Primal Religions 2020

Reflection of assigned book 1: In the book, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, by Victor Turner, he talks about rites of passage or “transitions” as having been marked by three distinct phases that are separation, margin, and aggregation. In the first stage, separation, the individual withdraws from everyone and starts to transition from one stage or status to another. An example of this could be cutting your hair as you do when you join the military and "cutting away" your old civilian life . The second stage is the margin or as also stated in the book the liminal period is the in-between stage where the individual is not a part of either stage or status as they have just left their old self behind but haven’t joined the next one. An example of this could be the week after finals before graduation, as we have left and finished school so that we are no longer senior, and the next class has risen to that title, but we are not yet graduated. The t...

My choice blog post 1: During my research for our final paper, I found a lot of information on the rites of passage that individuals go through and found many of them are similar between primal and modern cultures but the way we celebrate these rites of passage is very different. Specifically, with this post, I am going to talk about the rite of passage into "womanhood" that females have which is their first menstruation also known as a period. In some cultures such as one in Peru, girls are celebrated. Once a girl gets her first period she is isolated from the community and is taught by elders on how to be a woman. Once she has completed her training she is presented to the community as a woman ready to begin her own family and they have a feast to celebrate.  Many native societies publically celebrate a female's first menstruation as stated above but for many girls, today, publically announcing that specific transition would be humiliating to celebrate in front of eve...

During this article, Ball talks on the ideas that nature or sacred places may not be alive in themselves, but contain living things within them, giving them a type of breath, and a key difference between a living place and a non-living place. The living place containing “living” things such as humans or other animals, and a non-living place not containing either. Ball argues that these places in themselves are not alive, i.e, they cannot breath, speak, give information, or many other things that we think about when we consider what life is. In some areas, I agree with this. I do agree that these areas are not alive in the same way that we would think of humans as being alive, however, I cannot say that nature and places in nature are not alive in any way. Now, what we do know is that the people of oral traditions would not think of nature in the same way we do. For them, there is no separation for what is nature and what is not like there is for us, For us, nature is outside and w...

Music is one of the most influential aspects of human existence. Music has the power to make one feel a certain way, just based on the sounds and melodies that one hears.  It also is a unique platform for one to say something deeply profound and meaningful. The example that Dr. Redick used was the song Message in a Bottle by the Police. This song gives a great example of hidden meaning in music. It talks about the writer/musicians being castaways, being away from society, and needing to be rescued. They send out a message in a bottle, hoping someone will read it and be able to rescue them from whatever they needed to escape from. This brings up an incredibly interesting idea, most surrounding modern music. For many people, and I think we see it a lot in mainstream rap, music is just a way to make money. People will make music about things that they know will have a lot of record sales, such as booze, sex, drugs, and illegal activity. However, we see a dramatic shift in the content ...

During class, Dr. Redick said that many sacred places may seem to look like a womb, or may have the same sacred "vibe" as that of a womb. In seeing this, he told us a story of a waterfall that the area also depicted that of a womb. He described it as the "vagina of the universe". In seeing this, we could understand how something that is beautiful might be the womb of nature, spirits, or any other positive force that may be around the native people that believe in this type of thing. Beauty coming from beauty is something that simply makes sense to most people. From that, we could understand how the human spirit, something beautiful, could come from a natural "Womb" that's caused by something as grand as a waterfall. However, what about something as massive as the Grand Canyon? Could this be seen as a womb? Is it something else? Since it is such a massive canyon, would it be the birthplace to all other birthplaces, or is it simply a giant hole in the gr...

I found this particular passage to be quite intriguing, where Turner quotes Monica Wilson's description of ritual studies: "Rituals reveal values at their deepest level...men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is convetionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies" (p. 6). Wilson explains that since ritual practices are indicative of an individual's values, and since rituals are performed in group contexts, we can learn to perceive the values of the larger culture in which an individual operates by studying ritual behaviors.  I find it interesting when I learn new ways of looking at the world to first try to apply that new method to our own culture. In this case, that would mean examining what kinds of rituals I perform, my friends and family perform, in our everyday lives; ideally, this will ...

April 18, 2020 In class readings 5 “The four directions are sacred, as are the “Four Sacred Mountains.” In ritual, space is organized according to fours, and bodies engage the space in highly patterned ceremonial movement. To make a place sacred means to take a space or area and symbolically arrange it according to the four directions and to use objects and one’s body within it according to the metapattern of the four directions (Ball 467). This quote is from People Speaking Silently To Themselves by Martin Ball. I picked this quote in particular because it reminded me of my essay topic for our 10-page research paper. I really liked this quote because I feel that it shows how primal (or oral) cultures use their environment as a basis for their religious practices. It shows that the four mountains are the foundation of the sacredness of place. As well as making areas that are not in the original sacred place into sacred space for ceremonial events and rituals. While reading this...