crazed believers inebriated by loud drumbeats and mind-altering sub-
stances. There are rituals like that; but many others—indeed, most—
are quite sober affairs. The performance is not always that fascinat-
ing, and its effects not always dramatic. Emotional involvement varies
a lot. The induction of a new shaman in Nepal or the staged killing of
young boys in Central Africa, mentioned at the beginning, are cer-
tainly spectacular; but the handling of relics in Indonesia or the sacri-
fice of a goat in India do not exactly set the pulse racing.
Most importantly, the supposed presence of gods and spirits is an
optional feature of rituals. The sacrifice of a goat is construed as a gift
[256] to the goddess; the presence of this invisible exchange partner is part
of how people represent the ritual. But young boys among the Gbaya
are initiated by older men, through a complex series of rituals and
mysterious performances that do not involve the ancestors.
One might want to say that there are two kinds of rituals, religious
and nonreligious. Ordaining a priest would be religious because God is
assumed to be around, while a wedding at the registrar's office would
be nonreligious. Armed with such a distinction, we could then try to
discern the differences between the two types. This, as anthropologists
know from bitter experience, leads to difficult problems. First, there
are many intermediate cases where supernatural agents are mentioned
but peripheral. Second, there are no very clear general differences
between the two types of rituals (except, of course, the alleged presence
of supernatural agents in one type). Many civil weddings follow a script
that makes them very similar to the religious version.
So let us analyze the situation in more concrete terms. People are
brought up in a particular human group, where gods are mentioned,
rituals are performed, and some rituals are performed with a men-
tion of the gods. If this latter association is stable, it must be because
it is easily acquired at each generation. In other words, there is
something in the representation of rituals that makes it relevant,
though not mandatory, to include supernatural agents in their
description.
As I said at the beginning, the way a ritual produces particular
effects is mysterious, not least to the people concerned. They have no
idea why saying this or doing that as the ritual prescribes should make
people married rather than get them cured of a disease or have some
other effect. People who have gone through a painful initiation of the
kind described by Houseman have a strong intuition that they have
become different and that boys who did not follow the initiation path
RELIGION EXPLAINED