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4 The Initiation of the Philosopher: Ritual Poetics and the Quest for Meaning IN A CLASSIC DEFINITION, CLIFFORD GEERTZ ARGUES THAT RELIGION constitutes a complex system of symbols, offering both a context and an order for various moods and motivations.1 Religion provides an interlocking set of codes by which a community, and the individuals within that community, formulate an “order of the world which will account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes of human experience.”2 Religious symbols and their semantics not only reflect particular social situations, but they also reshape such situations in the light of the problems of meaning that arise in real human experiences. Ritual activity is an essential component within this construction of meaning. In ritual, according to Geertz, “the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world.”3 Rituals function in at least two ways. On the one hand, they give bodily activity and motion cosmic significance. On the other, they provide an awareness, a form of consciousness , that is central to the formation of meaning.4 Ritual activity is, thus, interpretive. Such activity provides a focusing lens through which the individual perceives and reflects upon his or her own situation in the light of an ideal.5 The present chapter explores key features of ritual activity in order to illumine the H . ayy ibn Yaqz .ān cycle from another dimension. Whereas other chapters in this study have examined or will examine the literary , aesthetic, and psychological facets of these tales, the focus now switches to their sensual and kinesthetic apparati to show how these generate meaning. For even a cursory reading of these texts reveals a fullness of ritual vocabulary and a conceptual framework in which it is expressed. In each of these three narratives, we encounter for example 26001-04.qxd 10/8/03 16:14 Page 115 the relinquishing of one’s home and family, and the motion toward a certain goal. This journey, in turn, is informed by ritual activity: the protagonist becomes an initiate who must undergo baptisms in springs, encounters with eternal fires, and ascents up sacred mountains. The goal here is to show that these features are not arbitrary, but are crucial to unlocking the hermeneutical secrets of these works. Since ritual activity is a complex religious and social medium, it plays a variety of roles and communicates a density of meanings.6 Although there exists no unified theory of ritual, the work of van Gennep and Turner looms large.7 In what follows, I adopt and adapt parts of their theories in order to shed light on these tales. In doing this, my intention is not to put a rigid or artificial framework on these tales, making them conform to a modern theory that stresses the tripartite dimension of ritual . On the contrary, my goal is to use ritual theory as a light with which to illumine some of the inner dimensions of these narratives. Sometimes there exists a very close fit between the theory and the tale (especially in ibn Ezra’s account); other times the fit is less evident. Despite this, however , I persist in the attempt to take particular aspects of ritual theory to show how it aids our understanding of the telos that we encounter in all three of these tales: the initiation of the philosopher. However, a problem immediately presents itself. A rite is a performance and we have no evidence that these tales were ever performed. There is, then, a certain hermeneutical gap between a textual or symbolic account of ritual activity on the one hand, and an actual performance of it on the other.8 But this gap need not be prohibitive, since, as I stated at the outset, these texts reflect broader cultural and intellectual concerns . In particular, how is it possible to apprehend the divine? Under what circumstances can this occur? It is in response to such questions that we need to contextualize these tales. According to Eliade, the rite of passage provides the vehicle by which the initiate can potentially attain religious perfection.9 I wish to elaborate on his insight by arguing that the H . ayy ibn Yaqz .ān cycle provides the dynamics by which the initiate achieves intellectual perfection, which in medieval philosophical parlance was tantamount to religious perfection. These tales are ritualistic in both form and function. However, the...

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