Art, Ritual and Rita

The month of March for the Romans, as the first of the year, is intricately filled with festivals. Its opposite, the month of September, is virtually void of celebration. Likewise, December with the Latin yule, is the most festive month of all – with the feriae involving the winter solstice. Conversely, while the initial segment of June, December’s opposite month, does contain festivals, the second half that contains the summer solstice is surprisingly empty. By contrast, the Germanic-speaking peoples to the north appear to have more overtly always celebrated the midsummer. Each culture ‘puts together’ its celebrations differently and creates thereby something more than the mere sum of the parts – this ‘something more’ becoming in a word a signature of the culture involved.

‘Putting together’ is the root concept behind such words and concepts as art and ritual. The reconstructed Indo-European root is put as *ar-/arə-, and a number of important cognates are thought to derive from it. The ‘fitting together’ that is at the heart of this concept – the essence of both art and ritual – is perhaps best encapsulated by the Sanskrit word rita. Earlier Indic scholars frequently translated rita as ‘order’ – another cognate of ‘art’ and ‘ritual’. Rita itself became the contested ‘property’ between the gods or devas and their enemies, the anti-gods or asuras. Normally under the custodianship of Indra, the ‘king’ of the gods and personification of man/virility, it can also be seized or ‘taken over’ by Varuna. Indra’s loss of rulership, however, is always temporary. In one manner or another, he and his prototypes in other cultures (e.g., Zeus, the Hittite weather-god, etc.) regain their thrones and effective access to rita.

But if and when the asurian or anti-divine comes to possess rita as the ability to ‘put things together’ so that they are more than the sum of their parts, what form would rita then assume in the hands of the non-regenerative forces of utter annihilation? The asurian is not creative; its destructive capacities are beyond destruction. But if rita is ultimately a moral quality, what form would its ethics be in an anti-divine situation?

The answer here would need to be either or both the immoral actions of greed, violence and perversion, on the one hand, and the puritanical and anti-pleasure stance, on the other. In the countercultural days of the 1960s, this last was termed as being ‘uptight’. My wife and I during this period were students, and when we wished to attend the opera, we would purchase standing room tickets as that was all we could afford for the indulgence. During the intermission, we would go to the exits of the opera house and ask people who appeared to be leaving if we could use their seats. On one occasion, a young father was leaving with his daughter, and I went up to him and asked if he would mind if my wife and I could use his tickets since he would not be staying for the second act. The handsome man was taken back and then blurted out, “Oh, I don’t think that would be fair!” I was completely surprised and speechless as a result and unable to explain as I should have that in all other instances everyone was thrilled that their tickets and seats would not have been ‘wasted’. My wife, who had been at a different exit said afterwards not to matter; she had been given some wonderful seats by other departing people from the audience. But this for me became a definitive moment into understanding an ‘uptight’ morality. If rita is that ethos domain between the extremes of immorality and the overly strict, it is a ‘fitting together’ that conforms to equilibrium and balance.