Initiation and Priestly Ordination
One set of rituals under investigation are those rituals of initiation which, in the end, make the respective person eligible to perform the temple rituals. Only these temple priests (arcaka), the bearer of “ritual competence”, are eligible and capable to perform the rituals for the main deities in the three temples – they are the only ones who may be in physical contact with the god or goddess (that is, with the idols in which the god or goddess is present).
These temple priests are the group studied most intensively, for various reasons: they enact the rituals, they are in charge of preserving the textual and performative ritual tradition, and they are – in certain contexts – identified with the god.
Becoming an Arcaka is a long and intricate process. This kind of ritual competence is not available to everybody, but only to a specific group. Moreover, only if a complex set of preconditions is fulfilled can the respective person undergo several life-cycle and initiatory rituals which in the end make him eligible to act as fully fledged priest. Here this process, in which several steps are ritually marked, is referred to as “initiation into priesthood”, since today's education as ritual specialist takes place before and after the initiation.
The project concentrates on the actual initiation rituals as they are described in the relevant (ritual) texts and as they are performed and interpreted at present, but also takes into consideration the changing process of acquiring theoretical and practical ritual competence, because the temple priests’ eligibility to perform the rituals is under constant threat. For example in mid-May 2006 the State Cabinet of Tamil Nadu tried to implement the legislation that “qualified persons of any caste can be priests in any temple run by the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments”. Here, the actual measures taken by priests facing these threats of their eligibility to perform the rituals in this temple are of prime importance. Therefore the investigation is extended to other aspects of authorisation and agency of the ritual specialists – for example to the measures taken by the diverse families to cope with these uncertainties. Here, a change in the attitude towards the education of future temple priests is clearly discernible. While some families try to minimise or avoid the risks by sending some of their sons for “outside jobs”, others continue the family tradition, and try to counter the threat by sending their children to so-called “Āgama schools”. Initiated by government reforms, these Āgama schools also account for the “Vedicization” of temple rituals, because the young priests in these special schools learn Vedic recitation along with the Āgamic rituals. Since these schools are mainly established and maintained by the state, it is evident that the changed relation of state and religion in the colonial and post-colonial periods, brought with it a change in the concept of „what and how a priest ought to learn and know“.
These new āgama schools are now interfering with the traditions and threaten the orthodoxy by allowing for a professional priesthood, i.e. disestablishing hereditary priesthood. Before this may happen, we aim to study the family specific strategies to acquire, perpetuate and secure ritual competence. The focus here is on the texts used for the education and on the ways of socialization as priests. It has become clear by now, that this new kind of learning exists side by side with the more traditional use of texts. Although the Āgama schools did in fact change many facets of priestly education to a considerable degree, there are also some important continuities: transmission of ritual competence through mimesis, inscribing the action into the body. A great deal of priestly competence is achieved through watching, „being with elders”, playing priest, and imitating the ritual actions.
Our research done so far thus supports Wulf & Zirfas' thesis that ritual knowledge is acquired predominantly mimetically. They further reason that an understanding of rituals as text runs the risk of marginalizing the actual (material) performance and its ability to creatively shape reality in favor of a symbolic commentary. However, the actors' frequently expressed understanding of rituals as text (they usually describe the norm rather than the praxis; the 'text' is often rather imaginary) may be an important strategy to bestow continuity upon the in fact constantly changing rituals. Moreover, it turns out that there are many textual genres that do in fact play a significant role in the performance of rituals and in their transmission. These texts are not only diverse in character but also in their use. And it seems that main actors’ the declared belief in certain scripts ought to be interpreted not as a word for word execution of the prescriptions listed therein, but that the relation of text and execution within the tradition has to be understood differently, partly because the concept of “knowledge of texts” mainly refers to the fact that one knows what the text refers to and is able to enact it, in accordance not only with the textual prescription but also with the expectations of other participants in the ritual.
Here, the importance of creativity for competent acting becomes evident. The dichotomy of a ritual as described in a text, and its actual performance shows that even when there is a seemingly fixed structure or script, the creative acting of the participants and their creative response to contingencies and to the concrete context of the performance is as crucial to the enactment of the ritual as the (normative) ritual text.
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