RITUALS AND RITUALISTIC BEHAVIORS PERVADE OLD MORTALITY, THOUGH curiously for a novel depicting religious strife, few have an explicit or official sacramental purpose. From Old Mortality's endless restoring Covenanter gravestones to Alison Wilson's ritualized care of Milnewood after Henry Morton's presumed death, most of rituals in Old Mortality are symbolic actions operating in a culture struggling over symbols. Many of these rituals have received critical attention individually as examples of Scott's ironic distancing between ritual performance and real conditions in face of historical change or of subtle ways in which Scott's ostensibly evenhanded treatment favors Royalists (and Claverhouse) over superstitious Whigs. (1) But along with sharpening his satiric treatment of Whig and Royalist extremes and registering his present anxieties about radical Presbyterians, Scott's employment of ritual complicates his depiction of historical change. The most obvious rituals include those performed privately by comic or grotesque figures, such as Lady Margaret's devoted re-enactment of Charles II's breakfast at Tillietudlum, and public spectacles staged by Privy Council, such as wappen-schaw and triumphal procession that follows Whig defeat. Even Morton's seemingly natural behavior, however, has ritual elements. All can be seen as strategies for resisting--or appropriating--historical change. As Scott presents it, conflict leading to Whig uprising of 1679 involves more than obvious religious and political differences. It also encompasses the opposition of ancient manners to those which are gradually subduing them, as he described cultural change in his introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel. (2) But it is not simply a matter of one stage of development succeeding another, even though Morton's fictional party of moderates may represent future. It is a struggle, rather, between different responses to modernity. Historically, neither Whigs nor Royalists had much use for traditional rituals--the Calvinist Whigs despised High Church and Catholic rituals, and court of Charles II at times openly mocked secular rituals of state. Scott presents both camps as using reinvented or ad hoc rituals as ways of negotiating rather than simply resisting historical change; his individual characters use them less self-consciously as a way of appropriating a place in a changing order. Scott's anthropological imagination is less concerned with accurately depicting Whig and Royalist rituals than with showing how ritualization separates insiders from outsiders, high from low, and sacred from profane. Scott's own invention of tradition in staging a Highland fantasy for George IV's state visit to Edinburgh is well known and suggests even less concern for accurate recreation. (3) But improvised rituals and invented traditions of Old Mortality are more than fantasy: despite their lack of historicity, they express historical change. 1 Two rituals structure Scott's opening chapters and establish patterns for private and public rituals that follow. In first chapter, framing narrative of Old Mortality's pilgrimage to graves of martyred Covenanters appears private, but it also connects isolated members of a dispersed community. In second chapter, Scott opens narrative proper with wappen-schaw, which he describes as a Stuart attempt to revive feudal institutions, (4) and while it fails as revival, it provides a rite of initiation for Morton. In both cases, ritual's manifest purpose differs from its practical effect. Old Mortality's is not purely religious, nor is wappen-schaw wholly secular. By restoring obscure graves as monuments to martyrs, Old Mortality also memorializes their social and political opposition. His efforts may be recognized only by a few, but he links them as members of a community who set themselves apart from world both spiritually and politically. …