Ritual as Cosmogony

In his The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs , Jan Assmann notes the two purposes of rituals that mimicked “cosmic life and the cyclical recurrence of its natural phenomenon: day and night, summer and winter, the motions of the stars, the inundations of the Nile, sowing and reaping, decay and regeneration.”

The assumption is that the sacred is timelessly unchanging, and that ritual is a prophylactic against change: “The purpose of this ritual mimesis was dual: first, it was designed to incorporate the human world and its routines into the sacred circularity of cosmic life, thus countering decline and decay with a chance of regeneration (which in Egypt meant in the first place ensuring the prospect of new life after death); second, it served to sustain cosmic life in its circularity, not merely to ‘keep’ time by observing calendrical progress but actually to generate it.  The ritual calendar was not just a representation of the cosmos, but a cultural form that stabilized the cosmos it represented.  The motive for repetition was not . . . that the gods are conservative and only want to hear the same formulas repeated in perpetuity, but the conviction that the cyclical stability of the cosmos is constantly in jeopardy and has to be sustained by ritual repetition.  The ritual institutionalization of permanence thus has a cosmic significance: it generates cultural order with a view to sustaining cosmic order; memoria is raised to the rank of cosmogony.  The world is commemorated in order to counterbalance the perpetual drift toward decline, inertia, entropy, chaos.”