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involve participants in experiencing and affirming a set of values seen as rooted in those events. Memorial Day, with its parades, wreaths, and prayers, began by commemorating Union soldiers killed in the Civil War. Developing into a day to honor the veterans of all American wars, it was one of the primary means by which different faiths, ethnicities, and social classes were integrated into a sacralized unity.51 The Memorial Day rites so important in the small towns of America in the first half of this century testified to the values associated with those soldiers who sacrificed their individual lives for the good of the whole. Indeed, their sacrifices came to be seen as a type of death-conquering model or paradigm for what it meant to be a member of the national community.

As noted in chapter 1, Mircea Eliade drew attention to how the ritual reenactment of founding events is able to generate a meaningful, mythic, and cyclical sense of time, a temporal sense in which it is as if the original events are happening all over again. He thought this reenactment of sacred events released something of their original transformative power. Some theorists have argued that the more historical and secular a culture becomes, the more its calendrical rites give way to merely commemorative ones. In practice, however, many such rituals easily shift their emphasis back and forth, subtly evoking themes of cosmic renewal alongside themes of historical commemoration. Ultimately, it is the very rituals themselves that create the repetitions of seasonal and historical events that form the calendar.52 Similarly, these calendrical systems exist only insofar as a rite evokes other rites to form a temporal series that molds time into a cycle of holy events and affords people the experience of some version of original events. As the complex product of a ritual understanding of time and space, the calendar and its attendant systems mold human life to the point that it can appear essentially calendrical in nature.53

Rites of Exchange and Communion

Among the best-known examples of religious rituals are those in which people make offerings to a god or gods with the practical and straightforward expectation of receiving something in return—whether it be as concrete as a good harvest and a long life or as abstract as grace and redemption. Edward Tylor described the logic of these human-divine transactions as “the gift theory”; one gives in order to receive in return (do ut des).54 Direct offerings may be given to praise, please, and placate divine power, or they may involve an explicit exchange by which human beings provide sustenance to divine powers in return for divine contributions to human well-being. In less elaborate examples, one places flowers or incense before the image of a Hindu god until they are spent, while the rice and oranges one presents at a Chinese shrine can be removed for human consumption after the gods or ancestors have eaten their fill. More elaborate examples of these dynamics are found in the phenomenon of sacrifice. In the standard sacrificial scenario, an animal is killed, and part or all of it is presented as an offering to the gods in exchange for what the gods can give; leftover meat may be eaten in a type of communal meal.

Scholars have repeatedly attempted to organize these ritual activities in a logical way. Some have been concerned primarily to distinguish gifts, offerings, and sac-

rifice, each signifying a different form of human-divine interaction and social organization.55 Others have been more interested in a continuum of ritual practices that range from offerings that act as bribes to gifts that are said to have no purpose except the expression of pure devotion. Despite the tendency noted earlier to consider manipulative dynamics “magical” and disinterested devotion “religious,” these distinctions and their associated examples tend to break down when scrutinized more closely. In ritual, it is probably safe to say that no act is purely manipulative or purely disinterested. Ritual acts of offering, exchange and communion appear to invoke very complex relations of mutual interdependence between the human and the divine.

In addition, these activities are likely to be important not simply to human-divine relations but also to a number of social and cultural processes by which the community organizes and understands itself.

Hindu devotional worship known as puja is a good example of a system of simple offerings that appears to have no purpose other than to please the deity. These offerings can range from the simple and private to the elaborate and public. Sometimes they are visualized rather than performed. Whether presented to the image of a deity in the home, at a temple, or at a religious festival, puja rites evoke the ceremonies of hospitality traditionally shown to honored guests, particularly in ancient court life.

Indeed, it is fair to say that in the home or at a festival, such rites cast the deity as a lofty but temporary guest, while in a temple setting they acknowledge the deity as ensconced in the equivalent of his or her own palace.

Technically, puja involves sixteen different presentations called upacaras (attendances), although only a few might be used in any particular service. A devout family may have a small room just for worship in which there is an altar housing one or more images. Traditionally, the male head of the household performs a daily or twice-daily puja routine, although this job is frequently taken over by the woman of the house. The daily worship ceremony (nitya puja) in larger temples may be more elaborate, even repeating an upacara several times. When performing the main upacaras, the devotee first summons or awakens the god to be present at the ceremony.

The god is offered a seat, and with a formal greeting, the devotee asks the god about its journey. The devotee then symbolically washes the god’s feet and presents a small bowl of water so that the god might wash its face and rinse its mouth. Another bowl of water is presented for sipping, followed by a drink of water and honey. Next comes water for a bath, or, if the image is small, it may be submerged and dried with a towel. The devotee adorns the image with fresh garments, ornaments, perfumes, ointments, and flower garlands. Then the devotee steps back to offer incense to please the deity and a small burning lamp to give it light. Next come food offerings such as cooked rice, clarified butter, fruits, or betel leaf. At the end of the service, after the god has tasted the offerings, this food is distributed to those in attendance and eaten. Known as prasada, the return gift of food is thought to confer blessings from the deity. In a similar back and forth, all those present worship the image by prostrating themselves before it in an act known as dar~ana (seeing or auspicious sight), literally seeing the god and being seen by it in turn. Last, the god is dismissed, put to bed, or shrouded with a curtain.56

While flowers, lamps, incense, and prayers are offered to the images of deities in many traditions, Hindu puja fully plays out the underlying logic of human ser-

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vices rendered to anthropomorphized divine beings. The devotee who makes as if to fan the god’s brow or brush its teeth may not expect that the god or image really requires such physical ministrations. Rather, they form a “grammar of devotion,” according to Diana Eck, in which “gestures of humility . . . utilize the entire range of intimate and ordinary domestic acts.”57 Darshana, the exchange of sight, is central to this devotional grammar and has been called the most basic and sacramental act of worship in Hinduism. In the home, at the temple, amid a festival, or at any of the thousands of sacred pilgrimage places, the devout Hindu is said to “take” or “receive” darsan, while the deity or holy person (sadhu) is said to “give” it.58 The moment of mutual seeing that passes between the sacred and the human is the culmination of the more tangible exchanges involved in these rites.

The reciprocity underlying Hindu puja is relatively low key. Devotional offerings to the deity are not meant to result in direct or immediate concrete benefits, although they are understood to nurture a positive human-divine relationship that will benefit the devotee spiritually and substantively. In contrast, rites involving

Chinese spirit money are good examples of a system of offerings that often appears much less devotional and much more bureaucratic and pecuniary. Spirit money is coarse paper tied in bundles, on the top sheet of which there may be pasted a square of yellow or silver foil that identifies its currency and value. In Taiwan, gold spirit money, a wad of yellow paper topped with yellow foil, is given to the gods, while silver money is given to the ghosts and ancestors. Usually spirit money is burned to transfer it to the other world: the destruction of the material substance of the currency by fire is understood to release its essence in the other world.59 By the same principle, paper versions of other objects—messengers, houses, televisions, or mahjong sets—are also burned to transfer them to the other world. Although Chinese stores now sell more realistic-looking “play money” for these sacrificial purposes, it is important to note that real money would be of no use in the other world, where it would become fake and constitute something of an insult to its intended recipient.

According to the ancient classic on ritual, objects offered to the dead for their sole use must not be fit for actual use since it is not appropriate to treat the dead as if they were the same as the living.60 Spirit money is usually burned in order to solicit favors from the gods, provide the dead with the cash they need to take care of business in the courts and hells of the underworld, bribe celestial bureaucrats, and placate offending demons or interfering ghosts. In Chinese cosmology, the bureaucracy of the human world continues into the invisible world. Both spheres operate on the same principles: virtue is rewarded, but cash is very effective in working out deals and cutting through red tape.

An ethos of economic exchange is particularly prominent in two Taiwanese rituals, the rite to “repay the debt” and the rite to “restore one’s destiny.”61 In the first, life is assumed to be a type of monetary loan that must be repaid. At birth, one is given an advance from the celestial treasury; death, especially at an advanced age and after producing male descendants, is due to the exhaustion of these funds. At the funeral, relatives of the deceased burn a specially marked form of spirit money known as “treasury money” in order to pay off any remaining debt to the celestial treasury and in this way ensure the continuation of the deceased’s soul in a future life. Similar rites conducted during one’s lifetime can also replenish the funds in one’s

treasury account and stave off an early death. The ritual for “restoring one’s destiny” shares these assumptions. It is usually performed on New Year’s Day and at critical junctures in life—birth, the first month, one year, seven years, and so on—since such occasions are thought to drain one’s life vitality. It may also be performed on the completion of a project or at the time of some professional success since such forms of good luck can also use up one’s allotted vitality. If one’s life vitality is sapped through too much success, one can become prey to demonic maladies of all kinds. Rites to restore this vitality may be simple or grand, performed by a Daoist priest, a folk medium, or the head of the house, each in their own distinctive way. The Daoist will call down deities that he alone has the power to summon, the medium will journey in trance into the invisible world, and the head of the household will burn a preprinted petition. In all three cases, a formal request is made that enumerates the blessings the family has received from the gods, and then specially designated “restoration of destiny” money is burned to deposit it in the celestial treasury.

The ritual grammar of human-divine interaction in these Chinese ceremonies is not the same as the humble hospitality seen in Hindu puja. It is a language of banking, bureaucratic hierarchy, and closed energy systems that enables human beings to influence the cosmos by extending the meaning and efficacy of those activities that seem to organize the human world most effectively. For the Chinese, the cosmos may be experienced as less capricious and intimate than what Hindus experience, but both use distinct cultural conventions to ritualize human-divine interaction and exchange. By contrast, Mexican culture uses yet another system for representing human and divine interactions, primarily a grammar of vows and thanksgiving. This system is most evident in the custom of hanging retablos to express thanks to Jesus or the Virgin Mother. These small votive paintings depict the troubled scene in which divine help was extended, usually including a written explanation and thank you—doy gracias—to acknowledge this divine intercession in a public way.62

It is hardly surprising that there should be great variety in the things offered to supernatural beings or in the symbolic grammar with which these offerings are made.

More unexpected, perhaps, are the similarities, such as the widespread use of incense and smoke either as offerings themselves, as in Native American rites of the sacred pipe, or as a medium to bear offerings aloft to the gods, as seen in Chinese rites.63 Equally common is the offering of dances, songs, and even theater productions to entertain the gods. Traditional performances of Chinese opera and folk theater, Japanese Noh theater, and the Javanese puppet theater known as wayang, all of which routinely begin with invocations to the gods, are often held in temple or templelike settings and show many strong associations with ritual. While some dances may reenact sacred events, such as the creation of the cosmos or the yearly return of the ancestors, others are narrative tales presented to entertain the gods—for whom special seats may be reserved. The performances of the female dancers (devadasis) traditionally offered to the god Siva in south Indian Saivite temples are rituals of offering and entertainment with powerful—and controversial—overtones of virility and fertility.64

The concept of “sacrifice” as a distinct form of human-divine interaction and exchange has been a major topic in ritual studies since the time of Tylor and Robertson

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Smith.65 More than any other form of ritual, sacrifice has been considered a type of universal or nearly universal “institution” that can be explained in terms of principles applicable to all cultural examples. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss made an important contribution by distinguishing sacrifice from other forms of ritual offerings through the principle of sanctification: in sacrifice the offerings are consecrated.

Indeed, the word “sacrifice” derives from the Latin sacer facere (to make holy). As a logical corollary to this sanctification, the object offered in sacrifice is usually completely destroyed in the course of the rite, either burned to transfer the offering to the gods or consumed to share it with them. Inanimate or bloodless objects like vegetables, grains, and paper goods can be sacrificed, as in the Chinese examples, but the term usually implies blood offerings of animals, human beings, or their various substitutes. Distinctions drawn between offerings and sacrifices based on whether the object involved is inanimate or animate can be very hard to pursue systematically. For example, the ritual destruction of Chinese spirit money lies in a tradition of sacrifice that includes animal offerings and is quite distinct from simply leaving food on an altar. And according to Hubert and Mauss, the libations of milk offered in the Vedic sacrificial system prior to the development of puja offerings were “not something inanimate that is offered up, but the cow itself, in its liquid essence, its sap, its fertility.”66

Theories of sacrifice have tended to focus on the “communion” it is thought to afford between humans and gods, although this terminology derives from the Judeo-

Christian tradition and is not much used in many other cultures where sacrifice is important. The idea of communion with the supernatural recipients of the offerings is also used to distinguish sacrifice from ritualized killing. Communion implies that at a critical moment in the rite there is a union of the human and divine worlds: the offerer, the recipient, and the offering itself are understood to become together in some way, however briefly. The purpose of this form of cosmic union is usually explained as a matter of renewing the universe and reordering the human-divine relations that sustain it. However, other purposes are also given for the performance of sacrificial rites, including thanksgiving, the expiation of evils, and the placation of powerful deities, which are not incompatible with the notion of communion.

When defined in very general terms, some form of sacrifice can be found in almost all societies. The sacrifice of firstfruits in agricultural societies and of domesticated animals in herding societies demonstrates certain general correlations between the form of sacrifice and the type of socioeconomic structure. Cultural cosmology will also determine the format used. For example, the use of incineration and smoke to carry an offering aloft correlates with the belief that the gods reside somewhere beyond the human sphere; immersion is used to convey offerings to water deities, and abandonment of an offering in a ravine or on a hilltop is usually sufficient to convey it to gods thought to be abroad in the natural environment. The form of destruction can also reflect ideas about the type of human-divine interaction afforded by the rite: in some cases, total destruction of the offering appears to seal a contractual relationship; in others, communal consumption of the offering facilitates a sharing of substance.67 Both forms of sacrifice are in the Hebrew Bible: the burnt offering or holocaust (‘olah) in which the animal was completely incinerated, and the sacrifice of salvation or peace (zevah shelamim) in which part of the animal was

burned, the blood poured out on the altar or earth, and the remainder consumed in a communal meal. While the latter is the form observed in the Passover rites described earlier, the former type of sacrifice is most familiar from the story of Abraham and Issac:

After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him “Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Issac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. . . . Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.68

For Judaism, this burnt offering established a close bond between God and the descendants of Abraham, which was later sealed in the covenant made between God and Moses when both forms of sacrifice were performed:

And [Moses] rose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain

. . . [where he] burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people, and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”69

As indicated earlier, most theorists stress the communionlike nature of sacrifice, which is clearest when the rites involve first the sacralization and then the killing of a living animal or person. Consecration or sacralization can make the offering participate in the divinity of the god to whom it is to be given, even to the point, in some cases, that the offering may be thought to become the god itself. This form of consecration is seen in diverse practices, such as Christian doctrine of the real presence of Jesus Christ in the sacralized bread and wine; the offering and ingestion of the intoxicating sacred drink balché to feed the gods of the Lacandon Maya of Chiapas; the ritual consumption of peyote among some Native American tribes; and the Aztec sacrifice of prisoners of war to their sun god.70

The peyote cult is a good example of a sacrificial ritual in which the symbolism of communion is very strong. The cult formally developed, particularly among Native Americans of the southern plains only about the turn of the century as an inte-

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gral part of the Native American Church. Influenced by Christianity as well as pantribal religious beliefs and practices, the consumption of the sacred peyote button is thought to enable one to experience the closeness of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit is said to have put his power into the sacred button so that when it is gathered by a shaman and eaten in the appropriate way that power can be absorbed by his people to help them. The hallucinatory effects that can be produced by the drug are considered quite secondary to the more powerful experience of the Great Spirit, who may reveal some truth or bestow some power.71

Sacralization of an offering in order to make it as divine as the god who will receive it appears to have been an important part of Aztec sacrifice.72 As a principle of human-divine interaction, sacralization also sets up a type of economic exchange, according to Marshall Sahlins: “offered as food to the gods, the victim takes on the nature of the god. Consumed then by man, the offering transmits this divine power to man.”73 For the Aztecs, the offering clearly involved two identifications. First, the sacrifier, the one who sponsored the sacrifice and expected to benefit from it, was identified with the victim being offered and in some cases would declare that the victim “is as my beloved son.” Second, a series of consecrations also identified the offering with the gods who were its ultimate recipients. Aztec mythology, in fact, describes an original self-sacrifice of the gods that enabled the sun to move across the sky. Evidence concerning the treatment of many victims after capture and prior to their death suggests that they were made to reenact this cosmogonic sacrifice of the gods: they were bathed, dressed, and painted to represent specific deities, feted, and taught special dances. When these victims were sacrificed on the altar at the top of the central pyramid of Tenochtitlán, the still-beating heart was offered to the sun, blood was splashed on the altar, and the body was rolled back down the steps to be dismembered by those waiting below. For the Aztecs, the victim going up and coming down the great steps of Tenochtitlán, not unlike the rising and setting of the sun in the sky, was the medium for a necessary exchange between the human and divine world that ensured the ordered continuance of the cosmos. In Sahlin’s analysis, the victim closed a cycle between the sacrificers and the gods, linked the sacred and the profane, and facilitated the transmission of blessings and requests. Ultimately, he argues, “Victims, gods, and communicants become one. The consumption of human flesh was thus deifying”74

Human sacrifice has been found in many societies both ancient and modern.75

There are some basic similarities among the types of victims and the forms of destruction used, as well as differences in the social and cosmic purposes ascribed to the ritual. Nonetheless, human sacrifice can be seen as a simple extension of the logic underlying other forms of offerings. Whether the purpose is to avert evil, placate gods, achieve communion, reconstruct idealized kinship relations, or establish the proper reciprocity of heaven and earth, the offering of something—firstfruits, paper money, or human beings—has been a common ritual mechanism for securing the well-being of the community and the larger cosmos.76 Such offerings also redefine the culture’s system of cosmological boundaries—the human sphere, the sphere of the gods, the sphere of the ancestral dead, the sphere of malevolent demons, and so on—while simultaneously allowing the crossing or transgression of those very same boundaries.