Abstract

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world."Modern Western civilization, in its curiosity toward the exotic, has avidly studied ritual in other societies, yet has tended to avoid the study of ritual in its own society.2 It is as if the contemporary West feels itself immune to ritual's "anachronistic" or "regressive" nature, which appears to contrast with the West's sense of its own enlightenment or progress. Peter Shaffer's Equus, however, suggests the ritual nature of Modern secular society through the play's portrayal of a psychiatrist's treatment of an adolescent boy who has blinded six horses with a metal spike in a...