The Meaninglessness of Ritual

TLDR: The Agnicayana, a 3000-year-old Vedic ritual, was performed in a village in southwest India by Nambudiri as mentioned in this paper in 1975, which was filmed, photographed, recorded and extensively documented.

Abstract: The Agnicayana, a 3000-year-old Vedic ritual, was performed in 1975 in a village .in southwest India by Nambudiri. brahmins. This event, which lasted twelve days, was filmed, photographed, recorded and extensively documented. From twenty hours of rough footage, Robert Gardner and I produced a 45-minu~e film, \"Altar of Fire.\" Two records are planned with selections from th~ eighty hours of recorded recitation and chant. Photographs of the ceremonies were taken by Adelaide de Me nil. In collaboration with the chief N ambudiri ritualists and other scholars, I am preparing a definite account of the ceremonies, which will appear in two illustrated volumes entitled: \"Agni The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar.\" I shall here be concerned not with empirical deS<:tiption, hut with theoretical implications. Vedic ritual is not only the oldest surviving ritual of ·mankind; it also provides the best source material for a theory of ritual. This is not because it is close to any alleged ''original\" ritual. Vedic ritua~l is not primitive and not an Ur-ritual. It is sophis· . . ticated and already the product of a long development. But it is the largest, most elaborate and (on account of the Sanskrit manuals) best documented among the rituals of man. Hubert and Mauss, who noted these facts in 1909, used the Vedic animal sacrifice as source material . for the construction of a ritual paradigm (\"un scheme abstrait du sacrifice\") . 1 However, they did not know that these rituals are still performed, so that many data were inaccessibLe to them. I shall use data from the 1975 performance and textual ·material from Sans:l(rit manuals, in particular :the srauta siUras, a literature exclusively devoted to ritual which dates from clle eighth through fourth centuries B.C.