ner) adds up to 613, the number of mitzvoth, or obligations,
in the Torah.
Binding. Present-day Hindu practice continues to use
a thread or cord as the symbol of renewal, creating a closed
circle that ties the worshiper to the principles of the faith.
During Upanayana, a rite-of-passage ceremony, sacred cords
are placed over the shoulders of adolescent boys to signify
their eligibility for education within the caste tradition. For
the brahman caste the thread is cotton; for the ks:atriya (war-
rior or ruler) caste the cord is hemp; for the vai ́sya (artisan
or merchant) caste the cord is wool. Women also use the sa-
cred thread within rituals. For example, at the annual festival
of the goddess Gauri, a cotton thread sixteen times the
woman’s height is wound into a skein and laid before images
of the goddess. Later the skein is worn around the neck, then
buried or burned.
Ritual bonding frequently uses textiles. The priest’s
stole that drapes the joined hands of a couple during the mar-
riage ceremony in the Western and Eastern Christian
Church in effect becomes the tie that binds man to woman
and the couple to the church, reinforcing the sanctity of mar-
riage. In many Muslim societies ritual bonding occurs when
the bridal couple is invited to sit on a shared mat or textile.
Among the Batak tribes of northern Sumatra the climax of
the traditional marriage ceremony is the enveloping of the
couple in a single textile by the bride’s father. Other mem-
bers of the immediate family are also wrapped in shawls dur-
ing the course of the ceremony, further emphasizing the
bonds this event celebrates.
Offering. Literally hundreds of blankets, bolts of cloth,
and other utilitarian textiles, as well as great quantities of
nontextile domestic and ritual goods, were amassed by ex-
tended family groups among the tribes of the northwest coast
of North America for potlatch feasts. They were presented
to guests or burned in extravagant demonstrations of ex-
change. In contemporary revivals, commercial cloth and
clothing are exchanged. Although less dramatic, the import-
ed Chinese white silk scarves patterned with Buddhist sym-
bols and the simple Indian white cotton gauze scarves used
by Tibetan Buddhists convey a similar sense of offering and
sacrifice. In the wool-producing regions of the Tibetan Pla-
teau these exotic imports were tokens of exchange between
individuals upon meeting and offerings to images. Tibetans
also offer rectangles of cotton cloth block-printed with
prayers to the elements as acts of devotion. Flown from poles,
suspended on lines, or tied to the roofs of temples and
shrines, these textiles are literally destroyed by the winds that
activate intercessions with the gods.
Funeral customs provide other insights into textile-
offering practices. Although knowledge of the actual practice
is far from complete, the archaeological record for pharaonic
Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru is spectacular. The dry cli-
mates of the Egyptian desert and of coastal Peru have pre-
served vast quantities of textiles used in burial. Egyptians
wrapped mummies of the dead in fine linen. Complete ward-
robes of clothes and household linens, reflecting the status
and means of the individual in life, were also interred to pro-
vide the comforts of this earth in the next world. Along the
dry south coast of Peru, pre-Columbian mummy bundles of
aristocrats contain numerous finely woven and embroidered
sets of wool and cotton clothes as well as large quantities of
other fine textiles.
In China, where silk was a principal trade commodity
as well as the imperial standard for the payment and collec-
tion of taxes, silk textiles played a major role in life and death.
Throughout the centuries the number and quality of burial
clothes reflected the status of the individual in life. The re-
markably well-preserved chambered tomb of the Lady Dai
at Mawangdui, Changsha, which dates from about 160 BCE,
contained over twenty-seven items of silk apparel, including
some twelve coats, forty-six rolls of uncut silk, and numerous
silk wrappers and bags. During the later imperial period the
custom of preparing clothes especially decorated with charac-
ters meaning “long life” (the so-called shufu, or “longevity”
coats) arose, but burial clothes mainly copied an individual’s
official wardrobe, which designated rank at court. Archaeolo-
gy has also revealed abuses of the rules of entitlement, such
as the garments recovered from the tombs of Xu Fan (1463–
1530) and his wife from Taizhou, Jiangsu province, in which
the wive’s robes outranked those of her husband by two
ranks.
Although there are instances of funeral textiles recycled
from life, such as the bridal garments used for the burials of
Chinese women, which reflected a most exalted status in the
rigid patriarchial society that largely ignored women, most
were specially acquired for burial. The obligation and ex-
pense for a Confucian funeral were borne by the next genera-
tion of the family. By contrast, nineteenth-century aristo-
crats on the island of Timor in eastern Indonesia devoted
considerable amounts of time and money to amassing quan-
tities of prestige textiles for their own burials.
Sacrifices do not always involve fabrics of the greatest
economic or aesthetic value. For some cultures specific tex-
tiles are produced for shrouds. The traditional burial cloth-
ing of Jews is a set of simple, untailored linen garments. In
Bali the sacred cloths called bebali are in effect token textiles
made only for offering. Loosely woven, they are too fragile
for use; most are too small to function as clothing for the liv-
ing. During the late imperial period in China and continuing
into the twenty-first century, sets of paper clothes and mod-
els of bolts of silk are as offerings to the dead for the next
life.
Textile offerings were important in rituals honoring per-
sonified deities. In pharaonic Egypt images of gods within
cult temples were centers of elaborate ceremonies that imitat-
ed human life. Gods were awakened in the morning, fed,
bathed, and clothed, taken on festive outings, and put to bed
at night, not unlike the pharaoh, the living manifestation of
god on earth. Aqllawasi (House of Chosen Women), often
referred to as Virgins of the Sun, was a cloistered communityTEXTILES 9089