Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The ritual form
- 3 Self-referential messages
- 4 Enactments of meaning
- 5 Word and act, form and substance
- 6 Time and liturgical order
- 7 Intervals, eternity, and communitas
- 8 Simultaneity and hierarchy
- 9 The idea of the sacred
- 10 Sanctification
- 11 Truth and order
- 12 The numinous, the Holy, and the divine
- 13 Religion in adaptation
- 14 The breaking of the Holy and its salvation
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The ritual form
- 3 Self-referential messages
- 4 Enactments of meaning
- 5 Word and act, form and substance
- 6 Time and liturgical order
- 7 Intervals, eternity, and communitas
- 8 Simultaneity and hierarchy
- 9 The idea of the sacred
- 10 Sanctification
- 11 Truth and order
- 12 The numinous, the Holy, and the divine
- 13 Religion in adaptation
- 14 The breaking of the Holy and its salvation
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Summary
The essence of the sacred, it was argued in chapter 9, is unquestionableness and unquestionableness is an entailment of both canonical invariance and its performance. In an earlier chapter, I argued that canonical invariance also provides the ground for the idea of eternity, and perhaps of immortality as well: the unquestionable truths of the ultimately sacred are apparently eternal. They are further extraordinary because, although they are in words, the truth to which they lay claim is not the contingent truth that other expressions may but do not necessarily possess. They claim the truth of that which is, the absolute “truth of things”: not mere temporal veracity but eternal verity. There is an inversion here of what we are inclined to regard as the usual relationship of expressions to that which they signify. Statements, reports and descriptions are judged true, correct or adequate by the degree to which they correspond to the states of affairs or facts that they signify which exist independently of themselves. In contrast, if the ritual form makes unquestionable whatever it represents then ultimate sacred postulates, by being “truly said” in liturgy bring into being metaphysical facts or states of affairs corresponding to themselves. This act of creation by word, fundamentally performative in nature, is immediately mystified as constative expression. The result is that the correspondence theory of truth remains intact but is, as it were, “stood on its head.”
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- Chapter
- Information
- Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity , pp. 344 - 370Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999