Key Principle
Ritual symbols are not decorative or epiphenomenal -- they are the primary mechanisms through which societies encode, confront, and temporarily manage structural contradictions. Turner identifies three core properties: multivocality (a single symbol condenses multiple meanings across physiological, social, and cosmological domains), polarization of meaning (each symbol unites a sensory pole of bodily experience with an ideological pole of moral/cosmological categories), and unification of disparate significata (symbols bring together meanings that are separate in ordinary experience). These properties make symbols the "molecules" of ritual, capable of doing cultural work that discursive language cannot.
Why This Matters
If ritual symbols were univocal -- one symbol, one meaning -- they could only communicate. Because they are multivocal and polarized, they can transform: they bring the body and the social order into the same experiential frame, making abstract norms feel viscerally real and bodily states feel cosmologically significant. This is Turner's answer to how ritual actually works, not merely as communication but as efficacious action. The principle of ku-solola ("to make appear, or reveal") names this directly: "What is made sensorily perceptible, in the form of a symbol, is thereby made accessible to the purposive action of society" (Chapter 1).
This also grounds Turner's method. Because the Ndembu "have a paucity of myths," Turner builds interpretation from symbols upward rather than from cosmological narratives downward -- proceeding "atomistically and piecemeal from 'blaze' to 'blaze'" using native exegesis (Chapter 1).
Good Examples
Isoma's twin holes (ikela) as "tomb and womb": Two ritual holes -- one at an animal burrow (hot, death, witchcraft) and one newly dug (cool, life, health) -- connected by a tunnel. They simultaneously represent graves (tulung'a) and procreative power (lusemu): "tomb and womb" (Chapter 1). The patient passes through the tunnel, traversing the entire death-life axis in a single bodily movement. This is multivocality at its most compressed -- one material structure holds opposed meanings that the ritual action bridges.
The white pullet and red cock: The white pullet (purity, procreation, lusemu) is held by the woman and moves with her through the tunnel. The red cock (mystical misfortune, chisaku) is trussed and immobile, "consecrated for slaughter" (Chapter 1). Color, gender, and movement/stillness encode the same transformation the ritual aims to produce. "Movement represents life and stillness death" (Chapter 1) -- a general Ndembu symbolic code.
Medicine trees and multivocality: The chikang'anjamba tree ("the elephant fails to uproot it") encodes tenacity via its hardwood, health via its name (chikoli from ku-kola, "to be strong"), and male virility via its use in circumcision rites. "Many Ndembu can attach not merely a single significance but in some cases... many connotations to a single species" (Chapter 1). Folk etymology (ku-jikijila, "to blaze a trail") reveals that the Ndembu already theorize their symbols as mediating landmarks between known and unknown.
Counterpoints
Symbols condense contradictions without resolving them: The matrilineal-virilocal contradiction that generates Isoma persists after the ritual. The rite temporarily removes "the sting from certain troubled relationships" (Chapter 3), but the structural tension that produces affliction remains. Ritual symbolism manages contradictions; it does not eliminate them.
Method limits: Turner's "symbols upward" approach depends on the availability of articulate native exegetes. He cross-checks across informants to extract "the standardized hermeneutics of Ndembu culture, rather than the free associations or eccentric views of individuals" (Chapter 1). But access to exegesis is uneven, and some symbolic operations may exceed what participants can articulate.
Binary discriminations are observed, not imposed: Turner invokes Levi-Strauss's binary method but insists his oppositions (hot/cool, death/life, red/white, male/female) emerged from ritual performance and informant testimony, not from myth or imposed theory. "They are for the most part arranged in a set of what Levi-Strauss might well call 'binary discriminations'" (Chapter 1) -- but the ethnographic grounding matters.
Key Quotes
"In an Ndembu ritual context, almost every article used, every gesture employed, every song or prayer, every unit of space and time, by convention stands for something other than itself. It is more than it seems, and often a good deal more." -- Victor Turner, Chapter 1
"What is made sensorily perceptible, in the form of a symbol, is thereby made accessible to the purposive action of society, operating through its religious specialists. It is the 'hidden' that is 'dangerous' or 'noxious.'" -- Victor Turner, Chapter 1
"The crisis brought on by this contradiction between norms is resolved by rituals rich in symbolism and pregnant with meaning." -- Victor Turner, Chapter 1
"Rituals reveal values at their deepest level... I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies." -- Monica Wilson, cited in Chapter 1
Rules of Thumb
- When analyzing a ritual symbol, look for the sensory pole (what it feels/looks/sounds like) and the ideological pole (what moral or cosmological category it encodes). The power of the symbol lies in fusing these two registers.
- Multivocality is the norm, not the exception. A symbol that appears to have only one meaning has probably not been sufficiently investigated.
- Symbols that hold both affliction and cure in a single vehicle (like Isoma = "to slip out," naming both miscarriage and remedy) are doing the heaviest cultural work -- they serve as pivots of transformation.
- Ritual space is constructed, not found. "A small realm of order is created in the formless milieu of the bush" (Chapter 1). The built environment of ritual is itself symbolic.
- Making affliction visible (ku-solola) is halfway to treating it: "to name an inauspicious condition is halfway to removing that condition" (Chapter 1).
Related References
- Structure, Anti-Structure, and the Dialectical Engine - the structure/anti-structure dialectic that ritual symbols encode and manage
- Liminality -- Betwixt and Between - the liminal phase where symbolic transformation is most concentrated
- Three Modalities of Communitas and Their Historical Trajectories - how the communitas experience produced in ritual becomes institutionalized