What would create this impression? A first explanation would be
that the rituals are addressed to or involve powerful gods and spirits.
The latter are seen as powerful agents who can affect your health and
good fortune, without whose blessing or cooperation you cannot get
good crops, many children, a peaceful society or protection from nat-
ural disasters. However, this is a little misleading. People are not born
with the notion of powerful gods and spirits. They get that from other
people, from hearing what they say and observing how they behave.
The performance of rituals is one of the external elements that you
can observe long before you acquire complex notions of gods and spir-
its. So it may well be the case that rituals are not so much a result of [237]
people's representation of the gods' powers as one of its many causes.
That is, rituals are organized in such a way that they give a particular
shape and tenor to people's notions of supernatural agents and make
more plausible the gods' involvement in their existence.
The special flavor of ritual that we find in so many different cul-
tural contexts is not just a matter of special rigidity but also of the par-
ticular elements introduced in ritual sequences, as summarized by
anthropologist Alan Fiske: "a focus on special numbers of colours;
concerns about pollution and purity and consequent washing or other
purification; contact avoidance; special ways of touching; fears about
immanent, serious sanctions for rule violations; a focus on boundaries
and thresholds; symmetrical arrays and other precise spatial
patterns."^10
Among the common features of ritual in vastly different cultural
environments, we find an obsession with marking boundaries—for
instance, marking off some part of the ceremonial space as special.
Indeed, as historian of religion Veikko Anttonen points out, this
obsession with limits is probably the only common thread in other-
wise very different concepts of "sacred" space and objects. Another
extremely common theme is that of purity, purification, of making
sure that participants and various objects are clean, etc. The Javanese
handling of the relics, itself presented as a cleaning operation although
the objects are not actually cleaned in the usual sense of the word, is
preceded by a ceremonial meal. The chickens reserved for this meal
should all be perfectly white and should be washed three times by the
shrine caretaker before preparation and again after plucking. The
cooking should be done by a mature woman past menopause, as men-
struation is seen as polluting. The flowers brought to the ceremonial
WHYRITUALS?