1. The title of this chapter derives from the title of a lecture by Warren McCulloch, "What is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number?" (1965). The second phase of the dialogue—in the form of "what is a Newar that he or she may know Bhaktapur?"—will occupy us more centrally elsewhere. [BACK]

2. It should be noted that the idea of a mediating mesocosm with its own particular characteristics implies that Bhaktapur's relation to the great cosmos is not that of, say, a medieval monastery, which was sometimes conceived of as simply a faithful map of the heavenly city. [BACK]

3. Polytheism avoids the strains placed on a monotheistic representation such as Jehovah, who in his symbolically overloaded ineffability must represent, for example, both ideal human moral qualities, including compassion for individuals, and at the same time a contradictory set of para-human disruptive, destructive, protective, and controlling forces. [BACK]

4. We will consider some formal relations between myth and legend in the next section. [BACK]

5. The religiosity of Bhaktapur's marked symbolism is perhaps only a "problem" when looking back on it from later secular perspectives, perspectives where the sacred, to recall St. Paul (whose pronouncement we used in a discussion of the "problem of idols" in chap. 8) has been exiled from the creation to the distant and thus unencumbering realm of the Creator. [BACK]

6. For example, from James Joyce's story, The Dead , "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of." [BACK]

7. It should be noted that sexuality in civic symbolism is disconnected from ideas of family, procreation, love, or the normally erotic—its symbols are nonhuman and uncanny. This is a sexuality outside of the realm of the social person. [BACK]

8. For some vivid examples, see Hale and Hale (1970). [BACK]

9. The transformations in organization and meanings that characteristically occur as levels change highlight the peculiarity of those systemic patterns that are occasionally reiterated at different levels. A characteristic example in Bhaktapur is the Po(n) untouchables who mimic the larger macrosocial system in having their own "Brahmans," as they sometimes put it, and their own "untouchables." [BACK]

10. Compare Rappaport (1979) on the central importance of action and bodily involvement in ritual in an attempt to overcome the limits of ordinary language—in which lying is possible—for social commitment. [BACK]

11. The ontological status of deities in these three forms, and the truth claims of the forms themselves, differ. People may doubt a legend that, as we noted in the legend of the Yasi(n) God in chapter 14, often has different and contradictory forms, in a different way than they might doubt the presence of an embodied deity. [BACK]

12. Classification by levels generates mysteries when a particular entity is placed at different levels in different hierarchies. Within the class of dangerous deities females are more inclusive, more powerful, more independent, and more paradigmatic of the class than are males. This relation is reversed in the class of the benign deities. Women are differently ranked in these and still other classification and thus "femaleness" considered as a united, unsplit, category has a certain peculiarity about it. The goddess Bhaktapur' condenses as Kumari derives some of her fascination from being a concrete and differentiated deity, a "maiden," in one series, and a relatively full goddess in another. King, Brahman, and untouchable, in their own different ways, have different positions in hierarchies of purity on the one hand and of power on the other, and so become interestingly and generatively paradoxical. [BACK]

13. We have sketched, in chapter 2, some aspects of what we take to be the "states of mind" necessarily associated with orders such as Bhaktapur's. We suggested that they were both induced by experience within the city and, at the same time, motivated aspects of the city's order as ways of dealing with those particular states of mind. We hope, as we stated there, to deal with these topics at length elsewhere. [BACK]