Natural Symbols
Mary Douglas
Number of quotes: 7
Book ID: 157 Page: 1
Section: 2A
One of the gravest problems of our day is the lack of commitment to common symbols.. . . .
Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity. We are witnessing a revolt against formalism, even against form.
Pastor John’s note: book published in 2007
Quote ID: 3322
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 157 Page: 5
Section: 3A4A
A movement which begins as a sect expressing the religious needs of the poor gradually moves up the social scale. It becomes respectable. Its rituals increase, its rigorous fundamentalism in devotion to the Word becomes as weighted with magic as the sacramental edifice it started by denying. With respectability comes ritualism.
Quote ID: 3323
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 157 Page: 14
Section: 3A4A
This one example suggest that when the social group grips its members in tight communal bonds, the religion is ritualist; when this grip is relaxed, ritualism declines. And with this shift of forms, a shift in doctrines appears.
Quote ID: 3324
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 157 Page: 21/22
Section: 3A4A
After the protest stage, once the need for organization is recognized, the negative attitude to rituals is seen to conflict with the need for a coherent system of expression. Then ritualism re-asserts itself around the new context of social relations. Fundamentalist, who are not magical in their attitude to the Eucharist, become magical in their attitude to the Bible. Revolutionaries who strike for freedom of speech adopt repressive sanctions to prevent return to the Tower of Babel.
Quote ID: 3325
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 157 Page: 157
Section: 3A4A
Magicality is a product of social control. To insist that the symbols are efficacious is to threaten blasphemy and sacrilege with automatic danger and to promise the reverent automatic blessing. Magicality is an instrument of mutual coercion which only works when common consent upholds the system. It is useless for a witch doctor to invest a fetish with magic power by the sole authority of his charisma. Magic derives its potency from the legitimacy of the system in which this kind of communication is being made.
Quote ID: 3327
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 157 Page: 160
Section: 3A4A
Anti-ritualism is therefore the idiom of revolt. It must be so, and it must inevitably press the case by decrying not only meaningless rituals, but all rituals as such. Even when the case demands more articulate communication, even when more meaningful rituals are needed, anti-ritualism is undiscriminating in its sweeping condemnation of formality.
Quote ID: 3328
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 157 Page: 168
Section: 2E6
Plato’s image of the cave on whose wall are cast the shadows we mistake for real is a popular one today. There is a heady promise in various intellectual fields of escape from the conditions of knowledge. With this promise an impossible kind of freedom is being proposed, freedom from necessity of any kind. It is preached particularly in artistic and literary circles. These are the people who have shouldered the clergy’s old responsibility to care for the symbols of society.
Quote ID: 3329
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes