Literature and Sport as Ritual and Fantasy

Abstract

In From Ritual to Romance, first published in 1920 and an important source for T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Jessie L. Weston pointed to evolution of literature from previous rituals that gave rise to form of romance. Pursuing convergent interests to those in Sir James Frazer's analysis of primitive religion and ritual contained in The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion (1922), she found that quest of grail was based on various myths and cults--the principal one being triumph of life-giving deity and restoration of land to health and fecundity. Similar studies, by Gilbert Murray of Epic and Tragedy and by Francis Macdonald Cornford of Attic Comedy, traced origins of these literary forms to some of same primitive rituals. Allen Guttmann, in From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sport, has emphasized role of ritual in sports and quotes noted sport historian Carl Diem that physical exercises were originally cultic (16); he has argued that sport has a global, universal appeal, yet of sport reflects particular environment in which it existed and flourished. It has been noted by philologist George Lakoff, in Metaphors We Live By, that fundamental concepts such as ritual and fantasy can be powerful metaphors that reflect values deeply embedded in our culture (22), and give enhanced meaning to our lives. Claude Levi-Strauss taught us how to decipher universal and concurrent meanings from global rituals. And Roland Barthes found in sport--e.g. wrestling--a metaphor or structure that contained same underlying meanings that literature reflected: On a deja note qu'en Amerique le catch figure une sort de combat mythologique entre le Bien et le Mal. . (19).[1] Roger Caillois, in Jeux et Sports, argued dominant role of sport in world and presented an encyclopedic classification of sport and games by four types: agon, based on competition, alea, on chance, mimicry, on imitation, and ilinx, or voluptuous panic (173). Guttmann, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, and Caillois all concur that there is, according to Karl Beckson's definition, a second, or allegorical meaning to ritual, literature, sport, and games. Games, like literary genres, are as varied as cultures that have produced them. Some games reflect artifacts of primitive man; archery was created as far back as Paleolithic age, for example, and golf and perhaps game of hockey derived from idle pursuits of shepherd, his crook applied to rocks---no doubt with a mixture of accuracy and frustration. Football probably evolved from games in which skull of defeated enemy was used as first pigskin and certainly would account for etiology of game's brutality, similarly shown in medieval running of gauntlet and other modern hazing. Other games, like baseball, are said to have ritual origins either in an ancient Egyptian stick game as advocated by Herodotus, in fertility rights, or in expulsion of demons in China, as suggested by Huizinga. In any event, there was representation of cosmic relations between god and man, universal myth of solar-lunar conjunction in seasonal struggle between winter and spring. In Mesoamerican artifacts, there is evidence of such struggles represented in athletic contests---here is where rubber ball was created in pre-historic ages, and playing field itself was sacred ground. The artifacts of clothed warriors suggest dress for gods, warriors, and athletes---all of who occupied a high place in and religion and attest to significance of play in Americas at an early time. In Mayan theology, maize god was reborn on ball-field. The sacrifice of defeated army to decapitation or evisceration might have been associated with ritual practices of Incas and Aztecs. Paul Plass has made connection between gladiator sport and politics in The Game of Death in Ancient Rome, defining them as the political uses of public bloodshed, and describing them as spectator events that celebrate dismemberment and cruelty aimed at renewal of community's vigor through furious discharge of energy (14). …

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