I was reading up on the history of Zoroastrianism recently and was particularly struck by a passage that said something to the effect that, “The Priests [of whichever sect it was] gained dominance over rival sects through their mastery of purification rituals.” In other words, they won out over competitors in the public religion game because they had thought up better, and followed better, purification rituals.
Huh?
This made me realize how widespread (and exceedingly odd) the phenomenon of ritual purification/cleanliness/uncleanliness is across unrelated religions. Things like the “red tent” phenomenon of sequestering menstruating women, then having them undergo a purification ritual before they can rejoin the rest of society; clean and unclean animals; ritual handwashing; priests/shamans needing to undergo even more in-depth purification rites in order to speak with the divine/enter holy sites; etc.
So what’s the story with this? The one commonsense explanation–that it masks a more fundamental truth that cleanliness is a Good Thing, healthwise, and would be selected for whether or not people understand the reason–seems to fall apart when we consider how many disgusting things still go on in most parts of the world where germ theory, etc., is not high on people’s list (walking barefoot through parasitic-worm-ridden mud; drinking from polluted rivers; eating food that flies have been landing on; not being very careful with sewage disposal, etc.), and since most food taboos (and the menstruation taboo) have no rational basis.
Why are we obsessed with cleanliness, when we only even really discovered what it was in the last 200 years?
There has been general but undefined knowlege regarding the health value of cleanliness for far longer than 200 years. Bacteria were unknown, but there was still the knowledge that filth bred disease. The Greeks knew this, the Romans knew this. China knew this. For some bizarre reason, Europeans rejected this knowledge for a time. There is a fascinating account of European “medicine” made by an Arab Christian doctor during the Crusades. He is appalled by what he considers to be barbaric and superstitious practices of these Ferengi.
Maalouf, A. 1984. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. New York. Schocken Books.
There’s an idea, across religions, that you should be in a special state to commune with God, either doing something you wouldn’t normally do in the mundane world, or not doing something you normally would do. So, you shouldn’t look at “cleanliness” in this context as physical cleanliness (even though bathing is part of a number of cleanliness rituals), but as spiritual cleanliness…that your spirit is in the right state to meet God, whether that’s through fasting before you eat the Eucharist, like Catholics do, abstaining from sex before you offered a sacrifice at the Temple, like Jews did, or washing your face and hands with water or sand before praying, like Muslims do.
In a similar vein to what others have said. As you move through your ordinary life, you cannot do things as well and as perfectly as you would like. So you become less than you could be. Ritual cleansing is a way of reversing this and making yourself as much as you can be, so that you are fit to communicate with your deity.
Whether this purification takes place as washing, or balancing a piece of dung on your head to show humility, it seems to me to have much the same purpose, to prepare you for your communication with your deity.
I forgot to add, that this can be extended to any ‘spiritual’ activity. So a warrior might prepare him/her self for battle through a special activity, a swordsmaker might prepare themselves befor making a sword, etc. It in these and in the religious cases will also have an effect of preparing the persons mind for what is to come. It can be seen in a similar fashion with actors who have a ‘ritual’ they go through befor getting on stage, or sportspersons who have a special routine when warming up for an important match.
Yeah, I know the drill. “Thou art so groovy, and I am but mere dung. Thou art pure, and I am unworthy to clean thy toenails.” Sounds like depression to me, pal.
Everyone interested in this phenomenon owes it to themselves to read Mary Daly’s take on purification rituals (sado-rituals) as described in Gyn/Ecology. I’m no Mary Daly fan by any means but this is one of her most compelling analyses.