“Ensuring Ritual Competence. A Negotiable Matter: Religious Specialist”. In: U. Hüsken (ed.), When Rituals go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual, Leiden 2007, pp. 183-196 (Numen Book Series 115). (original) (raw)
Related papers
Two Notes on the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms
Vol. 3 | Num. 2 | Dicembre 2019
Launched in 2017, the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms provides an open-access commentary on selected ancient Greek inscriptions which define parameters of ritual practice. These short notes address two issues superficially concerning the name of the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms, but more deeply engaging with what one means by the notion of 'ritual norm' and what one implies in considering such norms 'Greek'. A term like 'cult regulation' might conveniently be used to replace the misnomer 'sacred law', but this encompasses a similarly broad and miscellaneous group of inscriptions. By contrast, the category of 'ritual norm' aims to reframe the discussion by focussing on normativity – paradigms and exceptions – with regard to two key rituals, sacrifice and purification. It thus only partly reprises the corpus of 'sacred laws', while also including other inscriptions or excerpts from them. Calling such norms 'Greek' is not int...
SACRED LAW " All laws of men are nourished by one law, the divine law. " So wrote the fifth century Greek philospher Heraklitos. The concept of " Sacred Law " is likely the remnant of a category first used in 1906 to define a particular corpus of Greek inscriptions pertaining to cult practice. It constitutes a subcategory of the vast category— " all laws of men " —that includes the intersection of the normative and the divine. Sacred law is not the abstract, pervasive, and diffuse notion of divine sponsorship—however conceived—of state power, or the vast realm captured between the terms " religion and law, " but covers a subcategory of explicit norms that govern religious cult practice. Despite being shaped by a particular curatorial moment, the term is a useful rubric for entry into the ancient materials, since the study of practice is an important cognate to studies of theology or belief. Sacrifice and the apparatus that developed to regulate it were perhaps the most important religious institutions in the ancient world—the stakes of obedience were cosmic in scale. Though modern readers may be accustomed to dismissing the legalistic component of ancient religion as primitive and though the laws themselves can be tedious to read, they are nonetheless a critical language through which these cultures communicated their idea of divinity. Moreover, they permit scholars an important inroad for comparison of phenomena, the commonalities of which, were one to look only (and anachronistically) at " theology " would be lost. Moreover indeed, one cannot understand religion at all in the ancient Mediterranean through the category of belief alone; right action, or orthopraxy, was not only what could be prescribed, but was what mattered. Sacred laws are preserved in a variety of corpuses, each of which presents challenges concerning analytical method. Within each culture, sacred laws, which are a category classified by content, must also be considered according to the genres in which they appear. While historical, literary, and other material remains tell us much about how religion was practiced, our concern here is with legal sources that take prescriptive and normative form. The standard compendia of Greek sacred law are made up of inscriptions, and so preserve distinctly public and emphatically local data, while Jewish sacred laws are preserved largely through textual collections composed in both earlier and later ages. The main sources here are the priestly materials in the Torah, a collection of laws governing the cult compiled in the Persian period (5 th c. BCE) or slightly earlier, but which take as their stated object the tabernacle, or tent of meeting, of earlier narratives. The second major source is the Mishnah, an early third-century CE legal collection that emerged from the rabbinic movement. The rabbis, who thrived only after the cessation of Jewish sacrifice following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, were a group of lay Torah experts whose complex relationship to the cult is belated and ambivalent, holding archival, nostalgic, and polemical motives in tension. Roman sacred laws are found in a wide array of sources, and much of what we know comes from collections compiled under the Christian empire, which combines a similar dual stance—conservative and polemical—toward the cultic traditions. Sacred laws are difficult to use as historical data. Their narrow focus and paradigmatic content testify to their profound conservatism across time and space, such that a phenomenological approach may be best. It is not unusual to see an inscription from the fifth century BCE anthologized alongside or discussed seamlessly and without comment beside another from the first century CE. Compounding this is the fact that most sacred law is technical and telegraphic —they have been compared to recipes for master chefs, so in lieu of a full recipe, we may have only an abbreviated list of ingredients. And given the ubiquity and centrality of sacrificial
2019. Two Notes on the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Axon, 2019
Launched in 2017, the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms provides an openaccess commentary on selected ancient Greek inscriptions which define parameters of ritual practice. These short notes address two issues superficially concerning the name of the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms, but more deeply engaging with what one means by the notion of 'ritual norm' and what one implies in considering such norms 'Greek'. A term like 'cult regulation' might conveniently be used to replace the misnomer 'sacred law', but this encompasses a similarly broad and miscellaneous group of inscriptions. By contrast, the category of 'ritual norm' aims to reframe the discussion by focussing on normativity-paradigms and exceptions-with regard to two key rituals, sacrifice and purification. It thus only partly reprises the corpus of 'sacred laws', while also including other inscriptions or excerpts from them. Calling such norms 'Greek' is not intended as an 'ethnic' designation of the rituals they describe but rather as a reference to the language of the inscriptions. The label 'Greek ritual norms' is thus programmatic, allowing for a wider investigation of the normative characteristics of rituals within the religious 'middle grounds' of the ancient Greek world.
Ritual Systems, Ritualized Bodies, and the Laws of Liturgical Development
Studia Liturgica, 2019
The “laws” of comparative liturgical development (Baumstark, Taft) are derived from pre-modern liturgical texts and the findings of early biology and linguistics. Yet Christian liturgy is not an organically evolving species; it is a ritual system, a cultural, political, self-regulating, self-reproducing set of rites that are used to interpret and correct one another. Focusing on the reception of new practices by practiced communities, a performance theory approach spotlights the systemic interrelationships of rites and the ritual habitus of human bodies. A ritual system makes particular meanings seem natural, permitting some new liturgical developments, impeding others. Ritualized bodies constrain rapid changes, while the entrance of bodies ritualized in a different system changes the environment, leading some to attempt to reinforce the status quo. Technologies for passing on liturgies are developed and used when a crisis demands change or imperils valued practice. Accounting for d...
Ritual and Emerging Church Hierarchy
The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual, 2018
Tradition and scholarship have often assumed that early Christian ritual authority coincided with church office. More recent scholarship raises questions about the uniformity of ancient practices and the extent to which ritual authority was concentrated in the offices of deacon, presbyter, or bishop. This chapter assesses writings of the first and second centuries to discover what kinds of ritual authority they indicate and whether they locate ritual authority in a particular office. Drawing on ritual theory, the chapter argues that language describing baptism, eucharist, and other meal rituals points to the establishment of ritual hierarchies through the enactment of the rites. However, the early texts also leave open the identity and office of the ritual specialists. Many early Christians—male and female, of varying offices or without any office—likely assumed these ritual roles.
Greek Ritual Norms: The Textuality of Ritual Norms ('Sacred Laws') in the Ancient Greek World
Greek Inscriptions II, 2019
In this second of two essays on the topic of ancient Greek inscriptions, I will briefly explore and discuss the textuality of ritual norms or, 'sacred laws', by looking 1) at the reasons for these ritual norms to have been written down in the first place and 2) how these norms/laws/decrees were able to get their observers to adhere to them. Throughout the essay I have made use of J.L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to better contextualize the meaning of the inscriptions dealt with.