Religion and origin myths have played an important role in the origin of the activities we call today sport. Discuss and compare how religious beliefs, mythology and ritual were expressed and functioned in the ancient sports of Greece and Japan. In other words, describe not only which beliefs were evident in these sporting traditions, but tell us for what purposes did incorporating these beliefs in sport achieve for these two societies?
Name: Hurul Ain Bte Muhammad Reni
Unlike modern sports which lack the definitive relationship to religious beliefs, mythology and rituals, ancient Greek and Japanese sports cannot seem to escape from them. However this association originated, these three features were clearly evident in the ancient sports of Greece and Japan through their origins, venues and ritual practices. By sports, this essay associates the Greeks with the ancient Olympics and the Japanese with sumo (and to a small extent, kemari). In examining how different (or similar) religious beliefs, myths or rituals were expressed in these sports, this essay will thus suggest that their function was unique to each society. In sum, this paper shall argue that by fusing these features in the ancient sports, ancient Greeks and Japanese managed to develop a sense of identity which they took great pride in.
The mythical origins of the ancient Greek Olympics served to remind the ancient Greek society of their own pagan beliefs. According to Tony Perrottet in his book The Naked Olympics, King Iphitos of Elis had first declared the Games in 776 B.C. as a form of submitting to divine instructions from the Delphic Oracle. Once the athletic games begun at Olympia, Greece was relieved from plague and warfare that had wrecked the society before that. The king of gods, Zeus himself enforced the terms of the Olympic Truce which disallowed military attacks, judicial cases and death penalties to be carried out during the Games. In fact, these terms were inscribed on a golden discus that was hung in a sacred place, the Temple of Hera at Olympia. The commencement of the games also had mythical features. A herald announcing the date of the upcoming Games would carry a sacred banner which bore the symbols used by Hermes, the messenger of the gods. In essence, the origins of the Olympic festival were deep in religious and mythical beliefs. For the Greeks, thus, the games were held every four years thereafter as a tribute to Zeus and to propound the ideas of unity and peace for their own society.
Apart from origins, the religious and mythical features were also evident in the venue of the ancient Greek sports. Olympia, the venue for the ancient Olympics, was a religious sanctuary to begin with. According to Perrottet, it was the greatest pilgrimage center of the pagan world with three famous temples dedicated to Zeus, Hera and Rhea. There were also some seventy altars covering the pantheon, memorials and shrines. In fact, when the games were not held in between the four years, Olympia continued to serve as a spiritual center. Thus Nigel Crowther asserts that despite the unfavourable conditions of Olympia, thousands of spectators continued to throng the place during the Games as a form of pilgrimage akin to the modern Hajj. Similarly, the venue for the pentathlon itself had mythical origins. The very spot where athletes competed in this sport was said to be the exact place where Apollo had beaten Hermes in a running race and Ares at boxing. The constant references to Greek pagan beliefs in the space where they held their games thus serve to remind the contestants and spectators alike of the sacredness of the sport. In return, the Greek athletes thus compared themselves to the gods and challenged the limits of human abilities. It would not be exaggerated to hence posit that the sacred venue of the ancient Olympics encouraged ancient Greek men to achieve great records in athletics and physiques that almost surpassed any other society.
On the other hand, the religious and mythical origins of ancient Japanese sports functioned as entertainment and agricultural ritual for ancient Japanese society. Evidence of terra-cotta figures called the haniwa suggested that sumo was performed as part of a Shinto ritual - a view propounded by P.L. Cuyler and Jorg Moller. Indeed, as supported by Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson in Japanese Sports: A History, sumo was held during festival celebrations at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Japan. The karasu-zumo (crow wrestling) was an example of boys representing the god wrestling against other boys representing the worldly sphere. Similarly, the hitori-zumo (one-man sumo) was part of an agricultural ritual performed as a reenactment of a wrestler’s solitary struggle against the spirit of a rice plant. The spirit would always win so it would bring abundance in crops. Similarly the kemari was performed to bring rain during a drought in 1215 and occasionally thereafter to thwart bad luck. Unlike the Greeks, religion provided a bridge between sport and livelihood for the Japanese as these origins clearly reflected the agricultural nature of Japanese society during that time and their beliefs in Shinto-ism. Yet it was quite similar to the Olympic Games because ancient Japanese sports was also a direct way of paying respects to the gods above so that their lives would in turn be blessed in other aspects besides economics.
Religious beliefs were also deeply entrenched in the rituals practiced in both the ancient Olympics and sumo. During the Olympics, for instance, a sacrificial ritual would be performed. Athletes offered symbolic offerings like ceremonial discuses or animals like goat, lamb or pig to their chosen gods. The idea was to seek favour from the gods in order for them win in the Games. Similarly, on the first day of the Games, each athlete was to take an oath of fair play beneath a ‘towering statue of Zeus Horkios, the God of Oaths’. This made the Olympic Games ‘paragons of virtue’ by promoting fairness in competition. On the other hand, before a sumo bout, salt would be strewn around the sumo ring. This practice, according to Guttmann and Thompson, served as a technique of legitimization ever since sumo was banned by the third Tokugawa shogun for causing public disorder. It is significant to note that this salt-throwing ritual stemmed from Shinto rituals of purification. Thus similar to the ancient Greeks in the ancient Olympics, ancient Japanese incorporated a religious ritual in their sport to seek favour from the deities so that their actions would be sanctified. Perhaps more noteworthy is the observation that religion and belief systems, when entrenched in ritual practices, make these ancient sporting traditions sacred to each society. In turn, the respect garnered from this sacredness is the main reason as to why these sports (and some of their rituals) are still practiced, albeit in varied forms today.
The ancient Olympics and sumo were secular in nature. These rituals had specific and unique functions to each sport but together, they emphasized that each sport was distinct for each society. In the ancient Games, for instance, the practice of applying olive oil to the bodies of athletes was so pivotal that the sacred balm had every role to play in each stage of the workout, according to Perrottet. Indeed, the oil functions as ‘a conservation of the athlete’s body moisture in the heat of the games and also as a tanning lotion’. However, the ritual importance of this was that it separated the Greek athletes from the rest of the society by virtue of their physique. Thus poets in ancient Greece ‘drooled about boys who looked “like finely-wrought bronze statues”’. For the Japanese, however, the bow-twirling ceremony known as the yumitori-shiki was a ritual performed on the last bout of the day. It involved the Tokugawa lenari giving a bow to the best yokozuna and then twirling the bow on the ring. This ritual was added by the Sumo Association to gain support from the shogun, in order to ‘lift the sport out of the vulgar world of entertainment’, according to Cuyler. Hence like the Greek practice of applying oil to their bodies, the bow-twirling ceremony in sumo acted as symbols of making ancient Greek and Japanese society different from others. More specifically, bathing oneself in oil represented masculinity and a taste for the aesthetics for the ancient Greeks while bow-twirling by the best yokozuna embodied the more civilized nature of the sport for the ancient Japanese. These symbols could thus be extrapolated to each society- ancient Greece was a society which valued the aesthetics while ancient Japanese were keen to represent themselves as a civilized society.
In conclusion, it is clear that religious beliefs and mythology were prevalent in the origins, venues and rituals of the Olympic Games and sumo. Through these, the ancient Greeks were eager to assert their values of unity, virtue, masculinity and paganism while the ancient Japanese were affirming their indigenous belief system, agricultural roots and civilized nature. At the same time, however, some of the rituals were less religious and mythical. In the oil and the bow, the ancient Greeks and Japanese had symbols of their distinct identities as a society. Hence even today, the Olympic Games are held every four years as an international competition partly to advocate the original ideas of Greek values. Similarly, the sumo is still practiced today to remind the Japanese of their tradition and culture.
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