ABSTRACT
The setting of Ritual, of the drama of the gods, is the cosmic entirety, and one's approach to this drama might usefully be made through the comparable example of the Epic which represents also, on a different level, another access to the Rites of Passage. The psychological base, the 'tragic flaw' in the hero, was a later refinement; Oedipus the Innocent remained the ethical archetype of Greek tragedy. The dramatic or tragic rites of the gods are, engaged with the more profound, more elusive phenomenon of being and non-being. In Asian and European antiquity, therefore, man did, like the African, exists within a cosmic totality, and did possess a consciousness in which his own earth being, his gravity-bound apprehension of self was inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon. Ritual drama, that is drama as a cleansing, binding, communal, recreative force, disappears or is vitiated during such periods or within such cultures which survive only by the narrowing of the cosmic whole.
