We shall be concerned in this chapter with self-referential messages and their transmission. A consideration of the self-referential aspects of ritual will lead us naturally to a consideration of the canonical, but the self-referential and its mode of transmission are of great interest in their own right.

We noted in the last chapter that, even in the most invariant of liturgical orders, there is some room for variation and that, in fact, variations of one sort or another may be intrinsic to particular elements of ritual performance. For instance, pig sacrifices may be demanded in a particular ritual, but the number of pigs to be slaughtered left unspecified. We also noted, although only in passing, that canonical messages are conveyed by the invariant aspects or components of liturgical performance; self-referential messages, by whatever variation performance of the liturgical order allows, entails or demands. We shall be concerned in this chapter with variation in liturgical performance, considering first variation and indexicality. We shall proceed to numerical variation in the contents of ritual and to the substantial representations of abstractions and to the digital representation of what are called analogic processes. Consideration of the effects of these aspects of ritual communication on the clarity and informativeness of its transmissions will lead to a discussion of the occurrence of rituals as binary signals, and to the role of ritual in transmitting information across the boundaries of unlike systems.