Ritual purification

“ The religious preparation for the performance of a sacred act usually concerns official persons (see below, under consecration, § 202) , but sometimes involves the purification of others. The largest act of purification is that which includes a whole community or people;363 the social mass is then regarded as a unit, and there is no reason, according to early thought, why such a mass should not, by a ceremony, be freed from all ritual disabilities, the idea of moral purification being, of course, absent or latent. ”

“ Yet the study of this group and its explanation has been a signal triumph for the science of comparative religion. It is a great pity that the general public knows, as yet, so little about the researches made by scholars into the wide-spread ritual of communion and purification, by means of which the participant becomes one with his deity and is even assured of salvation and immortality. The interesting fact is, that, here again, we find ideas which are essentially primitive and magical given a new setting. ”

“ In the Hebrew ritual a human bodily impurity and the apparatus of the temple alike require a sin-offering.373 In India the bath of purification stood in close relation with a sacrifice.374 In Greece the two were associated in the cults of Apollo and Dionysos and in ordinary worship in general.375 Thus, men and gods take part in the process of freeing the worshiper from the impure elements of life: the man obeys the law of the ritual, and the god receives him into association with the divine. ”

“ Ethical purification, as a matter of course, went hand in hand with cultic organization. The old gods or spirits, associates of the supreme god, became embodiments of moral conceptions, and a ritual of physical and moral purity was worked out. ”

“ In most primitive societies the chief sources of ritual pollution are birth, death, bloodshed, blood, especially menstruous blood. Numberless other things are or have been taboo among different peoples, such as trees, colours, foods and drinks, persons, places, seasons. Persons and things brought even involuntarily into contact or association with these are tabooed, and only recover their normal condition by some rite of purification or catharsis. Such rites operate by the transference elsewhere of the stain or impurity contracted. ”

“ Hence Ritual, which we do not find in the most primitive religions, but which is discovered in all of those that have advanced to a higher type. Even in the earliest Vedic 50 hymns—those of the Rig-Veda-Sanhitâ—we perceive clear traces of an established ritual from the manner in which the sacrifices are spoken of as having been duly offered. In the Zend-Avesta, elaborate ritualistic directions are given for certain specified purposes, especially for that of purification after any defilement. ”

“ But this superstition often proceeds with a logic of its own: as a corpse is most unclean, and all who touch it are impure, therefore dogs and wolves and carrion birds are impure and must not be eaten: and anything that however distantly reminds us of danger and death, such as quarrelsome acts and words, may come to be rigidly prohibited during a ritual of purification. As blood is primevally impure, therefore any substance analogous to it or of the same colour might be regarded as ill-omened, such as beans or pomegranates. ”

“ THE evolution of religious observances progressed from placation, avoidance, exorcism, coercion, conciliation, and propitiation to sacrifice, atonement, and redemption. The technique of religious ritual passed from the forms of the primitive cult through fetishes to magic and miracles; and as ritual became more complex in response to man's increasingly complex concept of the supermaterial realms, it was inevitably dominated by medicine men, shamans, and priests.
In the advancing concepts of primitive man the spirit world was eventually regarded as being unresponsive to the ordinary mortal. ”

“ Much of this ritual of sin-transference is altogether independent of the higher gods; it is worked by mesmeric or mimetic or mechanical magic. At a later period it is harmonised with their service and accompanied with prayer; and at this stage we note a curious ritualistic phenomenon. Blood, the primeval source of impurity, becomes itself {121} a purifier, not by the law similia similibus curantur, but owing to the growing power of the sacrificial concept. ”

“ In all these cases the virtue lies either in a sacred thing or act that has the quality of dissipating the mysterious defilement present, or in the removal or avoidance of the defiling thing; it is frequently required that the application of the cleansing substance be made by a sacred person, whose character adds potency to the act. The use of water for ceremonial purification has been, and is, practiced all over the world, alike by savages and by civilized peoples:365 the newborn child, ritually impure by reason of the 86mystery of birth, is bathed or sprinkled ”

“ The priests have always sought to impress and awe the common people by conducting the religious ritual in an ancient tongue and by sundry magical passes so to mystify the worshipers as to enhance their own piety and authority. The great danger in all this is that the ritual tends to become a substitute for religion. ”

“ And while we are anxiously discussing whether the life of eucharistic devotion is best fed through the eye or the ear, or how its outward form should be arrayed, it is only too sadly true, that that life and that body are a prey to divers diseases, and need medicine and restoratives, ere they are likely to exhibit much real vigour, nourish and clothe them as we will. ”

“ Rites to procure the rebirth of edible animals and plants.
Now too we can fully understand the meaning of the bloody ritual in the ceremonies for the multiplication of the totem animals and plants. We have seen that a strengthening and fertilising virtue is attributed to human blood. What {p106} more natural than that it should be poured out by the men of the totem on the spot in which the disembodied spirits of the totem animals or plants are waiting for reincarnation? ”

“ I was likewise engaged in the meeting for worship, to call Friends’ attention to the necessity of greater purification both in body, soul, and spirit; as the only medium through which we could gain an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven. I showed by the analogy of reason, that a purified soul could not be content to inhabit a polluted body; and that if the inside was made clean, the outside would be clean also; and that true and genuine Christianity will lead to cleanliness in our persons, in our houses, and in all our concerns. ”

“ The Hebrew Christians, to whom the Apostle wrote, were well acquainted with the laws of ceremonial purification by the blood of beasts, and birds, for by blood almost everything was purified in the service of the Temple. But it is only the blood of Christ that can purge the human conscience. ”

“ Of all these sources of evidence, none is more valuable than the testimony of ritual. A moment's reflection will show that ritual, among any people, wild or civilised, is not a thing easily altered. If we take the savage, his ritual consists mainly of the magical rites by which he hopes to constrain his gods to answer his prayers, though he may also "reveal" to the neophyte "Our Father". ”

“ Hence belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always take the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward ceremonies. ”

“ The gods were worshipped by fastings, by vigils, by continence, by the burning of copal and the offerings of flowers and scented herbs, and, of course, by sacrifice. Sacrifices were generally of animals. Self-mutilation, the piercing of ears and lips, the lacerating of tongues and other self-inflicted tortures, formed part of the ritual. During sacrifices women and girls were excluded from the temples. In each temple were two stones of sacrifice, one in the holy of holies and one in the vestibule. The solemnities surrounding human sacrifice were extraordinarily elaborate. ”

“ And what therefore I would earnestly desire that the Church of God in this land might draw forth from the present excitement and anxiety about ritual is, a faithful comparison of herself, in point of doctrine and practice, with the Apostolic and Primitive model. There are greater things than these; "The life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." ”

“ If by the spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. Mortification is absolutely necessary, and at every stage of the Christian life. It is the carrying into effect in detail of the fundamental law of our new life—the law which the baptismal ritual was intended to teach—life by means of death. For the body had gained the upper hand: it had come to control the weakened spirit. Therefore the reinvigorated spirit must react upon the body and its impulses. ”

“ It has been felt not only right but necessary, in all ages and places, to accompany the inward feeling of devotion with some outward manifestation of it. In other words, all religious actions are from their nature symbolical and figurative. But if the most obvious corporeal accompaniments to spiritual worship show this clearly, how much more evidently must all ritual systems appear to be symbolical? A system of worship, whether heathen, Christian, or heretical, is only the development and methodising of the simplest figurative acts of devotion ”

“ But at the same time, if the new philosophy did not find expression in the invention of the first deities, it gave them a much more concrete form than they had previously presented, and played a large part in the establishment of the foundations upon which all religious ritual was subsequently built up, and in the initiation of a priesthood to administer the rites which were suggested by the practice of mummification. ”

“ But, where men yielded up unauthorized offerings, even of their own blood, or of the very lives of their first-born, they confessed themselves unsatisfied with their attitude God-ward; and, where men followed a divinely prescribed ritual, they were taught by that very ritual itself, that the outpoured blood and the partaken flesh of the sacrifices were, at the best, but mere shadows of good things to come. ”

“ Now, since these ceremonials contributed nothing to man's purification in God's sight—a thing to be effected by nothing short of a new birth—Christ came with a new order of cleansing, namely, baptism, which is not a mere external ablution from physical impurities, but a washing effective in man's purification from the inward pollution of his old sinful birth and from an evil conscience, and bringing remission of sin and a good conscience toward God, as Peter says. ”

“ Couched in antique language, these liturgies are designed for the dedication of shrines, for propitiating evil, for entreating blessings on the harvest, for purification, for obtaining household security, for bespeaking protection during a journey, and so forth. Nowhere is any reference found to a future state of reward or punishment, to deliverance from evil, to assistance in the path of virtue. One ceremonial only is designed to avert the consequences of sin or crime ”

“ On this side rites of purification may become rites of consecration. In lower civilizations disease and madness are held to be caused by evil spirits which are similarly expelled; and on this side purificatory rites develop into the medical art. It must be borne in mind that a drug was originally not a substance succeeding by dint of its chemical properties and physical reactions on our bodies, but a talisman or charm taken internally and succeeding by reason of its magical properties. ”

“ Some doctors assert that all diseases, others that the greater number and the most serious and hardest to cure, are due to this. Moreover the oracles of the gods bear witness thereto, I mean that by the rite of purification not the soul alone but the body as well is greatly benefited and preserved. Indeed the gods when they exhort those theurgists who are especially holy, announce to them that their “mortal husk of raw matter”889 shall be preserved from perishing. ”

“ With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant's mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically treated needles into their flesh. ”

“ Kathartic practices required and implied no feeling of offence, of personal guilt, of personal responsibility. All that we know of these practices serves to bring this out and set the matter in a clearer light.
Ceremonies of “purification” accompany every step of a man’s life from the cradle to the grave. The woman with child is “unclean” and so is anyone who touches her; the new-born child is unclean;72 marriage is fenced about with a series of purificatory rites; the dead, and everything that approaches them, are unclean. ”

“ One may wonder why a magical ritual should be preferred and trusted rather than genuinely devotional worship; since it must, in fact, just as often result in disappointment. But, first, as to the priesthood, an elaborate ritual, difficult to carry out, is favourable to their power, because only professionals can execute it ”

“ Our language follows this ideal movement to its utmost stretch, where such words as cleansing and purification have passed from their first material meaning, to signify removal of ceremonial contamination, legal guilt, and moral sin. What we thus express in metaphor, the men of the lower culture began early to act in ceremony, purifying persons and objects by various prescribed rites, especially by dipping them in and sprinkling them with water, or fumigating them with and passing them through fire. ”