Abstract:

The symbolism of chaos which emerges from the “amusements” around which traditional Irish funerals were organized brings home an essential truth about corporate rituals: that they serve to focus our awareness of a global truth embodied within an articulated gesture of human meaning. In the act which signifies a specific dying, a message about all human life is encapsulated. The funeral is seen as a communication about survival. Examples of this are given, and it is argued that the structure of such ceremonies reveals the underlying function of ritual itself. Corporate rites present us with a paradigm of the use of chaos to clear a way for new kinds of order. In their three-fold configuration, rites of passage reveal the need for genuine beginnings to be preceded by actual endings.

Author: Roger Grainger