The Problem of Ritual Efficacy

The Problem of Ritual Efficacy

Series Editors Ronald Grimes, Wilfred Laurier University Ute Hüsken, University of Oslo Eric Venbrux, Radboud University Nijmegen

Ritual Efficacy Edited by William S. Sax, Johannes Quack, and Jan Weinhold

The Problem of Ritual Efficacy Edited by

william s. sax johannes quack & jan weinhold

1 2010

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

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Contents

Contributors, vii 1. Ritual and the Problem of Efficacy, 3 William S. Sax 2. Ritual Healing and the Investiture of the Babylonian King, 17 Claus Ambos 3. Jesus and his Followers as Healers: Symbolic Healing in Early Christianity, 45 Gerd Theissen 4. Healing Rituals in the Mediaeval West, 67 Peter Dinzelbacher 5. Excommunication in the Middle Ages: A Meta-Ritual and the Many Faces of Its Efficacy, 93 Paul Töbelmann 6. The Work of Zâr: Women and Spirit Possession in Northern Sudan, 113 Janice Boddy 7. Ritual Humility in Modern Laboratories: Or, Why Ecuadorian IVF Practitioners Pray, 131 Elizabeth F. S. Roberts

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8. Ritual, Medicine, and the Placebo Response, 151 Howard Brody 9. Bell, Bourdieu, and Wittgenstein on Ritual Sense, 169 Johannes Quack Index, 189

Contributors

Claus Ambos studied Assyriology, Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, and Indology at Berlin, Leipzig, and Heidelberg. He wrote a doctoral thesis on Mesopotamian building rituals (Heidelberg, 2002) and is currently Research Fellow in the Collaborative Research Centre Dynamics of Ritual (SFB 619 Ritualdynamik). Since 2008 he has also been active in the Priority Research Field The Order of Space, Norms and the Law in Historical Cultures of Europe and Asia at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. At the present time he is working on Babylonian royal ideology. Janice Boddy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. She is a cultural anthropologist interested in gender, ritual and religion, medical and historical issues, meaning, “the body” and selfhood, especially in northern Sudan, where she has conducted research since 1976. Her publications include Wombs and Alien Spirits; Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (1989); Aman, the Story of a Somali Girl (with Aman and Virginia Lee Barnes, 1995); and Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (2007). Howard Brody received his M.D. and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Michigan State University, then completed a residency in family practice at the University of Virginia in 1980. In 2006 he became John P. McGovern Centennial Chair in Family Medicine and Director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. He is the author of The Future of Bioethics (2009), as well as books and numerous articles about medical ethics, philosophy of medicine, and the placebo response.

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Peter Dinzelbacher finished his studies in History, Latin, Folklore, and Art History at the University of Vienna with a Ph.D. in 1973 and a Habilitation in Ancient and Medieval History at Stuttgart in 1978. He taught at universities in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Denmark, becoming an honorary professor at Vienna in 1998. He has published more than thirty-five books, mostly on mentalities, religion and art in the Middle Ages, and has written numerous articles in scholarly journals and encyclopedias in nine languages. He is the founder (1988) and editor of the yearbook Mediaevistik: Internationale Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Mittelalterforschung. Johannes Quack studied Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Anthropology at the Universities of Bayreuth, Edinburgh, and Heidelberg. Currently he is working as a lecturer at the Department of Religious Studies as well as at the Department of Anthropology of the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg. His Ph.D. thesis is on “rationalist” and antireligious movements in India. Further fields of study include popular Hinduism, ritual theory, medical anthropology (mental health), postcolonial theory, and modes of unbelief. Elizabeth F. S. Roberts investigates how biotechnologies and their bodily practice destabilize and remake Enlightenment dichotomies between matter and spirit, subject and object, love and money, religion and politics, and nature and culture. She is currently developing these themes in her book manuscript, God’s Laboratory: Relations and Religiosity in Ecuadorian In Vitro Fertilization, an ethnographic examination of the experience of women, parents, and medical practitioners involved with assisted reproduction in Ecuador. Her other projects include a study of medical migrations—the movement across borders in search of health and life—and collaborative research on the vast changes in legal and social practice around reproductive and life politics in Latin America today. William S. Sax completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1987. After two years at Harvard University, he fulfilled a lifelong dream by moving to New Zealand, where he taught Anthropology and Religious Studies for eleven years before taking up the Professorship in Anthropology at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. He has published extensively on popular Hinduism, ritual theater, women and religion, and ritual healing. He is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the South Asia Institute. Gerd Theissen studied Protestant theology and German Literature, completing his Ph.D. in New Testament Studies in 1968 and his Habilitation on Early Christian miracle stories in 1973 at the University of Bonn. For several years he

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taught at a secondary school. After two years as Professor at the University at Copenhagen (1978–1980) he taught New Testament exegesis at the University of Heidelberg. His main areas of interest are Jesus research, the sociology and psychology of Early Christianity, the history of Early Christan literature, and the theory of Early Christian religion. Paul Töbelmann is Research Assistant in the Historical Seminar of the University of Heidelberg. He has studied Chemistry, Philosophy, Political Science, and History at Heidelberg, completing his M.A. in 2005. His doctoral dissertation on “Staff Symbolism in Mediaeval Ritual” was completed in March 2008. He is currently working on a monograph concerning the ritualization of political assemblies and early parliaments in mediaeval Europe. His fields of study include the history of ideas, religious history, and political history in the Middle Ages. Jan Weinhold studied psychology at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Since 2002 he has been working as a research psychologist in the Collaborative Research Centre Dynamics of Ritual (SFB 619 Ritualdynamik) at the Institute of Medical Psychology, University of Heidelberg. He has published on the ritualized use of psychoactive drugs and on the intercultural aspects of ritual healing.

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The Problem of Ritual Efficacy

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1 Ritual and the Problem of Efficacy William S. Sax

Do rituals really work, and if so, then how? This is the question of ritual efficacy, and it provokes a range of responses. Some insist on the efficacy of their rituals, defending them against skeptics and heretics. Others deny the efficacy of rituals in the name of science, or modernity, or orthodoxy, asserting that those who believe in them are victims of ignorance, superstition, or even the Devil. Some scholars of ritual say that rituals do indeed “work,” but not in the way the natives think. Others (e.g., Quack, this volume) argue that the very question of ritual efficacy is misguided. Given all these competing voices, how should we approach the problem of ritual efficacy? How can we clarify the issues involved? In June 2007 a conference was held at the University of Heidelberg in which anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and medical scientists from Germany, Austria, Canada, and the United States met for three days to discuss theories of ritual efficacy, in an attempt to clarify the nature of the problem and the various approaches to it.1 Our deliberations showed that the question of ritual efficacy, like so many social scientific and historical questions, is more complicated than it seems at first glance, and that it is made even more complex by certain cultural assumptions that have profound effects on both popular and academic ideas about the nature of ritual. The very idea of ritual efficacy carries a kind of tension, even a contradiction, which relates to both of the key terms “ritual” and “efficacy.” This contradiction derives, first, from the fact that most ritual theorists are guilty of the academic sin of reification. They conduct research on rituals, they teach and write about them, and after some time they begin to think that “ritual” is something out there in the world, whose characteristics can be classified, enumerated, and

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analyzed, rather like a crystal or a virus. In other words, they mistake an analytic category for a natural kind. A similar mistake is regularly made by political scientists with respect to “politics,” by economists with respect to “economics,” by anthropologists with respect to “culture,” and so on. This point was eloquently illustrated decades ago with respect to the category “religion” by the distinguished theologian Wilfrid Cantwell Smith (1964), who showed how, over the centuries, the term religio, originally an adjective denoting a kind of mood or attitude, came to be reified as a particular thing out there in the world. In ritual studies, the point was made by Jack Goody in his article Against Ritual (1977) as well as by the sociologist Stefan Lukes in his brilliant polemic against Shils and Young, and especially their “neo-Durkheimian” analysis of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Lukes points out that in practice, the scholar of ritual recognizes his object—ritual—when he sees certain kinds of activities and beliefs that strike him as nonrational, or certain actions in which the means seem disproportionate to the ends (1975: 290). According to our meteorological theories, dancing cannot really make it rain, and so when someone performs a rain dance, we call it a “ritual.” According to our anthropological theories, one cannot change a person’s fundamental nature by cutting or tattooing his body, and so when people do such things in the course of an initiation, we call it a “ritual.” According to our medical theories, disease cannot be cured by worshiping ancestors, and so when people attempt to do so, we label it “ritual.” In short, the problem of ritual is the familiar “rationality problem” in a new guise—old wine in a new bottle. I have mentioned “our” post-enlightenment theories, according to which “we” label as “ritual” certain activities that seem to be nonrational. But for those performing the rain dance, or the initiation, or the healing, these “rituals” do indeed fit into a cosmology in terms of which they make sense. That is why the “native” participants typically refer to them not as “rituals” but rather as dancing, or healing, or simply as “work”. In much of North India, for example, the closest analogue to the term “ritual” would be devakarya, “the work of the gods” (a term that, incidentally, echoes the title of Raymond Firth’s classic ethnography of ritual, The Work of the Gods in Tikopia [1967]). What we see as ritual, they see as technique. The point is that the term “ritual” is our (post-enlightenment) term, and it reflects our problem—how to classify a certain set of apparently nonrational acts. Or perhaps I should say, “apparently ineffective acts,” for, as I shall argue, the popular understanding of ritual is not so much that it is nonrational, but rather that it is ineffective. As one may well imagine, Goody and Lukes’s line of argument has not found much favor among ritual theorists: after all, if it were widely adopted, it would mean the end of ritual studies. And although I do not intend to defend

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their notion to the death, I do think it important to note that their definition of ritual as a type of action in which the ends seem disproportionate to the means has the virtue of being honestly reflexive: that is, it links our intellectual problem and our definition of terms to our own social and cultural milieu. To do otherwise is to fall victim to a subtle but common form of positivism, according to which the cultural assumptions of the observer can and should be bracketed and held distinct from his or her theoretical and descriptive goals. How and why has the term “ritual” come to refer to a class of actions that are purely formal, external, and above all ineffective? To answer this question adequately would require a book in itself, but parts of the story have already been told by W. C. Smith, Talal Asad, and J. S. Uberoi. Smith’s book, The Meaning and End of Religion, documents the gradual transformation of the term religio from an adjective to a noun,that is, from an attribute of persons into a separate thing in itself. This process accelerated during the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, as the doctrinal content of religion slowly came to be regarded as being of more central importance than religious practices, until finally “religion” was conceived of as a set of beliefs that can and should be evaluated in terms of their internal consistency. How could “ritual” fit into such a scheme? As Asad shows, for medieval Christians ritual was not an expression or representation of theological “beliefs,” but rather a disciplinary practice that aided the cultivation of Christian virtues (1993, chapters 1 and 2). He compares medieval Christianity’s notion of ritual with the modern, anthropological one and, quoting St. Victor, writes that in medieval times, the sacraments are not the representations of cultural metaphors; they are parts of a Christian program for creating in its performers, by means of regulated practice, the “mental and moral dispositions” appropriate to Christians. . . . [But] learning to develop moral capabilities is not the same thing as learning to invent representations. (1993: 78–79) A similar point was made by J. S. Uberoi in his underappreciated classic Science and Culture (1978), where he argues that the Protestant separation of humanity from nature, a concept represented most clearly in the writings of Zwingli rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, facilitated the dualistic separation of (mental) “symbol” from (natural) “truth.” This idea further strengthened the tendency to interpret ritual (e.g., the Christian liturgy) in terms of what it “symbolizes” rather than what it actually does. The final result of these various processes is the peculiar, modern theory of ritual—what we can call the “representational theory”—which seeks to understand or interpret ritual in terms of the underlying ideas, emotions, structures, or relations that it

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“represents,” “symbolizes,” or “expresses,” rather than the ends toward which it conduces. The real, external world effects of ritual can be recognized only by the “objective” historian or social scientist and do not correspond its ends as conceived by the “natives,” since these are by definition nonrational. To analyze rituals as “expressing” inner states of feeling and emotion, or “symbolizing” theological ideas or social relations, or “representing” psychophysical states of the human organism, is to neglect the question of how they might be instrumental, how they might actually do things (other than in the trivial sense of representing ideas, social relations, or inner states more or less accurately). This question recalls the distinction between expressive and instrumental action developed by Talcott Parsons and his followers. Instrumental action includes things such as scratching an itch, building a house, or invading a foreign country. It is purposive and goal-oriented and is normally associated with the “hard facts” of economics, politics, and technology. “Expressive” action, on the other hand, is associated with art, religion, and of course ritual. A representational theory of ritual does not merely avoid the problem of ritual efficacy; it exemplifies it by assuming that rituals are, by definition, ineffective. One need only go through this week’s newspapers to find statements by public figures that illustrate the point. Shortly before the conference in Heidelberg, for example, in speaking of German–French relations, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “Es geht hier nicht um ein Ritual, sondern um die tiefe Überzeugung,” in other words, “This has to do, not with ritual, but rather with deep conviction.”2 To sum up: ritual has come to be thought of in popular discourse as a kind of action that is ineffective, superficial, and/or purely formal, and this view is the unexamined premise behind much of ritual studies. This attitude explains why, even though we cannot agree on a definition of ritual, we “know it when we see it”—and what we know to be rituals when we see them are acts that are apparently nonrational, in which the means do not seem proportionate to the ends, the intended objects of human action are nonempirical beings, or the theories of efficacy that ostensibly explain the ritual acts are inconsistent with modern, scientific paradigms. This reaction is similar to what an archaeologist does when he discovers a structure whose purpose is unclear—he calls it a temple. We do not refer to driving an automobile or playing football or taking an examination as a “ritual,” even though all of these activities involve highly formal, rule-bound behavior—we only call actions “rituals” when we do not understand the relation between means and ends, when they do not match our criteria of rationality, or better yet, when they do not correspond to our criteria of efficacy. Ritual is assumed to be ineffective, and it is in part this very

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ineffectiveness that constitutes the behavior as “ritual” in the first place. That is why the intellectual task that many students of ritual set themselves consists in trying to find out ritual’s hidden logic, its principles of efficacy, the things that it really represents—which must by definition be other than those related to us by the natives, since these strike us as nonrational. Nevertheless, the notion that ritual is ineffective is false, and we can show that it is false. We know that shamanic rituals heal, legal rituals ratify, political rituals unify, and religious rituals sanctify. Rituals transform sick persons into healthy ones, public space into prohibited sanctuary, citizens into presidents, princesses into queens, and according to some, wine into blood. One of our most important tasks as scholars of ritual is to explain how rituals accomplish these things (and how they sometimes fail to accomplish them), but it is important to remember that in pursuing this task, we are arguing against the grain of popular understanding. I have said that ritual exists as an analytic category and not as a natural kind. If we want to discuss intelligently how it might “work,” we require a working definition of it, and such a definition must acknowledge its unusual relation to the modern episteme. Foucault defined this episteme as the conditions of possibility for what counts as scientific. In my view, “ritual” is precisely the negation of the modern, scientific episteme, which is one of the things that make it such an interesting category. Further, because ritual is an analytic category, one cannot define it in essentialist terms. Instead, one requires a familyresemblance type of definition: in effect, a list of characteristics that we ascribe to things we call “ritual.” The idea of family resemblance as developed by Wittgenstein is that, although members of a family are not identical, they do share enough similar features—manner of speaking, facial shape, eye color, and the like—that one can recognize them as belonging to the same family.3 Now, what we call “rituals” clearly are not identical: they consist of different actions and are performed in different cultures and languages for different purposes. Nevertheless we can observe that certain characteristics are widely shared by that class of activities that we label “ritual,” and when a particular activity has a sufficient number of them, it “counts” as a ritual, more or less. That is the sense of the “family resemblance” approach to category definition: membership in the category is a matter of resemblance and degree, not of essence. What kinds of resemblances are relevant for the category “ritual”? Here I draw on Tambiah’s well-known (1979) definition, in which he provides a list of characteristics that we associate with those actions we label “ritual.” But to Tambiah’s list of features—“patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in multiple media, whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity),

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condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition)” (1979: 119)—I would add that rituals are “often regarded as ineffective or nonrational.” None of these characteristics, including apparent nonrationality or ineffectiveness, is essential for some practice to be regarded as a ritual; however the more of these characteristics a practice has, the more likely it will be regarded as a ritual. This definition has the advantage of focusing our attention on ritual as a form of practice rather than a representation of belief. I have criticized representational theories of ritual above, and so has Bell (1992), who invokes Bourdieu’s insistence that social theory is weakened by its ongoing attempts to reduce human action to, or reformulate it in terms of, language and/or “belief.” (These positions are summarized by Quack, this volume; see also Sax 2002, chapter 1). As Bourdieu puts it, practice has its own logic, which is not reducible to propositions expressed in language. Bell applies these ideas to the study of ritual, which she refuses to essentialize as an object with a finite set of characteristics, preferring instead to shift the terms of the discussion by writing of “ritualized actions.” She argues that such actions produce a “ritualized agent” and that they do so not by means of representation but rather through embodied practice. This notion is consistent with the fact (noted by many ritual theorists) that rituals, with their emphasis on sensory experience (prescribed bodily postures, music, dance, incense, food, etc.), work primarily on the body and not exclusively by cognitive means.4 If rituals were purely expressive, then their efficacy could consist only in the degree to which they adequately expressed beliefs, dogma, and so on. But Asad, Bell, and Bourdieu, along with many others, argue that in order to understand the efficacy of rituals, we should concentrate on embodied cognition rather than on symbolic expression. Several of the essays in this volume support such a focus. Boddy, for example, shows how forms of ritualized “possession” involve new ways of construing one’s own identity by establishing links within the kinship system. This is not a cognitive so much as it is a somatic process; in other words, the cognitive effects of the ritual are achieved through new and creative practices of embodied possession. Quack argues that differences in the attitudes toward ritual at an ashram in North India, between Indians on the one hand and North Americans and Europeans on the other, can be traced to their respective, embodied “ritual sense(s).” Ambos suggests that the king’s bodily experience of imprisonment during his investiture ceremony had powerful effects on his psyche. Roberts shows that a dispute about the use of ritual in Ecuadoran IVF clinics can be traced to a difference between the ritual styles of “spiritual” and “material” Catholics, with the former adhering to something like the Protestant representational theory while the latter exemplify embodied “faith.” The concept of “faith” is of particular interest in this regard, since it is

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often said by ritual practitioners to be indispensable to ritual efficacy. And as religious persons often remind us, “faith” is not the same thing as “belief.” It is an attitude toward religious things, not a proposition to which one assents, so what Bourdieu says of “belief ” is clearly true of “faith” as well: that it “is not a ‘state of mind,’ still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body” (1990: 68). This view is also borne out by the essays of Brody and Theissen (both in this volume), who, despite their very different disciplines (the former is a medical scientist, the latter a theologian), demonstrate that embodied faith is a prerequisite for ritual healing. For Brody, the patient’s confidence in the healer and/ or his methods has positive, measurable effects on the likelihood of the treatment’s success; while for Theissen, the historical Jesus himself recognized and proclaimed that his healing rituals were successful because of the faith of those whom he healed. Indeed, ritual healing provides the most interesting as well as the most problematic example of the problem of ritual efficacy. From the point of view of biomedicine, it is based on non- or even anti-scientific theories and practices, while biomedicine guarantees its own efficacy by systematically excluding “ritual” from its therapeutic techniques. Medical journals do indeed use the term “ritual,” but they define it as a practice that lacks therapeutic efficacy and should therefore be eliminated.5 Although the World Health Organization has encouraged “traditional medicine” in recent years (WHO 1978, 2002),6 this recognition does not extend to ritual healing but is limited to nonritual techniques such as bonesetting, herbal remedies, massage, and dietary practices. Evidently, the idea that ritual healing might be therapeutically effective is not thinkable for the WHO.7 But what exactly is efficacy, and how should we define or measure it? The answer depends on the standards against which it is measured, and these vary: the biomedical doctor has one set of standards, the Ayurvedic doctor another, and the shaman still another. The patient has his own set of standards, but that of his family may be different. The missionary has one set of standards, and the anthropologist a different one.8 It is highly questionable whether one can or should evaluate the effectiveness of one system by the criteria of another, but we do this all the time when we evaluate ritual healing in terms of biomedical criteria. Ritual healing may well be ineffective according to such criteria, but the opposite is also true: in a great many cases, modern medicine is ineffective in meeting those needs that are addressed by ritual healing. Surveys of “patient satisfaction” show that most of the time, sick people are more satisfied with treatment by ritual healers than by medical doctors. This issue was the topic of an early paper by Kleinman, who argued that “in

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most cases, indigenous practitioners must heal,” because they treat the human experience of illness, whereas “in most cases modern professional clinical care must fail to heal,” because modern clinicians usually limit themselves to disease, defined in strictly biological terms (1979: 24). And that is why, says Kleinman, “healing” is an embarrassing word for the medical sciences, which prefer the term “cure.” Like the assertion that ritual is merely expressive and therefore inherently nonefficacious, the biomedical critique of ritual healing is strongly linked to the discourse and practices of modernity. Biomedicine is associated with “development” and “rationality,” while ritual healing is associated with lack of development and “superstition” (Kendall 2001, Lee 1982, Dole 2004, n.d., Pigg 1995, Ram 2001: 13). But “superstition” and “modernity” are not natural categories either. Rather, they are relational entities, mutually defined and strategically invoked. During my own fieldwork on ritual healing (Sax 2008) I encountered numerous examples of the “modernist” critique of ritual healing. The first time I ever spoke about the topic was at the Institute for the Study of Human Behavior and Allied Sciences in Delhi, where I had been invited to give a talk to a group of medical professionals. I told my learned audience of doctors and psychologists about the system of oracles and healers, showed them a brief video clip, and proposed that ritual healing sometimes “works” by addressing the social causes of stress-related disorders. After my talk I expected an enthusiastic round of applause and a stimulating discussion. What I got instead was outrage. “How dare you conduct research on such a topic?” they asked. “This is nothing more than primitive, superstitious nonsense! You should be spending your time stamping it out, not conducting research on it!” Perhaps I should have expected such a reaction. After all, these were men of science, and the idea that ritual healing might have therapeutic benefits comparable to those of biomedicine seemed ridiculous to them, perhaps even insulting. They reminded me of the Nepali doctors discussed by Adams, who were exposed for such a long time to modern critiques of ritual healing (particularly by exponents of “development”) that they began to regard such practices as evidence of backwardness (1998: 12). Such a scenario is hardly limited to South Asia. Mullings has shown how in Ghana, family-based ritual therapy gave way to individual therapy under the modernizing influences of capitalism and Christianity as well as the transformation of villages into towns (1984: 121, 133–185). To be “modern” and scientific is to reject the theories and practices associated with ritual healing, because they lie outside contemporary paradigms of science, modernity, and development. Those who seek to defend or preserve ritual healing thus risk marking themselves—and perhaps even coming to understand themselves—as “nonmodern and deviant” (Nandy and

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Visvanathan 1990; cf. Pigg 1995), and this is as true of the “modernizing” cultures of Africa and Asia as it is of Europe and North America. Perhaps it is even truer there, since local elites in such places are surrounded by the practice of ritual healing and must therefore work even harder than their Western counterparts to distinguish themselves from those who engage in it. Kendall cites cases from Cypress and Sri Lanka that illustrate the middle class’s identification with “science” or with more “rational”-seeming religious practices as a means of asserting and naturalizing class domination. . . . . The point here is not that the new elites’ posture toward popular religion is an inevitable consequence of “modernity” so much as it represents the self-conscious inhabiting of new class positions. (2001: 30) Meanwhile, my friends back in the village where I was conducting my research kept asking me a simple, three-word question: “Yaham kuch hai?” Literally, this means, “Is there something here?” but there is more to the question than meets the eye, and I would paraphrase it as follows: “You are a highly educated person and have been investigating these things for years. So tell me: is there some special religious power here? Is there such a thing as miraculous healing? Have you seen it?” After I had been asked this question several times, I found myself wondering if the skepticism it implied was something new. Was there ever a time when local peasants accepted the efficacy of ritual healing without a doubt? Were the modest doubts implicit in this question a result of modern education? Would they grow? I observed plenty of skepticism in other contexts as well. Particularly memorable was the family settled in Delhi who returned to their ancestral village for a major healing ritual but whose father was so dismissive of the whole affair that he refused to participate in key rituals, while the teenage children found the possession ridiculous and laughable and were unable to participate in it properly.9 Then there were the educated persons I knew, especially those in the medical profession, who condemned the practices of the gurus as unscientific and superstitious but who surreptitiously visited them at night when their own problems could not be solved by modern medicine. As I write this introductory chapter in the Himalayas, I have just concluded interviewing local medical professionals about their views regarding ritual healing, Most of them responded to my initial questions by dismissing outright the possibility that it might be effective. But with a little patience and perseverance on my part, they began to talk about successful cases of which they know, and to affirm that, as good Hindus, they would not deny the power of religious rituals to heal the sick. As a result, I have come to share Adams’ view that the overt rejection of ritual

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healing is not so much a statement of disbelief in its efficacy as it is an assertion of one’s social position: modern, educated, and scientific. Discourses of modernity are also to be found in the religious realm, where local ritual practices, often involving bloody sacrifice, are challenged by those who wish to replace them with modern, high-caste, vegetarian practices. Once I met a local ritual healer just after he had successfully treated a client, and he shook with rage as he told me how a group of satsangis (the followers of a local religious leader) had harassed him as he walked through the bazaar They had shouted that people like him, along with their knowledge, should be stamped out. “I was coming here last night,” he said, and they started giving me a hard time, shouting “Down with the gurus! Down with the gurus’ knowledge!” So I said to them, “You mother-fucking satsangis, a girl is in trouble! You go there! You heal her! Take (your) satsangi doctors!” What do doctors do here? They give injections. The needle might break and kill the girl! I put the mark on her forehead and forced the god to identify himself and to become present. And once he was there we got the whole decision {faisla}: “I live at such and such a place, and so forth; worship me and I will be satisfied, otherwise I will definitely eat this girl {kha hi lunga}.” Can the satsangis do that? He said that the satsangis were making quite a stir and that so many people had joined them that they had multiplied like a bitch’s pups. He accused them of hypocrisy, of pretending to be satsangis on the outside but continuing to practice the old rituals behind closed doors. And he linked their “modern” rejection of ritual healing to an equally modern refusal to uphold traditional norms of ritual reciprocity. Just let them come here, and we’ll beat them with our shoes! On the outside, those bastards are saying that they’re satsangis, but indoors they’re making all the Brahmans dance [i.e., become possessed]. They worship [the demon] Masan in their houses, and the gods dance there, but on the outside they are all satsangis. But they don’t do puja! The god comes hungry, and he leaves hungry. The healer’s companion reinforced his accusation that the satsangis were behaving in a thoroughly modern, individualistic way: “Whatever rice they get, they eat by themselves. They’re doing well, but what is the goddess eating? She left as hungry as she came, but their own stomachs are full.” Some “modern” local healers even pursue their calling without ritual, thus making their practice appear more “scientific” and less “religious”—to

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themselves as well as to their clients (cf. Press 1971). S. B. Sati was the senior postman in Joshimath at the time of my research, and he was also an oracle— but with a difference. Partly because of his own education and professional status, and partly because of his location at a major stopover on the most prominent pilgrimage routes in India, he had developed an elite clientele consisting of politicians, educators, doctors, and similar persons from all over India. Sati was well known to the learned classes and professionals of his district, many of whom had consulted him, and his style was radically different from the usual oracular style of the area, the most striking difference being the total absence of ritual. Whereas most oracles began their sessions with various ritual techniques intended to induce possession, so that the following consultation is conceived to be one between client and deity, Sati recited no prayers, lit no incense, and did not become possessed. His clients did not even remove their shoes when they visited him! His sessions resembled medical or psychological consultations more than oracular ones. He would begin by drawing a map or a sketch of the client’s home and then proceed to diagnose the cause of their problems. The causes he would diagnose (cursing, familial strife, demonic affliction, supernatural “poisoning”) were very similar to those diagnosed in other, more typical consultations, as were his therapeutic prescriptions: mostly rituals of a familiar sort, but also the wearing of amulets (which he himself made) and other sorts of astrological and gem therapy. I believe that his highly unusual practice reflected the needs and expectations of his modern, educated clientele. Clearly there is a kind of struggle occurring in Garhwal over ritual healing; but it has little to do with the question of efficacy per se and much to do with “modernity” and one’s attitude toward it. People may well regard ritual practices as efficacious but still refuse to participate in them because to do so is to stigmatize themselves as pre-modern and nonscientific. Similar examples are to be found in many of the essays in this volume. Brody begins his essay by pointing out that the term “placebo,” like the term “ritual,” is a “term of suspicion” for medical scientists, even though it may work in similar ways. Although he asserts that “[m]edicine would lose a good deal of whatever efficacy it possesses, were we somehow to eliminate all its ritual elements and practices,” nevertheless most medical practitioners would probably “deny that ritual plays any role in their activities” because of the Cartesian dualism to which they subscribe, with its radical separation of mind and body. I would suggest that such Cartesianism is a hallmark of what I am calling “modernity.” Elizabeth Roberts shows how ritual practices in Ecuadoran IVF laboratories are subject to modernist critiques from the standpoint of “science” as well as from the standpoint of “religion.” From the scientific side, many medical professionals in Ecuador reject ritual practices

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in the lab because they are felt to be incompatible with modern science. From the religious side, they are rejected by more modern, “spiritual” Catholics, who accept the Cartesian separation of spiritual from material and are highly reluctant to acknowledge God’s intervention in scientific processes, much less encourage it as “materialist” Catholics do through their rituals. Boddy mentions the religious critique of Zar cult possession rituals by conservative Muslim clerics, for whom such practices are inconsistent with Islam. As with many other religious reformers (e.g., the Hindu satsangis mentioned above), I would argue that such reformist attitudes are fundamentally modern, even though they represent themselves as “traditionalist.” Both Dinzelbacher’s and Töbelmann’s essays describe “orthodox” critiques of ritual that, though they are medieval and not modern, nevertheless illustrate how the taking of a position with regard to ritual efficacy is a strategic act, through which one locates oneself in terms of political, economic, social, and theological disputes. All of this goes to show that the question of ritual efficacy is not just a question about how rituals work. To pose the question of ritual efficacy— and more importantly, to answer it in one way and not another—is also to say something about who one is, to position oneself with respect to a range of issues, from the relationship between mind and body to the difference between modernity and tradition, or the alleged conflict between religion and science. How do rituals work, and if so, how? Once should think twice before answering that question.

notes 1. The conference was organized by the Collaborative Research Area 619, “The Dynamics of Rituals”(Sonderforschungsbereich 619 Ritualdynamik), supported by the German Research Council, to whom we express our deepest thanks. 2. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/deutschland/artikel/961/64897/print.html, last accessed 28 May 2009. 3. See aphorisms 66–67 in Wittgenstein 2003. 4. Butler 1990, Connerton 1989, Csordas 1994 and 2002, Douglas 1973, Jackson 1983, Mauss 1979 [1935]. 5. This position is reminiscent of the Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor’s view that the mission of anthropology was to identify customs that had no utilitarian function and to root them out. 6. See Dole’s description of the Turkish health worker who says she is “not modern enough” for the WHO’s new emphasis on traditional medicine (n.d.: 22). 7. One of the WHO’s more recent policy statements (WHO 2002) adds the category “spiritual therapy” but does not define the term. 8. The complexity of the problem is discussed in a forthcoming paper written by conference participants Quack and Töbelmann.

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9. Eventually, their grandmother saved the day—and the ritual—by vigorously dancing for more than a quarter of an hour, which was itself a kind of miracle, since she was more than ninety years old!

references Adams, Vincanne. 1998. Doctors for Democracy: Health Professionals in the Nepal Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology. Asad, Talal. 1993. Geneaologies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Bell, Diane. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Csordas, Thomas. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— . 2002. Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave. Dole, Chistopher. 2004. In the Shadows of Medicine and Modernity: Medical Integration and Secular Histories of Religious Healing in Turkey. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28: 255–280. ——— . n.d. Mass Media and the Repulsive Allure of Religious Healing: The Cinci Hoca in Turkish Modernity. (Unpublished manuscript) Douglas, Mary. 1973. Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie & Jenkins. Firth, Raymond. 1967 [1940]. The Work of the Gods in Tikopia. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology Series. Oxford: Berg. Goody, Jack. 1977. Against “Ritual”: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic. In Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, eds., Secular Ritual. Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, pp. 25–35. Jackson, Michael. 1983. Knowledge of the Body. Man New Series 18(2): 327–345. Kendall, L. 2001. The Cultural Politics of “Superstition” in the Korean Shaman World: Modernity Constructs Its Other. In Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, eds., Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 25–41. Kleinman, Arthur. 1979. Why Do Indigenous Practitioners Successfully Heal. Social Science and Medicine 13B: 17–26. Lee, R. P. 1982. Comparative Studies of Health Care Systems. Social Science and Medicine 16(6): 629–642. Lukes, Steven. 1975. Political Ritual and Social Integration. Sociology 9(2): 289–308. Mauss, Marcel. 1979 [1935]. Body Techniques. In Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 95–123. Mullings, Leith. 1984. Therapy, Ideology, and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Nandy, A., and S. Visvanathan. 1990. Modern Medicine and Its Non-Modern Critics: A Study in Discourse. In Frederique Marglin and Steven Apffel, eds., Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 145–184. Pigg, S. L. 1995. The Social Symbolism of Healing in Nepal. Ethnology 34(1): 17–36. Press, Irwin. 1971. The Urban Curandero. American Anthropologist 73: 741–756. Quack, Johannes, and Paul Toebelman, n.d. Ritual Theory, Ritual Efficacy. Forthcoming in Journal of Ritual Studies. Ram, K. 2001. Modernity and the Midwife: Contestation over a Subaltern Figure, South India. In Linda Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, eds., Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 64–84. Sax, William S. 2002. Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal. New York: Oxford University Press. Sax, William S., 2008. God of Justice: Healing and Social Justice in the Central Himalayas. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. 1964 [1962]. The Meaning and End of Religion. New York: The New American Library (a Mentor Book). Tambiah, Stanley J. 1979. A Performative Approach to Ritual. Proceedings of the British Academy 65: 113–169. Uberoi, J. P. S. 1978. Science and Culture. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2003. Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Oxford: Blackwell. (First published in 1953) World Health Organization. 1978. The Promotion and Development of Traditional Medicine. Technical Report No. 622. Geneva: WHO. World Health Organization. 2002. WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2002–2005. Geneva: WHO.

2 Ritual Healing and the Investiture of the Babylonian King Claus Ambos Introduction The political implications of ritual healing will be discussed in this chapter with an example from my field of research, Assyriology, which deals with the civilizations of the Ancient Near East.1 I hope here to build a bridge between two seemingly different topics: the efficacy of healing rituals and the efficacy of political rituals. The essay focuses on some important elements of Babylonian royal ideology, as attested on cuneiform tablets which were inscribed in the first millennium BCE but which belong to a much older tradition reaching back into the second and even third millennium BCE. Mesopotamian techniques of ritual and divination were believed to have been transmitted to man by the gods themselves (Lambert 1998), and they could never work against the will of the gods nor force them to perform an action merely because it was desired by the ritual’s human participants. The reason is that ritual was not effective in itself but depended upon the gods’ collaboration. This concept could also account for occasional ritual failure: the gods simply were refusing any communication with the human sphere and were not inclined to accept a prayer or a ritual (Ambos 2007a). Ritual and cultic texts and prayers were transmitted over centuries or even millennia in the socalled “stream of tradition” (Oppenheim 1977 [1964]: 13) until the end of the traditional Mesopotamian culture. It should be noted that in the languages of the Ancient Near East there was no specific term for “ritual.” In Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian), for example, words for ritual are derivatives from the verb epe¯sˇ u—“to act, be active, proceed.”2

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The noun epi/usˇ tu means in general “act, activity, achievement, accomplishment” and can designate in a concrete sense acts we would call “ritual.” The term, however, has additional meanings, such as “handiwork, agricultural work, construction (as process), manufacture, finished structure, construction, plan, nature, situation.” Another frequently attested term we translate as “ritual” is ne¯pesˇ u, which means “activity, undertaking, doings, procedure.” In a concrete sense, this word also designates a “ritual (procedure).” It can also mean, however, “tools, utensils, implements.” So for the Mesopotamians, a “ritual” was rather a technique or procedure. All of this confirms Sax’s remarks in chapter 1, as does the fact that ritual was conceived as instrumental action. Countless rituals with diverse aims have been transmitted from the Ancient Near East. These include rituals of the regular temple cult and rituals for special occasions such as rituals of building, rituals to avert the consequences of a bad omen, to prevent slaves from running away, to gain the favor of a high-ranking dignitary, along with love charms, healing rituals, and many more, covering every field of private and public life.3 A ritual was not merely a symbolic or expressive action. When, for example, a house or a temple was built or reconstructed, the craft of the ritual expert was as important as the craft of the builder in leading the construction process. Designing buildings, constructing them, and performing the associated rituals were all considered as complementing each other: While the builder was responsible for the realisation of the technical aspects of the work, ritual experts guaranteed that the building process was performed under the protection and with the agreement of the gods (Ambos 2004; 2007b). The purpose of a ritual was usually specified in the introduction of a cuneiform ritual handbook. These handbooks tersely describe the sequence of ritual events and give directions for the participants. Although they cite the titles of prayers, they seldom explain how the ritual was actually performed, or give any hints about Mesopotamian theories of ritual efficacy.4 It is therefore difficult for modern researchers to understand the inherent logic according to the Mesopotamian worldview. Although there is some evidence of skepticism regarding the efficacy of ritual, this was never developed into a coherent critique, and we can say that in general the efficacy of ritual was considered as axiomatic (Ambos 2007a). Our knowledge of ritual in the long-dead cultures of the Ancient Near East is based not only on ritual handbooks, but also on numerous texts from daily life. Of extraordinary importance for the study of Ancient Near Eastern ritual and religion are various extant corpora of letters and reports written by ritual experts, diviners, and priests. I refer here very briefly to the correspondence of diviners and various officials with the kings of Mari in the first

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half of the second millennium BCE, and to the correspondence of the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal with ritual experts and scholars at their court in Nineveh in the seventh century BCE.5 Through these letters and reports, we can obtain a rather vivid picture of ritual and religious life in the Ancient Near East. My case study is centered on a ritual featuring the Babylonian king in a prison. This prison was a ritual structure of reeds in the steppe, where the king stayed every year for one night, in order to procure legitimation of his rulership. The stay in prison fostered the king’s bodily and mental health and ensured his material resources. This was evidently a very efficacious prison, because it promoted the king’s political power along with his material and physical well-being. So why is a prison used as both a hospital and the site of royal legitimation? The prison features prominently in a large cluster of rituals to be performed for the Babylonian king every year just before the autumn equinox in the month of Tashritu. At first glance, this cluster seems to be comprised of incommensurate rituals: healing rituals that could be performed by everybody including private persons, together with royal investiture rituals. The cluster begins with a ritual to heal pains in the joints as well other symptoms and ends with the ritual of investiture of the king with his regalia. For us today, to heal a man from an illness or to crown him king seem to be two totally different matters. The key to understanding their association there is the Mesopotamian notion of “illness,” which differs greatly from our own concept. In fact, the ancient Mesopotamians had a much wider concept of illness—encompassing the loss of bodily and mental health but also the loss of material resources and social standing. I propose to discuss healing rituals and royal rituals together rather than separately, thereby focusing on the efficacy of the various ritual acts and prayers as attributed to them by the Babylonians according to their worldview.

The Semiannual Reinvestiture of the Babylonian King during the New Year’s Festivals According to Mesopotamian royal ideology, the king was created by the gods as a being who, while not a god, was nevertheless superhuman, and far superior to ordinary men in his bodily and intellectual faculties. Already before birth and even conception, the future ruler was selected by the gods to one day become king of his country (Stol 2000: 83–89; Wilcke 2002: 70–83; Polonsky 2006: 308 f.). Thus the ruler did not acquire his royal status by the act of coronation

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or enthronement at the beginning of his reign, but rather this investiture was the fulfilment of a destiny decreed by the gods. After the gods had kept their promise and made their chosen one king, the Babylonian ruler had to obtain divine confirmation of his rule twice a year during the New Year’s festivals at the spring and autumn equinoxes. Royal legitimation was therefore not a unique act, but rather a constant process during the king’s reign. The sequence of events in both New Year’s festivals reflect each other. On the eighth day of the month of Nisannu in spring and on the eighth day of the month of Tashritu in autumn the most important gods of the pantheon decreed the fate of the king, for example Marduk in the city of Babylon or Anu in the city of Uruk. Then the gods, accompanied by the king, left their temples and moved in procession to their so-called akitu-houses outside the city.6 The spring festival in particular has received much attention in the last 100 years, not only in Assyriology but also in the History of Religion, such as in the writings of James George Frazer.7 Interest in the spring festival has usually focused on a peculiar ritual sequence of status reversal: The Babylonian king entered the temple of the god Marduk and was divested of his royal insignia by the high priest. The priest slapped the king’s face and made him recite a negative confession of his sins, that is, that he had not neglected the rites and the temples of the gods or the privileges of the citizens of Babylon. Only then did the priest present the insignia to the king, again slapping his face until the tears ran. A temporary status reversal including the removal of the king’s insignia also took place during the autumn festival, and it was then that the king stayed in the prison of reeds. Until now, however, little was known about this ritual.8

Problems in Performing the New Year’s Festivals: Absent Gods and Kings The performance of the two New Year’s festivals was constantly in danger of being impeded by various problems that could lead to the cancellation of these two most important events in the cultic calendar. The festivals required the presence of the gods in the form of their statues, as well as the king, who escorted the gods on their procession. But the festivals could not take place if either the king or the gods were absent. This meant that under certain circumstances the New Year’s festivals might not take place for years or even decades.

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The presence of the king, a necessary precondition for the performance of the New Year’s festivals, could unfortunately not be taken for granted. When the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus (reigning from 555 to 539 BCE) stayed far from Babylon for years in the town of Tema (in present-day Saudi-Arabia), these festivals could not take place, even though the crown prince was present in the capital and performed other royal functions. Various strategic or economic reasons have been suggested to explain the king’s long stay in Arabia. According to contemporary sources, Nabonidus was prevented from returning to Babylon because he became afflicted by an illness caused by the estrangement and alienation of the gods who had turned away from him. Only when his personal god Sîn became reconciled did the king recover and return to Babylon, where the angry gods again turned with favor to him.9 Human beings were protected by personal deities, who guaranteed their physical and material well-being, success, and luck. These gods constantly kept watch over humans, walking as guardian angels at their side and staying inside their body. A person who was abandoned by his or her personal god or gods suffered illness, financial losses, social exclusion, and a disturbed communication with the divine sphere because of failed rituals and ineffective oracles. As the Babylonians saw it, losing money and having shivering fits were not unrelated events, but rather two different symptoms deriving from the same source, namely estrangement from one’s protective deities. This was a terrible situation for any individual, since he or she could no longer occupy his or her previous social position. Under such circumstances, a king was no longer able to rule. In fact, Nabonidus’ absence from Babylon eventually had important political consequences. By staying far from Babylon and not participating in the New Year’s festivals, he weakened his legitimation as king. During his reign, Nabonidus had made enemies among the leading circles of Babylon. The accusations of his opponents are described in a propagandistic poem (Schaudig 2001: 563–578). According to his enemies, Nabonidus had done harm to the cult of Marduk, the city god of Babylon and lord of the other gods. He was accused of introducing the cult of a foreign god and disregarding Marduk’s status as lord of gods by elevating this new god to an equal rank. Furthermore, Nabonidus is said to have deliberately cancelled the New Year’s festivals. In the end, Nabonidus lost the support of the elite of Babylon and played into the hands of his adversary, King Cyrus of Persia. Cyrus conquered the Babylonian empire and (at least according to one of his own royal inscriptions) was greeted with joy by the people of Babylon (Schaudig 2001: 550–556).

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Healing, Protection, and Reconciliation with the Divine Sphere The fate of Nabonidus leads us back to the main topic of this chapter, the king in a prison of reeds. Nabonidus was expected to participate in his annual reinvestiture and legitimation by the gods during the New Year’s festivals but was unable to do so because he was estranged from his protective gods. Therefore, according to Mesopotamian ideas, he became susceptible to “illness,” which in their view involved political as well as bodily misfortune. When a healthy king was not present at the New Year festivals and they had to be cancelled, the processions did not take place and the gods simply stayed in their temples. This situation must have greatly weakened the king’s legitimation and may well have led to negative political consequences, as the case of Nabonidus suggests. The ritual cluster featuring the king in the prison of reeds served precisely to secure his presence at the New Year’s festival in autumn. The sequence of rituals leads to the eighth day of the month of Tashritu, the date when the king received his legitimation by the great gods and led the deities in procession to their akitu-houses outside the city. These rituals were performed as a preventive measure, even when divine anger did not actually threaten to harm the king. This precaution was understandable, because the anger of the gods could be aroused easily even without one’s intending to do so. Even if the king had behaved in a manner that he conceived to be pious and pleasing to the gods, no one could know with certainty whether they would accept this behavior or would consider it a transgression. This does not mean that pious deeds or god-fearing behavior was not effective, but it does illustrate the Mesopotamian belief that humans had no real insight into the intentions of the gods (Ambos 2007a). Therefore rituals were performed prophylactically in order to avoid even the smallest disturbance between the human and the divine sphere. The ritual cluster presented here consisted of at least two rituals: House of sprinkling water and If the death-spirit seizes a man. The performance of these rituals covered the first week of the month of Tashritu, preparing the king for his appearance at the New Year’s festival on the eighth day of that month:10 In performing the rituals of this cluster, the ritual expert acted as both lawyer and healer, employing various, legal, social, magical, and psychological strategies to bring about a reconciliation between the king and his gods. The mechanisms of Ancient Near Eastern ritual were in general deeply influenced by forms stemming from legal procedures. If one felt oneself treated unjustly by a higher authority (for example, one’s personal gods), one could go to court to appeal. A ritual performance had, in other words, the characteristics of a trial (Maul 1994). This similarity can be made clear if one looks at the role of the

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1–3. Tashritu: If the death-spirit seizes a man Dealing with SYMPTOMS: protecting the person of the king against disease-causing agents (conceptualized as demons),

4–8. Tashritu: House of sprinkling water Dealing with the CAUSE: reconciliation of the king with his personal gods. Temporary reversal of status: During the night of the eighth day the king stays without insignia in a prison made of reeds in the steppe. The king leaves the prison on the morning of the eighth day, receives his insignia, and returns to the city.

8. Tashritu: The RESULT: legitimation of the king. The major gods of the pantheon decree the king’s fate in the assembly of the gods. Procession of the gods, accompanied by the king, to their akituhouses outside the city.

human and divine participants. There was a “judge”—the sun god, who pronounced the concluding verdict—and there was a “lawyer”—the ritual expert— acting on behalf of his royal “client.”11 Since ritual could not work against the will of the gods, it would have been regarded as pointless to perform one when the gods were angry and had turned away. In that case the king had to produce other deities as powerful intermediaries, who interceded on his behalf with his own angry personal gods. Within the general framework of this legal setting, various basic ritual sequences were performed, which were aimed at physically removing every kind of “illness” from the body of the king. Many of the techniques employed by the expert would be termed “magic” by modern Westerners. The cosmos was considered a kind of clockwork mechanism. According to the Ancient Near Eastern worldview, there existed a relationship between matter, phenomena, processes, events, and actions. The mechanisms of this relationship were based on such principles as sympathy and antipathy. Ritual techniques could

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make use of these mechanisms to attain a certain aim.12 One very important technique was the use of magic analogy, and several examples will be discussed in this chapter. If someone wanted to manipulate persons (whether humans or supernatural beings), substances, matter, or states, all of which were beyond of his or the ritual expert’s scope, it was possible to magically equate or identify the said persons, substances, matters, or states with materia magica (organic or unorganic, living or dead) used in the actual ritual performance. This materia magica was then manipulated in such a way to cause an effect on it that corresponded to the effect desired on the real targets which were in the client’s focus. Thanks to the magic identification established by the ritual expert, the effects achieved on the materia magica would also be achieved on the targets—at least if the gods complied, because they could not be forced by magic or ritual. Let’s consider some important key-actions from the various ritual sequences of the cluster. The first ritual, If the death-spirit seizes a man, was a kind of broadspectrum healing ritual which had no specific connection to royal ideology and could be performed by any individual. This ritual is directed against various diseasecausing agents conceptualized as demons. Its aim is clearly expressed in the introduction (ll.1–2): “If a death-spirit seizes a person and continually pursues him or the evil alû-demon seizes him or (the demon) ‘Supporter of evil’ seizes him, or ‘Anything evil’ seizes him—in order to tear them from his (the afflicted person’s) body ( . . . ).” The demons mentioned here produced many different kinds of symptoms: shivering fits, paralysis, dizziness, diseases affecting the joints of the body, and mental derangement.13 In order to “tear them from” the sick person’s body, the ritual expert fashioned a figurine representing the demons and evil forces which had produced or threatened to produce the symptoms on the patient, in this case the king. The sun god, the judge, was asked to bring about a speedy decision in this case, to tear the disease-causing agents from the patient’s body and take them with him to the netherworld, which he traversed during the night. The figurine was touched by the patient and then disposed of by being buried in wasteland. The key concept behind the fashioning and the use of the figurine was basically that of establishing a magic identification which then could be exploited by the exorcist to the disadvantage of the demons and for the benefit of his patient: Demons and evil forces were harassing humans in various states and were therefore difficult to deal with.14 But because the exorcist had identified the figurine with the demons and disease-causing agents, there now existed magic sympathy between this statuette and the evil forces. Thus the demons and disease-causing agents had become comprehensible and manipulable by the human participants according to the needs of the ritual. In the form of the statuette, the demons could be forced to be present at the trial in front of

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the sun god. In the form of the statuette, the king could touch them and by doing so he could return to them the evil with which they had affected him, because the evil was believed to be a kind of physical matter attached to the afflicted person’s body. Thus the king got rid of his symptoms. And finally, in the form of the statuette, the demons and disease-causing agents could be disposed of by being buried at some distant place. This ritual against complaints caused by the malevolent death-spirit and other demons could protect the king against various disease-causing agents (as understood by the Mesopotamians) and evil forces, but such protection was not sustainable if a person had been abandoned by his or her personal gods. So after dealing with the symptoms and the evil forces which had produced them, the cause of the “illness” still had to be treated. This was the aim of the next ritual of the cluster, House of sprinkling water. This ritual began with an action of magic analogy: The king took in his hand birds of a species called marratu in Akkadian and released them into the sky. The analogy was of twofold character, based both on the act of releasing and on the name of the birds in question: Just as the king had granted life to the birds given into his hand and just as he had released them, likewise he wanted to be granted life by the gods and to be released from their anger. The choice of the specific animals was not based on chance: The Akkadian name of this species of birds meant “bitter thing,” so the king got rid of all kinds of bitter things oppressing him by making the birds of this species fly away from him. Then a watercourse was dug into the courtyard of the palace, and a miniature boat was placed in it and sent away, carrying all evil away from the palace and the king. During the day before the king’s appearance at the New Year’s festival, an exorcist had erected in the steppe a building complex made of reeds, consisting of a prison and a reed hut in a courtyard surrounded by a reed fence. The prison was very small, measuring only three cubits square. On the beginning of the eighth day, that is, in the previous evening, at sunset, the king and the ritual experts entered this reed building by the western door.15 The king was not wearing his royal insignia. During the night he stayed in the prison and recited prayers to various heavenly bodies and to the gods of the cities Nippur and Babylon, the two cities of Babylonian kingship. These were the very gods who had granted rulership to him. The king asked them to intercede on his behalf with his personal gods, who had turned away from him. In the morning at sunrise, after the gods of Nippur and Babylon had interceded on his behalf, the king left the prison and entered a reed hut, where he offered sacrifices for and recited prayers to Ea, Shamash, and Asalluhi, the gods who brought about the success of a ritual performance. Shamash, the sun god, was the divine judge. Ea was the god of wisdom, whose son Asalluhi

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had communicated the knowledge of ritual to man. These three gods were the decision-making body deciding on the case of the person who performed a ritual, in this case the king. Thanks to the intercession of the gods of Nippur and Babylon, the king’s personal gods had calmed their anger and the sun god could prove the king not guilty of any willful transgression against the divine sphere. Next, the king addressed his personal gods directly with prayers. It seems that in the reed hut the king also underwent an ablution, stripped off the clothes he had worn in prison, and put on his royal garment. Then he placed himself in the eastern door of the complex of reed buildings. Two exorcists stood to his left and right and by means of conifer cones they sprinkled him with holy water.16 The royal insignia were also sprinkled with water, and finally the king was invested with his regalia in front of the rising sun. Immediately afterwards, he returned to his palace, and there he directed a short prayer to the beer god in his capacity as “the one who relaxes god and man.” This prayer implied a kind of magic analogy: just as alcohol had a “relaxing” effect on the body, so the king wanted to be “released” from his sins and impurity. The Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) word used here means both “to relax” and “to release.” After pleading with the beer god for release, the king performed a beer-related act which would indeed release him from all physical remnants of sin and impurity attached to his body. He touched a fermenting vat and by doing so transmitted all that remained from his “illness” into this vessel, from which it could not escape and where it would be fermented. This was the concluding act of House of sprinkling water, and the king was now able to take part in the events of the New Year’s festival. Like many Mesopotamian rituals, the nocturnal ritual sequence in the reed buildings had the characteristics of a courtroom trial (Maul 1994). In this case, however, the king claimed his capability to execute his rulership, which he had lost because his personal gods had turned away from him. This point is not explicitly stated in the ritual handbook but can deduced from the contents of the prayers the king recited during the night. Whereas earlier scholars focussed on the final ritual act of the investiture of the king with his royal insignia, it can be shown that in general terms the ritual cluster was conceived by the Babylonians as a “healing” of the king in the broadest sense of the word. It protected him from illness and, much more important, from its cause: his alienation from the divine sphere and his estrangement from his gods, all of which led to loss of health, resources, status, and power. By being reconciled with the gods who guaranteed his health, luck, prosperity and success, the king was confirmed in his rule and enabled to fulfill his duty as a ruler, which in this case was to lead the procession of the gods at the New Year’s festival at the autumn equinox. This aim is implicitly alluded to in the introduction to

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the ritual handbook House of sprinkling water, with the words “When you perform the ritual of ‘House of sprinkling water’ in the month of Tashritu.” The connection with the New Year’s festival in autumn becomes clear only by the date of the performance specified in the handbook: it was to be performed in the period from the fourth to the morning of the eighth day of the month of Tashritu, ending immediately before the king’s appearance in the assembly of the gods in the temple and the ensuing procession during the eighth day. The rituals of the cluster of the New Year’s festival in autumn are clearly “rites of passage” (van Gennep 1999 [1909]) which consist of three parts: rites of separation, a marginal state, and finally rites of aggregation. The state of being forsaken by his gods is a marginal state for the king, who has lost (or is in danger of losing) his bodily and mental health and his economic and social position. Various rites of separation are performed at all stages of the rituals. It is evident that the “illness” that affected the king was considered a physical “thing” that had entered his body from the outside and could be removed physically through washing it away with water, stripping it off with the old clothes, transmitting it to a figurine and into a fermenting vat or sending it away in a miniature boat. It is interesting that according to Ancient Near Eastern belief it was not possible to annihilate evil matter, which could only be removed and sent away with a carrier or vehicle, or fermented into some other state.17 Rites of separation also involved what we might consider the use of magic analogies: The king released birds called “bitter thing” into the sky in order to be released from the anger of the gods and of “bitter things” oppressing him, or he addressed the beer god as the one who “relaxes” in order to be himself “released” from sin and impurity. Recovery of the status of a king that he had temporarily lost was likewise obtained in a physical way by his putting on royal garments and insignia. Separation from evil and impurity and aggregation to the status of a king were often connected. Conspicuous ritual acts included the ablution of the king and the change of clothes in the reed hut, as well as sprinkling him with water and investing him with his regalia in the eastern door of the complex of reed buildings in front of the rising sun. The concept of a rite of passage is particularly useful in regard to the second ritual of the cluster, House of sprinkling water, and its interesting ritual space: the complex of reed buildings in the steppe consisting of a prison of reed and a reed hut. The reed hut and the eastern door of the complex of reed buildings are clearly places of rites of aggregation, where the king regains his position as a ruler by reconciling with his personal gods and being invested with his regalia. Reed huts are well attested in many Ancient Near Eastern rituals. They were regarded as pure and apotropaic places of life and well-being, but they also had a legal aspect as the place where the decision-making body—Ea, Shamash and

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Asalluhi—decided the case of the person who performed a ritual.18 A prison as a place of a ritual performance, however, is quite unique and attested to only twice, one attestation being the prison of reeds in House of sprinkling water. The other ritual prison features in a “private” version of the royal House of sprinkling water, with the aim of reconciling an individual and his personal gods. So a prison as a ritual device to calm the anger of the gods was effective not only for a king, but also for normal people, without, however, the concluding act of investiture. The prison in this case was not constructed of reeds but rather was drawn on the floor of a reed hut with flour. The patient sat on a brick in this “prison” and recited prayers to bring about a reconciliation with his angry personal gods. After the ritual performance, the expert grasped the hand of the patient/prisoner and led him out of both the prison and his miserable state.19 As will be shown below, the prison as a ritual structure was a liminal space which had the characteristics of a reversed world. While the king stayed in this prison, he was in a liminal state and subject to a temporary loss of status.

Ritual Efficacy: The Prison as a Ritual Device The cuneiform ritual handbooks seldom explain why a ritual action is performed or a prayer recited. The manifold and very complex meanings of the prison as a ritual structure have to be decoded through the consulting of other sources. Like the reed hut, the prison erected in the steppe was made of reeds, so the building possessed an inherently pure and apotropaic quality. While staying there, the king would not be in contact with any kind of impure or evil matter. It seems strange, then, that this structure is designated with the term bῑt ṣibitti, which also serves to designate a normal prison with no ritual connotations. Why should a prison serve as a place for a ritual performance, anyway? From a strictly legal point of view, a prison sentence was not usual in the Ancient Near East. Condemned criminals were fined or were sentenced to a punishment affecting their life or body, such as death or mutilation. A prison was for people who were awaiting trial or execution or who were unable to pay their debts. If we leave aside other religious and ideological meanings, which will be discussed shortly, the king would appear to be a prisoner awaiting trial and he could leave the prison after one night, after being judged not guilty by the decision-making body, the gods Ea, Shamash, and Asalluhi. The Ancient Near Eastern prison did not have the advantages of a modern penal system. In a hymn to Nungal, the Mesopotamian goddess of prisons, the archetypal prison is described—a house of horror:20

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House, furious storm of heaven and earth, battering its enemies! (...) Its interior is evening light, dusk spreading wide, its awesomeness is frightening. ( . . . ) House, a pitfall waiting for the evil one, it makes the wicked tremble. ( . . . ) House, whose foundations are laden with great awesomeness, Its gate is the yellow evening light, exuding radiance, Its stairs are a great open-mouthed dragon lying in wait for men, Its doorjamb is a great dagger whose two edges cut in two (?) the evil man, Its architrave is a scorpion which quickly dashes from the dust, it overpowers everything. Its projecting pilasters are lions, no one dare rush into their grasp.

The Prisoner-King in Prison as a Criminal Individual While staying in the prison of reeds during the night, the king was not dressed in his royal garment and did not wear his regalia. It is consistent with this nonroyal attire that all the prayers the king recited in prison were the prayers of a suffering individual. During his nocturnal stay there the king addressed various heavenly bodies and the gods of the cities Nippur and Babylon, asking them to act as intermediaries with his personal gods. The prayers or incantations directed to these deities were classified by the Mesopotamians as “(prayers) of raised hands,” because of the gesture that accompanied their recitation. Prayers of this genre are not specific to the king and can best be defined as a plea of an individual private supplicant.21 In these prayers the sufferer attributes his miserable state to the anger of his personal gods. The following excerpt is from a prayer to the moon god Sîn:22 After my god has become angry with me (and) My goddess has stepped back from me, I ever endure (the following problems): (My gods) have imposed against me murder, bribe, and violence; Expenses, losses, privation, and diminution have very severely been inflicted upon me, and My heart has become distraught, my life has become short. The affected person had become a social outcast who lived in continuous fear and despair, until the interceding deities had managed to calm the anger of his personal gods. The status and social position of the praying person were

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irrelevant for the divine acceptance of the plea, since the gods helped even the weakest members of society, as we learn from another passage in the same prayer (ll. 44 f., 51–55): You take the destitute, who has become weak, by his hand. You let the weak one attain and receive a verdict of truth and justice. (...) The unskilled person you endow with ability, You have compassion for him who turned to you, You bring together again the family [lit.: living quarters] of him whose (family) is scattered, You remove the sin of him who bears a sin, You reconcile with him whose god is angry. The divine intermediaries are asked to intercede with the supplicant’s personal gods. The following lines are an excerpt from a prayer addressed to the goddess Gula (Foster 1993: 582 f.): O Gula, most great lady, merciful mother, who dwells in the great heavens, I call upon you, my lady, stand by me and hear me! ( . . . ) Because judging the case, rendering the verdict, Because reviving and granting well-being are yours (to grant), ( . . . ) O my lady, I turn to you, I am heedful of you. Accept of me my flour offering, receive my plea, Let me send you to my angry (personal) god, my angry (personal) goddess, To the god of my city who is in a rage and furious with me. ( . . . ) O Gula, most great lady, with the utterance of your sublime command, which is greatest in Ekur,23 And with your firm assent, which cannot be changed, May my angry (personal) god return to me, may my angry (personal) goddess relent to me, May the god of my city who is in a rage and furious with me, Who is angry, calm down; he who was vexed may he be soothed! (...) Toward the gods whom he asks to act as mediators, the king behaved as a person from a lower social level behaves toward a higher-ranking person. The performance of a “prayer of raised hands” and the accompanying ritual acts were arranged like an audience during which a petitioner requested a mark of favor of a higher-ranking authority (Zgoll 2003).

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After having left the prison and addressing his personal gods, the king recited individual prayers of the sort that might be recited by any private person. These prayers belonged to the category of “incantation for appeasing an angry god” (Lambert 1974). In these prayers addressed to his personal gods the king argued not unlike someone accused in court, at first negating any acts of transgression and misdemeanor, then admitting that he did commit these acts, but only unintentionally. Finally, he put forward the point that we are all sinners and that nobody is perfect. The transgressions mentioned in the prayers are of a vague, unspecified kind with no specific connection to the particular case. The following is a prayer addressed to a personal god (Lambert 1974: 274–277; cited here is Foster 1993: 641): My god, I did not know (how) harsh your punishment would be! I have sworn lightly a solemn oath by your name, I have disregarded your rites, I went too far, I have skirted (?) your duty in difficulty, I have trespassed far beyond your limits. I certainly did not know, much [ . . . ]. My crimes being (so) numerous, I do not know all I did. O my god, clear, forgo, dispel your ire, Disregard my iniquities, accept my entreaties, Transmute my sins into good deeds. Your hand is harsh, I have seen your punishment. Let him who does not revere his god and goddess learn from my example. O my god, be reconciled, o my goddess, relent! Turn hither your faces to the entreaty of my prayer. May your angry hearts be calmed, May your feelings be soothed, permit me reconciliation, Let me ever sing your praises, not to be forgotten, to the numerous peoples. Specific royal misdeeds are not mentioned in these “private” prayers. What the Mesopotamians considered to be royal crimes can be seen, for instance, in the composition Advice to a prince, a work listing in a casuistic style misdeeds of kings and the divine wrath that is their consequence (Foster 1993: 760–762). A characteristic crime of a king is disrespect for the privileges of the venerable cult centers of Babylonia and their inhabitants. Specific royal crimes are also mentioned in a kind of negative confession of sins that the Babylonian king delivered in the temple of Marduk during the New Year’s festival in spring. The king assured the god that he had not disregarded his royal duties toward the

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gods and their temples, that he had not torn down the city walls of Babylon, and that he had not disregarded the privileges of the citizens. Nothing of this kind is mentioned in the king’s prayers to his divine mediators or his personal gods.

The Prison as the Material Representation of the Anger of the Gods The prison of reeds in the steppe was the material representation of the anger of the personal gods of the king. Interestingly, in the so-called wisdom literature and other literary genres, the state of a person forsaken by his or her gods is described as a state of inability to act, of captivity, and is comparable to a stay in prison. Wisdom literature is a literary genre treating the question of the place of man within in the cosmological framework, the relationship between man and god, and ethical questions. In the so-called Poem of the righteous sufferer, the protagonist, who is subject to the anger of his gods, describes his situation in the following words:24 I take to a bed of bondage; going out is a pain; My house has become my prison. My arms are stricken—which shackles my flesh; My feet are limp—which fetters my person. Very similar is the concept attested in bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian prayers, that the person who suffers from the anger of his or her gods has become a “prisoner” in his or her own house.25 Clearly a person alienated from his or her gods had become inert, had lost his or her agency and ability to act. During the ritual performance, the king experienced this god-forsaken state physically by staying in a prison.

The Prison as the Netherworld During the performance of House of sprinkling water the king moved through the ritual space from west to east. During the night he stayed in the prison of reeds, which he left in the morning in order to enter the reed hut and finally to receive his regalia in the eastern door of the complex of reed buildings in front of the rising sun. By moving from west toward east, the king obviously followed the path of the sun during the night. And according to Mesopotamian ideology, the king was the likeness of the sun on earth among the people. It was certainly no accident that the king embodied the sun directly before the autumn equinox, when the New Year’s festival in autumn took place. During the night, the sun passed through the netherworld. Interestingly, the prison also had the aspect of the netherworld. The goddess of prison, Nungal or Manungal, belonged to

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the circle of netherworld deities and the temple of the deity bore the Sumerian name Ekur, which is also attested as a designation of the netherworld and was translated by the Babylonians as “prison.”26 So the king’s nocturnal stay in prison should be seen in analogy with the stay of the sun in the netherworld during the night. If the prison had a netherworld aspect, we may ask ourselves whether the king actually “died” when entering the prison in the evening and was “reborn” when leaving it at sunrise. It is perhaps relevant that the emergence of a baby from the womb of the mother was seen by the Mesopotamians as analogous to the sun’s emergence from the dark netherworld, that is, its rising in the morning (see in general Polonsky 2006). The same verb is used in Sumerian and Akkadian for both the emerging of the sun from the netherworld and for the emerging of the child from the womb. As the sun rises at the horizon to continue its journey across the sky, so is the birth of a child described as a journey starting at the horizon in the mother’s womb. The unborn baby is characterized as the dweller in the darkness of the mother’s womb who has not yet seen the rise or the light of the sun (Farber 1989: 149–151). The sun god is one of the gods assisting the woman in labor. In order to introduce newborn boys and girls to their future gender roles, there were rituals performed on them before the sun. Birth or the cutting of the umbilical cord was the time when the fate of the newborn was decreed by the gods. Likewise was sunrise a time when destiny was determined when the other gods joined the sun god to render judgment and verdict. The goddess of prison, Nungal or Manungal, according to the abovementioned hymn, assisted the mother-goddess Nintur in cutting the umbilical cord of the newborn child and determined his or her fate (Black et al. 1998–2006: ll. 71 f.): I assist Nintur at the place of child-delivery; I know how to cut the umbilical cord and know the favourable words when determining fates. Moreover the prison, as described in the hymn to Nungal, had the aspect of a place of death and rebirth, as is clear in the following excerpt:27 Its brick walls crush evil men and give rebirth to just men. ( . . . ) When the time arrives, the prison is made up as for a public festival, The gods are present at the place of interrogation, at the divine river ordeal, To separate the just from the evildoers; a just man is given rebirth. (...) My house gives birth to a just person but exterminates a false one.

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The death of the criminal and the rebirth of the just person have been understood at least by modern researchers as a kind of metaphor of rehabilitation or reformation of the prison’s inmates: By staying in prison, the criminal dies and is reborn as a just and honest man (Cavigneaux & Krebernik 1998–2001: 616 f.). The king left the prison in the morning in order to be invested with his regalia in front of the rising sun. It is also possible that the act of investiture was understood by the Mesopotamians as the “death” of the not-yet-crowned person and “(re)birth” of the crowned person (Wilcke 2002: 82 f.). As is mentioned above, a person was made king not by an act of investiture, but rather because he had been created by the gods to become ruler of his country. The actual investiture of the king at the beginning of his reign may have been a reenactment of this creation by the gods. There are attestations that the mothergoddess herself performs the investiture of the king. The following excerpt is from a Sumerian hymn to the temple of the mother-goddess Nintu (Sjöberg, Bergmann & Gragg 1969: 46 f. ll. 500–503): Mother Nintu, the lady of . . ., Within your (the temple’s) dark place performs her task: The (new)born king, she binds the headgear (around his head), The (new)born lord, she sets the crown (on his head), he is (secure) in her hand. The dark interior of the temple of the mother-goddess is clearly to be seen as an analogy to the dark womb of the mother (indeed the womb is attested in Mesopotamian incantations and rituals performed for babies as an archetypal place of darkness: Farber 1989: 149–150). Thus the ruler’s coronation by the mother-goddess in the dark interior of her temple can bee seen as analogous to birth (Krebernik 1993–1997: 513 f. § 6.5). We may therefore ask if the prison of reeds represented the womb of the mother-goddess and if the investiture of the king was understood as birth? The ritual handbook describing House of sprinkling water does not refer explicitly to birth and investiture of the king by the mothergoddess. However the king names himself a “creature of Ninmenanna” in a short prayer at the beginning of the ritual. Ninmenna or Ninmenanna is one of the names of the mothergoddess meaning “Lady of the crown” (Krebernik 1993–1997: 505 f. § 3.23). The royal self-designation “creature of Ninmen(an)na” is no peculiarity of the ritual House of sprinkling water but is also attested in royal inscriptions of Babylonian kings. This reference to the mother-goddess may well be a kind of framing: At the beginning of the ritual performance the king names himself a creature of the

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mother-goddess in her aspect as lady of the crown. During the night of the last day of the ritual performance he stayed in a small and dark prison, which may have represented the womb of the mother-goddess, among other things. The king leaves the prison/womb at sunrise to be invested with his regalia, which may bear the association of birth. It is noteworthy that the different and seemingly incommensurable situations of staying in a prison and of undergoing an investiture have very similar associations of death and rebirth. Moreover, in the ritual House of sprinkling water both these situations are combined and there is a further link between them by their connection to the path of the sun: The king leaving the prison at sunrise to be invested with his insignia is to be seen in analogy to the sun leaving the netherworld, the sunrise bearing again the metaphor of birth.

The Reversed World The various connotations of the prison where the king stayed for one night have one important aspect in common. In literary texts, the prison, the state of being forsaken by one’s gods, and the netherworld are all described as reversed worlds, where the normal world order was turned upside down. So the king was no longer king during this single night, and in fact he did not wear his royal insignia. It is also noteworthy that none of the prayers the king recited in prison were specifically royal prayers, but rather prayers that could be recited by any private person. They dealt with the problems and concerns of an individual, but not with those of an empire and its king. They obtain their relevance for kingship only when seen as a cycle addressed to the gods of the royal cities Nippur and Babylon. In the hymn to the goddess of prison, Nungal, the prison is explicitly described as a place where normal conventions are reversed. The inmates behave in a way opposite to that of normal people, as can be seen in the following excerpt from this composition:28 Brother counts for brother the days of misfortune, but their calculations get utterly confused. A man does not recognize his fellow men; they have become strangers. A man does not return the password of his fellow men, their looks are so changed. Similarly is the netherworld a world of reversal. It is a topos in Mesopotamian epics and myths that all living beings traveling to the netherworld, be they humans or gods, are advised to behave there in a way exactly opposite

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to the way they would behave on earth, so that they will not be recognized as strangers. A famous example is from the Gilgamesh Epic. Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu travels to the netherworld to recover two objects that have fallen into the realm of the death. Gilgamesh advises Enkidu to behave in the netherworld exactly opposite to the way he would behave on earth. For example, he should not behave in the proper way toward his dead relatives:29 You must not kiss the wife you love, You must not strike the wife you hate, You must not kiss the son you love, You must not strike the son you hate. As we learn from the myth “Nergal and Ereshkigal,” similar advice is offered to the god Nergal by the god of wisdom, Ea, when he travels into the netherworld (Foster 1993: 410–428, esp. 420 and 422). So it becomes evident that the prison where the Babylonian king stayed during the night of the eighth day of the month of Tashritu in autumn is associated on various levels (state of the god-forsaken person  prison  netherworld) with the concept of a reversed world. This reversed world mirrored the treatment of the king during the New Year’s festival in spring. Then the king did not stay without his insignia in prison, but he was divested of his insignia and slapped in the face by the high priest, as described earlier. The deeper meanings of the prison of reeds in the steppe were not just symbolic connotations but rather a means to an end: Because the ritual expert had made the prison corresponding to the state of being forsaken by the gods as well as to the netherworld, he could deal with the problems the king had to face: the anger of the gods and endangered kingship which was its consequence. When the king passed through the ritual space of the prison endowed with the qualities discussed above, his movement was not just movement, but rather an action of analogy which would cause the desired feedback: By leaving the prison, the king also left behind him the state of being forsaken by the gods. Likewise the king, when he went out of the prison, embodied the sun rising from the netherworld. And since, according to a concept commonly attested in the Ancient Near East, the king was regarded as the sun of his subjects, the ruler virtually exerted and confirmed his kingship by embodying the sun. Taking into account these various connotations of the prison of reeds in the steppe, we may assume that this stay had a deep psychological impact upon the ruler.30 After a night in a dark and extreme narrow prison, which he had entered as a poor sinner suffering from the anger of the gods, he left both

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the prison and his miserable state, going in the direction of the rising sun to receive his regalia and to turn again into a king. By mentioning psychological effects on the king, we should note, however, that during the ritual performance there was not much time to express individual repentance. As we have seen, during the ritual performance the king recited dozens of prayers to his divine intermediaries, his personal gods, and the decision-making body Ea, Shamash, and Asalluhi. These were stereotyped prayers with a fixed wording, which were pronounced for the king by the ritual expert. It was precisely the power of these prayers, stemming from the so-called stream of tradition, the traditional lore of Mesopotamian scholarship revealed by the gods themselves, that accounted for the efficacy of ritual.

Conclusion It was a characteristic mechanism of Babylonian kingship that the ruler was subject to a semiannual reinvestiture during the two Near Year’s festivals, at the equinoxes in spring and autumn. This chapter dealt with some aspects of the autumn festival. The appearance of the king at this important event was in danger of being impeded by various problems caused by the anger of the ruler’s personal gods. This anger led to “illness” as the Mesopotamians conceived it, that is, the loss of physical and mental health and of economic and social status. The anger of the personal gods and the “illness” resulting therefrom could prevent the king from appearing at the New Year’s festival to be confirmed in his office and so lead to political consequences. A cluster of various rituals presented in this chapter were aimed at guaranteeing the king’s presence at the autumn festival by healing all symptoms of “illness” and eliminating their cause by reconciling the ruler with his personal gods. In terms of efficacy, the ritual acts and prayers were perceived by the Babylonians as fulfilling their respective aim and thus were effective in enabling the ruler to appear at the festival. Ritual efficacy can be observed on various mutually dependent levels. The confirmation of the king’s status is attained after a temporary loss of status, a mechanism that can be observed worldwide in many rituals of investiture (Turner 2000 [1969]: 94 ff., 162 ff.).31 During the period of his loss of status, the king was in a marginal state, staying in a marginal space with the characteristics of a reversed world, the prison of reeds in the steppe. There are several basic rites of separation and aggregation in the true sense of the word. Evil, illness, and impurity were physically removed from the body of the king by being transmitted to other objects, by being washed away with water, by

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being stripped off together with the old clothes, or by being sent away in a miniature boat. The king was reintroduced into his royal status by putting on his royal garment and his insignia. In principle, each of these basic ritual acts was effective—not on its own, however, but only when performed in a broader legal context within a ritual. The king faced a trial before a divine decisionmaking body and he had to win over powerful gods as intercessors. If the gods accepted his acts and prayers, then these basic ritual sequences were effective. Even a single ritual was not effective on its own, but only as part of a cluster of several rituals, the respective rituals of the cluster being mutually dependent. Step by step the king was protected against disease-causing agents such as demons, reconciled with his personal gods, and then confirmed as ruler by the major gods of the pantheon during the New Year’s festival in autumn. Thus the performance of the various rituals of the cluster brought about physical health, reconciliation with the divine sphere, and confirmation of social and political status. In passing we note that in general terms the king’s confirmation in his office after a temporary loss of status during the autumn festival is mirrored in the spring festival, when the king was divested of his insignia, was slapped in his face by the priest of the god Marduk, delivered a report in front of the deity, and was then reintroduced in kingship. The participation in the New Year’s festivals was of the utmost importance for the legitimation of the Babylonian king, and so it is not surprising that he was prepared for his appearance at this important cultic and political event in the way as I have described. Religious legitimation of a ruler is attested everywhere in the Ancient Near East, but especially in Babylonia of the first millennium, where a dynastic concept was only weakly developed. Of course, the first-born son of a king would expect to follow his father to the throne, but simply being the oldest son was not sufficient to guarantee one’s succession. This situation is in marked contrast to Assyria, where even the last rulers of the empire in the seventh century BCE claimed to be members of a dynasty founded by a distant ancestor well over 1000 years earlier. But if we look at the state of the Babylonian monarchy in the first half of the first millenniumBCE, there was hardly any effective means to guarantee the well-being of the kings or a wellordered succession. During 200 years from the ninth to the seventh century BCE, for example, only once did a son follow his royal father on the throne (leaving aside Assyrian rulers reigning over Babylonia in personal union). This son, by the way, was murdered after only two years of reign, and his murderer, who followed him to the throne, was himself killed after only one month (Brinkman 1984: 16). This trouble, however, never raised any question among Babylonian

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scholars about whether this form of government and the rituals connected with it were effective. Indeed, the ritual featuring the king in prison was considered effective by both kings and scholars, and it was also used by Assyrian kings ruling Assyria and Babylonia in personal union in the seventh century BCE. The ritual had a long-range efficacy, being performed in Babylonia for kings residing in Assyria, hundreds of kilometers away. The Assyrian kings were informed about the performance of the ritual by letters from their agents in Babylonia. The ritual was transmitted even long after Babylonia was no longer an independent kingdom and had become part of the Persian empire. The New Year’s festivals were still attended in Hellenistic times by Seleucid rulers, but we do not know if a Seleucid (or before then an Achaemenid) ruler was ever slapped in the face during the New Year’s festival in spring or stayed in a prison in the New Year’s festival in autumn. notes 1. The ritual lore of the cuneiform cultures of Mesopotamia will be the focus of this essay. For Hittite Anatolia and its rich ritual tradition in cuneiform, see Haas (2003). Special characters are used sparsely and Akkadian words or names are presented in a simplified way. I am grateful to William Sax for reading an earlier draft of this article, improving my English and commenting on the contents. 2. For the following discussion of Akkadian words for “ritual,” I made use of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary). 3. For more on ritual techniques and the materia magica used in rituals see Maul (1994) and Haas (2003). 4. For explanatory commentaries on ritual and religious texts in Mesopotamia, see Livingstone (1986). 5. See Pongratz-Leisten (1999) on the role and position of the ritual experts and scholars and their lore of knowledge at the courts at both Mari and Nineveh. For an edition of the correspondence of the Assyrian scholars, see the series “State Archives of Assyria” (Helsinki), especially Parpola (1993). For the letters from Mari, I refer to the series “Archives royales de Mari” (Paris), especially Durand (1988). 6. For the New Year’s festivals, see Bidmead (2004), Cohen (1993), Linssen (2004), and Zgoll (2006). 7. For a critical appraisal of Frazer’s treatment of the New Year’s festival, see Fontenrose (1966: 5–8). 8. I discovered the evidence only recently in the British Museum, while working on yet unpublished or not correctly identified cuneiform tablets. 9. Schaudig (2001: 18 ff., 26, 493 with note 704 and p. 498; 494 and 499 l. 1 III 11–12; 566 and 573 col. I 18 f).

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10. The ritual If the death-spirit seizes a man is edited by Scurlock (2006: 530–535 and 712 f.). Scurlock, however, did not recognize that this ritual is closely connected to the ritual House of sprinkling water and was part of a cluster to be performed at the New Year’s festival in autumn. Fragments of the ritual House of sprinkling water were edited by Meier (1937–1939) and Berlejung (1996). Neither of these authors, however, identified the ritual correctly as House of sprinkling water, nor did they recognize that this ritual is connected to the ritual If the death-spirit seizes a man, nor did they recognize that both rituals were part of a ritual cluster to be performed at the New Year’s festival in autumn. I have prepared a new edition of both rituals, and they will be published, along with a discussion of their context, as a monograph in the near future. 11. With regard to the Mesopotamian view of “illness” and the role of the patient and the ritual expert, Howard Brody drew my attention to the concept of the “Sick role” of Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1968 [1951]: 428–479; see also Cockerham & Ritchey 1997: 117 f. and Quah 2005 [2001]: 33–35). According to this concept, society considered sickness to be a deviant behavior (Parsons 1968 [1951]: 467 f.), the patient being dependent on the help of an expert; in our Western world that expert would be the physician (1968 [1951]: 441). Interestingly, Parsons sees the role of the physician as that of a “court of appeal” (1968 [1951]: 436 f.). 12. A concise explanation of the principles of “magic” as attested in the Ancient Near East based on examples from Hittite rituals is given by Haas (1987–1990). 13. On the description of symptoms and methods of diagnosis in Mesopotamia, see in general Scurlock & Andersen (2005). For Hittite Anatolia, see Haas (2003: 55–62). 14. Incantations offer vivid descriptions of how demons in various states slip, sneak, blow, waft, drip, and flow into the houses of humans (Schramm 2001: 22 f.; Geller 1999: 51). 15. In the Ancient Near East, the day began at sunset, not at sunrise in the morning, as in our culture. 16. Representations of the king with two supernatural sages, the archetypal ritual experts, who stay at his left and right sprinkling water by means of conifer cones are well attested in Assyrian art: Magen (1986: 73–81). 17. For this concept, see in general Maul (1994: 85–93) and Haas (2003: 68 ff.). 18. On reed huts as ritual structures, see in general Taracha (2001) and Seidl & Sallaberger (2005/2006). Reed was considered a pure and apotropaic building material, connected to the cosmic subterranean ocean, the apsû. The reed’s place of origin, the reed bed, was the epitome of life and well-being, because in marked contrast to the desert it was a place abundant in water, teeming with fish, birds, and other animals. 19. Edition of this ritual by Ebeling (1931: 114–120). 20. Cited here are lines 1, 3, 5, and 12–17. The most recent edition of the hymn is by Attinger (2003) (with French translation). This English translation follows the one offered by Black et al. (1998–2006) in the “Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature” at http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk.

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21. To the problems of distinguishing between “prayer” and “incantation,” see Mayer (1976: 7 ff.), dealing also with the various attested Mesopotamian categories of prayers and incantations. 22. Mayer (1976: 495–502 ll. 56–60). In this English translation I also made use of the citations of the passages in the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary). 23. Ekur is the temple of the god Enlil at Nippur. 24. Lambert 1996 [1960]: 44 f., tablet II ll. 95–98. It is interesting that also Nabonidus, the Babylonian king abandoned by his personal god, quotes a passage from the Poem of the righteous sufferer to describe his god-forsaken state: Schaudig (2001: 493, 498), referring to Lambert (1996 [1960]: 32 f. tablet I ll. 52 and 54). The passage quoted by Nabonidus does not refer to the state of a prisoner but alludes to the fact that the godforsaken person is without protection against inauspicious omens like evil dreams and that even the diviners and ritual experts can do nothing to help this person as long as the gods are not inclined to accept oracular queries and rituals. 25. Lambert (1974: 289 f. ll. 15 f.; 292 ll. 15 f.; 293 ll. 12 f.; 301). 26. For the goddess of prison, see Cavigneaux & Krebernik (1998–2001). For the Akkadian (Assyrian-Babylonian) translation of the temple’s name as “prison,” see Maul (1988: 263–266 rev. 6 f.). 27. Cited are lines 56, 58–60, and 103, following Black et al. (1998–2006). 28. Cited here are lines 52–54, following Black et al. (1998–2006). 29. A. R. George (2003: 728 ff. ll. 10 ff. and 31 ff.; 749 ff. ll. 181 ff. and 771 f. ll. 181 ff.). Cited here is George (2003: 728 ll. 23–26 and 751 ll. 195–198). 30. Ancient Near Eastern ritual experts were well aware of the psychological impact of their rituals upon their patients and clients and were using psychotherapeutic effects deliberately. This fact is clearly attested in Hittite ritual texts; see the evidence collected by Haas (2003: 67 f.). 31. William Sax drew my attention to rituals of status reversal and rebellion in southeast Africa analyzed by Gluckman (1963). It should be noted, however, that there is no evidence that the temporary status reversal of the Babylonian king was accompanied by ritualized rebellion. On rituals of status reversal and inversion, see in general Babcock (1978); for more specific discussion of rituals of reversal and inversion in cultures of the Ancient World, see Auffarth (1991) and Versnel (1993).

references Ambos, C. 2004, Mesopotamische Baurituale aus dem 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. Mit einem Beitrag von A. Schmitt, ISLET, Dresden. ——— . 2007a, “Types of Ritual Failure and Mistakes in Ritual in Cuneiform Sources,” in When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual, ed. Ute Hüsken, Brill, Leiden, pp. 25–47. ——— . 2007b, “Ricostruire un tempio per nuocere al re: Rituali mesopotamici di fondazione, il loro posto nel culto e il loro impiego come arma politica,” in Kaskal: Rivista di storia, ambienti e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico 4, 297–314.

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Attinger, P. 2003, “L’Hymne à Nungal,” in Literatur, Politik und Recht in Mesopotamien. Festschrift für Claus Wilcke, ed. W. Sallaberger, K. Volk, & A. Zgoll, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, pp. 15–34. Auffarth, Chr. 1991, Der drohende Untergang: “Schöpfung” in Mythos und Ritual im Alten Orient und in Griechenland am Beispiel der Odyssee und des Ezechielbuches, de Gruyter, Berlin. Babcock, B. A. (ed.) 1978, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. Berlejung, A. 1996, “Die Macht der Insignien. Überlegungen zu einem Ritual der Investitur des Königs und dessen königsideologischen Implikationen,” UgaritForschungen 28, pp. 1–35. Bidmead, J. 2004, The Akitu Festival: Religious Continuity and Royal Legitimation in Mesopotamia, Gorgias Dissertations Near Eastern Studies vol. 2, Gorgias Press, Piscataway. N.J. Black, J. A., Cunningham, G., Ebeling, J., Flückiger-Hawker, E., Robson, E., Taylor, J., & Zólyomi, G. 1998–2006, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, available at: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk. Brinkman, J. A. 1984, Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747–626 B.C., Occasional Publications of the Babylonian Fund 7, Philadelphia. Cavigneaux, A., & Krebernik, M. 1998–2001, “Nungal,” in Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie vol. 9, ed. D. O. Edzard et al., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 615–618. Cockerham, W. C., & Ritchey, F. J. 1997, Dictionary of Medical Sociology, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. Cohen, M. 1993, The Cultic Calendars of the Ancient Near East, CDL-Press, Bethesda, Md. Durand, J.-M. 1988, Archives épistolaires de Mari I/1, Archives royales de Mari vol. 26, Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, Paris. Ebeling, E. 1931, Tod und Leben nach den Vorstellungen der Babylonier, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Farber, W. 1989, Schlaf, Kindchen, Schlaf! Mesopotamische Baby-Beschwörungen und -Rituale, Mesopotamian Civilizations vol. 2, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind. Fontenrose, J. 1966, The Ritual Theory of Myth, Folklore Studies vol. 18, University of California Publications, Berkeley. Foster, B. 1993, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, CDL Press, Bethesda, Md. Geller, M. 1999, “Freud and Mesopotamian Magic,” in Mesopotamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretative Perspectives, ed. T. Abusch & K. van der Toorn, Ancient Magic and Divination vol. 1, Styx Publications, Groningen, Netherlands. 49–55. Gennep, A. van. 1999 [1909], Übergangsriten (Les rites de passage), German translation by K. Schomburg and S. M. Schomburg-Scherff, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt. George, A. R. 2003, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Gluckman, M. 1963, “Rituals of Rebellion in South East Africa,” in Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa, ed. M. Gluckman, Cohen & West Ltd., London, pp. 110–136.

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Haas, V. 1987–1990, “Magie und Zauberei. B. Bei den Hethitern,” in Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie vol. 7, ed. D. O. Edzard et al., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 234–255. ——— , with the collaboration of D. Bawanypeck. 2003, Materia Magica et Medica Hethitica. Ein Beitrag zur Heilkunde im Alten Orient, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Krebernik, M. 1993–1997, “Muttergöttin. A.I. In Mesopotamien,” in Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie vol. 8, ed. D. O. Edzard et al., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 502–516. Lambert, W. G. 1960, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford. (Reprint 1996 Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Ind.) ——— . 1974, “Dingir.šà.dib.ba Incantations,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 33, pp. 267–322. ——— . 1998, “The Qualifications of Babylonian Diviners,” in Festschrift für Rykle Borger zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 24. Mai 1994. tikip santakki mala basˇ mu . . ., Cuneiform Monographs vol. 10, ed. S. M. Maul, Styx Publications, Groningen, Netherlands, pp. 141–158. Linssen, M. 2004, The Cults of Uruk and Babylon. The Temple Ritual Texts as Evidence for Hellenistic Cult Practice, Cuneiform Monographs vol. 25, Brill & Styx, Leiden. Livingstone, A. 1986, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Magen, U. 1986, Assyrische Königsdarstellungen—Aspekte der Herrschaft: Eine Typologie, Baghdader Forschungen vol. 9, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz. Maul, S. M. 1988, “Herzberuhigungsklagen”: Die sumerisch-akkadischen Ersˇ ahungaGebete, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden. ——— . 1994, Zukunftsbewältigung. Eine Untersuchung altorientalischen Denkens anhand der babylonisch-assyrischen Löserituale (Namburbi), Baghdader Forschungen vol. 18, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz. Mayer, W. 1976, Untersuchungen zur Formensprache der babylonischen “Gebetsbeschwörungen,” Studia Pohl Series Maior vol. 5, Biblical Institute Press, Rome. Meier, G. 1937–1939, “Die Ritualtafel der Serie ‘Mundwaschung’, ” Archiv für Orientforschung 12, pp. 40–45. Oppenheim, A. L. 1977 [1964], Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, rev. ed. completed by E. Reiner, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Parpola, S. 1993, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, State Archives of Assyria vol. 10, The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, Helsinki. Parsons, T. 1968 [1951], The Social System, The Free Press, Toronto & CollierMacmillan Limited, London. Polonsky, J. 2006, “The Mesopotamian Conceptualization of Birth and the Determination of Fate at Sunrise,” in If a Man Builds a Joyful House. Assyriological Studies in Honor of E. V. Leichty, ed. A. K. Guinan et al., Cuneiform Monographs vol. 31, Brill, Leiden, pp. 297–311. Pongratz-Leisten, B. 1999, Herrschaftswissen in Mesopotamien: Formen der Kommunikation zwischen Gott und König im 2. und 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr., State Archives of Assyria Studies vol. 10, The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, Helsinki.

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Quah, S. 2005 [2001], “Health and Culture,” in The Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology, ed. W. C. Cockerham, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp. 23–42. Schaudig, H. 2001, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Großen samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften. Textausgabe und Grammatik, Alter Orient und Altes Testament vol. 256, Ugarit-Verlag, Münster. Schramm, W. 2001, Bann, Bann! Eine sumerisch-akkadische Beschwörungsserie, Göttinger Arbeitshefte zur Altorientalischen Literatur vol. 2, Seminar für Keilschriftforschung, Göttingen. Scurlock, J. A. 2006, Magico-Medical Means of Treating Ghost-Induced Illnesses in Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Magic and Divination vol. 3, Brill & Styx, Leiden. ——— , & Andersen, B. R. 2005, Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine: Ancient Sources, Translations, and Modern Medical Analyses, University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Seidl, U. & Sallaberger, W. 2005/2006, “Der ‘Heilige Baum,’ ” Archiv für Orientforschung 51, pp. 54–74. Sjöberg, A. W., Bergmann, E., & Gragg, G. 1969, The Collection of the Sumerian Temple Hymns, Texts from Cuneiform Sources vol. 3, J. J. Augustin Publisher, Locust Valley, N.Y. Stol, M. 2000, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible: Its Mediterranean Setting, Cuneiform Monographs vol. 14, Styx Publications, Groningen. Taracha, P. 2001, “Hethitisch Ékippa- und das Sumerogramm (É.)GI.PAD mesopotamischer Texte,” Altorientalische Forschungen 28, pp. 132–146. Turner, V. 2000 [1969], Das Ritual: Struktur und Anti-Struktur, German translation of The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-Structure, by S. M. Homburg-Scherff, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt. Versnel, H. S. 1993, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion II: Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual, Studies in Greek and Roman Religion vol. 6, Brill, Leiden. Wilcke, C. 2002, “Vom göttlichen Wesen des Königtumes und seinem Ursprung im Himmel,” in Die Sakralität von Herrschaft. Herrschaftslegitimierung im Wechsel der Zeiten und Räume. Fünfzehn interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu einem weltweiten und epochenübergreifenden Phänomen, ed. Franz-Reiner Erkens, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, pp. 63–83. Zgoll, A. 2003, “Audienz—Ein Modell zum Verständnis mesopotamischer Handerhebungsrituale. Mit einer Deutung der Novelle vom Armen Mann von Nippur,” Baghdader Mitteilungen 34, pp. 181–203. ——— . 2006, “Königslauf und Götterrat: Struktur und Deutung des babylonischen Neujahrsfestes,” in Festtraditionen in Israel und im Alten Orient, ed. E. Blum & R. Lux, Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie vol. 28, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh, pp. 11–80.

3 Jesus and His Followers as Healers: Symbolic Healing in Early Christianity Gerd Theissen My so-called habilitation thesis on Early Christian miracle stories (Theißen 1974)1 more than thirty years ago was a rehabilitation of these small but very popular stories. I defended them against their interpretation as texts with a hidden theological message concerning a spiritual salvation. The telling of these stories appeared to me as a kind of “symbolic action” coping with concrete predicaments of life such as sickness and danger, despair and anxiety, isolation and oppression. Telling miracle stories was a rebellion against the hardness of the struggle for life—with the effect of reducing anxiety and creating confidence. Whether these miracles had really happened was not my point. When I was about to finish the book, I met a cultural anthropologist who was familiar with exorcisms in the Ethiopian church (Theißen 1974, p. 248 n. 51). She told me that possession by demons is widespread among Ethiopian women of the lower classes. Priests are able to free these women from demons who actually endanger their health and life. The exorcisms are performed according to patterns and scripts comparable to the New Testament stories. During the exorcism the congregation surrounds the priest and the possessed woman. The priest threatens the demon, the demon opposes the exorcism by violently shaking the body of the possessed, but in the end it is forced to leave the woman’s body. She seems to be dead but is reanimated after a while. I must have listened with a very skeptical look on my face, for she finished her report by saying: “And if one of the bystanders looks as skeptical as you, the demon will immediately enter you.”

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To be sure, no demon entered my mind, but rather certain doubts concerning whether I had written the book with adequate knowledge of exorcism and healing. Since then I have been increasingly convinced that symbolic healing throughout the world, and above all in traditional societies, is the best analogy to the exorcisms and healings of Early Christianity. And I asked myself whether there is perhaps more life-reality in the background of the miracle stories in the Gospels than we had imagined. It is true that the telling of miracle stories is a symbolic act opposing real problems, but these stories describe real healings that were performed with the help of symbols and rituals and may have had therapeutic effects. This chapter applies established theories of symbolic and ritual healing from cultural anthropology to the miracles of Jesus. It does not aim to develop a new theory on the efficacy of ritual healing, though it will add some new elements to these theories. But our first aim is to show that applying these theories is justified and will help us to understand better the healing activities of Jesus and his followers. Whereas historical critical research tended to interpret traditions of healings and exorcisms as literary constructions and to diminish their historical reality, conservative research defended their historicity, not because they could be explained by our knowledge of symbolic healing, but rather because they were regarded as true “miracles.” To understand Jesus and his followers as symbolic healers is therefore a new approach in biblical studies, developed within the last decades and influenced by insights from cultural anthropology. This new understanding of Jesus’ healings is no relapse into premodern hermeneutics that considered miracles as proof of Jesus’ uniqueness. If we consider charismatic healers throughout the world as analogies to Jesus, this uniqueness cannot be maintained. Using these analogies is a hermeneutical progress, because they may give us a better understanding of the miracles of the Gospels. We discover more life in these stories. We may even discover individual features that are not absolutely unique but at least particular to their historical context. Still, there is a problem that makes historical-critical scholars reluctant to interpret the healings of Jesus in this way: a story is not history. There is a gap between text and historical reality. Therefore, I will first discuss the historicity of Jesus’ healings. Second, I will deal with the question of whether it is justified to classify them as symbolic and social healings. Third, I will treat the efficacy of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms, applying the common theories on symbolic and ritual healing to them. We shall see that we must modify these theories in some regard so that they fit the evidence. Therefore our second aim is to suggest some modifications of established theories.

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1 The Problem of Historicity of Jesus’ Healings and Exorcisms Let’s consider three theses of historical skepticism with regard to miracles in the New Testament. The messianic propaganda thesis says that the miracles were told and invented in order to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah; a specific Jewish hope produced them. This argument was elaborated by David Friedrich Strauß in the nineteenth century (1808–1874). The miracle pattern thesis says that the miracles were told and invented according to general patterns of miracle stories in antiquity. This argument was developed by the form historical school at the beginning of the twentieth century. The thesis of a late origin of the miracle stories says that within Christian traditions the miracle stories originated relatively late and were added to layers containing no miracles. This outsider thesis was developed in the last few decades (Schmithals 1997).

1.1 The Messianic Propaganda Thesis The “messianic propaganda” thesis says that since people expected the Messiah to perform unique miracles, these were ascribed to Jesus, either being transferred from other miracle workers to him or being invented or shaped according to messianic expectations. Jesus was said to have fed the crowd in the wilderness like a new Moses. However, there are some problems with this thesis. In Judaism there is not an expectation that the Messiah performs miracles. In the Psalms of Solomon, dating from the first century BCE, he does not perform any miracles (cp. PsSol 17 and 18). At the turn of the new century messianic pretenders appear in Palestine as popular kings, but nothing is reported about miracles. During the entire first century CE many charismatic prophets and other figures appeared in Judaism—John the Baptist and some prophets—but none of them attracted miracle stories, although John the Baptist was regarded as a new Elijah and Elijah had performed miracles according to the Old Testament. In the second century CE Bar Kochba was proclaimed the Messiah without miracles being ascribed to him. We do, however, hear of a charismatic healer Chanina ben Dosa in Galilee, a contemporary of Jesus, but he did not claim to be the Messiah or a prophet at all. We may therefore conclude that, although miracle stories are not associated with all charismatic figures in those days, the great number of miracle stories associated with Jesus may be due to his historical activity. But there is a grain of truth in the idea that expectations created them. In some biblical and other Jewish texts there is the expectation that God will perform miracles in the last days (Jes 61:1; 29:18 f; 35:5 f; 42:18;

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4Q521). Inspired by this expectation, the imprisoned John the Baptist sent messengers to Jesus asking whether they should wait for another one. Jesus did not answer by saying, “Look, I am doing miracles,” but rather he said: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” He states, with many allusions to old eschatological expectations, that miracles are occurring but does not attribute them to himself (Mt 11:2–6). He regarded God as the actual author of these miracles, which are performed either through him or through his disciples or even through other miracle workers. Indeed eschatological expectations may have produced some miracle stories as signs and symbols of an eschatological fulfillment.

1.2 The Miracle Pattern Thesis (of the So-Called Formgeschichte or “Form History”) The second argument of historical skepticism is based on the fact that the miracle stories in the Gospels contain many recurrent motifs of miracle stories in antiquity. This argument refers not to specific Jewish expectations but to a general ancient belief in miracles among both Jews and Gentiles. Some typical motifs include the approaching of the sick person, his or her difficulties getting in contact with the miracle worker, specific healing manipulations, and the amazement of the crowd. The stories are told according to traditional patterns. Therefore, they probably reflect the competence of storytellers more than they do real history. Nevertheless, this form-historical skepticism is less convincing if we really take into regard all forms of the miracle tradition; miracles are described in three forms: in words, stories, and summaries. In the word tradition, we encounter the typical features of Jesus’ message. He speaks of repentance which may be expected from those who experienced miracles (Lk 10:13–15), he states that the kingdom of God is realized by his exorcisms (Lk 11:20), and he underlines the power of faith to move trees (Lk 17:5 f). In the narrative tradition, miracle stories lack most of these motifs. Jesus never addresses God as father, he never calls others to follow him or to repent, and he never speaks of the kingdom of God. The eschatological framework of his message is nearly totally absent (except in Mt 8:29). There is only one common denominator: the motif of faith is present in both traditions. Therefore, it deserves special attention, as we will see. The third form of miracle stories,, the summaries,, speak of healings and exorcisms without mentioning other kinds of miracles such as walking on water or multiplying bread. One summary of Jesus’ life is even a non-Christian document, the testimonium Flavianum of Josephus. It says that Jesus was a “performer of miraculous deeds” (Jos. ant

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18:63 f ). We may infer from this that in the first century the rumor of Jesus’ miracles reached people who, like Josephus, were not his adherents. In my view, this is the key to understanding the difference between word and miracle tradition. The “word tradition” indicates the tradition of Jesus’ disciples, who agreed with his message. In contrast, the miracle tradition lacks individual features of Jesus’ message because they were spread throughout the people in Palestine and its neighborhood. Here Jesus was experienced and shaped according to the general patterns of miracle workers in antiquity. He was enhanced and idealized, and fantastic stories were told of him that could never have happened. But in spite of this popular “shift” from history to story, there is a historical core behind these stories. Why do I say this? Even in their popular present shape we find individual features. Jesus does not heal broken legs or wounds or the bite of a snake. Traditional societies often have specialists for such “violations” by external factors (Bichmann 1995, p. 61), and Jesus was not such a specialist. In the Jesus tradition we exclusively hear about two forms of healings: “therapies” for sickness from internal causes, and exorcisms of possession by external spiritual beings: the two overlap. There are sicknesses caused by demons, but they can be distinguished from possessions, the substitution of a human ego by a demon. Therapies often presuppose a magic “healing power” that fills the sick person through contact with the healer, whereas exorcisms presuppose a struggle between the healer and the demons. Therapies fill the sick person with power, exorcisms empty the possessed of the demon. Therapies use contagious magic, exorcism antagonistic magic. There is an opposite dynamic at work in the two forms. Moreover, in both kinds of healing, Jesus does not use all the means that we find among his contemporaries. He never prays in order to heal a person (as Chanina ben Dosa did, cp. bBer 34b), and he never uses material substances in order to drive out a demon (as the Jewish exorcist Eleazar did, cp. Jos. Ant 8:46–48). We may conclude that, since not all kinds of healings and not all motifs of typical miracle stories are found in the Jesus tradition, the accounts are probably based on actual activities of the historical Jesus. Instead of being assimilated into general patterns, his figure has an individual profile within the miracle tradition.

1.3 The Thesis of a Late Origin of the Healing Stories A third argument of historical skepticism, developed by W. Schmithals, claims that since the miracles of Jesus are absent in the letters of Paul, the earliest writings of Early Christianity, and also missing in the Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel that some consider as being independent of the canonical Gospels,

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therefore the first writer of the oldest Gospel may have invented these miracle stories. But the reconstruction of an early stage without miracles is not possible. Paul says that he himself has effected the “signs” of an apostle, that is, that he worked those miracles that are expected of a true apostle (2 Cor 12:12), but he does not report any miracles performed by Jesus. In fact, Early Christian letters do not mention any miracles of Jesus at all, in spite of the fact that they knew some of them. The second letter of Peter shows acquaintance with at least one synoptic Gospel, the first letter of John knows the Gospel of John, and the letters of Ignatius know the Gospel of Matthew (cp. also Barn; 2 Clem). None of these letters says anything about miracles, but they are familiar with the miracle tradition of the Gospels. And the Gospel of Thomas is a composition of sayings that includes no stories at all. But even this Gospel refers to healings of the disciples (ThomEv 14). The silence of Paul and the Gospel of Thomas are no arguments for a late origin of the miracle tradition. Positively, we may say that the historicity of Jesus’ miracles is based on their multiple attestations in independent traditions: in the Logia source and in the Gospel of Mark, in the special tradition of Matthew and of Luke, and also in the Gospel of John as far as it is an independent witness. If, according to form history, all small miracle stories are basically independent traditions shaped according to standard narrative patterns, we have many more such sources. As a whole, they are no invention. Besides, we encounter some features that could not have been invented. The exorcisms provoke the question whether Jesus is acting on behalf of Satan (Mk 3:21 ff). This charge against Jesus must be authentic. Mark states that Jesus was unable to perform healings in his hometown because of the lack of belief in Jesus there (Mk 6:1 ff). To summarize my considerations concerning the historicity of the miracles: the miracle tradition is no late invention produced by Jewish messianic expectations and a general ancient belief in miracles. But there is a “popular shift” that transformed the historical memory of Jesus as a healer and exorcist according to general patterns of ancient beliefs in miracles and according to specific Jewish messianic expectations. However, the tradition undoubtedly has a historical core. Jesus was a healer and an exorcist.

2 The Problem of Classifying Jesus’ Healing Activities Our next question is, “May we compare Jesus with other healers and exorcists?” Is his healing activity “charismatic and symbolic healing” or “ritual and social healing”? The four labels “charismatic,” “symbolic,” “ritual,” and “social” refer to different aspects of traditional healings, to psycho- and

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sociotherapeutic effects (Bichmann 1995, p. 46). I think it is appropriate to apply all of them to Jesus. The term “charismatic healing” refers to the personal relationship between a charismatic healer and his adherents. Charisma is an interaction between a charismatic person and his adherents characterized by confidence and faith. This is expressed by the formula, “Your faith has saved you.” This faith or confidence is created by the rumor of Jesus’ miraculous deeds. Healing stories are therefore not merely secondary with regard to their underlying healings. On the contrary, they often play a constitutive role in healings from the outset. They trigger expectations among the people. We sometimes read in the Gospels that the rumor of Jesus’ healings is spreading (Mk 1:28.45; 5:14.20; 7:37) or that people come to Jesus after having heard this rumor (Mk 7:24 f.). This rumor is the origin of the miracle stories in Jesus’ lifetime. They functioned as faith-generating stories. The second term, “symbolic healing,” refers to the cognitive imaginations working in the healer and his clients. We encounter two symbolic concepts in therapies and exorcisms: the imagination of a magic power filling the client, and the imagination of an antagonistic struggle freeing the possessed from the demon. Neither the healing energy nor the demons are physical realities; instead, they are powerful symbols working within the brains of the sick person and the healer. Other powerful imaginations are less frequent: forgiving sins (Mk 2:1–12) and a declaration that a leper is ritually clean (Mk 1:40–45). Furthermore, we find the conviction that the transformation of a sick person is part of an eschatological transformation of the whole world—a conviction that is above all active in the miracle workers; we find this symbolic conviction only in the “word tradition,” which probably was transmitted by itinerant followers of Jesus who performed miracles (Mt 10:7–8), whereas this eschatological expectation is absent in the narrative tradition which probably was transmitted also among the people of Palestine who were not itinerant followers of Jesus. Both charisma and symbols constitute the psychosomatic or psychosymbolic dimension of healings and exorcisms. But they also have an external aspect supporting and reinforcing these internal psychic processes. The third term, “ritual healing,” refers to this external aspect, namely the visible performance of healing manipulations according to traditional patterns, which can be repeated again and again: the laying on of hands or the use of saliva (Mk 7:33; 8:23; Joh 9:6). These ritual devices triggered a tradition of healing in Early Christianity, which is somewhat different from the one associated with Jesus. According to the letter of James 5:13–16 the elders shall come together if a member of the congregation is sick. Then they are to pray for him (though prayer was no part of Jesus’ healings), anoint him with oil (though oil was never

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used in the healings of Jesus), and heal in his name (though Jesus never used his or God’s name in his healings). The prayer probably substitutes the elders for Jesus, the oil for his saliva, and his “name” for his personal presence. The fourth term, “social healing,” refers to the community in which the ritual acts are performed. Jesus’ healing activates social support in favor of the sick and thereby reintegrates them into their community. At the end of each miracle story the healed people are sent back to their houses and families. Some symbols refer directly to social peace: the forgiveness of sins may reconcile a group. The declaration of cleanliness returns the leper to social life, because being regarded as unclean had caused his isolation. But there is a problem: the healings of Jesus provoke conflicts as well. Forgiving sins and declaring a leper clean were the privileges of priests, and Jesus acts in their place. This process provokes protest and stress. The theory of social healing as reducing social stress must therefore be modified if it is to be applied to Jesus’ healings. In conclusion, we can say that it is justified to categorize Jesus’ healing activity as charismatic, symbolic, ritual, and social. Charismatic and symbolic healing both refer to its psychosomatic dimension, ritual and social healing to its sociosomatic dimension. Healing acts are facilitated by personal charisma and mediated by internal symbols; they are ritually embodied and socially embedded.

3 The Efficacy of the Healings of Jesus and of the First Christians If Jesus’ healing acts can be categorized as symbolic and social healing, their efficacy is above all due to faith. Faith is based on a charismatic relationship between the sick person and the healer. In the stories of Jesus’ healing, faith includes also the faith of those who support the sick. The efficacy of faith is our first point. But a problem remains: the healings of Jesus not only create social harmony but also provoke conflicts. The significance of social conflicts is our second point. Our last point is the significance of the ritual aspects of Jesus’ healings. “Faith” in our miracle stories is sometimes visible. When the supporters in Mk 2:1 ff remove the roof of a house and let down the mat on which a paralytic lies in order to bring the sick person to Jesus, the story says, “When Jesus saw their faith” (Mk 2:5). What the supporters do does not seem to be a repetitive act, although sometimes it is construed as such: an apotropaic rite to avoid the threshold of the house in order to increase therapeutic efficacy. In folk belief, the threshold is sometimes believed to be the place of demons who prevent people or supernatural powers from entering the house. The supporters

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of the paralytic avoid the threshold and thereby outsmart the demons. But this idea is disputed. With ritual elements of healings we understand all visible and repetitive acts with a symbolic meaning, whose performance is believed to have a physical impact on human beings. Also in this regard we come across a special problem: along with an increase in social conflicts, we also find a reduction of ritual elements. Our third point is therefore the efficacy of ritual elements in the healings of Jesus.

3.1 The Efficacy of Faith: Jesus as Charismatic and Symbolic Healer Concerning the efficacy of faith, the same can be said of all symbolic and social healers (but also of a good modern biomedical physician). What is striking with Jesus is that he consciously reflects this efficacy through faith: He has discovered the power of faith and coined the formula: “Your faith has saved you!” As it stands, this formula is unique in antiquity but not without analogies. In Epidauros in Greece, for example, in the healing cult of the god Asclepius, visitors were confronted with inscriptions reporting many healings and with votive tablets of those who had been cured by the god. These inscriptions had the same function as the rumor of the miracles of Jesus in Palestine; they instilled confidence. One of the first inscriptions reflects the “faith” implicit in these inscriptions, but does so in a different way than in the Jesus tradition: A man who could move only one finger of his hand came to the god as a supplicant, and when he saw the votive tablets in the sanctuary he did not believe in the cures and made fun of the inscriptions. In his sleep (in the sanctuary) he had a vision. It seemed to him that as he was playing dice in the room under the temple and was about to throw, the god appeared, jumped on his hand, and stretched out his [the man’s] fingers. When he [the god] stepped off [the man’s hand], he saw himself bend his hand and stretch out each finger on its own; when he had stretched them all out straight, the god asked him whether he still did not believe the votive tablets. And he said no. “Because before you had no faith in them, though they were worthy of belief, your name in future shall be Apistos,” said the god, and when the night ended he emerged from the sanctuary cured (Epidauros Nr. 3). This miracle story is a metastory referring to other miracle stories in the temple of Asclepius. Faith in Epidauros means belief in the miracle stories. This faith does not produce miracles but reacts to them. In the Jesus tradition, faith is more than such a receptive faith, it is an active faith producing miracles. Jesus says that faith is able to move mountains (Mk 11:22 ff ). This active faith is attributed to three human roles in the miracle stories and we may derive three theses from these texts.

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1. First of all it is the faith of those who are healed. It is the faith of the woman with the issue of blood who approached Jesus from behind in the crowd, hoping “If I touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Jesus said to her after she told her story, “Daughter, your faith has saved you, go in peace, and be healed of your disease” (Mk 5:34). It is the faith of the blind Bartimaeus and the two blind men (Mk 10:52; Mt 9:29). It is the faith of the Samaritan who returned to Jesus in order to thank him (Lk 17:19). His faith saved him. This motif corresponds with the word on faith: “If you had faith of the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (Lk 17:6). This motif is probably an authentic trace of the historical Jesus—preserved on the one hand in the word tradition of the Logia source (Lk 17:6) and Mark (Mk 11:22 f ), and on the other hand in many narrative stories. The motif surpasses ancient analogies and can scarcely be a later Christian retrojection, since “faith” in Christian tradition is primarily faith in Christ, his death, and resurrection. The faith of the miracle stories is much more general. How are we supposed to evaluate this faith motif ? Its point is the causal attribution of effective healing to the faith of the healed persons. This causal attribution is not at all a matter of course. We must remember that the sick people come to Jesus expecting help. They attribute the healing power to him. But the healer reattributes this power to their own faith—contrary to their expectations. In premodern times we encounter a remarkable consciousness of the power of confidence and faith. Today we know quite well—by experience and experiments and explanations through theoretical models—that faith and confidence can support healing processes on the side of both the patient and the physician. But it seems that Jesus has already discovered the healing effect of faith intuitively. His “discovery” is basically in harmony with modern research on the so-called placebo effect (Brody, chapter 8 of this volume). It is true that Jesus worked without medication, except saliva as a kind of folk medicine. But we may apply a theoretical model that explains the efficacy of placebos to his healings; that is the expectancy model. A deep-rooted expectation that a therapeutic practice will be effective (even if it is an inert medicine) enhances its efficacy, especially if this expectation is shared by patient and physician (Brody, chapter 8, this volume). This expectation activates the body’s own physical and chemical substances. In addition the meaning of the illness experience is changed for the patient. He feels the care and compassion of the healer and experiences mastery over his illness. Thus we have in our brains a wonderful drugstore that offers no manufactured medicine; rather, symbols and other cognitive convictions activate the body’s healing potential and in this way support the healing process. Healers work with this “symbolic medicine” by faith and expectation. It is true that these therapeutic means often do not

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directly cure disease, but they improve the general conditions of health and thereby make it easier to live with an illness. Also most biomedical treatment in our days does not cure illness but rather helps us to live better and longer with our diseases or handicaps. Premodern healers did the same—and in light of the short life expectancy in premodern societies, they were sometimes as successful as modern physicians. 2. In a second group of evidence, faith is the faith of those who support the sick person—a kind of vicarious faith. It is the faith of those who carried the paralyzed man to Jesus and approached him through the roof of the house. This story states that Jesus saw their faith. He saw their confidence in his healing power (Mk 2:5). It is the faith of the father Jaïrus, who asked Jesus for help and was told, “Do not fear, only believe” (Mk 5:36). It is the faith of the Syrophoenician woman, who asked for help for her demonized daughter (Mt 15:28). It is the faith of the father of the epileptic boy, who brought his son to Jesus. Jesus said to him, “All things can be done for the one who believes.” The father answered, “I believe, help my unbelief ” (Mk 9:23 f ). It is also the faith of the centurion of Capernaum, who asked Jesus to heal his servant, to which Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you in no one in Israel have I found such faith” (Mt 8:10). The faith of the supporters has been an argument against the psychosomatic explanation of the healings. At first glance, it seems improbable that the supporters’ faith could help the sick person; it is easier to imagine that the sick person’s faith helps him. In two cases the sick persons were not even present and Jesus performed a healing from a distance. In both cases non-Jewish, Gentile people were healed. This is often explained as a symbol for the “miracle” that the Christian message spread to non-Jews. The miracle is said to be a symbol of overcoming the distance between Jews and Gentiles. But this vicarious faith—and even the faith working from a distance—may be effective. Are faith and confidence effective only in the faithful persons themselves? Here, we may apply the theory of social healing. The sick persons are embedded in their social group. The healer is activating social support for them. Therefore, the faith of the supporters is important for the efficacy of healing. The shared faith may have positive effects, reducing social stress and conflicts. But what about healing from a distance? I think this can also be explained by faith.2 In the 1950s a physician in Hamburg cooperated with a healer in Munich, who was a lawyer by profession (Rehder 1995). The healer was convinced that he was able to cure persons from a distance by sending them messages at certain times. The physician asked him to treat three patients who were seriously ill, but he did not inform the patients of this treatment. He and his patients did not notice any relief after the hours when the spiritual

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healer sent his message to Hamburg. After this failure the physician informed his patients of the healer in Munich and of his extraordinary power to heal from a distance. He gave them writings of the healer and announced a spiritual treatment at a particular time. The healer himself was not informed, and he certainly did not send any healing messages in this particular moment. He did not know anything of this “experiment.” All three patients noticed a remarkable relief after the fictive time and hour. Their health was significantly improved, at least for a while. Therefore, in order to explain the distant healings of Jesus we must presuppose only that the Syrophoenician woman told her little daughter that she was looking for help from a famous Galilean healer, and the servant of the centurion of Capernaum had knowledge of his master’s attempt to meet this healer in order to ask him for help. This may explain why the daughter and the servant felt better. We need not claim that these concrete miracle stories really happened. It is enough to assume that such distant healings occurred and that the miracle stories were shaped according to such real experiences. This second aspect of faith-cures in the New Testament is also in harmony with modern research: the theory of social healing (cp. Sax 2007 and Sax, chapter 1, this volume) says that premodern healers activate social help for the patients and dissolve social conflicts. The reduction of stress by the overcoming of deep-rooted conflicts in families, tribes, or a village facilitates the healing processes. 3. In two texts the lack of faith explains the failure of healings. When the inhabitants of Jesus’ hometown heard of his miracles, they were astounded and said, “What deeds of power are being done by his hands!” (Mk 6:2). But Jesus realized that he was without honor in his hometown and therefore the story notes: “And he could do no deed of power there. Except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief ” (Mk 6:5 f ). When the disciples failed to heal the epileptic boy, Jesus complained, “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you?” (Mk 9:19). Jesus then healed the boy, but instructed his disciples: “This kind (of demon) can come out only through prayer” (Mk 9:29). Moreover, a unit in the word tradition also deals with the failure of exorcisms—without explaining it by a lack of faith. The logion of the returning spirit says, “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but it finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it comes it finds it empty and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So will it be also with this evil generation” (Mt 12:43–45).

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All three texts explain the failure of healings and exorcisms. There is no doubt that Jesus and the early Christians had to cope with failure. One explanation was a lack of faith—not only in the sick person but also in his social environment. Healing charisma is the product of a healer and of expectations in a group. If Jesus’ hometown has no confidence in the healing power of Jesus, he cannot perform deeds there. Psychosomatic and sociosomatic healing is nearly impossible under these circumstances. The logion about the return of the demon corresponds to experience. After a relief through symbolic healing, the relapse is all the more disastrous. If even the great healer fails, psychic depression must be even worse. If we make a distinction between illness and disease (Kleinman 1980; Pilch 2000) or in the German tradition of psychosomatic medicine a similar (though not identical) one between “Kranksein” and “Krankheit,”3 we may say that the symbolic healing of Jesus and his followers treat illness, they transform the social role, the self-estimation, and the confidence of the sick persons, independent of the organic disease. On the one hand, there is bottom-up causality from organic disease to the illness of the whole person. But on the other hand, there is also top-down causality from the improvement of the psychic and social situation of an ill person to organic disease.

3.2 Healing and Social Conflict: Healing Efficacy in Spite of Increasing Conflicts So far, Jesus’ healing activity fits into the general pattern of symbolic and social healing. But there is an unresolved problem concerning its sociosomatic dimension. The healing efficacy of Jesus (and his followers) is certainly due to in part to the reduction of social stress, but no doubt this healing activity also increased social stress: some healings provoked conflicts. Jesus and his message as well as the first Christians were disputed. Therefore, we cannot say that Jesus’ activity generally reduced social conflicts and stress. On the contrary, Jesus says to his followers, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided. Three against two and two against three, they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Lk 12:51–53). Social healing means that the healer reconciles conflicts in the family and the village, and this may contribute to an improvement of health. But Jesus also created conflict and stress. Must we therefore work without the theory of social healing if we try

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to explain the healing activity of Jesus and the first Christians? Or must we enlarge and modify the theory? Let me try to give two answers. The first answer is that the words concerning a conflict in the families concern those who follow Jesus on his wanderings. Jesus is addressing them when he says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). These followers provoked conflicts at home. But in the miracle stories nobody—with the exception of the beggar Bartimaeus—is allowed to follow Jesus. The healed are sent home. The antifamily ethos of the “word tradition” is absent. Therefore, we should distinguish two social relations during Jesus’ lifetime: on the one hand, discipleship, which increased conflicts with home and family; and on the other hand, healed persons, whose life in home and family was restored (Onuki 2004). The words of Jesus are often addressed to his disciples, who have experienced a break with home and family. The healing activity is above all addressed to people in the villages who come to Jesus as a famous healer. But this answer does not explain everything. There are conflicts visible not only within the “word tradition” but also within the “narrative tradition” of healing immediately connected with the healing process. Jesus’ healing activity sometimes violates norms. The second answer is therefore that the violation of rules does increase the value of the healing—the value of both the healer and the healed person. First of all, violating norms increases the authority of the charismatic healer. This effect can be observed in the texts. Jesus says to the paralytic: “Son, your sins are forgiven”(Mk 2:5). The scribes protest: “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mk 2:7). To declare forgiveness is the privilege of God and his priests. Jesus’ authority is divine authority. The same is true for the violation of the Sabbath. In John 5 Jesus legitimizes his healing on the Sabbath with the argument: “My Father is still working and I also am working” (Joh 5:17). Presupposed is the conviction that God continues to work on the Sabbath in order to preserve the creation. His adversaries object that he is “making himself equal to God.” A third example is the healing of the leper. Jesus says to him, “Be made clean!”(Mk 1:41). He declares him clean and sends him to the priest for an official declaration. But Jesus has already given this declaration. Therefore the healed leper does not visit the priest. The implicit logic in these examples is that the person who is justified in violating rules must have the same authority as the source of those rules, that is, God. This enhancement of the authority of a charismatic healer supports confidence and faith in him, and if his enemies refuse him, his adherents will experience this increase in value and authority all the more.

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The same is true for the healed person. If the charismatic healer risks a conflict in order to help a person, his doing so sends a strong message, which is that helping and healing are so important that even the violation of norms is justified. Therefore the increase of value also concerns the healed person. When Jesus breaks the Sabbath norms in order to heal or because his disciples are hungry, he is demonstrating that the interests of human beings are more important than the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27). The positive significance of violating norms may be even stronger if the respective norms are causing stress. Intolerant norms increase psychic anxiety, normative intolerance provokes social conflict. Hence breaking norms may sometimes be liberating and reconciling. So we may say that social healing does not always reduce conflicts and stress. Reducing conflicts and stress in a certain social reference group may coincide with an increase of conflict and stress in a different social reference group. We must take into account that Early Christianity as a whole not only reduced social conflicts but also increased them for its members. They enjoyed some healing charisma within their small congregations, but they had to tolerate discrimination within the society as a whole.

3.3 Healing and Ritual Elements: Healing Efficacy in Spite of a Reduction of Ritual Elements Social healing occurs by perceptible signs, by words, gestures, and material means. All these signs may be understood as ritual elements. Jesus himself used such ritual gestures, but he reduced them in comparison with contemporary healers. Josephus writes on the exorcism of Eleazar, another first -century CE Jewish exorcist: I have seen a certain Eleazar, a countryman of mine, in the presence of Vespasian, his sons, tribunes and a number of other soldiers, free men possessed by demons, and this was the manner of the cure: he put to the nose of the possessed man a ring which had under its seal one of the roots prescribed by Solomon, and then, as the man smelled it, drew out the demon though the nostrils, and, when the man at once fell down, adjured the demon never to come back into him, speaking Solomon’s name and reciting the incantations which he had composed. Then, wishing to convince the bystanders and prove to them that he had this power, Eleazar placed a cup or footbasin full of water a little way off and commanded the demon, as it went out of the man, to overturn it and make known to the

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The means of healing are ring and roots, in addition to some magic formulas and the name of the mighty king Solomon. In the stories of the Jesus tradition such ritual elements are absent, but others are present. Sometimes the public is excluded, as if Jesus tried to hide some magic practices (Mk 5:40; 7:33; 8:23; cp. Acts 9:40). Many healings occur by his touching the sick, as if a mysterious power were transmitted (Mk 5:30). The most important means of healing is the miraculous word. Sometimes it is said in Aramaic (as so-called rhe-sis barbarike-) and transmitted like a charm (Mk 5:41; 7:34). We encounter also saliva or a paste made of saliva and earth (Mk 7:33; 8:23; Joh 9:6 f). The apotropaic significance of spitting is not totally absent: When a “chain of his tongue” is salved with saliva (in the healing of the deaf man in Mk 7:35), it must be that the demons have caused a “chained tongue.” But no name of a great master is conjured, no prayer is said, no magic formula is cited from an old powerful book. We encounter in the Jesus tradition only a minimum of ritual gestures and elements, and these are surrounded by a magic aura. But are such gestures rituals (see Dinzelbacher, chapter 4 of this volume)? To be sure, they are not elaborated rituals, but rituals in statu nascendi. Nevertheless we may speak of rituals, because they are visible and repetitive acts with a symbolic meaning, whose performance is believed to have a physical impact on human beings. We must also take into account that the few ritual elements in the healings of Jesus are only a selection out of a much larger repertoire of ritual elements in the Jewish culture of those days. And they differ also from the elaborated rituals of the old church as the early Christian Eucharist differs from the Catholic mass. They are only rituals under development. This selection of ritual elements is important. It conveys a message. In the healings of Jesus, those ritual elements that underline the personal relationship between the healer and the sick person prevail. Taking the sick person aside focuses the healing on personal contact. Healing words are at the center. The contact by words is enhanced through contacts by touching. By the laying on of hands, a person is given a special status as successor or the gesture conveys blessings (Lang 1995, pp. 27 f ). The most intensive contact occurs by means of saliva. In antiquity, saliva is a drug against diseases of the eyes (Epidauros W 4; 9; Tac. hist. 4:81). Therefore it is unique that Jesus cures by saliva not only blind people but also a deaf man with an impediment in his speech in Mk 7:33 f: “He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up

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to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ ” Does the story say that Jesus put his fingers into the ears but then took them out of the ears and brought the saliva with his fingers to the tongue? The grammar does not exclude such an interpretation. But it is much more probable that Jesus grasped the head of the deaf man with his hands, put his fingers into his ears and at the same time touched the deaf man’s tongue with his own. This was a ritual gesture similar to a kiss—a symbol of care and love! Recall that Early Christianity knew the ritual gesture of the “holy kiss” (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26; 1 Petr 5:14). Nevertheless we must acknowledge a poverty of ritual gestures in the Jesus tradition. This “poverty” is symbolically very significant, because the few ritual gestures, which are all selected from a larger repertoire of ritual elements, signify an increasing proximity to the sick person—by words, touching, and finally a “kiss.” Such ritual acts correspond to the character of Jesus’ healings as cures by faith, if we understand by faith the personal confidence of the sick person in the healer. But this reduction of ritual elements and the concentration on some symbolic acts does not at all mean that the magic aura disappears in favor of a personal relationship. Both aspects of the ritual elements are crucial for the healing process and its efficacy. The healing efficacy of both aspects, the magical and the personal, can be explained by the two main psychological hypotheses proposed to explain the placebo effect, namely, conditioning and expectancy (Brody, chapter 8 of this volume). Jesus approaches sick persons by means of communicative interactions, which all people are familiar with, because they recur in many everyday situations. We all know by “conditioned learning” that words can give comfort, that contact with hands and mouth express love and care. Such elements trigger a feeling of security and acceptance. The efficacy of the personal aspects of the ritual elements is partly based on such conditioning by very frequent acts. The efficacy of the magic aura, on the other hand, is based on the expectancy that is aroused by very rare phenomena. Such an aura raises cognitive expectations that a powerful healer is at work. Therefore Jesus arranges mysterious acts: taking the sick person aside, speaking mysterious words, and using saliva. The magic surplus that transcends everyday communication supports the healing effects in the following way: If people perceive the healer as a professional and powerful healer in an adequate setting—this is in antiquity a magic aura—they have more confidence in him. Therefore neither the magical nor the personal aspect of these ritual elements should be neglected. The efficacy of ritual acts with such a double internal and external aspect may be explained by the Zielbezogenheits Hypothese of I. Rösing. This theory comprises three hypotheses concerning (1) the

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correspondence between healer and the sick person, (2) the correspondence between internal and external processes, and (3) the correspondence between different spheres of cognitive knowledge (Rösing 1990, pp. 714–727). 1. The correspondence between healer and the sick person requires a consensus between them on the target of their acts, so that both can activate those aspects of their symbolic worlds that can be referred to the target. In this regard, there is a correspondence between Jesus and the sick persons. Jesus has an understanding of himself as a powerful healer, and the people attribute to him such healing power. 2. According to Rösing’s Konvergenz Hypothese, the correspondence between internal and external processes supports the efficacy of internal cognitive symbols. Symbolic healing is more effective if internal processes are accompanied by external acts. We have seen that all external ritual elements underline an internal personal relationship: all other relationships disappear. Jesus does not pray to God, traditional knowledge of healing does not legitimize his healings, he does not use a powerful name like “Solomon.” 3. According to Rösing’s Wissens-Kreis Hypothese, the correspondence between knowledge of our own life, of the community, and of the cosmos further supports the efficacy of healing. For Jesus and the first Christians, their healing activities were embedded in the transformation of the whole world. The transformation of human beings was only a part of a much greater transformation of the world. But we find this view only in the tradition of Jesus’ words. In the tradition of the miracle stories, the view prevails that Jesus is the crucial figure in the history between God and human beings. He is the Son of God. The development from Jesus to early Christianity changed the practice of healing and its understanding: The healing rite in James 5:13–16 does not happen apart from the public, but occurs in the assembly of the elders at the bed of the sick person. The healing rite activates not only the confidence between the elders and the sick patient, but also confidence in third figures: in God through prayer, in Jesus by calling his name. Saliva is substituted for oil. The charisma of Jesus is reified; it becomes independent of the personal quality of the participants. The collective act of forgiving of sins demonstrates in a ritual way the basic condition of all symbolic healing: the restitution of social harmony within the community.

Summary My first aim in this chapter was to apply established theories on symbolic and ritual healing to the healing activity of Jesus and his followers. Using such

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theories in historical studies often means modifying them to make them fit the evidence. Therefore I underline some new elements in the theories on symbolic and ritual healing that I want to suggest. First, Jesus and the first Christians performed symbolic healings and are in this regard comparable to other healers in the world who activate faith and confidence even if they do not know they are doing it. But Jesus (and the first Christians) consciously discovered the healing power of faith, an understanding that partly accounts for the efficacy of all symbolic healing. Faith according to them was the crucial factor for the efficacy of symbolic healing. This point is less trivial than it may seem. As a rule, the efficacy of faith works unconsciously. People believe that magic, drugs, or rituals help them, and they are not aware of the power of their own confidence. Placebos no longer function if everyone knows that they are placebos. But in the Jesus tradition it is said: Your faith has saved you. It is not the (etic) statement of a neutral observer, but the (emic) statement of the healer. A second element is that the symbolic healing of Jesus and the first Christians was social healing, but the support they activated and the reduction of stress they achieved was limited to their adherents and congregations, who at the same time had to tolerate increased social stress and tension in their broader social environment. Social tension around healing activities may sometimes increase the value of healings, of the healer, and of the healed person, and it may thereby contribute to the efficacy of healing. Therefore we suggest adding to the theory of social healing the fact that the efficacy of healing is due to the reduction of conflicts,, and we stress a new element. There is also the possibility that an increase of conflict and stress may in some cases enhance the efficacy of healing. There is a common denominator for both possibilities: the intensity of care and help is increased in both cases. Basically the theory of social healing is substantiated. Third, Jesus and the first Christians performed acts of ritual healing. Jesus gives traditional ritual elements and gestures a special accent. He underlines the immediate personal contact between healer and the sick one. The relationship to all other figures diminishes but is reactivated in Early Christianity, through performing rituals by prayers to God and healing in the name of Jesus. At all events Jesus supports internal confidence by external ritual acts in his healings. He supports such a confidence even by reducing external ritual elements, because their reduction underlines immediate personal contact by laying on of hands and by gestures comparable to a kiss. This element fits into the theory that all therapies—in both premodern and modern times, in psychotherapies based on different theoretical foundations—have “common features” that explain their efficacy: personal

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contact, care and attention, confidence in the competence of the healer and control of anxiety. To sum up: The healing activity of Jesus and his followers can be explained as the activity of a charismatic healer in premodern times. This activity fits the theories that cultural anthropology has developed to explain the efficacy of symbolic and ritual healing. Some special features in the Jesus tradition—the significance of faith, increased conflict, and the reduction of ritual elements— necessitate some minor modifications of the theories of symbolic and ritual healing, but they do not contradict the (etic) theories of modern observers and cultural anthropologist; rather they show that elements of their (etic) theories already have been a part of the (emic) communication of human beings in premodern times.

notes 1. The present state of research is represented by B. Kollmann, 1996, 2002; Theissen 2007. A new approach is offered by P. F. Craffert 2008. I am grateful to P. Craffert for giving me the chapter on “Jesus Shamanic Functions: Healing, Exorcism, and the Control of Spirits” before its publication. 2. The following analogy concerns the possibility of healing from a distance. The cultural framework is in both cases very different. The comparison between Jesus in the first century CE. and a German healer in the twentieth century will demonstrate only one common feature: healing from a distance is no more miraculous than healings with immediate contact, so long as we agree that faith and confidence are the crucial factors. 3. The differentiation between “Krankheit” and “Kranksein” can be derived from a famous dictum of the German physician Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine: “In der Wirklichkeit gibt es gar keine Krankheiten, es gibt nur kranke Menschen.” In Caius (Pseudonym of Georg Groddeck), “Krankheit,” Hygieia 7 (1893–1894), pp. 17–19, reprinted in: Georg Groddeck, “Krankheit als Symbol. Schriften zur Psychosomatik,” ed. Helmut Siefert, Frankfurt a. M. 1984, pp.24–26 (italics in the original text). Cp. Greifeld 1995, pp. 16 f.

references Bichmann, Wolfgang, 19952, “Medizinische System Afrikas,” in B. Pfleiderer, K. Greifeld, and W. Bichmann (eds.), Ritual und Heilung, Eine Einführung in die Ethnomedizin. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, pp. 33–65. Craffert, P. F., 2008, The Life of A Galilean shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in AnthropologicalHistorical Perspective. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books. Greifeld, Katarina, 19952, “Einführung in die Medizinethnologie,” in B. Pfleiderer, K. Greifeld, and W. Bichmann (eds.), Ritual und Heilung, Eine Einführung in die Ethnomedizin. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, pp. 11–31.

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Groddeck, Georg, 1984 [1893/94], “Krankheit,” in Helmut Siefert (ed.), Krankheit als Symbol. Schriften zur Psychosomatik.” Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag 1984, pp. 24–26. Kleinman, Arthur, 1980, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kollmann, Bernd, 2002, Neutestamentliche Wundergeschichten, Biblisch-theologische Zugänge und Impulse für die Praxis, Urban Tb 477. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ——— , 1996, Jesus und die Christen als Wundertäter. Studien zu Magie, Medizin und Schamanismus in Antike und Christentum, FRLANT 170. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lang, Bernhard, 1995, Art, Handauflegung, Neues Bibellexikon 2, pp. 27 f. Onuki, Takashi, 2004, “Urform und Entfaltungen der Heilungswundergeschichten Jesu. Zur formgeschichtlichen Verortung der ‘Semeia-Quelle’ des Johannesevangeliums,” in Heil und Erlösung. Studien zum Neuen Testament und zur Gnosis, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 165. Tübingen: Mohr, pp. 20–59. Pilch, John J., 2000, Healing in the New Testament. Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology. Minneapolis: Augsburg. Rehder, Hans, 1955, “Wunderheilungen, ein Experiment,” Hippokrates 26, pp. 577–580. Rösing, Ina, 1990, 19953, Dreifaltigkeit und Orte der Kraft: die weisse Heilung. Nächtliche Heilungsrituale in den Hochanden Boliviens, Mundo Ankari 2, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins. Sax, William, 2007, “Heilen Rituale?” in Axel Michaels (ed.), Die neue Kraft der Rituale. Heidelberg: Winter, pp. 213–236. Schmithals, Walter, 1997, “Vom Ursprung der synoptischen Tradition,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 94, pp. 288–316. Theißen, Gerd, 1974, 19987, Urchristliche Wundergeschichten. Ein Beitrag zur formgeschichtlichen Erforschung der synoptischen Evangelien, StNT 8. Gütersloh: Mohn = G. Theissen, The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1983. ——— , 2007, “Die Wunder Jesu. Historische, psychologische und theologische Aspekte,” in W. H. Ritter and M. Albrecht (eds.), Zeichen und Wunder. Interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Biblisch-theologische Schwerpunkte 31. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 30–52.

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4 Healing Rituals in the Mediaeval West Peter Dinzelbacher

Dedicated in friendship to Prof. Werner Gerabek

Since the terms “rite” and “ritual” are not used in the same way in every branch of the humanities and by every scholar, it is important here to note how they are to be understood in this chapter. By healing rituals—and these are the sole concern in the present context—I mean repeatable, communicative acts that are generally accompanied by words and are aimed at influencing nonhuman powers or beings, with the actions not being directly aimed at a practical effect. Administering a medicinal plant to a sick person, for instance, is not a rite, even though its medicinal preparation may have been conducted while certain blessings were uttered, or it may have been gathered at a particular time to the accompaniment of certain formulae, certain gestures, the use of certain implements,1 and the like. We are talking of a performative form of expression with a stereotypical structure that permits people to communicate with nonhuman powers. I see no reason to restrict rituals to collective actions (see for instance Hahl and Fricke, 2003); the individual can also act ritually on his or her own, and even when deliberately excluding the public.

Mediaeval Theories of Illness The “master narrative” of that epoch of a thousand years that we imprudently like to refer to with the periodizing concept “Middle Ages” was, beyond doubt, constituted by the Christian religion in the form expounded by the Catholic

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Church, at that time a most formative force in people’s thoughts and deeds in all areas of life. For this reason the characterization of the Middle Ages as an “age of faith” is fully justified (even when instances existed of disbelief if not atheism) (cf. Dinzelbacher, 1999). This is not to say that other conceptions of the universe did not exist alongside it, such as those in the Early Middle Ages hailing from pagan Antiquity or of Germanic, Celtic, Slavic provenance, or the new deviant developments in the High Middle Ages in response to Oriental religions (Catharism) or philosophies (Averroism). These became intertwined with Christianity in every imaginable way, or entered into direct competition with it. Since the principal holy book, the Bible, repeatedly depicted the founder of the new religion as a healer and combater of illness, despite Christianity’s pronounced orientation to the world beyond and its strong devalorization of everything that had to do with the body, it was quite legitimate for even the faithful to concern themselves with bodily health. This meant that, in principle, a coexistence was possible between medicine based on natural observation and religion based on faith. Turning specifically to its etiology, in retrospect a number of parallel discourses may be distinguished in the Middle Ages, which in practice also manifested in a variety of combinations: 1. The medical discourse in the present-day sense, in which somatic dysfunctions are explained solely in terms of physical, chemical, or biological causes—as prevailed in the medicine of Antiquity and Islam. Part and parcel of this was also the teaching of the four temperaments, which was central for doctors of both Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and which viewed disorders as the outcome of an imbalance (dyscrasy) in the body’s four vital humors (Keil, 2005). 2. The iatromathematical discourse, as applied to astrology in Antiquity and the Orient, which relates physical disorders to the effects of cosmic occurrences, because the human body as microcosm was deemed to be unshakably bound to the macrocosm. This discourse was represented in Western Europe from the tenth century onward and entered university medicine in the fourteenth century. The constellations of the stars (and above all the moon) were regarded as representing the causes of ailments, as well as indicating their prognoses and therapy, particularly since the individual limbs and bodily organs were assigned to the seven planets or twelve signs of the zodiac (Horchler, 2005; Weisser, 2005). 3. The religious discourse, which attributed such disorders to the direct or collateral effect of invisible powers from the religious domain, such as deities, demons, elves, and intermediate beings, or in monotheism to the one god. Its

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pathophoric effect was grasped as punishment for either breaking a taboo or for sinning (as with King Uzziah of Judah in the Old Testament), or as a test for the chosen (as with Job in the same work [2 Chronicles]). There is no end to the available evidence that in the Middle Ages, illnesses, accidents, and death were also frequently regarded as direct punishments by God (see for instance Esser, 1997). Such evidence is, however, rarely from the specialist medical literature, being mainly the preserve of devotional, hagiographical, theological, and poetic texts, as well as healing formulas and visual sources. Since this etiology is particularly characteristic of the Middle Ages, it is worth casting more light on it by means of a few examples. The words of the poet Thomas Hoccleve (1368–1426) may be taken as our motto: All myghty god as lykethe his goodnes, visytethe folks alday as men may se, with lose of good and bodily sikenese, and amonge other he forgat not me. . . . (Complaint 36 ff., cited in Esser, 1997) An example of God as a direct deliverer of illness is to be found, for instance, in the Revelationes of Birgitta of Sweden (†1373): She tells of hearing that a renowned priest refused to believe in her revelations. With that she entered into prayer, during which Jesus appeared to her, compared the arrogance of the man with having “dung in [his] mouth,” and promised He would deliver the man a slap in the face by His hand. . . . Whereupon the priest was humbled by affliction and died of the gout (St. Birgit of Sweden, Revelationes 6 ). The priest’s sickness and death were thus the consequence of the saint’s prayer in response to his negative attitude toward her, effected directly by God in person. As was true of her Lord, it was also possible for His saints not only to heal but also to inflict ailments. “We worship saints for fear . . . Who dare deny St. Anthony a fleece of wool for fear of his terrible fire, or lest he send the pox among our sheep?” (cited in Wilson, 1983). The English reformer William Tyndale (†1536) was only repeating here the popular opinion that saints also inflicted the illnesses that they specialized in relieving, in this case St. Anthony with ergotism, called St. Anthony’s Fire. Paracelsus was critical of this superstition: “St. Vitus’s Dance” (chorea), “St. Quirin’s Penance” (phlebitis), or “St. John’s Revenge” (St. Vitus’s Dance) had, in his view, natural and not supranatural causes (Meier, 1993). There was no disputing the notion that demons—those rebellious angels whom Michael had cast along with Lucifer from heaven into hell—could also make people sick, but in practice they were rarely named as the cause of illness, even in the anthologies of miracles (Finucane, 1977). Not even epilepsy

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(Wittmer-Butsch and Rendtel, 2003) or raging epidemics were attributed primarily to diabolic causes. Isolated cases do, however, crop up from time to time, such as the report of a carpenter who had a fall that resulted in such alarming fits of insanity that the only explanation his acquaintances could offer was that a demon had entered him (ibid., 125). Or the miniature, say, of the evil spirits that sowed the plague from the air in the Chronicle of Giovanni Sercambi (c. 1400), or the illumination in the autobiography of the Dominican Friar Heinrich Seuse (†1366), in which an evil spirit belabors him with a drill to give him toothache (Dinzelbacher, 1996). The image we constantly encounter from the Middle Ages is above all of a disease projectile fired by some supernatural or netherworldly being, which might be used to explain lumbago (Hall, 2007) or the plague (Dinzelbacher, 1996). In theological writings the transcendental hierarchy was naturally upheld by the qualification that the action of demons occurred only with God’s sanction. Demons of sickness do appear, but more in the notions of popular belief than in those of the educated, aside from the mentally ill, who were often designated as possessed (demoniaci, demoniati). But this possibility was often not even touched on in medical treatises, although sometimes it was admitted to, so the spectrum of opinions regarding madness, say, ranged from its being outside of a doctor’s jurisdiction to a consideration of the merits of scientific explanations (Beek, 1969). Note that evil spirits play no important role in the miracle collections (Wittmer-Butsch and Rendtel, 2003) (where we would have expected them). Here is an example of one of those intermediary beings that were named particularly often in popular religion as inflicting illness: In Anglo-Saxon and Nordic mythology the elves were ambivalent creatures that could cause great mischief, such as lumbago (English: elfshot). Here they assumed the role of the sickness demons (Dinzelbacher, 1996; Hall, 2007). Since the time of Wolfram von Eschenbach (early 13th cent.) at latest, the Bilwis was often testified to in Germany as being a misanthropic creature that fires arrows of disease (Handwörterbuch d. deutschen Aberglaubens [HDA] 1; Lecouteux, 1988). His name is clearly a euphemism: “the well-wisher”; toward the end of the Middle Ages he was refashioned as an anthropomorphic monster or witch. Apparently it was also said that the souls of unbaptized children would transform into Bilwises and cause illness with their darts (Grimm, 1981; Güting, 1974). A favorite indictment at witch trials in the Later Middle Ages was that the accused had used sorcery in order to cause gout—Luther named “shooting the shanks” as the chief occupation of witches and accused them of imperiling his brother’s life in this manner; Molitor’s Hexenbuch from 1489 contains a

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woodcut with the motif of the “Hexenschuss”—lumbago, but literally “witch’s shot”—showing the act with a clarity that omits nothing. These etiologies corresponded to various therapies, to wit medico-scientific and/or magico-religious. It was also not uncommon to combine these in practice; in Late Mediaeval plague tracts, for instance, religious, astrological, and medical etiologies and therapies are listed one after the other. The common opinion was that it was beyond human ability to know whether in concrete cases the illness had been inflicted from heaven as a punishment for sins, or had its origin in the constellation of the stars or other natural circumstances (Esser, 1997).

Healing Rituals Generally speaking, rituals were probably more a part of everyday life in the Middle Ages than in the epochs before and after. Formalized, that is, traditionally prescribed actions can be found in mediaeval religion, above all in the liturgy and paraliturgy, and otherwise in social communications, especially in the field of law. There is, however, a prevailing tendency in current Mediaeval Studies to interpret even spontaneous behavior—such as rulers and heroes weeping in public—as mere ritual stagings. To my mind this view is not only indemonstrable but contradicts the sources (Dinzelbacher, in press). In the context of illness, rituals seem to have been of importance only when magical healing was attempted. Although they always seemed appropriate in the realm of high religion when people turned to God and His saints, they were scarcely central; as any number of testimonies divulge, a mere prayer or visit to a church brought about supernatural healing without any special ritual actions. If one analyzes, for instance, the weighty miracle book of St. Walburga of Heidenheim from the late ninth century, it is noticeable that prayer and pilgrimage were the order of the day, while rites, such as touching the stretcher in a reliquary shrine or the stave of a saint or a lamp in a church, are named only once each (Bauch, 1979). Much the same can be said of other, similar texts. Expanding the concept of ritual to include the mere act of visiting a living thaumaturge or a saint’s grave seems to me as erroneous as subsuming a visit to the doctor, shopping at a pharmacy, or taking the cure at a spa under the heading of rituals. Basically, pilgrimages are concerned purely and quite practically with visiting the person or places from which one expects help, even if it is transcendental help. That ritual elements also entered the situation, such as the general practice of votive offerings or special ceremonies at specific places,

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alters nothing in the fact that this was not the heart of the issue, not at least according to contemporary reports. But neither should making an offering at the altar, which practically always preceded events, be characterized as a ritual, for in keeping with the Do-ut-des principle of mediaeval Catholicism (Dinzelbacher, 2000), it was simply a payment for the anticipated or received help. A glimpse at Middle High German poetry reinforces this impression: sickness and healing procedures are described soberly according to the scholarly-medicinal tradition, or are connected with astrology, which was regarded then as a true science (Haage, 1992), while not a word is to be found on special rituals. So if the outbreak of epidemics led to veritable floods of penitential rituals—whether unspectacularly in the form of ordering a mass, or sensationally as in the processions and societies of the flagellants (Angel, 1996)—these are not healing rites but rather prophylactic actions aimed at nipping the disease in the bud. One could speak of panic being bridled by the use of auto-aggressive rites. In the simultaneous collective attacks on lepers and Jews (Graus, 1994), aggressions were directed outwardly and the primary aim was to mete out revenge on a scapegoat.

Religious Healing Rites Both the official and parallel belief systems (Parallelglaube is the term used today by German folklorists instead of Aberglaube) offered methods to fight illness by preternatural means. These were often linked with the performance of rituals, but not exclusively so—unless one wishes to extend the concept of ritual to include simply praying for health, or to mere vows. Ecclesiastical rituals refer to behavior that conforms to religion préscrite (regarding the terminology see Dinzelbacher, 2003), in other words, that is customarily recommended, enforced, or tolerated by the hierarchy. In first place— necessarily so in a monotheistic faith—rituals are addressed directly to God. Viewed theologically, every ritual or prayer is actually directed to God, who is to be moved to clemency by the intercession of a saint, while in the imagination of popular religion it was the saint himself or herself who healed—or made one ill. Communication with God is performed chiefly by means of prayer and liturgy. So it goes without saying that those who could afford to do so would have celebrated masses for their health. We have numerous examples from the ranks of the nobility. For example, in 1463, after a sleepless night in pain, the Archduke of Austria, Albrecht VI of Habsburg, summoned not only his doctor

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but also a priest and, surrounded by numerous courtiers, had the mass said while his valet massaged his hands and feet. His dictum, “But, God willing, ‘twill turn out well,” allows the mass to be interpreted as a liturgical plea to God for convalesce, and not as a death ritual (Hayer, 1998). Similarly, people resorted to public prayer and rogations when, for instance, the Emperor Frederic III had a leg amputated after suffering a stroke (Lipburger, 1993). It should be noted at least that apart from bestowing the holy sacrament, the utmost importance was attached to the prophylactic nature of the sacramentals, that is, to the holy water, consecrated salt, palm branches, and other implements. The oil for anointing the sick, for instance, was deemed so powerful that a woman who was restored to health by its use was allowed to wear only black for twelve months after, and she had to abstain from dancing and physical love during that time (Burger, 1990; Klingner, 1912). It is clear that phenomenologically the church sacramentals could not be distinguished from magical actions but were white magic that was elevated only post facto by theological explanations (Dinzelbacher, 2000). One example of direct prayer connected with a healing gesture can be seen once again in the case of Birgitta of Sweden: While she was on a pilgrimage to a shrine on Monte Gargano accompanied by the Bishop of Wexiö, he fell from his horse and broke two ribs. So as not to delay their journey, he asked the saint for a miracle. After uttering a humility formula, she knelt down to pray and touched the bishop’s side with the words: “May the Lord Jesus Christ heal you!” The pain vanished in an instant; the bishop got up and followed the woman throughout her entire journey (St. Birgit of Sweden, Revelationes 3). People also turned collectively to God when sickness loomed: time and again processions were held not as regular features of the church year, but as specific reactions to crisis situations. The flagellants, for instance, in the middle of the fourteenth century inflicted themselves with wounds that were supposed to keep the Black Death at bay, while singing in couples in a procession, as is customary, around the church with banners, candles, and crosses (Limburger Chronik, quoted in Bartels, 1997). There can be no doubt that cures from sickness were the main function expected from the saints or their relics (Kolmer, 1993; Sigal, 1985). Without being able to back this statement statistically, the impression is very strong that petitions were more frequently addressed to the saints in heaven or to their relics than to the Lord Himself. Prominent saintly remains in the keeping of a church could even become the center of a cult comparable only to that of the sanctissimum: the head of John the Baptist, for instance, was liturgically worshipped day and night in twelfth-century Angely by a hundred monks: caput sanctissimum a centeno monachorum choro die noctuque veneratur (Liber iiiius

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S. Iacobi 8, 1978). Conversely it was the custom in the humiliatio to subject the relics—as if they were living persons—to humiliating punishments if they failed to help.2 Of immense importance to pious feelings in this epoch, and also recommended by the established church, was the veneration of holy remains3. Quite simply any substance that had come from the body of the thaumaturge or been in contact with it was regarded as a relic. For instance, the hair of Hildegard of Bingen helped to soothe labor pains and to allay mental illness when applied to the body, and the soil in which the bones of the blessed Gerlac of Valkenberg rested, when dissolved in water and drunk, would make throat ulcers disappear (Vita Hildegardis 3). It was essential that seekers of help visit the shrines in person and, if possible, touch them so that the virtus, the magical power of the dead, was transmitted to them. It is for this reason that many of the reliquaries or shrines in churches were slightly raised, or the graves fitted with openings that enabled a person to crawl inside, that is, that accommodated the desire for the most intense possible physical proximity (a further component of this custom was the notion that illnesses could be “wiped off ” in this manner). The life of the Alsatian saint Morand (†1115) describes how people could stick their head through holes set in his tomb slab in order to be freed of their pains. Yet this activity should still not be characterized as a healing ritual, because the way in which this indirect contact (the holy bones remained untouchable in their casket) was sought with the healing object was no different than when today’s patient goes to be treated with physiotherapy massage apparatus in order to alleviate pain. A contemporary illustration of this type of tomb can be found on an illuminated page from the thirteenth century depicting the shrine of Edward the Confessor (Jordan, 2004), or on the tomb of St. Osmund, which is still preserved in Salisbury, England (Finucane, 1977), or on that of Otto of Bamberg in St. Michael’s Minster in the city of Bamberg (dated about 1430) (Beck, 1962). In the case of smaller relics, the pilgrim would be touched with them by the priest. A handbook for pastors printed in 1506 indicates that while displaying the shrine, one should say: “Come here with piety and let you be touched with the reliquary, so that the dear saint may be your good intercessor and advocate” (cited in Beissel, 1892). Here too—irrespective of the theological “rectification” in the closing words—a simple healing mana is transmitted to the sick person, not unlike modern day radiation therapy. In the case of the incubation (Beek, 1969; Saintyves, 1931), the healing sleep in a temple or church, one might wonder whether or not this was a direct form of therapy or a rite. This practice was well known to Antiquity and

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continued to be observed in christianized form. When, for instance, Gerald of Wales (1147–1223) reports how a raving youth first returned to his senses after being chained in irons to the tomb of Hugo of Lincoln for a week (Groß, 1990), one could draw a parallel to a comparable stay in a hospital. The “hall” crypts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were designed with many aisles for droves of pilgrims; the sick would regularly spend the night there and a possessed person was tied up until a miracle occurred or the patience of his wards ended (Beek, 1969; Finucane, 1977; Saintyves, 1931; Wittmer-Butsch and Rendtel, 2003). Yet there are also numerous instances in which instead of the incubation resulting in healing, the local patron saint merely appeared to the invalid in a dream and told him or her how to achieve some aim. An example can be found in the eleventh-century miracle book of St. Fides of Conques, who is famed to this day for her cult statue: One Gerbert, who had already once been granted a miracle, spent no less than three months supplicating night after night before the martyr’s altar. At last she visited him in a dream and commanded that next day he join the monks’ procession to the shrine of St. Michael; only then would his blindness be cured (Robertini, 1994). The best means of availing oneself of the saint’s power was to ingest their bodies. The central rite of Catholicism was and is theophagy, the physical ingestion of the incarnate god during the solemn rite of communion (Hoffmann, 1891). A more sensual relationship to God is hard to imagine (Bynum, 1987; Walter, 1992),4 however much theologians have constantly attempted to undermine such concreteness through sublime interpretation. Much the same was true of the grave of certain wonder-working saints, where it was not uncustomary to break or rub off pieces of the stone slab; sometimes, as was the case of the stigmatic Elisabeth of Reute (†1420), this act led to the pious destruction of the tomb slab (Schurer, 1962). More harmless was “taking along” the miraculous power by drawing a Paternoster cord across the face of a deceased person of saintly repute, or pouring oil, water, or wine over the bones of a dead saint so as to drink it or use it as a rub. A large number of pilgrimage sites possessed skull relics from particular saints, and the skullcap could be removed and used as a beaker for wine (Legner, 1995). This may be a christianized form of a largely Celtic custom, in which the skull of the vanquished foe was fashioned into a goblet. Here indeed we may speak with confidence of a rite—accepted by the Church—which, in addition to summoning the saint, also transmitted the orenda to the sick person through contact with the sainted relic. The oldest Christian reference is to be found in the Itinerarium de locis terrae sanctae of Pseudo-Antoninus Placentinus (c. 570), who drank from the gold-rimmed skull of St. Theodata.

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But not infrequently neither such a brief physical contact, nor an often lengthy incubation, nor the ingestion of reliquial medicine, but a multipartite sequence of actions was required. And thus a rite was performed. Only some thaumaturges—by no means all—demanded such a rite. Rituals can be seen in the Middle Ages and Early Modern era in the not infrequent offerings in kind made to a saint or church the quantity was determined by weighing the sick person’s body (Franz, 1960). This procedure corresponds to buying off one’s own body, which is actually doomed to death, by an “exactly equal” substitute offering. Analogously, one could also have a candle made to exactly the same length or weight as the patient and donate it to the saint, or a wax figure of the ailing limbs, or similar trading (Bacci, 2000). And naturally the rich could court the saint’s favor by means of votives made of precious metals such as gold and silver. A well-known example that has been preserved is the kneeling wax figure of Margrave Leonhard of Görz (in the same size and of the same weight as the nobleman) dating from the late fifteenth century (Philippovich, 1965; Waldmann, 1990). Admittedly this procedure is dominated somewhat by the aspect of exchange or trade: a healthy body or body part is given in return for the proxy offering: the saint accepts the form cast in gold, wax, iron, or other costly material and repays it with the unscathed member in flesh and blood. This procedure is especially clear when children are desired, such as when in the 1180s Prince Ladislaus of Poland sent a delegation with the golden statue of a child to St. Aegidius (French: Gilles) in Saint-Gilles to receive an heir in exchange. His wish was heard (Girault, 2007). Rites focused on demons are found particularly in the Orthodox-Catholic milieu in connection with possession, a state that nowadays, like its positive counterpart, enthusiasm, is almost always viewed as a schizoid disorder. The familiar rite for this condition is exorcism (Dinzelbacher, 1996; Dinzelbacher, 2000; Scheidegger, 2002)5—the “classic” evocation of Christianity for driving out evil spirits. From the Antique and Mediaeval viewpoint, the evil ghosts could have lodged themselves almost anywhere, in objects, animals, or people. Consequently exorcism was (and is) a central part of every Christian baptism: “Depart unclean spirit and make way for the Holy Ghost!” to quote Luther’s Taufbüchlein or Little Book on Baptism of 1523. For adults exorcism is used mainly in cases of possession, and in practice it consists not merely in holy words and impressive gestures, such as holding up the crucifix, but also can consist of physical injury. The Devil is unable to withstand the rod (Klingner, 1912), and so a good caning was often part of the process. Even placing the stole around the patient’s neck seems to be little less than an act of throttling when one studies Grünewald’s realistic depictions

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on the Heller Altar in the Staedel in Frankfurt. A natural element in exorcism was spraying the person with holy water and less often immersion; in 1402 a patient was drowned in this way by the Egmond monks. The Franciscan monk Thomas Murner (†1537) described the rite in St. Anstett at Wittersdorf as follows: “They are exorcised there, thrashed with scourges and immersed in cold water” (Beek, 1969). In this form, Catholic exorcism may be described as “sacral antidemonic therapy” (Nola, 2004).

Magic Healing Rites Even the magia naturalis, which consisted of arcane knowledge drawn from natural history, was viewed most critically by the Church and obviously was banned when it was employed for black magic. Scholarly ritual magic only became more common, though, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through the Humanists’ keen interest in Neoplatonism, and it too was used for healing purposes. Natural forces and angels were seen as the active powers here, and less so demons. Forbidden on principle was magia supranaturalis, which operated with angelic or more frequently demonic powers. In the Late Middle Age both forms6 came to be associated with the belief in and the persecution of witches (Zambelli, 1991). If one takes not a theological but a phenomenological definition of the concept, one must regard countless paraliturgical and related actions performed by the clergy as magical, including those conducted for healing purposes. When, for instance, a page choked on a chicken bone while eating, Bishop Hartmann of Brixen (†1164) took a slender candle, twisted it around the youth’s neck, and ordered him to attend his Holy Communion the following day, when the candle would be lit. Further augmented by the bishop’s invoking the relevant saint, St, Blaise the martyr, the anticipated effect did not fail to manifest (Sparber, 1957). St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae wrote that it is legitimate to “hang relics for protection around one’s throat or elsewhere.”7 Another learned Dominican priest, Heinrich Seuse, had no scruples about scraping off paint from portraits of saints with his own hands and rubbing them into a patient’s injured eyes in the name “of God’s power and the holiness of these old fathers” in order to effect a healing miracle (Bihlmeyer, 1906). Still preserved in the parish Church of St. Grat in Valhourles is the early mediaeval bell that was placed over the heads of the mentally ill for healing purposes, a rite that was also practiced at St. Fillan’s in Scotland (Beek, 1969). Another healing rite was performed in the Late Middle Ages in the chapel of St. Louis of Toulouse, in Palermo, in which a piece of Cyprus wood was touched

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to the portrait of the saint and dipped in burning oil before being placed on the tongue of the person soliciting help (Goodich, 2004). In the Middle Ages the ailing who wished to know whether they could be cured or were destined to die would go on a pilgrimage to St. Erminold in Prüfening or St. Quirinus in Tegernsee, to St. Leonhard in Inchenhofen or to the Holy Blood in Wilsnack. In all these places of pilgrimage (as well as a number of others) the monks used scales (which one had to mount up to thirty times) the deflection of which was regarded as an oracle for the course of the ailment. One could ask the saint for a cure or a speedy end. The fact that even high ecclesiastical dignitaries submitted to this rite, such as Archbishop Konrad of Mainz in 1200, demonstrates the legitimacy it enjoyed (before later being abolished) (Franz, 1960; Pietsch, 1884). More frequent was the procedure testified to from the Carolingian period, at latest, until modern times, of weighing the miraculously healed person with food or wax (Bauch, 1979). An unusual rite (apart from incubation and swallowing dust from a saint’s grave) also had to be undergone at St. Hubertus’s in the Ardennes: it is known that from the eleventh century onward a sick person would be given a silk stole—the Sainte Étole that had fallen from the heavens—to wear around his or her head, and that a thread from it would be sewn into the person’s forehead after a small incision had been made. This relic remained for nine days in the person’s body, during which time he also had to observe a wealth of other ceremonies and taboos, such as reciting particular prayers a certain number of times, or enduring a proscription against combing himself, and the like. The disease that St. Hubertus specialized in was rabies. It is so dreadful that despite all the Christian prohibitions in the Middle Ages, the sufferer would often be smothered out of compassion. That people persisted for a long time in their belief in the Hubertian rites can be explained by the fact that the disease fails to erupt in roughly a third of all those bitten by rabid animals. This escape from the disease would be regarded as a miracle. And given that God was almighty, all miracles were possible. “Which is why He is called the Almighty, because He can bring about anything!” as we read in the Vita Quarta of St. Patrick (Bieler, 1971). In keeping with this practice, Caesarius of Heisterbach (†1240) admitted quite openly that the Church simply offered the better magic: “Whoever hastens to the Church in sickness not only has health restored to their body but simultaneously the forgiveness of their sins. So if a double gain lies waiting for us in the Church, how can these wretches be so foolish as to look for cures from enchanters, from springs and trees, from amulets, magicians, and augurs. . .” (J.-C. Schmitt, 1993). But the Church did not always help. In such cases, as Michael Scot, a vaunted and notorious scholar from the circle of Kaiser

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Friedrich II of Staufen, recommended, “Where medicine fails, the physician should advise the patient to go to diviners and enchantresses, although this may seem wrong [inhonestum et nephas], or contrary to the Christian Faith—but true nevertheless” (Finucane, 1977). Sometimes there was also the possibility—exclusively for the privileged—of legally obtaining help from a witch. The following case would deserve little credence had it not been reported by the fiercest guardians of the orthodoxy, the Dominican inquisitors who wrote the Hexenhammer (Malleus Maleficarum or literally Hammer of Witches). According to them, Nicholas V. (1447–1455) had permitted a German bishop to charge a witch to cast the same illness on his spell-casting lady love that she was using to torment him. The Prince of the Church was promptly healed, and his mistress struck down. But from the perspective of the phenomenology of religion, as was already remarked, the paraliturgical actions of the priests were often nothing more than magic licensed by the Church. The magic condemned by the Church was as much a part of daily life as the tolerated form, and yet it was viewed as heresy, a break with God and the One True Church, and was consequently hounded. Famous, for instance, is the rite that the Inquisition attempted to wipe out in the middle of the thirteenth century in a grove in the Dombes near Lyon—a ceremony by which the women of the vicinity attempted to give strength and health to weak and sickly children through the aid of St. Guinefort. This saint, however, happened to be a greyhound that had been unjustly killed after defending a child in its crib. The rite was no less bestial than the saint and was conducted by an enchantress together with the baby’s mother (J.-C. Schmitt, 1982): After offering salt and other items and spreading out the afflicted child’s nappy close to Guinefort’s grave, the women tossed the child nine times from one person to the next and beseeched the fauns to exchange it for the healthy child they had allegedly stolen—the notion of the changeling which even a person like Martin Luther firmly believed in (Grisar, 1912; Shahar, 1991). The baby was then left between two lit candles, where it sometimes died of its burns (the purificatory power of fire was also enlisted medicinally when children were drawn to the hearth to fight “consumption” [Schönbach, 1900] ). Sometimes wolves would arrive and rend the child. If it survived, it would be immersed nine times in a nearby river; if it survived this ritual also, it was regarded as the original, healthy child returned. We know of a large number and wide variety of magic rites from the Middle Ages, which either came from local customs or were of scholarly origin; their consummation also depended on certain spells that have been handed down to us in their scores, in both Latin and the vernacular. A group of such incantations was aimed directly at the cause of illness, a creature that evidently

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was only later identified as a demon by the Christian system. Originally an evil hybrid creature must have been pictured raging in the body, often in the form of a worm. In the Old High German Wurmsegen (blessing against worms) it was called nesso and its children nessiklinon (Schulz, 2003); the notion of the “toothworm,” which also belongs to this complex, remained widespread right into the modern era (Gerabek, 1993). But many of the spells were aimed directly at the ailing body part, above all the blood, and treated it as a being in its own right: “So do it, Blood!” Doubtless one recognizes here the memory an even older (and otherwise latent) zone of mental representations, here admittedly connected with the exemplar of the healed Christ in illo tempore, that is, with the “myth” belonging to the rite (Trier Blood Blessing, Saxon, tenth century): Christ had been wounded, then he became again whole and sound That blood stood still, so shall you do, blood! Three Amens, three Pater Nosters. (Holzmann, 2001)8 Apart from uttering or singing or shouting out the blessing or incantation, we also find various operative rituals. These include, of course, making the sign of the cross, writing down magical names, blowing and spitting on the appropriate spots, and others (Schulz, 2003). Turning to a more detailed account, a fourteenth-century manuscript not only prescribed for epilepsy the recital of the Our Father and other prayers, but also stated that one should “take a buckskin strap and bind it around the throat, as long as he is in pain, and say. . . .” The strap was later to be placed under the shoulder of a dead person at his or her funeral, thus burying the illness until the Day of Judgment (Holzmann, 2001). The operative element could certainly enjoy great prominence in a ritual. Thus a fifth-century Latin pharmacopoeia chiefly containing folk remedies gives “A highly useful spell against gripe: Press the thumb of the left hand into the belly and say: ADAM BEDAM ALAM BETUR ALAM BOTUM. After saying this nine times, touch the earth with the same thumb, spit, say it another nine times, and then nine times more, touching the ground and spitting in between each set of nine” (Marcellus Empiricus 28, 72, cited in Dinzelbacher and Heinz, 2007). In the Lacnunga, an eleventh-century collection of old English texts somewhere between medicine and white magic, one finds the following remedy for diarrhea: A parchment amulet is to be inscribed with the words from a heaven’s letter that an angel brought to earth in Rome. The size of the parchment is measured to fit the girth of the sick person’s head and then it is attached around his neck (Skemer, 2006). In a rite known from the Late Middle Age, a sick person is renamed by means of exstinccio or extraccio

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candelarum: a number of candles were inscribed with names, and the patient was given the one on the candle that burned the longest in order to deceive the sickness demon with the “false” name. Occasionally one encounters magic prescriptions that demand absolute silence: According to an Anglo-Saxon leech book, an inflammation of the finger will depart if one scratches the name of the patient into a piece of wood, pours blood over the letters, and throws the wood over one’s shoulder into flowing water, without uttering a word (Olsan, 644–650). So in these instances rites are an integral part of magical therapy. Without them the black arts would also cease to function, as an evil spirit personally informed its conjurer when the latter complained to him about his lack of success. “He justifies himself and says that it is not his fault, but the ceremonies lack something, and for that he requires a scientifically trained person. . . .” Erasmus of Rotterdam reported on the matter, with which he had completely familiarized himself, in a letter dated 14. I. 1501.

Medical Rituals? Did the doctors of that epoch also use rituals in the pursuance of their profession? Even if the term is taken very broadly, one could scarcely name here such repetitive and purely functional actions as inspecting urine samples or feeling a person’s pulse. And what of the customary consultation of the horoscope and the heavenly constellations, or the choice of the right day (avoiding the unpropitious “Egyptian days,” as they were called [see for instance Mauch, 2006])? Not from the perspective of the Middle Ages, because in the eyes of those academically trained doctors they were dealing with a serious scientific technique. Moreover, a link with faith-bound religious operations is scarcely enough to qualify something as a healing ritual. After all, mediaeval medicine did not exist in a vacuum free of worldviews, but like any other profession, was essentially under Church supervision. The clergy sought to exercise control by means of Canon Law. Thus, for instance, in the canon 22 of the Lateranum IV the medical profession was bound to advise the patient on all accounts to “call the physician of the soul” (Foreville, 1970). In practice this meant, for instance, that (according to the regulations issued in 1328) the hospital in Munich refused to administer help before a patient had confessed (Dirr, 1934). And obviously there were also highly devout doctors who took it upon themselves not to give a consultation before the patient had rued his or her sins, as Nikolaus of Bibra proudly noted around 1283 with regard two Erfurt doctors (Mundhenk, 1997).

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Although surgeons in particular evinced a comparatively large number of skeptics and agnostics in the Middle Ages (Dinzelbacher, 1999), the large majority would have been devout in the normal sense of that time, as attested to by numerous biographies. After all, no lesser authority than Galen had agreed to have an abscess cured by the god Asclepius (Mullin, 1979). The sequence of behavior sketched out here in regard to sickness was instilled in the people accordingly, such as by the much read lawyer poet Sebastian Brant: Illness often comes from sins, And sin great days of sickness brings. So he who wants to avoid disease, Should ensure he God doth please, See to it he goes to confess, Before he imbibes remedies, And that his soul is fit and thrives, E’er the body’s physician arrives. . . . (from “Narrenschiff,” in Lemmer, 1986) Admittedly religious aspects do not appear to have had any bearing on the practice of administering therapy as a doctor. The specialist literature was by and large indebted to a tradition hailing from pre-Christian Antiquity, which as a rule continued to remain free of Christian influence and reinterpretation. It cannot be assumed that religious ceremonies were a regular part of the agenda of the Mediaeval medical profession. Doubtless due to their small numbers compared with the overall population, the doctors only occasionally found themselves competing with the saints (Dinzelbacher, 1994); despite the strikingly large number of religious skeptics already found in this profession in the Middle Ages (Dinzelbacher, 2009), the majority were pious and many of them did not scoff at praying for supernatural help—or receiving the same through magic.

Who Performed the Healing Rituals? Magical and religious healing rituals were not performed primarily by “ritual experts,” such as healers or priests, but chiefly by the sufferers themselves. This is suggested because there were a great many forms of blessing and incantation that were generally designed for self-administration. One can think of such words as Niem ain wurzen . . . mach ein kränzlin davon. . . . [Take a spice, make a garland of it] or (making the sign of the cross and repeating the Pater Noster):

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Ich hab mich verruckht vnnd hab mich verrenckht, Got den herren hat mann gehenckht. Schadt jme sein henckhen nichts, so schadt auch mir mein verrenckhen nichts. I’ve cricked myself, put myself out of joint But God the Lord has been hung. Yet for him the hanging does not hurt So my crick will do me no wrong. The poem clearly implies that the incantation and the accompanying rituals are to be performed by the afflicted person. Obviously other evidence exists. A narrative example, as it were, is the story of Deacon Walfroy given by Gregory of Tours (second half of the sixth century): After the destruction of a Temple dedicated to Diana in the course of Christianization, his entire body began to be covered with pustules. “I went alone into the church and stripped myself before the holy altar. Now I had there a jar full of oil which I had brought from Saint Martin’s church. With this I oiled all my body with my own hands and soon lay down to sleep. I awoke about midnight and rose to perform the service and found my whole body cured as if no sore had appeared on me. . . .” (Tours, 1916: 8, 15). Or: The celebrated doctor Arnaldus de Villanova tried out a modified Pater Noster prayer on himself by requesting that he be freed of warts and by plucking and burying glasswort during three repetitions; by the time the plant had rotted, the warts had disappeared (Löhr, 1943). Of course, there were also professional and semiprofessional healers— ranging from ecstatic shamans to herbalists to quacks—who practiced Christian or non-Christian healing rites. Even the clergy could clearly work as magical healers, as for instance a certain priest of Ramsholt in Suffolk, who tried to cure his sick daughter with “charms and medicines” before it occurred to him to summon St. Thomas à Becket (Finucane, 1977). In emergencies neighbors or other helpful people would step in, such as the five widows who attempted to help a drowned man by reeling off nine Our Fathers (Finucane, 1977). Even when they had none of their own, priests possessed the charisma of their position, which now and then seems to have been helpful with the sick; saints, on the other hand, always distinguished themselves by their personal charisma. The mediaeval Vitae are full of descriptions of successful exorcisms; one famous case is the exorcism of a possessed noblewoman in 1169 by Hildegard of Bingen, which fills many pages of her biography. After Sigewize had been taken unsuccessfully to a succession of relics over a period of eight years, the demon revealed that only Hildegard could dispel him. For this the saint drew up an exceptionally elaborate ritual: after fasting and scourging

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themselves, followed by prayer and communion, seven priests as embodiments of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost were to surround the possessed woman with rods. Using various formulas of exorcism, the woman was to be beaten repeatedly on the head, back, breasts, navel, kidneys, knees, and feet. The ritual produced only momentary respite. Not until the afflicted noble went on a pilgrimage to Hildegard in her convent and was exorcised by her in person did the evil spirit leave via her private parts (Radimersky, 1957; Schipperges, 1985). Admittedly this great efficacy on the part of the abbess (who according to Church law was not entitled to perform exorcism), compared with that of the consecrated holders of office, presents a most unusual case in the annals of demonology. No doubt a major function of the saints was essentially to aid the faithful in their illnesses as “heavenly doctors.” This applies not only to medical specialists such as Cosmas and Damianos, but, according to the anthologies of miracles, to virtually all the venerated. As a rule, such living charismatics as Hildegard saw themselves as nothing more than mediums of grace, whose intercessions simply motivated God to perform a miracle. Against this belief, the healers and magi on society’s margins believed in part that their powers issued from their own selves, while others believed they acquired them by banning evil spirits or signing themselves away to the same in a pact. Rulers could also possess a certain healing power: it sufficed to secretly cut off the fringes of the cloak of Merovingian King Guntram (sixth century) and dissolve them in water to create a draft that instantly restored health to those with fever (see in this connection Erkens, 2005). This royal unction “worked” in this archaic world every bit as well as the mana in the saintly garments kept as relics. Unexpectedly, however, this incident appears to be the only example from the first half of the Middle Ages. Not until the later epochs did a celebrated tradition emerge of wonder-working kings—in both England and France (Bloch, 1924; Boureau and Ingerflom, 1992; Cardini, 2005). In particular scrofula, also known as the “King’s evil,” could be healed by the touch of a sovereign in an act that could be termed a rite, not least because it was performed at specific times (Le Goff, 1988).

Possibilities for Interpreting Efficacy Depending ultimately on the type of text involved, the sources of the epoch refer both to healing successes due purely to medicine from this world, as well as to successes due to transcendental intervention. Proofs would seem to obviate themselves here. Did people in the Middle Ages ponder on the efficacy of

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rituals in this regard? As a rule the sources do not broach this subject, and it is likely that those who employed healing rituals generally proceeded on the assumption of a power (virtus) that resided in the word, gesture, or charm itself and that was not questioned. Nor was there any discussion in the many pharmacopoeias as to why certain medicinal plants had this or that effect. Other healers, however, took their guidance from the ancient tradition that medicinal plants had qualities corresponding to the bodily humors. Naturally some medical texts also noted that medicines consisted of natural substances created by God and that even medicinal healing is due to God, the prime cause (Esser, 1997; Haage, 1999), as was already written in the Old Testament (Ecclesiasticus 38:2–4). The first of these explanations concurs with our own understanding of the world, the second with the dominant worldview of that epoch, which stands in contradiction to the general knowledge of our time and above all to historical method, which recognizes on principle only structures that are immanent in the world. In regards to magic, certain intellectuals since Antiquity have in fact considered giving a rational explanation for it. Among Christian authorities we see that St. Augustine developed a theory of signs that remained influential throughout the Middle Ages (Markus, 1994). According to him, signals may be discerned in magical rites by which the demons are invited to employ their powers according to the wishes of the magus. Therefore unlike other authors of Antiquity, he did not qualify magic as a neutral exercise of hidden natural powers, but recognized it as an evil action per se, because Christianity did not acknowledge the existence of benign demons, so the possibility of white magic was ruled out. The performance of such rites in secret was seen by the Church fathers as a basic indication of evil intentions. The structural similarities between the operations of the saint and those of the magus were not lost on Augustine, but since he assumed that the two had totally different purposes— on the one hand the glorification of God, on the other that of man—they had to be judged differently. It should be noted that such models sought to explain magical operations as a whole, and not simply or especially those of healing magic. As for the possible efficacy of rites in healing terms, from the current scientific perspective the same possible explanations should be applied to the Middle Ages as to other cultures with healing procedures that are coupled with rites: • Mental aspects, especially autosuggestion, whether autonomous or introduced by a healer;9 suggestion or hypnosis; also a placebo effect. Remarkable in this connection is the fact that the majority of successful healings that are ascribed to mediaeval saints relate to mental or

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Be that as it may, evidence that “rituals transform sick persons into healthy ones”11 must be deemed lacking for the Middle Ages, because in no single instance of healing do we know all of the environmental factors that existed. This point may be underlined if we look at an autobiographical text that describes a recovery through the ritual of incubation: As a child, reports the subsequent Benedictine Abbot Guibert of Nogent (†1124), he succumbed for several days to a fever and was not even able to eat. Thereupon his mother instructed the boy’s teacher and the chaplain to spend the night with him before the altar of their own church. At around midnight they were awakened by an appalling din—and the next morning Guibert was fully restored. Although the report is written by the person concerned, and it brings us as close to what Clifford Geertz terms the “first order” of evidence as is possible for the Middle Ages, one cannot definitely conclude that the doubtless impressive experience during the incubation had produced a cure through a mental shock. The illness could have reached its natural term by then, or unmentioned medicines could have been administered—there is simply no information one way or the other in the source, so these possibilities cannot be excluded. Guibert, writing many years later as an abbot, clearly believed in this religious explanation, in keeping with his world picture, and he propagated it accordingly. Now that rituals have long attracted the attention of cultural anthropology, religious studies, and sociology, in recent years the topic has also gained a place in the areas of Mediaeval history and literary studies. This attention can be seen in publications dedicated to the topic, although as a rule they are concerned not with healing rituals but withrituals in politics, communications, literature, and other fields (e.g. Althoff, 1994, 1997; Classen, forthcoming; Harth and Schenk, 2004; Leyser, 1993). Although undoubtedly rituals could be of great importance in a culture centered chiefly on oral communication, this was far less true of the specific realms of sickness and healing than it was of religion or the exercise of power (J.-C. Schmitt, 1999). Furthermore, in many cases the ritual was doubtless merely the form that cloaked the actual agents. These might be the blows administered during an exorcism that broke through a psychosomatic block, or an herb given amidst incantations and gestures, for example. When, for instance, a cure for mental disturbances in an Anglo-Saxon

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leech book recommends that beer be mixed with herbs and lichen and drunk from a church bell over which seven masses have been sung (Olsan, 2000, 650), there is a distinct possibility that it is primarily the medicinal plants that trigger the physical and mental reaction. This was exactly the opinion that Doctor Johannes Hartlieb expressed in 1455–1456 in his treatise on superstition regarding the “forbidden arts.” He wrote that the blessings performed with holy water had no power of their own and that the effect came from the herbs and roots dissolved therein, from “that power that things have of which they be made. This be however quite natural and has nothing to do with blessing or words” (Hartlieb, 1989). This process can clearly be seen when a thaumaturge such as Franceso di Paola, whose cures were always ascribed by his contemporaries to divine grace, regularly administered an herb or some other substance when giving his patients “spiritual” treatment (Addante, 1988). As always when reframing a topic, scholars of the Middle Ages have succumbed to the danger of overestimating the relevance of the freshly “discovered” to their own discipline. Seductive in this case is perhaps the unconscious longing for the stability allegedly provided by rituals; more than a few historians in our ritually barren times have been led to interpret early procedures along these lines, although the sources do nothing to substantiate this hypothesis. A glaring example is the interpretation of the public weeping by rulers as a political ritual (Dinzelbacher, in press). It is with this phenomenon in mind that I call here for the significance of ritual behavior in the spiritual and worldly healing arts of the Middle Ages to be given only as much weight as is justified by the sources. And this, as I hope could be seen, lies almost exclusively in the realm of white magic, whether performed by the Church, outside the Church, or by its opponents.12

acknowledgments My heartfelt thanks to Bernhard Haage for his Argus-eyed reading of the first draft of this chapter. The translation by Malcolm Green has been authorized by the writer.

notes 1. It goes without saying that there are libraries of books on the controversial theoretical discussions surrounding each of the main concepts such as religion, rite, ceremony, magic, etc. I have used the terms as they appear in my Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum II (Dinzelbacher, 2000). A good, brief overview is given by S. Tschopp and W. Weber (2007, 113 ff., 147 ff.). Not yet available by the time this article was concluded were Ambos et al. (2005) and Althoff et al. (2007).

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2. See Geary (1983), who gives examples from the 11th and 12th centuries, and of a ban on this custom in the 13th century. 3. See Dinzelbacher (2003) for a summary and list of sources. 4. “En communiant à la messe, le chrétien mange donc la chair d’un homme et celle d’un dieu” (Walter, 1992: 145). 5. The literature in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Lexikon des Mittelalters, etc., is by and large unusable for Medieval practice. The best informed is still Franz (1960). 6. This distinction seems first to establish itself after 1200 (Kieckhefer, 1992). 7. “collo suspendere vel qualitercumque portare ad suam protectionem” (Aquinas: 2, 2, q. 96, a. 4, 3). See also Siebert (1907). 8. “Ich beser dich wurm vnd wyrmin . . .” (Holzmann, 2001). 9. Introduced autosuggestion is the term used in W. Seabrook, Witchcraft. Its Power in the World Today (1968), to explain the psychosomatic efficacy of black magic (this only functions when the victim is informed that magic is being used on him, to which he or she responds with anxiety fantasies leading to physical illness). 10. The findings of Sigal (1985) must in principle apply to Germany and the late Middle Ages, too. See for instance Busse-Wilson (1939) and Ohler (1985). For modern examples of miracle cures and their explanation from the worldly perspective see for instance Nickell (1993). 11. See William Sax in the introduction to this volume.

references Addante, P. 1988. San Francesco di Paola. Cinisello Balsamo. Althoff, G. 1994. Ritual und Demonstration in mittelalterlichem Verhalten. In B. H. Helmut Brall and Urban Küsters (eds.), Personenbeziehungen in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, 457–476. Düsseldorf. Althoff, G. 1997. Les rituals. In J.-C. Schmitt and O. G. Oexle (eds.), Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du Moyen Age en France et en Allemagne. Actes des colloques de Sèvres, 231–242. Althoff, G., et al. 2007. Die neue Kraft der Rituale. Sammelband der Vorträge des Studium Generale der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg im Wintersemester 2005/2006. Stuttgart. Ambos, C., et al. (Eds.). 2005. Die Welt der Rituale. Darmstadt. Angel, H.-F. 1996. Der religiöse Mensch in Katastrophenzeiten. Frankfurt. Bacci, M. 2000. Votive Offerings. In C. Lindahl et al. (eds.), Medieval Folklore, 1021–1025. Santa Barbara. Bartels, K. 1997. Musik in deutschen Texten des Mittelalters. Frankfurt. Bauch, A. (Ed.). 1979. Quellen zur Geschichte der Diözese Eichstätt II: Ein bayerisches Mirakelbuch aus der Karolingerzeit. Regensburg. Beck, G. 1962. Der heiligen Otto von Bamberg. Bamberg. Beek, H. H. 1969. Waanzin in de middeleuwen: Beeld van de gestoorde en bemoeienis met de ziecke. Nijkerk.

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Beissel, S. 1892. Die Verehrung der Heiligen und ihrer Reliquien während der zweiten Hälfte des Mittelalters. Freiburg i. Br. Bieler, L. (Ed.). 1971. Four Latin Lives of St. Patrick. Dublin. Bihlmeyer, K. (Ed.). 1906. Heinrich Sense, Deutsche Schriften. Stuttgart. Bloch, M. 1924. Les rois thaumaturges. Paris. Boureau, A., and Ingerflom, C. (Eds.). 1992. La royauté sacrée dans le monde chrétien. Paris. Burger, C. 1990. Volksfrömmigkeit in Deutschland um 1500 im Spiegel der Schriften des Johannes von Paltz OESA. In P. Dinzelbacher and D. R. Bauer (eds.), Volksreligion im hohen und späten Mittelalter, 307–328. Paderborn. Busse-Wilson, E. 1939. Die Wunder am Grabe der hl. Elisabeth von Marburg. Beiträge zur hessischen Kirchengeschichte 11: 184–209. Bynum, C. W. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley. Cardini, F. (Ed.). 2002. Per me regnes regnant. Geneva. Classen, A. (forthcoming). Rituale des Trauerns als Sinnstiftung und ethische Transformation des eigenen Daseins im agonalen Raum der höfischen und postheroischen Welt. Zwei Fallstudien: Mai und Beaflor und Diu Klage. LiLi. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik. Dinzelbacher, P. 1994. Christliche Mystik im Abendland. Paderborn. Dinzelbacher, P. 1996. Angst im Mittelalter. Paderborn. Dinzelbacher, P. 2000. Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum II: Hoch- und Spätmittelalter. Paderborn. Dinzelbacher, P. 2003. Mentalität und Religiosität des Mittelalters. Klagenfurt. Dinzelbacher, P. 2008. Warum weint der König? Mittelalterliche Herrscher und Helden in Tränen. Dinzelbacher, P. 2009. Unglaube im Zeitalter des Glaubens. Badenweiler. Dinzelbacher, P., and Heinz, W. in print. Europa in der Spätantike. Darmstadt. Dirr, P. (Ed.). 1934. Denkmäler des Münchner Stadtrechts I. Munich. Erkens, F.-R. (Ed.). 2005. Das frühmittelalterliche Königtum. Berlin. Esser, T. 1997. Die Pest: Strafe Gottes oder Naturphänomen? Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 108: 32–57. Finucane, R. 1977. Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England. London. Foreville, R. 1970. Lateran I–IV. Mainz. Franz, A. 1960. Die kirchlichen Benediktionen des Mittelalters. Graz. Geary, P. 1983. Humilation of Saints. In S. Wilson (ed.), Saints and their Cults, 2nd ed., 123–140. Cambridge. Gerabek, W. (1993). Der Zahnwurm. Geschichte eines volksmedizinischen Glaubens. Zahnärztliche Praxis 44: 162–165; 210–213; 258–261. Girault, M. u. P.-G. (Ed.). 2007. Livre des Miracles de saint Gilles. Orléans. Goodich, M. 2004. Lives and Miracles of the Saints. Aldershot. Graus, F. 1994. Pest—Geißler—Judenmorde, 3rd ed. Göttingen. Grimm, J. 1981. Deutsche Mythologie III. Frankfurt. Grisar, H. 1912. Martin Luther. Freiburg.

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Groß, A. 1990. “La folie.” Wahnsinn und Narrheit im spätmittelalterlichen Text und Bild. Heidelberg. Güting, E.-D, and Beheims, M. Gedicht gegen den Aberglauben und seine lateinische Vorlage. In Forschung und Berichte zur Volkskunde in Baden-Württemberg 1974–1977, 197–218. Haage, B. 1999. Alchemistische Arzneimittelherstellung vor Paracelsus. Nova Acta Paracelsica 13: 217–236, 229. Haage, B. D. 1992. Studien zur Heilkunde im “Parzival” Wolframs von Eschenbach. Göppingen. Hahl, W., and Fricke, H. (Eds.). 2003. Ritual: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, vol. 3. Berlin. Hall, A. 2007. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge. Harth, D., and Schenk, G. (Eds.). 2004. Ritualdynamik, Kulturübergreifende Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte rituellen Handelns. Heidelberg. Hartlieb, J. 1989. Das Buch der verbotenen Künste: Aberglauben und Zauberei des Mittelalters, aus dem Mittelhochdeutschen, übersetzt, kommentiert und mit einem Glossar versehen von Falk Eisermann und Eckhard Graf. Munich. Hayer, G. 1998. Krankheit, Sterben und Tod eines Fürsten. In M. Wenninger (ed.), du guoter tod, 31–50. Klagenfurt. Hoffmann, J. 1891. Geschichte der Laiencommunion bis zum Tridentinum. Speier. Holzmann, V. 2001. Ich beser dich wurm vnd wyrmin. . . . Bern. Horchler, M. 2005. Die Alchemie in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters. Baden-Baden. Jordan, W. C. (Ed.). 2004. Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Suppl. I. New York. Keil, G. 2005. In W. Gerabek et al. (eds.), Enzyklopädie der Medizingeschichte, 641 ff. Berlin. Kieckhefer, R. 1992. Magie im Mittelalter. Munich. Klingner, E. 1912. Luther und der deutsche Volksaberglaube. Berlin. Kolmer, L. 1993. Heilige als magische Helfer. Mediaevistik 6: 153–175. Lecouteux, C. 1988. Der Bilwiz: Überlegungen zu seiner Entstehungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte. Euphorion 82: 238–250. Legner, A. 1995. Reliquien in Kunst und Kult: Zwischen Antike und Aufklärung. Darmstadt. Le Goff, J. 1988. Le mal royal au moyen âge: du roi malade au roi guérisseur. Mediaevistik 1: 101–113. Leyser, K. 1993. Ritual, Zeremonie und Gestik: Das ottonische Reich. Frühmittelalterliche Studien 27: 1–26. Lindahl, C., et al. (Eds.). 2000. Medieval Folklore. Santa Barbara. Lipburger, M. 1993. Zum Tod Kaiser Friedrichs III. In L. Kolmer (ed.), Der Tod des Mächtigen, 125–135. Paderborn. Löhr, H. 1943. Aberglauben und Medizin. Leipzig. Markus, R. 1994. Augustine on Magic: A Neglected Semiotic Theory. Revue des Études Augustiniennes 40: 375–388. Mauch, U. 2006. Der frühneuhochdeutsche Traktat über die verworfenen Tage. Mediaevistik 19: 213–240.

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Meier, P. 1993. Paracelsus. Zürich. Mullin, R. 1979. Miracles and Magic. London. Mundhenk, C. (Ed.). 1997. Occultus Erfordensis. Weimar. Nickell, J. 1993. Looking for a Miracle. Amherst. Nola, A. d. 2004. Der Teufel, Wesen, Wirkung, Geschichte. Munich. Ohler, N. 1985. Alltag im Marburger Raum zur Zeit der heiligen Elisabeth. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 67: 1–40. Olsan, L. 2000. Medicine. In C. Lindahl et al., Medieval Folklore. Santa Barbara. Philippovich, E. v. 1965. Kuriositäten—Antiquitäten. Braunschweig. Pietsch, P. 1884. “Kleine Beiträge zur Kentnis [sic] des Aberglaubens des Mittelalters.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 16: 185–196, 190. Radimersky, G. W. 1957. Magic in the Works of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179). Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache, deutsche Literatur 49: 353–359. Robertini, L. (Ed.). 1994. Liber miraculorum S. Fidis 2, 1. Spoleto. Saint Bridget of Sweden. Revelationes 6. Retrieved from http://saintbridget.fiberia. com/vol1_book1/b1_b1_ch6.htm Saintyves, P. 1931. En marge de la Légende Dorée: Songes, miracles et survivance. Paris. Scheidegger, G. 2002. Das Neugeborene und der Teufel. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 84: 259–291. Schipperges, H. 1985. Heilung einer Geisteskranken im hohen Mittelalter. Zeitschrift für klinische Psychologie 33: 58–64. Schmitt, J.-C. 1982. Der heilige Windhund. Stuttgart. Schmitt, J.-C. 1993. Heidenspaß und Höllenangst, Aberglaube im Mittelalter. Frankfurt. Schmitt, J.-C. 1999. Rites. In J. Le Goff and J.-C. Schmitt (eds.), Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident médiévale. Paris. Schönbach, A. E. 1900. Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt II: Zeugnisse Bertholds von Regensburg zur Volkskunde (SB Wien 142/7). Vienna. Schulz, M. 2003. Beschwörungen im Mittelalter. Heidelberg. Schurer, P. 1962. Die selige Gute Betha von Reute. Reute. Seabrook, W. 1968. Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today. New York. Shahar, S. 1991. Kindheit im Mittelalter. Munich. Siebert, H. 1907. Beiträge zur vorreformatorischen Heiligen- und Reliquienverehrung. Freiburg. Sigal, P.-A. 1985. L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale (XIe–XIIe siècle). Paris. Skemer, D. 2006. Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. University Park. Sparber, A. 1957. Leben und Wirken des seligen Hartmann, Bischofs von Brixen, (1140–1164). Vienna. Tschopp, S., and Weber, W. 2007. Grundfragen der Kulturgeschichte. Darmstadt. Waldmann, S. 1990. Die lebensgroße Wachsfigur. Munich. Walter, P. 1992. Mythologie chrétienne: Rites et mythes du Moyen Age. Paris.

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Weisser, C. 2005. In W. Gerabek et al. (eds.), Enzyklopädie der Medizingeschichte, 652 ff. Berlin. Wilson, S. (Ed.). 1983. Saints and Their Cults. Cambridge. Wittmer-Butsch, M., and Rendtel, C. 2003. Miracula: Wunderheilungen im Mittelalter. Cologne. Zambelli, P. 1991. L’ambigua natura della magia. Milan.

5 Excommunication in the Middle Ages: A Meta-Ritual and the Many Faces of Its Efficacy Paul Töbelmann 1 Introduction Being excommunicated was for many centuries one of the most dreadful things that could happen to a Christian. Throughout late Antiquity and the early and high Middle Ages, excommunication was a powerful means to reform a sinner, as well as being a severe social, economical, and political hazard. It would be wrong to call excommunication a ritual, although there was a specific liturgical ritual associated with it. Far more than that, it was also a juridical instrument of discipline, a sociological as well as spiritual phenomenon (Logan 1968; Vodola 1986). The character of excommunication in the Middle Ages will serve as an excellent example for demonstrating that ritual efficacy is a highly complex thing. A ritual—much like any other social activity—can and will impact many different objects at once. These can often be separated into distinct spheres or levels of efficacy. In the case of excommunication, one of these is the sphere of ritual itself: excommunication affected not only the excommunicate’s ability to participate in the community’s religious rituals, but also every other community member’s ritual experience. Thus excommunication was a meta-ritual; that is, a ritualized system of actions and ideas that influenced other rituals. In this chapter I will first give an overview of the development and historical dynamics of excommunication in the Middle Ages. Next I will analyze the solemn rite of excommunication, what I call the candle ceremony. Finally, I will

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interpret medieval excommunication in terms of its complex threefold efficacy and will develop the notion of meta-ritual in more detail. I aim to foster a deeper understanding of the difficulties and intricacies involved with analyzing ritual efficacy, and to further the notion that understanding ritual efficacy is a cornerstone of understanding why rituals are performed at all. I also hope that this presentation of a phenomenon right on the brink of what can still be called a ritual will nurture the idea that ritual is not a phenomenon sui generis, but rather just one class of complex social activity among many—even though it is set apart in its intentional logic (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994).

2 History In the year of the Lord 878, Pope John VIII wrote to his colleague archbishop Athanasius of Naples to congratulate him: “Your holiness has, with faithful devotion, taken care to gladly sacrifice and cut off a limb of your body that is putrid with great infection” (Kehr 1928: 72 f.; cf. Lohrmann 1968). This amputation referred to the excommunication of Athanasius’ brother Sergius, the Neapolitan duke who had snubbed the pope time and again. Sergius had made alliance with the Saracen pirates who had been scouring the coasts of Italy for decades (Rizzitano 1965; Daniel 1975: 55). This alliance was an unbearable sin in John’s eyes, and since Sergius was unwilling to change his foreign policy, he was found guilty of contumacy, the refusal to bow to the authority of the Church. This was the “infection” referred to in John’s letter, a contagious affliction that might, John feared, spread to endanger the Church’s whole body (Engreen 1945). Athanasius had removed the limb in the manner prescribed in Matthew 5:30: “If thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body go into hell.” But what kind of body was this? John was referring to the ancient Christian notion of ekklesía, the community in Christ (Struve 1978). According to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, this is the community of the Eucharist. By taking part in the bread and wine that are the flesh and blood of God’s son, all Christians also take part in the Holy Spirit that suffuses the body of Christ. Christ himself, according to Paul’s letter to the Colossians, is “the head of the body, that is, the congregation.” The ritual of the Eucharist, performed by individual Christians who undergo the ritual of baptism, ties them together and fuses them in one mystical body (Gommenginger 1951: 4 f.). Therefore, the community of Christians everywhere was endangered if a member contracted a (spiritual) disease. In the case of Duke Sergius, this disease consisted in trafficking

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with the Saracens, for these were, according to Pope John VIII, an “impious people,” “enemies of the cross” and “odious to God.” Good Christians should never take refuge with these “limbs of the devil, who are the children of fornication, and vessels of wrath.” Instead, they should work “for peace and unity among the faithful,” so that “the body of God’s holy church is not wounded in its members.” Apparently, there existed a body of the devil that opposed the mystical body of Christ at every turn, intent on wounding its members or afflicting them with disease (Vismara 1974: 21 ff.). While this idea was not wholly new in Pope John VIII’s time, he was certainly one of the more consequential pursuers of bodily hygiene, so to speak. Not many popes before or after him made use of excommunication against princes and monarchs as often as he. And his is also one of the earliest examples of excommunication used solely for political purposes—for all the talk of Christian unity, simile and metaphor could not disguise the fact that John’s ends were highly political in nature (Engreen 1945). He tried to create a league of independent Italian principalities and baronies, with himself at the summit. He put pressure on his political enemies, especially those who worked with the Saracens, by employing the most severe penalty the Church could inflict: excommunication. In this chapter I will study this penalty from several different angles, with special attention to its efficacy. When finally I return to this starting example, I hope to have clarified some general ideas about Christian ritual in the Middle Ages. In the early days of Christianity, excommunication was understood as a state of being rather than as a sentence (Logan 1989: 536). Closely interwoven with the broader concepts of sin and penance, it referred to the state sinful persons were in. The state of excommunication meant that they were no longer part of the community in Christ, they were set apart from God. Until about the fifth to sixth century A.D. sinners were understood to have left this community of their own accord, by their own doing, without interference by the Church (Gommenginger 1951: 29). Even if their sin was secret and they still attended the Eucharist, partaking in the bread and wine no longer held sacramental power for them and did not bring them any closer to God. Once a mortal sin had come to be known publicly, though, this private state of excommunication before God was also transformed into a public matter. Sinners were separated from the congregation in that they were no longer allowed to take part in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. They were commanded to show regret and do penance, even after they were readmitted to the Eucharist (Gommenginger 1951: 30, 32 f.). In many ways, penance was similar to Jewish methods of discipline (Hill 1957: 1 f.; Hein 1975: 3–12, 412–414). It could consist in wearing specific penitent garb and hair, in prayer, almsgiving,

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fasting, abstinence from sexual intercourse, and pilgrimages. As van Gennep has noted, these rites of penance not only resembled Jewish disciplinary rites, but also made heavy use of Jewish mourning imagery (1960: 93–97; cf. Vodola 1986: 9 f.). The penance was to be undertaken in a state of excommunication from the Church, as part of the hardships penitent sinners had to endure. In no way did it exclude them from the social community at large, however: only the sacraments were forbidden to them (Gommenginger 1951: 28). The most hardened heretics and schismatics were sometimes punished by the denouncement of a synod and set apart from the social community as well, because they were deemed a danger to other Christians. This denunciation was known as anathema and was well nigh irreversible (Gommenginger 1951: 44). But even in ancient Christianity the excommunication of penance was reserved for severe cases, namely, contumacy (Gommenginger 1951: 42 f.). Only sinners for whom simple penance—that is open confession of their wrongdoing and the promise to make amends—did not seem to be effective were held to be in a state of excommunication, so as to increase the pressure. Excommunication must first and foremost be understood as an instrument of Church discipline, whose aim was always to correct the excommunicate by pressuring him to return to the fold (Hill 1951: 215). Being prohibited from the sacraments must have been a severe blow to any Christian’s confidence, for it carried the danger of dying without confession and extreme unction—making the soul highly susceptible to eternal damnation. Thus it was a powerful reminder of the dangers of sinfulness, and of the therapeutic worth of penance, and was applied mostly medicinally (Reynolds 1987: 433; Logan 1989: 537 f.). Small wonder, then, that only the highest-ranking and therefore presumed wisest Church personnel, namely bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and of course the pope, were charged with excommunicating unrepentant sinners (Hill 1951: 213; Logan 1968: 25 ff.). In ancient Christianity, penance was still very much a public matter. Confessions were made, penance was performed, and absolution was granted in front of the whole congregation (Reynolds 1987: 433). Consequently, excommunication from the church was firmly anchored in the public as well, since it excluded the excommunicate from the rituals a congregation performed together. But until the seventh century A.D., public penance gradually came to be reserved for notorious sinners only. Private sins could be confessed privately, and the priest could administer private penance for them (Gommenginger 1951: 35, 39). Publicly known sins, on the other hand, increasingly came to be regarded as crimes to be judged in court. Penance and excommunication were separated into private and public; penance no longer excluded the penitent from the Eucharist, and excommunication was no longer understood as a

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state being incurred by sinning, but as a sentence handed down in court. This was the beginning of the distinction between the interior and exterior forums. God was the sole judge of the imagined court of the interior forum. He judged secret sins, thoughts, and lack of faith, and his decisions were executed by priests. However, the court of the exterior forum was staffed by ordinary men (Mörsdorf 1957). Naturally, actions such as heresy and blasphemy were considered crimes in the Middle Ages, to be punished by the ecclesiastical courts. But minor sins such as adultery, incest, perjury, or simply working on a holiday were handled much the same way as these, though perhaps less harshly. The ecclesiastical courts could also judge a sinner to be notorious, or contumacious, and proclaim him excommunicate. Thus excommunication was firmly attached to the juridical procedures of the courts and would be incurred by anyone foolish enough to stick to his crimes or otherwise deny the courts’ authority (Hill 1951: 214; Logan 1989: 536). Since ecclesiastical courts were not limited to bishops, they were in practice often headed by other clergymen, especially abbots and archdeacons (Logan 1968: 33 f.). In the High Middle Ages, many were even headed by laymen, who consequently gained the power of excommunication when they acted as judges. The secular powers also began to reinforce the sentences of ecclesiastical courts with fines, imprisonment, confiscation, and even exile. Excommunicates were often not allowed to hold public office or to participate in warfare; they could not be plaintiffs or judges and could not swear oaths, a restriction that made legal defense very difficult (Vodola 1986: 70 ff.). Around A.D. 1140, Gratian’s Decretum compiled the canon law of the time and served as a sturdy fundament of judgment in ecclesiastical courts. The Decretum also contains Gratian’s understanding of excommunication. It institutionalized excommunication as the most severe punishment to be handed out by ecclesiastical courts. Contumacy was still the prerequisite for this ultimate instrument of Church discipline. But whereas in late antiquity contumacy was “deliberate and obstinate opposition to the very authority of the Church,” by the twelfth century it had come to mean merely disobedience to ecclesiastical law (Logan 1968: 44). Thus excommunication could be, and was, incurred much more easily and frequently. A more severe form of excommunication, what Gratian called excommunicatio totalis, later generally known as major excommunication, was a viable threat to the stiff-necked. An excommunicate who did not seek reconciliation could be judged incorrigible and proclaimed anathematized. Not only did this judgment ban them from the sacraments of the Church, it also imposed on every Christian the obligation not to traffic with the anathematized under

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any circumstances, be they social, political, or economic. Anybody who dared infringe on this obligation was put under the sanctions of minor excommunication, that is, exclusion from the sacraments. This excommunicatio totalis was similar to, though less severe than, anathema, and the sources often treated the two as if they were the same. Excommunicates were often forced to reconcile quickly with the ecclesiastical authorities; otherwise additional penalties were inflicted by the secular arm. In England and the Empire, the period of warning was forty days and six weeks, respectively, after which the obstinate excommunicate was threatened with imprisonment in England, and the imperial ban in the Empire (Logan 1968: pass.). This kind of regulation became very common in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, as the Church pressed lay authorities to lend their weight to the salvation of souls. After excommunication had been proclaimed against a sinner, there was no more the Church could do, after all. The excommunicate’s soul was then in great danger of being lost, a fate that meant defeat not only for the sinner but also for the Church. This danger, together with the more common use of excommunication as a sentence, made it necessary to employ the secular arm to enforce compliance by excommunicates. One special form of excommunication, excommunicatio latae sententiae, was institutionalized in the twelfth century as well (Huizing 1955; May 1980: 173 f.; Vodola 1986: 28 ff.). Without our going into this matter too deeply, suffice it to say the following. Certain crimes, such as striking a priest, preaching heresy, and desecrating or robbing a church, were said to carry a sentence of excommunication in themselves. No further act was necessary on the part of the Church authorities: The moment a crime punishable by excommunication latae sententiae became known, the offender was excommunicated. This construction contributed to excommunication’s becoming more and more impersonal and technical, as we shall see.

3 Ritual As a ritual of exclusion, excommunication made use of a few distinctive forms, although the most important part was arguably the words spoken. Ritual actions signifying exclusion could include spitting or closing doors. They always bore the marks of a curse segregating the excommunicate by making him sacer; that is, putting him as an individual in a spiritual rather than social category (Vodola 1986: 3 ff., 45 f.). One ceremony became most prominent. The following ritual prescription was originally compiled in the eleventh century in Burchard of Worms’ Decretum, as caput 3 in the eleventh book. Gratian copied it a century

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later as c. 106 of the third quaestio in the eleventh causa: “Twelve priests must stand around the bishop in a circle holding burning candles in their hands, which in conclusion of the anathema or excommunication they must fling to the ground and extinguish with their feet; after this, letters are sent through the parishes, containing the names of the excommunicated and the reasons for the excommunications.” These are the words to be spoken (ibid.: c. 107): “Following the canonical institutes and the examples of the Holy Fathers, we eliminate the violators of God’s churches N. from the bosom of Holy Mother Church and from community with all Christianity, by the authority of God and the judgment of the Holy Spirit, until they come to their senses and satisfy God’s church.” This prescription invokes powerful imagery: A church lit only by twelve candles; a bishop in full regalia speaking the condemning words in a solemn voice; twelve priests in a circle around him, at all points of the clock; the bishop reaching the end, the candles being tossed to the ground; twelve heels crunching down, smothering the light, darkening the church. A bishop for Christ proclaiming the sentence, twelve priests for twelve apostles as witnesses, candles for the light of salvation, extinguished like the light of faith in the excommunicate. Gratian does not go into specifics concerning the setting of this ceremony. In fact, today we do not know whether this procedure was actually much used at all, for no sources survive that explicitly say so. In the case of England, a study of over 15,000 excommunicates has not revealed one case in which this ritual is reported to have been performed (Logan 1989: 537). This kind of source difficulty is no news to historians, of course: it is one of the main difficulties, or, if you like, challenges of the trade. The most common elements of daily social life are sometimes the hardest to ascertain from the sources, simply because medieval authors thought them too common to waste parchment by mentioning them. Some logical assumptions may thus be in order, even though there is little direct evidence for the performance of the candle ceremony. It is quite feasible to surmise that the thousands of monks and clerics who copied Gratian’s work thought of the prescribed procedure as the primary, correct, and proper way to go about an excommunication. It may be that the candle ceremony was not performed all the time, or even with any great frequency, yet in medieval contemporary thought it remained the “proper” method. Gratian’s Decretum had soon achieved such a status that it became almost unheard of to copy only part, and not all, of it. As a result, the candle ceremony was guaranteed a dedicated space in what people knew about excommunication. We cannot be sure that the described form was actually used in everyday practice, but neither can we dismiss the evidence of this source out of hand. Let us simply assume for

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the moment that the candle ceremony was a distinct possibility, a very solemn way of excommunicating an obstinate sinner. In day-to-day affairs, especially in court, excommunication cannot have taken the form described. For instance, it was not always a bishop who excommunicated a culprit. As was mentioned, even a layman could hand down the sentence, acting as judge in an ecclesiastical court. It might be assumed that the candle ceremony still needed to be performed to act upon the findings and sentence proclaimed by the court. If this were the case, the bishop and his candle-bearing clerics would have been the executing organs of the court, little more than spiritual henchmen, if you will. However, this does not seem to have been the case. Gratian and the Decretists all agreed that the moment the sentence of excommunication was declared, it took effect. Even an unjust sentence of excommunication was believed to be valid and fully as binding as the most justified one (Hilling 1905: 253 f.). No appeal, no injunction, even if it were granted later by higher authority, could save the excommunicate from feeling the full effects of the excommunication the second the sentence was declared. So we cannot assume that the candle ceremony was needed, because the court sentence itself was sufficient. The actual excommunication, then, seems to simply have been the bishop’s (or court official’s) speech declaring it. Why, then, the candle ceremony? What further use could it possibly serve? Again, the answer may lie in Gratian’s own writings. He usually does not distinguish clearly between excommunication and anathema, but in one instance he tells us that excommunication “separates from the society of brothers” while anathema “cuts off from the body of Christ itself, that is the Church.” The words spoken in the candle ceremony aim at exactly this latter action, the cutting off or elimination from the Church. So while the words “in conclusion of the anathema or excommunication they must fling [the candles] to the ground . . . ” hold that the ceremony could be used for either anathema or excommunication, they probably referred mostly to the former. Anathema held much greater power of condemnation, since it was usually all but irreversible, except through great persistence of penitence. Although Gratian was far from precise concerning this distinction, his contemporaries were much clearer, in at least some cases. Thus the candle ceremony might have been the form specific to anathema, or major excommunication. This is actually the opinion of a few of the Decretists, most prominently Hostiensis, and has attracted modern scholars as well (Logan 1968: 14 nn. 4–6; Vodola 1986: 44 ff.). For further consideration of the ritual itself, let us turn to the form in which excommunicates could obtain absolution. Gratian prescribes the following procedure: “If some excommunicated or anathematized man, led by penitence, asks forgiveness and promises emendation, the bishop who excommunicated him

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shall come before the church, and twelve priests with him, who shall stand around him on all sides. And if he asks forgiveness prostrated on the ground, and vows to be watchful in the future, then the bishop shall lead him into the church, taking his right hand, and give him back to the communion of Christ, and sing the seven penitential psalms, together with these prayers. . . .” Then follows the bishop’s oration: “We beseech thee, Lord, grant this your servant the proper fruit of penitence, so that to your holy church, from whose integrity he deviated through sin, he be given back without sin by seeking forgiveness of his crimes.” The ritual described here is in many respects the mirror image of the candle ceremony of excommunication. Again, a bishop is necessary as the main actor. Again, twelve priests accompany him, “surrounding him on all sides.” The bishop’s declaration is now a prayer, the antithesis of the curse-like pronunciation of excommunication. The ritual is performed outside the church proper, which is still closed to the still excommunicate, penitent though he may be. Only after it is performed may the absolved enter the church and take part in the singing of psalms and speaking of prayers. But first of all, he must show obedience to the clergy’s authority by prostration and asking for forgiveness. This ritual of reconciliation effectively annuls the ritual of excommunication by putting right the wrongness of the excommunicate’s former behavior. In certain pontificals (manuals for episcopal ceremonies) there can be found a further stipulation that supports this view: those the excommunicate has wronged must be compensated and must testify to their full and proper compensation. All this is intended to remove the conditions that made the excommunication necessary in the first place. Only when this is done may the prayer that effects reconciliation be spoken and may the absolved enter church, sing psalms, and pray. This ritual too was very likely performed only when an anathematized person was reconciled. By canon law, the spoken formula of absolution sufficed to offset minor excommunication. Again, it was the speech act, in practice often limited to the famous ego te absolvo, that was effective. Structurally and morphologically, these two rituals do not offer much to study in regard to ritual efficacy. It would be desirable to perform an analysis of the form of the excommunication ritual described above as related to its efficacy; however, the simple fact that the excommunicate was probably never present at his own excommunication makes it hard to believe that the form of the rite would affect him much. It was more likely the knowledge of a person’s state as an excommunicate rather than the specific ritual performed that brought about all the effects. Moreover, a strict liturgy such as that of the candle ceremony is not easily adapted to specific circumstances. I am therefore quite certain that the form of the excommunication ritual, fascinating though it may be, will not help us much in establishing its efficacy.

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4 Efficacy The role of excommunication in the Middle Ages, as well as its dynamics, depended to a large degree on its efficacy as perceived by contemporaries. Catholics in the Middle Ages did not ask whether the Eucharist or the excommunication was efficacious. To them, the efficacy of such rituals was axiomatic (so long as certain conditions were met). But when I, as a modern historian, raise the question of the efficacy of such rituals, I consider effects that may have been peripheral to or entirely absent from the understandings of those who were involved in them. I may, for example, adopt a sociological viewpoint and understand the Eucharist to form a seed of collective identity, to build social coalitions, or to reproduce and ensure the dominant position of the clergy. Thus, “did it work?” is a completely different question from my perspective than from the medieval Catholic’s. Nevertheless, and primarily out of necessary respect for my source materials, I wish to propose an account of efficacy that does not contradict the understanding of those who participated in or were affected by the rituals. These considerations lead us to the following conclusion. According to Gratian and the Decretists, the role of excommunication was to separate a sinner from the “fraternal community,” that is, from the congregation of the faithful, the community of the Eucharist. Thus, the ritual of excommunication was efficacious if it successfully separated a sinner from the community. This end was achieved by prohibiting his participation in the Eucharist. According to the opinions held and stipulations made in canon law and early scholastic theology, the effect was automatic. Excommunication excluded the contumacious sinner from the sacraments by its very pronouncement. But the question is not to be dealt with so easily. After all, if the “native point of view” (in this case, that of the believer) is the only one that counts, then there is little scope for sociological or historical analysis. I would like to develop a perspective that sees ritual efficacy as a problem but that is still close enough to the contemporaries’ view of the ritual that it does not blatantly contradict them. Let us step back and take a more encompassing look at the efficacy of excommunication. It seems that in the case of excommunication in the Middle Ages, there are three spheres of effect, that is, three levels on which it was effective: the ritual sphere, the sociological sphere, and the spiritual sphere. These spheres, while heavily interrelated, can still be analytically separated and varying efficacy can be ascribed to each. This type of analysis implies that there may be several layers to every ritual’s efficacy, depending on perspective and the spheres it takes into

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consideration. But it also prevents us from any clear-cut conclusions regarding the efficacy of excommunication—and perhaps of any other ritual as well. The immediate aim of excommunicating someone was directed toward the ritual sphere: the desired effect was the excommunicate’s exclusion from the community of the sacraments. But it also had a more comprehensive range of effects—the application of pressure by way of exclusion from the community-as-society—which occurred primarily in the social sphere. Not only was the excommunicate forbidden to enter church or receive benefit from the sacraments; he was also forbidden to undertake any action to which sacramental power still clung. The most important of these was the oath, the basis of civil law, and thus of public life. It regulated all kinds of legal as well as social relations and had an important impact on the political and economic spheres. Forbidding oaths in itself must have been a significant hindrance to any legal act the excommunicates wished to undertake. Furthermore, they could not function as judges or plaintiffs, they could not hold public office, they could not take part in elections, and in the case of excommunicated clerics, they could not say mass or perform other sacerdotal functions. In legal matters, excommunicates were faced with severe handicaps (Vodola 1986: 70 ff.). The constraint put on their public life went so far as to necessitate a papal decree stating that money owed an excommunicate must still be paid back (Vodola 1986: 129 ff.)! The excommunicates’ private life was also disturbed by the repeated insistence that everybody communicating with them risked excommunication themselves; Gratian himself treated this particular point with utmost distinction, dedicating a full seventeen chapters to it. So, did even the excommunicate’s family turn away from him? And what about friends, colleagues, and vassals? Although Pope Gregory VII decreed as early as 1078 that an excommunicate’s familia—meaning parents, spouse, children, servants, and thralls—was still allowed to interact with him as usual, it took until the thirteenth century before this adjudication was generally recognized (Vodola 1986: 24 ff.). Therefore the sociological effects of excommunication were much more encompassing than the ritual effects, although it is important to remember that the former were derived from the latter. Excommunication deprived the individual of social and business contacts to a greater or lesser degree, it hampered him severely in court, and it could estrange vassals and even families. These social, political, and economic consequences may even have been what individual clerics aimed to do when they performed an excommunication. But there was also much criticism to the effect that excommunication should not be undertaken frivolously and for personal gain. It was argued that in too many cases, excommunication was obviously intended to achieve certain social effects, and that this was against the spirit of the institution.

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The ostensible end of excommunication lay in the spiritual sphere. This end was not exclusion but rather reformation of obstinate sinners, their readmittance to the sacraments, and ultimately the salvation of their souls through the punishing liturgical and sociological consequences of excommunication. In fact, the excommunication ritual’s spiritual effect was not limited to the excommunicate’s soul, but had to do with the whole Christian community. As the opening quotation indicates, a powerful conviction that sin is ultimately contagious held sway in medieval Christian discourse. By establishing excommunication as one of its most threatening instruments for dealing with those who did not care about the rules, early Christianity took a page from the Talmud. For in early Christianity, rituals of penance were not only similar to Jewish rituals of grief; they also incorporated Jewish notions of purity, especially where excommunication is concerned (Hein 1975). In Christianity, the greatest impurity arises from the rejection of Christ and the Holy Spirit. While the exclusion of those who rejected Christ by defying his church might chasten them on the one hand, on the other it also safeguarded their fellow community members against their impurity. The spiritual end of excommunicating somebody was thus twofold: to reform them through chastening, and to protect the noncontaminated from contagious, sinful notions. So excommunication had effects in at least three spheres: the ritual, the sociological, and the spiritual. It could be said to be effective in that it excluded sinners from participation in ritual, that it separated and degraded them socially, or that it spiritually reunited them with the Church and led to their salvation. Depending on perspective, any one of these effects might be declared to be decisive. Although from the perspective of the “inventors” and practitioners of excommunication the soul was its final object, the sources show that in practice it often aimed at one of the other two spheres (Hill 1951). Every use of excommunication could therefore potentially be styled an abuse. This was all the more the case as the emphasis shifted from the ritual to the sociological sphere over the course of centuries.

5 Use, Misuse, Abuse At the beginning of this chapter stood an example from the ninth century A.D., in which excommunication was used for mostly political ends by Pope John VIII. While John certainly had a powerful vested interest in politics, he probably did not distinguish between the ritual, sociological, and spiritual spheres. His understanding of the body of Christ was holistic; therefore, any political opposition to what the pope regarded as salutary policy was punished or

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constrained just the same as more common forms of sin. John VIII was not much concerned with duke Sergius’s individual salvation. He would probably have argued that Sergius’s excommunication was conducive to the salvation of many thousands of others, but there is no doubt that he stressed what today we call the political as opposed to the spiritual. Although this kind of amalgamation of the political and the spiritual is unthinkable today, it was typical of the Middle Ages. In A.D. 1076 Pope Gregory VII excommunicated king Henry IV, and although they were famously reconciled at Canossa the following spring, only three years later the pope saw fit to renew the excommunication in his ongoing struggles with the king. Henry died without obtaining reconciliation. In A.D. 1160 Pope Alexander III and his schismatic rival, Victor IV, excommunicated each other; Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, who supported Victor, was excommunicated as well, but the emperor also had his own bishops excommunicate the city of Milan, which had supported Pope Alexander. In A.D. 1209 Pope Innocent III excommunicated his former ally Emperor Otto IV for treachery. His successor, Emperor Frederick II, was excommunicated no less than three times and died an excommunicate—though this circumstance did not stop him from embarking on a (successful) crusade to the Holy Land in 1229! The list goes on, and it should be obvious that excommunicating a king did not guarantee his submission. It was much more likely that he would simply ignore the excommunication; it would not have been hard for him to find or, if necessary, create a bishop who would still read mass for him. Furthermore an excommunicated king’s total exclusion from society was quite difficult to bring about, and so excommunication as a political instrument was not terribly effective. Also the church often contented itself with the mere threat of excommunication so far as the powers-that-be were concerned: It simply would not do to anger individuals of authority any more than necessary, and it would probably endanger the ongoing work of the Church (Hill 1951: 216, 221; Hill 1957: 7 f.). Moreover, secular authorities were understood to reign according to God’s mandates, as in Paul’s letter to the Romans (13:1 f.). There are no fewer than twenty-one clauses in Gratian’s Decretum, taken from synodal rulings, that condemn priests who still communicated with excommunicates and bishops who absolved them without proper legitimation (all contained in C. 11, q. 3). The fact that these directives were deemed necessary suggests that even contumacious sinners could still find some friends among the clergy, and that excommunication was not always an impediment to their participation in the sacramental rites. In the late Middle Ages, excommunication was routinely used as a means to enforce obedience from the direct subjects of a church, to coerce debtors to

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repay borrowed money, and, in England, even to enforce the political and legal provisions of the Magna Carta (Howland 1901: 22; Hill 1957: 9). In fact, the use, or abuse, of excommunication became so widespread and indiscriminate that some scholars hold this development to be an important factor in bringing about the Reformation (Anker 1919). The efficacy of excommunication cannot be said to have been concentrated in the sphere of ritual or spirituality: its social ramifications came to be its most telling aspect. Leaving behind the archaic rituals of penance and the powerful imagery of the candle ceremony, excommunication became a mere judicial sentence with well-defined ramifications and corollaries. More and more during the waning of the Middle Ages, its ritual efficacy took second place to its juridical and political efficacy.

6 Meta-Ritual We now have a general overview of the ritual in question. We have seen how it was performed and how it could be ritually repealed. We have gained a general insight into its historical development and changing significance, and have identified three different levels of its efficacy. We have seen that the excommunication ritual itself is not very illuminating structurally or morphologically, at least where its efficacy is concerned. In practice, it consisted mostly of a speech act. The candle ceremony may or may not have been performed much, and if it was at all important, its purpose was to lend a visual and spatial quality to the speech act performed by the excommunicating bishop. Yet the excommunicates would never have witnessed this ritual themselves, and the simple sentence, “I declare thee excommunicate,” spoken by any authorized person, was apparently sufficient to bring about all the consequences mentioned so far. If we left it at that, excommunication could be dismissed as just another instance of illocutionary acts: the performance of the excommunication ritual, that is, the central speech act all by itself, brought about the “conventional consequences” discussed above (Austin 1962). Yet for me the fascinating dimension of excommunication is not the ritual per se but rather what I would like to call its meta-ritual character. I have argued that the soul was the final object of this rite, and the soul’s salvation its end. Obviously, the soul and its salvation are central to many rituals of the Catholic Church. Because the priesthood had been given the power to bind and loose by God, it was capable of performing feats that touched the domain of the soul, called sacraments. These were usually liturgical in nature, so as to be set apart from other necessary priestly functions such as preaching and counseling. But the soul is ultimately the property of the individual, and individuals can, by

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sinning, decide to withhold their souls from being affected by the sacraments. Unable to affect (and thus save) the souls of such individuals, the Church can only try to touch on the sphere that is closest to the soul. For early and medieval Christianity, this was the ritual sphere. By restricting or downright prohibiting access to the Christian ritual sphere, in which medieval communities were above all grounded, the Church could still hope to affect an excommunicate’s soul, albeit in a mediated way. This proximity of ritual to the soul is hard to understand without one’s taking for granted the truth of Catholic Christian teachings. The secularized scholar of Western modernity struggles with the notion. Still, the “structure” of the soul, if I may call it that, must have been hard to grasp even for Gratian and the Decretists, as it still is for contemporary theologians. As St. Augustine saw it, the soul is the ultimate perceiver of every Christian’s environment, and the arbiter of the perceived in moral terms (Wienbruch 1971). It can perceive through the body’s sensory organs and immediately “know” the right and wrong about the perceived, because God has invested in the soul certain fundamental truths, which illumine the outer world and its significance for the Christian individual. This is also why (Church) ritual is so powerful and so close to the soul: because God informs each Christian that this is so in a subliminal, preinterpretive way. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus (2002), already well established by the writings of Catherine Bell (1992) as an integral part of ritual studies, could be said to work much the same. Although of course it is not God who effects immediate understanding and emotive reaction in Bourdieu’s concept, the habitus consists of “structured principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations” (Bourdieu 2002: 72). Because habitus is not God-given, it is not eternal and unchanging, but “transposable” (ibid.). Yet in any instance of habitus-informed practice, the action performed and its perception are structured on a level once removed from conscious interpretation. This analogy between soul and habitus might seem rather crude. Yet it may be helpful to imagine—from the modern scholar’s perspective—excommunication as an effort to make a direct impact on the habitus. The aim was not only to influence the sinner’s habitus, to touch on deeply held convictions and practical knowledge and implant the certainty of impending doom. Excommunication of one community member also changed the ritual sphere of all other members. Not only were excommunicates simply not present in church anymore—a fact that must have reminded everybody else of their state—but their names were also proclaimed in church, to make them public and to remind the community that they must not traffic with these persons nor mimic their misbehavior. The exclusion of excommunicates modulated Christian ritual in a way that demonstrated several things to all participants: the clergy’s power to bind and loose;

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their authority not only to provide but also to negate the benefits of the sacraments to good and bad Christians; the purity and unity of the Christian community; its inviolability by bad influences; and finally its responsibility to remain pure, united, and inviolable by excluding obstinate sinners. Excommunication in the Middle Ages shows that there is no such thing as a singular ritual. It cannot be stressed enough that individual ritual acts are part of the ritual sphere as a whole. I dare not call them a system, since doing so would imply more regularity than the evidence warrants. Yet it seems clear that rituals not only draw on a socially common body of symbols and interpretations thereof, being concerned mainly with “signification and communication” (Singer 1984: 30). Nor do they simply take a set of “building blocks” or elements particular to time, place, and culture, rearranging these in order to produce sense (Michaels 2007: 242 ff.). Rather, rituals also interpret, reinterpret, and otherwise influence each other. For every ritual of inflicting damage on one’s enemies, there is one to mitigate damage taken; for every ritual of exclusion, there is one of readmittance; for every ritual of bonding, there is one of separation. Many rituals are meta-rituals, in that they affect the ritual sphere as such. Seen this way, even such a straightforward ritual as a wedding can be understood as having a meta-ritual component. Under modern law in Western countries the wedding ritual commonly may be performed only once. A wedding is self-referential insofar as its performance precludes its being performed again. Divorce, on the other hand, can be performed only after a wedding has already been performed. While these rituals aim at being efficacious in spheres outside of ritual, they have a certain meta-ritual character. Excommunication, which restricted participation in many other rituals of the same community, was much more strongly geared toward this meta-ritual aspect. At least originally, its primary area of efficacy was the ritual sphere, and its broader political, legal, social, and economic effects were added only to reinforce this element. It was thus a metaritual in the purest sense. The sociological and spiritual effects of being excommunicated were, originally, only derivatives of its effects on the ritual level. The reason can tentatively be sought in the recursive relationship between ritual practice and the habitus that informs it: ritual practice structures activity in a way that produces, reproduces, and manipulates the fundamental dispositions that make up the habitus (Bell 1992). Anything that impacts ritual practice as massively as excommunication must therefore be of the utmost importance in the shaping of the ritual habitus. This is what I mean by calling excommunication a meta-ritual. Other typical meta-rituals include inaugurations and depositions, consecrations, initiations, and basically all rituals that are tied into a more encompassing ritual

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system. All these represent a huge “encroachment” on “normal” ritual practice, in that they make possible or impossible large areas of ritual activity. Thus their impact on the ritual habitus is much greater than that of rituals concerned primarily with a more, shall we say, “practical” end, such as healing rituals, ritual curses, or ritual thanksgiving. In the case of medieval excommunication, however, this meta-ritual character was lost over time. Medieval society’s grounding in ritual ensured that the further effects, which stemmed from the meta-ritual effects of being excommunicated, would increase the pressure on obstinate sinners. But with growing literacy and the beginnings of scholasticism came a growing juridification of religious and social life. The social, political, economic, and juridical effects of excommunication became more and more unhitched from its meta-ritual character. Over time, their significance grew, while that of exclusion from the sacraments lessened. Thus the meta-ritual character of excommunication came to have less and less of a telling impact on its efficacy—although it never ceased to be its defining characteristic.

7 Conclusion In the early days of Christianity the efficacy of excommunication lay first and foremost in the ritual sphere. Excommunication was a meta-ritual, for it restricted or outright forbade participation in the sacraments, most importantly, the Eucharist. This restriction shaped the ritual sphere, in which not only the excommunicate but all members of the community were embedded. The Christian community was in many ways grounded in this ritual, so exclusion from it could, and did, lead to social isolation. But in the first centuries after Constantine made the Christian faith his state religion, excommunication was but one of many rituals of penance and was reserved for the most obstinate of sinners. Only after the seventh century did it affect the juridical sphere, and social and even economic and political consequences became an integral part of its effects. These were “naturally” derived from the effects excommunication had on the ritual sphere, but over time they became institutionalized by canon law as typical effects of excommunication, in lieu of its meta-ritual efficacy. Thus, the social, economic, and political effects were increasingly considered to be the most important ones. The distinction between minor and major excommunication, though never more than tenuous, became more widespread. With the advent of Gratian’s Decretum in the twelfth century, and the annotation and continuation of his work by the Decretists in the next century, excommunication was finally

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institutionalized and well-defined. However, it had lost much of its ritual, as well as its salutary character, which deteriorated even further in the late Middle Ages. Now it was based mostly on the legal fixation of consequences in spheres outside the Church. What had been a ritual became a juridical sentence. While theologians still upheld its basic meta-ritual character, misuse, abuse, and overuse for political and economic ends diluted the original qualities of the excommunication ritual. The growing gap between its basic meta-ritual character and the utilitarian way in which it was used aroused a lot of criticism, but this went mostly unheeded by Church and lay authorities. Lessening faith in the intentions of the excommunicators, as well as a dramatic rise in the number of excommunicates for all kinds of reasons, led to the deterioration of excommunication’s overall efficacy, on all levels. Growing literacy, education, and rationality finally brought about the Reformation. When in 1520 Martin Luther publicly burned the papal bull Exsurge Domine, which declared him excommunicate, he lent expression to a historical development that no longer accepted the unfettered power that excommunication had held in earlier times. I might put forward two theses culminating in a third: One is that excommunication must exist as a threat to be efficacious. As it was overused, it lost its value to qualitative as well as quantitative inflation. Two, excommunication was too potent not to use, because of the three quite different levels on which it was effective. It entailed so many and so powerful consequences that its use promised success for any ends one might have in mind. Three, the fundamentally meta-ritual character of excommunication, which originally made it so powerful and its use so potent and widespread, inevitably resulted in its reduction to a minor technique after the ritual sphere underwent critical re-tailoring in the Reformation. references Anker, K. 1919, Bann und Interdikt im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert als Voraussetzung der Reformation, Tübingen. Austin, J. L. 1962, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson, Oxford. Bell, C. 1992, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, New York. Bourdieu, P. 2002, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 16, 14th ed., Cambridge. Daniel, N. 1975, The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe, Arab Background Series, London & Beirut. Engreen, F. E. 1945, “Pope John the Eighth and the Arabs,” Speculum 20, pp. 318–330. Fransen, G. 1992 (ed.), Burchard of Worms, Decretorum libri XX ex Consiliis et orthodoxorum patrum decretis, tum etiam diversarum nationum synodis seu loci communes congesti, Aalen.

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Singer, M. 1984, Man’s Glassy Essence. Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology, Bloomington, Ind. Struve, T. 1978, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 16, Stuttgart. Vismara, G. 1974, Impium Foedus. Le origini della “respublica christiana,” Milan. Vodola, E. 1986, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, Berkeley, Calif. Wienbruch, U. 1971, “signum,” “significatio,” und “illuminatio” bei Augustin, Der Begriff der Repraesentatio im Mittelalter. Stellvertretung, Symbol, Zeichen, Bild, ed. A. Zimmermann, Miscellanea Mediaevalia. Veröffentlichungen des Thomas-Institus der Universität zu Köln 8, Berlin, pp. 76–93.

6 The Work of Zâr: Women and Spirit Possession in Northern Sudan Janice Boddy To speak of “ritual efficacy,” or ritual-and-efficacy, implies the prospect of tangible results: sprinkled with holy water, a wheelchair-bound man rises to walk—a miraculous but obvious cure. Yet much that ritual accomplishes takes place behind the scenes, at the level of the cognitive and the emotional, helping to orient participants in social and cosmological space, or, as Rappaport (1993) suggests, producing their commitment to it. In this chapter I will mobilize ethnographic information on Hofriyat, a village of Arabic-speaking Muslims in northern Sudan, to discuss the potential—not certain—efficacy of ritual for shoring up the meaningfulness of participants’ everyday world or reestablishing it when it is under threat. The rites described are zâr spirit possession ceremonies, practiced by people with whom I have conducted anthropological fieldwork since the mid 1970s (Boddy 1989). I will examine zâr rites for their capacity to open up cultural meanings and to enable both participants and onlookers to adjust their moral compass, sense of self, and somatic well-being. To the extent that zâr produces effects on and in participants, it does so, I believe, by calling attention to the ambiguities and conundrums of daily life through the simultaneous invocation of otherness and locally apposite behaviors and ideals. Individuals are propelled into a series of awkward confrontations from which they claim to emerge transformed. But before arguing this point, let me sketch some ethnographic context for the Sudanese zâr.

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Zâr The term zâr refers at once to a type of spirit (plural zayrân), the illnesses such spirits bring by taking possession of humans, and the rites by which zayrân can be appeased. Variants of zâr are found in Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia, Arabia, and Iran.1 In Sudan, zâr rituals and coteries of adherents, mainly women, were originally modeled on local Sufi brotherhoods or tarîqas, whose zikrs or “remembrance” rites are largely the preserve of men (Constantinides 1991, Makris 2000). Today the two are well distinguished, and many who consider themselves pious Muslims condemn the zâr as unIslamic. Although religious scholars regard the zâr with disfavor, they subscribe, as all Muslims do, to the foundations on which the practice rests, for zayrân belong to the class of beings called jinn, whose existence the Qurcan substantiates.2 Jinn are mischievous ethereal entities who inhabit a world that is both parallel to our own (they have homelands, ethnic groups, religions, classes, sex, and age) and contiguous with it (their lands are superimposed on our own), but who are imperceptible to us most of the time. They are sentient beings created by Allah and both similar to and different from bani Adam— sons of Adam, human beings. Whereas humans are composed of water and earth, jinn are composed of their complements: air and fire. Though jinn live longer than humans, they are nonetheless governed by natural laws and bound by social contracts; they are born, have childhoods, grow up, marry, reproduce, and live in families. Yet vis à vis humans they have a number of exceptional abilities. They can move unimpeded through walls and doors, transform themselves into animals, assume human form. They can take possession of humans at will, signaling their presence by provoking illness, disturbing visions, or dreams. Some jinn are malevolent, others benign, but zayrân, also known as red jinn ( jinn al-ahmâr) or red winds (rowhan alahmâr), are capricious pleasure seekers, amoral and ambivalent. Most of the time they remain “above” ( fôg) their human hosts, exerting constant pressure on the head or neck, inducing in them specific moods, bodily sensations, and desires whose import can be deciphered with the aid of zâr specialists, shaykhat.3 Sometimes, however, a spirit causes its host to feel unwell or exacerbates an existing complaint. This problem calls for an appeasement ceremony, in which the troublesome zâr is invited to “descend” into the human realm and make known its demands, in return for which it should restore its host to health. On such occasions, zayrân manifest themselves to observers by

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entering the bodies of their mediums during trance, displacing their persons, and acting in their stead. The possessed seldom enter trance spontaneously; trance is a state one must learn to effect in order to negotiate an appropriate relationship with intrusive zayrân. As adepts put it, one learns through the ritual how not to resist a spirit’s attempts to enter the human realm through the vehicle of her body. “Trance” here refers to a general human capacity to abnegate wakeful awareness. Yet how trance is experienced depends not only on universal aptitudes but on the culturally specific contexts in which they are invoked. For Hofriyati it is a period when the quotidian self is in abeyance and an outside agent appears to dominate the bodily being. Although Western psychology tends to describe trance as an “exceptional” state, in many societies it is expected and in some even routine; indeed, more exceptional cross-culturally is the heightened significance attached to rational self-awareness and the pathologization and avoidance of trance states in much of the west.4 For heuristic purposes we can think of trance as a form of transitory psychological dissociation, or separation of normally connected mental processes, that enables one to experience an other than socially normative relationship between body and mindfulness, a suspension of conscious volition and thought. To witness trance is to witness a transitory shift of the socially normative body–mind relation in another human being. I am aware that considerable ink has been spilled over the inadequacies of Cartesian dualism for capturing non-Western realities and contributing to their exoticization. Long before the 1987 publication of Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s seminal article “The Mindful Body,” ethnographers had amassed considerable evidence of monism in cultures around the world: cosmologies and forms of sociality that do not constitute mind and body as separate entities or that brook no firm split between self and other, variously defined. Certainly, northern Sudanese with whom I worked do not see themselves as unique entities, wholly distinct from others of their group, nor do they experience affective and physical events as unconnected: a man who, as an infant, consumed his mother’s milk just when an Ethiopian spirit arrived “above” her finds that he is plagued by the same spirit in later life, as evidenced by a desire for coffee on Sundays and the salience in his dreams of the color red. Just as he and his mother share bodily substance—blood and its nutritional products—so they share a spirit who was attracted to that bodily substance at a specific time. Personhood in northern Sudan is relational rather than individualistic; a person is linked corporeally and morally to kin. More on this point will help make sense of zâr and the potential efficacy of possession rites.

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The Theme of Closure in Hofriyat During prepubescence Hofriyati undergo ritual alterations of the physical body that profoundly affect their corporeal sensibilities.5 Genital cutting orients the mindful bodies of boys and girls to their incompletely shared social world, establishing differences in their dispositions and their adult perspectives. A girl’s body is “purified,” feminized, closed by the removal of clitoral tissue and infibulation of her external labia, then concealed behind courtyard walls, where she is expected to remain. A boy’s body is complementarily masculinized by circumcision, uncovered, opened to confront the world with which he must henceforth engage. Girls thus learn in a visceral way that their future lies in childbearing and the inside world of the house; boys, that theirs revolves around provisioning and protecting family and village life. The female body, however, is both a metonym and an icon of village society, guarded from external threat by its own scar tissue, household walls, and the defensive efforts of local men. Enclosure and “covering” also characterize social relations, in that marriage is strongly endogamous in Hofriyat. People are expected to wed cousins, whose parents are also cousins, and so on into the past. Indeed, I found that more than two-thirds of first marriages in the village conformed to this pattern (Boddy 1989). Most people also marry within a tightly circumscribed territorial range, and genealogical and territoral proximity generally overlap. Yet villagers recognize that, however valued, enclosure is always relative. For life to continue, bodies, houses, and families must have openings. The trouble is that this requirement makes people, and especially women, vulnerable: to other humans, but also to powerful spirits, some capricious and some malign, who cannot be kept out by walls, human skin, or closed doors. Illness results when physical and architectural defenses are breached, for then spirits are encouraged to intrude. For females, bodily closure is considered not just normative but healthy, even curative: a young girl who has been ailing for some time may be prematurely infibulated in order to “be made well.” Infibulation, by enclosing the womb, contains and safeguards uterine blood, the source of a woman’s fertility, men’s (and women’s) future descendants, and the village’s well-being. Local concepts of procreation stipulate that a child’s bones and sinew (hard parts) are formed from the semen or “seed” of its father, while its flesh and blood (soft parts) are formed from its mother’s blood. Such contributions are again complementary, if differently weighted: flesh and blood, after all, are ephemeral, bones relatively enduring. Like the skeleton that structures the body, patrilineal descent structures human relations in durable,

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continuing ways. While patrilineally endogamous marriages are preferred, in practice marriages traced through close female kin are highly suitable, even should prospective spouses belong to different local lineages. Indeed, relations traced through flesh and blood—that is, through women—link the village’s skeletal descent groups, providing integument that eventually succumbs to entropy and decay unless renewed by successive intermarriages. The social body—the endogamous village—is thus homologous with the physical body; both are moral entities. There are implications here for daily social relations and a person’s sense of self. Bodies are at once integral and interdependent, thoroughly and complexly relational. Indeed, one can regard the village as an organism in which physical substances—flesh, blood, bone—circulate and are shared among individuals to varying degrees. Likewise, degrees of consubstantiality map social alignments, official and unofficial, that are realized in a physical way. Closely related women experience their shared corporeality acutely. It is common, for example, for a woman whose daughter has died in childbed or from some other cause to fall gravely ill herself from a malady called du’f, “weak” or “diminished blood.” This gendered view of consubstantiality intersects with ideals of harmony, balance, and purity in bodily constitution. Regardless of one’s sex, a person’s health can be controlled to some extent by eating foods or smelling odors described as “pure.” Pure foods are white or enclosed by skins, rinds, jars, or tins. Consuming these is said to “bring blood” (bijîb ad-dum) and enhance health, while consuming food or drink defined as “impure” can diminish blood’s capacity, precipitate illness, and render the body assailable by zayrân. Breathing impure smells—of human sweat or blood—is idiomatic of physical openness and signifies spirit intrusion. Because women are deemed less able to resist invasive spirits than men, a woman who encounters bad smells may immediately fall ill or enter possession trance. But beyond this possibility, any untoward event or act, such as walking alone at night through village lanes, endangers a woman’s health, for bodies out of place are also “open,” vulnerable to zayrân and other jinn. Importantly, zayrân, the red jinn, are powerfully attracted to women’s blood, the exposure of which is thus carefully controlled, for drawing the attentions of a zâr can have serious repercussions for pregnancy and birth. Zayrân who “seize” a woman’s blood can prevent her from becoming pregnant or can “loosen” her fetus and precipitate miscarriage. This situation is clearly problematic, in that women bear the onus for reproduction in Hofriyat; only under exceptional circumstances will a man be suspected of infertility. A woman who

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does not give birth in the first year or two of her marriage or who produces daughters but no sons risks divorce or co-wifery as her husband continues his quest for descendants. A Hofriyati woman is therefore understandably anxious to placate troublesome spirits should she experience conditions of “openness” and find herself possessed. She is under considerable pressure to conform to the specific ideals of her sex: to be “closed,” chaste, and modest, to conduct herself with dignity, to marry a close kinsman, and to produce numerous offspring, especially sons. Not to do so or to experience a setback in these pursuits leads readily to possession. Thus, zâr possession is an unfortunate but not unusual condition. Most consider it a lifelong state, least welcome in its early stages, when a difficult, unruly spirit is reluctant to release its grip on a woman’s reproductive health until its demands are met. The purpose of the healing rite is to tame the zâr and establish a social relationship between it and its human host. But the success of this venture requires that the woman and her family recognize the difference between the two. Establishing this difference is critical to the spirit’s being accepted as the cause of fertility problems rather than the woman herself. It is this external responsibility that zâr rites help to accomplish, at the same time as they grant opportunities for gaining perspective on the bond between female self and reproductive function that Hofriyati culture enjoins.

Ambiguity, Difference, and the Zâr I propose that spirit possession in Hofriyat provides a corrective to such cultural identifications of mind and body, self and other, or self and context, that have or could become stultifying, disenabling—impediments to agency and a healthful orientation to the world. Zâr rituals in northern Sudan play with the significance of openness and closure, unsettle accepted canons of morality and propriety, and in doing so help to establish useful categorical distinctions in the minds and through the bodies of the possessed. The zâr is a culturally and historically specific aesthetic; its rites invoke the familiar along with the alien and ambivalent in ways that are at once intuited and quietly observed. It is, in this way, therapeutic. How so? By summoning spirits to enter the visible world through their human hosts, the rituals confirm two things: the materiality of spirits, and their power over women’s lives. Asserted afresh with each new or repeat diagnosis, the existential distinction between host and spirit enables the possessed to distinguish between her symptoms and her culturally constructed, socially

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monitored self. Where procreation is at issue, for instance, the rites affirm to others and herself that she is inherently fertile, for zayrân have interfered with her ability to reproduce. The ritual thus supports her self while providing occasion to reflect on its composition. Crucial to this process, I think, is the temporal oscillation of experiential positions during rites. The effiacy of zâr rituals in providing space for confronting the taken-for-granteds of daily life, but also for affirming their worth, depends on more than undergoing possession trance. It also requires that one witness trance being experienced by neighbors and kin. To show how this process works entails further elucidation of the zâr and thus a return to its ethnographic logic. According to Hofriyati, there are two levels of existence in the natural world: one occupied by humans, another by creatures called jinn. The physical abode of jinn is contiguous with our own but, like the creatures themselves, is normally invisible to humans. The world of jinn overlies and shares qualities with the visible world yet exists independently of it; jinn are not the ghosts of former humans, but existents in their own right. At certain places and times the boundaries between human and jinn domains are weak, and jinn, who are less restricted by their physical makeup than humans, can cross over and wreak havoc with human lives. Although invisible to humans most of the time, jinn are not supernatural beings but the physical counterparts of humans in a quadripartite, holistic creation. Humans are composed of dust and water, jinn, of wind and pure fire. Humans have form and are diurnal, jinn are formless and most active at night. The two are obverse entities: each form is the antithesis of its counterpart. By virtue of their composition, jinn are able to negotiate the human world with a fluidity that its regular inhabitants lack. Where humans must use doors, jinn can burst through walls and ceilings when intent on entering a human’s room. Importantly, jinn can enter a human body and thus temporarily occupy it; a human wishing to initiate relations with another is constrained to communicate that desire in less immediate ways, although kin, who share corporeal substance, may be considered already to “possess” each other in this sense. As has been noted, the jinn who most often trouble Hofriyati are zayrân, self-indulgent, gregarious hedonists who live, as humans do, in societies andwho have occupations, religions, and ethnic identities. Among them are zâr Europeans, Turks, Ethiopians, and other Africans; kings, slaves, merchants, herdsmen, prostitutes, nuns, male homosexuals, Coptic priests, Islamic holy men, Nuer leopard-skin chiefs. Zayrân are either male or female, children, adults, or elderly. They are born; they marry and reproduce; eventually they die. They are not wholly good or bad but, like humans, something of both.

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Their chief characteristics are ambivalence and caprice, in which they differ from humans only by excess. A zâr may be the counterpart of a human historical figure, such as General Charles Gordon or the Virgin Mary. Each is named and has an individual history, typical behaviors when appearing in the body of a human host, and kin relations with other zayrân which, in a key departure from those of Hofriyati, cross-cut kinship as well as ethnic and religious lines. Zayrân who possess Hofriyati and are the focus of their ministrations belong only to foreign societies in the parallel world of jinn. Villagers have no knowledge of zayrân who behave or look like themselves. Indeed, despite their similarity to humans in some regards, zayrân are quintessential others, alien physically, socially, and culturally. Even Muslim spirits who exhibit admirable piety and self-restraint ultimately subvert local values by being wed exogamously, to non-kin adherents of other faiths. The complexities of zayrân become obvious during possession rites, when spirits are summoned in sequence to show themselves in the bodies of their human (mainly female) hosts. On the one hand, spirit performances hyperbolize village ideals, caricature them in the spirits’ outlandish demands for human finery: gold, henna, imported soaps, and delicate fabrics, all markings of femininity in Hofriyat. Here zayrân are analogous to their hosts, but more extreme. Yet such behaviors belie the deeper disparities between humans and zayrân. And this aspect, too, receives ceremonial elaboration: a spirit acts in ways appropriate to its specific but in some way non-Hofriyati ethnic group, social role, religion, and sex. A zâr may be wanton and undignified, take on superior airs, beg piteously, dance about wildly, speak in brash tones or coy ones—behaviors improper for Hofriyati but especially Hofriyati women. When zâr and villager occupy the same body, the characteristics of each cast those of the other into relief. Their partial resemblance contributes to the effect by furnishing a line of bearing that both invites their comparison and illuminates their contrasts. To see how the zâr acts as a foil to women’s everyday lives, we need to consider the Hofriyati wedding, a distilled expression of salient cultural values and ideals. Clues to this insight can be found in the zâr’s special vocabulary, which, like subtle transparencies in works of allegorical fiction, serves to orient novice readers. For example, a woman for whom a zâr is held is referred to as the “bride of the zâr,” and spirits are likened to husbands in that both have a penchant for caprice. Certain references are a bit more obscure: during a wedding the groom and his entourage must fight a mock battle with the bride’s kin at the formal or men’s entrance to her home before being granted admittance; further, in Hofriyati thought the bride’s vaginal opening, closed by her infibulation, is the symbolic equivalent of this threshold, and the groom has acquired

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the right to pass over both of them. In the lexicon of the zâr, a woman’s husband is known as her “doorkeeper” (bowab), a term that links this context to that of the wedding while also alluding to the fact that since husbands provide funds to mount spirit rites, they can effectively open or bar the invisible “door” behind which spirits are said to stand before entering their hosts when summoned by the ritual drums. For the imaginatively engaged participant in a possession event, this double entendre explodes as it brings to mind further associations of doorways, thresholds, keys, and enclosures, symbols ubiquitous in Hofriyat. Once this line of thought is started, it becomes increasingly clear that the zâr is, in much of its structure, an elaborate and supple parody of the wedding and, by extension, of everyday life. As it unfolds, it unlinks routinized associations, extolling as potentially positive what the wedding cautions against, namely, forging contractual relationships with outsiders. The zâr contains a wealth of potential messages, not least being that the cultural directives of “closure” and fertility that so rigidly frame women’s lives are neither immutable nor utterly determinate. Zâr symbolism and ritual structure are not the only vehicles for opening up implicit meanings. During the ritual, spirits are summoned in sequence, by ethnic affiliation. One by one throughout the night they appear in villagers’ midst, and as they do a catalogue of “others” comes to life, dramatizing a series of spirit (human) traits. Muslim holy men zayrân display masculine piety and unctuous religiosity; Ethiopian zayrân display nobility and improper sexuality; European zayrân show a fondness for drink, material acquisitiveness, and the soi-disant benevolent exercise of power. Each spirit “scene” provides a backdrop for values to which villagers subscribe; in each case positive values are depicted along with negative ones in a context already rife with ambiguity. Zayrân embodied in their hosts provide concrete expression of the problems of human existence in heightened relief. One of my favorite ethnographic examples will help illustrate this point. It refers again to the wedding: ideally that ceremony, like the zâr, lasts for seven days. Its climax comes near dawn of the third morning, when the bride is led out from seclusion with a shawl of red and gold silk draped over her head, concealing all of her body but her legs. She is positioned on a mat in the center of the courtyard, where she stands, barefoot and immobile, until her husband steps onto the mat and removes the shawl. Now she is revealed in all her finery and her family’s gold, with elaborately hennaed hands covering her face in a gesture of timidity. Gently, the groom releases her arms and she begins the exacting bridal dance: eyes tightly shut, arms extended to the sides, back arched, feet moving in tiny mincing steps that never leave the mat. Toward the end of each song she breaks off her dance and shyly recovers her face, then

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recommences with the groom’s signal, as before, repeating the sequence until she has had enough, and her kinswomen lead her away. At no time ought the bride to have seen her husband or the gathering for whom her dance was the focus of rapt attention and long anticipation. In the zâr, Luliya is a female Ethiopian prostitute spirit who demands that Sudanese wedding incense, jewelery, and a bridal shawl be ready for her ritual use. When Luliya appears during a zâr, a bridal mat is spread and the spirit dances as a Hofriyati bride. When the silky shawl is removed, Luliya’s (host’s) hands cover her face; when these are pulled away she starts to dance with closed eyes, though far less reticently than the bride and with obvious pretense at shyness. What is happening here? On one level a wanton, uncircumcised, nominally Christian spirit presumes to dance as a chaste, circumcised, Muslim village woman. In the attempt, the spirit overcompensates, exaggerating the controlled steps of the bride to the point where simulated Hofriyati drama becomes a spirit farce. Luliya is not by nature bashful; her timidity must be feigned. The spirit’s own personality shows through the facade she erects with the aid of her host, illuminating Hofriyati ideals against a background of patently non-Hofriyati traits. But this is not all. What the audience actually observes is a normally restrained, infibulated Hofriyati woman in the role of a wanton, uninfibulated foreigner who in turn “plays” a village bride who is the epitome of restraint. In looking at the other, Hofriyati see the other looking at them; while in looking at the woman entranced, they see themselves looking at the other looking at them. The multiple reflection is dramatically sustained . . . then suddenly shatters as Luliya peeks over the hands of her host, giving herself away to the laughter of her human audience. This densely convoluted episode is more than a comic discourse on the ambiguities of gender and sexuality, for it raises these as issues in themselves and points to the somewhat subversive observation (in Hofriyat) that feminine deportment is not innate but culturally constructed, and thus perhaps modifiable. In these and other possession dramas two levels of meaning—that of everyday life and that of its extraordinary counterface, the zâr—oscillate and nourish one another, enabling the ritual to accumulate interpretive weight with each spirit appearance, challenging observers to draw their own conclusions. As an aesthetic genre, the zâr enables a great deal to be implied which might be too inappropriate, heretical, or politically dangerous to say outright. Human “authors” entirely disavow their authorship: whatever is said is said by zayrân, whose existence is thereby reasserted as a matter of fact. Observers at a zâr are confronted by a series of riddles, a multilayered paradox in which alien beings are presented as antithetical to Hofriyati, yet more Hofriyati than

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villagers themselves, all in the bodies of ordinary women. When inhabited by a zâr, a woman is literally not who she is—not human, not Hofriyati, not even, in most cases, female. That said, though the identities of the possessed and her intrusive zâr are distinct, and it is the aim of the rite to cultivate awareness of their distinction in the possessed, witnesses may find it difficult to maintain the separation of entities, and those describing the event sometimes refer to the woman and her spirit interchangeably. Yet this risk of confusion is what makes the rite so provocative. Like the grotesque in Western art and literature, by forcing together incongruous entities and ideas it uncouples naturalized associations and disturbs assumptions that tacitly guide routine life. And for any who would push interpretation further, zayrân appear to be none other than Hofriyati themselves, seen in the mirror of an artfully imagined world. Thus might Hofriyati women become objects, indeed subjects, to themselves. This is not the work of trance alone but rather the continuous shifting back and forth throughout the rite between moments of “absence” (ghaiyba) and moments of self-aware “presence” (hadra), now seeing your friends and kinswomen as zayrân, now becoming absent from your self as a zâr takes hold and you provide that potential for others; this enactment, I think, is what helps to destabilize cultural embodiment. When a spirit takes over, a woman is said to experience its social world; released from trance when the drumbeat shifts to that of another zâr, she witnesses this other world through the bodies of her friends and kin. Even for those who merely observe, the juxtaposition of own and other realities is highly suggestive. Zâr trance is not just a subjective experience; it is also a cultural performance in which implicit cultural knowledge is brought to conscious attention through parody, inversion, caricature. Women afterwards say they “see things differently” and “feel better” about their lives. One might reasonably suggest that the ritual’s method is mimesis, or simulative representation: the rite “shows,” rather than explicitly “tells,” via a series of episodes in which familiar women become temporarily alien to others and themselves. The mimetic faculty is, as Bourdieu (1990) notes, the basis for human learning; I would argue that zâr rites provide occasions in which there can take place contextual learning—what Gregory Bateson (1972) called “deutero-learning” or learning about learning, about what has been learned. In bringing together the commonplace and the strange in temporally and systematically circumscribed ways, the rituals open spaces for reflection in which empathy and insight can emerge. Through her imaginative engagement in the rite, a participant is enabled to disengage herself from the image of womanhood that she so closely identifies with and that she has come to embody so completely. She claims a moment of emotional distance from her social and cultural situation, yet under the cloak of ambiguity that does not demand

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renunciation of her self, only contextualizes it. The vacillation of audience and participant positions, of seeing and feeling, being exposed to satire and the challenging juxtaposition of contradictory categories and domains, may propel her to levels of understanding that are foreclosed in everyday life. Possession inserts a caesura between body and mind, self and context, precisely when the culturally informed, personal elaboration of their unity has become problematic for health. Along with the issues surrounding fertility, the symptom most often associated with zâr is zihuj—lassitude, depression, apathy. Periodically participating in zâr rites, along with fulfilling the everyday tasks that one’s spirits impose, are mnemonics, aids for preserving the separation of entities within oneself, for maintaining insight and adjustment within the relational world.

Social Efficacy Possession also “works” in quite pragmatic but equally personal ways on the social plane. Having spirits enables a woman to open up the dense tangle of relationships in which she is enmeshed, a situation that stems from the high frequency of endogamous first marriage (Boddy 1989) and the precepts that ensure its continuity. Village genealogies are extremely convoluted and kinship bonds are multidimensional. A woman’s mother’s sister may also be her father’s brother’s wife and her own mother-in-law. Paradoxically, because one is related to almost every kinsperson in several different ways, and each of these ways carries its own set of obligations, moral allegiance is not just concentrated but ambiguous and potentially contradictory. Under such circumstances it can be crucial for individuals to map out personal networks of support within their encompassing group of kin.6 But because women are expected to be submissive to menfolk’s desires and are responsible for maintaining the social fabric through continuous mutual visiting, their personal networks may be less apparent or less readily negotiated than men’s. Moreover, a woman’s personal identity may be complicated and unclear to others: sisters, for example, but also paternal aunts and nieces, are considered social and jural equivalents, expected to assume the other’s place in a marriage when one of them has died. So thoroughly merged can these women’s identities be that male genealogists generally fail to note when a man’s children have been borne by different though closely related mothers, whereas had the mothers not been closely related the point would have been remarked.7 Though a man may also replace his deceased brother in the latter’s marriage, the children of that marriage are named for their actual fathers, reflecting the greater individuation of men’s social identities.8 For women, the point remains that for Hofriyati (as

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Karen Brown [1990:13] succinctly notes of Haitians), “human connection is the assumption; it is separation that requires both effort and explanation.” Knowledge of maternal kinship that is at risk of being lost in this patrilineal society is partially preserved in informal, narrative genealogies of women’s spirit afflictions. Because zayrân are attracted to blood, and maternal blood is the substance that forms a child’s own blood and flesh, offspring are likely to acquire spirits that have also possessed maternal kin, typically mothers and maternal grandmothers, though mother’s and grandmothers’ sisters can be sources of spirits as well. Importantly, members of a rural possession group not only share a mutual history; it is, in part, because of that history that they become possessed. During my fieldwork roughly two-thirds of all women in Hofriyat had acknowledged a spirit affliction at some point in their lives and almost half of the women over the age of fifteen claimed to be possessed. Since virtually all of these women had sisters, mothers, aunts, nieces, and neighbors who were fellow adepts, participants in local zâr ceremonies knew each other intimately from contexts other than possession. In Hofriyat at the time of my fieldwork, zâr added layers to existing kin relations rather than, as I. M. Lewis (1990, 1991) hypothesized for the urban zâr, compensating for their loss. Whatever understandings zâr might catalyze depend not only on a person’s kin conundrums but also on characteristics of spirits and humans involved. When Saida, for instance, was pregnant with Miriam, she became possessed by the spirit Hakim Basha, a highly placed Western doctor zâr. Thus, when Miriam fell ill as a married woman and possession was diagnosed, the spirit responsible was believed to be Hakim Basha. So it transpired: Miriam during her healing rite went into trance and Hakim Basha emerged to confront the assembly through her body. But Miriam’s mother’s mother had also been possessed by Hakim Basha. Being possessed by the same spirit who possessed one’s deceased maternal grandmother is a way of relating to that ancestor, but indirectly, not through words or overt acts of allegiance but through embodied experience. Here too, then, social alignments were being realized through corporeal ones. The few village men who were possessed or in whom possession had been acknowledged during childhood had all acquired their spirits from their mothers. Zayrân accentuate “blood lines.” In the complicated tapestry of local relatedness, specific spirits provide threads of coherence, lines of matrilineal continuity. Zâr possession thus provides an embodied counterpoint to officially articulated kinship; in doing so it activates matri-group understandings and support. But perhaps it goes even further. From well before the Christian millennium until at least the fifteenth century AD, and possibly for some centuries after that, matrilineality with preferred endogamy and adelphic succession

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were predominant structural principles in the region of Sudan stretching north along the Nile from Khartoum to the Dongola Reach, in which Hofriyat is located. There is evidence, too, that royal women, who in some political epochs may have been sister-wives, governed during their brothers’ absences and sons’ minorities.9 In late medieval times the Muslim rulers of Egypt frequently captured important Nubian women (and their sons) in war, holding them at Cairo to ensure peace along the southern border: letters from Nubian kings and nobles entreating their sisters’ and mothers’ return attest to these women’s roles as important state advisors (Vantini 1981: 182). Contemporary headstones of commoners’ graves make it clear that this pattern was not confined to royalty.10 Under leaders of the overtly patrilineal and Muslim Funj confederacy established in the sixteenth century, the political reality of matrilineal descent was, in a sense, domesticated though not denied, for the king’s maternal uncle was assigned a powerful role as superintendent of the palace (literally, the royal enclosure or hosh) and the status of an heir’s mother was a principal determinant of his succession (Spaulding 1985). As recently as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long after Islam and Arab patrilineality had taken root in northern Sudan, matrilineal tendencies were evident in the ascendancy of paramount kings’ sisters’ sons to the local throne in the vicinity of Hofriyat.11 Perhaps, then, zâr plays a role in validating villagers’ archival knowledge and keeping alive in shadow form an ancient social structure that was historically eclipsed by Arab influence. Traces of matrifocality may be seen in the fact that during my fieldwork a woman was expected to give birth in her mother’s home; she would reside there for the last trimester of her pregnancy and for several months after delivery, until she and her baby were declared well and fit to return to her husband. Such visits, which included younger children, often stretched to a year or more, particularly if the husband was a migrant laborer, and were repeated with successive pregnancies. Thus matrilineal patterns of spirit possession that were described earlier may articulate pragmatic and emotionally compelling affiliations among sometime co-resident matrikin, whose relationships are officially secondary, as much as they reflect the matrilineal past and its embodied continuation. Still, the matrilineal logic of possession constitutes a political parry to the historical process of Arabization itself. Possession thus works to index or effect (re)alignments of hegemonically related kin. More than this: hierarchies of age, sex, and authority are covertly challenged when spirit relations are mapped onto those of the possessed, as, for example, when a woman and her mother-in-law are possessed by Muslim father and daughter spirits, respectively. A person can be latently possessed

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by several different spirits at once, spirits of different sexes, ages, and social estates who hail from various homelands in the spirit world. Thus a woman’s personal pantheon may present different facets of her social identity or express her internalization—embodiment again—of domestic stresses and strains. For full sisters to have no common zayrân might nuance a distinction between them, where they are otherwise social and substantive equivalents. Likewise, for a woman and her sororal niece, who is also her son’s wife, to be possessed by the same zâr would intensify their matrilateral bond while downplaying the affinal one; if both are possessed yet no common spirit links them, the opposite emphasis might obtain. The versatile ambiguities of Sudanese kinship are echoed and braced by the subtleties of spirit discourse, for only those with a thorough understanding of local relationships and their tensions, and knowledge of villagers’ possession histories, are equipped to recognize in specific cases of possession the delicate reweaving of kinship and the querying, even defiance of established allegiances that they can imply. And such knowledgeable individuals are, overwhelmingly, women, whose status limits their social maneuverability and thus may sharpen their attention to the details of social affairs. Possession, especially in a rural area such as Hofriyat, helps participants open up thickly layered, politically significant relationships, separate their strands, assess and negotiate their respective valences. Importantly, however, it is not the women who initiate this process, but zayrân.

Conclusion Zâr, as a ritual complex, works in at least two related ways to alleviate personal distress. It is, first, an ingenious means for Hofriyati women whose embodiment of feminine cultural images so clashes with the exigencies of their lives that they have fallen ill, to gain perspective on their circumstances from a position ostensibly beyond village truths, through possession trance, the experience of being temporarily alien to themselves, and by observing such transitions and alterations in family and friends. As such it locates responsibility for failing to realize cultural ideals in exogenous agents, preserving a woman’s embodiment of those ideals—her self—while reducing the suffering that it brings. Second, zâr offers participants a way to open up the dense knot of relationships in which they are invariably caught, so as to subtly navigate their positioning and gain insight into the logic that informs their daily lives. The efficacy of zâr may not be obvious or instantaneous, but implicit and cumulative, developing

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gradually and continuously over time. And this may be why spirit possession in Hofriyat is considered a lifelong affliction, but also a lifelong boon.

notes 1. Constantinides 1972, 1991. Cloudsley (1983: 75) has some evidence that zâr is practiced in the Maghreb as well. 2. See Suras 6, 17, 18, 34, 37, 46, 55, 72, and 114. 3. Feminine plural of shaykh. There are male zâr specialists too, but they are less common than female and more typical of zâr tumbura than zâr bori, the form I describe here. On tumbura, see Kenyon 1991, 2004, and Makris 2000. 4. For further development of this point and a literature review on spirit possession cross-culturally, see Boddy 1994. 5. This section is drawn from Boddy 1989, 2002, 2007. 6. For discussions of the social implications of endogamy, see Barth 1973, Bourdieu 1977, Comaroff and Comaroff 1981, Comaroff and Roberts 1981, Comaroff 1985, Peters 1972, Rosen 1982, Solway 1990. 7. Women, however, did remember, and they provided significant information about maternal relatedness. 8. Thus Hofriyati do not practice a “true” form of the levirate. 9. See Al Hag Hamad Mohammed Kheir 1987, Kronenberg and Kronenberg 1965, Vantini 1981, Adams 1984, Spaulding 1985. 10. Dr. Nicholas Millet, Curator, Royal Ontario Museum, personal communication, 1992. 11. Burckhardt 1819: 247; Bruce 1813, vol. 4: 509.

references Adams, William Y. 1984. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Al Hag Hamad Mohammed Kheir. 1987. Women and Politics in Mediaeval Sudanese History. In The Sudanese Woman, Susan Kenyon, ed. Graduate School Publications 19. Khartoum: University of Khartoum Press, pp., 8–39. Barth, Frederick. 1973. Descent and Marriage Reconsidered. In The Character of Kinship, J. Goody, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–19. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ——— . 1994. Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 407–434. ——— . 2002. Tacit Containment: Social Value, Embodiment, and Gender Practice in Northern Sudan. In Religion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective, S. J. Ellingston and M. C. Green, eds. New York: Routledge, pp. 187–221.

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——— . 2007. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, R. Nice, trans.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— . 1990. The Logic of Practice, R. Nice, trans. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, Karen McCarthy. 1990. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bruce, John. 1813 [1790]. Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile. London: James Robins. v.4. Burckhardt, John Lewis. 1819. Travels in Nubia. London: John Murray. Cloudsley, Ann. 1983. Women of Omdurman: Life, Love, and the Cult of Virginity. London: Ethnographica. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, John, and Jean Comaroff. 1981. The Management of Marriage in a Tswana Chiefdom. In Essays on African Marriage in Southern Africa, E. J. Krige and J. L Comaroff, eds. Cape Town: Juta, pp. 29–49. ——— , and Simon Roberts. 1981. Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Constantinides, Pamela. 1972. “Sickness and the Spirits: A Study of the ‘Zaar’ Spirit Possession Cult in the Northern Sudan.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of London. ——— . 1991. “Ill at Ease and Sick at Heart.” Symbolic Behavior in a Sudanese Healing Cult. In Symbols and Sentiments, Ioan M. Lewis, ed. New York: Academic Press, pp. 61–83. Kenyon, Susan M. 1991. The Story of a Tin Box. In Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond, I. M. Lewis, A. al-Safi, and S. Hurreiz, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute. ——— . 2004. Five Women of Sennar: Culture and Change in Central Sudan (2nd ed.). Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press. Kronenberg, A., and W. Kronenberg. 1965. Parallel Cousin Marriage in Mediaeval and Modern Nubia, Part 1. Kush 13: 241–260. Lewis, I. M. 1990. Spirits at the House of Childbirth. Times Literary Supplement, June 1–7, p. 590. ——— . 1991. Introduction: Zar in Context, the Past, Present and Future of an African Healing Cult. In Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond, I. M. Lewis, Ahmed al-Safi, and Sayyid Hurreiz, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, pp. 1–16. Makris, G. P. 2000. Changing Masters: Spirit Possession and Identity Construction among Clave Descendants and Other Subordinates in the Sudan. Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Peters, Emrys. 1972. Shifts in Power in a Lebanese Village. In Rural Politics and Social Change in the Middle East. R. Antoun and I. Harik, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 165–97.

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Rappaport, Roy A. 1993. The Obvious Aspects of Ritual. In Ecology, Meaning and Religion. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, pp. 173–222. Rosen, Lawrence. 1982. Bargaining for Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret Lock. 1987. The Mindful Body. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (1): 6–41. Solway, Jacqueline. 1990. Affines and Spouses, Friends and Lovers: The Passing of Polygyny in Botswana. Journal of Anthropological Research 46 (Spring): 41–66. Spaulding, Jay. 1985. The Heroic Age in Sinnar. East Lansing, Mich.: African Studies Center, Michigan State University. Vantini, Giovanni. 1981. Christianity in the Sudan. Bologna, Italy: EMI Press.

7 Ritual Humility in Modern Laboratories: Or, Why Ecuadorian IVF Practitioners Pray Elizabeth F. S. Roberts Crucifixes and images of the Virgin Mary watch over the microscopes and gamete incubators in several of Ecuador’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) laboratories. The majority of Ecuadorian IVF clinicians and laboratory biologists pray for God’s aid when aspirating and transferring gametes, and most would agree with Dr. Molina, one of Ecuador’s most prominent IVF specialists, when he exclaimed to me, “God is in the laboratory.” How can we make sense of the use of these images? Why are these practitioners of modern biotechnology and medicine invoking God? What do these ritualized actions and declarations do? Are they efficacious? Simply put, the answer to the last question is, “Yes.” When IVF practitioners call on divine intervention in their clinics and labs, they are acting to secure and control an uncertain outcome—pregnancy. Ritual exchange relationships with God are central to IVF and important for making sense of clinical results. This chapter describes how calling the divine mitigates uncertainty, but it focuses more specifically on another form of ritual effectiveness. These rituals also work because by humbling themselves in front of the power of God and other Catholic intermediaries, Catholic Ecuadorian IVF practitioners effectively neutralize the official Catholic condemnation of IVF. This condemnation revolves around two primary issues. The Vatican argues that (1) the research, development, and practice of IVF involve the destruction of embryos, that is, the “destruction of human life,” and (2) by engaging in assisted reproduction, humans are technologically interfering with a process that should remain under God’s dominion (Ratzinger 1987). But if, as these practitioners claim,

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God and the Virgin have a hand in determining IVF outcomes, then surely their clinics have God on their side. I became aware of these enchanted laboratories in 2000 when I first began to observe Ecuadorian IVF clinics. In 2002–2003 I carried out a year of ethnographic research in seven of Ecuador’s nine private IVF clinics (which is a relatively high number for an extremely poor rural nation of less than 12 million), all located in either Quito or Guayaquil.1 While the mechanics of IVF are roughly the same country-by-country, there are key differences in the practice of IVF between nations.2 For instance, the optimal number of eggs retrieved from a woman undergoing an IVF cycle varies with the policies of country and clinic, depending on costs, drug protocols, the local health care system, and the existence (or nonexistence) of regulatory institutions. IVF, which might be seen by some as an “immutable mobile,” an entity that can be moved without a change of meaning (Latour 1988), turns out to be very mutable indeed. Comparing the problems, debates, and anxieties that may surface regarding new technological and scientific practices in different sites “provincializes” (Chakrabarty 2000) scientific and ethical norms, even though some of these norms, such as the separation of religious and scientific rationalities, remain globally dominant. While most northern practitioners of science and biomedicine assert that their practice is disenchanted, this assertion is not so pressing to Ecuadorian IVF practitioners. Like other Ecuadorian elites and middle classes, these IVF clinicians and biologists are heirs to Enlightenment thought, and they experience themselves as modern in their participation in these high-tech endeavors. Nevertheless their spiritual approach to laboratory rationality does not trouble these IVF practitioners’ experience of themselves as moderns. In contesting the position of the Catholic Church through routine prayer, Ecuadorian IVF practitioners demonstrate that they are comfortable combining the domains of spirit and matter in the realm of science. It would be easy enough for northern scientists to dismiss these claims of God’s favor as another example of the inability of “third world” biologists to purify their labs of spirit. My task, however, is to explain how and why Ecuadorian IVF practitioners, who are fully enlisted in a modern project, proudly declare God’s presence in their midst.

Modern Catholic Dilemmas In detailing the spiritual actions of modern Ecuadorian laboratory practitioners, I am suggesting not an “alternative modernity” (Gaonkar 2001), but rather a local formulation of the predicament involved in achieving modernity

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within a nation marginalized to that process. In Ecuador the urban middle- to upper-class IVF practitioners with whom I worked could be described as avid participants in what Talal Asad (1993) calls the “modern project,” for which elite and professional classes strive. This project aims at institutionalizing civil equality, industry, consumerism, and freedom of the market, and in Ecuador it is most often understood as yet-to-be-achieved. In my daily encounters in Ecuador, there was a palpable sense of what has been termed Ecuador’s “national inferiority complex” (Miles 2003: 123). As a representative of a northern nation that supposedly functions properly, I was frequently used by Ecuadorians of all classes to enact a standardized monologue: “What’s wrong with this country? Why are we so backward?” Depending on the person speaking, the blame, I was told, rests with the dysfunctional state, corruption, or the superstitious and insular indigenous groups of Ecuador. To remedy this failure, politicians have been attempting to “modernize” the mentality of the nation, often by trying to create a shared sense of being Ecuadorian (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996).3 IVF has been held up as one symbol of pride in Ecuador’s scientific progress, but Ecuadorian IVF practitioners have engaged in this same failure narrative, constantly lamenting the difficulties of “peripheral” bioscience due to what they saw as their country’s failure to maintain the infrastructure of a “modern” nation-state. They had to go elsewhere for training and, on returning, faced an ongoing “crisis” that they narrated in economic, political, and social terms. Many of these Ecuadorian technical elites, who hold advanced degrees they attained elsewhere, are compelled to seek employment in three or four locations, as clinicians, teachers, or consultants. But even though IVF practitioners represented their need to travel elsewhere for training as a sign of Ecuador’s distance from modernity, they were not anxious about how their enchanted laboratories deviated from modern secular science. While modernity was a key symbol of attainment for these middle-class Ecuadorians, they did not consider laboratory mixtures of spirit and matter to be worrisome signs of a premodern irrationality. In North America and Europe, by contrast, the laboratory is most often seen as a modern secular realm that demands the purification of spirit so that the work of science may proceed (Latour 1993; Shapin and Schaffer 1989). Its daily operations are imagined to be “secular” in the extreme, with the full excision of religion from its domain (Hess 1993). It is sometimes easy to forget that the secular was initially constituted through the creation of religion as a bounded object constricted to the “private” sphere. Max Weber’s famous thesis that linked forms of Protestantism to the rise of capitalism (2001) predicated the modern era on the emergence of a new type of religious subjectivity, not on the total banning of religion from modernity. But “the secular” has taken

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on life of its own, so it is sometimes viewed as having brought about religion’s demise. Historian Jonathan Sheehan argues that [a]s an analytical category, secularization plagues the efforts to connect the Enlightenment and religion, not least because the term is so crucial to the self-imagination of the modern age, which has, from the eighteenth century onward, understood itself as surpassing its religious past. (2003) However, in Ecuador it is perhaps easier to make the connection between Enlightenment and modern forms of religious subjectivity, because these moderns do not imagine themselves as “surpassing” a religious past but rather as living in a fully religious present. In the past two decades, social scientists such as Bruno Latour (1993; Latour and Woolgar 1986), Donna Haraway (1991, 1997), and Talal Asad (1993, 2003) have begun to question this standard narrative of modern disenchantment. More recently the unabashed religiosity of the Bush administration and its supporters has made this narrative even easier to complicate. While the Bush administration has exhibited little interest in “surpassing” religion, its move to infuse science with religiosity has perhaps compelled beleaguered North American scientists to police the boundaries between scientific and religious epistemologies with renewed vigor. The overt banishing of religiosity from laboratory practice in the United States appears to conform to what Bruno Latour (1993) calls the “modern constitution.” Latour contends that modernity is predicated on the belief that certain domains such as nature, culture, politics, and the economy can and should be separated from each other. Moderns are those people who make these separations and who distinguish themselves from those who do not. Modernity, then, constitutes itself in relation to this otherness. One of the most basic modern separations, especially within modern science, is that between animated spirit and inert matter.4 This separation established the natural material world, the domain of science as uninfluenced by spiritual forces, which are the domain of religion. In the infancy of European capitalism and colonial expansion, the meaning of the English word “science” shifted from “general knowledge” to the “theoretical and methodical study of nature,” a nature that was newly mechanistic (Williams 1985: 278). Enlightenment thinkers posited a spiritual order in the universe, where God was no longer directly involved in the daily operations of the world, epitomized in Descartes’ argument that “God has so established nature . . . and concluded His work by merely lending His concurrence to nature in the usual way, leaving her to act in accordance with the laws which He had established” (1996: 26). Mirroring the emerging modern order, the universe became differentiated

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into the spiritual, natural, and social realms, parallel to the divisions of church, science, and the state (Hess 1995: 79). Protestantism, the new religion of a modern world (in which religion came into being as a separable entity), took to heart God’s departure from the material world. To be modern was to deny the possibility of earthly enchantment. The Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation and its doctrine of God’s earthly transcendence came in the form of the Council of Trent (1545– 1563), which asserted the divine immanence of God on earth, but only to a point. Throughout the next several hundred years, this emphasis on God’s earthly presence served as a means for Catholics to differentiate themselves from Protestants. Simultaneously, this earthly focus became somewhat problematic in the eyes of Church administration. The declaration of God’s intervention in human affairs seemed to foster “the natural tendency” on the part of Catholic peasants “to blur the distinction between genuinely religious activity and superstition,” causing Catholicism to appear “premodern,” “backwards,” and “uneducated” (O’Connell 1986). The quandary of how to maintain a clear distinction between the mainline Protestant separation of God from Earth, and the Catholic belief in the possibility of God’s miraculous intervention on earth, while at the same time preventing the populist faithful from determining the public face of Catholicism, has been termed the “Tridentine dilemma”(O’Connell 1986). Since the early twentieth century, Catholicism has been at work crafting an image of itself as fully engaged with the enlightened, scientific ethos of the day, while retaining the possibility of divine immanence.

Materialist Catholicsm In Europe, modernity was birthed partially though a process of distinguishing between those who made separations between a transcendent (Protestant) and immanent (Catholic) God. But in Latin America this cosmological battle took a different form. There, many of these contestations took place among the Catholic faithful rather than against the non-Catholic outside world. Historian Pamela Voekel argues that the move toward Enlightenment and modern ideals came not from elite men who had moved away from the Church, but rather from elite reformers within the Catholic Church (2002). Referencing Foucault, Voekel portrays these men as “self ” fashioned into a new form of Catholic subject heavily borrowed from the Protestant Reformation. These men, whom she terms “enlightened Catholics,” proclaimed themselves sober, civic-minded, self-disciplined, and rationally bureaucratic. They objected to what they saw as the premodern displays of traditional Catholicism, with its outwardly focused,

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baroque, and personalistic professions of devotion to God and saints in order to effect material change on earth.5 Voekel claims that, at least in the late eighteenth century, these men were fighting not for a separation of Church and state, but instead for a rationalized Catholic state; thus the purifications of modernity in Mexico and other Latin American nations took place within the framework of Catholicism. Voekel’s distinction between forms of Catholic subjectivity is key to my analysis of God’s invocation in the clinics and laboratories of Ecuadorian IVF. While she distinguishes between “enlightened” and “baroque” Catholics, I find it more useful to make a distinction between spiritual and materialist Catholics. Both subject positions are modern in the sense that both participate in naturalizing the opposition between the spirit and the material, although it is spiritual Catholics who have come to be called “modern,” and materialist Catholics who have come to be called “traditional.” For spiritual Catholics, God is in effect a Cartesian God. He created the natural world and now as a spiritual presence has left its daily operations behind to be observed and managed by men. This spiritual God is bounded, rule oriented, and like Him, the spiritual Catholic is foremost an individual who is inwardly focused, temperate, and rule-oriented. Spiritual Catholics are similar to mainline Protestants in many ways, especially in their distrust of materiality, except that as Catholics they must allow for the occasional intervention of God on earth, albeit much less frequently than do materialist Catholics.6 The God of materialist Catholics can and does play an active role in the daily material affairs of earth and men. He subverts His own natural laws through these interventions (often known as miracles), because He and His intermediaries are deeply involved in personal (not individualistic) relationships with materialist Catholics. While spiritual Catholicism requires the cultivation of the self-disciplined individual, materialist religiosity might be most accurately described as the cultivation of exchange relationships. Many of the practitioners as well as the patients with whom I worked were enmeshed in personal exchanges with saints. A materialist Catholic might seem to be a contradiction in terms, since materialism is often portrayed (especially by Marx, its most ardent champion) as antithetical to enchantment. Thus, materialist Catholics could be seen as radically nonmodern because of their insistence that God and His intermediaries can and do transform the material world, but this reading ignores how the very distinction between modernity and nonmodernity is, as Latour argues, constituted through the purificatory practices of modernity itself. Understanding the majority of IVF practitioners and patients in Ecuador as materialist Catholics explains their argument that their laboratories are God’s

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domain. Of the twenty laboratory biologists and clinicians with whom I spent the most time, fifteen could be categorized as embodying a materialist Catholic religious sensibility. Of the five remaining, two were atheists, and the other three I have come to think of as spiritual Catholics. These three denied God’s influence on clinical outcomes with statements like, “God is not a puppet master,” or “Faith does nothing.” These practitioners told me that they have no dealings with individual saints but only Jesus Christ, mirroring longstanding Protestant and Evangelical sentiments about the idolatry involved in forming relationships with the graven (material) images of saints. But when working with patients, everyone—even the atheist practitioners—would invoke God at specific moments of the IVF process.

Ritual Expression: Clinic and Lab My presuppositions about modern medical professionals were challenged in my first days of observation in Ecuadorian IVF clinics. Initially I assumed that the Catholic religious imagery hanging on the clinic walls was on display for the patients, the majority of whom I knew to be religious. My assumption proved to be wrong when I first entered clinic laboratories and operating rooms and observed that these images, as well as religious rituals, occupied an integral position in the practice of many embryologists and clinicians. God, it seemed, had not been banished from the premises. His will was invoked in two main areas of clinic life: first, in prayer, during procedures and treatments, and second, in practitioners’ reflections on the general state of clinical affairs. A cycle of IVF consists of many steps or phases, some more dramatic than others. First the patient is given hormones to stimulate her follicles so that more than one egg will be released at ovulation. The clinician checks the patient’s follicles with a sonogram every other day to measure their growth. When the follicles are large enough (usually around days 12–15), they are vaginally aspirated or harvested in an operating room. Follicular fluid containing the eggs is suctioned out of the patient’s uterus and deposited into test tubes, which are delivered to the waiting biologist in the darkened laboratory next door. From there the biologist empties the contents of these tubes into petri dishes and examines the fluid for eggs under a microscope. The next drama, although more solitary, is one of the two most fraught moments of the process. The laboratory biologist, now alone, prepares the eggs for insemination. Once she places the sperm in the petri dish, there is nothing else she can do but hope, until she checks for fertilization 18 to 20 hours later. It is at this time that she reflects on the quality of the eggs and sperm and prays

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for an outcome. At Dr. Padilla’s clinic, the laboratory biologist Linda kissed and caressed the incubator as she intoned her desire for God to fertilize the eggs. She would often say a short prayer, addressing God familiarly: “Que Diosito quiera que los ovulitos fertilicen. [May God want the eggs to fertilize.]” At another lab, the biologist Dr. Escobar made the sign of the cross before he placed the petri dish with the ovum and sperm in the incubator. With the gametes safely inside, he patted the incubator, saying, “Go with God.” In Dr. Leon’s laboratory, when she finished combining ovum and sperm, she would touch the image of the Virgin Mary hanging over the principal microscope and then make the sign of the cross. As she closed the door to the incubator after placing the petri dish inside, Dr. Leon would touch an attached crucifix, which was hanging in a sterile plastic bag, and again make the sign of the cross. In addition to these visible acts of devotion, some biologists told me that they make silent prayers throughout the cycle as well. Dr. Larea explained that at every aspiration she says “a prayer to God asking Him to let us get the number of eggs we need and that we get good results. I say this before I enter the lab before each aspiration so that it goes well. God help us.” She continued, “I have Christ in the laboratory. Whenever I go to do a procedure, I ask that he enlighten me to do things well.” The next day, before checking the eggs for fertilization, the biologist might make the sign of the cross. If the resulting embryos are bonito (beautiful) instead of feo (ugly) or not fertilized at all, she might give thanks and make another sign of the cross. After this crucial check the new embryos are monitored daily for cell division and regularity until the transfer. Finally, before the transfer, the right embryos must be selected and another prayer might be offered at this moment: “God permit me to choose good embryos.” The transfer of embryos to the patient is also a moment of great consequence. It occurs from 48 to 72 hours after the aspiration. During transfers, God’s intervention is called for in several ways. At Dr. Padilla’s clinic, the biologist, Linda, would enter the operating room from the laboratory holding a tube containing the embryos that were to be inserted into the catheter already positioned in the patient’s cervix. Dr. Padilla would then say out loud, mostly for the benefit of the supine woman and her husband, “This is the serious part.” When he placed the embryo-filled catheter inside the patient’s uterus for a timed minute, he would twice intone, “God help us, may these implant” as a nurse guided the patient’s right hand in the sign of the cross. With the transfer complete, the patient’s legs would be taken out of the stirrups and laid on the table. She would be covered in blankets and the table was cranked up so that her legs were higher than her head. When Linda returned to the lab after checking the catheter, she would often announce to everyone, “This all depends on God. It’s in the hands of God if they [the embryos] will stick.” She

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would then turn to the now inverted patient and say, “There is a high chance you’ll get pregnant. But you don’t know. If God helps us, all will go well.” As each practitioner exited the room, he or she kissed the patient on the cheek and told her and her husband, “God willing, you will be pregnant,” or “We need to have faith.” One morning, at another clinic, while holding a catheter in the supine patient’s cervix, Dr. Quiroga turned to a visiting biologist and remarked, “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone got pregnant?” Then he mentioned a recent American study of the hormone selectin, which in the future might allow for better control of implantation. The biologist replied, “But for now only God can help us.” Dr. Quiroga nodded in agreement. When he removed the catheter, he said to the patient, Felicitaciones. Que Dios nos ayude. No podemos hacer mas hasta la prueba. [Congratulations. May God help us. We can’t do anything more until the test.] Throughout my observations, God was evoked at all of these stages but was summoned most frequently at the moments surrounding the fertilization and the transfer. These two moments were pivotal in the IVF process. They signaled times when the clinicians, after preparing as best they could, ceded control of the gametes to the unknown. Using Victor Turner’s language—the sperm and eggs, which hopefully will combine into embryos while in the incubator, are quintessential “entities in transition” (Turner 1969). They are liminal—an especially apt term, given that liminality frequently involves womb-like spaces, darkness, and invisibility, all attributes of the incubator where the gametes are placed for their metamorphosis. They sit in dark, unseeable places and cannot be manipulated while there. The eggs and sperm are put in a sealed incubator, where they are not examined for a day. Then the embryos are placed in a uterus, unseen for two weeks of waiting, a period punctuated by frequent hormone injections and testing. This stage stands in contrast, to other, more controllable stages, such as the stimulation, when follicles can be monitored by ultrasound through the patient’s body every day.7 As Malinowski documented seventy-five years ago, calling for “spiritual assistance” is a common means of managing uncertain outcomes (Malinowski 1984). Trobriand islanders who venture into deeper waters do so, as do Mexican potters, Masaii warriors, and American baseball players. Ecuadorian embryologists do it as well, and these embryologists’ calling on the Virgin Mary, or God, serves as a means to control an unknown future, similar to checking temperature gauges on the incubators, or sterilizing pipettes. This case is singular, however, because the weight of a presumed scientific modernity makes the evocation of God in the laboratory different from these other routine and “material” laboratory procedures. According to the “modern constitution,”

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these invocations should not occur because they contradict the basic materialist tenets of science and biomedicine. However, while controlling an indefinite outcome is certainly part of what these rituals do, I believe that they also serve to manage the Church’s disapproval of these practitioners’ livelihoods. Invoking God does more than manage the future and tilt the odds toward pregnancy. By disavowing their own agency and humbling themselves before God, these practitioners effectively counter the Churches’ claim that IVF is a godless practice.

About Belief An understanding of why and how Ecuadorian IVF practitioner’s ritual contestation with the Church is efficacious requires both a consideration of the category of belief and a genealogy of ritual itself. When I present this material to North American scholars they frequently ask, “Just how meaningful are these evocations of God?” Maybe, they suggest, we should think of these practices as rote and unconscious actions, like crossing oneself while walking by a church or regularly exclaiming Dios Mio! to signal dismay—acts that in these scholars’ minds do not signify internalized conviction or belief. For heirs to Enlightenment thought, belief is supposed to signal a deeply held conviction of the essential self. This understanding of belief is also part of a common refrain heard in Ecuadorian scholarly and religious literature, and in daily life, which concerns the shallowness of Ecuadorian Catholic piety. “Look how the churches are empty.” “Look how hypocritical they are to use birth control.” These “facts” are repeated not only by those who, like priests, are not satisfied by the level of institutional and popular support and power that the Church maintains in Ecuador, but also by the atheist practitioners with whom I worked. Scholars from Weston Le Barre (Le Barre and Mason 1948) to Michael Taussig (1980) have used these same “facts” to indicate the Church’s failure to effect internalized piety among Andean peoples. But none of these denigrations or celebrations of the lack of “true” religiosity in Ecuador describes the palpable devotion of urban Ecuadorians, who commonly make pilgrimages to Catholic shrines but rarely attend Sunday mass. In Ecuador, mass attendance is not a significant marker of Catholicism (although it might be a useful marker of spiritual versus materialist Catholicism). Indeed, when I asked doctors and patients in Ecuador, or anyone for that matter, if they were religious, the most common response was, “I’m Catholic. I’m not a fanatic, though. I don’t go to Mass.” But avoiding mass does not preclude a Catholic identity. One of

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the very few studies of urban religiosity in Ecuador, conducted in the early 1980s, found that Ecuadorians, at least in the Northern Sierra, identified as Cristianos (Catholics) first, before race or class groupings. Religious belief was employed as the sign of a true person (Stutzman 1981). And as anthropologists have demonstrated, belief can be experienced in a variety of local and historically specific ways. Thomas Kirsch argues that for contemporary Zambian forms of Christianity, belief is better understood as “the practice of cyclically regenerating a condition of internalized believing” than as “a stable and perpetual interior state” (2004: 699). As with Zambian Christians who are constantly “restaging the will to believe,” materialist Catholic Ecuadorians’ understandings of faith are not determined by a permanent and internal state of doctrinal belief. Thus Ecuadorian IVF practitioners’ prayers to God and the Virgin do not appear shallow or hypocritical to themselves or those around them. Their “beliefs” and the effectiveness of their rituals are constituted through the performance of humility and do not necessarily reflect the desire for an internal and permanent state of being. As Bourdieu puts it, “[p]ractical belief is not a ‘state of mind,’ still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body” (1990: 68). Variability in belief experience is directly linked to variability in ritual acts, as is demonstrated through Talal Asad’s careful parsing of the genealogy of ritual. Asad distinguishes between premodern Christian, modern Christian, and secular understandings of ritual. The earlier view of rite in premodern Christian monasteries had to do with actively learned skills and instrumental behaviors that formulated a connection between “outer behavior and inner motive” (Asad 1993: 58). This view changed in the modern period as ritual came to be seen as signifying behavior, “classified separately from practical, that is technically effective behavior” (ibid.). In premodern monasteries the liturgy, or the routine ritual of mass, was not separated out as a symbolic enactment of Christian faith, but, like copying manuscripts, was for monks a practical means to develop virtue (ibid.: 64). Obviously modern Ecuadorian IVF practitioners are not premodern European monks, but nevertheless Asad’s genealogy of ritual allows us to see that the commonplace anthropological analysis of ritual as “symbolic of ” something else, or as signifying a deeply held belief, might not adequately match the experience of those we study. For materialist Catholics, the external presentation of one’s belief is linked to an emphasis on outward signs rather than on the internal cultivation of belief. Asad’s work on secular modernity demonstrates that “belief ” has come to describe an internally “genuine” and deeply felt state. Permanency and consistency, in addition to internality, became two more

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hallmarks of belief, all of which emphasize “the priority of belief as a state of mind, rather than as a constituting activity in the world” (Asad 1993: 47). From the point of view of contemporary spiritual Catholics (or anyone who connects belief with genuine conviction), materialist belief looks suspect, selfserving, shallow, hypocritical, and erratic. In the case of materialist Catholic Ecuadorians, prayers to the Virgin can be understood more as a “constituting activity in the world,” like the disciplinary and external ritual of self-oblation that IVF practitioners use to make clear to those present—patients, other practitioners, themselves, and God—that the power of life rests in His hands. Thus, instead of questioning the depth of Ecuadorian IVF practitioners’ conviction or belief, we might imagine them as engaging in an integral and technical ritual. In this case the discipline of the ritual instills the virtue of self-oblation—the constant enactment of humility before God, which differs greatly from the egoenhancing presentation of self that I have encountered in my research with IVF doctors in the United States (Roberts 1998a, 1998b). During the most fraught moments of an IVF cycle, when the potential for life’s creation hangs in the balance, these clinicians perform a “divine service” by reminding themselves, and others, that they are not responsible for the creation of life.

Boundary Disputes Throughout my fieldwork, practitioners, especially laboratory biologists, shared with me a litany of reasons for the rate of pregnancy success and failure in their particular clinics. Laboratory equipment (e.g., the quality of cultivation media, pipettes, incubators), types of patients (e.g., spates of older or younger patients), and natural disasters (after a nearby volcanic eruption, the ash covering Quito infiltrated the labs and was blamed for a month of bad results at several clinics) are commonly invoked to explain good or bad outcomes. For most practitioners, God was also part of this scenario. While I would imagine many of these causal explanations to be common to IVF labs around the world, it was the unabashed but unreflexive insertion of a divine causality that struck me as noteworthy for moderns. One morning the laboratory biologist Linda lamented the fact that most recent patients had not gotten pregnant. She reminded me of an embryo transfer that I had observed three weeks before. When Dr. Padilla pulled the catheter out from the patient’s uterus, it was covered with blood. My stomach lurched as I saw Dr. Padilla and Linda exchange a look. I knew well that clinicians carefully maneuver the catheter precisely in order to avoid uterine bleeding. Linda

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reflected that in that particular case the blood might have ruined the woman’s chances, since blood is invasive and damaging for embryos. For that case it’s the only explanation we have because we are doing nothing different. Nothing! God is not giving me a hand. Lately He has forgotten me. When we transfer the embryos and I see that the embryos I transferred to this patient were good quality and could give a pregnancy, and nevertheless it is not given, it’s because unexpectedly God didn’t want it. Linda’s invocation of God relates to an implicit boundary debate with the Catholic Church. Clinical practitioners are keenly aware that the Church finds IVF objectionable, and this is something with which they as Catholics have to grapple. Their rebuttals took two basic forms: (1) We are not playing God; we are only God’s helpers; and (2) God gave us the ability to do this, so it must be okay. They do not directly respond to the charge that IVF exterminates life, an objection that both practitioners and patients and even many priests in Ecuador often overlooked. Rather, they focused their rebuttals on the Church’s objections to the artificiality of IVF. Many practitioners had practiced responses to Church condemnation of IVF’s artificiality. Dr. Molina’s comment that “God is in the laboratory” was part of a larger statement that he made to reporters when they asked if he was not “playing God”: Many times in interviews in radio and television they have asked me if in the laboratory you are not playing with life, playing God. And I have answered, “God is in the laboratory.” We are nothing more than assistants. We are only putting our small grain of sand in to get results. With declarations like this, IVF practitioners countered Church claims that IVF distorts the proper relationship between God and humanity. They positioned themselves in agreement with the Church: according to them the ultimate authority over life rests in God’s hands, not their own. Through ritual enactments and declarations of faith they offer a countertheological discourse about God’s interventions. The practitioners themselves are only assistants. Their scientific workspace becomes God’s space, His laboratory. This contrast between IVF practitioners’ claiming God’s intervention and priestly denial of this possibility enacts the centuries-old Tridentine dilemma, a debate that usually took place between priests and peasants rather than between

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priests and scientists. And like peasants, these practitioners also employed stories of official Catholic hypocrisy to discount the Church’s position on IVF. When I brought up the Church position directly with clinic directors, they inevitably told me how the directors of Catholic hospitals were against IVF—that is, until their daughters could not have children. On another occasion, when I asked Dr. Molina if he knew about the miraculous seventeenth-century bench in the local Convent of Santa Catalina, reputed to help infertile women who sit on it and pray to get pregnant, he said, “No.” But then, winking at me, he wanted to know “if the nuns get pregnant too.” He explained that “[t]here are tunnels under the churches in the old town where the priests and nuns meet, and they have found the remains of fetuses there.” This was not the first time I had heard this story, but never from a doctor who might have a specific interest in portraying the Church in a less than flattering light, given his own role in facilitating a condemned form of virgin birth. Dr. Molina’s jokes about the sex lives of priests and nuns were similar to the anticlerical humor circulated among Southern European peasants, which was used to challenge the authority of the priests and the Church hierarchy without rejecting Catholicism as a whole (Badone 1990). Like Southern European peasants, who object to what they see as rigid, Church-created boundaries, Ecuadorian IVF practitioners are not preoccupied with dividing the world into the oppositional spheres of sacred and profane, spiritual and material. What differs in this case, however, is that the Church officially vilifies these practitioners’ livelihood, and that the practitioners are not operating from a position of social or educational inferiority to the priesthood. Throughout my fieldwork I also spoke with priests in Ecuador about why the Church is against IVF. Evident in most of these discussions was the tightrope walked by institutionalized Catholicism, which diminishes, but cannot completely extirpate, miraculous displays of personal favors bestowed by God. When I explained how IVF practitioners called on God in their clinics and laboratories, the priests denied that God’s miraculous intervention could occur within territory reviled by the Church. These priests, as spiritual Catholics, emphasized God’s primary role as the creator of natural laws, not an entity with a material presence on earth. When I told one priest that IVF practitioners saw God’s handiwork in IVF clinics, he countered by identifying psychological forces, such as relaxation, as the “real” causes of “miraculous” clinic results. Such priests did allow that God does very occasionally intervene on earth. One priest told me, “God doesn’t break His own natural laws.” Nevertheless, he had known one infertile woman who had become pregnant from praying on the miraculous bench at the convent of Santa Catalina. Another priest told me dismissively that praying to God in an IVF clinic is like Colombian assassins

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praying before killing someone, or like doctors praying before performing an abortion. These comments frame the stakes of this moral contest between IVF practitioners and the Catholic Church. Are IVF practitioners acting as false gods and killers, or are they God’s helpers, as they themselves claim? In their response to Ecuadorian IVF, priests must reign in signs of personalistic Catholic devotion and adamantly critique claims of God’s favor within the context of an activity the Church condemns. The Tridentine dilemma is modern in that its tensions enact a boundary dispute between spiritual and material explanations (e.g., Is it God or is it psychology?), a quintessentially modern preoccupation. To North American scientists and medical professionals, this debate between priests and practitioners of scientific medicine might appear as what Asad (2003: 10) has described as the “failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity,” given that the terms do not presuppose a solely material and disenchanted scientific universe. In this enactment of the dilemma, however, the modern struggle is about religious legitimacy in what many have imagined to be a wholly material sphere. Claims of God’s favor make these practitioners somewhat unusual moderns in yet another way. One of the key facets of modernity as described by Weber (1991) is the creation of a rationalized, impersonal bureaucracy. The God of both mainstream Protestants and enlightened Catholics is bureaucratic. He does not break His own laws, at least almost never. Materialist proclamations of God’s presence in the laboratory, God’s direct effect on clinical pregnancy rates, and claims of personal exceptionalism are not bureaucratic or rationalized. These miracles are signs of personal exchanges with God, which provide certainty and, more important, undermine Church claims that IVF is against God’s will.

Conclusion As these Ecuadorian elite proponents of technomedicine demonstrate, modernity is not always about the “formation of the secular” or the banishment of enchantment from the realm of natural law. In Ecuador, a nation-state fully engaged in a modern project, religion has not been relegated to the private sphere. Modern Ecuadorians are disinterested in the full embrace of secularity even in settings that are avowedly secular elsewhere. Even though Ecuador is one of the most officially secular nations in Latin America (Aguilar-Monslave 1984), public spaces, schools, and government offices are filled with Catholic religious imagery. Although Ecuadorian IVF practitioners are by no accounts pious, everyday life, even everyday scientific life, is suffused with religiosity.

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The examination of bioscience around the world can destabilize conventional assumptions of secularity, prompting us to ask: In what other sites or nations does religiosity play a role in the laboratories of modern science and biomedicine? Even scholars such as Bruno Latour (1993), who have done much to disrupt our received notions of disenchanted science, characterize scientists as being cleaved to the image of science as rational, disciplined, and, above all, purified of the spiritual. To be clear, this is not an attempt to expose the “irrational, religious underbelly” of science and biomedicine: instead, it is a call to explore how the northern proclamation of God’s banishment from the laboratory is not the only way that bioscientific workers can understand and arrange their material and spiritual worlds. Modern Ecuadorians have their own specific moral landscape where religious evocation does not have to be separated from scientific medical practice. This example can aid scholars working elsewhere to reexamine longstanding assumptions about the automatic separation of religious and material rationalities in scientific settings. The need to explain why God resides in Ecuadorian IVF laboratories should prompt a parallel need to defamiliarize the avowed disenchantment of North American or European labs. For many Ecuadorian IVF practitioners, there is nothing remarkable about the evocation of the divine in a high-tech biomedical setting. This possibility suggests a different construction of the relationship between science and religion than is often supposed in theories of modernity. When practitioners of Ecuadorian IVF make appeals to God and the Virgin for the fertilization of eggs retrieved during IVF, they are operating within a modern project where God’s intervention does not contradict their identity as Catholics or as practitioners of modern scientific medicine. These clinicians assert God’s presence in the laboratory to neutralize Church disapproval, but they see no need to cordon off the material from the spiritual. Modern boundary tensions are at work in Ecuador, not necessarily over the primacy of science or religion, but over the proper boundaries of enchantment. Humbly giving over one’s laboratory to God effectively allows these practitioners to stake a claim to legitimate Catholic practice. These rituals of humility work. In Ecuadorian IVF, God has been appointed the director of laboratory life.

notes 1. My research took place in IVF clinics, where I observed and talked with practitioners and patients in waiting rooms, laboratories, operating rooms, and patients’ recovery rooms. In addition I conducted over 130 formal interviews for the project, the majority with female infertility patients, and sometimes their male partners and other family members. I also conducted interviews with IVF

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practitioners, physicians, technicians, laboratory biologists, or staff at IVF clinics, as well as egg and sperm donors, surrogate mothers, priests, lawyers and bio-ethicists. For an extended discussion of my findings see Roberts (forthcoming). 2. IVF practitioners vaginally remove a woman’s eggs from her hormonally stimulated ovarian follicles. Laboratory technicians combine these eggs in a petri dish with sperm. The resulting fertilized eggs, or embryos, are transferred back into a woman’s uterus in the hopes of implantation and pregnancy. 3. Business groups were behind a recent modernizing campaign. In fall of 2003 these groups organized a ceremony where the nation gathered to synchronize its watches in order to increase worker productivity. 4. In Latour’s modern constitution, the flip side of purification is the proliferation of hybrids. This is the logical outcome of the modern belief that entities like nature or culture exist and thus can be separated. When these supposedly separate realms are brought together, they are called hybrids (Latour 1993). 5. Coastal liberal reformers have been battling against what they see as the entrenched patron client relations endemic to Sierran agrarian society that they understood as preventing the development of free trade. 6. See Webb Keane (2002) for a discussion of Protestant distrust of materiality. He paraphrases Marx concerning the links between Christianity and capitalism where the “the concrete comes to be subordinated to the abstract” (Keane 2002). Ironically, the separation of the material world from the spiritual world is what, according to Weber, allowed Protestants, who made that separation, a means to achieve an unimaginable level of material accumulation (Weber 2001). 7. The moments where the lack of control is heightened are linked to God in a way that other moments of the process that we might expect to be sacred are not. For example, after the quality of embryos was checked, prayers or thanks to God were frequently offered. The embryos themselves, though, do not necessarily provoke such sentiment: after a transfer; when there are “extra” embryos, they are often dumped unceremoniously into the trash. For further discussion see (Roberts 2007).

references Aguilar-Monslave, L. A. (1984) The Separation of Church and State: The Ecuadorian Case. Thought 59, 205–219. Asad, T. (1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——— . (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Badone, E. (1990) Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of practice, Cambridge: Polity. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Descartes, R. (1996) Discourse on the Method; and, Meditations on First Philosophy, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

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Gaonkar, D. P. (2001) Alternative Modernities, Durham N.C.: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association. ——— . (1997) Modest*Witness @ Second*Millennium. FemaleMan *Meets* Onco Mouse: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge. Hess, D. J. (1993) Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. ——— . (1995) Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts, New York: Columbia University Press. Keane, W. (2002) Sincerity, “Modernity,” and the Protestants. Cultural Anthropology 17, 65–92. Kirsch, T. (2004) Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief. American Anthropologist 106, 699–709. Latour, B. (1988) The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——— . (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ——— , and S. Woolgar. (1986) Laboratory Life : the Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Le Barre, W., and J. A. Mason. (1948) The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau, Bolivia, Menasha, Wis.: American Anthropological Assn. Malinowski, B. (1984) Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Miles, A. (2003) Healers As Entrepreneurs: Constructing an Image of Legitimized Potency in Urban Ecuador. In J., Koss-Chioino, T. L. Leatherman, and C. Greenway (Eds.), Medical Pluralism in the Andes, London: Routledge. O’Connell, M. (1986) The Roman Catholic Tradition Since 1545. In R. L. Numbers and D. W. Amundsen (Eds.), Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, New York: Macmillan. Radcliffe, S., and S. Westwood. (1996) Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America, London: Routledge. Ratzinger, C. J. (1987) Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, the Apostle. February 22, Rome. Roberts, E. (1998a) Examining Surrogacy Discourses: Between Feminine Power and Exploitation. In N. Scheper-Hughes and C. Sargent (Eds.), Small Wars : The Cultural Politics of Childhood, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— . (1998b) “Native” Narratives of Connectedness Surrogate Motherhood and Technology. In J. Dumit and R. Davis-Floyd (Eds.), Cyborg Babies: From TechnoSex to Techno-Tots, New York: Routledge. ——— . (2007) Extra Embryos: Ethics, Cryopreservation and IVF in Ecuador and Elsewhere. American Ethnologist 34, 188–199. ——— . (forthcoming) God’s Laboratory: Mixed Relations in Andean IVF Clinics. Shapin, S., and S. Schaffer. (1989) Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Sheehan, J. (2003) Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay. The American Historical Review 108, 1061–1080. Stutzman, R. (1981) El Mestizaje. An All Inclusive Ideology. In N. Whitten (Ed.) Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, Urbana: University of Illinois. Taussig, M. (1980) The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Turner, V. W. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine. Voekel, P. (2002) Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Weber, M. (1991) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London: Routledge. ——— . (2001) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Routledge. Williams, R. (1985) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New York: Oxford University Press.

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8 Ritual, Medicine, and the Placebo Response Howard Brody

Definitions and Preliminary Observations The “placebo response” may most usefully be defined as a change in a person’s health status that is caused by the symbolic aspects of a therapeutic intervention.1 It turns out to be extremely difficult to give a completely consistent definition of this phenomenon.2 Some commonly offered definitions are actually quite misleading. It will not do, for instance, to say that the placebo response is a change in health produced by an inert medication or other therapy, since inert remedies cannot, by definition, produce changes. Even in today’s medical literature, it is common to encounter definitions that characterize the placebo response as the nonspecific response to therapy, as contrasted with the specific response that is presumably caused by the treatment’s physical or chemical properties. This is also incorrect. When a placebo treatment is administered to patients with asthma, for instance, it generally (if it has any effect at all) reduces wheezing but does not relieve pain. By contrast, when a placebo is given to patients with a headache, a certain number are likely to have pain relief but no improvement in their breathing. How this result makes a placebo more “ ‘nonspecific” than any other therapeutic modality is never explained. I have offered a definition of “placebo response” without attempting first to define “placebo.” This approach is important because the most fruitful accounts of placebo response do not restrict the term solely to circumstances in which an actual placebo is employed. Today placebos are rarely prescribed in U.S. medical practice, yet I would contend that virtually any medical encounter that involves a conscious patient is potentially subject to a placebo response

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as one component of the overall therapeutic intervention. Because the disconnect between “placebo” and “placebo response” suggests to many that the latter term has outlived its usefulness, some have proposed that a better term would be context effect or meaning response.3

The Placebo Response as “Suspect Category” Let us return for a moment to the unsatisfactory definition of the placebo as an inert remedy. This definition is offered unblushingly by many expert physicians, many if not most of whom would accept such a definition without objection. If it were then pointed out to them that it seems illogical to attribute an effect to something inert, the physicians would be inclined to shrug off this idea as being of little importance, a mere semantic quibble. On the other hand, if one offered a similarly flawed, illogical definition of a term such as “diabetes,” these same physicians would protest loudly. What does this reaction signify? I would suggest that the placebo response, within medicine, is a sort of “suspect category,” in some of the same ways that ritual can be viewed as a “suspect category” according to Sax.4 For example, starting in about 1950 medicine adopted the double-blind, randomized, controlled trial as the methodological cornerstone of research into new therapies, in hopes of eliminating the placebo response as an explanation for the efficacy of any new therapeutic agent. Yet a research program to better understand the placebo response was inaugurated by the U.S. National Institutes of Health only within the past half-decade. For much of the twentieth century, “placebo response” was a wastebasket category for medicine to shift embarrassing phenomena so that they could then be ignored, rather than an explanatory category for seeking greater insight. When a systematic review, purporting to dismiss the placebo effect as an important phenomenon in double-blind randomized trials, appeared in a major American medical journal in 2001, the editorialist appeared to be highly gratified that at last the overromanticized placebo notion had been put in its proper place (which, one gathered, was no place at all).5 The placebo response, as I have defined it, is a subset of a larger category that might be called “mind-body healing.”6 But conventional Western medicine retains a strongly Cartesian, reductionist tendency that is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of mind-body healing—or any significant interaction of mind and body, for that matter. Montgomery notes that most of the sciences, especially the social sciences, were addressing postmodern concerns during the latter decades of the twentieth century and were accepting the breakdown of the subjective-objective distinction. By contrast, medicine during this period

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remained steadfastly positivist and Newtonian in its worldview. Montgomery attributes this medical intransigence to physicians’ (and patients’) extreme resistance to the acknowledgement of uncertainty.7 Most students of the placebo response agree that on average, placebos appear to be efficacious roughly one-third of the time, though this average disguises a considerable variability depending on context. The inherent uncertainty of the placebo response seems sufficient to dismiss it from the minds of many physicians. Many physicians, on being told that at least some of the efficacy of the treatments they administer to their patients is probably attributable to the placebo response, would initially at least feel insulted. I believe that this tendency is lessening, as medicine slowly becomes more accommodated to mind-body interactions and as placebo phenomena become more widely known. Still, it is worth noting that to label anything in medicine as a “placebo response” is to put it in a category that renders it somewhat problematic.

Rituals in Medicine Many healing activities in conventional Western medicine may helpfully be analyzed as rituals. Do their ritual elements help to account for the placebo response? To answer this question we must look at psychological theories of placebo mechanisms and then assess recently accumulated empirical data on the placebo response that point toward underlying neural processes. Some preliminary observations may highlight features of ritual that are especially pertinent to healing and to the placebo response. I understand rituals to be conscious, intentional, often repetitive bodily actions that attempt to impose meaning on one or another aspect of the world. In performing ritual, the person often relinquishes individuality in favor of a role that follows specific, prescribed rules. That is, his or her body transforms itself into something larger than, and external to, individual self. The prescribed rules that constrain bodily action in ritual often dictate what is socioculturally believed to be “right and fitting to do in the context of a given situation.”8 The notion of “right and fitting” helps to elaborate how ritual creates meaning. Ritual is a bodily acting-out of what sort of situation one is in, and what ought to be done about it. At least according to one theory, rituals are attempts to control nature. Healing rituals fall within the larger category of restorative rituals—the sick person is ill or is in a state of disharmony with nature, and the ritual’s purpose is to restore health or harmony. According to Sax, rituals in this category are transformational.9 Later we will ask whether the fact that a ritual is believed by its participants to be transformational can itself be a source of ritual efficacy.

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Conventional Western medicine, which will largely be the focus in this chapter, contains a great many rituals.10 Two that are commonly seen in a teaching hospital are the physical examination performed by the physician, and the “rounds” during which the examining physician presents to the other physicians all the findings that have been gleaned for that patient, along with the diagnosis and the plan of therapy. A sociologist of medicine might be most interested in the latter sort of ritual. For our purposes I will discuss only the rituals that involve the patient directly. I will assume that medical rituals that occur off-stage (as it were) from the patient’s perspective have much less effect on the meaning that the patient attaches to the illness and its treatment. A complication of studying ritual in conventional Western medicine is that medicine subscribes to a scientific belief system, according to which everything is done because of the profession’s scientific knowledge. Since to many, “ritual” equates with religion or superstition, medical practitioners might immediately deny that ritual plays any role in their activities. They may be reluctant to acknowledge that even if we grant the questionable assumption that everything in medicine is scientifically based, some practices may have features of ritual in addition to their scientific content, and that those ritual elements might be independently effective in some aspects of healing. The tendency to dismiss ritual as part of medicine reflects the same Cartesian, reductionist strain in medicine’s belief system that renders the placebo response a “suspect category.” By contrast, a medical sociologist or anthropologist would perceive important analogies between healing rituals practiced in so-called primitive cultures and many of those routinely engaged in as part of Western medicine. Jerome Frank, a psychiatrist, argued in a classic study that most of Western psychotherapy works because of elements that it shares with these healing rituals, with religious faith healing, and with the placebo response.11 To Frank, such an observation explained rather than denied the efficacy of psychotherapy. Anthropologists have argued that ritual may be efficacious in an even more determinative manner. Kleinman, for example, stated that the rituals performed by indigenous healers, in accordance with the rules prescribed by their culture, “must heal.”12 I believe that he intended to say that the sufferer in such a ritual has two choices: either he, and all around him, regard him as having been healed; or he becomes an exile from his community. To regard himself as not having been healed when all the culturally prescribed rules have been scrupulously followed is tantamount to adopting a foreign belief system that would remove him from his culture. This is true even if he keels over dead the next day. Western medicine has its own version of such an event, even if often spoken in jest: “The operation was a success but the patient died.”

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Psychological Theories: Expectancy and Conditioning Let us now seek a scientific explanation of how two things might lead to a sick person’s being healed: taking a sugar pill or similar “inert” medication within a Western medical context; or undergoing a healing ritual in an indigenous community. The scientist would first insist that we somehow exclude a likely alternative explanation—that the illness resolved because of its “natural history.” That is, even absent the sugar pill or the ritual, the sick person would have gotten better just as fast. Assuming that we can exclude the natural-history explanation, we are left with what appears to be a true placebo response. The explanations then offered would probably involve two psychological mechanisms—expectancy and conditioning. According to expectancy theory, the mere belief that something will happen sometimes produces bodily responses that conform to the expectation. Taking the sugar pill, or undergoing the healing ritual, the patient expects to improve. That expectancy involves activation of specific areas in the brain that are in turn capable of activating other brain areas that alter peripheral physiology, via neural, hormonal, or immunological mechanisms. The final result is that alterations in bodily function occur that move the patient in the direction of restored health. Through conditioning theory, a placebo response works in accord with classical Pavlovian conditioning. In the case of the sugar pill, for example, in the past the patient has been exposed to an unconditioned stimulus (the chemical content of nonplacebo remedies) and a resultant unconditioned response (relief of the symptom). Repetitively, the conditioned stimulus (the outward appearance of the pill) was linked to the unconditioned stimulus (the chemical content of the pill). After enough repetitions, the conditioned stimulus became capable of producing the response, even in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus (that is, a chemically inert pill produces similar relief of symptoms). There is a good deal of evidence in support of expectancy theory.13 For instance, patients randomized to receive either acupuncture or massage for low back pain displayed markedly varied reactions to the two treatments. The apparently random pattern disappeared, however, if one factored in their expectancies. Those who expected to get better with massage and who were randomly assigned to the massage group did much better at a statistically significant rate; a similar thing happened for those who expected maximal improvement with acupuncture.14 The role of expectancy in placebo-induced analgesia has been extensively studied by Fabrizio Benedetti’s group at Turin, one of the most active groups

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of placebo-response investigators. They have shown repeatedly that the expectation of pain relief leads to actual pain relief, and that the neural system that is implicated in this causal chain releases endogenous opioids, or endorphins. Naloxone, a chemical that blocks endorphin activity, reliably reverses the analgesia associated with expectancy.15 There is less evidence to link conditioning theory to the placebo response, yet some data seem strongly suggestive.16 Robert Ader, in classic experiments, was able to produce a conditioned immunosuppression response in rats. After rats had repeatedly received a powerful immunosuppressant drug along with saccharin, the rats demonstrated significant immunosuppression after being administered saccharin alone.17 Eventually these findings were replicated in humans.18 Ader also showed that an antihypertensive medicine, atenolol, could produce a conditioned response such that subjects showed antihypertensive effects when later given a placebo.19 Asthmatic children were administered their usual asthma medication in a metered-dose inhaler, and simultaneously exposed to a vanilla aroma, for fifteen days; the vanilla aroma then was capable of improving their lung function even when the inhaler was filled with a saltwater solution.20 In a particularly elegant set of experiments, Benedetti’s group set up a conditioned response in pain patients to two different analgesics—an opioid, and a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication. They discovered that the conditioned response in the subjects who had been conditioned with the opioid could be reversed with naloxone, the chemical that blocks the effect of both endorphins (endogenous opioids) and extrinsic opioids. Since this group had previously shown that naloxone could reverse placebo analgesia induced by an expectancy state, one might imagine that this experiment suggested that expectancy and conditioning were identical. But when the naloxone was then administered to the subjects who had been conditioned using the non-opioid analgesic, no reversal of the response occurred. The investigators concluded that when an opioid is the unconditioned stimulus, the conditioned response involves an endogenous opioid pathway and so can be blocked by naloxone; when a different medication is involved in the conditioning process, a different chemical pathway is activated and so naloxone is no longer effective in reversing it.21 To put it more fancifully, the conditioned response follows along the same biochemical trail that was initially blazed by the unconditioned stimulus. The naloxone-reversal studies would seem to suggest a lack of overlap between expectancy and conditioning as placebo-response mechanisms. Yet such a dichotomy seems unwarranted. Conditioning in the conscious animal,

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especially the human, is a form of learning. It seems hard to claim that the asthmatic children, for instance, did not come to expect that their asthma would improve when they smelled vanilla. Psychologists studying the placebo response have demonstrated that some human studies that were initially interpreted to be “pure” conditioning studies actually were contaminated with a good deal of expectancy.22 Yet the experiments with naloxone reversal of analgesia would seem to suggest, by contrast, that the conditioned response is separable from expectancy effects. The principal difference between expectancy and conditioning as explanatory models is that conditioning requires a previous, repeated exposure to a particular stimulus. By contrast, I may expect that something will heal me, even if I have never experienced it or been exposed to it before. Conditioning is a backward-looking explanation while expectancy is forward-looking. We might fantasize trying to resolve the apparent dispute between the expectancy and conditioning models of the placebo response by prying open the subject’s head and peering into the brain to see just what is happening. Some of the most promising recent research on the placebo response has involved neural imaging modalities that promise to do just that.

Neuroimaging Studies of the Placebo Response In the past decade neuroscientists began to use positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the placebo response. The bulk of the studies have been done for three medical conditions: pain, Parkinson’s disease, and depression. Althought most such data at this point must be regarded as preliminary and relatively few of these findings have been extensively replicated, some data do seem reasonably robust:23 • When a placebo response can be detected by neuroimaging, it appears to involve the same anatomic centers as would be active in a pharmacologic response to the medication that the placebo mimics. Placebo analgesia seems to involve mostly endogenous opioid pathways. Placebo responses in Parkinson’s disease involve the dopamine-secreting cells of brain nuclei. Depression seems to be an exception; at least some research suggests that brain areas activated by placebo differ from those involved with pharmacologically active antidepressants. Specifically, the brain areas activated by

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•

•

•

•

•

placebo represent only a subset of the brain areas activated by the pharmacologically active antidepressant.24 The role of expectancy and of endogenous opioids in placebo analgesia seems to have been firmly established. The brain regions that become active during the placebo response in pain correlate quite precisely with, first, cognitive areas involved in expectancy, and second, areas known to be involved in endorphin release and responsiveness. Placebo responses appear to involve generally a complex interaction between cognitive and emotional centers. What I think is going to happen to me, and how I feel about it, refuse to remain in watertight compartments. Thoughts and emotions interact in complex ways in producing the typical placebo response. Two mechanisms can be postulated for placebo analgesia. Events in the brain may dampen or shut off incoming pain signals from the body’s periphery. Alternatively, once the pain signals have been received, the manner in which the brain processes them may be modulated. Neural connections are known to exist that are compatible with either mechanism. Neuroimaging data suggest that both occur to some degree. It is also possible that one mechanism occurs early in the placebo response and the other occurs later—although, surprisingly, it seems to be the inhibition of incoming pain signals that is the lateroccurring phenomenon.25 The same brain regions that are involved in expectancy-triggered placebo analgesia appear to be involved in other expectancy states without pain. One experiment, for example, manipulated subjects’ expectancy to diminish the perception of an aversive taste stimulus. Many of the same brain centers were activated in this study as would in placebo analgesia, including the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, an area known to be richly supplied with opioid receptors. This suggests to some that there is a general expectancy-sensory-response system in the brain and that placebo analgesia is only one way that this system functions.26 One of the most mysterious elements of the placebo response has been its unpredictability and variability. Though it is often possible to predict what percentage of subjects will experience symptom relief, it has been virtually impossible heretofore to predict which individuals would respond to placebo. Neuroimaging offers some clues as to how placebo responders might differ from nonresponders, and it might in the future do much to elaborate the basis for this significant level of variation.27

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At the same time that these neuroimaging studies have been carried out, the group at Turin has exploited a useful experimental model—comparing covert and overt administration of “active” medication or other therapy. Our basic model assumes that when a conscious patient receives a medication, chemical and placebo elements are both present. A traditional way to study which is which is to give a dummy pill that eliminates the chemical element. The newer studies shine a light on the phenomenon from another angle— the chemical element is retained, but the symbolic element is removed, since the subject no longer has any way of determining when and how much of the chemical has been administered. (For instance, an intravenous infusion pump concealed behind a screen may be programmed by a computer to administer doses of a narcotic painkiller at various intervals.) Initially it was shown that when open administration of intravenous narcotic for postoperative pain is contrasted with hidden infusions that are identical, the pain relief in the hidden situation was about half as great.28 Similar results have been found in medication for anxiety and in electrical stimulation of the brain for Parkinson’s disease. It has also been shown that covert discontinuation of a treatment leads to less symptom rebound than open discontinuation.29 The discontinuation findings, incidentally, would be viewed by some as evidence in favor of a conditioning mechanism. In summary, recent neuroimaging data, combined with other research, make it difficult to accept the claims that the placebo response is an experimental artifact or wishful thinking.30 Neuroimaging data suggest that our earlier, crude model of the placebo response as mind-body healing is correct for conditions so far studied—that a “mental” stimulus leads to a neural response that closely mimics whatever occurs when a pharmacologically active substance is administered. One might harbor concerns that this turn toward neuroimaging data to explain the placebo response represents an unfortunate reductionism, in which beliefs, emotions, and social meaning are dismissed as ephemeral and only data that can be obtained by high-technology brain scanners are seen as real. Popular responses to reports of these studies readily raise such concerns. On the other hand, so long as we insist that neuroimaging represents only one among many tools with which to approach the placebo response, there seems less danger of such a reductionism. I believe that it is very important to use neuroimaging to discover what brain centers are activated, and in what order, in association with the research subjects’ first-person reports of their experiences and thoughts. I think this process is methodologically sound so long as we grant epistemic primacy to those first-person reports and never presume that brain imaging data are somehow privileged over or above those reports.

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Implications for Ritual Many if not most of the activities that have been studied in placebo-response experiments may be construed as rituals. How might an understanding of these behaviors as rituals further illuminate the placebo response? One of the simplest and most common rituals in medicine is the repetitive swallowing of a pill or capsule. A placebo pill administered four times a day is generally more effective than a placebo pill administered twice a day.31 Other medical rituals are more complex and novel and could well stimulate enhanced placebo effects. In one study that compared a real transcutaneous electric nerve stimulator (TENS) with a dummy machine for back pain, all subjects to whom the dummy was administered were impressed by the visual and sound feedback and claimed to feel the (nonexistent) electrical stimulation.32 In this study, however, the actual relief of pain attributable to the dummy TENS unit was not very impressive. Of greater moment was a study comparing acupuncture, sham acupuncture, diazepam (a tranquillizer and muscle relaxant), and a placebo pill for chronic arthritis of the neck. Acupuncture, sham acupuncture, and diazepam were all equivalent in pain relief and were all statistically superior to the placebo pill.33 That is, the symbolic, ceremonial, or ritual aspects of acupuncture were more important in producing pain relief than the physical or physiological effects of inserting and twirling the needles; and the pain relief produced by this ritual was equivalent to that of a powerful drug. Very few medical practitioners seem to be aware of the significance of the studies of overt vs. covert medication administration by Benedetti’s team. The vast majority of medications now administered conventionally have never been subjected to this experimental design. If the findings on the analgesic effects of open vs. hidden infusion of narcotics were to be replicated widely with other classes of medication, and with the oral as well as the intravenous route of administration, then we would be faced with the finding that fully half of the effectiveness of all these powerful medicines—antihypertensives, cholesterol-lowering drugs, antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs—rely on the ritual of taking them regularly and knowing that one is taking them. The average practitioner would probably reject this hypothesis out of hand. It is important to realize that today such a rejection would be an act of faith rather than science. Plausible claims have already been put forth to demonstrate that the placebo response probably accounts for the majority of the therapeutic benefit seen with antidepressants.34 In 1980, drawing on an earlier anthropological analysis by Adler and Hammett, I proposed a “meaning model” of the placebo response.35 The meaning

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model offers an empirical hypothesis that a positive placebo response (improvement in the patient’s symptoms) is most likely to occur when the meaning of the illness experience for the patient is altered in a positive direction. This positive change in meaning, in turn, depends on several factors: • The patient feels listened to and attended to by the caregiver. • The patient is provided with an explanation for the illness that coheres with his general worldview. • The patient feels care and compassion from the caregiver and other helping individuals. • The patient experiences an enhanced sense of mastery or control over the illness. The body of data gathered in the intervening years would, on balance, tend to support the meaning model. The evidence was at any rate sufficient to prompt Moerman in 2002 to urge that we replace the term “placebo effect” with “meaning effect.”36 The meaning model assists us in understanding the sense in which rituals can be “meaning-making,” and how in turn those meaning-making elements of ritual might explain ritual’s efficacy in healing. A local community, by conducting a healing ritual, offers an explanation of what is happening. To perform a ritual is to do what one’s society and culture proclaim to be the correct thing to do under certain circumstances; so the performing of the ritual is reassuring evidence that those circumstances, and not some others, pertain to what is going on. In Western medicine the “local community” may be a shrunken group, compared with indigenous healing ceremonies in which the entire village participates. The “community” might consist of the patient and the physician, the physician’s office staff, and the immediate friends and relatives of the patient to whom the patient has confided symptoms and who played a role in urging the patient to seek medical attention. Even if small in number, this community can be very powerful in shaping meaning, and the sociocultural authority invested in the role of the physician enhances that individual’s status as a proclaimer of what events mean. Sadly, it is not a part of many medical rituals today to listen carefully to what the patient says and to take that account seriously. International studies of patient satisfaction with primary medical care highlight “the doctor does not listen to me” as one of the most common complaints.37 If, however, the physician does indeed listen carefully to the patient’s account, then the meaningfulness of the ritual is enhanced. The patient now has increased confidence that what is going on is directed at this specific person and her individual, unique problems.

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The ability to offer an explanation, coupled with a display of care and compassion, counteract one of the most powerfully demoralizing aspects of serious illness. The sufferer commonly feels as if no one else has ever suffered in this way before, that no one else could possibly understand the suffering, and that therefore the sufferer is effectively an outcast from the community, cut off from the understanding and sympathy of fellow human beings.38 The performance of a healing ritual becomes a bodily enactment of reconnection with the community. Since the community can explain what is happening and can select the proper ritual for it, it must be known, and so the source of the suffering cannot be as opaque as was feared. Since the sufferer herself, and her suffering body, are participants in the ceremony, it must be possible to reconnect and to experience human sympathy. Finally, rituals offer a tool that promises to the community a higher level of control over the world. The conjoint participation in the medical ritual by all parties amounts to a common declaration by the community that the natural events that led up to the illness are open to human mastery. The community asserts with confidence, “Take this pill four times a day for two weeks, drink lots of fluids, and get extra rest, and you will get better.” The patient came to the physician initially because he felt out of control. The performance of the healing ritual reasserts control and so brings substantial comfort. Ritual is, for all these reasons, psychologically comforting to the victim of illness. The psychological comfort derives directly from the manner in which the ritual alters the meaning of events for the participants. The comfort and the alterations in meaning seem to be closely allied with the factors that (other things being equal) would be likely to produce a positive placebo response. Which of the various elements of ritual meaning, one may ask, contribute the most to the placebo response? Kaptchuk and colleagues have recently demonstrated a research approach that holds future promise for addressing this question. They created a design (administering sham acupuncture to patients with irritable bowel syndrome) that allowed them to titrate different elements— for example, separating the ritual administration of the acupuncture from the presence or absence of a warm and attentive relationship with the practitioner. They showed that each added element contributed to the total reduction in the severity of the bowel symptoms, with the supportive patient-practitioner relationship probably accounting for the largest single component.39 Further studies designed to tease out the precise contribution of individual elements of ritual and meaning could be quite instructive. Theissen, analyzing the stories that portray Jesus as healer, calls upon the placebo-effect literature as a way of explaining the purported efficacy of

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these healing ceremonies. It is worth noting that Theissen’s analysis matches very closely the meaning model I have presented here. First, Theissen stresses the importance of expectancy, noting the poor success of healing ceremonies among those lacking faith, and the probable value of the spreading rumors of Jesus’ healing prowess in ensuring greater success in the future. Next Theissen emphasizes the dual psychological and social character of these rituals; they activate important psychosomatic processes but also remain socially embedded and exert some of their efficacy via their ability to alter social relationships. I would add that Jesus’ standard analysis of his own healing powers, “your (own) faith has healed you,” might be viewed as an important message of possible mastery and control over illness. Jesus’ willingness to approach the sick person to perform the healing ceremony, especially when that person bore some social stigma, might be seen as a powerful statement of compassion and social reconnection.40 In sum, Theissen’s analysis recalls Frank’s earlier comparison of psychotherapy and religious faith healing, claiming that what modern Western medicine has in common with such rituals may better explain a good deal of its healing efficacy than what sets it apart. A simple way of expressing what we know about the placebo response is that the human brain seems to be hard-wired to get better in illness, and that certain sorts of mental stimuli seem capable of turning on this hard-wired system to produce symptom relief. The elements that make up ritual seem to be especially effective in turning on the wiring circuits.41 The preceding account is very general. A more specific implication of ritual for the placebo response arises from the observation that repetition seems to be a common element of rituals. We have seen that there has been some dispute about the extent to which conditioning mechanisms, as opposed to expectancy, mediate placebo responses. Other things being equal, if rituals truly possess healing efficacy, and if this efficacy is achieved by neural pathways similar to those implicated in placebo responses, then conditioning might well play a larger role in the placebo response than has previously been recognized. Expectancy cannot be eliminated. If, via conditioning, the performance of healing rituals over time produce positive changes in health, then the person will come to consciously expect better health outcomes whenever such a ritual is performed (such as when he swallows pills). Nevertheless, the fact that the operative neural pathways are strengthened by repetition, and that a newly performed ritual at a later date appears to reactivate a neural pathway that was previously laid down and stored in memory, suggests that some sort of conditioning process may be implicated. At the very least, future research on the placebo response should attend carefully to the possible role of conditioning.

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Conclusion Besides its implications for further research into the placebo response, what does a ritual analysis of medicine suggest for the practitioner? The science writer Nicholas Wade once wrote, “All medicine is a form of theater.” In my experience, physicians are largely unwilling to equate what they do with a theatrical performance. They regard acting in theater as fakery, just as they view the placebo response as disreputable because it seems to depend on a dummy or fake treatment. They are not reassured by analyses from those who understand theater, on how acting can be a deeply honest business— just as they may not be reassured by more expansive definitions of “placebo response” that try to make clear that this phenomenon does not depend in any way on administering placebos and may actually accompany almost all medical encounters.42 If physicians understood that the rituals in medicine themselves have healing potential, so that the physician’s ability to participate in these rituals in optimal fashion might make a serious difference in the patients’ health outcomes, then perhaps physicians might be willing to address the skills they need to acquire in order to perform in such rituals to the best of their ability. What does it mean, for instance, for the physician and patient to become jointly involved in a healing ritual, in an ideally empathic way? Adler, whose early work on the physician–patient relationship laid the groundwork for the meaning model of the placebo response, has recently proposed that the empathic physician can serve in some cases as an external physiological regulator for the distressed patient. “Mirror” neural pathways have been identified that appear to function in situations of high empathy, by which I can alter my own autonomic function, such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, in the direction of the functions of the other person who provides the empathic presence.43 Medicine would lose a good deal of whatever efficacy it possesses were we to eliminate all its ritual elements and practices. Yet we are far from understanding those ritual elements and their efficacy in any satisfactory way, whether at the level of brain neural circuits or at the level of clinical practice.

acknowledgment I am grateful to Robert Rose and to anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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notes 1. H. Brody. The placebo response: recent research and implications for family medicine. J Fam Pract 49:649–654, 2000; A. Harrington (ed.). The placebo effect: An interdisciplinary exploration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 2. I. Kirsch. Unsuccessful redefinitions of the term placebo. Am Psychol 41:844–45, 1986. 3. Z. Di Blasi, E. Harkness, E. Ernst, et al. The influence of context effects on health outcomes: a systematic review. Lancet 357:757–62, 2001; D. E. Moerman. Meaning, medicine and the “placebo effect.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002; F. G. Miller, and T. J. Kaptchuk. The power of context: reconceptualizing the placebo effect. J R Soc Med 101:222–25, 2008. 4. W. S. Sax, chapter 1 (this volume). 5. A. Hrobjartsson and P. C. Gotzsche. Is the placebo powerless? An analysis of clinical trials comparing placebo with no treatment. N Engl J Med 344:1594–1602, 2001; J. C. Bailar. The powerful placebo and the Wizard of Oz. N Engl J Med 344: 1630–32, 2001. 6. A. Harrington. The cure within: A history of mind-body medicine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 7. K. Montgomery. How doctors think: Clinical judgment and the practice of medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 8. E. M. Zuesse. Ritual. In: M. Eliade (ed.). Encyclopedia of religion. New York: Macmillan, 1987:12:408. 9. W. S. Sax. Healing rituals: A critical performative approach. Anthropol Med 11:293–306, 2004. 10. E. M. H. McKinney. Medical error: Overcoming barriers to truthful disclosure. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas Medical Branch, March 2007:96–100. I am grateful to Johannes Quack for pointing out to me the recent literature on rituals and ritualization, according to which many of these medical activities, as well as some to be addressed later (such as pill-taking), would be viewed as “ritualized actions” rather than as “rituals” in the full sense. No conclusions in this chapter hinge on that distinction, so I would lose nothing by substituting “ritualized action” for “ritual” in much of what follows. Nevertheless I would urge some caution before one concludes that many of these medical behaviors are not rituals. Rituals, it is noted, are often employed to demarcate a privileged sphere of activity from the everyday. I would propose that a similar privileging is a major function of many medical “rituals,” and indeed that that privileging (setting aside the medical activities as “special”) plays a role in medicine’s healing efficacy. Furthermore, medical rituals are important in determining membership in and the boundaries of a social group. A new physician coming from a distance establishes his credentials with the local medical community (and with patients) especially through his unhesitating ability to participate in these various rituals. 11. J. D. Frank. Persuasion and healing. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. 12. A. M. Kleinman. Why do indigenous healers successfully heal? Soc Sci Med 13B:17–26, 1979 (emphasis in original).

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13. I. Kirsch (ed.). How expectancies shape experience. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1999. 14. D. Kalaoukalani, D. C/ Cherkin, K. J. Sherman, et al. Lessons from a trial of acupuncture and massage for low back pain: Patient expectations and treatment effects. Spine 26:1418–24, 2001. 15. M. Amanzio, A. Pollo, G. Maggi, and F. Benedetti. Response variability to analgesics: A role for non-specific activation of endogenous opioids. Pain 90:205–15, 2001. 16. F. Haour. Mechanisms of the placebo effect and of conditioning. Neuroimmunomodulation 12:195–200, 2005. 17. R. Ader. Conditioned immunopharmacological effects in animals: Implications for a conditioning model of pharmacotherapy. In: L. White, B. Tursky, and G. E. Schwartz (eds.). Placebo: Theory, research, and mechanisms. New York: Guilford Press, 1985, 306–23. 18. M. U. Goebel, A. E. Trebst, J. Steiner, et al. Behavioral conditioning of immunosuppression is possible in humans. FASEB J 16:1869–73, 2002. 19. A. L. Suchman and R. Ader. Classic conditioning and placebo effects in crossover studies. Clin Pharmacol Ther 52:372–77, 1992. 20. M. Castes, M. Palenque, P. Canelones, et al. Classic conditioning and placebo effects in the bronchodilator response of asthmatic children. Presented at Research Perspectives in Psychoneuroimmunology VIII, Bristol, UK, April 1–4, 1998. 21. M. Amanzio and F. Benedetti. Neuropharmacological dissection of placebo analgesia: Expectation-activated opioid systems versus conditioning-activated specific subsystems. J Neurosci 19:484–94, 1999. 22. N. J. Voudouris, C. L. Peck, and G. Coleman. Conditioned response models of placebo phenomena: Further support. Pain 38:109–16, 1989; G. H. Montgomery and I. Kirsch. Classical conditioning and the placebo effect. Pain 72:107–13, 1997. 23. F. Benedetti, H. S. Mayberg, T. D. Wager, et al. Neurobiological mechanisms of the placebo effect. J Neurosci 25:10390–402, 2005. 24. H. S. Mayberg, J. A. Silva, S. K. Brannan, et al. The functional neuroanatomy of the placebo effect. Am J Psychiatry 159:728–37, 2002. 25. T. D. Wager, J. K. Rilling, E. E. Smith, et al. Placebo-induced changes in fMRI and the anticipation and experience of pain. Science 303:1162–67, 2004; J. K. Zubieta, J. A. Bueller, L. R. Jackson, et al. Placebo effects mediated by endogenous opioid activity on mu-opioid receptors. J Neurosci 25:7754–62, 2005. 26. I. Sarinopoulos, G. E. Dixon, S. J. Short, et al. Brain mechanisms of expectation associated with insula and amygdala response to aversive taste: Implications for placebo. Brain Behav Immun 20:120–32, 2006. 27. J. K. Zubieta, W. Y. Yau, D. J. Scott, and C. S. Stohler. Belief or need? Accounting for individual variations in the neurochemistry of the placebo effect. Brain Behav Immun 20:15–26, 2006. 28. M. Amanzio, A. Pollo, G. Maggi, and F. Benedetti. Response variability to analgesics: A role for non-specific activation of endogenous opioids. Pain 90:205–15, 2001.

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29. L. Colloca, L. Lopiano, L. Lanotte, and F. Benedetti. Overt versus covert treatment for pain, anxiety, and Parkinson’s disease. Lancet Neurol 3:674–84, 2004. 30. A. Hrobjartsson and P. C. Gotzsche. Is the placebo powerless? An analysis of clinical trials comparing placebo with no treatment. N Engl J Med 344:1594–1602, 2001; A. Hrobjartsson and P. C. Gotzsche. Is the placebo powerless? Update of a systematic review with 52 new randomized trials comparing placebo with no treatment. J Intern Med 256:91–100, 2004. 31. A. J. de Craen, D. E. Moerman, S. H. Heisterkamp, et al. Placebo effect in the treatment of duodenal ulcer. Br J Clin Pharmacol 48:853–60, 1999. 32. S. Marchand, J. Charest, J. Li, et al. Is TENS purely a placebo effect? A controlled study on chronic low back pain. Pain 54:99–106, 1993; T. J. Kaptchuck. The placebo effect in alternative medicine: Can the performance of a healing ritual have clinical significance? Ann Intern Med 136:817–25, 2002. 33. M. Thomas, S. V. Eriksson, and T. Lundberg. A comparative study of diazepam and acupuncture in patients with osteoarthritis pain: A placebo controlled study. Am J Chin Med 19:95–100, 1991. 34. I. Kirsch and G. Sapirstein. Listening to Prozac but hearing placebo: A meta-analysis of antidepressant medication. Prevention and treatment 1, article 0002a, http://journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html; B. T. Walsh, S. N. Seidman, R. Sysko, and M. Gould. Placebo response in studies of major depression: Variable, substantial, and growing. JAMA 287:1840–47, 2002. 35. H. Brody. Placebos and the philosophy of medicine: Clinical, conceptual, and ethical issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 122–23; H. M. Adler and V. B. O. Hammett. The doctor–patient relationship revisited: An analysis of the placebo effect. Ann Intern Med 78:595–98, 1973. 36. D. E. Moerman. Meaning, medicine and the “placebo effect.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 37. M. Stewart, J. B. Brown, A. Donner, et al. The impact of patient-centered care on outcomes. J Fam Pract 49:796–804, 2000. 38. J. Berger and J. Mohr. A fortunate man. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston 1967; E. J. Cassell. The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine. N Engl J Med 306:639–45, 1982. 39. T. J. Kaptchuk, J. M. Kelley, L. A. Conboy, et al. Components of the placebo effect: Randomized controlled trial in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. BMJ 336:999–1003, 2008. 40. G. Theissen, chapter 3 (this volume). 41. H. Brody and D. Brody. The placebo response: How you can release the body’s inner pharmacy for better health. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. 42. E. B. Larson and X. Yao. Clinical empathy as emotional labor in the patient– physician relationship. JAMA 293:1100–6, 2005. 43. H. M. Adler. Toward a biopsychosocial understanding of the patient– physician relationship: An emerging dialogue. J Gen Intern Med 22:280–85, 2007.

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9 Bell, Bourdieu, and Wittgenstein on Ritual Sense Johannes Quack

Introduction In 2006 at Heidelberg University, the French anthropologist Michael Houseman gave a workshop on divination rituals. Instead of giving a lecture, however, he presented the participants with a pair of shoes and said that they had belonged to Marcel Mauss and that the group should try to come up with a ritual using them. No further instructions were given. This chapter is concerned with the notion of “ritual sense.” In relation to this topic it is interesting to note that within a short period of time the participants found it easy to invent a ritual that seemed appropriate to all of them. How did they manage to do this? Further I wonder whether, during this process, any of them thought of how to make the ritual efficacious (or deliberately pointless, for that matter)? In order to clarify this problem, I want to raise some further questions: Does it help to state here that all the participants shared a “ritual sense”? If so, is the ability to invent rituals based on a universal human ritual instinct (as Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests) or is it based on a culturally specific, embodied ritual sense (as Catherine Bell suggests)? And what might the answer tell us about the notion of ritual efficacy? In her book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice Catherine Bell claims that “[i]t is through a socially acquired sense of ritual that members of a society know how to improvise a birthday celebration, stage an elaborate wedding, or rush through a minimally adequate funeral” (1992: 80). The first part of this chapter will deal with Bell’s argument. It will examine her concept of ritual sense (or “sense of ritual”) as a “socially acquired” sense, a form of embodied knowledge about

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how to perform a ritual. I will then demonstrate how she relates her arguments to Pierre Bourdieu’s work, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of her use of the concept of “ritual sense.” This discussion and critique of Bell will draw on ethnological fieldwork I conducted in 2005 in Rishikesh, India. My argument concerning Bell will be that in many cases it is helpful to look at a socially acquired sense of ritual but is problematic to focus explicitly on ritual, since Bourdieu’s much broader notion of “habitus” is more important here. I will further argue that Bourdieu’s own use of the term “ritual” also leads in a different direction: not toward a culturally specific ritual sense, but toward Wittgenstein’s concept of a “ritual instinct.” In his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” (henceforth referred to here as Remarks) Wittgenstein writes about the invention of rituals as well. He gives the following example: Recall that after Schubert’s death his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favourite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a sign of piety. (1993: 126) The second half of this chapter will focus on aspects of Wittgenstein’s and Bourdieu’s use of the term “ritual.” Both seem to claim that human beings are in a certain way “ceremonial animals” (i.e., that they have a ritual instinct). They also claim that there are limits to the possibility of explaining rituals and that one should first and foremost acknowledge the ritualistic elements in one’s own practices. The argument here will be that there are some considerable overlaps in Wittgenstein’s and Bourdieu’s approaches to ritual. Their central arguments, however, are not about rituals understood as ceremonies, but rather about ritual understood as a basic element of various human actions. Nevertheless certain problems of ritual theory—for example, the problem of efficacy—appear in a different light if one accepts Wittgenstein’s Remarks as a conceptual basis. Further, we shall be able to identify some of the shortcomings of Bell and Wittgenstein by looking at them in terms of the concept of ritual efficacy. Hence the question of ritual efficacy will be the vehicle for the summary of the discussion of the notion of “ritual sense” in the light of Bell’s, Bourdieu’s, and Wittgenstein’s comments. The general direction of my final argument here is that the question, “How do rituals work?” either implies the problematic notion of some of kind of ritual efficacy sui generis, or posits that it should be reformulated in a much more specific manner. For this discussion,

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the use of the notion of intentionality seems to be unavoidable, whether one talks about ritual sense or ritual efficacy. But before considering Bell, Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, and ritual efficacy, I will give an empirical example of the notion of ritual sense.

Different Performances of Pujas in Sacha Dham Ashram, Rishikesh In 2005 I spent several months in Rishikesh, where the holy river Ganges flows into the north Indian plains as it leaves its Himalayan home. Rishikesh is famous for it ashrams1 and meditation centers, most of which are located in one of two neighborhoods of Rishikesh called Ram Jhula and Laxman Jhula. The precise location of my fieldwork was in an ashram in Laxman Jhula called Sacha Dham. The Sacha Dham (“abode of truth”) ashram was perched on a small cliff overlooking the Ganges. Its actual area was about 200 meters long and 100 meters wide, including five major buildings and a small, beautiful garden. In spring 2005 another large building was under construction to extend the guest house facilities, all of which are exclusively for Indian disciples who come to stay in the ashram. Non-Indians were asked to stay in one of the countless hotels, guesthouses, and ashrams around Sacha Dham. Older members of the ashram told me that building and renovation work has been going on in the ashram continuously for many years. Although a lot has changed and grown in the last decades, especially since an American woman now called Shanti Mayi came some twenty years ago to stay with Guru Shri Maharajji, it was always emphasized that Sacha Dham is a “traditional Vedic ashram.” This means, for example, that visitors were advised to be particularly careful to observe traditional rules of dress and behavior, but it also refers to the important lineage of Gurus to which Shri Maharajji and Shanti Mayi belong, and which is served by eight additional priests (pandits). The male Indian Guru Shri Hans Maharajji and the female American Guru Shanti Mayi were then guiding the Sacha Dham ashram. One of the peculiarities of the ashram was that many Indians came to visit Shri Maharajji, while Shanti Mayi is visited almost exclusively by non-Indians, mainly people from Western Europe, but also from the United States. Both Gurus stood in the same lineage and their “theological accordance” was emphasized by both sides. Nevertheless, the daily religious practices—mainly pujas2—were not performed together by the two groups of disciples. During my stay, Shanti Mayi’s disciples’ program of activities—which was not compulsory and from which she

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herself was usually absent—started generally at 5 A.M. with silent meditation to greet the dawn. The gayatri mantra,3 which was seen as “a universal prayer for the awakening of all beings,” was chanted daily at 9:30 A.M. together. Pujas or devotional rituals were also offered daily in various forms—a Shiva-puja at 6 A.M., the havan-puja4 at 7 A.M., the Durga-puja at 7:30, and two Ganesh-pujas during the day—usually in the garden right beside Shanti Mayi’s house. Central to all of them was a variation of the arati-ceremony5; honoring the Sacha lineage of Gurus and “the Guru within.” About four days a week Shanti Mayi offered satsang6 (also referred to as “Dharma Drum”), an opportunity to ask her questions about spiritual matters, to talk about personal experiences, and “to drink in the wisdom of her words and the silence between the words.” Bhajans, or devotional hymns, were usually sung before the satsang began and were seen “as a chance to dissolve the thinking mind in the pure joy of singing heartfully, melting with others.”7 For the Indians by contrast, the day started with a havan-puja in the morning. Furthermore an arati-puja was performed at the beginning and end of the day in the temple of the ashram, complemented by the reading of extracts out of the Ramayana and the singing of bhajans before or after the arati. Additionally, the statue of Sri Sacha Guru in the main temple of the ashram was fed, put into bed, woken up, and so on daily, acts that were not, however, part of a special ceremony one could somehow attend. For arati, the reading of the Ramayana, and singing, the attendance of Westerners was allowed, and a few used this opportunity from time to time to listen only to the singing of the bhajans. One focus of my fieldwork was to describe the differences between these performances of what, in principle, were the same rituals. My main focus was on the performance of the havan-puja, so one day I would perform the havan and probably some other rituals with the Indians and the next day would do so with the Westerners. I tried to make sense of these differences in terms that might be relevant to ritual theory. The term puja is commonly applied to a combination of rites of worship, honor, or welcome of a deity in any of its manifestations and in any context in India, such as in front of the shop, or in large, elaborate temple ceremonies (cf. also note 2). It is often emphasized that at the center of the phenomenon of puja lies a transaction between worshiper(s) and the deity(ies) (see Fuller’s The Camphor Flame). This becomes noticeable through the fact that the prevailing metaphors for puja are hospitality, servitude, service, and blessings. The aspect of the deity being treated as a guest, and the mutual interaction between the deity and the devotee, are also mentioned in most scholarly descriptions of puja.8 Attention is thereby often drawn to the question of to

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what degree puja mirrors the hierarchical relationships in Indian society. Further an attempt is often made to describe what happens when the worshiper meets the deity, since the borders between the mundane and the godly realm, in the context of Indian religiosity, are said to be not as strong as in other religions.9 If one compares this perspective on pujas to the stance taken by the nonIndians in the Sacha Dham ashram, it is striking that the emphasis shifts from metaphors of hospitality, service, and blessings with respect to the relationship with a deity to the experience of a general “spiritual feeling” that is experienced in the same way during pujas, satsang, or meditation. One man from England wrote on my questionnaire: As I walk across Laksman Jhula towards Satsang, my alignment has already begun. Almost every time that I have gone to Satsang, as I begin my walk towards Sacha Dam [sic], my expression calms, quietude comes, and sometimes I do not even make eye contact on my way. Often I will not speak, my intention becomes more and more focused. This is because . . . ? I left Satsang yesterday rich in Loving Neutrality. Wandering the street for a couple hours I was open and mostly at peace. . . . Time would pass. I was quite content. Statements referring to the daily pujas were very similar to this one. None of the Westerners spoke of a “transaction,” but rather of the “self,” which becomes “focused,” “at peace,” or “one with everything else.” The following statement about the performance of pujas is but one example: I associate [with puja] feelings of openness being connected to everyone and everything, a sense that there is more to life than just living, more harmony, peace inside myself, warmth from myself towards all living beings, and an understanding of people. In order to discuss such differences, it is necessary to go into more detail. However, my focus here will be primarily not on “theological interpretations” but rather on the actual practice of puja. To summarize my findings, I see the performance of the “Western pujas,” relative to the “Indian pujas,” as being concerned with “togetherness” as well as being “closed” and andächtig.10 For example, the Westerners put great emphasis on each participant’s harmonizing with the others, thereby stressing “togetherness.” One person, for example, said, “We sing together, in harmony, but [the Indians] neither have the same melody nor the same rhythm.” Another person commented, “It is the fact that so many people sing with just one voice which makes our singing so powerful. Everybody is melting into it.”

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Certain aspects of the Westerners’ ritual practice seemed to be “closed”— for example their sitting in a circle facing inward, and their concern to ensure that the rite had a clear beginning and end, so that people felt that it was inappropriate to come late or leave early. One Swami of Shanti Mayi from the Netherlands told me that she felt it very disrespectful and disturbing when an Indian woman performed her own puja right beside her while she was performing her Ganesh-puja. The Indians in the ashram seemed to have a far more “open” attitude to the performance of pujas. I observed several times how people performed their own puja at the same time and place where another public puja was being performed, and that anyone could join or leave the major performances anytime. The term that captures the last difference best is the German andächtig, that is, “devout, prayerful, or pious.” Once again, little incidents are exemplary. While performing the fire ritual (havan), one was told not to point the feet toward the fire. Hence the normal sitting position was cross-legged. Since I was not accustomed to sitting like this, to do so for about an hour was in the beginning quite a challenge for me. This was not the case for most of the other Westerners, some of them having practiced yoga for years. From time to time I felt that because of the specific andächtig atmosphere of the ceremony, I was disturbing the others by moving around too much. In contrast, a German woman said, “In Indian pujas there is a lot of traffic going on. I mean the whole atmosphere is kind of confusing and chaotic.” A further point of illustration is the fact that the Westerners performed the arati without blowing a conch shell or striking a gong or metal plate. A Dutch woman said, “They [the Indians] spill water everywhere, bang extremely noisy on metal plates while blowing a horn and ringing a bell, throw rice and flowers everywhere—and in the end it looks more like a battlefield.” The Westerners often used the same adjectives in referring both to everyday life in India and to the Indian pujas: for example, “chaotic,” “noisy,” “strange.”11 None of these qualities are conducive to the kind of atmosphere they saw as central to their puja—which I call “prayerful” (andächtig). In all these respects the Indian pujas contrasted with those of the Westerners, and the sum of these small individual differences makes the two pujas quite distinct from each other. Accordingly the Westerners were reluctant to join the pujas of the Indians, claiming, for example, “The Indians’ puja does not work for me.” Of course, there were other reasons why Indians and Westerners did not perform the pujas together: for one, the groups were separate in various ways— not at least due to language and other cultural barriers. But there was no obvious disharmony between the two groups, so how do we explain such radically different concepts about what constitutes an appropriate puja? Following Bell,

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one could argue that one important reason for the different performances is a difference in the groups’ respective “ritual senses.” Accordingly one could conclude that a common “ritual sense” existed among the Westerners about what is appropriate in a puja (that is in their puja). Hence the concept of ritual sense could play an important part in explaining the separate performances.

Bell, Bourdieu, and Ritual Sense Bell’s opus magnum Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992) begins by arguing that traditional theories of ritual are based on a problematic hierarchical opposition between thought and action, an opposition she seeks to avoid by focusing on the concept of “ritualization,” that is, focusing on ritual practices rather than on rituals as reified “things.” I will ignore here Bell’s argument that ritualized actions reproduce power relations, which she sees as implemented in hierarchical oppositions constructed through the process of ritualization. I will focus instead on the very basis of her position: her concept of ritual sense and its relationship to “ritualization.” Bell writes that “the implicit dynamic and ‘end’ of ritualization . . . can be said to be the production of a ‘ritualized body.’ A ritualized body is a body invested with a ‘sense’ of ritual” (1992: 80). Having a ritual sense, in her terminology, amounts to having a culturally specific “ritual mastery” inscribed in one’s body, which generates a feel for what is or is not acceptable in ritual. A ritual sense is a culturally dependent and “situational” disposition (1992: 81). Further, we are dealing with a flexible set of schemes and strategies acquired and deployed by a ritualized agent (cf. 1992: 80), and third, the use of the ritual sense shows how ritual activities generate a sense of what is or is not acceptable in ritual. In this respect the basic function of the ritual sense is presented as creating a distinction between ritualized and nonritualized,—thus, acceptable and unacceptable—ways of doing the task at hand (cf. 1992: 74). As with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, such an incorporated knowledge consists of dispositions that are based on past experiences, find their expression in the present, and, thereby shape the future. Hence for Bell, the notion “ritual sense” is not merely classificatory: she also sees it as a causal-explanatory notion, similar to Bourdieu’s habitus. In a nutshell, the culturally dependent “ritual sense” produces ritualized agents as well as new schemes of what counts as ritual. All of these aspects seem to be at stake in Bell’s remark that one’s ritual sense allows one to “rush through a minimally adequate funeral.” This idea evokes Clifford Geertz’s famous essay “Ritual and Social Change” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) on a failed ritual in Indonesia. His essay is concerned primarily with showing that

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functionalism is not able to deal adequately with social change, but Bell wants to make a different point: [A] focus on the sense of ritual would shift the emphasis . . . to how minimal ritual procedures were improvised with sufficient respect for tradition that the child was considered buried more or less satisfactorily. (1992: 80) Bell’s theoretical concepts—like ritual sense, ritual mastery, embodied strategies, and so on—are based implicitly or explicitly on Bourdieu’s work, and in particular on his central notion of habitus. For example, scholars from abroad who visit the University of Heidelberg should not have problems interacting with academics whom they have never met before, at places they have never seen before. They just “know what one does” in a particular situation, because they are all representatives of the species Homo Academicus. Because of mental and corporal schemes of action that function as the basis for the generation and ordering of their interactions, they act like “fish in the water” in a familiar academic milieu. Such an unconscious mechanism, which enables us to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations, is what Bourdieu (1990, chap. 3) calls habitus. It is the basis of the “knowledge” of “what one does” in a given situation, a knowledge so deeply bred into our bones that we do not even think about it—at least as long as we are in a familiar environment, that is, as long as our habitus fits the milieu, in this case the university. Returning to Rishikesh, one could say that even the Westerners who had never performed a puja before were able, without any problem, to participate in one conducted by the disciples of Shanti Mayi. I expressly asked those who were participating for the first time, and all of them told me afterwards either about their “deep” and “powerful” personal experiences or at least how much they liked it. As for myself, I can say that the procedure and the singing, indeed the whole style of the “Western puja” felt somewhat “natural” to me. However, the pujas performed by the Indians in the ashram were experienced differently by the disciples from the United States and Europe. Most Westerners I talked to felt strange and rather uncomfortable during the “chaotic” and “noisy” Indian-performed pujas. In line with Bell’s application of Bourdieu, one can argue that the implicit “ritual sense” of the Westerners, their ritual habitus, their sense of what “one does” in a ritual did not fit the milieu of the “Indian pujas” but instead matched the “closed” and andächtig rituals conducted in the West. So far it seems to be helpful to look at a socially acquired sense of ritual to explain similarities or differences in the way rituals are performed. I will argue here, however, that Bell’s limiting her focus to ritual

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is problematic for two reasons. First, we lose more than we gain if we limit Bourdieu’s much wider notion of habitus in such a way. Second—and more important—Bell’s concept of ritualization is problematic with respect to the explanation of the differences between ritualized and nonritualized actions. I hope that my brief account of the pujas in Sacha Dham ashram suffices to indicate the relevance the concept of habitus might have for ritual activities, especially with respect to the differences in performances in a cross-cultural setting. To paraphrase a passage from Bourdieu’s book Distinction: A [ritual] has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. . . . A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colors and lines, without rhyme and reason. (1984: 2) My paraphrase involves substituting “piece of art” with the word “ritual,” indicating that these socially inculcated bodily senses Bell stresses by drawing on Bourdieu are not specific to rituals in any way. A similar point could easily be made with respect to differences in the choice of clothes, of hotels and restaurants, of music and schools of art—in Rishikesh and elsewhere. Indeed, one of the central and most interesting points of Bourdieu’s social analysis is the linkage he uncovers between apparently different realms of society. Thus, in Distinction Bourdieu relates—within one theoretical framework—the preferred drink of people with the way they dress, their political views, their financial background, and other factors. In the ethnographic section above I mentioned that in addition to their divergent senses of ritual, there were other reasons why Indians and Westerners did not perform the pujas together. These reasons will be lost from view, however, if the theoretical focus is limited to the ritual sense. The similar descriptions of pujas, satsangs, and meditation practices, for example, point toward a shared “sense” of the Westerners that is not confined to rituals but extends to other religious and social practices. Hence, my first point of criticism is that Bell’s application of Bourdieu omits one of the most interesting aspects of his theorizing and thereby misses important connections and interrelations between different spheres of social action. One could of course argue that for a scholar of ritual it is still interesting to limit Bourdieu’s discussion of practical sense to ritual sense. Doing so, however, brings in the notorious problem of the definition of ritual, which Bell refigured only as the problem of the conceptualization of “ritualization.” So for the present discussion, the relevant question is, what are the specific characteristics of ritualized actions that justify Bell’s focus on the “ritual sense”?

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There are two ways in which Bell tries to answer this problem. On the one hand she describes the terms she uses (ritual sense, ritualization, etc.) in a way that comes close to defining them, and on the other hand she gives some examples of how these terms can be applied. In her account, agents possessing a ritual sense are able to ritualize everyday actions in such a way that they become ritualized actions. The participation in ritualized actions in turn is what produces and shapes the ritual sense of the people involved. This amounts to asserting, in a rather circular fashion, that ritual activity is the result of the practice of ritualization and the other way round. In her words: “Essential to ritualization is the circular production of a ritualized body which in turn produces ritualized practices” (1992: 93). Besides the implicit danger of reifying the process (described by Bourdieu with respect to habitus as a structured and structuring process) by which individuals acquire their sense of ritual, these formulations do not explain anything with respect to the specific characteristics of ritualized actions. Moreover, the few examples Bell does provide of processes of ritualization do not solve the problems at hand, but instead raise further questions. She writes: An even simpler example might contrast the routine activity of buying some regularly used article of clothing for a spouse or child (such as gym socks) and the ritualized version of buying a similar but different article (argyle socks) and giving it as a gift. These activities are differentiated in the very doing and derive their significance form the contrast implicitly set up between them. Routine giving plays off ritualized giving and vice versa; they define each other. (1992: 91) This might be a good example for the difference of doing something routinely as opposed to doing it carefully, but not for the ritualization of buying a pair of socks. Acting with care is characteristic of many different sorts of actions, only some of which would be considered ritual—learning a new piece on the piano, for example—leaving aside the question of why one would ritualize the buying of a pair of socks in the first place. Clearly she is aware of the problem. She writes that “this is not to say that ritualization is simply acting differently. Otherwise, buying mismatched socks at a bargain table . . . would qualify as ritual” (1992: 91). And later she adds that “ritualization can be characterized in general only to a rather limited extent since the idiom of its differentiation of acting will be, for the most part, culturally specific” (1992: 93). So we are left where we started: “strategies of ritualization” that draw “privileged distinctions” between ways of acting in a “culturally specific” way. This problem of how to differentiate ritualized from ordinary actions is only underlined by Bell’s later book, Ritual: Perspectives and

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Dimensions (1997), where she again draws attention to how the ritualization of an activity establishes its own ritualized frame. She states that ritualization, given a voice, would say: “This is different, deliberate, and significant—pay attention!” (1997: 160). Yet also here she fails to answer the obvious question regarding the difference(s) between ritualized actions and other actions that are also different, deliberate, and significant—but are not rituals. This is not merely a problem of terminology and consistency but relates to her use of Bourdieu as well. Given the similarity of ritual sense to Bourdieu’s practical sense and habitus, Bell has to somehow “claim” or mark out the ritual field or respective milieu of the application of the ritual sense, since this is what is at stake. Of course, Bourdieu himself uses and discusses the notion of ritual throughout his writings, but I would argue that when one looks more closely at such statements, one recognizes that he pursues Wittgenstein’s rather than Bell’s view of ritual. So I turn now to consider what Wittgenstein had to say about “ritual instinct” and how this view articulates with those of Bourdieu.

Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Ritual Sense The concept of ritual instinct12 is central to Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Wittgenstein had at least two encounters with different editions of Frazer’s Golden Bough and there are several versions of his Remarks, none of which he released for publication. Here I refer to the most comprehensive edition of Wittgenstein’s writings on Frazer (edited by Klagge and Nordmann in 1993) and to the very interesting interpretation by the French philosopher Phillip De Lara in his article “Wittgenstein as Anthropologist” (2003).13 A striking claim of the Remarks is that a “ritual instinct lies at the bottom of all rites,” that “one could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal” (Wittgenstein 1993: 128). But in order to understand what Wittgenstein hints at with such statements, we first have to differentiate between several intertwined arguments within his Remarks. I will focus here on two. First, Wittgenstein holds that there are limits to the explanation of rituals, notwithstanding the fact that they can be explained in various ways. The second point is a kind of moral argument developed by Wittgenstein: that one must recognize (as Frazer conspicuously did not) that “our” way of thinking and acting is not very different from that of “the natives.” Concerning the first argument, Wittgenstein is convinced that the demand for a full explanation of ritual actions betrays a misunderstanding about what rituals are.14 But it would be a further misunderstanding to think

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that Wittgenstein suggests that reference to an instinct is all one can say with respect to ritual action. He does not mean that explanations or elucidations of any sort are impossible. His point is rather that some features of human life cannot be thoroughly explained, for they are a constitutive part of the human predicament. “Here one can only describe and say: this is what human life is like” (1993: 121). In this respect, an example clarifies his point: Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied. (1993: 123) The self-correction here is central to an argument to which I will later return. In a first step Wittgenstein suggests that the intention to produce causal consequences as well as the intention to express some emotion or desire is not a primary quality of ritual action. One kisses the picture of one’s beloved neither because one expects a causal consequence nor in order to express one’s feelings directly. Here Wittgenstein tries to overcome the false dichotomy between intellectualist and expressive or symbolic accounts of ritual by employing the concept of “instinct.” But he seems to go one step further. When he writes that “it aims at nothing at all,” he seems to be suggesting that there are nonintentional human actions—such as an involuntary twitch of the eyes—which are to be understood as more than simple “behavior.”15 According to Wittgenstein, if we want to understand such actions adequately, we have to realize that we simply behave this way; it is an “instinct-like reaction” to a significant phenomenon. If one compares such statements to some of Bourdieu’s statements on rituals, one cannot miss the similarities.16 Bourdieu writes on ritual practices: Rites are practices that are ends in themselves, that are justified by their very performance; things that one does because they are “the done thing,” “the right thing to do,” . . . they may have, strictly speaking, neither meaning nor function, other than the function implied in their very existence. (1990: 18) There are also striking similarities between Bourdieu and Wittgenstein with respect to the second, moral argument, namely that it is wrong to oppose our way of thinking to the magical, mystical, ritual thinking of the natives. Bourdieu writes that the anthropologist would probably give a better account of rituals or kinship relations if he introduced into his theory the

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“understanding”—in Wittgenstein’s sense of the ability to use them correctly—that is evident in his . . . skill at performing the social rituals of academic life. (1990: 18) He claims that there are analogies between the “practical logic of ritual” and “our way of using the opposition between right and left in politics,” all of which leads us to discover that “mythological thinking is quite often nothing but the logic of three-fourths of our actions” (Bourdieu interviewed by Lamaison 1986: 114). Wittgenstein, on the other hand, writes about “our kinship to those savages” and states that the principle according to which these practices are arranged is a much more general one than in Frazer’s explanation and is present in our own minds, so that we ourselves could think up all the possibilities. (1993: 127) All of this goes to show that Wittgenstein’s “ritual instinct” and Bourdieu’s “practical sense” are parallel concepts and that both are useful for interpreting ritual practices. The point is that we are dealing with a very basic, prereflective aspect of human beings, which can be part of various actions. A well-known example is that of bowlers who see that their bowling ball is heading too much to the left, and then move their upper body to the right.17 Neither do they seek to express their feelings to the people around them nor do they think that their movement has some influence on the direction of the bowling ball. They do it instinctively. Hence the concept of ritual instinct is to be seen only as the basic level of ritual practice. On a second level one could investigate the expressive and instrumental aspects of any given practice. Such a differentiation of levels is problematic, however, and at the end of this chapter I will discuss how Wittgenstein sets out to differentiate between the two levels, and whether it is helpful to introduce a level of a basic action that, while not intentional in any way, is still more than mere behavior. Coming back to my fieldwork in Sacha Dham ashram, I want to add that the two arguments outlined above in the name of Wittgenstein would find agreement among most of the Westerners, including Guru Shanti Mayi—in particular the claim that there are limits to the explanation of ritual practices. With respect to my work, they frequently told me that I was searching for explanations of things where there are no explanations—only experience. Yet they made this comment with respect to rituals as well as to other actions. One could argue that their position was akin to Bourdieu’s statement that

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the problem of ritual efficacy the “thinker” betrays his secret conviction that action is fully performed only when it is understood, interpreted, expressed, by identifying the implicit with the unthought and by denying the status of authentic thought to the tacit and practical thought that is inherent in all “sensible” action. Language spontaneously becomes the accomplice of this hermeneutical philosophy which leads one to conceive action as something to be deciphered, when it leads one to say, for example, that a gesture or ritual act expresses something, rather than saying, quite simply, that it is “sensible” (sensé) or, as in English, that it “makes’” sense. (1990: 36–37)

Some problems involved in this statement will be addressed when we turn to the question of the efficacy of rituals. First, however, I want to conclude my discussion of Wittgenstein. At first one has to see that a different notion of ritual is at stake here. When Bourdieu compares ritual actions to the “logic of three-fourths of our action,” he seems to be thinking in Goffmanian terms about ritual, rather than in terms of the sorts of ceremonies that puja, mass, baptism, and the like exemplify. A similar point can be made with respect to a central problem of Wittgenstein’s account of “ritual instinct.” The example of the bowler (as well as some of Wittgenstein’s own examples in the Remarks) makes it more than clear that here we have left the realm of rituals conceived as ceremonies. If the movement of a bowler exemplifies the ritual instinct at work, it is hard to argue that we are still talking about rituals as they are usually conceived in social theory (for example by Bell).18 Rather, Wittgenstein is reminding us about one aspect of human life and the dispositions it produces, trying to make us see that there are many aspects of our day-to-day life that have nothing to do with means and ends as this relationship is usually conceived. This observation implies that the opposition set up at the beginning of this chapter between a universal human ritual instinct (as suggested by Wittgenstein) and a culturally specific, embodied ritual sense (as suggested by Bell) is only apparently contradictory, since the respective conceptualizations of “ritual” are on different levels. Hence, it is not problematic for Bourdieu to be involved in both understandings of ritual sense. But—to come back to Wittgenstein—it would be silly to suggest that he did not notice that many of our actions are means to ends. In fact, I expressly omitted parts of the quotation in this respect. Wittgenstein writes, “One could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal,” but he immediately adds, “That is, no doubt, partly wrong and partly nonsensical, but there is also something right about it” (1993: 218, my italics). What seems right to me is that there are aspects of human behavior for which what Weber called Zweckrationalität

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(“instrumental rationality”) is not an exhaustive explanation. Along these lines one probably could say with Bourdieu that an action makes sense to the actors merely because they have an appropriate sense of it, because it “makes sense” to them. The ritual performed by the Westerners in the ashram makes sense to the other Westerners because they share a common ritual sense, or better, because their habitus fits the milieu. But—and here I diverge from Wittgenstein—such an interpretation does not mean that such actions are not intentional. They might not be based on Zweckrationalität, but although they are not in this sense goal-oriented, the point of such actions is still understandable to other people. Central to such an argument is that “understanding” means to understand the intentions behind the action. What Wittgenstein sees as being wrong (about the statement that man is a ceremonial animal) is to think that this is the case for all human actions. And he would probably see the attempt to ascribe those features to a distinct class of actions as nonsensical. The argument of Wittgenstein is therefore against the category “ritual” as it is commonly used in the social sciences. In a Wittgensteinian perspective ritual action must be understood not as a distinct class of actions or behavior, but as central aspect of some human actions.19

Ritual Sense, Efficacy, and Intentionality What has all of this is to do with ritual efficacy? To make my point clear I want to start with a very basic question: Is it helpful at all to talk about the efficacy of rituals? Does the question, “How do rituals work?” make sense? Some of the participants at the conference that led to this book seemed to imply that rituals (whatever we consider them to be) have a special kind of efficacy. To my mind it is wrong and misleading to suggest that there is something like ritual efficacy sui generis (cf. Sørensen 2006 for the most recent formulation of such a position). I do not think that there is one answer to the question of “how rituals work.” Shamanic rituals may heal, legal rituals may bind, political rituals may resolve difficulties, religious rituals may cleanse or bestow grace, and so on—or they may not. But how and when they succeed cannot be explained by a general theory of ritual; nor is the efficacy of such actions, when they are successful, specific to rituals.20 Speech acts, general causal relations, placebo effects, catharsis, rhetoric, and luck can and do help explain the efficaciousness of an action—but this fact does not depend on whether or not the action is ritualized. Such a position regarding ritual efficacy is, for example, underlined by Howard Brody’s paper on the placebo effect in this volume. Brody could have written the same article without mentioning ritual at any point. His important

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contribution to the topic of ritual efficacy is based not on a general theory of ritual efficacy, but rather on the way in which he shows how ritual performances might enhance a certain kind of efficacy (placebo effects). What I have said about Bell and Wittgenstein is intended to underline this basic point. In her introduction to Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Bell writes that that she wants to provide “potentially more fruitful questions about the origins, purposes, and efficacy of ‘ritualized actions’ than are accessible through current models” (1992: ix). I am skeptical about whether she succeeds in this goal. Here again one has to ask what, precisely, she means by the “efficacy of ritualized actions”—how, for whom, and against what are they efficacious? I assume that she wants to say that it is fruitful to ask how ritualized actions are efficacious in the production of a ritual sense (which in turn is relevant to a reproduction of power relations—misrecognized by the actors themselves). Recall her earlier quote that “the implicit dynamic and ‘end’ of ritualization . . . can be said to be the production of a ‘ritualized body.’ A ritualized body is a body invested with a ‘sense’ of ritual” (1992: 80). I argued that her approach is problematic since she seems to be talking primarily about the fitting of a ritual habitus to a ritual milieu and that the mechanisms at work in such an effect are not at all specific to the process of ritualization. It is telling that Bell herself at decisive points does not speak about efficacy but rather states that the focus on ritual sense helps to show how the child from the example of Geertz was “considered buried more or less satisfactorily.” The notions of adequacy or appropriateness—although the analytical value of these terms might be even less than that of the notion “sense” or “instinct”—bring us back to the example at the beginning of this chapter. I claimed that, while it was no problem for participants in a seminar on ritual theory to invent, within a short period of time, a ritual that seemed appropriate to all of us, none of us even thought of the question of how to make it efficacious. This observation points in the direction taken by Wittgenstein: the idea that rituals are not primarily about efficacy. For him, the most basic feature of rituals is that they are based on an instinct-like reaction to a significant phenomenon. The belief in causal consequences, like the explicit expression of emotions or desires, is a secondary quality of ritualized actions, and so therefore is the question of efficacy. Since the question of efficacy can only be added to ritual action, any talk about ritual efficacy, and even more so any talk about an efficacy specific to rituals, is misguided, because these are properties of human action in general. You would not ask Schubert’s brother or the man who kisses the picture of his beloved whether their actions were efficacious.

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But Wittgenstein’s observation that instrumental or expressive theories of ritual are not always sufficient ways to make sense of a ritualized action (they rather are based on a false dichotomy) does not imply that such actions are pointless. This is where Wittgenstein’s position (as well as De Lara’s interpretation of it) that such actions “aim at nothing at all” needs to be discussed further, primarily since the word “aim” bears much theoretical weight here. I only want to hint at an alternative approach, one that takes on the problems debated above but that is not based on the notions of sense, instinct, efficacy, instrumentality, or expression but rather on the notion of intentionality.21 To use an earlier example, the question is whether an (intentional) basic action is performed by a bowler by moving the upper part of the body to the right or by a lover who kisses the picture of his beloved. If one looks at it this way, one sees that the lack of instrumental rationality as well as the lack of an intended expression of feelings does not necessarily make the respective actions “pointless,” nor is it appropriate to say that such actions “aim at nothing at all.”22 I have attempted to show that one must treat the efficacy of rituals on a case-by-case basis, and must acknowledge that with respect to efficacy, ritual actions do not differ from other sorts of action. The latter point was exemplified in the discussion of Bell when I argued that one has either to defend a concept of ritual efficacy sui generis based on a sufficient conceptualization of ritual/ritualization, or acknowledge that there is no ritual-specific efficacy. The discussion of Wittgenstein’s position raised the question of whether efficacy is in any sense a primary feature of ritual activities. This led me to consider them not only as similar to other actions having multiple relations to the lives of human beings but also as intentional and, because of this intentionality, as understandable to other human beings. With respect to all the problems raised in this chapter concerning ritual sense as well as ritual efficacy, I finally argued that a discussion of intentionality is unavoidable. So, although I introduced and discussed the notions of ritual sense and ritual instinct, I feel that they help us neither to answer “the problem of ritual efficacy” nor to understand specific aspects of ritual actions in general. Bell’s formulation of a ritual sense depends on an inadequate conceptualization of the term “ritual(alization).” Wittgenstein’s idea of a prereflective, instinctive and unintentional reaction to “significant phenomena” did not explain how to conceptualize the mental states of the persons performing these actions (rituals). With respect to ritual efficacy, my conclusion is that different rituals call for different considerations of their efficacy, because they are primarily species of action. In short, when it comes to ritual efficacy, we must follow another piece of advice from Wittgenstein and resist our “craving for generality.”

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acknowledgment I want to thank Don Gardner and William Sax for their valuable comments, and the German Research Council and the German Academic Exchange Service for their financial support.

notes 1. In our context, the term ashram refers to a more or less secluded residence or “hermitage” of a religious community gathered around a Guru. There are, however, other ashram concepts—for example the one propagated by Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi. 2. The performance of a puja normally employs the use of a statue or image (murti). It is often emphasised that pujas bring together the human and the divine worlds at specific times and places by actualizing the presence of deity in a physical from that in some way embodies the reality of that deity. In most of the pujas there are at least three actions involved. The devotee first presents an offering to the murti, then the devotee is granted the blessed sight (darsana) of the deity and receives the deities’ blessing in the form of a mark (tilak) as well as a blessed article from the worship (prasad). 3. Gayatri is a name of a goddess as well as the name of a verse of the Rig-Veda. The gayatri Mantra is uttered by many Brahmins at dawn as well as in the brahmanic initiation ritual. It is often presented as being a condensed form of whole Veda. 4. In the havan or havan-puja, ritual oblations are offered into a sacrificial fire. 5. Arati is the honorific passing of a flame (lighted lamp, piece of camphor, etc.) in front of a guest, deity, or statue of a Guru. The essential gesture of arati is that of moving the object in a circular, clockwise fashion before the statue. In temples, usually a conch shell is blown, a gong is sounded, or a bell is rung continuously at the same time. 6. Satsang can be translated as “association of the true,” that is, of persons who are devoted to the truth. The term is used for devotional groups who meet, sing hymns, listen to sermons, and so forth. 7. All unreferenced quotes in this paragraph are taken from Shanti Mayi’s homepage “The Un-Spun Web” (http://www.shantimayi.com/ch1/sachadham.html) on 09.08.05. 8. Cf. Babb (1975: 43), Courtright (1985: 33), Fuller (1992: 60), and Rodrigues (2003: 35), to mention just a few. 9. The position of Chris Fuller is here most clear. He writes: “Puja, at its heart, is the worshiper’s reception and entertainment of a distinguished and adored guest. It is a ritual to honour powerful gods and goddesses, and often to express personal affection for them as well; it can also create a unity between deity and worshiper that dissolves the difference between them” (1992: 57). According to Fuller, the aspects of hierarchy as well as the transgression of borders are “two of the most critical features of Hindu religion and society” (1992: 3) and he keeps them in mind throughout his book The Camphor Flame (1992), especially in the chapter on pujas. 10. Lacking a tantamount translation, I used the German term andächtig. It can be loosely translated as devoutly, prayerful, docile, pious, etc. and in German it is kin with Andacht (Engl.: devotion, prayer).

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11. Cf. on this point one of Fuller’s descriptions of pujas: “Puja in a large temple, especially in the blackness enveloping the innermost shrines, has a powerful sensual impact, often amplified by the press of a large crowd of devotees in a hot, confined space. Frequently there is a deafening and even discordant sound as the music of pipes and drums combined with ringing bells and the chanting of sacred texts” (1992: 57). 12. For Wittgenstein’s notion of “instinct,” see De Lara (2003). 13. Cf. De Lara (2005) for a more extensive outline of his position. 14. The frame of explanatory reference is here Wittgenstein’s general aversion to “theories” in philosophy and his view that explanations always come to an end somewhere. For the point of the argument of this paper it is, however, not necessary to elaborate on this view. 15. “Intentionality” is to be understood here as a specific state of the mind that plays a distinctive role in the etiology of actions and not as a kind of “concept” (what would be called “intension” in the philosophy of mind). 16. It is not surprising that Bourdieu’s position resembles Wittgenstein’s, since he openly refers to Wittgenstein throughout his writing, most famously on his discussion of “following a rule.” But in an interview conducted in 1986 by Pierre Lamaison, Bourdieu gives the impression that he read the Remarks after he formulated his position on rituals (Lamaison and Bourdieu 1986: 118). 17. Cf. Ahern (1979: 16), where she quotes Piaget, who used the example of the bowling player to describe “spontaneous magical ideas in the adult” and relates this example to Wittgenstein’s Remarks. 18. Ahern, in her brief discussion of Wittgenstein, fails to notice the different concepts of ritual at stake (cf. Ahern 1979: 16). 19. Cf. De Lara (2003), to whom the reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s position given above owes a lot. 20. Cf. Skorupski’s critical remarks in Symbol and Theory: “What does a term have which brings together a man shaking hands, a man praying to his god, a man refusing to walk under a ladder, a man clapping hand at the end of a concert, a man placing medicine on his crops?” (1976: 171). 21. Not only is the notion “intentionality” well discussed and substantiated in the pertinent areas of philosophy, but it is further central to the respective debates in the classical as well as recent debates in ritual theory (cf. Skorupski 1976, Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994). In my perspective, basic actions in general are expressive of the mental states that cause them, irrespective of the question whether these actions were undertaken in order to express these states (they might not even be conscious to the actor while performing them). 22. De Lara (2003) discusses the notion of “intransitive expressions” where we do not have to proceed by saying what, for example, a piece of music might be an expression of. To my mind it is not satisfactory either for a music concert or for a ritual to say that it is merely expressive (not to mention the grammatical/logical reasons involved, since expressing is a two-place predicate). Beattie’s “expressivist” position that ritual activities are better to be compared to a ballet performance (Beattie 1986) seems to loom here still in the back, although De Lara is conscious of some of the problems involved.

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references Ahern, Emily M. (1979), “The Problem of Efficacy: Strong and Weak Illocutionary Acts,” Man 14:1–17. Babb, Lawrence A. (1975), The Divine Hierarchy: Popular Hinduism in Central India. New York: Columbia University Press. Beattie, J. H. M. (1986), “On Understanding Ritual,” in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell, 240–268. Bell, Catherine M. (1992), Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. ——— (1997), Ritual. Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction, a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——— (1990), The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Courtright, Paul B. (1985), “On this holy day in my humble way: Aspects of Puja,” in Joanne Punzo Waghorne (ed.), Gods of Flesh—Gods of Stone. Chaberburg, Pa.: Anima, 33–50. De Lara, Philippe (2003), “Wittgenstein as Anthropologist: The Concept of Ritual Instinct,” Philosophical Investigations 26(2): 109–124. ——— (2005), Le rite et la raison, Wittgenstein anthropologue. Paris: Ellipses. Fuller, Chris. J. (1992), The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Humphrey, Caroline, and James Laidlaw (1994), The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship. Oxford: Claradon Press. Klagge, James C., and Alfred Nordmann (1993), Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, Indianapolis: Hackett. Lamaison, Pierre, and Pierre Bourdieu (1986), “From Rules to Strategies: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu,” Cultural Anthropology 1(1): 110–120. Rodrigues, Hillary (2003), Ritual Worship of the Great Goddess: The Liturgy of the Durga Puja with Interpretations. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Skorupski, John (1976), Symbol and Theory, a Philosophical Study of Theories of Religion in Social Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sørensen, Podeman (2006), “Efficacy,” in Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (eds.), Theorizing Rituals. Leiden: Brill, 523–531. The Un-Spun Web, http://www.shantimayi.com/ch1/sachadham.html (accessed on 09.08.2005). Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1993), “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (1931–1948),” in James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (eds.), Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Index

Adams,Vincanne, 10–11 Africa 11 agency, 32, 118, 140 age of faith, 68 Akkadia. See Babylonia Allah, 114 America. See Latin America; North America anathema. See excommunication Ancient Near East, 17–19, 22–23, 27–28, 36, 38 Anu, 20 Arabia, 21, 114 Asad, Talal, 5, 8, 133–134, 141, 145 Asalluhi, 25, 28, 37 Asclepius, 53, 82 ashram, 8, 171–174, 176–177, 181, 183 Assyria. See Babylonia assyriology, 17 astrology, 72 Babylonia kingship in, 17, 19–20, 25, 35–38 pantheon of, 20, 23, 25, 27–28, 33, 36, 38 baptism, 76, 94, 182 Bateson, Gregory, 123 belief as bodily state, 9 christian, 135 as deep conviction, 140–142

as opposed to faith, 9 in miracles, 48, 50, 53 psychological notion of, 155 Bell, Catherine, 107, 169–171, 174–179, 182, 184–185 Benedetti, Fabrizio, 155–156 biblical studies, 46 biomedicine, 9–10, 132, 140, 146 Birgitta of Sweden, 69, 73 black magic, 77 body imagery, 117–118 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8–9, 107, 123, 141, 169–171, 175–183 bureaucracy, 145 candle ceremony. See excommunication cartesian dualism, 13–14, 115, 136, 152, 154 cartesian separation. See cartesian dualism Cartesianism. See cartesian dualism catholicism, 72, 75, 140, 144 materialist vs. spiritual, 135–137, 141–142 charismatic healing. See faith healing Christianity, 45–46, 67–68 communion, christian, 75, 77, 84, 101. See also excommunication conditioning mechanism. See conditioning theory conditioning theory, 61, 155–157, 159, 163 context effect. See placebo response

190

index

conventional medicine. See biomedicine coronation ritual. See ritual of coronation Cyrus, 21 Decretum. See Gratian demon Descartes, 134 development, economic, 10 Devil. See Satan discourse of modernity. See modernity disease. See illness double-blind trial, 152 dualism. See cartesian dualism. dynastic kingship, 38 Ea, 25, 27, 28, 36–37 Ecuador, 13, 133–134,136, 140–141, 143–146 effectiveness. See efficacy efficacy complexity of, 93–96 of excommunication, 102–106 (see also excommunication) levels of, 102–104, 106 and possession, 115, 127 and psychological theory, 54–55, 61, 155 of ritual performance, 3, 7–9, 17–18, 37–39, 46, 53, 59–63, 84–87, 110, 161, 170, 182–185 social, 124–128 theory of, 101–104 Egypt, 114, 126 embodiment, 8, 9, 123, 127 as habitus, 170 of ritual sense, 175–176, 178 (see also ritual sense) Enlightenment, 5, 132, 134–135, 140 and post-enlightenment, 4 Epidauros, 53 epilepsy, 69, 80, 86 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 81 Ethiopia, 114 etiology, mediaeval, 68–71 Eucharist, 60, 94–96, 102, 109 Europe, 11, 68, 98, 133, 135, 171, 176 excommunication, 93 vs. absolution, 100–101 abuse of, 104–106 history of, 94–98 and meaning of the soul, 104, 106–107 as political instrument, 95, 97, 104–105, 109

and ritual, 98–101, 106–109 and sinning, 94–98 social consequences of, 95–98, 101–102, 109 excommunicatio totalis. See excommunication exorcism, 26, 45, 59, 76–77, 83 expectancy model. See expectancy theory expectancy theory, 54, 61, 155. See also conditioning theory faith, 46, 48, 81, 84, 109 christian, 72, 79, 109 efficacy of, 63–64 and embodiment, 8–9 healing, 154, 51–58, 61, 63 lack of, 97, 99, 110 vs. secular science, 137, 139, 141, 143 fertility, 116–18, 121, 124 fieldwork, 10, 113, 125–126, 142, 144, 170–172, 181 Foucault, Michel, 7, 135 Frazer, James George, 20 Galen, 82 Garwhal, 13 Geertz, Clifford, 86, 175, 184 Gennep, Arthur van, 96 Gilgamesh Epic, 36 Goody, Jack, 4 Gospel, 46, 49 Gratian, 97–100, 102–103, 105, 107, 109 Greece, 53 Guru, 171–172, 181 habitus, 107–109, 170, 175–179, 183–184 Haraway, Donna, 134 Hildegard of Bingen, 74, 83 historical skepticism, 47–50 history of religion, 20 Hexenhammer, 79 healing ritual, 9, 11, 17, 19, 24, 71, 81–82, 85 (see also ritual healing) definition of, 67 in medicine, 153, 155, 161–62, 164 illness experience, 54, 161 as opposed to disease, 9–10, 57 mediaeval theories of, 67–71 in Mesopotamian cosmology, 19, 21–23, 25–27, 37

index and rituals, 71–72, 74, 79, 86, 161–163 (see also placebo response) caused through sinning, 69–71 and spirit possession, 114, 116–117 India, 4, 8, 13, 170–174, 176–177 infertility, 146 intentionality, 171, 183, 185, 187 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 8, 13, 131–133, 136, 140–147 catholic critique of, 131–132, 143 cycle of, 137–139 Iran, 114 IVF. See in vitro fertilization Jesus of Nazareth, 9, 53–64, 69, 73, 137, 162–163 as exorcist, 46, 47–52 Jinn, 114, 117, 119–120 John the Baptist, 47–48, 73 Kleinman, Arthur, 9, 154 Latin America, 135–136, 145 Latour, Bruno, 134, 136, 146 legitimation of power. See political ritual liminality, 27, 28, 32, 139 Lock, Margaret, 115 Lucifer. See Satan Lukes, Stefan, 4 Luther, Martin, 70, 76, 79, 110 madness. See mental illness magic analogy, 24–27 magic healing, 71, 85 magic identification. See magic analogy Malleus Maleficarum. See Hexenhammer Manungal. See Nungal Marduk, 20–21, 31, 38 Marx, Karl, 136 materia magica, 24–26 matrilineality, 125 meaning model, 160–161, 163–164 meaning response. See placebo response medical pluralism, 84–87 medical ritual. See rituals in medicine mental illness, 70, 74, 77 Mesopotamia cosmology of, 22, 25, 32–33 concept of illness in, 19, 22, 25, 37 rituals in, 17, 18, 26, 28, 34 royal ideology, 19, 29, 31

191

meta-ritual, 93, 106–109 Mexico, 136 mimesis, 123 miracle, 75, 77. See also miracle stories miracle stories, 45–50 in healing, 50–52, 62 modernity, 3, 10–14, 107, 136, 139, 141, 145–146 as opposed to religiosity, 131–35 modern medicine. See biomedicine Nabonidus, 21–22 Nergal, 36 neuroimaging studies, 157–159 New Testament, 45, 47, 56 New Year’s Festival, mesopotamian description of, 19–27 as rite of passage, 27–28 interpretation of, 27 Nineveh, 19 Nintur, 33 Nippur, 25–26, 29, 35 North America, 3, 11, 133–134, 142, 171, 176 North India, 4, 8, 170–174, 175–177 Nungal, 28, 32–33, 35 oracle, 10,13, 21,78 Paracelsus, 69 paradigm of science. See scientific paradigm Parkinson’s Disease, 157 patient satisfaction, 9, 161 Persia, 21 personal deity, mesopotamian idea of, 21–28, 31–39 personhood, relational, 115 pilgrimage, 71, 75, 78 placebo 13, 54, 63, 151–153, 155–160, 164 placebo effect. See placebo response placebo response, 151–164 and biomedicine, 152, 154 definition of, 151–152 efficacy of, 153–157, 163–164 and faith healing, 54, 63, 154 and neuroscience, 157–159, 163 explained through psychological theories, 61, 155–157 and ritual, 13, 153–154, 160–164 political ritual, 17, 19, 22

192

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positivism, 5 possession, 8, 45, 49, 70, 75–76, 113–115 and gender, 117–118, 120–121 and kinship, 116, 124–128 practice theory, 8. See also Bourdieu, Pierre pregnancy, 117, 126, 131, 142–143 prison of reed, mesopotamian 19–27 as ritual setting, 28–29 interpretation of, 32–37 Protestantism, 5, 8, 133, 135 psyche, 8 psychological theories, 155–157. See also expectancy theory; conditioning theory puja, 12, 171, 176–177, 182 Western vs. Indian perceptions of, 172–175 Quran, 114 rationality, 4, 6, 10, 132 instrumental, 183, 185 relic, 73–75, 77–78, 83–84 religio, 4, 5 representational theory, critique on 5, 8 reproduction, assisted. See in vitro fertilization reproductive medicine. See in vitro fertilization Rishikesh. See India rite. See ritual rite of passage, 27 ritual in biomedicine, 153–154, 160–164 of coronation, 19–27 critique of, 11–14 defining, 7–8, 51, 53, 60, 67, 71, 74, 94, 158, 163, 177–178 efficacy (see efficacy of ritual) failure of, 17, 20–21, 56, 57 framing of, 34, 102–103, 177–179 genealogy of, 141–142 linguistic analysis of, 4, 17–18 as nonrational practice, 4, 7 popular understanding of, 7, 8 prophylactic performance of, 22, 26 reification of, 3, 4, 175 substance use in, 26, 60

theory of, 5, 6, 8, 27, 94, 106–109, 160–163, 170, 172, 184 violence in, 84 ritual healing, 4, 7, 9–11, 24–27, 50–52 and placebo, 13, 61, 152, 160–163 ritual instinct, 169–170, 179, 181–182, 185 ritualization, 175, 177–179, 184–185 ritual sense, 8, 169–171, 175–179, 182–185 Sabbath, 58–59 saints, role of, 73, 75–84, 136–37 Satan, 3, 50, 69, 76, 80 satsangi, 12, 14 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 115 Schmithals, Walter, 49 science and religion, relationship between, 146 scientific paradigm, 6, 9–10, 81, 164 self-healing process, 54–55. See also placebo response sense of ritual. See ritual sense Shamash, 25, 27–28, 37 sin. See excommunication Smith, Wilfrid Cantwell, 4–5 social healing, 50, 52, 55–56, 59, 63 social stress, 57–59 Somalia, 114 soul. See excommunication speech act, 98–101, 106, 183 spirit possession. See possession status reversal, 20 St. Birgit of Sweden. See Birgitta of Sweden stream of tradition, mesopotamian, 17 Sufi, 114 Sumeria. See Babylonia superstition, 3, 10, 69, 87, 154 symbolic healing, 46, 49, 57, 62–63. See also ritual healing theophagy, 75 threshold, 52–53 trance, 115, 117, 119–120, 122–123, 125, 127. See also possession Turner, Victor, 139 Uruk, 20 United States of America. See North America. universalism, 63–64, 179

index van Gennep, Arthur. See Gennep, Arthur van Vatican, 131 Virgin Mary, 120, 131–132, 138–139, 141–142, 146 Weber, Max, 133, 145, 182 Western medicine. See biomedicine white magic, 73

witchcraft, 70–71, 77, 79 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 169–171, 179–185 World Health Organisation, 9 Zambia zâr, 14, 113, 122–127 nature of, 114–115, 117–121 zayrân. See zâr

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