ABSTRACT
Plutarch said: “At Athens, Lysimache, the priestess of Athene Polias, when asked for a drink by the mule drivers who had transported the sacred vessels, replied, ‘No, for I fear it will get into the ritual’” (quoted in Smith 1982: 53-65). There is reason within ritual. Ritual is not the merely mechanical repetition of an act whose form and content is fixed rigidly in advance. When G.K.Chesterton inveighed against “the man of science, [who] not realizing that ceremonial is essentially a thing which is done without a reason, has to find a reason for every sort of ceremonial” (1905:144), he was wrong to deny reason as such to ritual, although he was of course right in his condemnation of the man of science (for instance, the author of The Golden Bough), who seeks to reduce the reason in ritual to that of science, the only kind of reason he knows. Whenever a ritual is performed, there are decisions to be made-about what to leave in, and what to leave out, about how to adapt the model to the circumstances. Ritual acts must “fit” the situation in which they are performed, and ritual acts must “work” (whatever it is for a ritual act to “work,” or preserve that which is essential to it qua ritual of a given type). The priestess of Athene Polias had to think about what made her ritual the ritual it was, and be led by this to decide which modifications are, and which are not, consistent with its unity and function.
