The ritual of the royal bath in Madagascar: the dissolution of death, birth and fertility into authority 1

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to study particular meaning and general significance simultaneously. It describes and analyses the ritual of the royal bath. The chapter investigates the background of contemporary non-royal rituals of death, birth and fertility. It emphasizes the unity of meaning and function in royal rituals. In fact rituals which are more or less distant variants of the Merina ritual of the royal bath occur among many other peoples in Madagascar and beyond; this has led to many discussions which take in, at one time, these numerous variants. By the ritual, the authority of the king was naturalized, in that it was merged with cycles existing beyond human action and therefore human challenge. People aligned themselves along the lines of social linkages, especially along the lines of authority marked by the unequally reciprocated gift of the jaka . Furthermore, because of the calendrical nature of the ritual, this social order became part of temporal and astrological order.

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