Purity and Danger

“In this book I have tried to show that rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience. So far from being aberrations from the central project of religion, they are positive contributions to atonement.”

One of the aims of Douglas’s book is to dispute certain views of earlier anthropologists, including the view that purity rules represent a “primitive” (in the pejorative sense) pre-rational mindset. On the contrary, Douglas finds them tied to universal human religious feelings and perceptions, especially those related to making reparation for sin. By performing a sacrificial ritual, one can atone for an offense against the moral law.

“For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience.”

For Douglas, purity rituals and beliefs are fundamentally about order and disorder. They are a way to make sense out of human life, which can seem messy and chaotic. Therefore, they include an element of rational classification, with items that don't belong being excluded.

“The more we know about primitive religions the more clearly it appears that in their symbolic structures there is scope for meditation on the great mysteries of religion and philosophy. Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.”

Here, Douglas again emphasizes that primitive religions can be a portal to understanding universal human concepts and experiences. It is her novel contribution to suggest that beliefs about dirt (i.e., impurity) can also contribute to this. This is because dirt can symbolize religious concepts like disorder, evil, and death.

“It is true that there can be a marvelous correspondence between the avoidance of contagious disease and ritual avoidance. The washings and separations which serve the one practical purpose may be apt to express religious themes at the same time. So it has been argued that their rule of washing before eating may have given the Jews immunity in plagues.”

In this passage, Douglas addresses the common notion that ancient purity rules can be interpreted in light of our modern knowledge of hygiene. The two may coincide, but they cannot be explained solely on this basis. Rather, the rules have a symbolic, spiritual, and ethical meaning.

“There is a comfortable assumption in the roots of our culture that foreigners know no true spiritual religion.”

Douglas wants to close the false dichotomy between “physical” and “spiritual” religion—that is, between a religious system that emphasizes bodily purity and one that emphasizes spiritual purity and moral virtue. She wants to show that ancient purity customs were not purely physical but had deep spiritual content. An example is the dietary prohibitions of ancient Judaism, which symbolized the Jews' covenant relationship with God.

“A contrast between interior will and exterior enactment goes deep into the history of Judaism and Christianity.”

In this passage, Douglas draws a contrast between inner religious concepts and how they are expressed in external actions. For example, the ancient Jew could hold the idea of being pure in heart, and express this in the act of abstaining from pork (an “impure” animal). In Christianity, the perception that religious ritual had hardened into routine and lacked interior motivation was one of the factors that led to the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.

“The long history of Protestantism witnesses to the need for continual watch on the tendency of ritual form to harden and replace religious feeling.”

The Protestant reformers were concerned that the rituals of Christianity, such as the Mass, Confession and indulgences, were becoming sterile and mechanical and were not backed up by sincere sentiment. Douglas argues that the reformers inaugurated a longstanding anti-ritualist tradition, one that sometimes went so far as to mock the truths the rituals stand for (76). While acknowledging that the reformers' criticism of “dead formality” had some value, she cautions against importing this bias into our judgments of other religions.

“For it is a mistake to suppose that there can be religion which is all interior, with no rules, no liturgy, no external signs of inward states. As with society, so with religion, external form is the condition of its existence.”

Douglas acknowledges that it is natural for humans, having physical bodies, to express themselves through their bodies and external gestures. In this, religion is no different from society, which also relies on external gestures to express social relationships. It is worth noting that Douglas was raised as a Catholic and so may have been particularly disposed toward the idea of ritualism—i.e., that external ritual expresses spiritual states.

“Not only does ritual aid us in selecting experiences for concentrated attention. It is also creative at the level of performance. For an external symbol can mysteriously help the co-ordination of brain and body.”

Douglas is expressing the theme that ritual puts a “frame” or limit around certain human experiences. Moreover, it ties the spiritual and physical together. Douglas cites the example of an actor whom a physical prop inspires to give a perfect and moving performance.

“The difference between us is not that our behavior is grounded on science and theirs on symbolism. Our behavior also carries symbolic meaning.”

Here, Douglas again is reacting against earlier anthropological views which have filtered into our common way of thinking about “primitive” versus “modern” societies. Douglas believes that our modern purity practices are often symbolic in nature—for example, when we have separate bathrooms for men and women in a house, we are drawing boundaries and creating a particular sort of social order similar to what might be done in an African tribe. 

“Money is only an extreme and specialised type of ritual.”

The subject of money and currency comes up as a result of Douglas’s discussion of magic and ritual. She sees money as similar to ritual in that it is a “fixed, external, recognizable sign” that “mediates transactions” and “makes a link between the present and the future.” In addition, the efficacy of money relies on the people having faith in what it represents, much like a ritual.

 “So far from being meaningless, it is primitive magic which gives meaning to existence.”

Douglas is once again reacting against dismissive attitudes of earlier anthropologists toward the idea of magic and ritual. She sees magic not as irrational but as something that creates order, hierarchy, and can bring healing to people and society. She cites as an example a “Shamanistic cure” in an African village, in which a sick man toward whom many people in the village bore a grudge was cured by having the villagers air their grievances against him.

“So impersonal elements in the universe are credited with discrimination which enables them to intervene in human affairs and uphold the moral code.”

Here, Douglas is describing the primitive view of the universe—including storms, weather and the elements—as personal and involved in human affairs, in contrast to our modern scientific view but similar to the religious view of Jews, Christians and Muslims in which God is a personal being who intervenes in human affairs.

“Witches are social equivalents of beetles and spiders who live in the cracks of the walls and wainscoting. They attract the fears and dislikes which other ambiguities and contradictions attract in other thought structures, and the kind of powers attributed to them symbolise their ambiguous, inarticulate status.”

Douglas analyzes witches as figures belonging to the margins of society. They are in a sense like the “anomalous” animals claimed to be unclean in some ancient societies. Exposing their witchcraft is an attempt to bring their rebellious activity under control.

“[T]here are no grounds for supposing that primitive culture as such is the product of a primitive type of individual whose personality resembles that of infants or neurotics.”

In this passage, Douglas is reacting against the view propounded by psychoanalytical thinkers that primitive culture is the projection of individual quirks and hang-ups, and that its aim is to escape from the hard realities of life and death. Rather, the human body is conceived as a symbol of the social body. Many primitive rituals confront the realities of life and death, rather than avoiding them.

“Do [primitive cultures] try to ignore the unity of death and life? On the contrary, my impression is that those rituals which most explicitly credit corrupt matter with power are making the greatest effort to affirm the physical fullness of reality.”

As in the previous quote, Douglas is reacting against psychoanalytical interpretations of primitive culture. It is not the case that primitive ritual attempts to deny the reality of death and evil, but rather to confront it and incorporate it into a coherent system of belief. An example is the Nyakyusa sweeping dirt onto mourners at a funeral.

“The rituals enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expression they enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body.”

In primitive cultures, the body is used as a symbol or metaphor for society at large—the social body or body politic. The body also mirrors the relationships in society at large, and bodily health can symbolize the health of a society. For example, an African shaman's cure of a villager's physical illness took place in conjunction with healing the social breaches that had developed between him and the other villagers.

“In the beginning of the twentieth century it was held that primitive ideas of contagion had nothing to do with ethics […][It] remains to show that pollution had indeed much to do with morals.”

Another of the false dichotomies Douglas attempts to expose is that between religion (or ritual) and ethics. Early anthropologists portrayed human religious development as an evolution from external ritual to a concern with ethical action. Douglas desires to show that the old rituals embodied ethical ideals and expressed moral rules.

“The two dominant beliefs in [the Engas'] culture are the superiority of the male principle and its vulnerability to female influence.”

Douglas is analyzing a society, the Mae Enga people of Papua New Guinea, in which there is a strong element of antagonism between the sexes. It is believed that the sexes pose a danger to each other and that men in particular will be contaminated by contact, sexual or otherwise, with women. Douglas sees this as caused by the fact that the men choose their wives from neighboring—that is, foreign—clans.

“Female pollution in a society of this type is largely related to the attempt to treat women simultaneously as persons and as the currency of male transactions. Males and females are set off as belonging to distinct, mutually hostile spheres. Sexual antagonism inevitably results and this is reflected in the idea that each sex constitutes a danger to the other.”

This expands upon the previous quote in describing the sexual hostility among the Mae Enga, a hostility rooted in the efforts of men to acquire control over multiple women as they climb the social ladder. Inevitably, this antagonism created paradoxes and instability in the society and destroyed the natural harmony between the sexes.

“The primitive church of the Acts in its treatment of women was setting a standard of freedom and equality which was against the traditional Jewish custom. The barrier of sex in the Middle East at that time was barrier of oppression, as St. Paul's words imply.”

Douglas ties together her researches into primitive societies with the history of early Christianity. She implies that St. Paul, in saying that there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus, was reacting against the sexual strife he observed in Middle Eastern societies and proposing a new model to follow. The idea that virginity had a special positive value was also related to this, since the Virgin Mary was envisioned as destroying evil by becoming the mother of Jesus and thus inaugurating a new social order.

“If this social order has to be changed, the Second Eve, a virgin source of redemption crushing evil underfoot, is a potent new symbol to present.”

Douglas argues that early Christianity extolled virginity in order to counteract the adversarial sexual relationships common in societies of the time. She specifically alludes to the Christian theological idea that the Virgin Mary was the Second Eve, undoing the sin of Eve by accepting to be the mother of Jesus—an idea derived from the Book of Revelation and expounded by St. Paul, who also asserted that “in Christ Jesus there is no male or female.”

“If the faithful have come to think of rites as a means to health and prosperity, like so many magic lamps to be worked by rubbing, there comes a day when the whole ritual apparatus must seem an empty mockery. Somewhere the beliefs must be safeguarded against disappointment or they may not hold assent.”

In primitive societies, magic and ritual function in an instrumental way, promising material benefits if one obeys moral code. Douglas reasons that those religions that most emphasize material benefits are most vulnerable to disbelief if the benefits do not happen. Therefore, such religions must set up safeguards against disappointment. One such safeguard is to posit that an enemy of the social order, like a witch or sorcerer, is continually undoing its good effect (215).