(1965)), any“native”participant of a ritual will be able to judge whether a
certain action is a ritual or not (McCauley & Lawson, 2002, pp. 4–6, 8–10; that
is, a ritual according to Lawson and McCauley’sdefinition). Importantly, we
do not have to ask experts of religious traditions (theologians or scholars of
religion) to decide what rituals are, but rather people who participate in them:
native speakers of languages and performers of rituals have the competence to
identify them intuitively. But how can we differentiate between rituals (such as
the minister baptizing the infant), on the one hand, and other actions that are
not rituals (such as the cook whipping eggs), on the other hand? The answer is
twofold (cf. McCauley & Lawson, 2002, pp. 13–16). (1) First, in a religious
ritual, one of the agent, patient, or instrument is connected to aculturally
postulated superhuman agent(a god, spirit, or other superhuman agent in a
given culture). This seems to exclude the cook whipping eggs being a religious
ritual. But what can we say about the case of a priest whipping eggs or John
reading the Bible? (2) Second, rituals are actions that result in a change in the
religious world. The result of the baptism is that the child is baptized, which is
recognized as a new state of affairs in the religious world. No such change is
attributed to the priest whipping eggs or John reading the Bible (arguably, the
“Bible”in this example is not even a proper patient but fulfills some other
thematic role). Note that the theory does not allow for a meaningful inter-
pretation of rituals without the involvement of a culturally postulated super-
human agent (such as sports events, May Day marches, etc.), which Lawson
and McCauley (McCauley & Lawson, 2002, pp. 8–9) do not consider to be
religious rituals.
A connection between a participant of a ritual and the culturally postulated
superhuman agent is established by so-calledenabling rituals; for example, the
priest had to be ordained before he could perform a baptism. Sometimes more
than one element of the ritual is connected to the deity; in such a case, we have
to ask which one is connected more directly. In a marriage ritual, for example,
the Church usually requires that the bride and the groom were also baptized.
However, since baptism itself was performed by a priest, the bride and groom
are one step further away from the deity (than the priest is from the deity) in
terms of enabling rituals.^11 According to the Ritual Form Theory, baptism and
Table 5.2.The representation of ritual as action
Agent Action (by Instrument) Patient
The cook whips (with the whisker) the eggs.
The priest baptizes (with water) the infant.
(^11) As Biró (2013, p. 132) rightly pointed out, the notion of distance in terms of the number of
enabling rituals is poorly defined. Was a medieval priest closer to God than a priest is today, by
being fewer steps removed from Saint Peter? If the same priest who baptized the bride and the
Ritual 115