Rites of the God-King offers a critical revision of mainstream Hinduism from the perspective of the life of a single ritual from medieval India. Drawing theoretical connections to modern ethnographies, it raises questions about the nature of kingship and priesthood, image-worship, and ritual change.
Focusing on the tension between the purity and impurity of the "devadasis"--a handful of female devotees of the Hindu temple and cult of Jagannatha at Puri--this book examines ideas about kingship, power, sexual purity, the role and status of women, and other central concerns of Hindu religious and cultural life.
From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.
Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. Hitch explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech.