‘Fire’ In Chinese Popular Religious Ritual

Popular religion is a valuable cultural resource,so the attitude towards it should be more rational.Ritual is the most important link in popular religion.People use it to explain the relationship between people with the natural,social environment and their way of life.At the same time,they can also understand what kind of thoughts,world outlook,values,etc.As Geertz said: "The function of ritual is to make the cultural performer confirm the authenticity of the ‘meaning’ carried by the symbol and make it a belief or belief.But there are many symbols that can express the role of meaning in a ritual: the sacred objects,ritual behavior,and organizational forms,etc.Prior to this,the research on popular religion from the perspective of ritual can be roughly divided into two types: one starts from the whole of the ritual,and discusses the function of the ritual to the community or group;the other is to select a symbol in the ritual and explore the symbolism of this symbol in this ritual.This paper combines these two research methods,selects the southern Fujian region as the scope of investigation,and fire as the symbol.Finally,I try to discuss the religious meaning of"fire" in popular religion more comprehensively.The main part of the thesis discusses the religious symbolism of flames from the fire itself.However,fire sometimes does not exist in the form of flames in popular religion,so the paper summarizes several forms of fire in popular religion,and discusses the symbolic meanings of different forms of fire in popular religion one by one.After that,the dissertation further zoomed in and placed fire in rituals.By collecting data on folk customs and popular religion rituals in southern Fujian which is the research scope of this dissertation,it was found that fire has the same meaning in different rituals.Therefore,the dissertation categorizes the meaning of fire in rituals and analyzes in detail how the meaning is manifested.