broken relationship, or as an appeal for rectification of a
problem.
Another potential meaning of tears that is suggested by
their crossing the bodily boundary of inside/outside bears
mention: Tears may serve as a sign of ecstasy—an out-of-
body state or psychosomatic experience. This is why tears are
often associated with mystical experience in religions around
the world, including Jewish Qabbalah, Christian mysticism,
and Sufism. Alternatively, tears may be taken as a sign that
a spirit or deity has entered a body and possessed it. In the
religious services of Pentecostal Christians, for example, the
descent of the Holy Spirit into the body of a believer is sig-
naled by glossolalia (speaking in tongues), the loss of full
consciousness, and frequently by copious tears flowing down
the face. The absence of tears may also be a sign that a human
body has been possessed. During the Spanish Inquisition in
Europe, suspected witches were sometimes ordered to cry.
Because the ability to cry tears was considered to be a mark
of human nature, the inability to produce them on com-
mand signaled that a demonic nature inhabited the witch’s
body.
Healthy eyes bring light into the dark cavernous human
body and the mind, providing crucial information about
conditions in the exterior world. In the West, the eyes have
long been called “windows to the soul.” Although this meta-
phor is culturally specific, reflecting on the phenomenology
of windows enables us to appreciate the symbolic associa-
tions drawn in the West between windows, eyes, and tears.
A transparent window provides outsiders with visual access
to an interior space, while simultaneously providing insiders
with visual access to the exterior. As such, windows are a pas-
sive medium for visual activity across a boundary demarcat-
ing an interior and an exterior space. Eyes are like windows
insofar as they, too provide visual access to both the interior
and exterior of the human body. In sharp contrast, tears cross
the bodily boundary of inside and outside in one direction
only: Tears flow out of the eyes, not into them. The unidirec-
tional nature of the flow of tears informs the widespread be-
lief that tears carry information about the interior world of
an individual (or, at times, of a group) out to the broader
world. Tears are believed to be signs of interior and otherwise
invisible states, most commonly affective or spiritual states.
However, as noted earlier, the determination of the meaning
of specific tears is also affected by the local religious and med-
ical understanding of the body. For instance, in the Western
humoral theory of the body, which held sway from the time
of Galen in the second century CE until the Renaissance, tears
were taken to be a symptom of the changing balance of the
five humors in the body. Similarly, melancholy, which was
characterized by uncontrollable bouts of crying, was consid-
ered to be the result of excess humidity in the body.
Unlike transparent windows and healthy eyes, which
allow clear vision across boundaries, tearful eyes produce
blurred vision. Phenomenologically, this blurred vision of
the outside world suggests the blurring of boundaries and
differences. Thus, ritual tears shed in mourning over a de-
ceased person may blur the boundary between the dead and
the living. Similarly, ritual tears may dissolve other spatial
and temporal boundaries. The participants in the annual
ShiEi devotional rites of Muharram, for instance, weep in
order to return to the time and the place of the martyrdom
of al-Husayn at Karbala. Recalling this aspect of the phe-
nomenology of tears also helps us to better understand the
phrase “dissolve into tears.” When an individual dissolves
into tears, verbal speech is no longer possible, but the entire
body “speaks.” Collective weeping can produce a psychoso-
matic experience of communion.Another aspect of the phenomenology of tears has long
caused problems for students of religion. Tears are often
seemingly spontaneous emotional responses to external stim-
uli or memories. When understood to be a spontaneous and
unwilled affective response to joy, anger, frustration, and so
on, crying appears to be a natural and universal human emo-
tional response and therefore, precultural in nature. Al-
though feelings or emotions have a subjective immediacy and
reality, they have no observable or objective physical reality
per se. Feelings have to be expressed—in a grimace, a smile,
a frown, a cry, rolling of the eyes, and so on—in order to
be communicated to others. Tears, though, are literally ex-
pressed in the sense that lachrymal fluid is squeezed out of
the body. This characteristic allows actual tears to provide
apparent objective evidence of subjective states and of other-
wise hidden psychosomatic conditions.
The problem historians of religions faced was that ritu-
alized weeping is clearly not spontaneous; it is choreo-
graphed. Ritual weepers, professional and nonprofessional as
well, can often turn their tears on and off at will. Some West-
ern scholars found this disconcerting; others found it to be
confirmatory evidence of the presumed duplicitous and in-
sincere nature of “primitives.” Yet others, perhaps influenced
by the Protestant suspicion of the “empty” rituals of the
Roman Catholic Church, sought to distinguish between
“real” tears and artificial or false ones. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
in his famous anthropological study The Andaman Islanders
(1922) noted that there were two types of weeping: (1) weep-
ing as a spontaneous expression of feeling; and (2) weeping
as “required by custom.” Following Durkheim’s argument
in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), Rad-
cliffe-Brown largely dissociated ritual weeping from individ-
ual emotions of grief, sadness, and so on. Functionalists fol-
lowed Radcliffe-Brown in arguing that, rather than being
provoked by a strong emotion such as grief, the tears shed
in ritual contexts primarily served to evoke feelings of social
solidarity. Here, too, they developed a claim made by
Durkheim, who asserted that ritual weeping produced a col-
lective sense of “effervescence” that helped to restore and
strengthen proper social relations.
The functionalist interpretation of ritual weeping is not
completely wrong; ritual tears serve multiple purposes, in-
cluding creating a shared emotional state. However, insofarTEARS 9025