ABSTRACT
The principal scholarly models of ritual explain it in functionalist terms as a behavior which increases group cohesion, or as a symbolic language by which people communicate meaning between and within social groups. Actual participants in religious rituals, meanwhile, often describe them as efficacious methods for achieving desired goals or for communicating with gods. Cognitive approaches to ritual trace its characteristic features to intuitive processes, including those which have evolved to help us identify threats in the environment. Whitehouse’s modes theory asks how certain features of a given ritual system, such as frequency and emotional intensity, correlate with its social context and the types of memory activated in its transmission. McCauley and Lawson’s ritual form theory proposes that ritual features are tied to the relative agency of gods and worshipers in a given ritual. Greek rituals were located in time by the festival calendar, and in space by the sanctuary and the procession. Animal sacrifice, the most important Greek ritual, has generated a long history of interpretation. The illustrative essays examine sacrifice in the Koan festival for Zeus Polieus, trace the growth of Theseus’ cult in Athens and apply ritual form theory to a sample of Greek rituals.
