"Approved Flesh": The Sacrificial Foundations of Modernity in Peter Shaffer's Equus

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world."

—Max Weber¹

Introduction

Modern Western civilization, in its curiosity toward the exotic, has avidly studied ritual in other societies, yet has tended to avoid the study of ritual in its own society.² It is as if the contemporary West feels itself immune to ritual's "anachronistic" or "regressive" nature, which appears to contrast with the West's sense of its own enlightenment or progress. Peter Shaffer's Equus, however, suggests the ritual nature of Modern secular society through the play's portrayal of a psychiatrist's treatment of an adolescent boy who has blinded six horses with a metal spike in a moment of apparent religious fury. Yet it is not only the boy's sacrificial impulse or primitive "religiosity" that the play examines, but the apparent sacrificial underpinnings of Western society as well, including the underlying motivations of the boy's thoroughly (or ostensibly) rational, secular, and civilized psychiatrist.

In Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Catherine Bell wrote that "despite the abundance of ethnographic studies of ritual in predominantly oral societies, it is important to note that we do not know nearly as much as we should about ritual in literate, stratified, industrial, and postindustrial societies."³ Meanwhile, Roy A. Rappaport, in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, wrote of the intrinsic relationship between ritual and human culture generally. Arguing that "religion's major conceptual and experiential constituents… are creations of ritual,"⁴ Rappaport contended "that religion's origins are, if not one with the origins of humanity, closely connected to them."⁵ So crucial has ritual been to human societies, he states, that it "is without equivalence or even… satisfactory alternatives. This may go a long way toward accounting for the ubiquity of ritual, a ubiquity that approaches universality; no society is devoid of what a reasonable observer would recognize as ritual."⁶

Rappaport's observations about the "ubiquity" and near "universality" of ritual, and of ritual's "close connection" to if not coidentity with "the origins of humanity," are suggestive of ritual's fundamental place in contemporary Western civilization. Yet as Barry Stephenson notes in Ritual: A Very Short Introduction, "Through the twentieth century the idea of ritual impoverishment develops; one of the ills of Western culture is the absence of ritual."⁷ Echoing Rappaport, however, other commentators, Ernest Becker and René Girard among them, have seen ritual, and the violence with which it is typically bound up, as being fundamental to any society, including that of the West. Becker saw the "terror of death"⁸ as the basis of human culture, and believed that "Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbol system that is covertly religious."⁹ This vision of ritual's importance resonates with Girard's assertion that "we have entered an era when anthropology will become a more relevant tool than political science."¹⁰ For Girard, "it is not surprising that men are doomed to ritual,"¹¹ which he characterized as "nothing more than the regular exercise of 'good' violence."¹² Elsewhere, he contended that "human culture is predisposed to the permanent concealment of its origins in collective violence."¹³ While in his book Battling to the End Girard analyzed modern warfare as a fundamentally sacrificial or ritualistic human expression, Tobin Siebers observes a ritualistic impulse in contemporary art, contending that "the ease with which mechanical reproduction represents human violence forces art to return to the scene of its emergence from ritual, where human violence and the rise of signifying practices were first fused together."¹⁴

For Girard, as for Rappaport, "religion is everywhere, and… must be the origin of everything," which accounts for "the only things that are common to all cultures… language, ritual and God."¹⁵ Girard further argued that "Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely."¹⁶ If...