Ritual Dynamics: The Boiotian Festival of the Daidala (original) (raw)
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Ritual and Its Transgressions in Ancient Greece
. Ginzburg (ed.), A Historical Approach to Casuistry. Norms and Exceptions in a Comparative Perspective, London: Bloomsbury, 47-64 , 2019
What happens when rituals are transgressed? When a ritual works normally, we hear very little about the religious, social, or cultural expectations surrounding its performance. When it fails or is infringed upon, however, the anomaly highlights accepted norms and reveals what is usually hidden or taken for granted. In this chapter, I will frst look at the etymology and semantic development of the term “ritual,” since the former has only recently become clearer and the latter is still a matter of ongoing research (see the section Ritual: Etymology and Semantic Development). Next, I will look at two case studies of ritual transgressions taken from famous festivals in ancient Greece—the Tesmophoria and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Finally, I draw some conclusions based on these examples.
Designs of Ritual: The City Dionysia of Fifth-Century Athens
In, Celebrations: Sanctuaries and the Vestiges of Cult Activity, ed. M. Wedde, Athens: Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens, Vol. 6, pp 207-235, 2004
Don Handelman THE STUDY OF RITUAL must address the meta-level of designs through which particular rituals are organized. Rituals are schemes of practice and action that are designed culturally to accomplish a variety of purposes less easily done through other means. Designs of ritual organize the practice of ritual into coherent and continuous patterns. Without design, ritual structures and processes could not exist. The idea of design itself depends on logic. I am not referring to the logic of logic of philosophy and mathematics, but rather to the logics of phenomena. The logics of phenomena refer here to the principled ways in which certain social phenomena are intentionally ordered and disordered as practice (and practiced as ordering and disordering). A given ritual is activated, first and foremost, by the practice of its logic(s) of organizational design. In this work I will be concerned primarily with the design that I call modelling; though some mention will also be made of the design of presentation (I have discussed these in detail in Handelman 1998). 2 MY focus here is on rituals that are designed culturally to change the world outside these events some way. This is a key issue in ritual studies since it implies that ritual must have a special ontological status in the world that enables ritual to act on that world. In the case of rituals that model, that impact on the world outside themselves, their ontological status is to be designed as worlds unto themselves.
Although concepts of performance theory were successfully applied to the study of rituals in the social sciences, research on ancient Greek ritual practice was not affected by such approaches to any significant degree. To a large extent, this might be due to the fragmentary character of the available evidence, consisting mainly of material remains of ritual activities in the archaeological record, and representations of rituals in art. In the absence of detailed descriptions of ritual practice in literary sources, it is therefore difficult to reconstruct whole ritual sequences, which would greatly facilitate their interpretation as performative acts. Criticizing a view of ritual as primarily non-verbal and action orientated, this paper emphasizes the role of speech in Greek rituals and examines some of the evidence for mimetic and narrative ritual performances. Drawing on the example of the Athenian Oschophoria, the performative aspect of a specific ritual is investigated. In addition, the simplified interpretation of the Oschophoria as an “ephebes’ rite” is dismissed in favour of a more balanced reading that adequately considers not only the eminent agricultural aspect of the festival but also the different groups of participants.
Festivals and Contests in the Greek World
“FestivalsThesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum VII, Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum 2011, 1-43 and 160-172
Typography by Martino Mardersteig, printing and binding by Stamperia Valdonega Group, Verona Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum.
The festival of Saint Demetrios, the Timarion, and the Aithiopika
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2016
The description of the festival for Saint Demetrios in Thessaloniki in the Timarion has long been used as a source for regional and liturgical history. It is in fact a literary rewriting of a festival at Delphi in Heliodoros’ Aithiopika. This paper demonstrates how the description of the Demetria represents a moment in Byzantine humanism as well as a reflection on the process of literary composition itself. An explanation is also proposed here for why Heliodoros’ festival at Delphi in particular, out of all descriptions of festivals in ancient literature, appealed to the author of the Timarion.
Myths, Festivals and Rituals in Greece
Myths, Festivals and Rituals in Greece. In Maria-Luiza Dumitru Oancea & Ramona Mihăilă (eds.): Myth, Symbol, and Ritual: Elucidatory Paths to the Fantastic Unreality III. Bucharest: University of Bucharest Publishing House: 227-252, 2019
The local festival dedicated to the Anniversary of the Vision of Agia (Saint) or Osia (venerable, blessed, saint) Pelagia is celebrated on the Greek island of Tinos and is dedicated to one of the most recent Orthodox saints, Agia Pelagia, a nun who was sanctified in 1971. After the great Greek War of Liberation (1821) broke out, the pious nun Pelagia had several mystical visions which lead to the finding of the miraculous icon of the Annunciation. According to the tradition, Pelagia repeatedly saw, in her visions, the Panagia (Virgin Mary), who ordered her to start digging to find her icon. In 1823, the icon was unearthed in the field where it had remained for about 850 years. “Pelagia’s Vision” is celebrated annually on 23 July. During the festival the church housing her skull next to her cell in the monastery of Kekhrovouno, where she had the visions, is particularly important. Based on a presentation of this festival and some other relevant rituals from Greece where I have conducted fieldwork, the article will explore some aspects of the way myths are important when re-presenting the past in the Greek context both, earlier and today. Keywords: Method, Myth/s, Gender, Greece, Festivals
Ritual, Continuity and Change: Greek Reflections
History and Anthropology, 2004
Greek death practices. It points to the importance of focusing on questions of "form" in ritual practices-that is, "how" rituals work and are transmitted, more or less completely, from one generation to the next. It also considers the importance of historical consciousness, in particular the notion of "changing continuities", in understanding some of the existential ways that ritual addresses common human experiences of temporality.