Human Speech and Early Writing

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

Connecting the history of theatrical performance to the history of communication connects it to one of the most basic characteristics of humans as a species: the use of language. Many living beings have some form of communication, from the “waggle dance” of the honey bee, to the howling of wolves, to the hoots and gestures of chimpanzees. A number of features distinguish human communication, however, including the arbitrary relationship between word and meaning, the specificity of a sign’s meaning, the use of language to preserve knowledge over generations, and more. The evolution of human speech and language, and the subsequent invention of writing, both had a revolutionary impact on human consciousness. Each changed fundamentally the way humans interacted with each other and their environment, and how they imagined themselves and their place in the world.

In this overview of the development of speech and writing, we consider what human consciousness might have been like before language as we know it, examining how perception, action, and imitation were central to early human existence. We trace one theory of the evolution of speech and language that explains how humans developed the unique ability for symbolic communication – an ability essential for storytelling and for writing and performing drama. We examine the ways in which the human imagination and the ability to communicate through performance are engaged in different types of social organization.

We then consider the impact of the invention of complete systems of writing, by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (approximately 3000 bce), and by Native American societies in Mesoamerica (probably in southern Mexico around 600 bce). The invention of writing produced a revolution in both human consciousness and social organization as profound as the invention of speech and language. As Maryanne Wolf argues, genetically humans “were never born to read” (Wolf 2008: 3). The acts of writing and reading “rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think,” which altered the intellectual and cultural evolution of our species (Wolf 2008: 3). This revolution produced highly reflexive modes of writing/reading/performance, such as poetry, drama, and criticism in some but not all cultures.

The evolution of human language and consciousness

Episodic and mimetic modes of communication

Early in human history, engaging in participatory, communal, bodily-based activities such as early forms of hunting, music, dance, and archaic ritual served both to heighten one’s sensory perceptions and awareness, and to further orient and attune each person to others in the immediate group and to the environment. In these early practices, the human operated primarily as a perceiver/doer/actor-in-the-world. One engaged the world directly and immediately, without the mediation of “thinking” about an activity (McNeill 1995: passim). Success in hunting with archaic weapons depended on the ability of individual and group to move silently, quickly, and with stealth while sustaining synchronous coordination through non-verbal communication with others. Survival was no doubt enhanced for those best attuned to their senses and those who could form strong bonds with others in small communal groups fighting for life in harsh environments.

In his outline of four phases of human evolution – the episodic, the mimetic, the mythic, and the theoretic – Merlin Donald describes this earliest stage of human evolution as being part of an “episodic” culture, wherein one lives within the here-and-now (1991). There is no past or future, only the present.

Ethnologists’ studies of animal behavior show that many animals, and especially our primate ancestors, also engaged in simple mimesis (imitation). The ability to learn by imitating behavior is essential to survival. Mimesis also can be autotelic – that is, it has its own rewards that are experienced as enjoyable and even playful. Mimetic behavior can thereby generate a sense of well-being. Merlin Donald uses the term “mimetic” to describe this second phase of human development beyond the episodic. In the mimetic phase, gesture, posture, and facial expression begin to be used as early forms of non-verbal communication.

Both the episodic mode of staying in the moment and the mimetic mode have been central to the activities of the performer and actor throughout history and across cultures. The episodic and mimetic modes are prerequisite aspects of performance from ritual to drama.

The evolution of human speech

“Language” is a term that is now applied to the myriad forms of communication that evolved over millions of years to allow all living beings to communicate with other animates, especially those of the same species. Ethnologists study everything from the dance language of honey bees, to the chemical “language” used by ants, to various bio-acoustic modes of communication such as those of birds, frogs, blue whales, and elephants. Scientists studying Bermudan humpback whales have discovered that they vocalize lengthy “love songs” varying in pitch and lasting from six to thirty minutes. Such songs change over time, with a constant process of development in which new elements are composed, repeated, and elaborated. Dolphins and especially miniature chimps, the bonobos – with whom humans share 99 percent of the same genetic make-up – can be trained to communicate spontaneously and creatively.

But humankind and our closest ancestors developed more sophisticated modes of both natural and unnatural communication. How did this happen? Although the great apes that preceded hominid development possessed the neural pathways necessary for complex modes of communicative expression to convey information, what humans in particular eventually possessed were the lips, tongue, and modes of controlled exhalation that would anatomically allow us to speak.

Some forms of human development, such as tool-making, do not necessarily require language. More complex social activities, for example crossing a sea mass such as the Strait of Gibraltar (between southern Spain and North Africa) in a planned migration, certainly do. Similarly, cooperative hunting requires the use of speech.

As the anatomical ability to breathe properly to support speech evolved, the brain continued to enlarge, and as more complex modes of thought processes and language use evolved, the necessary neural pathways developed. What resulted was not a single “primeval” language, but rather the distinctive capacity to use language self-referentially, that is, the ability to use words that point to other words via syntax. This development was only complete anatomically when modern humans, Homo sapiens, became dominant, approximately 150,000 years ago.

Mythic and theoretic modes of communication

By 120,000 years ago a Homo sapiens recognizable as our identical ancestor had emerged. One particular group of “modern” Homo sapiens, living in a cave at the mouth of the Klasies River in South Africa between 120,000 and 60,000 years ago, were settled permanently, engaged in complex domestic life, felled giant buffaloes with spears, possessed a complex knowledge of their environment, practiced music and art (using red ochre “crayons”), engaged in ritual burial of the dead, and used language much as we do today. Homo sapiens either absorbed or replaced earlier ancestors.

The period brought a “cultural explosion.” The species could depict humans, animals, symbols, and perhaps even note the passage of time (lunar calendars) in bone and ivory, on stone and wood. They fashioned flutes, drums, and stringed instruments, and painted or etched the walls of caves (Figure 1).

As Fischer notes, “By now articulate speech – and the symbolic reasoning it allowed – was certainly being used in all the ways we are familiar with today, and hominids were no longer merely the ‘talking ape’, but the ‘symbolic ape’” (Fischer 1999: 56).

Early forms of speech allowed communication and planning sufficient for humans to cross seas, settle villages, and further develop technology, hunting, music, dance, rituals, and narratives. According to Merlin Donald, the evolution of human speech and language transformed our mimetic capabilities into the “mythic” phase of our development. Telling stories about ourselves, our communities, and our place in the world allowed an entirely new way of understanding and representing reality.

Human language, writing, and society

Band, tribe, chiefdom, state

The need for survival and for a sense of belonging or connectedness to others leads human beings to organize themselves into communities. Each type and scale of social organization – bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states (Diamond 1997: 267ff) – engages in different ways our communicative abilities, our imagining of ourselves, our relationships to others, and thereby the types of performances we create. The development of writing/reading, and the subsequent emergence of drama and theatre, seems to have come with the formation of states.

By the time fully articulate speech developed (35,000 years ago), all humans lived in bands – intimate, relatively simple, nomadic bands. Most continued to do so until as recently as 11,000 years ago. Today only a few bands live autonomously in remote regions of New Guinea and the Amazon. Bands are usually nomadic and range in size from five to eighty people. They base their relationships on kinship; share a common language; exchange stories, words, dances, music, rituals, and goods; and, arguably, make decisions in ways that are relatively informal. For people living within bands, experience is shaped primarily through ever-evolving relationships with the immediate environment and through face-to-face contact with those with whom one has daily involvement, often shaped by collective performances and rituals.

About 12,000 years ago, a warming climate in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East (today’s Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; see Figure 2) and perhaps a few other places in the world, allowed a new form of settled social organization to emerge – tribes. Improved technology allowed the growth and domestication of wild grains, eventually producing an agricultural revolution. Major population settlements with permanent dwellings were built in which hundreds rather than dozens of people lived, sharing a common language and culture, including music, dance, stories, and rituals. Tribes consist of more than one kinship group (clans), but are still small enough that all individuals are known by relationships and names. As peoples settle, particular languages become associated with specific geographical regions. Language becomes associated with land.

Chiefdoms emerged by approximately 5500 bce in the region of the Fertile Crescent and by around 1000 bce in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Chiefdoms are considerably larger than tribes, numbering from several thousand to as many as tens of thousands of people. Chiefdoms were the first societies organized around a central hereditary authority figure who often held a monopoly over the exercise of power, centralizing information and decision-making. Some chiefs, such as those in Hawaii, were assumed to be divine, or of divine descent, and either combined in their own role the authority of being chief priest, or supported a separate group of priests who provided justification for their authority. As late as 1492 ce, chiefdoms were common in productive areas of South and Central America and some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the eastern United States, and Polynesia. But by the twentieth century chiefdoms had disappeared as they were conquered by centralized states. Today, states are the most familiar form of social, political, and economic organization; indeed, the entire land mass of the world, with the exception of Antarctica, is now ruled by modern nation-states.

The earliest forms of state organization arose around 3700 bce in Mesopotamia and 3000 bce in Mesoamerica, some 2,000 years ago in China, Southeast Asia, and the Andes region of South America, and over 1,000 years ago in West Africa. Features of these first states were: leadership by a titled, hereditary leader – either a king considered divine or an equivalent leader; the adoption of slavery on a larger scale than chiefdoms; and the development of state religions, often with standardized temples. Most important for our discussion, all of the societies that invented writing (Sumer, Mesoamerica, China, and Egypt) or were early in creating their own systems (Crete, Iran, Turkey, the Indus Valley, and Mayan cultures) “involved socially stratified societies with complex and centralized political institutions.” They stored food surpluses grown by peasants sufficient to support these institutions and the specialists (Diamond 1999: 236). Historians of early writing systems have argued that writing emerged only when and where there was a need for a system of writing within a context that provided the social, economic, and human resources necessary to support specialists in written language, such as copyists, librarians, teachers, religious specialists, poets, and eventually in a few cases, dramatists. Writing never developed among hunter-gatherer societies organized into bands or tribes or even among more settled chiefdoms, because they did not possess the need, the institutions, or the agricultural resources necessary to support it. For example, among many of the Pacific islands, writing remained unnecessary for centuries. In many Pacific societies, elaborate states never developed, so there was no need for a complex system of bookkeeping.

The invention of systems of writing/reading

For around 97 percent of human history, societies depended exclusively on oral communication: no form of writing existed at all.  However, precursors of complete systems of writing appeared as early as 100,000 years ago when humans began to invent a wide variety of graphic symbols and mnemonics (memory tools) to store information. Graphic symbols were usually reproductions of commonplace phenomena of the physical world such as the sun, stars, fauna, flora, human-like figures, and so on. Aids to memory such as knot records, notches made on bone or a staff, or pictographs served a linguistic function. Knot records date back to the early Neolithic period and reached their peak with the South American Inca’s quipus – an elaborate system of counting. While knots and notches record numbers, prompt memory, and suggest categories, pictures are able to record much more information and suggest characteristics and qualities as well. Tens of thousands of years ago, pictorial communication appeared in early cave art (see Figure 3), and, among some Native Americans, pictography was long used to convey complex messages with no recourse to articulate speech. Knots, notches and pictographs remain “incomplete” or “pre”-writing in that they do not use their marks or pictures to communicate articulate speech.

Complete systems of writing/reading did not evolve like language, but were invented to communicate articulate speech via the use of conventional, artificial marks on a durable surface. The spoken word is transformed into a representative sign. In Mesopotamia clay tokens were used as early as 8000 bce to count grain and animals in the region’s early farming settlements. Somewhat before 3000 bce the Sumerians in Mesopotamia managed to develop from a repertoire of pictograms and symbols the first complete system of writing – cuneiform. Cuneiform is a form of writing scratched or inscribed on clay tablets with a pointed tool (stylus). With the invention of Sumerian script, individuals began to read a sign inscribed on clay as a sound with its own independent value.

By 2500 bce the Sumerians’ simple cuneiform script was capable of “conveying ‘any and all thought’ … adequately fulfil[ling] the needs of its society” (Fischer 2001: 52). The earliest inscriptions are lists accounting for payments, goods, people, etc. Of all the cuneiform inscriptions discovered, 75 percent are administrative and bookkeeping records. Among the remaining 25 percent are legal, religious, astronomical, and medical writings, and dictionaries and recipes. Also in this 25 percent – and most significant for our purposes – are the first and oldest of many literatures of the world. These include hymns, laments, descriptions of activities of the gods, and quasi-epic stories. The extant poetic works include two poems of Enmerker, two poems of Lugulbanda, and a cycle of five poems known as Gilgamesh. The Gilgamesh cycle dates approximately from 2700 bce. Like the later Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic of Gilgamesh was most likely a collection of disparate but related stories gathered and elaborated by tale-tellers and eventually written down after hundreds of years of oral transmission and performance. It enjoyed wide popularity throughout the Near East, and also exists in Hittite and Hurrian versions.

The transition from oral communication to writing was not universal, and its development took place at different times and with different systems in different cultures and historical periods. The second documentable case of an independent development of writing is among Native American societies in Mesoamerica, most likely southern Mexico, from approximately 600 bce Chinese, Egyptian, and Easter Island modes of writing may have also developed independently. Whether this is the case or not, most linguists agree that all other systems of writing were inspired by if not direct descendants of either the Sumerian or Mesoamerican systems.

Most pre-literate peoples who developed writing did so by borrowing and then adapting systems of writing they encountered. For example, on Syria’s northern coast, Semitic scribes of Ugarit borrowed the outer physical form of Sumerian cuneiform script to write the Hurrian language (Figure 4). In East Asia, some scholars believe that it was in the Shang state in north central China (c.1545–1500 bce) that an early version of the Chinese system of character writing developed (arguably originating in Mesopotamia), later to be influential in the development of the writing systems used in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. On the Indian subcontinent where well over 200 scripts eventually developed, they all derived from one source script – Brahmi – which itself derived from a Semitic (probably Aramaic) source by c.253–250 bce.

The earliest type of writing utilized logographs (mostly pictograms), which represented entire words.  Eventually, however, phonetic elements were needed to assist with pronunciation. In some cases, the phonetic symbol was incorporated into an abstracted version of the pictographic image to produce a logograph; Chinese is a modern example of this form of writing. Elsewhere the writing reoriented toward phonetics entirely, representing the smallest pronounceable particle of speech, the syllable. Syllabaries not only aided pronunciation, they also greatly reduced the number of symbols needed to represent speech; the Japanese kana scripts are an example. In some cases the visual symbol represented both the consonant and the vowel. But in some cases the symbol represented only the consonant, and the vowel was inferred from the context (or not spoken if the word ended in a consonant). These were the first alphabets, and they reduced the number of symbols to a minimum; the classical Hebrew and Arabic scripts were both of this type, except that they included a few vowels (in their modern forms they often incorporate indicators for all vowels). The first alphabet that represented both consonants and vowels emerged in Greece around 2,800 years ago. This form facilitated the representation of Greek’s diphthongs and consonant clusters.  The inclusion of vowels made it easy to adapt the phonetic alphabet to other languages, and most modern alphabets ultimately derive from the Greek.

Performance, communication, and remembrance

All societies, whether organized as an intimate band or a large-scale state, have a need for communication and remembrance. Oral cultures do this through recitations of lengthy genealogies, elaborating epics and myths, or reciting religious/ritual texts, performances that in some cases required remarkable feats of memorization. Rich storehouses of oral lore, epics, myths, and tales were adapted to a variety of modes of oral performance by storytellers and bards. Sometimes they informed rituals, dance, and music which served to knit people together into a community with a particular world-view. When larger scale, state societies developed, they often developed a need for writing primarily to record financial and administrative matters, but also religious and other cultural matters. Eventually, in some societies various forms of drama emerged. Some consisted of commemorative dramas about religious, mythological, or historical events; other plays, often treating or reflecting the society’s current interests in politics or culture, presented perspectives on those same cultural memories or occasionally totally original subjects. Centuries later, particularly as societies increasingly relied on writing to preserve their cultural memory, original plays became the norm. Theatre Histories examines how drama and its performance are shaped by their particular social and cultural contexts, and how each negotiates a particular relationship with writing and textuality.

Key References

Audio-visual resources

Chauvet cave website: www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/.

Books

Chauvet, J.-M., Deschamps, E.B., Hillaire, C., Bahn, P.G. and Clothes, J. (1999) Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (the Oldest Known Paintings in the World), New York: Harry Abrams.

Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Donald, M. (1991) The Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Donald, M. (2001) A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, New York: W.W. Norton.

Fischer, S.R. (1999) A History of Language, London: Reaktion Books.

Fischer, S.R. (2001) A History of Writing, London: Reaktion Books.

Fischer, S.R. (2003) A History of Reading, London: Reaktion Books.

McNeill, W.H. (1995) Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mithen, S. (2005) The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Wolf, M. (2008) Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Cambridge, UK: Icon Books.

Primary Orality

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

A distinctive human consciousness and set of social formations developed with the evolution of language.  Likewise, the invention of complete writing systems necessarily altered human consciousness. To what degree is it possible in today’s literate world to re-imagine what life and its performances were like before writing/reading? To answer this question, we turn to the work of Walter J. Ong, who takes as his subject “thought and its verbal expression in oral culture,” and secondarily “literate thought and expression” as they emerged from, and in relation to, orality (Ong 1988: 1).

Ong asserts the obvious: we are so literate today that “it is very difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe” (Ong 1988: 2). Most cultures today have some knowledge of a form of writing in their history. To help us understand the difference between our literate modes of communication and those before writing, Ong identifies two forms of orality: primary and secondary. Primary orality refers to those peoples who have never encountered writing and whose entire worldview and modes of communication are untouched by any form of writing. In contrast are present-day high-technology cultures and societies in which there is “secondary orality,” an orality “sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices, an orality that depends on the existence and functioning of writing and print” (Ong 1988: 11).

Voicing and listening in the mythic mode

Tete ka asom ene Kakyere.

(Ancient things remain in the ear.)

(an Akan [Ghanaian] proverb, Vansina 1985: xi)

In primary oral cultures, the perception, action, and doing that are fundamental to early human survival remain central to what one does and how things are known. What is known is learned through direct participation and/or apprenticeship rather than through abstract study. In primary oral cultures, there are no “libraries.” Human beings are the only repository for traditional oral narratives, myths, tales, proverbs, classificatory names, and information on how to perform a ritual or tell/sing a monumental epic story.

Here speaks the storyteller, telling by voice what was learned by ear. Here speaks a poet who did not learn language structure from one teacher and language meaning from another, nor plot structure from one and characterization from another, nor even an art of storytelling from one and an art of hermeneutics from another, but always heard all these things working together in the stories of other storytellers. And this poet, or mythopoet, not only narrates what characters do, but speaks when they speak, chants when they chant, and sings when they sing.

(Tedlock 1983: 3)

Apprenticeship in verbal arts of performance, drumming, hunting, dancing, or ritual requires some form of discipleship. Initial learning through listening, doing, the direct imitation of a teacher/elder, and repetition all allow a neophyte to reach a level of mastery sufficient to enable improvisation (within limits of accepted conventions).

Rich and complex early oral texts were eventually transcribed, such as the Sumerian epic known as Gilgamesh, India’s Mahabharata, and the well-known Greek epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey. But a fundamental shift occurred when such texts were no longer simply heard, but read for their meaning. As Walter Ong explains:

The scholarly focus on texts had ideological consequences. With their attention directed to texts, scholars often went on to assume, often without reflection, that oral verbalization was essentially the same as the written verbalization they normally dealt with, and that oral art forms were to all intents and purposes simply texts, except for the fact that they were not written down. The impression grew that, apart from the oration (governed by written rhetorical rules), oral art forms were essentially unskillful and not worth serious study.

(Ong 1988: 10)

Their intricacy, however, was not always recognized.  Research by folklorists studying oral performance reveals the creativity and complexity of oral modes of composition. Archaic forms of skilled oral performance and discourse might best be thought of as “weaving or stitching – rhapsōdein, to ‘rhapsodize’ … to stitch songs together” (Ong 1988: 13). For some forms of oral performance such as epic/heroic tales there is no fixed text. Each performance is composed as it happens. The mechanisms of remembering involve cueing and scanning – highly creative processes that take place as a particular story is “stitched” together in performance.

Primary oral cultures are “episodic” locations of listening, hearing, and voicing where “mythic” worlds are created. The hearer experiences and absorbs the musicality of the voice – its timbre, tone, amplitude, pitch, resonance, vibration, and shape as the voice moves between sounding and silence(s) – the pauses of varying lengths that help mark, set off, and/or accentuate what is voiced. Reception is perception, not “meaning.”

We can gain insights into performance in primary oral cultures by examining an extant tradition in which the experience of “hearing” is central. (We need to understand that the extant practices of indigenous peoples today cannot be taken to be exactly the same as practices in archaic periods.) The Sami – also known as Lapps or peoples who herd reindeer – are an indigenous people whose homeland stretched across northern Finland, Sweden and Norway, and into the Kola Peninsula.  Like most indigenous peoples, the Sami have suffered years of cultural and political oppression. Nevertheless, they participate in both the national (Norwegian) and transnational (global) worlds, and have successfully found ways to negotiate their traditional relationship to the natural world with their immediate, modernized environment.

The relationship of the Sami to nature was based traditionally on an acceptance of the provisional nature of human existence – a view necessitated by living in close relationship within a particular ecosystem. The necessities of survival produced a worldview in which all creatures and their environments are seen as fundamentally interdependent. One Sami practice illustrates this: “serious listening,” that is, hearing and obeying the heartbeats of the Earth itself. Among the many stories still part of the extant Sami tradition is the myth of the creator god who plucked a beating heart from a two-year-old reindeer and placed it at the center of the earth so that its living pulse beat in the ground of all being(s). When life becomes difficult, people press their ears to the ground and listen. If they hear the reindeer’s beating heart, all will be well. If not, they are doomed.

“Seeing” words in the mythic mode

Just as “listening” is an episodic mode of communication that helps create a “mythic” world, so does “seeing.” Among the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin, West Africa, the oral elaboration of a story by an excellent teller makes the story a “spectacle” (ìron) in that “it is visible through the storyteller’s dramatization, and the spectator visualizes it further in his mind’s eye” (Drewal and Drewal 1983: 1). As seen in early cave paintings, some of the earliest forms of oral performance no doubt literally made use of images as a memory aid for the teller and to enhance the pleasure of the audience. Imagery is a way for humans to access the “invisible” where their language is not written. But images also played a key role in the development of some writing systems such as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese characters. For literate Westerners raised in alphabetic cultures, the central role of images in early communication may be difficult to comprehend.

“Picture-recitation” – the telling of lengthy stories with pictures – exemplifies the central importance of images in some archaic performances. One scholar hypothesizes that picture-recitation originated in India (sáubhika, citrakathı, and par) and spread through Indonesia (wayang bèbèr), Japan (etoki), China (zhuanbian), Iran (parda-dar) (Figure 1), Turkey, Italy, and Germany (Mair 1988: passim). When this genre first developed, it is likely that the pictures were primary and the “texts” (eventually written down) were oral elaborations of the stories told by the pictures.

To take one example, Chinese “transformation texts” (bianwen) date from the Tang period (618–906 ce), and are part of the central history of Chinese fiction and drama since they represent the first extended vernacular narratives in China. The bian story-tellers were lay entertainers – mostly men, but occasionally women – inhabiting a niche in society between the sacred and the secular. The contents of this once flourishing popular performance tradition were both secular and religious, and in China mainly Buddhist. Bianwen became a well-known literary genre but it derived from a much earlier form of oral story-telling with pictures, first called zhuanbian, literally “turning transformation [picture scrolls]” (Mair 1988: 1). The term “transformation” refers to miraculous powers of transformation and manifestation of early Buddhist figures. Artists represented these manifestations in wall-paintings, on silk or paper, known as bianxiang – “transformation scenes or tableaux,” which a storyteller used during performance. Like most such “folk art” traditions, in China these modes of performance were neglected in historical records which exclusively documented the products of elite, high society.

In the Javanese version of picture-recitation, wayang bèbèr (“unfolding/unrolled shadows”), a narrator (dalang) unrolls a long, horizontal scroll on which are painted a series of scenes as he chants and speaks the story the scroll reveals (Figure 2). Six to eight scrolls are required to perform an entire story. It is likely that wayang bèbèr was at first “closely connected with animistic rites of ancestor worship” (Brandon 1970: 5). Some scholars have argued that Java’s most popular and well-known form of traditional theatre today, wayang kulit (literally, “shadows made of leather”), developed as figures on a scroll, were at some point detached from the scroll to become individual puppets. With a host of puppet-characters to manipulate independently, the shadow puppeteer was able to bring the shadows to life on his screen. This allowed shadow-puppetry to supersede in popularity the older, more static picture-recitation form. As explained in the Balinese example in our online essay “Ritual Places and Performances,” it also became a powerful efficacious ritual practice through which one could cast out or exorcise witches (Mair 1988: 60).

“Serious listening” and/or “seeing” characterize many archaic modes of performance which engage the spectator’s senses directly, and help create one’s relationship to the world understood through myth, not history. Myths, epics, and even tales are traditionally context-specific; that is, like rituals they are told or enacted within a context that specifies precisely when or where each story is to be communicated. Among the Zuni of New Mexico a story such as “The Girl and the Protector” is only to be told late at night; if you tell it during the day you will hasten the coming of the darkness.

If you tell it after the snakes have come out in the spring and before they go underground in the fall, take care to omit the first and last lines and to hold a flower in one hand while you speak. Otherwise the story may attract the attention of the snakes.

(Tedlock 1983: 68)

In primary oral cultures, everything has its place and time, usually within a recurring cycle. One’s experience of the day, the waxing and waning of the moon, the passing and return of seasons, the placement of the stars in the sky, and the marking of larger units of “annual” time help create an experience of time as cyclical – not linear or historical.

But what happened to early oral performances when they encountered writing for the first time?

Oral texts and their transmission under the written sign: Vedic chanting in India

Where complex writing systems did develop, they did not displace many modes of oral, verbal, expressive communication. We now examine the history of how a once completely oral mode of performing and transmitting sacred texts – the Vedas of India – has continued to exist to the present day “under” the written word.

Most well-known oral compositions – Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey or the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh – died out as oral performances. All we possess of these traditions, especially in the West, is a suggestion of these traditions in the form of texts set down in writing. But in other parts of the world, among native peoples in Asia and Africa for example, oral performances still abound.

The oldest sustained form of continuous oral performance in the world is chanting of the Vedas in India. Four different Vedas exist, the oldest of which is the Rig Veda, dating from as early as 1200 bce. The four Vedas are collections of poems, hymns, and invocations derived from ritual and religious practices which originated in the Central Asiatic region. Since their composition, they have continued to be transmitted orally from generation to generation down to the present by socially high-ranking, male priestly communities, for whom recitation of the Vedas is their life’s work and purpose – an unbroken line of transmission for over 3,000 years.

With the development of written Sanskrit (eighth century bce) these priestly families became literate. However, their texts were not committed to writing until very recently. Vedic education is not an intellectual undertaking but a rigorous training in ritual chanting. It is traditionally undertaken by all Brahmin boys who must learn to recite in its entirety the specific Veda inherited by their families (for an early twentieth-century account, see Wood 1985: 58–89). This prodigious task of memorization is necessary so that each boy can chant the Vedic verses appropriate for each of the specific rituals required to sustain Brahmin life, can function as a priest in the temples, and can collectively perform the lengthy sacrificial rituals understood to be necessary to sustain the universe.

Until the late twentieth century, full-time training for young Brahmin boys started soon after the ceremony of the investiture of the sacred thread (upanayanam) at approximately the age of seven and continued for eight to twelve years. Teachers as well as students undertake instruction in recitation of the Vedas with little if any intellectual understanding of the meaning of the texts they are learning. The process of transmission is an entirely oral, embodied process. In the Sama Veda tradition of Kerala, in southwest India, the most musical of the four Vedic traditions, the teacher literally places his hands on the student as he chants the text, manipulating the student’s head and body to the particular rhythm of the text so that the student learns not in his head by memorizing, but through his body’s engagement with the text (Figure 3).

When writing was introduced, Brahmins saw writing as inferior to speech. Indeed, writing down the sacred chants was at first forbidden, because a Veda is intended only to be heard as it is chanted. The Vedas are distinguished from written texts which are “remembered.” Since the written word is not directly heard, it is a recollection of something heard or spoken in the past.

After writing developed, oral transmission continued to play a central and even dominant role in many modes of traditional knowledge and learning, from religious ritual to hands-on therapies within traditional medicine and performance down to the present day. Simultaneously, a great body of literature emerged. India produced the world’s first linguists who categorized letters according to the specific place of articulation – a very “modern” practice. From the time that Sanskrit texts began to be written down and eventually composed, the way of writing Sanskrit has always borne the marks of the centrality of the aural/oral dimension of the language. Scribes traditionally did not distinguish one word from another, but rather used sandhi to mark and distinguish “breath groups,” so that the text would be chanted correctly (these are not markings for understanding in silent reading).

Among the oral traditions briefly discussed here, Vedic chanting and wayang bèbèr in its earliest form served sacred, ritual purposes. In early archaic cultures, primary ritual practices shaped one’s consciousness and awareness. Early complex states in Egypt and city-states in Greece organized their societies around ritual much more than we do in modern Euro-American societies. Unlike Christianity, especially the Protestant tradition with its emphasis on personal faith and a written word considered divine, early societies often “had no holy books and no interest in what individuals privately believed. Piety was a matter of performing ritual acts in honor of the gods, and these acts were the glue that held society together” (Wiles 2000: 27). While rituals continue to be practiced by many peoples today, they are secondary in shaping most people’s consciousness and relationship to their world.

KEY REFERENCES

Online Resources

Sami peoples: http://www.samitour.no/english/9–1-historie.html#02.

Books

Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities, London: Verso.

Brandon, J.R. (ed.) (1970) On Thrones of Gold: Three Javanese Shadow Plays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Drewal, M.J. and Drewal, M.T. (1983) Gelede: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mair, V.H. (1988) Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Ong, W.J. (1988; 1st edn 1982) Orality and Literacy, London: Routledge.

Tedlock, D. (1983) The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Vansina, J. (1985) Oral Tradition as History, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Wiles, D. (2000) Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wood, A. (1985) Knowledge Before Printing and After: The Indian Tradition in Changing Kerala, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Ritual

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

Ritual specialists: Accessing sacred power

In twenty-first-century cosmopolitan cultures, commonplace understandings of a person’s “power” and “energy” are based on biomedical, scientific assumptions. It is typical to presume that power and energy are stable, rationally measurable, and quantifiable. But this has not always been so. In this essay we examine cultural specialists whose performances are a means of accessing powers that are considered sacred. These specialists perform in order to diagnose and/or heal an illness, to read signs of the future, to help conquer an opponent or an enemy army, or to uphold the universe itself. They have a special form of agency.

In many historical periods and cultures, agency and power are viewed as a complex set of interactions. Many traditional concepts of power and agency consider neither to be absolute. Both power and the ritual specialist’s ability to access or wield that power are considered contingent, unstable, capricious, dangerous, and locally immanent. Within such a contingent “world,” it is necessary to have cultural specialists who gain specific forms of agency that enable them to engage, interact with, and/or control unstable powers.

Many archaic prayers, incantations, rituals, and the like were developed and performed in order to actualize, stabilize, or rectify human relationships to the immanent powers of the cosmos within the immediate environment. Sacred words or ritual landscapes (sites for rituals) do not “represent” or “mean” something, nor is it necessary for them to be interpreted; rather they are understood to have “power” in and of themselves. By its very design, a particular ritual landscape is assumed to actualize a relationship to the sacred.

Saying certain words also can actualize a particular power, it is believed. In the oral transmission of the Vedas in India (discussed in the “Primary Orality” essay on the website), the Brahmins chanted mantras – a series of sacred words and/or syllables, often not translatable. They are instruments of power, that is, tools designed for a specific task. Their transmission is usually circumscribed by secrecy. Once a mantra is given by a master who possesses its power to a student, it must be brought to accomplishment, usually by a process in which the student undergoes austerities and works through thousands of cycles of repetition. Mantras today are ubiquitous throughout South, Southeast and East Asia, and are used for either good (“light”) or evil (“dark”) purposes.

Different types of cultural specialists are understood to possess as a divine gift the ability to access and develop special powers to diagnose and/or heal an illness, to read signs of the future, to conquer an opponent or an enemy army, or to uphold the universe itself. In small-scale bands, tribes, or even in somewhat larger chiefdoms, multiple powers are often assumed to be present in single individuals – ritual specialists and/or shamans (Figure 1). The term shaman derives from the original Siberian Tungus word, saman, meaning “one who is excited moved, raised” (Laderman 1991: 7). Shaman refers to a member of a traditional branch of religious specialists believed to be able to heal a variety of illnesses, counteract misfortune or solve personal or social dilemmas after entering a state of trance to communicate with the powers in the unseen world.

As societies grew larger and more complex, some individuals became specialized in applying their powers within a single sphere. Where states developed, individuals with special powers continued to function, but their powers were sometimes circumscribed by the centralization of authority in official religious practices. Specialist groups of priests acted on behalf of the state.

Interpreting and understanding ritual

If in primary oral cultures saying something is intending something, performing a traditional ritual is similar in that it is understood to “do” or “accomplish” something. Rituals are not done “for nothing.” When performed fully and correctly, a traditional ritual is sufficient to itself and therefore requires no authority outside itself. Early in the development of ritual activity, what was accomplished may have been nothing more than fully engaging in ritual activity as part of a small community – the structuring of movement, gesture, voice into patterns that pleased or bound people together, thereby creating its own intrinsic value. Today the practice of ritual and religion has become a matter of individual choice rather than social or cosmological necessity. Indeed, the term ritual is used often to refer not only to traditional sacred or religious rites, but also to “rituals of everyday life” or “secular” rituals, constituted by the performance, for example, of the ceremonies of a monarchy or state government. Given our focus here on the early history of performance, we examine traditional rituals.

Traditional rituals are special occasions, made distinct from everyday time, that form and re-form self and social identity, and in which self and one’s relationships are “constituted and ordered” (Kapferer 1984: 179). Many rituals are performed to achieve a purpose or results; they may be intended to heal, to protect, to harm, to propitiate an ancestor spirit or a god, or to mark a major transition or transformation in one’s status, such as birth, puberty (initiation), a new relationship, or death. Whatever the purpose of a ritual, as Richard Schechner reminds us, there are usually elements within a ritual process which provide some form of pleasure or entertainment (2002: 70–1). Masking, costuming, impersonation, dance, music, narrative, and humor are strategically utilized in some rituals, not only to achieve their efficacious ends but to please the gods, ancestors, and/or humans gathered to participate or witness. Consequently, efficacy and entertainment are not binary opposites, but rather form a continuum.

Of the many types of rituals which exist, ethnographer/folklorist Arnold van Gennep has examined “rites of passage” as they mark major transitions in one’s life within both simple and complex societies (1960). Van Gennep identified a three-fold structure of ritual action through which an individual passes – separation from society, existing in a marginal or liminal state, and reintegration based on achieving a new condition or status. The investiture of the sacred thread for Brahmin boys (described in “Primary Orality” on the website) is one example: a rite of passage into one’s life-work of chanting the Vedas. Among the Gisu of Uganda, an extensive ritual of initiation marks a young boy’s transition from boyhood to manhood whereby he becomes able to serve as male provider and sexual partner. Here young boys are sequestered from their family and undergo a series of rites that culminate in circumcision. For the ritual initiation to achieve its efficacious end of transforming boy to man, the neophyte must not flinch or in any way register a response to the tremendous pain and blood-letting as his foreskin is cut off. Male powers and courage are thereby tested (La Fontaine 1985: 117ff).

Anthropologist Victor Turner describes how at the time of undergoing such rites, the individual is “neither here nor there” but rather is “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Turner 1969: 95). In the post-liminal phase at the conclusion of the rites, the individual exists within a “new” reality – one’s fundamental state, condition, and/or status has changed. The transformations that take place within ritual processes can be generative, profoundly changing an individual. Other rites of passage, such as ceremonies of death, mark the crossing of different thresholds – in this case from life to another dimension or world.

Some rituals are highly prescribed processes, requiring specialist knowledge. Others, such as the Yoruba Egúngún masquerade, allow for improvisation within the context of performance. What does one experience when performing a very strictly prescribed ritual? Frits Staal argues that ritual structures follow rules that may result in no single, explicit meaning (1996). More like the pleasure, purpose and function inherent in music, some rituals have a satisfaction and pleasure all their own that are part of the practice and structure of the ritual, that is, rituals do not have to be about something other than themselves.

The structural properties of ritual … require not only consummate skill and expertise but also a lot of the priests’ attention – not less than is required, say, from the member of an orchestra, a ballet company or a team of engineers set upon the execution of a common task. … It is characteristic of a ritual performance, however, that it is self-contained and self-absorbed. The performers are totally immersed in the proper execution of their complex tasks. Isolated in their sacred enclosure, they concentrate on the correctness of act, recitation, and chant. Their primary concern, if not obsession, is with rules. There are no symbolic meanings going through their minds when they are engaged in performing ritual. … [W]hat counts in ritual is what the ritualist does.

(Staal 1996: 115, 453)

Staal’s focus on the experience of the ritual participant is a useful antidote to the over-emphasis that some Western scholars have given to the “symbolic” dimension of ritual – to what ritual represents. Symbolic interpretations of ritual were developed by Westerners whose early speculation about the nature of ritual was informed by the Christian assumption that all ceremonies symbolize religious truths and eternal values. But historically, Christian preoccupation with symbolic interpretation of Christian rites developed very late, at the time of the Carolingian Renaissance during the eighth century ce in Europe (Staal 1996: 124–5).

Some forms of ritual or shamanic performance require either the ritual specialist or a member of the community to undergo possession or to enter an ecstatic state of trance. What happens when an individual experiences possession? Anthropologist Edward Schieffelin provides the following analysis based on ethnographic research among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea.

Kaluli spirit séances in Papua New Guinea were highly entertaining, even thrilling events, but they could only ethnocentrically be called performances in a Western sense. … This is because, in séance, the issue is not performative illusion but the exact opposite: it is the presence of spirits. If anything, it is the spirits themselves who perform.

Kaluli spectators know very well that spirit séances can be faked and keep a sharp eye for signs of “performing” or, as they see it, deception. Spirits in séance cured illness and revealed the identity of witches, both of which were activities of considerable (even life-and-death) social and political consequence, and people did not fool around with them. … A “performance” in the Western sense was precisely what speaking with the spirits through a medium was not and could not be. It had more of the character of a telephone conversation. The Kaluli themselves likened it to speaking with someone over two-way radio. To describe Kaluli séance as a performance in the popular Western sense would be to violate its ethnographic nature.

(Schieffelin 1998: 203)

When discussing traditional rituals, we must also be careful not to assume that the participant/spectator relationship is like that at most theatre performances. Schieffelin describes what the relationship is like between dancers and spectators in the Gisalo ceremony of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea:

In Gisalo, the dancers sing nostalgic songs about the lands and rivers of their audience’s community. Members of the audience are moved so deeply they burst into tears, and then, becoming enraged, they leap up and burn the dancers on the shoulder blades with the resin torches used to light the performance. Indeed, this remarkable response could be interpreted as virtually necessary to the performance, since if the audience is not moved and the tension between performers and audiences does not rise to the pitch of violence, the ceremony falls apart and is abandoned in the middle of the night. … [A]fter a successful performance, the dancers pay compensation to those whom they made weep. … It is real grief and rage that are evoked. … The performers are held accountable for the painful emotions they evoke – and the retaliation upon them (and the compensation they must pay) return that account – as well as those emotions being an indication of the beauty and effectiveness of the performance. The dancers and song composers … are extremely pleased if they have managed to provoke numbers of the spectators to tears, despite the consequences to themselves.

(Schieffelin 1998: 203; 1976: 21–5)

Clearly, traditional rituals are understood to have real consequences, attain fundamental change, and/or access specific powers in particular contexts.

Between ritual and theatre

Just as oral performance and verbal arts continue to be practiced and interact with complete systems of writing, so did oral, ritual and shamanic performance practices interact with the new forms of dramatic performance (or theatre) wherever they began to develop, such as in Greece, India, China, and Japan. Ritual and shamanic performance helped shape dramatic conventions, aesthetics, and/or performance context. Oral and ritual performance remain an integral part of many cultures and sub-cultures today; therefore, it is wrong to use the word “primitive,” in its popular demeaning sense, to describe cultures where ritual or shamanic performance still exist.

In the past, many theatre historians accepted the argument that theatre was born out of ritual. This theory was put forward by a group of Cambridge University classics scholars known as “the Cambridge Anthropologists” – Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), Francis Cornford (1874–1943), and Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928). The theory of the ritual origins of theatre is now discredited, due to insufficient supporting evidence, the presence of opposing evidence, and problems in the theory’s argument. The assumption that it is possible to find a single origin of theatre is in itself a problematic proposition. Theatre is not one “thing,” but rather a complex set of human communicative activities involving, as does the practice of ritual, fundamental human desires to imitate, play, imagine, and structure our experience.

Nevertheless, theories of ritual can be useful for interpreting the “ritual action” of later forms of drama and theatre. Naomi Conn Liebler has argued for a reading of Shakespeare’s tragedies as “festive,” a term which marks “the celebration of a community’s survival” (1995: 8). Liebler builds on theories of ritual and the “festive,” especially the early work of C.L. Barber in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959). She argues for an analogous understanding of tragedy’s relationship to the “festive,” that is to say, to social, communal functions. Liebler concludes that “tragedy is not ritual; ritualistic elements in tragedy are not themselves actual rituals. In theatre, we are always in the realm of ‘as if,’ of semblance or resemblance. Ritual and theatre do not share similar efficacies, but they do share similar intents” (1995: 25–6).

KEY REFERENCES

Books

Barber, C.L. (1959) Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Gennep, A. van (1960; 1st edn 1909) The Rites of Passage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kapferer, B. (1983) A Celebration of Demons, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kapferer, B. (1984) “The Ritual Process and the Problem of Reflexivity in Sinhalese Demon Exorcisms,” in B. Kapferer (ed.) Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, Philadelphia: Institute for Human Studies Issues.

Kirby, E.T. (1975) Ur-Drama: The Origins of Theatre, New York: NYU Press.

La Fontaine, J.S. (1985) Initiation: Ritual Drama and Secret Knowledge Across the World, London: Penguin.

Laderman, C. (1991) Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Liebler, N.C. (1995) Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, London: Routledge.

MacAloon, J.J. (1984) Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Schechner, R. (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Schieffelin, E.L. (1976) The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Schieffelin, E.L. (1998) “Problematizing Performance,” in F. Hughes-Freeland (ed.) Ritual, Performance, Media, London: Routledge.

Staal, F. (1996 [1990]) Rituals and Mantras: Rules Without Meaning, Delhi: Motilal.

Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ Publications.

Ritual Places and Performances

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

Here we examine accounts of four different types of ritual and shamanic practice. Each type in its own way helps form (or reform) historical “selves” and/or “social identities” in the ever-changing present.

Late Neolithic ritual landscapes and pilgrimage in England

Among the 100 monuments of the late Neolithic period in Britain are the complex at Thornborough (North Yorkshire), possibly the most important sacred site of the day, and the site at Stonehenge (Wiltshire), well known today. The Thornborough complex was in use from approximately 3500 bce to at least 2500 bce. Its henge monuments were the site of major calendrical rituals that attracted masses of short-term pilgrims from across the entire northern region (Figure 1). A henge is a circular structure with a surrounding bank. On a flat gravel plateau near the River Ure, the ancient peoples of the period constructed the only linked cluster of three massive henge monuments ever built. Each of the three primary henges measures a staggering 250m in diameter and 15m in height, capped at the time with local white pumice. Each has a double entrance, with an external ditch. The three henge monuments are equally spaced, and extend over 1.7km (more than a mile) on an orientation running northwest to southeast. As seen in Figure 1, the three henges are linked by passageways. The central henge was constructed on top of an earlier cursus monument measuring at least 1.1km, indicating that the site had already long been used for ritual purposes. Scattered near the site are additional Neolithic–early Bronze Age monuments, including three other henges in areas close-by, at least ten burial mounds, and traces of contemporary settlements. The massive scale of the linked henges indicates that it accommodated significantly large gatherings of pilgrims. It is as if the three major cathedrals in England (Westminster, York and Canterbury) had all been placed in one location.

Henges are specially constructed to interact with the landscape and thereby create what is known as a “ritual landscape.” Once inside a circular henge, one enters a 360-degree self-contained universe – nothing of the outside world can be seen. Cut off from the everyday world outside the enclosure, environmentally and architecturally, the space is bounded by the henge whose white-pumice face joins the sky.

One hypothesis is that the henges were built to align with the three middle stars within the constellation Orion known as “Orion’s Belt” on specific dates. When pilgrims gathered inside the site facing one of the openings on a clear night, they witnessed a spectacular moment – the appearance on the horizon of the constellation, Orion. Since the three linked henges reproduce the precise configuration of Orion’s Belt, those gathered would have experienced a moment of union between earth and sky – a womb-like encirclement of self/community within their cosmos. It must have been an awe-inspiring annual moment for those making the pilgrimage.

These sacred, ritual spaces were kept apart from everyday activities. Camps were set up at a distance of approximately 600 meters from the henges. Beyond the camps, at least some individuals performed a “ritual deposition” of highly valuable Cumbrian stone axes and perhaps other objects of high value. The monuments themselves are part of a wider landscape that contains burial monuments and settlement areas.

While much remains speculative, what can be concluded from these Neolithic sites is that there was a richly elaborated system of ritual performance taking place within them. The ritual within these landscapes served to orient the peoples of the period within personally, socially, and cosmologically specific spatial and temporal frames that must have given shape and “meaning” to their lives. The shape and meaning derived from their involvement in and experience of the act of pilgrimage and participation in the rites that no doubt occurred within this extraordinary ritual landscape.

The Thornborough site provides us with a tantalizing view of early ritual performance in a sacred, ritual landscape. Sketchy as the picture is, it is soundly based on the archaeological evidence of this and comparable sites of the period. In the next section we provide an overview of oral and ritual/festival performance practices in early Celtic cultures in Ireland and Wales – an era for which there is archaeological evidence, as well as some problematic textual evidence.

Early Celtic oral and ritual festival performance

In this section we address the question of what we can learn about performance in a culture for which there are both archaeological evidence and early written accounts. Here we (re)construct pre-literate Celtic oral and ritual/festival performance circa the sixth century ce. The Celts possessed rich traditions of oral (bardic) performance as well as ritual/festival performance. At its peak in the later first millennium bce, the Celtic world stretched from Ireland, Wales, and Spain in the west, and Scotland in the north, to the Czech Republic in the east and northern Italy in the south, and even beyond Europe to Asia Minor (Figure 2). During most of the first millennium bce, the entire region of northern Europe inhabited by the Celts was virtually non-literate. So, of the three traditional primary sources of evidence for interpreting ancient history – archaeological, linguistic, and literary – our only ample evidence for the early Celts is archaeological. The earliest linguistic evidence is sparse before the Roman period. The first allusion to the Celts by name (Keltoi) is in the writing of the Greek historians, Hecataeus of Miletus in about 500 bce, and Herodotus in the fifth century bce.

By the end of the first century bce, Celtic culture seems to have ended as Europe came under the control of the Roman Empire. A new hybrid culture emerged from the interaction between Roman and Celtic traditions and practices. The new “Romano-Celtic” culture is nowhere better witnessed than in the bardic traditions.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West during the fifth century ce, Europe was overrun by a new Germanic culture. The Celts virtually disappeared, except in the furthest western extremes of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany, together with Cornwall and the Isle of Man. There the Celtic languages survived, and a vernacular Celtic mythic tradition developed during the first and second millennium ce.

Written Irish dates from the sixth century from within a monastic milieu and remained so for 600 years. Can these texts reveal much about the earlier, oral Celtic traditions? Scholars do not agree. From the sixth century on, Irish and Welsh thought and learning were an amalgam and interweaving of indigenous and monastic elements. All that remains of course is what the monks chose to record and transmit. “Of the learned oral tradition which preceded the written and which continued alongside it, obviously we know nothing except by written reference,” writes Celtic scholar, Proinsias Mac Cana (1995: 782). The monks left a vast collection of prose and verse texts covering historical and genealogical, mythico-historic, lyrical, tribal and family lore, social and legal procedures, medicine, and even some dramatic materials. In Wales the corpus of lore was known as cyfarwyddyd, meaning “guidance, direction, instruction, knowledge.”

The tale of the birth of Ireland’s greatest epic hero, Cu Chulainn, is both “a coherent mythico-heroic text” and “a tersely phrased version of an [earlier] oral narrative” (Mac Cana 1995: 783). Mac Cana argues that there was a very high degree of consistency between the earlier oral and later written versions of these stories for the following reasons: (1) oral literature/learning were highly valued long before the invention of writing; (2) the stories were formulaic; and (3) their transmission and telling were “cultivated and controlled by an elitist and privileged class of semi-sacred savants and poets” known as druids, and later the filidh (Mac Cana 1995: 783).

Oral performance in the telling of such tales no doubt played a central role in pre-literate Celtic culture. Although very late, the following eleventh-century tale from Wales tells what happened when Gwydion and his companion poets visited the court of Pryderi:

They made them welcome. Gwydion was placed at Pryderi’s one hand that night. “Why,” said Pryderi, “gladly would we have a tale [cfarwyddyd] from some of the young men yonder.” “Lord,” said Gwydion, “it is a custom with us that the first night after one come to a great man, the chief bard [pencerdd] shall have the say. I will tell a tale gladly.” Gwydion was the best teller of tales [cyfarwdd] in the world. And that night he entertained the court with pleasant tales and story-telling [cyfarwyddyd] till he was praised by everyone in the court.

(Davies 1995: 786)

Telling tales was the product of a dynamic verbal culture prior to the invention of writing. Stories were told to entertain, with rules for oral art playing a key role in their composition and performance. Only eleven native Welsh tales have survived. The earliest texts that have emerged, though, are clearly a result of the interweaving of the early oral culture, and the later literate culture.

The picture of the early bards that emerges from Irish and Welsh sources is that the early, pre-Christian Celtic bards sang praises to the gods. Their songs of praise were thought to bring benefits to their patrons and the people in general. Their words also had power in them. When praising the qualities of a ruler, the singing bard was in effect calling these qualities into existence in the ruler (Ross 1995: 431). Bards also might sing satirical songs, which were understood to bring physical blemish, bad luck, or even death to the person against whom they were sung.

The early monastic literature also provides glimpses into the early ritual and religious life of the Celts. Written either in Latin or early medieval Gaelic, these monastic sources attribute many miracles and powers to the monks in order to make them competitive with the Celtic druids. In pre-Christian Celtic cultures, the druids were the religious and ritual specialists who were thought to possess special powers, knowledge, and the ability to communicate directly with the gods. (The druids correspond to the Brahmins of India and flamines of early Rome – all three descended from the ancient Indo-European priestly tradition.) The druids were in charge of all ritual, assisted by other specialists including the bards. They used incantations and other means to foresee the future and predict events, serving therefore as prophets for their rulers. They may have received their divinatory powers through trance states, prompted at times by chewing acorns. They possessed knowledge of astrology and did calendrical computations. They reputedly possessed powers as shape-shifters and could either change their own shape, or that of others, into animals or birds. They were masters of illusion and skilled healers through the use of therapeutic and other treatments. Even natural phenomena supposedly obeyed their dictates – they commanded winds, fires, and mists. Finally, they were teachers of songs for noblemen and guardians of hereditary learning and oral traditions. Oaths sworn before druids were considered sacred and binding. Druidic teaching was completely oral. Irish druids “sang over” (for-cain, a word which can also mean “prophesy, predict”) their pupils; the pupils repeated the lesson in chorus. Led by the druidic orders, great national assemblies and performance festivals took place annually in ritual landscapes as part of a liturgical calendar of sacred times and festivals.

Under the influence of Christianity, the druids came to be negatively regarded as “witchdoctors” or “sorcerers.” As Celtic culture was Christianized, only vestiges of early Celtic oral and ritual traditions remained.

Ritual, ceremony, and collective social life: Hopi ritual performance cycles

We focus here on the ritual practices of one Native American people – the Hopi whose traditional homeland is on three mesas in what is now northeastern Arizona (Figure 3). Perhaps 30,000 years ago, the first ancestors of today’s Native Americans, including the Hopi, arrived in North America. In pursuit of mammoths, bear, and reindeer, proto-Mongoloid groups living in northern China and northeast Asia crossed the Bering Strait – a temporarily exposed land bridge. These immigrants, now called Native Americans, were at first exclusively groups of hunters who eventually diversified as they moved south and as the climate they encountered changed. Some key traditions, practices, and beliefs have survived the centuries, such as dwellings (earth lodges, conical tents, birchbark lodges), use of feathered ornaments, and a relatively democratic political organization featuring tribal/group councils. A strong ceremonialism attached to hunting survived, as did elaborate ceremonies and rituals practiced in order to contact and make present the spirits. Three classes of traditional healers and ceremonialists developed among the early Native Americans, consistent with their proto-Mongoloid origins. There were herbalists who cared for everyday wounds and aches, the medicine man who sought to access the supernatural to make ill persons well, and the shaman – a medicine man who, like the shamans in Siberia, underwent a trance state to discover disease or cure the sick.

Until about 5000 bce, Native Americans continued to live as hunters, while some descendants lived as fishermen and collectors. A new era dawned in Mexico at this time when humans in the region developed the ability to grow crops. Squash, beans and maize became staple foods allowing the development, as in early Sumeria, of fixed, agriculturally based settlements. For some Native Americans, annual hunting rituals were displaced by rituals and ceremonies centering on the growth of vegetation and marking harvest seasons. Those living settled lives developed a spiritual view of the cosmos and their environment in harmony. In the American Southwest, one settled form of Native American culture is known as Pueblo. Among the Pueblo peoples are the Hopi and Zuni, whose rituals and ceremonies were elaborated as a means of securing rain and fertility. Each society developed its own ceremonial organizations to keep its world in harmony.

We focus here on the ritual practices of the Hopi. In prehistoric times, the Hopi cultivated a variety of crops including kidney and tepary beans, cotton, pumpkins, and maize. The most ancient Hopi village, Oraibi, dates from around 1125 ce suggesting it is either the oldest, or one of the oldest, continually inhabited locales in what is now known as the United States of America.

When the Spanish first encountered the Hopi people (whom they called “Moqui”) in 1540, they imagined that the high cities on rocky mesas, gleaming like gold in the desert sun, were the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. Although not made of gold, Hopi villages were thriving urban centers.

In 1629 Catholic Franciscan friars were sent to evangelize the Hopi and their neighbors – the Zuni and Acoma. Although the Hopis converted peacefully to Catholicism, their native religion, at the center of which were the ritual dances of the Kachinas, never died out. In the descriptions of these by the evangelizing Spanish, we can see that the ritual Kachina dances then were similar to those still performed (although the Spanish did not understand the purpose of what they were seeing). Traditional Hopi religion and beliefs are organized around an annual ritual calendar intended to maintain equilibrium with their environment. For a period of approximately seven months each year Hopis interact with the Kachinas (from kachi, life or spirit, and na, father) – unseen supernatural beings and spirits of the dead. Kachinas have the power to “bring rain, exercise control over the weather, help in many of the activities of the villages, punish offenders of ceremonial or social laws, and in general act as a link between gods and mortals” (Dockstader 1985: 9). The Kachinas visit during the months beginning with the Winter Solstice, Soyala (21 December), and stay until just after the Summer Solstice (21 June) when the Home Dance (Nimán) takes place. As beneficent supernatural beings, the Kachinas are thought to have always been with the Hopi, having come with the original Hopi ancestors when they emerged from the Underworld at the beginning of time. They wandered together until they settled where they are located today in Arizona.

Hopi interact with these beings via male masked dancers – also known as Kachinas. As in other Native American ritual societies, such as the Yaqui peoples, it is a great honor and responsibility to become a Kachina. To become a particular Kachina by enveloping oneself in a complete costume and “helmet-mask” covering the entire head, is to lose “one’s personal identity and … [become] imbued with the spirit of that being” (Dockstader 1985: 10). At the time of the ceremonies, one must follow specific prescriptions for behavior and deportment, remaining pure and celibate in order to serve as a suitable messenger. The performers embody and impersonate these beings through a series of dances from their initial emergence at Winter Solstice until they return “home” in July. From August through November, non-Kachina rites occupy the ritual calendar, with the Snake or Flute Dance (Chuchubtí) in August, Women’s Society rituals in September/October (Marû and Oáqöle), and the Tribal Initiation (Wuwuchim) in November.

Hopi religious ceremonies are conducted between underground chambers (kiva) reached by ladders, and public areas of villages, especially the plaza. The kiva are both sacred spaces for secret ceremonies as well as communal lodges.

The nine-day Powamú (Bean Dance) ceremony celebrates fertility each January. It is the major ritual of the Kachina cult. Sixteen days before Powamú, beans are planted inside warm, humid kivas, in order to force new growth. There are eight days of secret rituals and preparations. Some performances are dramatic enactments of Hopi mythology, with clan ancestor Kachinas, such as Eótoto – the father of the Kachinas – putting in an appearance. On the night of the fifth day of the ceremony, Kachina Mother Hahai-I Wuhti demands to see the sleeping children. The following afternoon, she and her monster children, the Nataska Kachinas, are joined by Ogre Woman, Soyok’ Wuhti Kachina, who carries a bloodstained knife and long crook to capture young children to eat. Parents threaten their disobedient children with the monsters’ wrath and bribe the monsters with food.

Eótoto Kachina is the chief of all Kachinas (Figure 4). Aided by the loyal Aholi Kachina (who once cut his own throat to permit Eótoto to escape), Eótoto draws cloud symbols in corn flour on the earth, pointing towards the village. Aholi calls out loudly while striking the picture with his staff. Carrying green shoots of corn, Eótoto performs a water ritual in six directions to guide the rain-clouds to the village. Simultaneously, other Kachinas bring gifts to the children.

During Kachina dances, a number of Táchkutí appear – the clowns (Figure 5). Commonly known as “Mudheads” since their heads are covered with sack-like masks, they dash around the village making crude jokes, eating like gluttons, and tripping over themselves. They mime falling down dead and are only revived by the performance of explicit sexual acts. They then distribute seeds to young women who plant them to ensure fertility. Long-Billed Wapamu Kachina is a guard who uses his yucca whip to keep the clowns moving and to prevent onlookers from disrupting the Kachina processions. During Powamú, people with rheumatism can be cured if Wapamu whips the affected body part.

On the ninth day, the public ceremonies occur. As many as 100 masked Kachinas may dance in the plaza. Warrior Maid He’e’e Kachina waves her arms from the rooftops, signaling other Kachinas to chase people into their houses and whip those who refuse. The young bean plants in the kivas are cut and taken to a shrine. Finally, the Kachinas distribute the beans to the households. Various clownish Kachinas mimic the serious rituals. Sometimes, they even impersonate obnoxious tourists, pushing, taking photos, and shouting in crude English.

Every four years when children between the ages of six and ten are to be initiated, they are brought to the kivas. After rituals and songs, the elders depart. It is dark. The sound of pounding feet on the roof signals the entrance of the Kachinas who climb down the ladder. The children suddenly recognize their fathers, uncles and brothers. Hú’Kachinas whip the children with yucca whips, then whip themselves, fiercely warning the children to keep their new knowledge secret. This annual cycle of traditional ceremonies constitutes an elaborate ritual drama through which “men, animals, plants and spirits are inter-transposable in a seemingly unbroken chain of being” (Ortiz 1969: 143). Historically, this type of ceremonial cycle is typical of peoples who created settled, agricultural communities. For Hopi and others still practicing complete ritual cycles today, the ceremonies point to a common past, usually articulated in an origin myth, and also serve as the primary touchstone of individual and social identity in a changing world.

Healing powers of ritual/shamanic specialists: An exorcistic shadow-puppet performance in Bali

The performance of the Balinese shadow-puppet play, wayang Calon Arang, is, in effect, a healing ritual. The play demonstrates the early historical roots of shadow-puppet theatre in animistic ritual/religious practice. It also demonstrates how the serious business of ritual may quite logically involve humor, including ribald comedy, scatological word-play, or sexual innuendo, such as we have seen in the comic “Mudmen” in Hopi Kachina ceremonies.

Calon Arang is the supreme or “Queen Sorceress in Balinese ritual drama … the semi-historical manifestation of the widow (Rangda)” (Hobart 2003: 103). Performances of Calon Arang are arranged with a specialist puppeteer when villagers wish to expose and exorcise witches in their area. Involving learned/scholarly healers, spirit mediums, and masked ritual dramas, the performance of Calon Arang engages one or more of the diverse, sometimes demonic, dark, or evil powers in order to “heal” an individual or community. In Bali, illness, death, and a considerable number of human troubles in everyday life are attributed to leak (in high Balinese, desti) – usually translated as witches. Healers refer to them as “agents of power” or “poison wind” – people whose practices access the destructive and the malign, rather than the positive aspects of power (Hobart 2003: 104). They are able to transform at night into monkeys, tigers, pigs, chickens or flickering lights. In such transformed states, leak can enter households to bring a variety of troubles, illness, or even death. If someone wishes to victimize or curse another, one goes to a sorcerer to acquire a drawing inscribed with magical syllables (Figure 6).

The performance of Calong Arang’s story in the form of a traditional shadow-puppet play takes place outside the local village death temple at night. It is considered dangerous for the puppeteer to undertake, since it temporarily exposes the invisible realm of dark powers. The puppeteer, therefore, is usually also a healer who regularly encounters both demonic and protective powers. He must be an individual with strong spiritual powers since narrating the story “tests [his] capacity to combat and contain malevolent forces and energies” (Hobart 2003: 112). During the performance, at a certain point in the story, the puppeteer “‘summons the witches’ … of the area to attend. Only a few witches may come, but many may be drawn to the show, like heavy gusts of wind, in order to ‘test’ the power of the puppeteer” (Hobart 2003: 114). The local witches who come are called out by the shadows on the screen. In such performances, past and present, the invisible is made visible, at least temporarily, so that the invisible, in its malevolent form, can be engaged and controlled, at least temporarily, by the healing powers of the puppeteer.

Humor, like ritual, often plays at the transition points or boundaries where darkness, horror, and human fear lurk. The opening scene of Calon Arang is set in the court of the great Balinese prince, Erlangga. Erlangga has ordered his two servants, the proto-typical comic duo, Wayan Geligir and Nang Kinyan, to deliver a message to the widow from Dirah. The comic duo hold the “screen” as they discuss their fears about their forthcoming journey. The naive and simple Nang Kinyan whispers to his companion:

Agents of power will approach us at night …

[D]o you know any mantras so that it will become light?

WAYAN GELIGIR: Why should I learn mantras?

These days we have electricity! Lights can now be switched on and off with ease in the villages. Matches can also be bought for a few Rupiah. It takes at least one year of study to become sufficiently sakti [powerful], just to transmit mystic fire from the hands.

NANG KINYAN: Wadah!

WAYAN GELIGIR: [M]oreover witches who take on the forms of monkeys, chicken, pigs, or fierce ogres may these days be electrocuted!

Attending the 1993 performance of the play in Tegallalang, Gianyar, Bali, anthropologist Angela Hobart relates how the audience, in response to the servant’s comic repartee, “bursts out in laughter” while simultaneously “tension mounts as [they are] alerted to the presence of leak … who may be lurking nearby” (Hobart 2003: 116). Here comedy, so far from being separate from ritual, serves the serious business of exorcistic ritual. Also, while the Hopi Kachina ceremony and Korean kut performance (explained in a case study on the website) include comic “acts” or “mini-dramas,” only the Balinese shadow-puppet performance of Calong Arang performs a fully developed dramatic narrative.

KEY REFERENCES

Online Resources

Thornborough: For more images of the ritual landscape, go to the following websites: http://thornborough.ncl.ac.uk/, http://themodernantiquarian.com/site/3939, www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nov.10712.

Balinese shadow puppets: search YouTube for this topic and select The Sacrifice of Bima, Parts 3 and 4 for a sampling of music and puppets (not translated). Scenes from Calong Arang are also available but with live actors. Search “calong arang”.

Books

Davies, S. (1995) “Mythology and the Oral Tradition: Wales,” in M.J. Green (ed.) The Celtic World, London: Routledge.

Dockstader, F.J. (1985) The Kachina and the White Man, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Green, M.J. (ed.) (1995) The Celtic World, London: Routledge.

Hobart, A. (2003) Healing Performances of Bali, New York: Berghahn Books.

Mac Cana, P. (1995) “Mythology and the Oral Tradition: Ireland,” in M.J. Green (ed.) The Celtic World, London: Routledge.

Ortiz, A. (1969) The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ross, A. (1995) “Ritual and the Druids,” in M.J. Green (ed.) The Celtic World, London: Routledge.