ABSTRACT
Aesthetic rituals are usually created by a group, with perhaps one person central to the conception of the whole. It would be possible to say that all activity which involves viewing and appreciating the arts is aesthetic ritual action, in that a group of people, or separate individuals, relate to symbols of an aesthetic type. For modern Westerners, and Communists in the USSR, for instance, they are not religious ritual objects, but aesthetic objects, which may nevertheless have the capacity to communicate something of a ‘numinous’ atmosphere to people who are not believers. In the case of aesthetic rituals based on myth, the relation between myth and the ritual performance is clear, and it is the reverse of what is often said by anthropologists and others about myth and ritual. The key area where church ritual has departed from other ritual actions is in dance.
