Review: Imagining Ritual

Author(s): Kees W. Bolle

Source: History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Nov., 1990), pp. 204-212
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062901
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 REVIEW ARTICLE

IMAGININGRITUAL

To Take Place: Toward a Theory in Ritual. By JONATHAN Z. SMITH.Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. xvii+183.
Jonathan Smith's latest book contains some very suggestive statements for
students of ritual; for example, "There is a 'gnostic' dimension to ritual," and
"ritual demonstrates that we know 'what is the case'" (p. 109). The numerous-
ness of such inviting and stimulating statements alone makes the work
praiseworthy. Moreover, its lively style and the author's passionate involve-
ment in scholarly discussions on the subject make reading the book a pleasure.
If the study of ritual cannot be said to have made great strides, it certainly
has quickened since Joseph Fontenrose dealt myth ritualists the final blow
with The Ritual Theory of Myth in 1971. Until a couple of decades ago, the
study of ritual was by and large a casual affair, something ad hoc if not
haphazard-and not only among the myth ritualists, but in general. Sche-
matically, exceptions notwithstanding, the study of religions early in our
century was still restricted to a concentration on systems of faith and doctrine,
and only slowly has attention shifted to symbols and myths; ritual has
emerged last of all as worthy of special consideration. A landmark was J. C.
Heesterman's treatment of The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration (The
Hague, 1957). One of Walter Burkert's well-known studies deals explicitly
with ritual (Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual [Berkeley,
1979]). Frits Staal wrote his Agni, the VedicRitual of the Fire Altar (Berkeley,
1983) in two volumes and enriched with recordings; he had already caused a
stir with his essay "The Meaninglessness of Ritual," in Numen 26 (1979):
2-22, which was followed by "The Sound of Religion" (Numen 33 [1986]:
33-64). A fascinating anthology of scholarly essays and discussions appeared
in 1987: Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert,
Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Forma-
tion (Stanford, Calif.). And since 1987, we have a periodical entirely devoted
to ritual, Journal of Ritual Studies.

01990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0018-2710/91/ 3002-0006$01.00
History of Religions 205

The fact that ritual has never received proper treatment, and that the new
attention is not very well focused, concerns Smith. Smith would not be
himself if he abstained from controversy. At times, he seems deliberately
challenging, if not shocking. I must admit that I am among the admirers of
his style, but I am aware that this admiration is not shared by some others
including graduate seminars which otherwise have a fondness for provoca-
tion. Smith sees it as his task to destroy scholarly arguments and procedures
that stymie what he considers proper investigation.
His most notable victim is Eliade. Readers may need to be told about
Smith's special affection for Eliade, for it does not radiate from his pages.
At issue is Eliade's treatment of a detail in Australian aboriginal religion.
The crux of the matter is expressed in another statement students of ritual
would do well to ponder: "The language of 'center' is primarily political and
only secondarily cosmological" (p. 17). This statement anticipates the central
thesis of Smith's book. Eliade's treatment of the "detail" is more than a
detail; it is a symptom of Eliade's entire "system" of interpretation, his
morphology of religion. The "sacred mountain" structure Eliade finds among
the aboriginal Australians in fact does not exist. Rather, it is a suggestion
from ancient Near Eastern documents that Eliade made into a universal and
crucial element of religion: "the pattern of the 'Center' is a fantasy" (p. 17).
To make matters worse, the very idea of a "cosmic mountain" in the Near
East existed only in the imagination of the Pan-Babylonians, whose blueprint
for interpretation had already been discarded for quite a while among scholars
of the ancient Near East at the time Eliade did his writing (p. 16).
In a somewhat milder form, Smith's critical assessment of Eliade was
already known to readers of his Imagining Religion (Chicago, 1982). How-
ever, the present work goes a step further. Eliade made use of discarded views
and posited them as valid interpretations. But he did not merely sin against
sound scholarship by universalizing erroneous principles; his very concentra-
tion on "the religious" was a mistake. That is what gives bite to Smith's
statement, quoted before, that "the language of 'center' is preeminently politi-
cal and only secondarily cosmological."
It is true that the first chapter does not explicate these words. They sneak
up on the reader but eventually turn into a devastating critique of the master.
But to what extent does the explication succeed? This question is not the only
one to be raised in the course of reading Smith's book, but it is likely to be
on the minds of many readers.
The thesis that the political outweighs the merely cosmological means in
fact that "power" explains "the sacred" more easily than the latter would
explain the former. Power of a ruler, a state, an oligarchy, a family provides
the crucial element to unravel the mystery of religious expression.
Smith's first chapter, "In Search of Place," leads us back to a much greater
sobriety in interpretation than Eliade's obsessions with transcendental centers.
Places are not revealed through some mystical experience but, rather, remem-
bered-obviously, a much more common event in human experience. Ex-
amples are adduced, from the ancient Near East to classical India, to show
that it is difficult to generalize beyond the specificity of local remembrance.
Things are in fact rather ordinary with respect to "holy" places: "it would be
206 Review Article

possible, in principle, to locate any particular building ideology along a

continuum from the sphere of 'nature' to that of 'culture'" (p. 21). Indian
temples would have to be placed at the natural, organic end of the continuum
and would be themselves akin to the Aranda traditions in Australia. In the
Near East, by contrast, "A temple is built where it happens to have been
built. A temple is built at a central place, the place where a king or god
happens to have decided to take up residence" (p. 22). Smith is careful to
differentiate his own distinctions "along a continuum" from earlier distinc-
tions that resembled his but still suffered from a theological murkiness
(p. 21). He is concerned-perhaps more than necessary?-to suggest there is
nothing objectionable (and nothing unduly speculative) about his distinctions
along a continuum from general memory of places to a more special memory
of specific places.
Some questions might be raised nevertheless. Although Smith is cautious
in his references to India, it is not difficult to list kings in Hindu India who
happened to take up residence somewhere and to build temples. Hardly any
town of significance is without its great king and its great temple. (Among
these are Chidambaram, Kanchipuram, and Tanjore, and any travel guide
extends the list.) If we are to think in terms of continuum, much of India
could be pushed a lot closer to the ancient Near East. The Aranda find
themselves perhaps a bit more isolated in their closeness to the pole of
ordinary nature than we were led to believe. In the case of Indian Buddhism,
the poles of the continuum seem to lose much of their power to orient us
toward Australia. In general, royal patronage and royal funds to build are the
rule. Would we have heard much of Buddhism if the Buddha had established
his community near his birthplace (in Nepal) rather than near Benares? The
continuum Smith posits may still be valid, but it becomes hazier in the light
of historical developments. What are we to make of local ancestor cults in
Southeast Asia that became centered in the ruler who, upon his death, was
sculpted in large dimensions resembling a deity? If so much depends on "the
place where a king or god happens to have decided to take up his residence,"
and if there is such a sense of "arbitrariness of place" (p. 22)-what could be
more arbitrary in the establishment of sacred sites in the Near East than the
Javanese sacralities that were seemingly so much closer to the Aranda? The
interpenetration of ancient local symbolism with imports from India occurred
all over Southeast Asia. Perhaps Smith means to say that he really wants to
regard all "sacred places" as the same, provided we dispense with the idea of
transcendental centers. This becomes clearer when we read on. We should
forget altogether about such unilluminating notions as "religious experience"
and "the sacred" and instead focus on the undeniable human function of
memory with its principal object: the power established in a particular place
which in the course of history can become associated with a ruler or dynasty.
However, as now expressed, the continuum between two poles is still not as
free of "murkiness"as Smith wants it to be.
This continuum linking all things shows a remote and certainly unintended
resemblance to Van der Leeuw's distinction between religions of presence and
of will. The latter correspond to what in Smith's presentation are the "cul-
tural" developments of greater historical and political consequence than the
History of Religions 207

Aranda with their interest in "ancestral spots" could have imagined. Is there
some problem concealed even after Smith's attempt to clean up the murkiness
of the tendencies to overtheologize?
It seems to me that as historians of religions we have to sympathize with
the effort to search for a foothold in evidence, and the last thing on our
minds should be any belittling of such efforts. Very rightly, Smith looks
askance at questionable presentations of what the materials say; his Imagin-
ing Religion (1982) was replete with examples, and the present book en-
deavors to provide a model for consistency in assessing the evidence of
religions. Unfortunately, even in the best attempts, it is difficult to avoid all
reference to assumptions. And, as in all science, those are the abiding and
most resistant obstacles to clear analysis.
Smith's second chapter, "Father Place," does address itself to the problem
of assumptions. It begins with a quote from Roger Bacon: "Place is the
beginning of our existence, just as a father," and with Sigmund Freud's
memories of places he learned about as a youngster in school. It reviews
geographical observations by Kant and modern geographers, and concludes
with startling suggestions in discussions on modern sociologists and anthro-
pologists from Durkheim to Clifford Geertz.
The novelty of the suggestions, quite different from customary views held
by religionists and social scientists, does not make for easy persuading.
"Place" becomes a crucial notion indeed-more so than Eliade's "center"-
for from now on, we should have to see it "not simply in the sense of
environmental generation, but also in the sense of social location, of gene-
alogy, kinship, authority, superordination, and subordination" (p. 46). What
this means, among other things, is that Durkheim (and Mauss) made a
cardinal mistake: they allowed some special, in fact religious emotion to creep
into their own analysis (p. 40)-an error resulting from their inability to
distinguish between "place" and the generally distorted recollection of place,
or between spacial distinctions and ideological distinctions. Smith accepts
and employs the term "ideology," and he praises Georges Dumezil for having
introduced it into the discussion of religion, thereby making Smith's correc-
tion of Durkheim possible. Dumezil's well-known studies of tripartition in
archaic Indo-European traditions rest in part on the realization that what the
myths tell us is not a direct reflection of a given society, but the expansion of
ideal forms.
Then what exactly is the great difference Dumezil effected for Smith?
Smith's formulation of the answer is worthy of note. It is, he says, "the
'linguistic turn', theories of the social, world-construction role of language-
an enterprise of fabrication in both senses of the term: an affair of both
building and lying" (p. 41). Note that the term "religion," which Dumezil also
rarely uses, is absent. And the reader turns to the next chapter in hopes of
seeing the author slacken his rigor just a bit, to hear him say something that
is not strictly a system of ideas based on divisions of locality.
Now that we have been told so emphatically that the notion of "place" is
the cardinal source of what might hitherto have been considered an irredu-
cible religious expression, the title "To Put in Place" of the next chapter is
promising. The theory proposed therein is not an endeavor at classification a
208 Review Article

la Claude Levi-Strauss-although Levi-Strauss figures in the discussion-but

primarily an elaboration on some of Louis Dumont's ideas in Homo hier-
archicus (Paris, 1966; translation, Chicago, 1970). Dumont argued for an
understanding of the peculiar relationship and complementarity between
royal (political) power and sacerdotal (ritual) purity in Indian culture. Accord-
ing to Dumont, the two are not merely opposites, for the Indian documenta-
tion shows rather "the encompassing of the contrary," a thesis that seems
richly borne out by texts concerning royal rituals in Brahmanic India. How-
ever, Smith wants to add something which he thinks Dumont should really
have arrived at. This something is, quite bluntly, the primacy of power: for
Smith, the king precedes the priest. It would seem that this is no extension of
Dumont, but something quite different. The chapter also takes us away from
the Indian materials; Smith finds his evidence in a text of Ezekiel which is
none too clear to biblical specialists and part of which (Ezek. 44:8) Smith
himself calls "exceedingly murky" (p. 62). In it, so it seems, the Levites are
lowered to a place that was reserved for foreigners, outsiders, those in the
unenviable position of not belonging to Israel's "system" (pp. 62-63). This
and other features of the various "maps" Ezekiel presents point to radical
political changes. Among them are new places assigned to Judah and Ben-
jamin (p. 66). Thus it is indeed power that does all the putting into place.
Smith is satisfied in chapter 3 to establish the fact that Ezekiel is truly
"systemic." (This word occurs in several crucial passages in the book and
seems to connote approval.) Ezekiel's system (especially as used in the last of
the four "maps" in the text) is "more egalitarian, recognizing the integrity and
legitimacy of each of the subsystems. But it is an egalitarianism possible only
from the perspective of hierarchical domination by the highest order" (p. 70).
This apparently demonstrates the final purpose of the text. The text's systemic
nature compares favorably with another effort made in Aristeas (second
century B.C.E.), in spite of the fact that the latter is not murky (pp. 71-73).
The question occurs: How can we be so sure of all this "systemic" persua-
siveness on the basis of a text of such extraordinary difficulty? Isn't the
foundation of the argument a bit narrow? Another question one might ask,
even if one is not a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist: Do actual classes distinguish
themselves sufficiently clearly in this systemic process? Or, in other words, is
this type of analysis universally applicable? Do we have a sufficiently sturdy
basis-methodologically-to regard various traditions as having followed the
same course, or are we dealing with an unusual case, and do "systems"
elsewhere that might show some similarity merely happen to have developed
the same features?
Part of the problem is settled in the next chapter, called "To Replace." The
alleged attempt of Ezekiel to show "a 'diametric' schema from the perspective
of superordination" (p. 71) is superior, indeed systemic, so we are told,
because it can be said to be "necessary" and "replicable" (p. 73). Chapter 4
takes us to Jerusalem's Christians, hence to another time and tradition.
The question now to be dealt with is as follows: How does a new ritual site
come into being? Some things change, yet most everything basic remains the
History of Religions 209

same in Smith's view. He briefly refers to Constantinople and other topoi

that might serve to make the point, but he settles for Christianized Jerusalem
as the perfect heuristic device. The political influence of bishop Makarius of
Jerusalem was a dominant factor in placing Jerusalem on a renewed spiritual
map, with its supposed sites of Jesus's tomb and resurrection. The early
church historian Eusebius gave the development his imprimatur, for he "built
a 'Holy Land' with words" (p. 79).
The writer knows and the reader infers that those sacralities so freely
bestowed on a piece of real estate are made out of whole cloth. And just in
case a reader has missed the moral, he cannot miss the point when it is made
explicit in the final chapter: "Ritual is not an expression of or a response to
'the Sacred'; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual (the
primary sense of sacrificium)" (p. 105). In Smith's summary, Eusebius's
account runs as follows: "Constantine, under divine guidance, addressed
himself to constructing a building at the site of the resurrection in Jerusalem"
(p. 79), whereby Smith does not fail to note parenthetically that "no indica-
tion is given as to what traditions were available to determine the place."
According to Eusebius, what (merely?) happened was this: "Constantine
deemed it necessary to bring to light . . the blessed place ... so that all
might be able to see and venerate it" (p. 79). After Eusebius, the holiness of
Jerusalem is completed by the discovery (or rather, invention of the discovery)
of the original site of the Cross. The "archaic imperial language of cos-
mogonic myth" (p. 80) employed by Eusebius is continued until "the basic
dossier is complete" (p. 82).
The significance of these transformations in Jerusalem recounted by Smith
is that they repeat the pattern he has found before, except that a slight twist is
provided by the series of events in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
Christ, which is basic to the church's liturgy. "The structured temporality of
the liturgy accomplished for Christianity in its relationship to the loca sancta
what the Jewish hierarchical distinctions accomplished with respect to Jeru-
salem and its Temple" (p. 95). The structures of the two "could become
independent structures of thought, creativity, and human action" (p. 95).
Historical occurrences, such as the destruction of the Temple, had little to do
with it. Only the form made a difference between the two. On one side, the
"enduring monument" was the Mishnah, on the other the liturgical year.
Each in its own way "perhaps deserves to be titled the true 'new Jerusalem'"
(p. 95).
What are we left with? Or what has religion come to? It has certainly cut all
ties with das ganz Andere, although some others already had seen to that
with some degree of success. Religion has become a mental operation that
does not even depend on history. Rather, it is a habitual pattern of thought
we can detect in certain people who delude themselves into submission to a
superhuman authority or an excuse for what they do. It is but fortunate that
we are now in a position to look through it all.
The experience of reading To Take Place-and this is no small compli-
ment-is a bit like reading Voltaire, except that Voltaire had a sense for the
210 Review Article

frailty of human existence; somewhat of a sense for human needs remained.

Perhaps Thomas Paine is a better analogue. Only reason remains, not en-
cumbered by David Hume's questions and seemingly unassailed by doubts of
any kind.
I readily admit that I remain fascinated, for I too would not like to build
the edifice of our understanding on my sensitivity to human needs or my
anxieties about my reason. But does this heroic stance lead me to no other
conclusion than the destruction of everything resembling a phenomenology of
religion, the declaration that all notion of the sacred is a figment of the
imagination? Is the creation of religious symbols a farce? Would it have to
seem as if nothing remained but a division between religious oddities and
sworn atheism? Is there no philosophical question left? Is James Luther
Adams completely wrong and a mere leftover example of an old-fashioned
sentimentality when he takes delight in repeating Sabatier: "Man is incurably
religious"?
There is a final question: What light does all this shed on ritual? The last
chapter addresses it: "to take place" is the ritual. What actually makes up
religion is what happens, and it is a matter of taking, of power exerted, often
forcefully and violently. After the preceding expositions, the reader is no
longer surprised to find little room left for the extraordinary qualities tradi-
tional scholars (up to and including Eliade) have extolled with the term
"sacred." By way of introduction, Smith quotes some Renaissance and En-
lightenment rhymes. Most incisive is one line in prose by Erasmus (the year is
1503): "To place the whole world of religion in external ceremonies is sublime
stupidity" (p. 101). Contrary to another cherished scholarly opinion earlier in
our century, that myth and ritual are closely related, the actual history of the
scholarly imagination concerning the categories myth and ritual diverged
considerably (p. 101). The real reason why scholars have been fascinated with
myths is the dream dreamt by Justin Martyr concerning the logos spermati-
kos: this dream seemed to make it worthwhile to discover "the truth" that
was hidden in myths all over the world.
The history of scholarship with respect to ritual was quite different: the
very suggestion that ritual contained any truth was dismissed, even if the
existence of an original meaning was accepted. Smith is careful to point out
to us that the conclusion which seems near-that myth and ritual are equally
meaningless-is not the one to be drawn. Instead, he argues that ritual
cannot be called "empty"without qualification.
The qualification may not console every reader. We are urged to admit that
ritual is empty, and, in the final analysis, even meaningless, but the good
news is that its existence cannot be denied. And what explains its existence?
Smith's gift for formulas provides the answer most concisely: "place directs
attention" (p. 103). More generally, and more directly, this means that ritual
made people think. Maps, such as those of Ezekiel, could turn into "abstract
topographies," and, in the end, they could turn into "sheerly intellectual
systems" (p. 109). Thus we meet with the intriguing thought that there is
indeed a "gnostic dimension to ritual."
History of Religions 211

The basic thesis of Smith's book rests on the underlying conviction, ex-
pressed in various forms, directly and indirectly, that we should forget about
the "sacred" in general as well as "the sacred center" in particular. Instead,
the study of ritual should reveal to us that the real power is a matter of given,
very human activities and desires for power over places, which, in turn, give
rise to real thought.
The thesis is too articulately expressed to be belittled by pointing crudely
to instances of one-sided or questionable interpretation, in addition to the
questions already raised. It is difficult nevertheless not to point to a quotation
from Durkheim, not for what it says, but for what it leaves out. Durkheim
speaks of the mutually incomparable worlds of ordinary life and ritual-an
essential theme for Smith's exposition. Durkheim says that a person "cannot
penetrate into the other [ritual life] without at once entering into relations
with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy." Is it a
coincidence that in this statement as quoted on page 40, the words "with
extraordinary powers" are left out? The relative pronoun refers to them, and
not, as it now seems, to the more abstract "relations."
Another little puzzle is the absence of references to Frits Staal, Bruce
Lincoln, and Brian K. Smith. The first two have published widely and have
proposed ideas that may not be identical to Smith's nor to each other's, but
they are at times closely adjacent to the argument in the book and much
more supportive than many of the authors who are quoted. For better or
worse, the study of ritual practices has an important focus in Indian materials,
even though Smith does not feel at home there. Brian K. Smith's important
article, "The Unity of Ritual: The Place of the Domestic Sacrifice in Vedic
Ritualism," was published a year before To Take Place (Indo-lranian Journal
29 [1986]: 79-96).
One quotation from an expert on Indian texts, J. C. Heesterman, takes us
back to the core of the book. "[The ritual] has nothing to say about the
world, its concerns and conflicts. It proposes, on the contrary, a separate,
self-contained world" (p. 110). This statement may be heard as agreeing with
Smith's propositions, as he himself suggests. Indeed, a thesis that requires
serious consideration (and it could have been said in the same words by Staal
as well as by Smith) is that ritual does not require an explanation outside
itself, such as desire for magically obtainable ends, an expression of emotions,
a stage play for ideas or (mythical) texts. On the contrary: "Ritual gains force
where incongruency is perceived and thought about" (pp. 109-10; as Smith
had already demonstrated in his Imagining Religion). This argument may
indeed "accord" with Heesterman, and it may even be true-but it is not
proved by Heesterman's groping generalization about Hindu ritual (especially
the Brahmanic material), which suffered more than most from simpleminded
formulas concerning magic acts and desired ends. It certainly has little, if
anything, to do with Smith's reasonings concerning "place."
The real bone of contention is the problem surrounding Smith's desire to
demonstrate that no ritual center becomes homologized (to use Eliade's
favorite term) with a transcendent center. On the contrary, the former is
212 Review Article

something truly functioning by itself, and the latter is irrelevant and in no

way pointed to by the ritual documentation. And is that what is left over and
what sets thought in motion? Is that what Smith wants us to understand
when he says "incongruency is ... thought about"?
Then the mystery may be no longer the reality of the sacred or the
mystifying center, but the mystery of thought. But then, why act ritually in
the first place? As in the case of Van der Leeuw's phenomenology (a model
for Eliade, and no favorite of Smith), here also the last thing said can only be
the word of the fairy tale Van der Leeuw quoted at the end of his book: "and
so everything has its end, and this book too. But everything that has an end
also commences anew elsewhere."

KEESW. BOLLE
University of California, Los Angeles