1.1: Ritual Origins of Theatre?

Many cultures imagine a mythic origin for theatre in ritual.[i] The earliest surviving evidence of what might be called a play—an ancient Egyptian ceremonial procession scholars have called The Triumph of Horus—describes the ritual battle between Horus and his uncle Seth. Greek philosopher Aristotle locates the beginnings of tragedy in hymns sung in honor of Dionysus. The word tragedy derives from the Greek word tragōidia, or “goat song,” possibly referencing ritual sacrifice or choruses dressed as goats or satyrs. Bharata Muni, the supposed author of the Nāṭyaśāstra, the foundational text of Indian Sanskrit drama, states that theatre is a gift from Brahma and credits ancient Vedic rituals for its development.[ii] Japanese playwright Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443) likewise claims a divine origin for theatre, linking the development of Nōh drama to ritual performances offered to Prince Shōtoku (574–622).[iii] These accounts, across cultures and time periods, suggest a deep and lasting connection between theatre and ritual.

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[i] Scholars have long debated whether theatre developed directly from ritual practices. While many cultures link performance traditions to religious ceremonies, historians caution that there is limited concrete evidence proving that ritual evolved into theatre in a linear historical progression.

[ii] The Nāṭyaśāstra, attributed to Bharata Muni, is a foundational Sanskrit treatise on performance dating roughly between 200 BCE and 200 CE. It describes acting techniques, stage architecture, music, gesture, and aesthetic theory, including the concepts of bhava (emotion) and rasa (aesthetic flavor experienced by the audience).

[iii] Japanese playwright and theorist Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443) helped codify the aesthetics of Nōh theatre. His writings emphasize subtlety, spiritual presence, and the concept of yūgen, a refined sense of mysterious beauty achieved through restrained performance.

Theatre and ritual certainly share key features. Both involve embodied performance designed to yield a spiritual, social, or emotional result. Both rely on spectatorship. Both often take place in spaces specifically designated or prepared for performance. These overlapping concerns have led many scholars to propose that theatre developed out of ritual. But this idea quickly runs into problems. First, there’s little direct evidence to support it. Second, and more importantly, the idea that theatre naturally evolved from ritual rests on the assumption that all cultures follow a single developmental path—from the “simple” or “primitive” to the “complex” or “civilized.” This is a dangerous assumption. Culture doesn’t follow a universal script. Societies emerge in unpredictable, nonlinear, and context-specific ways. Beneath the surface of linear progress narratives lie a Pandora’s box of discredited and deeply harmful ideologies—white supremacy, social Darwinism, and eugenics, or the belief that human reproduction could or should be manipulated to favor so-called desirable traits. These ideas once lent scientific cover to racist hierarchies and colonial domination. Because theatre often reflects society back to itself, these racist ideas are inextricably woven into the fabric of theatre history, literature, and criticism. They continue to haunt thinking that treats non-European cultural forms as evolutionary steppingstones to European “high” art.

For a long time, only European art was considered worthy of serious study. When the rituals or performances of non-European cultures were examined, it was often only to serve colonial narratives: either to position Europe as the culmination of cultural development or to mine “primitive” traditions for artistic inspiration. These ideas were reinforced by social Darwinism—a 19th-century theory that applied Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural selection to human societies. Social Darwinist thinking fueled racist and colonial ideologies, including the belief that some cultures were inherently more “advanced” than others. Arguments that theatre evolved from ritual often draw, consciously or not, from these same assumptions. They reduce complex cultural practices to stages in a Eurocentric timeline, where the goal is always something that looks like Western theatre. Today, scholars are more skeptical. While theatre and ritual undoubtedly overlap, the idea that one naturally grew out of the other is far from settled—and often reveals more about who’s doing the theorizing than about the cultures being studied.