ABSTRACT
Rituals may be disdained, others accepted as social obligation, some with wholehearted enthusiasm. The psychic attachment to each is a matter for the individual. But ritual occasions and their references also set social rhythms of historical identification. Regular festivals or fairs, theatrical performances and other displays and stories commemorate these occasions. The repetition, annual, five-yearly, whatever, is then repetition of origination just as it is of an ancestor or an historical foundation and its anniversary. The beings celebrated and pictured in Chinese local festivals are addressed as actual historical persons. ‘Once Christianity became established, every place came to have its patron saint or saints. These fulfilled the functions of the local gods or tutelary spirits found elsewhere in the world’. Official histories, dissenting histories, and the myths, festivals, theatre, and ritual of popular gods are all open to being interpreted as operations of historical signification and its celebration.
