With the flurry of cleaning that traditionally marks the coming of the new year in my household, I began to think about cleaning as a ritual act, evident across so many cultures. Perhaps the most well-known in the western secular world is the tradition of spring cleaning, with possible roots in the Persian new year tradition of kahneh tekani (“shaking the house”); Jewish Passover traditions; Maundy Thursday altar cleanings, foot washings; and so on. The Japanese similarly have a new years’ tradition called o-souji, a weeks-long deep decluttering and dusting.
In the context of Sinhalese performance, cleaning is a highly significant, carefully ritualized component of most ceremonies. Ritual practitioners of the Dewol Madu Shanthikarmaya, for example, will often practice abstinence from meat and alcohol leading up to a ceremony, and wear fresh white cloth. The ritual performance space, the ranga bhoomiya, is not only cleaned but further festooned with fresh flowers, gok-kola (palm leaf) artwork, and lamps; this extensive preparation is a communal activity that often engages an entire village for weeks, in an overspilling of human effort. During the ceremony itself, the ritual space is regularly refreshed with kaha diya (turmeric water) and anguru dummal (charcoal smoke).
In the Sinhalese ritual context (and I suspect this to be true of most religious rituals), the aim of cleaning and decorating is to create beauty as a divine offering or bribe, in order to attract the beneficent gaze of gods. In other words, it is believed that the pleasant appearance, fragrance, aroma, flavour, and sounds of a ritual ceremony attract divine interest, just as they attract the interest of humans.
There is indeed a kind of duality at work in ritual cleaning, then, and in ritual overall, in that it is something done both for the benefit of gods and for the benefit of humans, and these are inextricably entwined. In the ritual context, the cleaning of outer space is a means of purifying the inner space of mind and spirit as well: a kind of ritualized therapy.
The persistence of cleaning rituals, even into these secular times, causes me to consider the therapeutic, mental or emotional effects of cleanliness and order to be of some significance in understanding both human nature and the development of ritual. Plenty of animals, after all, have a natural instinct for cleanliness and order. How many of our rituals, how much of dance and art, have root in our animal instincts?
Gaman Thaale 