he culture's connection with its most sa cred origins and symbols, typically with its creation myth, i.e., its conceptualization of the creative principle of the universe. Thus a ritual such as the Judaeo-Christian Sabbath "reproduces the primordial gesture of the Lord, for it was on the seventh day of the Creation that God 'rested'" (Eliade 23). But in a larger sense, every ritual, in Eliade's view, "repeats the initial sac rifice [= ritual] and . . . finds himself transported into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place" (Eliade 35).
A significant body of research, cutting across several cultures and languages, exists that seeks to clarify the nature of the connection between cultural development and transmission and language use. Religious ritual is a part of such connection. "Religious observance," says Keane, "tends to demand highly marked and self-conscious uses of linguistic resources" (Keane 47). Therefore it would be expected that religious rituals would differ according as the shape of linguistic communication were predicated of written or oral traditions. According to Keane (47), cultures in general and religions in particular display tension "between transcendence and the situated and concrete na ture of verbal practices. So much depends on these assumptions and tensions that much religious debate dwells on linguistic forms." In other words, whatever form it takes, language impinges on ceremonial, doctrinal, and mystical religous content.
Cultures and religions that are a part of them are divided between those that have traditions of cultural transmission via the written word and those that transmit culture orally. The former category is associated with literacy, while the latter category, lacking a significant written cultural tradition, is associated either with illiteracy or preliteracy. Both Christian ity and Buddhism fall into the category of written/literate re ligious traditions, while Native Ameri...