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chance. Events occurring simultaneously showed a special interdependence both with each other and, through our psyches, with us as observers (Jung 1968:xxiv; cited in Jackson 1978:117). Indeed we do often ascribe a hidden causality to what we interpret as coincidence, which in that sense is taken as something prior to us. But when we look at certain social events, we see people actually creating a pool of meanings, first by speaking and thinking of different events as if they occur simultaneously, even in contradiction, and then by relating events to each other in causal sequence. That is to say, through an event initially evoking the idea of simultaneity, people reorder events and make the new combinations intelligible to a wider public. |
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The event I shall look at is that of divinatory speech among the people with whom I have worked. But first I shall suggest some more universal aspects of the contrast and relationship between simultaneity and sequencing. |
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Let me begin with a biblical text, Mark 1:3 on John the Baptist: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight." The idea of confusion suggested by the crying in the wilderness and the implication that the confused paths of the Lord need to be straightened represent two common archetypal ideas which we conventionally associate with religion and ritual. |
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The first archetype can be seen in the many expressions of tangled, crossed, or confused states: the sins of incest and some forms of adultery; the ritualization of breech and other abnormal births; the dangers of improperly conducted rites of passage or of neglected relations between juniors and seniors; the use of key terms for witchcraft which relate to the idea of trapping and ensnaring and even the celebration of the Christian Cross (Easter) and the Jewish Passover as central events at about the same time of the year. |
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The second archetype may be thought of as an attribute of the broad contrast between nature and culture. It is the contrast between wilderness and wandering on one hand and fixed, secure, clearly and narrowly defined (often home) bases on the other. We have the biblical examples of Jesus and John the Baptist going off into the wilderness but returning new "straightened-out" men; the parable of the prodigal son forgiven and welcomed back from his aimless debauchery in the wastelands of the outside world; prophets coming into the small-scale society from a wider, alien, outside world; and, in at least some societies (including the Giriama
7 and Swahili of Kenya who are the subject of this essay), sick patients going off, sometimes in trances, to the forest or bush, impelled by an inner understanding, to gather the correct medicines required for their return to the now legitimate, i.e., "straight," role of diviner. |
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First then, tangled states become "objects of the ritual attitude." Like cases of boundary confusion, they may be thought of as sources of power, sometimes |
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