Schitish ritual practices in the theological-psychological context (on the example of Shah’s-Vakh’s Ritual)

Abstract

The article offers an analysis of the Shiite ritual self-torture (Ashura or Shahsey-Wahsey) as seen in a psycho-emotional way. In the first instance, the author offers an analysis of the Ashura ritual itself, the attitude of the Sunnis towards it, as well as a special kind of performance, which grew out of it. The author also gives an interpretation of the ritual of self-torture as a psychological phenomenon and discusses possible reasons for irrational behavior of its participants and spectators. As a result, it was revealed that the basis of the irrational behavior of both the participants and the spectators of the ritual is the emergence of affective (emotional) empathy. It should also be noted that in course of the analysis of the psychological state of three categories of people (those who are deeply aware of the meaning of ritual acts, those who perform the ritual and the spectators) was discovered a manifestation of the two-level empathy, i.e. 1) the empathy in its literal sense, when its object is placed directly in front of the empath as in the case of witnesses of a ritual procession; 2) the empathy of a different kind, which is called here as the “empathy of a deep religious world perception”. This is a kind of empathy when the object of empathy is located in the depths of the world perception from the religious point of view.