Witchcraft In Etiquette

This thesis applies the relevant principles of sorcery and combines the related knowledge about the cultural anthropology and the folklore to analyze and discuss the sorcery objects and events in the "Three Rites" of Confucian classics, namely The Etiquette, The Book of Rites and The Rites of Zhou. It consists of five chapters.Chapter one is the introduction, analyzing the significance of the research topic and reviewing the sorcery’ research status quo since 1920s and introducing some scholars’ three-rites-related research on the sorcery. This chapter discusses the specific object and methods of this research and introduces the definition of sorcery and the relationship between sorcery and the religion. It also introduces the related principles of sorcery proposed by some anthropologists such as Frazer and so on in the last part of this chapter.Chapter two to chapter five is the main body of this paper. It classifies the sorcery objects and events in the "Three Rites" into "life etiquette", "production etiquette" and "living rite". Besides, the last chapter focuses on the characteristics of the sorcery in Zhou dynasty seen in the "Three Rites". The specific contents are as follows:Chapter two is about "life etiquette", analyzing the sorcery events included in "fertility etiquette" and "burial etiquette". In the "fertility etiquette" part, from the perspective of historical development, the author discussed the sorcery objects and events in detail, such as the couple’s intercourse taboo, the sorcery about praying for a baby and delivering a baby and the taboo about giving a name. Besides, the author discusses the ancients’ concepts reflected by the sorcery objects and events and the socio-cultural background based on those concepts. In the "burial etiquette" part, the author discusses the concept of spirit greatly connected with the burial sorcery. Besides, based on the concept of spirit, the author uses the sorcery-related principle and combines it with the principles as the cultural anthropology, folklore, sociology and the theory of yin and yang and the five elements and so on, to analyze the spiritism and other sorcery events which are related with the burial etiquette and discusses the social and cultural background against which the sorcery belief formed.In the Chapter three "production etiquette", the author investigates the sorcery in the ancients’"farming rite" and "hunting rite", especially discussing the "silkworm goddess" sorcery, rain-seeking sorcery, the sorcery of the year-end sacrifice, the sorcery of praying for victory before a war and the horse-raising sorcery. When expounding the related problems, the author also uses the oracle bone inscriptions and other materials to seek for the historical origin of some sorceries. Moreover, in this chapter, the author combines the anthropological phenomenon as the linguistic worship to discuss the benison sorcery in detail.The chapter four is about the "living life etiquette". Firstly, the author discusses the exorcism sorcery that the deity of Fang Xiang implements. From the view of sorcery, the author analyzes Fang Xiang’s image of "witch". Secondly, the author talks about the ancients’ sorcery of saving the sun and the moon at the time of the eclipse of the sun and the moon. Besides, the author uses the related theories to investigate the sorcery principle of the ancients’ saving the sun and the moon. Thirdly, combined with the knowledge about the astronomy and the pharmacology, the author analyzes the pressing-sorcery-related principle and its cultural background. At the last, the author discusses the sorcery behaviors in the meetings and sacrificial activities.The chapter five discusses the characteristics of the sorcery in Zhou dynasty seen in the "three rites". Combined with the pre-Qin’s passed-down literature and the excavated literature, the author uses the witch officials’ political status recorded in the Zhou Rite to investigate the witches’ low status in Zhou dynasty and analyze its reason. Then, the author uses American scholar Redfield’s concept of "the large tradition and the small tradition" to compare the sorceries in Zhou’s large and small tradition, discussing their mutual conflicts and interaction. At the last, combined with the whole paper, from the perspective of the historical development the author discusses the phenomena of the sorcery from "custom" to "rite" in Zhou dynasty and talks about the phenomena’s form and influence by combining the "three rites".In the last part of the closure, the author makes a necessary summary of the paper on the whole.