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to the achievement of a mature sense of self.29 These theories support the idea that rites of passage not only effect transitions in the social sphere but also concomitantly in the psychological sphere. Van Gennep’s model has also been applied to the rituallike, even initiatory, nature of pilgrimage and some of its more recent analogs. Setting out from home and a familiar world, the pilgrim endures the trials and tribulations of the journey, passes through strange lands to which he or she does not belong, and finally arrives at a place considered holier than others, a sacred center where wisdom or grace or gifts are dispensed. Securing a token of that dispensation, the pilgrim returns home bearing the transformed identity of one who has made the journey, touched the sacred objects, and received heavenly boons for the effort. These themes are visible in literary accounts of pilgrimage, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to the Chinese classic novel, Journey to the West, which recounts the journey of the 7th-century pilgrim Xuanzang to India to secure Buddhist scriptures, and to Malcolm X’s decisive trip to Mecca as recounted in his autobiography.30 Setting off on a journey has always evoked aspects of an initiatory ritual transition to a new identity, and in both fictional and historical versions the pilgrim is apt to find it hard to fit back into the old life afterward. Religious pilgrimage has continued to thrive amid the transportation developments of the 20th century, while its more secular counterpart, tourism, is apt to invoke very similar images of transformation and renewal, whether the destination is Paris, Gettysburg, or

Disneyland.

Calendrical Rites

Beyond those ceremonies that mark social stages of life, an equally obvious and important corpus of rituals is calendrical in nature. Just as rites of passage give order and definition to the biocultural life cycle, so calendrical rites give socially meaningful definitions to the passage of time, creating an ever-renewing cycle of days, months, and years. Both types of rites make time appear to be “an ordered series of eternal re-beginnings and repetitions.”31 Calendrical rites occur periodically and predictably, accompanying seasonal changes in light, weather, agricultural work, and other social activities. Some occasions are reckoned according to the solar calendar and therefore occur on the same date every year, such as New Year’s Day on the first of January or Christmas on the twenty-fifth day of December. Others are calculated according to the lunar calendar, causing their dates to vary every year, as seen in the holidays of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), Easter Sunday, or the Chinese lunar

New Year. The use of various intercalary days to coordinate the lunar or solar calendars ensures a correspondence between the ritual occasion and a particular time of the year, often evoking a rich set of associations between the seasons of nature and the rhythm of social life.

The Islamic calendar presents a very interesting exception to these practices since it is designed to transcend the customary solar and lunar years, directly depicting the way that Allah is seen by Muslims to transcend the human and natural world. The Muslim calendar and annual cycle of ritual practices are tied to a critical point marking the beginning of Islamic time and history, Mohammed’s emigration from

Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E., where he founded the Muslim community. This became year one in the Islamic era of the Hijrah, traditionally stated as 1 H. or latinized as 1 anno hegira.32 Using a lunar year of true months, each month being 29 to 30 days or new moon to new moon, the Islamic year comes to approximately 354 days, 11 days short of the solar year. Most lunar systems add intercalary days or months to maintain the fit with the solar year, but the Qur’an forbids this adjusting of the natural order. Hence, many Muslim ritual days have no fixed relationship to the seasons; each year they are 11 days from where they were the year before. According to Frederick

Denny, the Muslim religious calendar “slides slowly behind the ‘seasons,’” untied to the usual calculations of the march of time and difficult to convert into other systems.33 Calendrical rituals can be roughly distinguished in terms of seasonal and commemorative celebrations. Seasonal celebrations are rooted in the activities of planting and harvesting for agriculturists or grazing and moving the herd for pastoralists.

While these types of celebrations seem to appear in all communities directly or indirectly dependent on the fecundity of the land, the style of ritual varies with the type of cultivation. For example, the rites found in societies based on rice cultivation are similar to each other but differ from those found in societies based on the cultivation of wheat, corn, or yams or on animal husbandry. Despite these differences, however, rites of sowing-raising and harvesting-slaughtering often seem remarkably similar.

In brief, the sowing of seed is usually marked by offerings to ancestors or deities in order to secure protection for the fields. In return, harvest rites generally involve festivals in which the firstfruits are given back to the gods or ancestors, accompanied by a communal feast with abundant food, music, dance, and some degree of social license. Sometimes the gods or ancestors themselves are thought to arrive for the celebration and are escorted out of the village at the end of the festivities. In Japan, the traditional New Year celebration is calculated according to the lunar year and therefore celebrates the inception of spring and the planting of the rice. In the premodern period, Japanese New Year festivities included the erection of a pine tree, a symbol of both constancy and renewal, which served as a temporary shrine for the rice deities (kami) who come down from beyond the mountains. They are given offerings of rice, the “essence” of which was embodied in glutinous cakes called mochi.34

Like rites of passage, calendrical rites can be said to impose cultural schemes on the order of nature. These cultural schemes may attempt to influence or control nature, as when rites address the amount of rain or the fertility of the land, or they might simply try to harmonize the activities and attitudes of the human community with the seasonal rhythms of the environment and the larger cosmos. In both cases, they constitute working interpretations of the natural and social worlds. In some cultures, such as the Panare of South America, calendrical rites are literally seen as keeping the cosmos in motion; an eclipse of the sun could be blamed on a ritual poorly executed. Further, for a civilization like the ancient Inca, whose calendrical achievements were truly magnificent, the calendar operated in extensive and complex ways to integrate spatial positions, social hierarchies, genealogical histories, and dynastic power.35 The attempt to coordinate human activity with the state of the cosmos underlies many of the techniques of divination and prognostication used to determine auspicious days to travel, marry, or sell grain. Ritual experts in China, India,

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and the Buddhist and Muslim worlds, among others, routinely consult elaborate astrological calendars before planning ritual events like a funeral, ordination, or the groundbreaking rites that precede construction of a building.

The second group of calendrical rites, commemorative ones, includes activities that explicitly recall important historical events, whether or not the date is accurate.

For example, the Fourth of July in America commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Similarly, Bastille Day, celebrated in France on July 14, honors the launching of the French Revolution when a Parisian crowd stormed the infamous prison on that day in 1789. Significantly, with the formal founding of the French republic on September 22, 1792, the revolutionaries went on to set up a new, secular calendar in what one analyst has described as “undoubtedly the most radical attempt in modern history” to challenge the hegemony of the prevailing calendrical system.36 The French republican calendar purged all the symbols and structures associated with the Catholicism of the Gregorian calendar, discarding not only longcherished feast days but also Sunday and the seven-day week itself. A new ten-day week culminated in Décadi as the official day for rest. Moreover, the year no longer started on January 1 as established by the Catholic monarch Charles IX, but on September 22. Even history itself was recalculated independently of the birth of Christ. The republic replaced the Christian era with the republican era and September 22, 1792, retroactively became “day one” in the first year of the republic. Through these highly symbolic reforms, political history was started anew, and the break between the old and new orders was made total. Despite the dramatic symbolism of this radical tampering with time, however, popular support was far from widespread, so Napoleon did not hesitate to abolish the republican calendar in 1806.37 The French effort to redefine the social polity by means of calendrical reorganization was echoed in the reforms initiated by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s. He also experimented, ultimately unsuccessfully, with dissolving the seven-day week in favor of a fiveand then a six-day version, in order to disrupt church attendance.38

The designation of December 25 as the birth date of Jesus of Nazareth in the

Christian calendar is not, of course, historically accurate. That particular date is most likely a Christian appropriation of the day on which ancient Romans celebrated the winter solstice and birthday of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, who was proclaimed the protector of the empire by Marcus Aurelius.39 In the same way that the spread of Christianity in the 4th century led it to displace and appropriate the religious practices of the Roman Empire, so Buddhism appropriated practices associated with the indigenous folk religions of Southeast Asia as it spread into those areas from India.

Hence, Buddha’s Day in Southeast Asia, known as Visakha Puja since it occurs on the first full-moon day in the month of Visakha (April-May) at the beginning of the rice planting season, has little to do with reliable history and a great deal to do with a Buddhist rendering of an older calendrical festival. Nonetheless, Visakha Puja is the holiest day in the religious calendar, simultaneously commemorating the Buddha’s birth, his enlightenment, and his entry into Nirvana at death, which are believed to have miraculously occurred on the same day of the year.40 The appropriation of calendrical festivals already deeply engrained in the fabric of a community seems to be a very common and highly effective strategy in places where one set of religious practices encounters and tries to dominate another set. Jewish-American

and African-American reactions to the powerful presence of Christmas in a predominantly white and Christian United States have also involved creative appropriations that will be analyzed in part III. Just as often, however, calendrical decisions have been used to segregate and sharply reidentify groups. For example, the Gregorian calendrical reforms of 1582 underscored the divide between Catholics and Protestants, while the French revolutionary reforms put the French out of step with the rest of monarchical Europe. The unique pace of the Islamic calendar has made appropriation of the solar or lunar rites of other groups very difficult. Even today the Islamic calendar provides a type of temporal segregation between those holidays rooted in Qur’anic tradition and those deriving from regional customs, no matter how Islamicized the latter may come to be. Such calendrical distinctions are effective in solidifying group identity, while the appropriation of local rites acts to extend that identity to new subgroupings.41

Many religious traditions define their whole calendar year through a series of rites that express the most basic beliefs of the community. The traditional Christian calendar is particularly elaborate in its annual chronicle of the birth, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Additional saints’ days and other holy days have traditionally created an ongoing round of rites in which the rhythms of the year are formed by religious devotions and responsibilities. The Islamic year also commemorates the birth and death of the prophet Mohammed (Id-E-Milad or Mawlid al-Nabi), his mysterious journey to heaven (Mi‘raj), the first revelations of the sacred Qur‘an on the “night of power” (Laylat al-Qadr) in the month of Ramadan, and his pilgrimage from Mecca to Medina (Dhu Al-Hijjah). In addition, there are important holidays such as the commemoration of the death of Mohammed’s grandson, Husayn ibn ‘Ali, which is of great historical and cultic significance to the identity of the Shi ‘ah, who see themselves as followers of Ali. In all these cases, calendrical ritual turns the events of a historical narrative into a type of cyclical sacred myth, repeated annually, generating powerful images and activities of corporate identity. In a study of Roman calendrical ritual, Mary Beard concludes that the calendar presented a majestic parade of images in “ritual time,” whereby linear and historical features were collapsed into a series of overlapping stories. This ritual parade of images became the prime means of representing what it meant to be a Roman. For both the peasant and the sophisticated urbanite, participation in the sequence of calendrical rites was the discovery and rediscovery of “Roman-ness.”42

The Jewish ritual meal known as the seder, literally the “order” of the service, which is held on the first night of the seven-day holiday of Passover, is a good example of an enduring rite rooted in both seasonal and commemorative traditions. Biblical evidence suggests that the holiday is a combination of two different ancient festivals. One was the pastoral festival of Pesah (“passed over”), probably associated with the new year in the southern tribes of Judah. With its sacrifice of a firstborn lamb or kid, it came to commemorate the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. The second ancient holiday was the seven-day spring agricultural festival of matsah, or unleavened bread, celebrated in the more northern areas. Not only did these two rituals eventually merge into one, bringing together images drawn from both animal husbandry and agriculture, but also the format and ethos of the resulting holiday continued to undergo subtle shifts that reflected the historical situation of the Jewish

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community.43 In brief, these shifts corresponded to three main epochs in Jewish history.

During the first epoch, which closed with the reforms of King Josiah in 620 B.C.E., the feast of unleavened bread was held in the spring at the first harvest. It was distinct from the holiday of the paschal lamb, which was celebrated in the home, where the family placed the blood of a sacrificed lamb on their door posts and then dined on the meat, together with bitter herbs and unleavened bread known as matsah. King Josiah’s reforms required every male head of a household to bring an animal offering for sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem at Passover. This requirement transformed the domestic Passover meal into a pilgrimage to Solomon’s temple as the symbolic center of Judaism and a public cult supporting political centralization. In this context, the religionationalist dimensions of the Passover sacrifice took on much greater significance. Biblical and early postbiblical sources describe a holiday atmosphere as families traveled to Jerusalem, had their offerings ritually killed in the Temple compound, handed over part to the priests, and took most of the meat back for a family meal, accompanied by the traditional bitter herbs and unleavened bread. Those who could not make the trip to Jerusalem could observe the roughly simultaneous festival of unleavened bread, share a meal, and instruct their children in the story of the Exodus; they probably did not make an animal offering. Despite the destruction of the temple by the Persians in 586 B.C.E., this model for the Temple-centered Passover ritual endured throughout the period of the Babylonian captivity as Jews nurtured a sense of identity focused on the temple. With their subsequent return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple, the Passover festival continued as a major holiday while gradually new features were added, such as the drinking of wine, more prayers and singing.44

The destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and the enforced exile of the Jewish community meant that the Passover rite could no longer be celebrated in the same way. In the subsequent third epoch, under the leadership of the emerging rabbinical movement, Passover was gradually reinterpreted once again as a ritual focused on the home and the newly organized synagogues. The new situation of the Jews, in exile from Jerusalem where the Temple was in ruins, accounts for a shift in the tone and the symbols in this revised Passover celebration.

The animal sacrifice was no longer central. Instead, the leg bone of an animal was grouped with the unleavened bread (matsah) and bitter herbs to form a complex of sacrificial symbols linked less to the Temple than to the redemptive events of the

Exodus itself. The paschal animal is eaten, it was said, because the Jews in slavery in

Egypt sacrificed a lamb, put its blood on their door posts as a signal to the Angel of Death, and shared its meat in a family meal. The bitter herbs are eaten to recall the bitterness of their years in slavery, while the unleavened matsah recall how the escaping Jews did not have time to let their bread rise. As the feast of unleavened bread merged to become part of the weeklong observance of Passover, the unleavened bread itself became the more dominant symbol, evoking life, purity and humble recognition of God’s hand in Jewish history. Changes gradually made in the narration of the Exodus account also emphasized a parallelism between the Exodus and the Diaspora, including expressions of trust in God’s ongoing redemption of his people and the hope of eventual return to Jerusalem. This is the form in which the Passover seder comes down to us today.45

The historical events of the Exodus are retold in the Haggadah (“telling”) that is formally recited during the family seder. The Haggadah is a collection of stories, songs, and prayers that assumed its current form in the medieval period, with different versions adding specific features. Available as a small booklet, it guides the family through the various stages of the meal and provides the prayers that they recite. For example, the oldest male present is the “master of the seder” and he opens the meal with a sanctification of the wine (kiddush), followed by the introductory prayer: “This is the bread of poverty which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry enter and eat; let all who are needy come to our Passover feast. This year we are here; next year may we be in the Land of Israel. This year we are slaves; next year may we be free men.”46

The youngest male present then asks the first of four questions, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The master and all present reply, together or taking turns, with the account of the delivery of the Jews from Egypt contained in the

Haggadah. As the story unfolds, the significance of each symbol is explained. Three matsot, made at home or under the supervision of a rabbi are placed on the table under a cloth. After the sanctification of the wine, the middle one is broken in half, and one piece, called the afikoman (“dessert”), is traditionally hidden so that the children will later have the fun of trying to find it and bring it back to be eaten last. The master of the seder lifts the other matsot and asks:

This matzah which we eat, what is the reason for it? Because the dough of our fathers had not yet leavened when the King over all kings, the Holy One, blessed be he, revealed himself to them and redeemed them.

As it is said: “and they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual” [Exodus 12:39].47

Also present on the table is a concoction of bitter herbs, usually made with salad greens, called maror: “These bitter herbs we eat, what is the reason for them? Because the Egyptians made the lives of our forefathers bitter in Egypt.”48 Likewise, a paste made of nuts, fruit, and wine called haroset represents the mortar that the Jews labored to make into bricks for the Pharaoh. Salted or vinegared water in a bowl symbolizes the tears of suffering, into which a vegetable (karpas) like parsley or celery is dipped. A roasted shank bone and hard-boiled egg represent the paschal lamb and the part of it given in sacrifice in the days of the temple. Four cups of wine are drunk at specific places in the meal in celebration of God’s deliverance of the Jews.

After a closing set of prayers, the seder ends with hymns also included in the Haggadah booklet.

Like many commemorative rituals, the seder establishes a fundamental link between the past and the present, specifically, that every Jew has been delivered from Egypt by God. “In every generation let each man look on himself as if he came forth out of Egypt,” reads the Haggadah.49 All Jews are in exile and anxiously await their return to Jerusalem: “This year we are here; next year may we be in the Land of Israel. This year we are slaves; next year may we be free men.”50 This theme vividly demonstrates the power of a commemorative ritual to invoke the original events as ongoing acts of God. Even those rites that evoke secular events long past attempt to