The notion that rituals, like natural languages, are governed by implicit, rigorous rules led scholars in the last century, harking back to the early Indian grammarian Patanjali, to speak of a "grammar," or "syntax," of ritual, particularly sacrificial ritual. Despite insightful examples of ritual complexes that follow hierarchical rules akin to syntactic structures in natural languages, and ambitious attempts to imagine a Universal Grammar of sacrificial ritual, no single, comprehensive "grammar" of any ritual system has yet been composed.
This book offers the first such "grammar."...