Customary rituals express the separation of the unique world of human beings, whose lives are regulated by divine prescriptions, from the forces of the world which lack human reason and knowledge of God. Such separation can, of course, never be total since, for their sustenance, people depend on things that originate in or come from outside human society. Although the boundary between these two domains has to be maintained to protect human life from corruption by outside forces, it also has to be perpetually crossed so that human life can continue. All the rituals which I have discussed are preventive in character, in that their aim is to ensure that no adverse consequences will result from the necessary but inevitable crossing of the boundary.

In this chapter, I describe rituals which are retributive rather than preventive in character. They have to be performed when the boundary separating the two domains has been blurred, not as a result of people or things moving across it deliberately, but as a result of an uncontrolled intrusion of one domain into the other. Such an intrusion can occur in different ways and it leads not only to adverse consequences for specific people whose well-being then has to be restored through the performance of an appropriate ritual, but also, in many situations, it results in the disruption of the proper cosmological order which affects the well-being of the whole community.