“The setting of Ritual, of the drama of the gods, is the cosmic entirety, and our approach to this drama might usefully be made through the comparable example of the Epic which represents also, on a different level, another access to the Rites of Passage. The epic celebrates the victory of the human spirit over forces inimical to self-extension. It concretizes in the form of action the arduous birth of the individual or communal entity, creates a new being through utilizing and stressing the language of self-glorification to which human nature is healthily prone. The dramatic or tragic rites of the gods are, however, engaged with the more profound, more elusive phenomenon of being and non-being. Man can shelve and even overwhelm metaphysical uncertainties by epic feats, and prolong such a state of social euphoria by their constant recital, but this exercise in itself proves a mere surrogate to bewildering phenomenon of the cosmic location of his being. The fundamental visceral questioning intrudes, prompted by the patient, immovable and eternal immensity that surrounds him. We may speculate that it is the reality of this undented vastness which created the need to challenge, confront and at least initiate a rapport with the realm of infinity. It was-there being no other conceivable place-the natural home of the unseen deities, a resting-place for the departed, and a staging-home for the unborn. Intuitions, sudden psychic emanations could come, logically, only from such an incomparable immensity. A chthonic [pertaining to the gods and spirits of the underworld] realm, a storehouse for creative and destructive essences, it required a challenger, a human representative to breach it periodically on behalf of the well-being of the community. The stage, the ritual arena of confrontation, came to represent the symbolic chthonic space and the presence of the challenger within it is the earliest physical expression of man’s fearful awareness of the cosmic context of his existence. Its magic microcosm is created by the communal presence, and in this charged space the chthonic inhabitants are challenged." Wole Soyinka “Myth, Literature and the African World” Page 2
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:29:48 +0000
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