Ritual, Commemoration, Anniversaries, and the Year

Last night, I attended my newly graduated friend's going away party. Dr. David Divalerio, or Divo, as we call him, will be moving to Wisconsin for a tenure track position in the field of Tibetan Studies. Several persons attended whom I will not see for a while, if ever. It was a fun evening, with games and talk on all sorts of topics. As the evening drew to a close, I made a point of saying goodbye to each person there, as I myself will quite soon be leaving the country for a couple months. I asked about their summer, when we would next see each other, and offered respectful appreciations, fond wishes and the like. It was bittersweet, but in many ways, made for an 'almost ritual' process.

I say 'almost ritual', because I don't want to imply that I was simply going through the motions. Each person there has been a friend to me for some time now, and I will sincerely miss their company. Even a number of them expressed similar feelings about the departure.

When I had completed the circuit, I took one final look back at these friends, waved goodbye to all of them at once, and turned to the door. As I left, the feeling of the moment fell upon me with greater force, and it occurred to me then just why we humans love our rituals. That moment, with those friends there, was as religious a gathering as any that I attend these days. 90% of the people there were religious studies majors, and so it was natural that I should feel at home in their company. But the present feelings of warmth and laughter needed to be brought to a close, so that the commemoration of our friendships, the acknowledgement of the inscrutibility of providence over the future, would be given its space. And it seems to me that no other activity could have been more appropriate.

We feel cheated when our friends depart without saying goodbye to us, as much as we might feel awkward in having said goodbye and then lingering in that person's presence. The 'goodbye' ritual is one that pervades human society as an almost perennial religious act, because it serves a felt need to commemorate the closing of one period in our life, so as to make ready for the next.

Similarly, the practice of commemorating yearly cycles through ritual dramatizations of past events embodies a certain sort of religiosity. But this very sort of religiosity is one which is specifically oriented toward temporality in such a way as to assert the recurrence of the eternal within the temporal, like a play, a drama, that recures time and again throughout beginningless and endless time. This sense of beginningless and endless time is what Gauḍīya thinkers such as Prabhupada call 'sanātana'. It has been used as a name for each of the primal devas in various texts.₁

The commemoration of events through ritual dramatization repeats the past in a certain sense, and thus gives us a sense of the past, it is a history in its rudimentary form, in the form of a narrative, a retelling, a reflection which tries to embody. This largely constitutes an exercise of memory then, an exercise which is aimed to preserve a narrative, one in which the past is re-presented, or made to join back to the present.

The basic unit of this cycle is the anniversary, the annus-versus, or yearly-turning.₃ We see in the anniversary the tendency of our most basic commemorations, our rejoining to memory, the events of the past. But there is an almost obvious difference between that of the goodbye ceremony at the beginning of the summer and, say, the anniversary of one's father's death. In the former, the ceremony is intended to make possible a completed break from the moment, to allow for a moving on. Whereas, in the latter case, we may often find that this completed break feels so violent that the anniversary rather becomes an opportunity to return to the past, to revisit that moment, to reopen it once again, through com-memoration.

Particularly when death is involved, it seems that we might often use the anniversary to move in the opposite direction of that which is felt in the well-performed goodbye ceremony. Is the commemoration of the death of a loved one, repeated over and over, year after year, a sign of the brokenness of the ceremony? We can recall Levinas' phenomenon of the Face, and reflect on how a person's face can hold our attention, how it can matter greatly to the completion of the ceremony. It is as if we need the benediction of the Face for the ceremony to properly achieve its finality, to enable the moving on to other things. Commemoration in this sense, can thus become a pulling back from the finality of death, or at least an acknowledgement of the inability to move beyond it. But moreover, it is for this reason that we cannot expect to be rid of our religious institutions without also ridding ourselves of some extremely basic human goods. If it came down to it, would you discard all commemorations, all rituals of rememberance, all practices of salutation? For in these, we have the seeds, already, of new religions.

But if this is one function of the anniversary, it is not the only one. J. Gonda points out in his work, Prajapati and the Year, that
the yearly cycle is a globally pervasive structure upon which many events can be correlated, organized, and commemorated, and by which, many popular rituals are structured.₂ In this sense, the Year is theologically or metaphysically active; it has a God-like influence. Thus, the practice of rituals, bounded to a yearly cycle, constitutes a recurrence of the theological question of God's presence and transcendence. As I have spoken about this at length in other places, I will refrain from repeating myself here. However, it will be important for me to explore further the relationship between God, Time, the Year, and Ritual as my studies progress.

Endnotes:

1: Monier Williams does provides a textual reference for Viṣṇu as 'Sanātana', in the bhaṭṭi-kāvya. The citation titles for brahma, and śiva are given as 'lexicographers'.

2. In the Vedic period, such correlations between ritual and annual cycles were made quite explicit and constituted a form of theology of Time. Even today, we find such traditions as with the Kala-cakra-tantra innitiation in Tibetan Buddhism, a ritual which stretches over 12 days, commemorating the 12 months of the year. Such a ritual structure echoes the ancient Vedic rites. Indeed, we might say the same of the 12 days of Christmas, which has a central importance to Christians, and is located approximately at the Winter solstice. It seems to me unlikely these are mere coincidences.

3: the verbal root 'versus' is nearly the same in Sanskrit, 'varta', and which in many of its derived terms carries the connotation of temporal existence. Philologically speaking, this does provide some evidence for a culture of cyclic time outside of India.