3

THE BOG IRISH

The Bog Irishman in his faithfulness to the rule of Friday abstinence is undeniably like the primitive ritualist. Magical rules have always an expressive function. Whatever other functions they perform, disciplinary, anxiety-reducing, or sanctioning of moral codes, they have first and foremost a symbolic function. The official symbolism of Friday abstinence was originally personal mortification, a small weekly celebration of the annual celebration of Good Friday. Thus it pointed directly to Calvary and Redemption. It could hardly have a more central load of meaning for Christian worship. In reporting that it has become empty and meaningless, what is meant is that its symbols are no longer seen to point in that direction or anywhere in particular.

Yet symbols which are tenaciously adhered to can hardly be dismissed as altogether meaningless. They must mean something. We can start by asking what are the most poignant experiences of the Irish girl who has left her home to do service in London hotels or hospitals, or of the Irish man who arrives looking for big, quick money in construction work. If they have friends and kin to find them lodgings, their sense of exile is softened by a sense of continuity, the Irish newspapers sold outside Church after Mass, the weekly dances in the parish hall. There is a sense of belonging. If no such welcome is arranged, they are likely to see on the doors of lodging houses: ‘No Irish, no coloured’. Then the sense of exile and of boundary is sharper. This is what the rule of Friday abstinence can signify. No empty symbol, it means allegiance to a humble home in Ireland and to a glorious tradition in Rome. These allegiances are something to be proud of in the humiliations of the unskilled labourer's lot. At its lowest it means what haggis and the pipes mean to Scots abroad on Burns’ night. At its most it means what abstaining from pork meant to the venerable Eleazar as narrated in 2 Maccabees.

The Catholic hierarchy in England today is under pressure to underestimate the expressive function of ritual. Catholics are exhorted to invent individual acts of almsgiving as a more meaningful celebration of Friday. But why Friday? Why celebrate at all? Why not be good and generous all the time? As soon as symbolic action is denied value in its own right, the flood-gates of confusion are opened. Symbols are the only means of communication. They are the only means of expressing value; the main instruments of thought, the only regulators of experience. For any communication to take place, the symbols must be structured. For communication about religion to take place, the structure of the symbols must be able to express something relevant to the social order. If a people takes a symbol that originally meant one thing, and twists it to mean something else, and energetically holds on to that subverted symbol, its meanings for their personal life must be very profound. Who would dare to despise the cult of Friday abstinence who has not himself endured the life of the Irish labourer in London?

Friday abstinence must be interpreted under the same rubric as Jewish abstinence from pork. In Purity and Danger I argued that the dietary rules in Leviticus xi afford a shorthand summary of the categories of Israelite culture. The pig is not singled out for special abhorrence more than the camel and the rock badger. The dietary rules, I suggested, should be taken as a whole and related to the totality of symbolic structures organizing the universe. In this way the abominations are seen as anomalies within a particular logical scheme (Douglas, 1966: ch. 3). Since writing this, useful criticisms have been made. Dr S. Strizower (1966) has pointed out that I overlooked the importance of restrictive dietary rules in setting the Israelites apart from other people and in expressing their sense of apartness. Ralph Bulmer has argued that if my interpretation of the whole set of rules as carrying a condensed classification of the universe be conceded, it still does not explain the particular abhorrence of the flesh of the pig (1967: 21). Why should this one animal be singled out to be the chief representative and vanguard of all other abominations? The answer to both would seem to be in the two books of Maccabees. This is the narrative of how Judas Maccabeus led the people of Israel against their conquerors, the Greeks.

1 Maccabees i, 21. And after Antiochus had ravaged Egypt in the 143rd year, he returned and sent up against Israel . . . 23. And he proudly entered into the sanctuary and took away the golden altar . . . 26 . . . and there was great mourning in Israel . . . 29. And all the house of Jacob was covered with confusion. 32–8. He attacked and destroyed the city, threw down the walls, took the women captive . . . and built the city of David with a great and strong wall and with strong towers and made it a fortress for them . . . 39 . . . and defiled the holy place . . . 40. And the inhabitants of Jerusalem fled away by reason of them, and the city was made a habitation of strangers; and she became a stranger to her own seed and her children forsook her.

Not content with political and military victory, King Antiochus ordered all the nations under him to leave their own laws.

45 . . . And many of Israel consented to his service: and they sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath.

Throughout the subsequent narrative of the overthrow of the invading armies and the purification of the temple three themes are treated as co-ordinate symbols:

defilement of the temple
defilement of the body
breach of the law.

The temple is finally rebuilt and rededicated, with high walls and strong towers round about (1 Maccabees iv, 60); a necessary military precaution. But the leaders of Israel also took as drastic precautions against the defilement of their bodies (2 Maccabees v, 27):

But Judas Maccabeus . . . had withdrawn himself into a desert place, and there lived among the wild beasts in the mountains with his company: and they continued feeding on herbs, that they might not be partakers of the pollution.

Those who circumcised or observed the Sabbath in secret were brutally killed by the conquerors. It is clear here that any of the rules, dietary and other, and any among the dietary rules, were equally held sacred and their breach equally held polluting. But Antiochus ordered swine to be immolated on their altars (1 Maccabees i, 50) and took eating of swine's flesh as a symbol of submission (2 Maccabees vi). So it was he, by this action, who forced into prominence the rule concerning pork as the critical symbol of group allegiance. Circumcision, after all, is a private matter concerning the private parts of a person. Observing the Sabbath, also, does not necessarily impinge on other people's lives or at least only periodically. Refusal of commensality is a more total rejection of social intercourse. If the heathen eat pork, the pork-avoiding Israelite cannot join their meals. In a greatly lessened degree, if a Catholic is invited out to dine on Friday, his ritual allegiance may be an affront to his hosts, only because it is not one they share. Thus pork avoidance and Friday abstinence gain significance as symbols of allegiance simply by their lack of meaning for other cultures. The splendid passage describing Eleazar's trial explains how eating pork came to be abhorred as an act of betrayal as well as of defilement.

2 Maccabees vi, 18. Eleazar, one of the chief of the scribes, a man advanced in years and of a comely countenance, was pressed to open his mouth to eat swine's flesh. 19. But he, choosing rather a most glorious death than a hateful life, went forward voluntarily to the torment . . . 21. But they that stood by, being moved with wicked pity, for the old friendship they had with the man, taking him aside, desired that flesh might be brought which it was lawful for him to eat, that he might make as if he had eaten, as the king had commanded, of the flesh of the sacrifice. 22. That by so doing he might be delivered from death. And for the sake of their old friendship with the man they did him this courtesy. 23. But he began to consider the dignity of his age and his ancient years and the inbred honour of his grey head and his good life and conversation from a child: and he answered without delay, according to the ordinances of the holy law made by God, saying that he would rather be sent into the other world. 24. For it doth not become our age, said he, to dissemble: whereby many young persons might think that Eleazar, at the age of fourscore and ten years, was gone over to the life of the heathens: 25. And so, they, through my dissimulation and for a little time of a corruptible life should be deceived, and hereby I should bring a stain and a curse upon my old age . . . 27. Wherefore, by departing manfully out of this life, I shall shew myself worthy of my old age. 28. And I shall leave an example of fortitude to young men, if with a ready mind and constancy I suffer an honourable death, for the most venerable and most holy laws. And having spoken thus, he was forthwith carried to execution.

Notice that it is not one law, but all the laws for which he dies, and that the execrable character of pig itself as an animal or form of food does not enter into the discussion. Nor does it enter into the next chapter in which seven brothers and their mother were apprehended and compelled by the King to eat swine's flesh. In all the gruesome description of how their tongues were cut out, their heads scalped and their bodies fried alive in huge frying pans to the merriment of pagan onlookers, nothing is said whatever about the abominable character of pig. But after such historic acts of heroism, no wonder the avoidance of pork became a specially powerful symbol of allegiance for the Jewish people and so attracted the later hellenizing exegesis that looked to the moral attributes of the pig. Whereas this symbol in origin owed its meaning only to its place in a total pattern of symbols, for which it came to stand, as a result of its prominence in persecution. We belong to a generation whose perception of symbols is blurred except in familiar social contexts. So it may be easier to sympathize with the irritation of the cook in King Solomon's Mines at the unswerving obedience of the Zulu, Umslopogas, to his dietary laws. If two symbolic systems are confronted, they begin to form, even by their opposition, a single whole. In this totality each half may be represented to the other by a single element which is made to jump out of context to perform this role. Other people select among our external symbols of allegiance those which offend or amuse them most. So Shifra Strizower is right. Further account of the apartness of the people of Israel and of their beleaguered history would have given more meaning to their dietary laws. The story of Maccabees teaches that the Israelites took the purity of the temple and the purity of the human body to represent adherence to all the details of the law and so a total turning of each person in his own body and of the whole nation in the temple and in the law towards God. For when they cleansed and rebuilt the temple (1 Maccabees iv, 42) ‘he chose priests without blemish whose will was set upon the law of God’. The high walls they built around Mount Sion and the strong guard they set upon their mouths were the symbolic ramparts of their commitment to their religion.

Perhaps it is true that Friday abstinence became a wall behind which the Catholics in England retired too smugly. But it was the only ritual which brought Christian symbols down into the kitchen and larder and on to the dinner table in the manner of Jewish rules of impurity. To take away one symbol that meant something is no guarantee that the spirit of charity will flow in its place. It might have been safer to build upon that small symbolic wall in the hope that eventually it could come to surround Mount Sion. But we have seen that those who are responsible for ecclesiastical decisions are only too likely to have been made, by the manner of their education, insensitive to non-verbal signals and dull to their meaning. This is central to the difficulties of Christianity today. It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by colour-blind signalmen.

I will now give some space to the question of Friday abstinence to demonstrate that there is indeed a clear movement in educated Catholic circles in England, a move from symbolic to ethical action. But it is a less important example than my second one, the change in the attitude to the Eucharist. Friday abstinence was never anything more than a disciplinary rule. No special sacramental efficacy was officially imputed to the act, negatively or positively, whereas the doctrine of the Eucharist is as magically sacramental as any tribal religion.

Some anthropologists reading this may be as confused as to the nature of Friday abstinence from meat as the most benighted of the faithful. They may even share Goodenough's belief that the focus of the ritual is not on penitence, but on a positive celebration of fish as against meat. He has argued ingeniously (1956: 50ff.) that fish, which Catholic housewives queue for on Fridays, is a powerful condensed symbol of Christ and that herein lies the true explanation of the observance. However there is no rule about eating fish; only a rule about abstaining from flesh meat. In February 1966 Pope Paul VI issued a decree on fasting and abstinence. He expounded the tradition of penitence, ‘a religious and personal act which has as its aim love and surrender to God’. Citing numerous Old Testament instances of the fast as pleasing to God, and citing Christ's example in the New Testament, he describes acts of penance as ‘participating in a special way in the infinite expiation of Christ.... Thus the task of bearing in his body and soul the death of our Lord affects the whole life of the baptized person at every instant and in every aspect.’ He goes on to condemn any form of penitence which is ‘purely external’. Recognizing that very different conditions prevail in rich and poor countries, he proceeds to revise the Church laws on fasting and abstinence, concentrating them in the season of Lent and otherwise requiring abstinence only on Fridays. These minimal penitential days and seasons are intended to ‘unite the faithful in a common celebration of penitence’. At the same time he invites the Bishops to substitute wholly or in part other penitential exercises (Paenitemine, 17 February 1966).

An article in L'Osservatore Romano (20 February 1966) by W. Bertrams (a canon lawyer at the Gregorian University) comments on the decree and gives it a little extra twist away from ritual and towards ethics and social justice:

Indeed, the faithful must be taught that the Christian spirit of penitence demands also the voluntary privation of things which are not absolutely necessary, so that the money which would have been spent in obtaining them may be used instead for works of charity.

A year later the English hierarchy takes up the invitation to adapt the penitential legislation to local conditions. A letter is issued from the Archbishop's house, Westminster (21 July 1967) seeking the views of all clergy and laity. The letter shows no sense of history or of the value of symbolic action; moreover it shows a strange ambivalence to the subject in hand. It starts firmly by announcing that there is no question of simply abolishing Friday abstinence, but of asking whether an obligatory rule of Friday abstinence achieves its purpose today. What the purpose is, the letter treats very summarily, and goes on with:

Some consider that the obligation should be abolished and instead Fridays should be marked by prayer, voluntary abstinence or other penitential exercises. It is argued that obligatory Friday abstinence is not necessarily a penance and that modern conditions make it difficult to observe it. For the most part, professional and working people have their midday meal away from home, often in a canteen. Again, social events are often fixed for a Friday. And whilst an alternative dish is often available, it is questioned whether it is advisable in our mixed society for a Catholic to appear singular in this matter. Non-Catholics know and accept that we do not eat meat on Fridays but often they do not understand why we do not, and in consequence regard us as odd.

Echoes of the Reformed Synagogue! Arguing that it is not a hardship to avoid meat, and then adding that there is too much hardship for those eating away from home and social embarrassment for those dining out, this seems an inadequate statement to use for consulting the mind of the faithful. When the consultation was concluded, the following was issued from Westminster:

As respect for the moral law decreases, the need for self-denial grows greater. Many Catholics have begun to ask themselves if going without meat on Friday is penance enough. Some find it no penance at all. Meanwhile, in Asia, Africa and South America many Catholics have to go without meat not only on Friday but every day. Millions are starving or at least underfed.

The Bishops have therefore decided that the best way of carrying out our Lord's command to do penance is for each of us to choose our own way of self-denial each Friday...

(31 December 1967)

Thus was the old ritual abolished. In the old days the child admonished to eat his tapioca for the sake of starving millions would be puzzled to know how this obedience would benefit the hungry. The problem of how to benefit the hungry by not abstaining from meat does not arise. The Catholic Institute for International Relations quickly produced a collecting box marked ‘Friday fund. One meal a day’, and sent it around with an appeal: ‘Friday Apathy or Friday Action: Will you put a little away for others each Friday? Boxes from CIIR’. Now there is no cause for others to ‘regard us as odd’. Friday no longer rings the great cosmic symbols of expiation and atonement: it is not symbolic at all, but a practical day for the organization of charity. Now the English Catholics are like everyone else.

Interestingly, the American bishops did much better (from the ritualist, anthropological point of view) than the English in their handling of the same opportunity. There is no down-grading of the symbolic function, more sense of history, more recognition of the need for symbolic solidarity with the past and present body of the Church. Their pastoral statement begins with admirable directness:

Christ died for us on Friday. Gratefully remembering this, Catholic peoples from time immemorial have set apart Friday for special penitential observance by which they gladly suffer with Christ, that they may one day be glorified with him. This is the heart of the tradition of abstinence from meat on Fridays.... Changing circumstances, including economic, dietary and social elements, have made some of our people feel that the renunciation of the eating of meat is not always and for everyone the most effective means of practising penance.

Their sense of liturgical continuity comes out in a list of recommendations which start by saying ‘Friday should be in each week something of what Lent is in the entire year. For this reason we urge all to prepare for that weekly Easter by freely making of every Friday a day of mortification in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ.’ Thus the liturgical year is encapsulated in the liturgical week. They go on specially to commend voluntary abstinence from flesh meat as a means of observing Friday:

(a) We shall thus freely and out of love of Christ crucified show our solidarity with the generation of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in time of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity to Christ and His Church.
(b) We shall thus also remind ourselves that as Christians, although immersed in the world and sharing its life, we must preserve a saving and necessary difference from the spirit of the world. Our deliberate personal abstinence from meat, more especially because no longer required by law, will be an outward sign of inward spiritual values that we cherish.

(Pastoral statement of Conference of Catholic Bishops on Penitential Observance, Washington, D.C., 18November 1966)

It is easy to recognize in the banality of the English hierarchy's attitude the working of the Bernstein effect, surely not among all the Bishops, but certainly among their advisors. It is puzzling to know how the American hierarchy came to take a different view of symbolic action. It is unlikely that their secretariats are not equally staffed by new men, reared in personal homes and masters of the elaborated code. It may be that the greater sociological awareness of the Americans makes the difference. For the sociologist of religion would be superficial indeed if he were not aware of the power of symbols to order experience. No one would deny value in its own right to the symbolic function who takes time and perspective to reflect objectively on the issue. Those who belittle it are responding shortsightedly to their own subjective situation in home and in society.

I seem to have taken a very heavy hammer to crack a small liturgical nut. Friday abstinence is a disciplinary rule, a mere detail. Although this book is not intended primarily for anthropologists, I have written about this theme at length for their interest. For anthropologists often exhort one another to turn to contemporary religions for their material and particularly to Christianity. Dietary restrictions are deep in their traditional subject matter and I wish to show that modern examples are as susceptible to the modes of analysis we employ as are primitive ones. Why not? The only difficulty hitherto has been the lack of a frame of analysis for comparing ourselves and tribal societies along the series from high magicality to low. In the 1960s Bernstein's work on ourselves and Turnbull's work on the pygmies enable this framework to be set up. The discussion can begin.

Now I turn to the other example of how messages about symbols issue from the Vatican only to be decoded here as messages about ethics. The celebration of the Eucharist is central to Catholic dogma. If this gets bowdlerized, then the tendency which Herberg describes for denominations to become social compartments empty of distinguishing doctrines will have worked its way right through the modern world. Historic, sacramental Catholicism will have faded out.

To introduce the problem, I take Pope Paul's Encyclical letter Mysterium Fidei (1965). Here he refers, as his reasons for pastoral concern and anxiety, to current disquieting views on the Eucharist. Among these, he notes that it is not

right to be so preoccupied with considering the nature of the sacramental sign that the impression is created that the symbolism – and no one denies its existence in the most holy Eucharist – expresses and exhausts the whole meaning of Christ's presence in this sacrament. Nor is it right to treat of the mystery of transubstantiation without mentioning the marvellous change of the whole of the bread's substance into Christ's body and the whole of the wine's substance into his blood, of which the Council of Trent speaks, and thereby to make these changes consist of nothing but a ‘trans-signification’ or a ‘transfinalization’, to use these terms. Nor, finally, is it right to put forward and to give expression in practice to the view which maintains that Christ the Lord is no longer present in the consecrated hosts which are left over when the sacrifice of the Mass is over.

(Paul VI, 1965: 7–8)

Here is a doctrine as uncompromising as any West African fetishist's that the deity is located in a specific object, place and time and under control of a specific formula. To make the deity inhabit a material object, whether shrine, mask, juju or piece of bread, is ritualism at its starkest. The condensation of symbols in the Eucharist is staggering in its range and depth. The white circle of bread encompasses symbolically the cosmos, the whole history of the Church and more, since it goes from the bread offering of Melchisidech, to Calvary and the Mass. It unites the body of each worshipper to the body of the faithful. In this compass it expresses themes of atonement, nourishment and renewal. Such intensive condensation is hard for anyone to stomach who has had a highly verbal, personal upbringing. But this is not all. Symbolizing does not exhaust the meaning of the Eucharist. Its full meaning involves magical or sacramental efficacy. If it were just a matter of expressing all these themes, symbolizing and commemorating, much less blood and ink would have been spilt at the Reformation. The crux of the doctrine is that a real, invisible transformation has taken place at the priest's saying of the sacred words and that the eating of the consecrated host has saving efficacy for those who take it and for others. It is based on a fundamental assumption about the human role in religion. It assumes that humans can take an active part in the work of redemption, both to save themselves and others, through using the sacraments as channels of grace – sacraments are not only signs, but essentially different from other signs, being instruments. This touches on the belief in opus operatum, the efficacious rite, whose very possibility was denied by Protestant reformers. In Catholic thought there is an economy of mediation through the Church, through the sacraments and especially through the Mass as the Eucharistic counterpart of Calvary. Dr Francis Clark goes to the root of this question in his admirable survey, The Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation, from which I quote now. Protestantism rejected mediation equally through the instrument of things as through the instrument of persons. For Luther, and above all later teachers,

there was no place for any created reality to mediate to men God's salutary action, nor for the active sharing by men in the dispensation of grace. His cardinal objection against the traditional doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass was that it was a ‘work’, something which belonged to that whole order of instrumental mediation and of man's active participation in the economy of grace that was anathema to the Reformer. . . . The celebration of the Lord's supper was a promise and a testament of that pardon to the individual communicant; it could not ‘do’ anything for others nor could it ‘offer’ anything to God.... In the Babylonian Captivity he insisted:

God does not deal, nor has he ever dealt with man in any other way than by the word of his promise. So too we can never have dealings with God in any other way than by faith in that word of promise.

(Werke, Weimar, VI: 516, 521)

This radical opposition of inner ‘word’ to sacramental ‘work’ is the theological key to the understanding of the storm of hostility to the Mass which swept across Europe.

(Clark 1960: 106–7)

He goes on to quote Dr J. Lortz, saying:

It was a direct attack on the traditional sacramental concept, that is, against the objectivity of the divine life operative in the Church's liturgy. Here the resolution of Christianity into a religion of inner feeling was achieved at the very point at which its victory would have the greatest impact. Here was assailed the secret centre of the Church's unity.... For the Catholic Church, it was not the attack on the Papacy that was the most fateful event which has happened in the Reformation, but the emptying out from her Mysteries of the objective source of power.
(Die Reformation im Deutschland, 2nd edn, i, p. 229, quoted ibid.: 107)

No wonder that Pope Paul is worried by contemporary theologians who whittle down the Eucharist's meaning and who by ambiguous terms such as ‘trans-signification’ and ‘trans-finalization’ threaten to reduce it from an efficacious source of power to a mere symbol. Two years after his Encyclical, the Sacred Congregation of rites issued an Instruction on the Eucharistic Mystery (1967). Here it propounds four different modes of Christ's presence, recognizes them all, but exalts above all the presence in the Eucharist. Christ is present in the body of the faithful gathered in his name. He is present in his Word. He is present in the person of the minister, ‘and above all under the species of the Eucharist. For in this sacrament Christ is present in a unique way, whole and entire, God and man, substantially and permanently.’ This is the message that is sent out. By the time it reaches the faithful it is emasculated more than somewhat. For the writers of popular catechisms and prayer books have evidently been through Bernstein's personal upbringing. They prefer to expatiate verbally on their inner feelings, at a cosier, more intimate level. My comparison with primitive religions would probably disgust them. Great magical acts of worship, which make humble and noble analogs congruent in ever more inclusive patterns, leave them cold. So we find that the New Catechism, in the chapter on the Eucharist, gives to the doctrine of the real presence only as much attention as it gives to the commemorative aspect of the rite. It says rather more about the Eucharist as a thanksgiving, about the togetherness of the people who celebrate it, and the symbol of the common meal and nourishment. The doctrine of the transformation of the bread into divine body is played down and the other modes of Christ's presence (particularly the ‘Word’) played up (Higher Catechetical Institute, Nijmegen, 1967: 332–47). They can't take it, the Dutch bishops who issued this catechism and the open-minded English teachers who seize on it as a watered-down expression of a faith that has practically lost meaning for them. The mystery of the Eucharist is too dazzlingly magical for their impoverished symbolic perception. Like the pygmies (I say it again, since they seem often to pride themselves on having reached some high peak of intellectual development) they cannot conceive of the deity as located in any one thing or place.

But, if my interpretation of Bernstein's research is right, vast unlettered flocks scattered over the globe do not share this disability. By reason of their positional upbringing and social experience they are capable of responding profoundly to symbols of orientation and boundary. I will show in Chapter 5 that they already use their own bodies as symbolic analogs for thinking about society and the universe. They respond less strongly to verbal exposition. They probably feel less need for personal justification by good works. What is too strong meat for their pastors is their natural food. ‘The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.’ There is no question now that the flocks are neglected by jolly, hunting parsons bent on pleasure. But there seems to be a case for arguing that serious, well-intending pastors misunderstand the need for a nourishing food, because it does not seem to suit their own digestive systems. But this would still not be pitching the case against them strongly enough. There is no person whose life does not need to unfold in a coherent symbolic system. The less organized the way of life, the less articulated the symbolic system may be. But social responsibility is no substitute for symbolic forms and indeed depends upon them. When ritualism is openly despised the philanthropic impulse is in danger of defeating itself. For it is an illusion to suppose that there can be organization without symbolic expression. It is the old prophetic dream of instant, unmediated communication. Telepathic understanding is good for brief flashes of insight. But to create an order in which young and old, human and animal, lion and lamb can understand each other direct, is a millennial vision. Those who despise ritual, even at its most magical, are cherishing in the name of reason a very irrational concept of communication.

I have dared to compare Christian ritual with magic and primitive notions of taboo. I am aware that the argument will hardly serve to recommend ritual to the non-ritualist. Yet his contempt both for magic and rules of impurity is based on ignorance. The drawing of symbolic lines and boundaries is a way of bringing order into experience. Such non-verbal symbols are capable of creating a structure of meanings in which individuals can relate to one another and realize their own ultimate purposes. Learning and perception itself depend on classifying and distinguishing. Symbolic boundaries are necessary even for the private organizing of experience. But public rituals which perform this function are also necessary to the organizing of society. One could suppose that industrial society, which is organized by economic exchange, does not need to be activated by symbols necessary to create solidarity in small communities. This might account in straight Durkheimian terms for the withering away of interest in ritualism today. It does not at all account for the lack of ritual in some tribal societies. But if the argument works for ourselves there is a dreary conclusion for those who turn to good works to solve problems about their own identity. They are liable to be frustrated on every count. First, it would seem that they must give their good causes over to the bureaucratic energies of industrial organization, or they will have no effect. Second, although any office or clinic is capable of being organized by positional symbolic patterns, since these people are incapable of appreciating the value of symbolic behaviour they will never be able to arrange their personal relations so that a structure of non-verbal symbols can emerge. We all know the seminar chairman who takes a different seat every week so that no symbols of authority or precedence can invest the spatial relations of the group. Some of us may even know the small publisher's office where the office boy has to be consulted now and again about the quality of a book and where the manager makes the tea because it is felt that solidarity requires continuous confusion of roles. An anthropologist told me that his inhibition against exercising authority was so strong that his first fieldwork had to be made extremely difficult by his refusal to employ a servant. These very people, who prefer unstructured intimacy in their social relations, defeat their wish for communication without words. For only a ritual structure makes possible a wordless channel of communication that is not entirely incoherent.

The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man's inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows straight from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker's real intentions. Either he is not a man who uses speech as a façade to conceal his thought, or on this occasion there was no time for polishing it up: incoherence is taken for a sign of authenticity. In the same way, leaders in a Pentecostal church compete to demonstrate their holiness by ‘talking with tongues’, that is by pouring out a stream of incoherent speech. The more unintelligible, the more evident to the congregation that the gift of tongues is present. At the same time the anti-ritualist suspects speech that comes in standard units, polished with constant use; this is the hard coin of social intercourse, not to be trusted as expressing the speaker's true mind.

In rejecting ritual forms of speech it is the ‘external’ aspect which is disvalued. Probably all movements of religious renewal have had in common the rejection of external forms. In Europe Manicheeism, Protestantism and now the revolt of the New Left, historically they all affirm the value of the follower's inside and of the insides of all his fellow members, together with the badness of everything external to the movement. Always we find bodily symbolism applied, from the values placed on internal and external parts of the body, on reality and appearance, content and form, spontaneity and established institutions. David Martin has recently written of contemporary religious existentialists in these terms:

Radicals tend to reject ‘religion’ by comparison with the gospel. Religion is a complex of institutions built around an idol ‘God’ who is falsely regarded as an existence alongside other existences. The proper use for the word ‘God’ is to refer to the qualitative aspect of all existence. Religion obscures Him in forms and formulae, ritualizes him sacramentally when in truth, He can only be known experimentally and experientially. Only thus can He become true for the individual person. Bound up with false religion is morality, understood as a body of rules rather than as genuine personal responses to the uniquely situational character of moral choice . . . The existentialist movement expresses an ageless tension between the experiential and the formalized, the objective and the personal, the individual and the institutional.

(Martin, 1965: 180–81)

Why the elect always carry in themselves a confidence in their own inner purity and their capacity for direct, unmediated access to God is something best accounted for by the psychoanalysts. But it is a paradox of this study that those who most readily despise ritual should not be exempt from the longing for non-verbal communication. Melanie Klein, writing of the close contact between the unconscious of the mother and of the child, said:

However gratifying it is in later life to express thoughts and feelings to a congenial person, there remains an unsatisfied longing for an understanding without words – ultimately for the earliest relation with the mother.

(Klein, 1963: 100)

And again, of an infant's attitude to the breast of his mother:

I would not assume that the breast is to him merely a physical object. The whole of his instinctual desires and his unconscious fantasies imbue the breast with qualities going far beyond the actual nourishment it affords.

Footnote: All this is felt by the infant in much more primitive ways than language can express. When these pre-verbal emotions and phantasies are revived in the transference situation, they appear as ‘memories in feelings’, as I would call them, and are reconstructed and put into words with the help of the analyst.

(Klein, 1957: 5)

If it is true that we are moved all our lives by longings for an ideal, impossible harmony derived from memories of the initial union with the mother in the womb, then it is understandable that we should also idealize non-verbal communication. Alas for the child from the personal home who longs for non-verbal forms of relationship but has only been equipped with words and a contempt for ritual forms. By rejecting ritualized speech he rejects his own faculty for pushing back the boundary between inside and outside so as to incorporate in himself a patterned social world. At the same time he thwarts his faculty for receiving immediate, condensed messages given obliquely along non-verbal channels.