6 - Secret thoughts and shared understandings

Summary

In the previous chapter I reasoned in terms of the actions of a single ritual leader's consciousness, working with culturally given materials and clarifying or harmonizing sets of implications and associations of the sacred symbols. When the products of such work are incorporated in public rituals and assimilated by the audiences, the result is an ordering and elaboration of the fans of connotations that characterize sacred symbols. In this way, the cosmological constructions of the different Ok sub-traditions are developed and elaborated in different directions. But there is also another aspect of the private use of symbols: when culturally validated and standardized symbols are used as vehicles for substituted themes and fantasies by the individual. If such themes and fantasies have a repressed or subconscious character, a disposition towards them may be widely present or easily induced, and thereby they may become shared in an audience or congregation through only mild suggestion and innuendo, perhaps largely unconscious both on the part of the person who originates the process and those who are influenced by it. Implicit and supressed metathemes can thus become established and developed, and thereupon be articulated and made explicit, till finally they become recognized as the essential themes of the ritual in question.