La stringa rituale: una teoria delle varianti ritualistiche attraverso l’analisi di un sacrificio indiano antico

Abstract

Ritual is a creative and artistic action – this is the central idea of this paper – and the proof of this suggestion is that every ritual could attest several variants. Through a deep survey on the aśvamedha in the Hindū textual sources, the author tries to demonstrate that in the religious history of India various aśvamedhas ex-ist. The ritual dynamics goes through the creation of a ritual string – a sequence of acts – the performers can transform and modify creating new strings. The analysis of the aśvamedha reveals a lot of problematic elements proving different ways to celebrate the same rite. The ritual string is the concept through which the author tries to understand the mechanism of ritual attitude: like grammar, the ritual has a cybernetic dimension and the ritual variability could be the new frontier of the researches about this.