Christian Ritual Research Articles

The Solar Christ in Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts of Early Colonial Mexico

The friars who ministered to the Nahua (Aztec) Indians incorporated into their Nahuatl teachings Old World symbolism which used the sun as a metaphor or type for Christ. The solar Christ had different connotations in Nahuatl because of differences between Christian and Nahua views of cosmology, morality, history, and the symbolism of sun and light. Indians today view Christ as a solar deity; Christian teaching may be one source of this identification. The Mendicant friars who converted the Indians of Mexico to Christianity after the Spanish Conquest left behind a large corpus of Christian doctrinal literature in Nahuatl and other Mesoamerican languages. These texts include sermons, catechisms, biblical excerpts, dialogues, hagiography, meditations, hymns, and confession manuals. They were written by friars conversant in the native languages, in collaboration with indigenous students who were educated in Spanish and Latin and who had considerable influence on the native-language texts. Because of their dominantly European content, these texts have received relatively little attention from ethnohistorians more interested in the indigenous side of Indian-Spanish contact. Thus these texts constitute a largely unexploited ethnohistorical resource of great value for interpreting colonial culture, particularly in regard to religion but also to language, political and social relations, and other aspects of Indian life. They provide a useful guide to the acculturative pressures operating upon native ideology. They may also help to establish more continuity between the indigenous beliefs and practices recorded in sixteenth-century ethnographic descriptions and those observed by ethnographers in the present. The doctrinal corpus is dominated by texts in the Nahuatl (Aztec) language. This extensive body of Nahua-Christian literature reveals precisely how Christianity was presented to the Nahuas, how Christian conEthnohistory 35:3 (Summer 1988). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I8o0/88/$i.5o. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.133 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 05:27:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Solar Christ in Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts cepts were translated and explained, and what elements of indigenous belief were carried over by the friars into what was, in effect, a Nahuatl interpretation of Christianity. Christian concepts picked up new meanings and symbolic associations as they were translated into Nahuatl; at the same time, the new contexts and modes of expression characteristic of Christian preaching began to influence the meanings of Nahuatl terms. Analysis of this hybrid literature helps to illuminate the true character of the so-called spiritual conquest. Christian doctrine was Nahuatized in the process of its accommodation to native categories of language and thought just as Christian personages and Christian rites took the place of the indigenous ones that most closely resembled them. This paper examines the treatment of one motif, Christ as the sun, in the colonial Mexican literature, and analyzes this motif in light of its Old World origins and its New World cultural setting. The use of this motif in the Nahuatl doctrinal writings of three prominent friars, the Franciscans fray Bernardino de Sahagun and fray Juan Bautista and the Augustinian fray Juan de la Anunciacion, is discussed. The Solar Christ in the Old World and the New The Christ-sun is by no means a common theme in the colonial literature, but it illustrates some interesting aspects of the translation process, including the very sensitive issue of idolatry. It is the sort of identification that one might expect the friars to avoid in the interest of preventing idolatry. Alternatively, the fact that they did use it might be seen as an attempt at planned syncretism, the fostering of identifications between indigenous and Christian figures as an easy way to bring the Indians into the church. In reality, though, the friars were neither so conscientious nor so crafty. They were simply employing an Old World motif, translating its terminology into Nahuatl and using it in traditional contexts. Formal Christian teaching did not necessarily contradict the Nahuas' own interpretations of Christianity; the difference between Old World and Nahua Christianity lay in the articulation of their respective worldviews and the way that metaphors operated within them. It is widely known that present-day Mesoamerican Indians view Christ as a solar deity (see, for example, Gossen 1974; Hunt 1977; Taggart I983; Vogt I969). This identification may look like a survival of indigenous solar worship, but in fact the identification was not inconsistent with sixteenth-century Christianity. For Christ to become identified with the sun was a logical response given the structure and character of the indigenous worldview; the argument here is not that the friars were responsible for this identification but only that theirs was one voice active in the intercultural dialogue within which this identification originated. 235 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.133 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 05:27:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Status Inconsistency and the Politics of Worship

AbstractAfter an explanation of salient points of Wayne Meeks's construction of a social history of Pauline Christianity, this essay explores his concept of ritual efficacy with attention to what it might lend to a fuller understanding of ritual/sacramental efficacy in the contemporary churches. Because the communities of l'Arche of Jean Vanier are constituted by a great diversity of persons who are vastly unequal, at least in terms of intelligence, they provide a contemporary reference for investigating Meeks's claim that the function of Christian ritual is to socialize persons of various strata into a communitas in Christ. No definitive resting point is reached, the conclusion being that in light of various social factors facing the churches, Christian ritual needs to socialize persons into communitas more effectively than it usually manages to do. Suggestions for doing so are offered.

Notes on body pain and truth in medieval Christian ritual

Anthropologists who study exotic religions tend to analyse rituals as systems of symbolic communication. This article offers an historical analysis of particular medieval Christian rituals directed at establishing the Truth, especially those in which physical pain is employed. Its primary interest is in the disciplinary conditions and effects of such rituals, and not in their symbolic meaning.

The Aesthetic Dimension in the Liturgy: A Theological Perspective for Literary Historians

In 1965 O.B. Hardison broke important new ground in the study of the origins of the drama with his Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages. Rejecting Karl Young's traditional distinction between Mass and drama, he urged that the Mass itself be considered a form of sacred drama, and that the rise of 'genuine' or representational, drama be seen as the natural outgrowth of tendencies already present in Christian ritual. In advancing this thesis Hardison made persuasive use of a number of important new resources in the study of liturgy, particularly those to be found in comparative religion and depth psychology, and his work has, understandably, had an enormous impact upon the profession. It has sparked a greatly renewed scholarly interest in the liturgical origins of the drama and has given rise to a whole new brand of interdisciplinary liturgiological scholarship, perhaps best represented in the work of C. Clifford Flanigan.

Christian Rituals: An Essay in Sacramental Symbolisms

AbstractBoth anthropologists and theologians, each in their separate ways, are interested in rituals and their symbol-units. Victor Turner, from extensive fieldwork, has evolved a definition of ritual as “prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers.” Monica Wilson has insisted that “it is the values of the group that are revealed” in rituals and their symbol-units. The present essay is located at the interface of anthropology and theology. It surveys pertinent anthropological information and then analyzes the Christian rituals of baptism, confirmation and eucharist, and their symbol-units, to clarify and focus their meanings and the values and ontology of the Christian group which are revealed in them.

Religion Among American Indians

The traditional worldview of North American Indians is outlined as a basis for explicating the central tribal ceremonials and for comprehending the tribal response to prolonged missionization from Christian denominations. The missionaries operated in a context of authoritarian superiority, and most conceived of themselves as bearing civilization, rather than a plain scriptural message; hence, there was little concern to modify Euro-Christianity to fit with native rituals and values. Today, most Indians are Christians, at least nominally; but, in many cases, the Christianity is integrated with the native worldview, and the individual participates in a variety of both Christian and neotraditional rituals. The destructive impact of the European invasions stimulated millenarian movements, such as the Ghost Dance; the continued vitality of these movements was expressed in the recent occupation of Wounded Knee, which should be comprehended as a religious, rather than a political, action. The Peyote Cult, organized as the Native American Church, constitutes a syncretism of Christian and traditional rites and attitudes, and it is widespread as intertribal and pan-Indian. Further pan-Indian, neotradi tional, revivalistic, and millenarian movements may be anticipated.

Hamilton Hartridge, 7 May 1886 - 13 January 1976

Hamilton Hartridge, the eye physiologist, whose interests and life seemed so much concerned with mechanical problems and mechanical crises, was born when two mammoth traction engines, on the way to an exhibition at the Crystal Palace, passed by the house and shook down the ceiling on to his recumbent and pregnant mother, who, losing consciousness, gave birth to her tiny premature boy. The doctor, soon arriving to treat the unconscious mother, was astonished to hear the cry of an infant beneath the blanket. He judged the chance of its survival so small that he assumed the responsibility of performing the first Christian rites and baptized him Hamilton. Fortunately the tiny baby lasted not only all that day, but a further 89 years. Hartridge was born on 7 May 1886 at Stamford Hill, London, the son of Henry Hill Hartridge and Sophy Annie ( Walton). His family is an old one mainly from Kent where, near Hawkhurst, there is Hartridge Manor and Hartridge Mill. Thomas Hartridge was a Justice of the Peace in the thirty-fourth year of King Edward III when there were only eight in the whole County of Kent. Hartridge’s father was a wool importer, but in his spare time he was a good cabinet-maker and a skilled craftsman. ‘A broken bicycle, a new spring for a clock or a broken garden tool was repaired in no time!’ An engineer uncle did much to stimulate Hamilton’s keenness in science, and later his father’s cousin Gustavus Hartridge, ophthalmic surgeon at the Westminster Hospital, contributed to Hamilton’s interest in the eye. His mother was a keen pianist and singer and seemed to have an inexhaustible stock of poems and fairy stories in her memory, with which she entertained her daughter and two sons, Hamilton being the eldest child.

Review: Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies

Review: Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies

Two Books from the Jung Institute

Two Books from the Jung Institute David Leeming (bio) The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, by Marie-Louise von Franz (1970). Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths, by Marie-Louise von Franz (1972/1973) (Spring Publications, Zurich and New York). Marie-Louise von Franz was a trusted associate of Carl Jung and she remains one of his staunchest disciples. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus and Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths are essentially transcripts of lectures delivered by Dr. von Franz at the Jung Institute in Zurich between 1959 and 1962. Like the other books in the Spring Publications Seminar Series*—a series edited and compiled by Jungians—these books are of value to the student of children's literature when read in their proper context. The Jung Institute Lectures are directed primarily at students of Jungian clinical psychology. The fact that a fairy tale or a myth or any other kind of narrative can, by way of Jungian analysis, reveal something of the problems of human psychology is of immense importance to the psychiatrist. But unless Jungian analysis or Freudian analysis or any analysis of literature is applied to literature by someone whose primary concern is the appreciation or evaluation of the literary work itself, the result is all too often the [End Page 236] simplistic kind of literary interpretation which is to be found in the Puer Aeternus book in question here. Dr. von Franz does teach us much about the psychological problems of Saint-Exupéry and, by extension, of others who suffer from the Puer Aeternus (eternal youth) syndrome.* But for her Le Petit Prince is a cadaver to be dissected, while for many adults and children it is a living experience to be felt and appreciated. Whereas The Problem of the Puer Aeternus is sometimes irritating to the reader whose discipline is not psychology, Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths is an engaging work, perhaps because in it Dr. von Franz concentrates on universal mythic motifs rather than on the interpretation of literature. If the literary critic avoids the all too prevalent tendency to confuse clinical conclusions with literary ones, however, the information supplied by Dr. von Franz in both books can be applied to literature—especially to children's literature and most especially to the fairy tale. The work of Jung and his followers has helped many to get at the essence of those "mysterious chords" struck in works of art—those chords which move and attract us even in the absence of common knowledge or conscious experience. The theory of archetypes grows out of Jungian psychology, and nowhere are archetypal images and patterns less veiled than in the fairy tale. For example, once we understand the "puer aeternus" type we should have no difficulty in recognizing it in the fairy tale involving the youth of mysterious or special origins who, by way of tests and trials, redeems a family or a society by uniting himself (or herself) with a royal person who is in some magical way revealed as his or her logical complement. The prince and the princess live happily ever after; they reunite the male and female principles—the Yin and the Yang. They achieve eternal youth. The ritual marriage at the end of the fairy tale (and at the end of 'adult' comedy) represents the mystic's ideal, the reunion of formerly deluded man with the universal and eternal reality. "Whereupon" writes Alan Watts, "the life which had seemed momentary would be found momentous, and that present which had seemed to be no time at all would be found to be eternity" (Myth and Ritual in Christianity [Beacon, New York: 1968], p. 236). Perhaps this is a partial explanation of the emotional attraction of the fairy tale. One could go on from here in the Jungian manner to bring into play "puer aeternus" figures of myth—Dionysus, Attis and others—who might lead us still further into the truth and vitality of the tale. The importance of the creation myth to the fairy tale is clearly shown here too. Dr. von Franz amply illustrates the connection between creation stories and rituals of initiation and renewal. The...

Myth and Ritual in Christianity

Myth and Ritual in Christianity

Myth and Ritual in Christianity. By Alan W. Watts. (Thames and Hudson; 25s.) - Foolishness to the Greeks. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford. By R. C. Zaehner. (Geoffrey Cumberlege; Clarendon Press; 2s. 6d.) - Sacred Books of the World. An Anthology. By A. C. Bouquet. (Pelican Books; 3s. 6d.)

Myth and Ritual in Christianity. By Alan W. Watts. (Thames and Hudson; 25s.) - Foolishness to the Greeks. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford. By R. C. Zaehner. (Geoffrey Cumberlege; Clarendon Press; 2s. 6d.) - Sacred Books of the World. An Anthology. By A. C. Bouquet. (Pelican Books; 3s. 6d.)

Reviews of Book: Myth and Ritual in Christianity

Reviews of Book: Myth and Ritual in Christianity

Book Review: Myth and Ritual in Christianity

Book Review: Myth and Ritual in Christianity

Jellingebægeret - vor ældste kristne kalk?

Jellingebægeret - vor ældste kristne kalk?

(1) Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation (2) High Gods in North America: Upton Lectures in Religion, Manchester College, Oxford, 1932 (3) East and West in Religion (4) Christian Myth and Ritual: a Historical Study (5) A Short History of Religions

(1) Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation (2) High Gods in North America: Upton Lectures in Religion, Manchester College, Oxford, 1932 (3) East and West in Religion (4) Christian Myth and Ritual: a Historical Study (5) A Short History of Religions

BEES AND BEEKEEPING IN SOUTH INDIA

Among insects, in fact, among the numerous lower animals, the honey bee occupies a unique position. It has been man's associate practically from prehistoric days. In view of the honey it yields and in consideration of the various virtues displayed by the creature in its, social life this creature was not only held by the ancients in high esteem but was even endowed with divine powers and became the centre for many myths and superstitions. It was probably due to such ideas that the bee was added as an insignia by great men it is said to appear on the crowns of the Egyptian kings, on the arms of the Pope and on the imperial robes of Napoleon! Honey and wax were attributed divine properties and in Christian rituals honey was given to babies in baptism and the church candles were to be of pure wax! In India, the existence of bees and the usefulness of the pro- ducts we get from them are facts well known to almost every layman. But very few among us possess any clear and definite ideas regarding the natural history of bees or about the aetiology and purpose of the useful products man gets from them. There is, of course, reference in different Indian literary and medical works to honey as Madhu and to the honey bee as Madhu makshika, (literally honey fly) the exact term by which it is known in the vernaculars, though it is scientifically incorrect to call it a fly. The little that is known of them may be more or less summed up in these statements (1) that hees abound in forests, (2) they give us some very valuable and useful pro- ducts, (3) they are a proverbially hard working and industrious lot, and (4) that they sting. All the rest regarding them has been practi- cally a sealed book to most of us. The honey bee is, therefore, one of our familiar creatures and yet one about which we really know very little !!!