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Chapter Sixteen The Patterns and Meanings of the Festival Year
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A Note on Moving Deities Within the City

When the city's spaces and what they represent are tied together or contrasted in a serial, interactive manner rather than in a parallel summative way, the characteristic device used is the jatra . The deity is either moved systematically so that masses of people may be brought into contact with it, or else—less commonly—masses of people move systematically to encounter a deity or a sequential set of deities. These movements, jatra s, follow traditional routes, variously tying together


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units of the city and, often, the city as a whole. They explore central points, axes, and boundaries, as people move or as focal deities are carried through space and time. In so doing the procession of people or of the deity is often brought into an encounter with other kinds of dramatic enactments.

By far the most common movement is that of those jatra s that move the deities themselves. Such movements would seem to be a utilization of an unremarkable resource for the enactment of symbols, for putting symbolic forms into effective relations with space and community. Yet, an observation by Walter Burkert suggests that such jatra s are, in fact, problematic in comparative perspective. Burkert writes of ancient Greece that "processions with images of gods—which play a major role in the Ancient Near East—are [in Greece] an exception. . .. Such a moving of the immovable is an uncanny breaking up of order " (1985, 92 [emphasis added]). Bhaktapur's gods leave their temples and their fixed positions, and although they do not wander at will in the course of the annual events, their order is a mobile order. The contrast with Greece suggests that the movement of Bhaktapur's gods—or at least of the jatra images they inhabit—out into the city from their fixed bases in the city are invasions, albeit controlled and not chaotic ones, of what in Greece was becoming a safely secular space.


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Chapter Sixteen The Patterns and Meanings of the Festival Year
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