Exploring Ritual Bodies and Structuralist Assumptions

Lecture 8 RITUAL BODIES

Pollution miaros (adj.) miasma (noun) miainein (vb.) miasma : stain, (physical/moral) pollution

Structuralist Assumptions 1. There is a human need to classify in order to understand. 2. Classification tends to be binary. 3. Whatever resists classification causes category anxiety. 4. Classifications are not always static, but can represent transitions. 5. Transition between categories is potentially dangerous. 6. Whatever resists classification, fails to transition successfully from one category to another, or is out of place is dirt. 7. Dirt is taboo; dirt is powerful; dirt is simultaneously attractive and repellant.

Structuralist Assumptions 3. Whatever resists classification causes category anxiety. GARDEN soil HOUSE dirt PLATE filth

Structuralist Assumptions 4. Classifications are not always static, but can represent transitional categories. INFANT CHILD ADOLESCENT ADULT CORPSE 5. Transition between categories is potentially dangerous. LIVING (above ground) GHOST (below ground) DEAD

Restrictions on Entrance into Sacred Space ELIGIBILITY STABLE CHARACTERISTICS PURITY FROM TEMPORARY CONDITIONS

Stable Characteristics age ethnicity kinship residence citizenship language gender various rites of passage Greek vs. non-Greek family/tribal affiliation township or deme Athenian vs. Spartan e.g. Eleusinian Mysteries male vs. female

Gender Restrictions sex life-cycle rituals segregated by sex war, athletics, political life MALE reproduction, fertility, domesticity FEMALE worship of some deities/aspects of deities segregated by

Eligibility for Artemis Worship FEMALE female prepubescent child MALE hunter (ritual abstention from sex) nubile female woman in childbirth

CHILDBIRTH TEMPORARY CONDITIONS PHYSICAL STATES BLOOD DEATH SEX ATTRIBUTES CLOTHING FOODS IRON

Female Body menstruation blood low surface integrity lactation milk childbirth fluids; child afterbirth placenta; fluids

Menstruation cold uterus female low internal heat flesh soft, spongy flesh absorbs fluids poor cooking of nutriment excess blood in tissues menstruation

A boy actually resembles a woman in physique, and a woman is as it were an infertile male. The female, in fact, is female on account of a sort of inability: namely, it lacks the power to cook [peptein] semen out of [blood] because of the coldness of its nature. Thus, just as lack of cooking [pepsis] causes diarrhea in the bowels, so in the vessels it produces various discharges of blood, and especially menstrual discharge The female is as it were a deformed male; and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition namely, it lacks one constituent, and one only: the principle of soul. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 728a17, 737a

SACRED hieros MALE MALE/FEMALE FEMALE SECULAR d mosios POLLUTED miaros

PHYSICAL STATES DEATH SEX CHILDBIRTH within temenos outside temenos If anyone fornicates in the sacred precinct [temenos], the authorities shall make him expiate it by the sacrifice of an ox and by complete purification. Archaic inscription from Olympia