once their congenital power has been activated by initiation or ill will, witches may inflict infertility, drought, injury, or illness, and they are widely thought to be the sole cause of death. Suspicions of witchcraft fasten on social and moral deviants (Nadel 1954, 171), whether solitary malcontents or the moderately rich and powerful envied for inexplicable success; the latter are also frequently victims of witches or sorcerers who strive to bring them low. But witches are not merely deviant members of society but the outright negation of natural and social order itself, eating human flesh and preferring night to day, practicing sexual perversions and "defecating on prepared fields . . . or urinating in drinking or milking receptacles," as among the Mandari of the Sudan (Buxton 1963, 103), or "flying through the air or walking upside down on their hands and smeared white with ashes," as among the Kaguru of Tanzania (Beidelman, 65). Witches among the Amba of Uganda (Winter 1963, 292–93) not only go about naked at night, transform themselves into leopards, and feed on people, but "sometimes stand on their heads or rest hanging upside down from the limbs of trees," eat salt when thirsty,

and victimize members of their own village; such behavior not only differs from that of ordinary people, like the practices of sorcerers, "it is the exact reverse, an inversion of the moral code" (and indeed of human nature) in every particular (cf. Middleton 1960, 248).

Witches are thus a continual threat to an ancestral order dependent, in paradoxical symbiosis, on witchcraft to swell the ancestors' numbers through death, which would not occur in its absence, and to activate their protective intervention through malice toward the living. Witchcraft is the indispensable counterpart by which ancestral order, or social order in general, is defined, the chaos (or rather the anti-cosmos, for witchcraft too has its order) against which the socially sanctioned cosmos is measured and without which its sanctions would have no force.

Up to a point, the seeming irrationality of witchcraft can be reconciled with a functionalist model of society. Kluckhohn's study of Navajo witchcraft (1944, 106–112) contends that witchcraft beliefs are both psychologically adjustive in providing a channel for expression of tribal tensions and sociologically adaptive in affirming the tribe's solidarity against disruptions. Yet though belief in witches no doubt serves important social functions, such explanations seem wholly inadequate to account for its disturbing power. For witches are not, like ancestors, easily subsumed under social categories; they embody something other, a fundamentally extra-social threat to the fragile order that can sometimes channel but never fully contain it. They are associated not with culturally engendered ills but with the most uncontrollable powers of nature, the sharks that devour shipwrecked sailors in the Trobriands, the blight that ravages crops, the disease that mysteriously weakens and kills.

If this power were directed by or against strangers it might indeed be an instrument of social cohesion, but the widespread belief that witches choose their victims exclusively from their own village and even from their nearest kin, Winter comments (1963, 283), is tremendously disruptive of group integration. Witchcraft is "the enemy within"; it blames incomprehensible disease and destruction on those closest at hand, and thus works both against social adaptation by increasing internecine conflicts and against individual adjustment by arousing fear, as in Cochiti Pueblo, that one may be unconsciously guilty of witchcraft through "bad thoughts" responsible for another's illness or death (Fox, 266). And because it confounds all carefully constructed categories of kinship and community it detracts far more from stability than it could ever contribute. Witchcraft, Winter remarks of the Amba (n.d., 152), in contrast to the ancestor cult which increases the solidarity of the group, enhances "negative feelings of hatred which tend to pull it apart and destroy it." For this reason, the sociological determinism of Radcliffe-Brown and his school, Winter concludes (1963, 297–99), presents a very one-sided view

of social phenomena by ignoring the disintegrative effects of witchcraft. The "formal congruence between the set of ideas and the social structure" in the Durkheimian tradition may even, when one term inverts instead of reflecting the other, produce disruption instead of cohesion—or rather a perpetual tension between them, a precariously dynamic rather than a statically harmonious equilibrium.

The running conflict between integrative ancestors and disintegrative witches is one prominent manifestation in tribal religion of a larger opposition between society or culture itself, the realm of humanly perpetuated if divinely founded order, and everything that lies threateningly (or invitingly) outside its control. The two are sometimes understood as opposing aspects of a single divinity. Thus among the Lugbara (Middleton 1960, 250–57), God, or adro , in his transcendent celestial aspect is creator of men, women, and cattle (and hence of society), but in his evil or immanent aspect this same adro stands menacingly opposed to the social order: "He is an 'inversion' of both God in the sky and of man. He lives in rivers and the bush, the waste places between the compounds, which are feared as 'outside' and uninhabited places," and is associated, as the "bad God," with witches and sorcerers, rain groves, and inexplicable manifestations of miraculous power, known also as adro.

More commonly, the uncontrollable "outside" forces are embodied as demonic spirits of the wild who may unpredictably intrude on the social domain at any time and assault its members with spirit possession or disease. Their targets are typically chosen (in contrast to persons chastised by offended ancestors) at random. Such spirits may be the familiars of witches, or opposed to them, for they are characteristically not malevolent but amoral, as much leprechaun as devil. Their outsideness is their essence, pitting them ipso facto against everything normal. Their very unpredictability is a continual danger to human beings who can never safeguard themselves against capricious attack.

Similar spirits, from impish poltergeists to menacing trolls, are of course common throughout the world. Not only these picturesque sprites, however, but any outsider not readily subsumed by established social categories is "inherently linked with the Wild," Hallpike suggests (1972, 325), thereby becoming a source simultaneously (in Douglas's terms) of purity and danger. Many peoples of the world, like the Lugbara, and like the Dinka of the Sudan, make a "clear distinction between the wilds (roor ) and the homestead (bai ), 'the desert and the sown'," a distinction reflected, Lienhardt writes of the Dinka (63), "in a division of Powers into the non-rational and rational, the purposeless and the purposeful, those which share men's social life and those which . . . are merely menacing to human beings."

Nor is the menacing realm of the wild invariably negative; it can em-

body a potentiality for transformation. Among the Ehanzu of central Tanzania, to undo the effects of sorcery, Douglas relates (94–95), a "simpleton" is sent wandering into the bush, symbolizing a venture both "into the disordered regions of the mind" and "beyond the confines of society. The man who comes back from these inaccessible regions brings with him a power not available to those who have stayed in the control of themselves and of society." Through this hazardous journey into the wilderness the seemingly closed structure of tribal society opens momentarily onto an uncharted space in which a spiritual quest for the transcendent and unknown becomes a possibility at last.

An essential tension thus exists in many tribal religions between ordered social structure and the uncontrollable wild; moreover, the social structure itself is not a unitary construct but one that incorporates continuous conflict and change within its overall solidarity. As Gluckman has repeatedly emphasized, "Conflicts are a part of social life and custom appears to exacerbate these conflicts: but in doing so custom also restrains the conflicts from destroying the wider social order" (1966, 2). Conflict and resolution of conflict is the "pervasive theme" of Turner's early study of the Ndembu of Zambia, Schism and Continuity in an African Society —a theme (1957, xxii) reflecting the views of those, like Gluckman, who "regard a social system as 'a field of tension, full of ambivalence, of co-operation and contrasting struggle.'" Here a dynamic view of society (and of the ritual which expresses its dominant values) emerges from adaptation of the Durkheimian model inherited through Radcliffe-Brown.

The strength of Turner's analysis stems from apprehension not merely of social conflict in general but of the particularly labile form of Ndembu society, in contrast with Fortes's more stable Tallensi. Ndembu society is matrilineal and virilocal; that is, inheritance is traced through women, yet a woman moves when married to the village of her husband and his matrilineal kin (to whom she and her children will be unrelated), thus repeatedly breaking up the residential unity of the kinship group. No sharp opposition between ancestral integration and the disintegrative forces of the wild can thus obtain in this society, since unlike that of the Tallensi, which "is related to the land, to agriculture, and to permanent residence on the land of well-defined corporate lineages," the Ndembu ancestor cult "is associated with the bush, its dangers and blessings, with the transience of settlement, with the hazards of life, and with the mobile human group itself rather than its specific habitation" (173).

Such a fissile society can hardly give rise through divinization of its unifying values to the transcendent solidarity thought by Durkheim to be the object of ritual; on the contrary, "norms and their supporting values can only appear to be consistent, since they must cover the pres-

ence of contradictions within the structure itself" (124). Instead of affirming established social structures, Ndembu ritual "compensates for the deficiencies in a labile society" (303) and repeatedly restates "a group unity which transcends, but to some extent rests on and proceeds out of, the mobility and conflicts of its component elements" (316). Thus not only invariance and immutability but conflict and change may be integral dimensions of ritual itself.

It is surely no accident that Turner's recognition of mobility and conflict in Ndembu society eventuated in rediscovery of van Gennep and formulation of the concepts of liminality and communitas. The exemplary rite de passage , in which van Gennep's stages of separation, transition, and incorporation are clearly demarcated, is the initiation rite signaling a change from one social status to another—notably from childhood to adulthood, as in the Mukanda rite of male circumcision studied by Turner among the Ndembu. In this ritual, involving (like many others from Africa to Australia) the segregation, after painful circumcision, of a group of boys from their family surroundings, instruction during the period of healing, and reintegration into society as adults, Turner found social divisions giving way, during the transitional period, to a transcendent sense of community. Through "the mystical efficacy of ritual," he writes (1967, 265–66), "Mukanda strengthens the wider and reduces the narrower loyalties," emphasizing the unity of males irrespective of matrilineal connections. It effects not only a transformation of jural status but an expansion of human outlook, a heightened awareness of commonality that might never have come into being without it.

Mukanda marks not only a biosocial transition, then, but "a complete change in the novice's ontological status," as Eliade says of initiations in general (1959, 187), through death to one condition and rebirth to another. Both by intense instruction and by confrontation during seclusion with a world radically dissimilar to the one they had known the initiates are profoundly transformed. Rites of passage thus both acknowledge and redress the divisions inherent in all societies; they affirm the processual nature of society itself by continual reaggregation of the individuals and groups that compose it and effect a fundamental reordering of previous allegiances.

Transference of a boy's attachment from the maternally dominated childhood family to the world of men is central to initiation in New Guinea. Here rituals organized (as among the Ilahita Arapesh or the Baktaman) in elaborate sequences in which all males participate at different ages frequently involve—along with revelation of cult objects—bleeding of the nose and penis and lashing of the genitals; treatment of young novices as "wives" subjected to homosexual intercourse; enact-

ment of rebirth by crawling between men's legs; and public exhibition of new initiates in the ostentatious regalia of manhood, eliciting assault upon them by the excluded and infuriated women.^[6]

One principal objective of these initiations, Tuzin remarks (103–04) of one rite of the Tambaran cult to which all Ilahita Arapesh males belong, is "to transform the novices into whole men by severing once and for all the ties of substance and affection which bind them to women, especially their mothers." The very extremity of these continual New Guinean initiations suggests the extent to which separation from childhood dependency and attachment to women in such fiercely warlike masculine societies is difficult if not impossible to achieve; here ritual at its most fanatically transformative affirms not the overall solidarity but the unresolvable internal conflicts of a society bent on transmuting or extirpating, regardless of cost, all affiliations not subordinated to its paramount object.

Initiatory rites effect a transformation of attachment and outlook not merely by mandating passage from one social dimension to another but by bringing the social order itself, in the person of initiants fully attached to neither dimension, into contact with the unsocialized "wild" that encompasses it; only thus can space for passage between the opposed conditions be opened. Van Gennep, who placed such stress (192) on territorial passage between stages, emphasized the "neutral zones"—"ordinarily deserts, marshes, and most frequently virgin forests" (18)—that formerly separated one territory from another and at the same time linked them together; it is in these pathless marges over which no social order can claim dominion that the crucial liminal phase of the rite of passage takes place.

Most initiatory rites marking the transition from boy to man involve collective isolation (in contrast to the individual seclusion of girls at first menstruation) in a hut beyond the edge of the village, and ritualized encounter with the wild is a frequent condition for the candidate's transformation. A Baktaman youth's first initiation begins when the men of the village, adorned with feather headdresses and pigs' tusks, suddenly sweep down at night, "tear the boy loose from the protesting and beseeching mother, and drag him off into the dark, frightening forest where till then he has not been allowed to go at night for fear of spirits and ambushes" (Barth, 51). Confrontation with supernatural monsters like the "hippopotamus" of the Kenyan Akamba or the "crocodiles" of the New Guinean Busama is often a central experience; among the key

[6] See Tuzin on the Ilahita Arapesh and Barth on the Baktaman. On novices as wives, see Bateson, 131; on homosexuality, Keesing 1982a, 10–11, and Herdt 1981. Both Barth (65, 67) and Tuzin (236) refer to rebirth by crawling through men's legs.

mysteries revealed in many societies is the identity of those behind the masks and of the flutes or bullroarers that supply their voices. The very segregation of men from women that begins in the boys' initiation hut reinforces the belief, held by the Busama and many others of New Guinea, that men are akin to spirits whereas women can never attain sacredness (Hogbin 1947–48, 54).

Not by exclusion of the wild but by encounter with it are individuals transformed and the dynamic equilibrium of a mobile society maintained. Man belongs both to desert and sown, whose perimeters he must discover since neither is given; only by seeking out and assimilating the alien wilderness, society's defining antithesis, can he cultivate a place in a world that he will thereafter experience as fully his own.

Because they bring expansion of knowledge through absorption of extra-social powers, initiatory rites are a paradigm—however repugnant the New Guinean instance may be to civilized man, to say nothing of civilized woman—of the questing hero's encounter with the beyond. Awareness of their interdependence with vital forces outside their control is the essential knowledge, embracing all lesser mysteries, which the initiates gain through their encounter. And since every revelation of ritual secrets reveals a deception, this knowledge is both of transcendent truths and of the illusions by which such truths are apprehended or invented—an epistemological paradox not irrelevant to the quest (see Barth, 81–82; Tuzin, esp. 261–68). Assimilation of this transcendent dimension results in the "ontological" self-transformation these rites bring about, as when Liberian novices, having been "killed" by the Forest Spirit and then resuscitated, seem to have entirely forgotten their past experience (Eliade 1958, 31, citing Frobenius) and can no longer perform the most basic acts which society had painstakingly taught them before their transformative confrontation with its self-projected opposite.

Liminality can be at once a negation of preliminal social structure and an affirmation of another order of things (Turner 1974, 196) because it incorporates an alien perspective indispensable to society as interactive process. Ritual, the vehicle for cultural assimilation of the wild, cannot be understood as merely affirming a pre-existent social reality, even the complexly fissile reality of Ndembu society analyzed by Turner; for in contradistinction to ceremony, to which Turner assigns the confirmatory function, ritual is transformative in essence (1967, 95). It is the "realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise" (97), the channel through which the unpredictable and indeterminate periodically subvert and renew the categories through which reality is perceived. Like the Chihamba rite of affliction studied by Turner (1975, 185), ritual in general aims "to break through the habitual

patterns formed by secular custom, rational thinking, and common sense, to a condition where the pure act-of-being is directly apprehended," the supremely liminal condition of man face-to-face with a radically unfamiliar world over which—until he can enlarge his newly inadequate categories of understanding by assimilating its influence—he has no control. Here on the threshold of the spiritual quest Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown's intellectually provocative reduction of ritual to repetitive affirmation of social order must, as in the rites of passage themselves, be left firmly behind; for society, so conceived, cannot alone be the source of what transforms and creates it.

Chapter Six—
Myth and the Journey beyond the Self

Ritual is by no means, then, merely a mechanism for denial of change. On the contrary, by incorporating forces potentially disruptive of social order it can be a potent instrument of communal transformation. When we turn from ritual act to mythic word the movement toward openness—the realm of the quest—is still more pronounced.

The Mythic Word and the Sacred Journey

Ritual changes only gradually, except in times of crisis, since it finds validation in a timeless past viewed as a pattern for subsequent ages. Variation does in fact continually occur (see Firth 1967a, 233–60), but invariance is commonly held to be indispensable to its effect. The spell or invocation, as the verbal aspect of ritual action, is also ideally fixed; formulaic prayer, like every magic spell, achieves "compulsion by exactness of word" (Reichard 1944, 10), from which the slightest departure suffices to render it void. But degrees of fixity differ greatly from culture to culture; thus Evans-Pritchard (1929, 631–32) notes in Zande ritual performance a laxity which would "horrify a Melanesian" and invalidate the magic act. Language, as a creative faculty distinguishing man from more rigidly programmed animals, is especially susceptible to variation; unlike the fixed "compulsive word" of the Navajo, Nuer prayers, for example, have "no set form and order," Evans-Pritchard reports (1956, 22; cf. 212), and each may be used "anywhere and at any time."

Nor is this flexibility peculiar to the relatively unritualistic Nuer; among the Tallensi, with their rigid ancestral obligations, the body of a prayer, Fortes writes (1975, 135), "is apt to be a free and ad hoc construction reflecting the particular features of the occasion, though stock

phrases will be used and stock sentiments and attitudes exhibited." The variability latent (even when strenuously denied) in culturally transmitted ritual becomes potentially limitless when the ritual word begins to free itself from subordination to fixed ritual action, and thus begins to open, however tentatively, from coercive exactness toward indeterminate exploration of the unknown.

Together with patterned actions and utterances, the sacred objects of ritual form an apparently closed symbolic system susceptible, however, to changing verbal interpretations. To the extent that multivocality, or diversity of potential signification, is its essence, the symbol is dependent on a continuing hermeneutic process for its existence. Its creativity lies not in sacral immutability but in the multiplicity of meanings to which it gives rise within this interpretive framework. The dynamic interdependence of fixed symbol and provisional word, not the symbol in isolation (for there can be no symbol in isolation), "actually 'creates' society," Turner writes (1974, 56), as a dialectic of structure and communitas, stasis and change. This relational meaning must in the end be verbally apprehended, for logos is relationship, and the word itself is a symbol oriented not toward an unchanging past but toward an indefinite future.

Verbal interpretation of ritual symbolism finds its most significant expression, among many tribal peoples, in myth. Not that myth is reducible to mere commentary on ritual. W. Robertson Smith (18) contended over a century ago that myths, insofar as they were explanations of rituals, were in almost every case secondary derivations from them. The hypothesis had a fertile impact on Frazer, the "Cambridge anthropologists" such as Jane Harrison, and the British and Swedish "Myth and Ritual" school, which interpreted myths as scenarios of rites demonstrating a pattern of divine kingship throughout the ancient Near East. But this view was easily reduced, by neglect of Robertson Smith's qualification, to Lord Raglan's claim (41) that "all traditional narratives originate in ritual"—an extreme position thoroughly rebutted over the last half century, at the risk of authenticating the no less untenable antithesis that association of myth with ritual "is nearly always trivial and casual" (Kirk, 18).^[1] The frequently close connection between them suggests, on the contrary, that inasmuch as myths can be seen (as by no means all can) as explanations or interpretations of associated rituals, they are not mere "secondary" reflections but verbal counterparts dynamically interacting with them. Such being the case, as Lévi-Strauss suggests (1963, 230), "we shall have to give up mechanical causality as an explanation and, instead, conceive of the relationship between myth and ritual as dialectical."

[1] For criticism of the "Myth and Ritual" hypothesis and Frazer's school, see respectively Brandon and Fontenrose.

This dialectic of repetitive act oriented (insofar as it is fixed) toward the immutable past and of variable word oriented (insofar as it frees itself from rote incantation) toward the potential future is another expression of the interaction of closure and openness, stasis and change, fundamental to life, consciousness, and language itself: here Bergson's two sources of morality and religion as inertial habit and forward thrust find one of their most fundamental expressions. Myth too, through close association with ritual, may fulfill the conservative function of validating the past by providing a "pedigree" for magic, according to Malinowski (141), and establishing a "sociological charter, or a retrospective moral pattern of behavior" (144). But like the blithely inconsistent explanations of ritual symbolism which native informants often bestow on baffled ethnographers, preliterate myths continually vary; they are pedigrees and charters, if at all, under constant revision. The same informant, Radcliffe-Brown long ago observed (1922, 188), "may give, on different occasions, two entirely different versions of such a thing as the origin of fire, or the beginning of the human race," and a similar variation characterizes the legends of many tribal peoples. Greater standardization no doubt occurred in more settled societies, but the flexible innovativeness of myth by no means came to an end, as the divergent renditions of Greek drama or the alternative versions of creation in the Hebrew bible abundantly demonstrate.

The characteristic variability of myth gives play to the indeterminacy latent in the ritual process (above all in its liminal phase), despite its adhesion to unchanging tradition. Far from being a structureless flux, however, mythic variability expresses the creative capacity of human consciousness and speech to assimilate unforeseeable experience in logically apprehensible form not by habituated repetition but by innovative recombination; myth, as the mobile complement of ritual, is thus an instrument not principally for control of a menacing outside world but for its exploration and transformation. It extends the reach of ritual, as word does of act, by transcending the immutability of a divinely given past—the sacral moment in which every time and place is the same—through projection, in the forward thrust of its narrative, of a potentially transformative future.

This dynamic conception sharply contrasts with Lévi-Strauss's structuralist tenet (which logically precludes dialectical interaction) that "mythology is static, we find the same elements combined over and over again, but they are in a closed system . . . in contradistinction to history, which is, of course, an open system" (1979, 40). Variability eludes the structuralist "quest for the invariant" (8), just as creative activity has no place in a human mind conceived as a "purely passive" crossroads where

all that happens is a matter of chance (4).^[2] In contrast to this assumption, the linguistically structured variability of myth permits the latent liminality of ritual to unfold through interaction with a perpetually changing world where the quest for an indeterminate goal becomes a possibility, if not a necessity.

Among the most common ritual symbols are the road or journey enacted by performance of the ritual itself. The image of a sacred road marking out the journey through life and beyond is widely diffused in native American religions, as in many others. Thus the White Path drawn on the floor of the Delaware (or Lenape) Big House leads to "the western door where all ends" and finds a celestial counterpart in the Milky Way along which souls of the dead travel to the spirit realm (Speck 1931, 2:23). In the Pueblos, where ritual has often seemed a monotonous denial of change, the symbol of the road embodies the mobility essential to even the most traditional religion. Among both Hopi and Zuñi, Elsie Clews Parsons observes (1939, 1:360–61), a line of meal sprinkled from the altar to the door of the sacred kiva is the road by which the spirits travel. Myths of mankind's emergence from beneath the earth to the "fourth world" of the present, and of the tribe's long wanderings before reaching the solstitial middle place ordained as their homeland, are further dynamic dimensions of Pueblo rituals, whose participants repeatedly re-enact the primordial tribal journey generation after generation.

Similar myths are explicit in such Navajo chantways as Upward Moving and Emergence Way, but every Navajo ritual is a journey along a road that eventuates, through purification and healing, in a change in status. Even the meticulously drawn but quickly obliterated "sand paintings" that are part of most rites are an indication, despite their seemingly static symmetry, of a transfiguring passage. "The corn with its four bars and four pollen footprints," Newcomb writes (155–56) of one painting, "was the ladder of life through its four stages, and above it was the blue bird indicating peace and happiness as a final goal," thus reminding the participant "that only by personal effort in mounting the ladder of life can spiritual strength be acquired." Movement is fundamental to any conception of ritual in which a purposeful journey plays so central a role. Indeed, in a broadened sense of van Gennep's term, not only initia-

[2] Contrast Cassirer 1955, 2: 69: "Nowhere in myth do we find a passive contemplation of things." Lévi-Strauss (1969, 10–12) rebuts "the illusion of liberty" by attempting to show "not how men think in myths but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." Of his analysis of mythologies and other taxonomies of "savage thought" in linguistic terms, Chomsky (1972a, 74) writes: "Nothing has been discovered that is even roughly comparable to language in these domains."

tions and other rituals marking formal alteration of the individual's bio-social status but virtually every rite, insofar as it maps out a path and invites to a voyage, is an incipient rite of passage or guided quest—for what seeker has not begun by following in the footsteps of another?—for renewal and transformation.

Even among sedentary peoples like the Pueblos, then, where ceremonies exalt recurrence and deny innovation, the suppressed dimension of the wild may reappear with a vengeance, and a vestigial quest survives in ritual imagery of the road. Among the Navajo, who are centuries closer to a hunting existence, undercurrents of mobility are perceptibly stronger. But an agricultural quest myth appears most prominently, among North American tribes, in conjunction with the rites of a more northern people, the Pawnee, who combined a planting and a migratory way of life, leaving solid earth lodges and carefully tended corn crops on the Great Plains of Nebraska several times a year (before their removal to Oklahoma) to encamp on the prairie and hunt the buffalo.

Affinities with the Pueblos and even possibly—in their sacrifice, as recently as 1838, of a captive maiden to the Evening Star—with the Aztecs suggest, if not an origin "somewhere in Old Mexico" (Grinnell 1889, 227), at least a significant southwestern influence which sharply differentiated the Pawnee from other Plains tribes. Pawnee ceremonies, like those of many agricultural peoples, were considered, Weltfish writes (8), "as the means for keeping the cosmic order in its course." As in Zuñi and other Pueblos, seasonal ceremonies were in charge of a priesthood, but—as among nomadic hunters of the Plains—were performed in response to a visionary call (5–6). Sedentary life was thus infused, for these cultivators and warriors, with mobility and individualism.

The remarkable ritual sequence described almost a century ago by the Pawnee Ku'rahus, or priest, Tahirussawichi, in Fletcher's monograph, The Hako , may once have been widely diffused throughout northeastern and midwestern America. In its Pawnee form the symbolism of the road is actuated as a communal quest for fertility. There was, Fletcher remarks, no stated time for performance of the Hako, which was not connected with any tribal festival, but was (26) "a prayer for children, in order that the tribe may increase and be strong." The ceremony's central object, an ear of corn with its tip painted blue to represent the sky, with four blue lines descending from it, symbolized the vital power of earth, "mother breathing forth life" (44), as fertilized by the heavens, and the possibility of human reproductive and spiritual power. But the fertility of the sacral ear was not passively given to man, a boon descending like the rains from heaven, but had to be actively sought; and the long and difficult road leading to it was no sooner finished than undertaken anew.

The procession went forth singing, on "a way which has come down to us from our far-away ancestors like a winding path" (69), leading through otherwise uncharted margins between known territories. Alone in a land of strangers, the Ku'rahus remembers (70–71), "we call upon Mother Corn and we ask her: 'Is there a path through this long stretch of country before us where we can see nothing?' . . . Then our eyes are opened and we see the way we are to go." Their guide, Mother Corn, introduces into this unfamiliar realm the perennial life-sustaining rhythms that mark a path—the path of oneness with the rhythms of earth and sky—through the inhumanly pathless wild. At dawn, when the old is made new, Mother Earth unfailingly hears the questers call: "She moves, she awakes, she arises, she feels the breath of the new-born Dawn," and everywhere life is renewed. "This is very mysterious," the Ku'rahus remarks (125), ". . . although it happens every day." The renewal of earth is the pathway to renewal of humanity, for women beget children just as earth brings forth the corn (190).

The quest led by the corn mother through threatening wilds culminates in discovery of the child through whom the fertilizing powers of heaven descend to renew the people, and the final ritual is appropriately that of Blessing the Child. "As I sing this song here with you," the old Pawnee priest told Alice Fletcher (258), "I can not help shedding tears. . . . There is no little child here, but you are here writing all these things down that they may not be lost and that our children may know what their fathers believed and practiced in this ceremony." Here too the quest finds a fulfillment that must, like the blessing of children, be repeatedly renewed lest it wither and perish.

In the Hako ceremony, with its striking similarities to ancient Mysteries of the Mediterranean world (see Alexander, 126–30), the mythic quest was identified with the immediate experience of its celebrants; its territorial passage was not mapped in corn meal or pollen on the floor of hogan or kiva but trod by foot through open country in which even familiar sights appeared new. No object met on the journey seemed ordinary, Fletcher observes (302): "The trees, the streams, the mountains, the buffalo were each addressed in song," becoming like the people themselves part of a myth pertaining not to a paradigmatic past but to a forever unfolding present involving both human beings and the world around them in fervently sought renewal.

Myths of the Heavenly Quest

In other myths the path leads to a qualitatively different world of the gods or the dead across distant seas, under the earth, or in the heavens. "At the beginning of the world men and God were in a direct relation,

and men could move up and down from the sky" by rope, bamboo tower, or a tall tree, a Lugbara myth relates (Middleton 1960, 270). But when this bridge was broken, "men fell down, scattering into their present distinct groups each with its different language," so that separation from heaven entailed division from one another as well. In a similar myth of the Sudanese Dinka, sky and earth were originally connected by a rope, and "men could clamber at will to Divinity. At this time there was no death" (Lienhardt, 33–34). But when accidentally struck by the first woman's long-handled hoe, Divinity withdrew to his present great distance from the earth and sent a small blue bird to sever the rope which had given men access to the sky. Since then, "the country has been 'spoilt,' for men have to labour for the food they need, and are often hungry."^[3]

Such African myths explain not only the origins of work, sin, or death, but man's remoteness from God on a continent where the vague sky deity of tribal religions is seldom worshiped (as by Nuer and Dinka) with the intense devotion accorded to spirits of the earth and the dead. The heavens are inaccessible in most of tribal Africa, even in myth (except for the trickster's occasional foray), since not even the greatest heroes could ascend to a world to which the passageway had forever been cut. "It is remarkable that out of these many myths concerning the primeval man and the loss of his original state," Mbiti remarks (127), "there is not a single myth, to my knowledge, which even attempts to suggest a solution or reversal of this great loss," nor any "evidence of man seeking after God for his own sake; or of the spirit of man 'thirsting' after God as the pure and absolute expression of being." There can be no quest for heavens from which the separation is so stark and the distance so forbiddingly great. Not that ascent to the skies and marriage between human and celestial beings are wholly absent from African folklore, but they are seldom deliberately sought and often suggest the baleful consequences of overcoming such a division.^[4]

The tribal African was typically intimate with transcendent power in terrestrial, not heavenly form. In other mythologies the celestial journey, even when barred to the living, plays a more central part. Thus in a Micronesian myth from Ulithi Atoll (Lessa 1961, 15–19), once the half-divine trickster Iolofäth reaches the sky world, Lang, on the smoke of burning coconut shells, nothing impedes him from joining his father, the sky god, nor can death prevent him, when caught in flagrante with

[3] Cf. the myths in Evans-Pritchard 1956, 10, and Buxton 1973, 22–23. For other African stories of man's separation from God, whether by accident or transgression, see Mbiti, 122–29.

[4] Cf. Radin 1970a, 69–72; Werner, 50–80; sections F0-F199 ("Otherworld Journeys") of S. Thompson, vol. 3, and of Clarke.

an avian divinity's wife, from returning to human foible. In another myth he adopts a boy, Discoverer-of-the-Sun, who has climbed to heaven after his human mother left him to go up to her husband, the Sun. Here, in contrast to most African tales, "There is two-way traffic between Lang and earth," Lessa comments (1966a, 12), "and the passage is traversed by both deities and mortals."

In pagan Polynesia the human soul partook of a "psychic dynamism manifesting itself physically" throughout the universe (Handy, 26), and because so many of the atua (gods or spirits) had once been souls of persons charged with mana, there was no gulf but a continuity between "natural" and "supernatural" (6). The dynamism of a mana common to men and gods and the relative accessibility of the heavens in Polynesian myth made the quest for a world beyond a possibility, if not for living individuals in so hierarchical a society, at least for the gods and heroes of old, in whose exploits transcendent aspirations denied an outlet even in ritual act found fulfillment in word.

In Polynesian myth the division of heaven and earth resulted not from human folly but from the effort of their offspring, oppressed by the dark intimacy of their union, to open a breathing-space between parents henceforth parted but still in continuous contact. In the primordial night known by the Maori as Po, the sky father Rangi and earth mother Papa embraced in darkness, all but suffocating their children. But their first-born, Tane, in Best's Tuhoe Maori version (1972, 1: 749–51), "lay down upon the breast of the Earth Mother, with his head downwards he raised his legs and pressed his feet against Rangi and so thrust the sky upwards until the heat of Ra, the sun, was no longer unbearable." This forced separation, though no doubt the origin of strife, was a felix culpa creating light and motion from darkness and stasis, and opening a passageway through the mediating space between conditions no longer fused in androgynous oneness.

Among those who remained below in the space thus created were the newly spawned race of human beings who were at first only males. Hence the search for the mortal female "became the great quest of the gods": far and wide, Best writes (1924, 41), "they wandered throughout the universe, ever seeking the female element, and ever failing to find it," until Tane formed a human image from the body of the earth mother and instilled it with life from the "primal origin of all things," Io (35; cf. 1954, 23–26, and 1959). Human beings, like the gods their souls might become, were distinguished by wananga , or celestial knowledge, brought down by Tane (Handy, 55); they belonged not to earth alone but in aspiration, at least, to heaven as well, as the frequent celestial journeys of both gods and humans attest. Even the more terrestrial female may ascend to the skies, like Heipua, "Wreath of Flowers," in a

Society Islands tale (Handy, 82–83), who dies of heartbreak when her celestial lover leaves her, but seeks him above and overcomes every danger to bring him back to earth, where she reawakens on her flowery bier to find him again at her side.

But the outcome of the quest is not always happy, as several Maori legends make clear. Rupe climbs from heaven to heaven in search of his sister, who cast herself into the sea after Mani transformed her husband to a dog; he succeeds, but perishes from the effort (Grey, 62–68; Best 1972, 1:816–18). Tawhaki seeks his baby daughter by the goddess Tangotango, who took her up to the sky when he refused to wash her. By climbing a vine rooted in earth and not looking back, he finds her, but in Best's Tuhoe version, he insists on ascending higher to obtain the dogs of his ancestor Tama and falls from the uppermost heaven when Tama rebuffs him (Grey, 46–61; Best 1972, 1:910–17). The Polynesian unlike the African heavens are invitingly open, but to leave terrestrial roots behind in a vertiginous quest with no comprehensible object may not be given to human beings, who inhabit neither earth nor sky but the liminal margin that severs and joins them.

When the object of the quest is comprehensibly urgent, however—not the dogs of Tama, but the conquest of death—its pursuit against impossible odds ennobles the hero who attempts it. The exploits of Maui of a thousand tricks were famed throughout the Polynesian islands which he fished from the sea: how he lengthened the day by netting the sun and fetched down fire from the goddess Mahu-ika, barely escaping incineration. To this mortal divinity not even his mother's prophecy that "you shall climb the threshold of the house of your great ancestor Hine-nui-te-po, and death shall thenceforth have no power over man" (Grey, 22–45) seemed beyond him.

Between Maui and Hine a dispute arose "concerning the permanence of death. Maui argued," in Best's version (1972, 1:944–47), "that man should die as dies the moon, which wanes and dies, but comes to life again strong and vigorous. . . . But Hine would have none of this, and said: 'Let man die for all time, that he may be lamented and wept over.' So Hine persisted in slaying man," and Maui persisted in endeavoring to exempt himself and his fellow mortals from death. "I intend," he tells his parents in Grey's polished account (22–45), "to go on in the same way for ever." Here is a truly transcendent effort to breach the irrevocable condition of man, resourceless only in fleeing from death, and despite his father's warnings, Maui resolves to visit his great ancestress in her dwelling place at the horizon.

Not in the uppermost heavens scaled by Tawhaki, then, but at the meeting place of earth and sky, evanescent juncture of the eternally disjoined Papa and Rangi, will Maui encounter Hine-nui-te-po, queen, like

Greek Persephone or Babylonian Ereshkigal, of the lower world, yet continuously in touch, at the horizon, with the living: a goddess of the greatest threshold of all. She has tried before to slay Maui, who always returned to life; once she obtains a drop of his blood, however, and works black magic upon it, he must perish. But Maui resolves to confront her, and finds her lying asleep. Warning his companions not to laugh, he enters Hine through the passage by which man is born; but a bird laughs, and Hine's genitals crush him to death. His quest to return to a prenatal condition has failed, but this culpa too is felix ; for only in between, not before or after, birth and death can life—and the quest—take place. Man as animal quaerens belongs neither to the earth from which he arises nor to the heavens to which he aspires, but to the horizon.

In such Polynesian myths of celestial transcendence, which seem never to have been closely connected with the ancestral and calendrical rites of these once rigidly stratified islanders, the forward thrust of the creative word prodigally compensates for the invariance of the repeated act; the myths are a "charter" not of things as they are but of their potentiality for becoming, like the questing heroes of myth, something other or more. Among southwestern American peoples, too, myth—though viewed by the Navajo as secondary to the fixed rite (Reichard 1939, 20)—articulates the quest for transcendence implicit in the pollen path and the sequential dry paintings of ritual. The great myth of these peoples, adapted by the Navajo and Apache from the Pueblos, tells of the people's Emergence from underground into the present fourth (or fifth) world where, in primordial times, they sought the Center of the Universe which became their tribal home. This myth of the people's collective quest for a place in the world resonates throughout Navajo ritual; not only the "Upward Moving and Emergence Way" but virtually every chantway celebrates the never-completed emergence that pertains as much to the open-ended future as to the determined past.

The Navajo chantway myths are stories whose hero undergoes a series of misfortunes and is restored by the supernaturals (Katherine Spencer, 19–28); from them he acquires sacred knowledge which he bestows as curing ceremonies. These heroes, at first rejected by their family, prove themselves by their ordeals as outcasts. Far from passively submitting to trials, they actively bring them about: "Why is it," the Chiricahua Windway hero exclaims, "that I suffer those hardships! It appears as though I were seeking the frightful things that are putting me to a test!" The heroes' trials thus take the form of deliberate quests, following exclusion from normal society, for knowledge transforming both hero and world. The pattern of these myths (and of the rituals they accompany) is that of van Gennep's rites of passage: separation, transition, incorporation.

The hero, having sought out the wild and made it part of himself, returns with superior powers: henceforth he will establish the norm for his world, until another hero comes to reject and renew it.

No Navajo myth more fully expresses the quest for transcendence than the search of Changing Woman's twin boys for their father, the Sun. This myth, linked to the Male Shootingway chant and, unlike the formulaic chants, subject to continued variation, finds closer analogues among the recently migratory Apache than the long sedentary Pueblos,^[5] for the mobility of the journey is familiar to the hunter as it no longer is, except in nostalgic memory, to the planter. In the time of monsters after the People's emergence, the myth relates (King, 21–29), Talking God found a baby girl in a flower bed by a rainbow, born of darkness and the Dawn: a creature of the horizon. Because she changed with the seasons, she was called Changing Woman. One day she wandered from her hogan and fell asleep in the noonday sun; when she awoke, she felt someone had come in her sleep, and saw tracks in the east. Four days later she gave birth to a boy and in four more to a second (four is the sacred number of many American tribes); the two babies "grew every four days, like corn," and at age twelve disappeared. They had gone to find their father, the Sun.

Warned by Old Age that they would die before reaching their goal, but rejuvenated by him (for they are Changing Woman's sons), and protected by eagle feathers Spider Woman had stolen from the Sun, the twins after many adventures reach the house of the Sun. His daughter warns that her father will kill them when he returns; instead, the Sun subjects them to a series of trials to test whether they are Holy People worthy to be his children. Aided by Spider Woman's talismans and timely advice from the Sun's daughter and a helpful inchworm, they survive an overheated sweat bath, poisoned cornmeal, and slashing flint knives. The Sun names the elder his son and the younger his grandson, then lets them descend to earth from a hole in the sky after they have identified the fog-covered mountains that delimit the Navajo homeland below.

Donning heavenly armor and wielding spears of lightning, they slay the monsters infesting their land, then revisit their mother and the mountain from which their journey began and receive songs from Talking God to augment their new power. When they fall sick from their toils, the Holy People cure them by performing "Where the Two Came

[5] I follow Navajo chanter Jeff King's version, recorded in 1942–43 by Maud Oakes. Others, all but the last recorded earlier, include Matthews, 104–34; Curtis, 1:98–106; Reichard 1939, 37–49; Klah, 73–99; and Link, 24–36. For Apache versions, see Opler 1938, 47–109 (esp. 47–55) and Goodwin 1939, 3–12, 16–26. A Pueblo analogue in E. Parsons 1926b, 99–102, does not involve a deliberate quest by heroes who simply "go where their father is."

to their Father"—that is, the healing chantway that re-enacts their heroic quest and conquest—four times. "Then . . . they talked of living in the future, and of the making of the future people." Thus ends this ancient legend of the celestially engendered seekers to whom warriors of old would pray, through the Male Shootingway chant, for a share in the sacred power won by their quest and brought back for the benefit of their people from the distant skies.

Chapter Seven—
Mobility and Its Limits in Communal Ritual and Myth

The collective bias of many twentieth-century views of society and religion was challenged, as we have seen, by such thinkers as Weber, Mead, Turner, and Berger. Karl Mannheim, too, asked (206), "From what should the new be expected to originate, if not from the novel and uniquely personal mind of the individual who breaks beyond the bounds of the existing order?" To break beyond the given toward exploration of the unknown is the essence of the spiritual quest, which is only conceivable when the individual no longer sees her existence as wholly defined by the collectivity.

For Firth, too (1964, 233–34), individual actions "tend to have structural effect"; thus the individual search may importantly influence the religious system, as it could never have done for Durkheim or his followers. Others may follow interpretations and actions learned from adventuresome seekers, who may impel social change. Hence examination of individual meanings, Firth writes (47), is indispensable to the study of religion, for without such investigation, "we cannot give satisfactory answers to the problems of religious transformation."

Structure has so often connoted fixity (in British as in French structuralist anthropology) that some writers, including Firth and Turner, have employed the more flexible terms organization or process . If structure implies order, Firth writes (61), "organization implies a working towards order—though not necessarily the same order." Turner likewise suggests (1967, 271) that without some discrepancy between its principles of organization, there could be no such thing as society, since society is "a process of adaptation that can never be completely consummated." This adaptation, like all others, is directed toward an evolving

end in a logical progression from mediate goals to final goal—insofar as any goal of an unending process can be "final."

Structure is necessarily adaptive, since in a changing world, as Rappaport notes (1979, 147), maintenance of homeostasis requires constant change of state and, in most cases, occasional structural changes whose outcome can never be predetermined. In such a purposively adaptive social organization, continually subject to indeterminate structural change through individual actions, above all on the part of its deviant seekers, ritual and myth play a crucial role. For together they run the gamut in tribal society between collective convention, immutably given and repetitively reaffirmed, and the "forward thrust" of more variant aspirations to transcendence. Rituals express conflict as well as conformity; and rites of passage, by confronting their celebrants with a socially uncontrollable Wild, provide a paradigm for the mythical explorations of questing heroes like Maui and the Navajo twins—a paradigm of radical separation from the known, perilous sojourn in an alien yet alluring liminal realm, and (in the Navajo if not in the Polynesian case) transformative re-incorporation into a world defamiliarized and reoriented by the heroes' triumphant return.

Such quests could not arise in a monolithic social order where ritual endlessly reaffirms what has always been and must be; but in a social organization unpredictably "working towards order" they are of central and formative importance. Just as the stake of the dead in continuity of their living descendants gives ancestor worship a "future orientation" (Fortes 1976, 6), so the seemingly static ceremonies of the ritualized Maori or Navajo actually open, through the creative variability of myth, toward a future initiated by the heroes of old but still—like the myths that tell of their exploits and even the slowly changing rites that enact them—in the process of formation.

Even so, the quest remains for the most part inchoate in ritual and myth, a latency awaiting realization. Rituals of rebellion and rites of passage accommodate dimensions of social conflict and mobility excluded from the static Durkheimian model, but their effect is not to challenge traditional society in the name of alternative values but to reinforce its essential rightness. Gluckman repeatedly affirms that "these rebellions, so far from destroying the established social order, work so that they even support this order" (1966, 28), since their controlled expression in ritual serves to resolve conflicts and thus to justify society as it is. Only a society fundamentally beyond question could permit such ritualized expression of open dissent and unbridled excess: "for the order itself," being immune from challenge, "keeps this rebellion within bounds" (1963, 127).

For Turner, Ndembu ritual affirms schism as an aspect of continuity, and tribal ritual in general acknowledges the individual only "by prescribing that he subordinates his individuality to his multiple social roles" (1968, 270). Rituals like the Mukanda thus function as a mechanism temporarily abolishing or minimizing deflections from normative behavior (1967, 269–70): such departures from the norm, by being safely contained in a circumscribed liminal arena, in the end reinforce normalcy. Therefore Turner's assertion (1968, 198) that in rites of passage the legitimacy of crucial Ndembu principles is endorsed does not contradict—though it importantly qualifies—his emphasis on liminal communitas as a realm of pure possibility and a source of novel configurations, for this is a temporary and strictly limited liberty showing (1967, 106) "that ways of acting and thinking alternative to those laid down by the deities or ancestors are ultimately unworkable and may have disastrous consequences." In a similar way, anomalous events may be the occasion for reaffirming communal unity, and rites of status reversal may corroborate the hierarchical principle by demonstrating the absurdity of departure from it.

Thus the circumscribed mobility to which tribal rituals give expression remains marginal to society. The urgent concerns most often addressed by religion are not transcendental but worldly: food, drink, procreation. As Lawrence and Meggitt (18) write of New Guinea, "Religion is a technology rather than a spiritual force for human salvation." There is small place and smaller motive for deviant individuals to quest for some faraway goal; for in the immediacy of shared human need there is little to distinguish one individual from others nor much to seek—so long as the rains and the crops are dependable and no catastrophe supervenes—beyond what human labor and the revolving seasons regularly bring. The questing component of ritual therefore remains largely potential, even though this momentous potentiality belies reduction of ritual to mere repetition of the past or affirmation of the status quo. Individual variation remains essential, as Mannheim and Firth stressed, for change in tribal as in all societies, but the very slowness of such change (and the insistence with which it is denied) suggest how rare deviation from ancestral ways is. The change institutionalized in rites of passage from one stage of life to another permits, in its carefully delimited transitional phase, only slight individual variation from socially established patterns: its goal, unlike that of the true quest, is fixed in advance and all but infallibly obtained. Through ritual, change thus becomes a dependable constant in tribal religion, whose rites repeatedly celebrate not so much stasis as the regularity of a change without past or future.

This assimilation of cyclical change with no clearly distinguished fu-

turity makes progressive changes inadmissible (Turner 1968, 277), since "norms must be maintained at the expense of novel ways of thinking and acting." In the end (which is very like the beginning), the fluidity and flexibility of primitive religion, Bellah writes (1970, 29), "is a barrier to radical innovation. Primitive religion gives little leverage from which to change the world"—and little stimulus to the individual quest which might give rise to change. For such a quest could only call society's values. in question if it led beyond them toward others unknown, as the passage meticulously mapped out in tribal rites, for all its enlarging potential, can never do.

Thus the liminal phase of rites of passage is itself a transition between the relative closure of confirmatory ritual and the exploratory openness of the quest; its domain is the cyclical change which is simultaneously stasis and movement. "In the liminality of tribal societies," Victor and Edith Turner remark (3), "traditional authority nips radical deviation in the bud," eliminating "open-endedness" and any "possibility that the freedom of thought inherent in the very principle of liminality could lead to major reformulation of the social structure." Myth, through the variability of language and oral transmission, may entail greater openness than ritual toward the undetermined future. Yet the vast majority of myths from every part of the world are also concerned with more mundane needs than ascent of the skies or conquest of death. Here again, the quest is latent or marginal,^[1] though even the earthiest trickster may sometimes incongruously remind us of his never quite severed celestial connections.

The heavenly spirits of tribal peoples, who in some mythologies embody at least a former possibility of transcending ordinary humanity, are generally subordinated as objects of worship—quite apart from futile questions of temporal priority—to those of the earth and ancestral dead, just as myth is often subordinated, in religious practice, to ritual, from which it may be entirely severed as it shrivels toward the practically inconsequential and readily predictable fantasies of the fairy tale. Even when myth is closely connected with ritual, as among the Navajo, it usually remains secondary, again suggesting that the opening toward the quest articulated by myth is a potentiality awaiting fulfillment, a forward thrust restrained by the massive inertia of the ceremony to which it is

[1] In Thompson's six-volume Motif-Index , only tales of sections F0-F199 ("Otherworld journeys") and H1200-H1399 ("Tests of prowess: quests") pertain directly to our theme, and in most the object of the hero's journey is fulfillment of a practical need giving little indication of a transcendent dimension. Such stories might be called metaphors of the spiritual quest, but what might not? Much of the perennial charm (and eventual monotony) of folktales lies in their firm adhesion to the touches of untranscended nature that dependably make the whole world kin.

adjunct. The mobility embodied, for example, by the symbolism of the road and the myth of emergence in so formalized a religion as the Pueblo is kept to a well-contained minimum, since the road is identical for everyone and always leads to the same middle place; the only choice—which is virtually none at all—is to begin the journey, for once that is done, there is no other road to follow.

The Hopi, Waters remarks (192), "is content to move slowly and in unison with all around him in this pattern into which he has been inducted at birth." Navajo ritual likewise leads infallibly toward a preestablished goal. And if myths like that of the Navajo twins give splendid expression to the quest, infusing the seemingly all but mechanical chantways with a measure of variability and openness, even these—because they are so clearly handed down from a sacred past and so closely associated with chants held to be eternally changeless—draw their listeners as much backward as forward. To the latter-day Navajo the celestial quest and the possible transformation it symbolizes is forever closed except insofar as he identifies himself with mythical heroes of the past memorialized in the monotonous repetitions of ritual. For within his traditional religion, the past, made potentially variable by myth, is the future, and adherence to it his only transcendence. The Navajo, treading his pollen path, thus partakes vicariously in the indeterminate quest of myth while scrupulously performing the rites whose efficacy the slightest deviation would instantly annul.

Ritual is praxis, undertaken to produce a concrete result. But it is also communication among its participants, and what its putative invariance communicates is that nothing is new. Ritual, A. Wallace writes (1966, 233), is "communication without information," since each ritual "allows no uncertainty, no choice, and hence . . . conveys no information from sender to receiver. It is, ideally, a system of perfect order and any deviation from this order is a mistake." Sanctity itself, Rappaport suggests (1979, 209), derives from the "quality of unquestionableness " imputed to unverifiable postulates. From this updated Durkheimian perspective, the opportunity for questing (which presupposes questioning, and possible novelty and choice) would again seem to be minimized or precluded. Yet far from simply reaffirming the certitude of stasis, the stereotyped communication of ritual serves a "mobilizing and coordinating function" (Wallace 1966, 235–36) by preparing the organism to act more quickly than less stereotyped and more informational communication could do, since this would require time and effort, because of the novelty of its message, to be absorbed. "The accomplishment of the ritual reorganization of experience is thus," Wallace writes (239), not mere indoctrination in society's pre-established values but "a kind of

learning," or at least a propaedeutic to the intensified learning that action, once initiated, will inevitably bring.

It is even possible that the sanctity associated with the invariant repetitions of ritual may have been, as Rappaport speculates (1979, 231), the stable foundation without which language and social order could not have developed during man's long evolutionary prehistory. In this case an apparently rigid structure would again have given rise to a flexible process capable of self-transcendence through adaptation to novelty and change: a prototype of the conscious quest that would eventuate from it. Quite apart from such conjectures, however, the call to action communicated by ritual in Wallace's conception endows it with a dynamic function not in the distant mythical time of foundations but in the unfinished present. The very unquestionableness of ritual, which seems to preclude the quest, may paradoxically foster it by serving as the fixed springboard for otherwise impossibly bold initiatives whose intrinsic uncertainties, outside the protective closure of ritual, demand continual adaptiveness to change and repeated choice among unpredictable alternatives—qualities inherent in every living, thinking, speaking human being, but focused most intensely in the questing hero who deliberately sets out to realize the transformative aspirations that remain potential in others.

Inasmuch as priestly ritual is conceived in tribal society as the primary form of communication with the spiritual world, it becomes the indispensable intermediary between divine and human. The role of the priest as the conservative guardian of established ritual, Firth observes (1970, 32), is reaffirmation of the existing order and traditionally accepted meanings. Through this institutionalization of religious transcendence the dynamic potentiality of ritual is safely contained and its powers channeled toward maintenance of tested traditions rather than exposed to the hazards of untried innovation. A society continually in quest of self-transformation would risk centrifugal disintegration; priestly ritual, with its orientation toward an unchanging past, offers the stabilizing assurance (as Durkheim and his school rightly stressed) that what has been found need not continuously be sought anew. Its invariance is no doubt a fiction masking a latent impetus toward change, but the fiction is supremely valuable, insofar as universally shared, in upholding the continuity of communal tradition on which the very existence of social order largely depends.