re. ng's earlier post about catholic rituals: the strange thing about most xtian variants/precursors--branches of the same tree--is that if you look at the practices--the enormous range of practices--people use to perform their faith, all are heterodox, all the result of syncretic processes--all are in motion, being fashioned and refashioned by communities who use them, who think about themselves and the world and themselves in the world through them. the internal ideology of these religions works at corss purposes with the dynamism of the practioners themselves. the philosphical underpinnings of xtianity has come to see being as determinate, as rituals performed as like objects which are identical with themselves and stable across time and are the same in every context---so the activities of people to adapt/change rituals is seen as little more than colorful local ornamentation.
last time i was in paris for any duration, i found myself on the bridge that spans the entrance to the overpass where diana spencer got spattered in a limo. there was a shrine built at the apex of the bridge--a kind of strange lumpy affair that had notes attached to it in various languages some of which had prayers to diana asking for her intercession written on them. "dear diana: ask god to heal my sister's leg please." at the time, i found this shrine supremely strange. and i have thought about it for a long time. i gradually realized that rituals are like this--people make them so they can think through them, they are built up from efforts to make meaning in and of the world, to think about agency in the world: and that the philosophical framework particular to catholicism does not let you thnk about this, because they see things the wrong way around.
catholicism controls for this by having a bureaucratic procedure for determining who is and is not a "real saint" and by doing that attempts to draw lines around what is and is not legitimate in order to stabilize and maintain an understanding of ritual as identical with itself and variation as local color.
the main thing that the mode of interaction with ritual and the world lumped together under the category "paganism" does is see ritual as something people make--patterned activity that enables modes of thinking about the world--thinking as cognition, thinking as performance--thinking as activity not hobbled by the ridiculous mind/body split--to unfold as they are. there is an entirely different philosophy implicit within that. this is the attraction of this way of thinking---for me at least.
the fact that i do not practice myself is a function of my disposition. i do not find personifications attractive--they do not speak to or for me. but the mode of thinking about human acitivity in general seems to me far more functional, and much closer to accurate materially, than anything xtianity, its variants and precursors, has to say.
and i think the world would be a better place--a more livable place--were the current hierarchy of established judeo-christian religions/"paganism" the reverse of what it now is. one can dream.....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
Last edited by roachboy; 03-17-2006 at 07:26 AM..
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