US tech enabled China’s surveillance empire. Now Tibetan refugees in Nepal are paying the price

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — This technology is now a key part of China’s push for global influence, as it provides cash-strapped governments cost-effective, if invasive, forms of policing — turning algorithms and data into a force multiplier for control.

Aniruddha Ghosal and Dake Kang
December 22, 2025


KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — The white dome of Boudhanath rises like a silent guardian over the chaotic sprawl of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, crowned by a golden spire that pierces the sky. Painted on each of the spire’s four sides are the benevolent eyes of the Buddha — wide, calm, and unblinking — said to see all that unfolds below.

Those eyes have served as a symbol of sanctuary for generations of Tibetans fleeing the Chinese crackdown in their homeland. But today, Tibetan refugees are also watched by far more malevolent eyes: Thousands of CCTV cameras from China, perched on street corners and rooftops to monitor every movement below. This intense surveillance has stifled the once-vibrant Free Tibet movement that had resonated around the world.

Nepal is just one of at least 150 countries to which Chinese companies are supplying surveillance technology, from cameras in Vietnam to censorship firewalls in Pakistan to citywide monitoring systems in Kenya. This technology is now a key part of China’s push for global influence, as it provides cash-strapped governments cost-effective, if invasive, forms of policing — turning algorithms and data into a force multiplier for control.

The irony at the heart of this digital authoritarianism is that the surveillance tools China exports are based on technology developed in its greatest rival, the United States, despite warnings that Chinese firms would buy, copy or outright steal American designs, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

For decades, Silicon Valley firms often yielded to Beijing’s demands: Give us your technology and we will give you access to our market. Although tensions fester between Washington and Beijing, the links between American tech and Chinese surveillance continue today.

For example, Amazon Web Services offers cloud services to Chinese tech giants like Hikvision and Dahua, assisting them in their overseas push. Both are on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List for national security and human-rights concerns, which means transactions with them are not illegal but subject to strict restrictions.

AWS told AP it adheres to ethical codes of conduct, complies with U.S. law, and does not itself offer surveillance infrastructure. Dahua said they conduct due diligence to prevent abuse of their products. Hikvision said the same, and that they “categorically reject any suggestion that the company is involved in or complicit in repression.”

Chinese technology firms now offer a complete suite of telecommunications, surveillance, and digital infrastructure, with few restrictions on who they sell to or how they’re used.

China pitches itself as a global security model with low crime rates, contrasting its record with the United States, said Sheena Greitens, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It’s got a set of solutions that it’s happy to share with the world that nobody else can offer,” she said. “(But) they’re certainly exporting the tools and techniques that are very important to authoritarian rule.”

The AP investigation was based on thousands of Nepali government procurement documents, corporate marketing material, leaked government and corporate documents, and interviews with more than 40 people, including Tibetan refugees and Nepali, American and Chinese engineers, executives, experts and officials.

While thousands of Tibetans once fled to Nepal every year, the number is now down to the single digits, according to Tibetan officials in Nepal. In a statement to AP, the Tibetan government in exile cited tight border controls, Nepal’s warming ties with China and “unprecedented surveillance” as reasons for the drastic plunge.

A 2021 internal Nepali government report, obtained by AP, revealed that China has even built surveillance systems within Nepal and in some areas of the border buffer zone where construction is banned by bilateral agreements. In a statement to AP, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied coercing Western companies to hand over technology or working with Nepal to surveil Tibetans, calling it a “sheer fabrication driven by ulterior motives.”

“Attempts to use Tibet-related issues to interfere in China’s internal affairs, smear China’s image, and poison the atmosphere of China-Nepal cooperation will never succeed,” the statement said.

The Nepali government and the Chinese-controlled Tibetan authorities did not respond to requests for comment.



Under pressure, many Tibetans are responding the only way they can: Leaving. The Tibetan population in Nepal has plunged from over 20,000 to half that or less today.

Former activist Sonam Tashi gave up protesting years ago. Now 49, today he’s just a father trying to get his 10-year-old son out — before the net pulls tighter. The boy was born in Nepal but has no document proving he is either a refugee or a citizen, a result of Chinese pressure.

Tashi described how those considered likely to protest are picked up in advance around key dates — like March 10, which marks the 1959 Tibetan uprising, or July 6, the Dalai Lama’s birthday. In 2018, Nepal’s police magazine confirmed that it was building predictive policing, which allows officers to watch people’s movements, identify in advance who they think will protest and arrest them preemptively.

“There are cameras everywhere,” Tashi said, sitting on a bus winding toward the Indian border. “There is no future.”

‘They gave us all the hardware’

After China crushed a Tibetan uprising in 1959, thousands fled across the Himalayas to Nepal, carrying only what they could: Religious paintings, prayer wheels and the weight of families left behind.

Their exodus, led by the charismatic Dalai Lama, captured the American imagination, with Hollywood films and actor Richard Gere’s congressional appeals putting Tibet in the spotlight. Washington trod a careful line, defending the rights and religious freedom of Tibetans without recognizing independence.



Today, the future of the Free Tibet movement is in question. Without refugee cards that grant basic rights, Tibetans in Nepal can no longer open bank accounts, work legally or leave the country.

Cameras are now everywhere in Kathmandu, perched on traffic lights and swiveling from temple eaves. Most link back to a four-story brick building just a few blocks down from the Chinese embassy, where officers watch the country in real time.

The building hums with the low breath of cooling fans. Inside, a wall of monitors blinks with feeds from border towns, busy markets and clogged traffic crossings.

Officers in crisp blue uniforms and red caps sit in the glow, scanning scenes. Beneath the screens, a photo published in a Nepali daily shows, a sign in English and Chinese reads: “With the compliments of the Ministry of Public Security of China.”

Their reach is vast.

Operators can track a motorbike weaving through the capital, follow a protest as it forms, or patch an alert directly to patrol radios. Many cameras are equipped with night vision facial recognition and AI tracking — able to pick a single face out of a festival crowd or lock onto a figure until it disappears indoors. The system not only sees but is learning to remember, storing patterns of movement, building a record of lives lived under its gaze.

A 34-year-old Tibetan cafe owner in the city watched the city change in quiet horror. “Now you can only be Tibetan in private,” he said. He and other Tibetans in Nepal spoke to AP anonymously, fearing retaliation.



The first cameras in Boudhanath were installed in 2012, officially to deter crime. But after a Tibetan monk doused himself in petrol and set himself ablaze in front of the stupa in 2013, police added 35 night vision cameras around it.

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The Chinese embassy in Kathmandu worked closely with the police, said Rupak Shrestha, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada who studied surveillance in Nepal. He said the police received special training to use the new cameras, identify potential symbols associated with the Free Tibet movement and anticipate dissent.

In 2013, a team of Nepal Police officers crossed the northern border into Tibet for a seemingly straightforward mission: Collect police radios from Chinese authorities in Zhangmu, a remote border town, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Kathmandu. A truck was loaded with equipment and a few handshakes later, they were driving back to Kathmandu.

The radios — made by the partly state-owned Chinese firm Hytera — looked like walkie-talkies but ran on a digital trunking system, a scaled-down mobile network for police use. Officers could talk privately, coordinate across districts, even patch into public phone lines. The entire system — radios, relay towers, software — was a $5.5 million gift from China.

“They didn’t give us the money,” recalled a retired Nepali officer who made the trip. “They gave all the hardware. All Chinese.”

He remembered not the border guards but the tech — sleek, reliable, and far ahead of anything they’d used before. He spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.



He said Nepal had initially considered buying the technology from the U.S. and only wanted to deploy the system in its two biggest cities. Hytera was a fraction of the cost and performed comparably, but China also wanted coverage near the border with Tibet. Nepal acquiesced.

They installed the technology in Sindhupalchowk, a border district with a key road to China used by Tibetan refugees. “We understood their mindset,” the retired officer said. “A secure border.”

A police envoy from the Chinese embassy began making regular visits to the Nepal Police headquarters. He’d chat over coffee, flip through brochures from Chinese companies. “He’d say, ‘You want anything?’” the retired officer recalled.

China began donating tens of millions in police aid and surveillance equipment, including a new school for Nepal’s Armed Police Force. Hundreds of Nepali police traveled to China for training on policing and border control, according to Chinese government posts.

Ahead of a summit of South Asian leaders in 2014, among the goods on offer were ones from Uniview, China’s pitch for an all-seeing eye.

The company was the Chinese surveillance business of what was then Hewlett Packard, or HP, before it was spun off in a 2011 deal. Since 2012, Uniview has been selling mass surveillance solutions to the Tibetan police, such as a command center, and developed cameras that track ethnicities such as Uyghurs and Tibetans.



Uniview installed cameras in Kathmandu for Nepal’s first “safe city” project in 2016. It started with the city’s roads, then went up across the capital — in tourist areas, religious sites, high-security zones like Parliament and the prime minister’s home.

The cameras didn’t just record. Some could follow people automatically as they moved. Others were designed to use less data, making it easier to store and review footage.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE, a successor company to HP that sells security solutions, has no ownership in Uniview and declined to comment. Hytera and Uniview did not respond to requests for comment.

Nearly all the cameras installed in Nepal are now made by Chinese companies like Hikvision, Dahua and Uniview, and many come bundled with facial recognition and AI tracking software.

Hikvision’s website and marketing materials advertise camera systems in Nepal linked via Hik-Connect and HikCentral Connect, cloud products that rely on Amazon Web Services. Hikvision sells to the Nepali police and government, and a template for Nepali tenders indicates CCTV cameras procured for the government are required to support Hik-Connect.

In return for Beijing’s support, top Nepali officials have thanked China repeatedly over the years, promising never to allow “anti-China activities” on Nepali territory.



The Nepali police head offices aren’t far from the now-forlorn Tibetan reception center, which used to shelter tired, hungry Tibetans fleeing across the border.

The building is nearly empty. The gates are locked. Those who do escape, like Namkyi, arrested at 15 for protesting Chinese rule, often have to wait for weeks confined indoors until they’re smuggled out again to the Tibetan capital in exile in India.

Silence has become survival.

“They know they are being watched,” she said. “Even though we are free, the surveillance cameras mean we’re actually living in a big prison.”

From clients to competitors

From the start, U.S. companies eager for China’s vast markets exchanged technology for entry.

Many were required to start joint ventures and research operations in China as a precondition for being allowed in. Dozens, if not hundreds, complied, transferring valuable know-how and expertise — even in sensitive areas like encryption or policing.

Little by little, Chinese companies chipped away at the lead of American tech companies by luring talent, obtaining research, and sometimes plain copying their hardware and software. The flow of technology continued, even as U.S. officials openly accused China of economic espionage and pressuring American companies for their technology.

“China is by far the most egregious actor when it comes to forced technology transfer,” Robert D. Atkinson, then-president of a think tank focused on innovation, warned Congress in a 2012 hearing.



American tech resistance came to a final, definitive end later that year with Edward Snowden’s revelations that U.S. intelligence was exploiting American technology to spy on Beijing. Spooked, the Chinese government told Western firms they risked being kicked out unless they handed over their technology and provided security guarantees.

After companies like HP and IBM agreed, their former partners became their fiercest global competitors — and unlike American firms, they faced few questions about the way their technology was being used. Companies like Huawei, Hikvision and Dahua have now become global behemoths that sell surveillance systems and gear all over the world.

American technology was key to this:

– Uniview, the Chinese AI-powered CCTV camera supplier, supplied the first phase of Nepal’s safe city project in 2016, installing cameras in Kathmandu. Uniview was carved out of California-based HP’s China surveillance video business.

– Hytera provided data infrastructure for the Nepali police, such as walkie-talkies and digital trunking technology, which enables real-time communication. Earlier this year, Hytera acknowledged stealing technology from U.S. company Motorola in a plea agreement, and had acquired German, British, Spanish, and American tech businesses in their growth phase.

– Hikvision and Dahua, China’s two largest surveillance camera suppliers, sell many of the cameras now in Nepal. They partnered with Intel and Nvidia to add AI capabilities to surveillance cameras. Those ties ended after U.S. sanctions in 2019, but AWS continues to sell cloud services to both companies, which remains legal under what some lawmakers call a loophole. AWS has advertised to Chinese companies expanding overseas, including at a policing expo in 2023.

– Chinese tech giant Huawei has become one of the world’s leading sellers of surveillance systems, wiring more than 200 cities with sensors. In Nepal, they supplied telecom gear and high-capacity servers at an international airport. Over the years, the company benefited from partnerships with American companies like IBM, and has been dogged by allegations of theft — including copying code from Cisco routers wholesale, a case which Huawei settled out of court in 2004.



Huawei said it provides “general-purpose” products “based on recognized industry standards.” Intel has said it adheres to all laws and regulations where it operates, and cannot control end use of its products. Nvidia has said it does not make surveillance systems or work with police in China at present.

IBM and Cisco declined comment. Policing gear maker Motorola Solutions, a successor company to Motorola after it split, did not respond to requests for comment.

U.S. technology transfer to Chinese firms has mostly stopped after growing controversy and a slew of sanctions in the past decade. But industry insiders say it’s too late: China, once a tech backwater, is now among the biggest exporters of surveillance technologies on earth.

Few realized “the U.S. shouldn’t be selling the software to China because they might copy it, they might use it for these types of surveillance and bad stuff,” said Charles Mok, a Hong Kong IT entrepreneur and former lawmaker now living in exile as a research scholar at Stanford. “Nobody was quick enough to realize this could happen.”

‘The great big eye in the sky’

Inside a 15th-century monastery in Lo Manthang in Nepal’s Mustang district, light slants through wooden slats, catching motes of dust and the faded faces of bodhisattvas.

Crumpled notes of Chinese currency lie at the feet of deities in the walled city along the Tibetan border. Here, shops stock Chinese instant noodles and cars with Chinese plates rumble down mountain roads.



A gleaming white observation dome just inside Chinese territory looms over the city. Visible from 15 kilometers (9 miles) away, it’s trained on the district that has long been a refuge for Tibetans, including a guerrilla base in the 1960s.

The dome is just one node in China’s vast 1,389-kilometer (863-mile) border network with Nepal — a “Great Wall of Steel” of fences, sensors and AI-powered drones.

Chinese forces have barred ethnic Tibetans from accessing traditional pastures and performing sacred rites. They have pressured residents of Lo Manthang to remove photos of the Dalai Lama from shops. And a “China-Nepal joint command mechanism” meets several times a month on border patrols and repatriations, according to a post by the Chinese-run Tibetan government.

The result is that the once-porous frontier is now effectively sealed, and China’s digital dragnet reaches deep into the lives of those who live near it.

In April 2024, Rapke Lama was chatting with a friend across the border on WeChat when he received an invitation to meet. He set out from his village and crossed into Tibet — only to be arrested almost immediately.

Lama believes his WeChat exchange was monitored; Chinese police appeared with unsettling precision, as if they knew where to look. After accusing him — wrongly, he maintains — of helping Tibetans flee into Nepal, the police seized his phone, which had photos of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan music. Then came months in a Lhasa prison, where isolation and inadequate medical care hollowed him out.



Lama did not return to Nepal until May 2025, gaunt and shaken. He later said he entered Tibet to harvest caterpillar fungus, valued in traditional Chinese medicine. Another friend who crossed the border remains in custody.

“Even now, I’m scared,” Lama says. He wears masks when wandering the streets, he says, “because of that lingering fear.”

The Chinese observation dome is a giant symbol of the same fear, towering over the border.

“It’s the great big eye in the sky,” said a 73-year-old Tibetan hotel owner in Nepal, who spotted the installation during a trip near the border last year. “For Tibetan refugees, Nepal has become a second China.”

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Associated Press journalists Niranjan Shrestha and Binaj Gurubacharya in Kathmandu, Manish Swarup and Rishi Lekhi in New Delhi, Ashwini Bhatia in Dharamshala, India, and David Goldman in Washington contributed to this report.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/.

 

 

Christmas in East Asia: monetised, aestheticised but largely devoid of meaning

/ Kenny Eliason - Unsplash

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By Mark Buckton - Taipei December 17, 2025

Christmas in East Asia is that rare thing: a global festival successfully imported, enthusiastically monetised, meticulously aestheticised - and almost entirely stripped of its original point. It is Christmas as a lifestyle accessory or an Instagram backdrop. But it is Christmas without Jesus Christ, sans family obligations, and in many places without a day off.

For hundreds of millions across Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China and elsewhere December 25 arrives not with the gentle hush of a public holiday, but with the familiar alarm clock signalling the need to get up and head to work or school.

Business carried on as usual, and the only tangible sign that anything unusual is happening is a Santa Claus inflatable wedged between a bubble tea shop and a real estate agent advertising “luxury micro-apartments”.

This is not to say Christmas is ignored entirely. In fact, quite the opposite is the case.

East Asia has embraced Christmas with the zeal of a shopping mall on commission. Streets and apartment complexes are draped in fairy lights of such wattage that passing satellites and astronauts stuck in the International Space Station over the festive period can probably see them. Department stores install towering trees as soon as US-themed Thanksgiving decorations are packed away in late November and are often decorated in themes that change annually - Nordic Minimalist Christmas, Pastel K-Pop Christmas and Luxury Champagne Christmas - none of which has much to do with Bethlehem, Nazareth or, indeed the true meaning of the Christian celebrations observed half a world away.

In Tokyo, Christmas is widely understood to be a romantic event for couples, ideally involving a hotel booking, a view of illuminated landmarks and a cake that costs more than a modest weekly grocery shop. In Seoul, it is similar, though with greater emphasis on social media documentation and the faint competitive undertone that accompanies all major Korean leisure activities. In Taipei, it is an excuse for shopping centres to play “Last Christmas” by Wham on a loop from early November until morale finally collapses around the Lunar New Year in January or February.

The religious content, meanwhile, is treated with polite indifference. Christianity exists in East Asia, of course, sometimes in large numbers, particularly in South Korea. But the public Christmas remains resolutely secular, in the way only a hyper-commercial society can manage.

Nativity scenes are rare; Santa Claus is ubiquitous. Angels may appear, but only if they can be rendered cute, cartoonish or holding a promotional placard advertising real estate or teen hangouts.

What Christmas means is therefore refreshingly clear: consumption.

Christmas in East Asia is about the wallet and buying things, preferably wrapped in red and gold, and preferably promoted with just enough Western imagery to make the locals feel“international” without requiring any understanding of its origins.

It is capitalism in a Santa hat.

Japan’s contribution to this global phenomenon remains the undisputed masterpiece: Kentucky Fried Chicken as Christmas dinner. Through a marketing campaign launched in the 1970s and never allowed to die, millions of Japanese families dutifully pre-order buckets of fried chicken weeks in advance. This is not parody. This is logistics in action. Miss your booking and Christmas is ruined, or at least reduced to a less festive bento box with a leg or a wing at best.

Elsewhere, Christmas food traditions are similarly inventive. There are strawberry sponge cakes, “Christmas lattes” that taste suspiciously identical to normal lattes, and chocolates presented in boxes so elaborate one assumes the contents must be priceless, only to discover they are exactly the same chocolates available year-round, merely rebranded and slightly more expensive.

The soundtrack, too, is resolutely globalised. Mariah Carey dominates malls from Shanghai to Sapporo with the kind of cultural imperialism usually associated with aircraft carriers. Local pop stars release Christmas singles that sound festive largely because they contain bells and the word “snow”, regardless of whether snow is actually a thing where the song is being played - in Taiwan it never is. Indeed, in tropical parts of East Asia, Taiwan again, artificial snow machines have been known to pump foam into 20+degree heat, just in case anyone forgets this is meant to be winter.

And yet, for all the lights, music and promotional tie-ins, there is an unmistakable hollowness to the day itself.

Christmas Eve may be busy. Christmas Day is often just… Thursday. Children go to school. Office workers attend meetings. Trains run on normal schedules. The great annual Western ritual of pretending not to check emails is largely absent.

For expats across East Asia, this can be disorientating. One moment you are standing beneath a massive Christmas tree while a choir of recorded children sings about peace on earth; the next you are answering emails about quarterly targets. The disconnect is almost impressive. East Asia has perfected the art of festive simulation without inconvenience to the school schedule or corporate calendar.

This, perhaps, is the key to Christmas’s success in the region. It is all sparkle, not substance. No awkward conversations at the dinner table. No arguments about politics. No compulsory goodwill beyond what can be expressed through a gift receipt.

It also avoids the deeper, messier questions that Christmas traditionally raises: charity, inequality, faith, forgiveness. These are quietly ignored in favour of LED reindeer and promotional discounts. The poor are not so much remembered as forgotten, unless they can be integrated into a corporate social responsibility campaign with suitable branding.

Even the language reflects this selective adoption. “Merry Christmas” is widely used, often enthusiastically, but as a seasonal greeting rather than a statement of belief. Christmas in East Asia is a temporary vibe, not a value system.

And when the day itself passes, it vanishes quickly. On 26 December, decorations begin to disappear with remarkable speed, replaced by banners advertising year-end sales or, in Chinese-speaking regions, Lunar New Year preparations which can still be as distant as six-weeks away.

Christmas, having served its purpose, is efficiently packed away until next November.

Op-Ed

Zionism Remade the Story of Hanukkah in Its Image. We Celebrate an Older Truth.

Zionism turned the moral of the Hanukkah story on its head to praise militarism. In truth, it is a holiday of peace.

By Elliot Kukla ,

Truthout

December 13, 2025

A person lights candles on a menorah with signs that say "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" as Jewish groups gather at Columbus Circle on the first night of Chanukah during an action dubbed "Chanukah for Ceasefire" on December 7, 2023, in New York City.

Michael Nigro / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images

When I was 19 years old, I traveled to Israel to find long-lost relatives who had survived the Holocaust. While I was there, I was “picked up” on the street by an ultra-orthodox woman who offered me free lodging in a hostel exclusively for Jewish travelers in the Old City of Jerusalem. I was a broke teenager at the time, so I said yes. It was Hanukkah, and all across the Jewish Quarter, picturesque oil menorahs twinkled in the windows and doorways of ancient-looking buildings built from a pearly-pink marble called “Jerusalem stone.”

I didn’t grow up celebrating Hanukkah, so my hosts explained to me that in 167 BCE, the ancient Jewish Temple, which once stood just around the corner from where I was staying, had been occupied by the mighty Hellenistic Seleucid Empire. Luckily, a small group of rebels known as the Maccabees fought back and recaptured the Temple. Since then, they said, Jews have kindled Hanukkah candles every year in honor of this marvelous battle, and dreamed of a return to reoccupy these very homes, in this exact neighborhood. The fact that we were finally there, they said, was the Hanukkah miracle come true.

I was captivated. It was an inspiring story, perfectly matched by the stirring ancient setting. Unfortunately, almost none of it was true.

The pearlescent stone buildings that looked age-old to my teenage eyes had actually mostly been constructed in the last few decades, on top of Palestinian homes that were bulldozed after Jerusalem was seized by the Israeli military in 1967. John Tleel, a Palestinian whose family lived in the Old City for 400 years, describes how the residents of the neighborhood where I was staying were given only 12 hours to evacuate. New homes and plazas were hastily built over what is now known as the Jewish Quarter, and constructed to look as if they’d always been there.

Likewise, Hanukkah, as a tale of a glorious battle, is a thin Zionist facade, pasted onto an old story that conveyed the opposite meaning for thousands of years. Traditionally, Hanukkah was a quiet, pacifist festival that taught an age-old lesson about the dangers of zealotry and the wisdom of gentleness in the face of force.

Related Story

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This holiday of feasts begins as people starve amid genocide in Gaza. Activists are fasting weekly for a ceasefire. By Maya Schenwar , Truthout  December 7, 2023

It is true that in 167 BCE, there was a Jewish uprising against the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, led by a group of rebels known as the Maccabees, which means “the hammers.” However, the Maccabees were not just fighting against the Hellenists. They were also fighting with many other Jewish groups who they saw as weak collaborationists because they wanted to negotiate with, instead of fight, the Seleucid Empire. In the end, the Maccabees’ military tactics led to a lot of bloodshed and a short-lived victory. The Temple was soon destroyed. For the next two thousand years, Jews lived all over the world, ate different foods, and spoke different languages. It was not retaking the land or rebuilding an army that led to our cultural survival, but telling shared stories that fostered a sense of belonging across generations and around the world.


Hanukkah was a quiet, pacifist festival that taught an age-old lesson about the dangers of zealotry and the wisdom of gentleness in the face of force.

For centuries, the Maccabees didn’t make it into these Jewish sacred stories. The Book of Maccabees, which records their battle, is a holy text in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, but it’s not included in Jewish holy books. In the Talmud, the ancient texts that lie at the center of all Jewish laws and practices, the rabbis ask: “What is Hanukkah about, anyway?” They knew the history of the Maccabees, but their question implies that they didn’t see this event as worthy of celebration. Instead, they offer a very different tale to explain the season: “For when the Hellenists entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils in it, and when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed over them and defeated them, they searched and found only one bottle of oil sealed by the High Priest. It contained only enough for one day’s lighting. Yet a miracle was brought about with it, and they lit with that oil for eight days.” (Shabbat 21b)


Early Zionists took the Maccabees from obscurity and claimed them as heroes precisely because traditional Judaism had dismissed them as unpleasant zealots.

This story is a consciously gentle miracle. Instead of celebrating the Maccabees’ military might, it lifts up spiritual values of faith, trust, and patience in a little bit going a long way. The choice to remember the perseverance of small flickering lights, and not a battle, is a decision to not canonize bloodshed even when “our” side is the winner. This message is explicit in the prophetic biblical passage from the Book of Zechariah read on the shabbat of Hanukkah in synagogue: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit.”

Zionism arose in the late 19th century as a secular European colonial movement, and many of its early tropes were explicitly a rebuke of religious Judaism. Early Zionists took the Maccabees from obscurity and claimed them as heroes precisely because traditional Judaism had dismissed them as unpleasant zealots. Early Zionists named sports clubs and athletics contests after the Maccabees, and argued that they were models for a new “muscular Jewry.” Israeli pop songs scoffed at the miracle of oil, and instead reframed the Hanukkah miracle to glorify the newly established gangs of Zionist militias that were chasing Palestinians off their lands.

This was a completely new and intentionally irreligious version of Hanukkah. And yet historical memory can be very short. Today, many people, including leftists, have forgotten that there is another, more ancient version of Hanukkah underneath the modern, Zionist facade. In this time of ongoing genocide in Palestine and cascading worldwide catastrophes, remembering the original meaning of Hanukkah, and its refusal to celebrate violence, is particularly important.

The word Hanukkah means rededication, because the Temple was defiled by the Hellenist Empire, and the menorah needed to be kindled to rededicate it. Since October 7, 2023, ancient Jewish symbols like the Star of David have been burned into Palestinian farmlands and branded onto the cheeks of Palestinians as signs of domination. Today, we again need to rededicate what has been defiled by this monstrous disregard of life.

As authoritarianism rises worldwide and many of our systems of care fragment, we need to save our age-old stories like seeds in a seed bank, as they contain vital spiritual nourishment. Within the story of Hanukkah’s oil, there are timeless, universal truths that we will need in order to survive this era: tales last longer than Temples, and faith can be more powerful than force. The night is often long, with only a little bit of fuel to warm and light it, but when we work together in solidarity, there is enough for everyone.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Elliot Kukla
Rabbi Elliot Kukla (he/they) is an author and activist who has spent the past 20 years working at the intersection of justice and spiritual care to the dying and bereaved. His book on hidden grief, The Heart Lives by Breaking, is forthcoming in Fall 2027 from Schocken (Knopf Doubleday).

FIAT LUX

This Hanukkah, learn about the holiday’s forgotten heroes

Jewish woman lights a candle for the festival of Hanukkah at the Western Wall Plaza in Jerusalem. Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images Alan Avery-Peck, College of the Holy Cross

The Conversation

December 09, 2025 


The eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah commemorates ancient Jews’ victory over the powerful Seleucid empire, which ruled much of the Middle East from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

On the surface, it’s a story of male heroism. A ragtag rebel force led by a rural priest and his five sons, called the Maccabees, freed the Jews from oppressive rulers. Hanukkah, which means “rededication” in Hebrew, celebrates the Maccabees’ victory, which allowed the Jews to rededicate their temple in Jerusalem, the center of ancient Jewish worship.

But as a professor of Jewish history, I believe that seeing Hanukkah this way misses the inspiring women who were prominent in the earliest tellings of the story.

The bravery of a young widow named Judith is at the heart of an ancient book that bears her name. The heroism of a second woman, an unnamed mother of seven sons, appears in a book known as 2 Maccabees.

Saving Jerusalem

These books are not included in the Hebrew scriptures, but appear in other collections of religious texts known as the Septuagint and the Apocrypha.

According to these texts, Judith was a young Israelite widow in a town called Bethulia, strategically situated on a mountain pass into Jerusalem. To besiege Jerusalem, the Seleucid army first needed to capture Bethulia.

Facing such a formidable enemy, the townsfolk were terrified. Unless God immediately intervened, they decided, they would simply surrender. Enslavement was preferable to certain death.

But Judith scolded the local leaders for testing God, and was brave enough to take matters into her own hands. Removing her widow’s clothing, she entered the enemy camp. She beguiled the Seleucid general, Holofernes, with her beauty, and promised to give her people over to him. Hoping to seduce her, Holofernes prepared a feast. By the time his entourage left him alone with Judith, he was drunk and asleep.

Now she carried out her plan: cutting off his head and escaping back to Bethulia. The following morning, the discovery of Holofernes’ headless body left the Seleucid army trembling with fear. Soldiers fled by every available path as Bethulia’s Jews, recovering their courage, rushed in and slaughtered them. Judith’s bravery saved her town and, with it, Jerusalem.

A family’s sacrifice

The book of 2 Maccabees, Chapter 7, meanwhile, relates the story of an unnamed Jewish mother and her seven sons, who were seized by the Seleucids.

Emperor Antiochus commanded that they eat pork, which is forbidden by the Torah, to show their obedience to him. One at a time, the sons refused. An enraged Antiochus subjected them to unspeakable torture. Each son withstood the ordeal and is portrayed as a model of bravery. Resurrection awaits those who die in the service of God, they proclaimed, while for Antiochus and his followers, only death and divine punishment lay ahead.

Throughout these ordeals, their mother encouraged her sons to accept their suffering. “She reinforced her woman’s reasoning with a man’s courage,” as 2 Maccabees relates, and admonished her sons to remember their coming reward from God.

Having killed the first six brothers, Antiochus promised the youngest a fortune if only he would reject his faith. His mother told the boy, “Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again along with your brothers.” The story in 2 Maccabees ends with the simple statement that, after her sons’ deaths, the mother also died.

Later retellings give the mother a name. Most commonly, she is called Hannah, based on a detail in the biblical book of 1 Samuel. In this section, called the “prayer of Hannah,” the prophet Samuel’s mother refers to herself as having borne seven children.

Working with God

Jewish educator and author Erica Brown has emphasized a lesson we should learn from the story of Judith, one that emerges from 2 Maccabees as well. “Just like the Hanukkah story generally, the message of these texts is that it’s not always the likely candidates who save the day,” she writes. “Sometimes salvation comes when you least expect it, from those who are least likely to deliver it.”

Three hundred years after the Maccabean revolt, Judaism’s earliest rabbis stressed a similar message. Adding a new focus to Hanukkah, they spoke of a divine miracle that occurred when the ancient Jews took back the Temple and wanted to relight the holy “eternal flame” inside. They found just one small vessel of oil, sufficient to light the flame for only one day – but it lasted eight days, giving them time to produce a new supply.

As the influential rabbi David Hartman pointed out, the Hanukkah story celebrates “our people’s strength to live without guarantees of success.” Some ordinary person, he points out, took the initiative to rekindle the eternal flame, despite how futile doing so may have seemed.

Ever since, Judaism has increasingly focused on the interaction of the human and the divine. The Hanukkah story teaches listeners that they all must play a part to repair a hurting world. Not everyone needs to be a Judith or Hannah; but, like them, we humans can’t wait for God to take care of it.

In synagogues, one of the readings for the week during Hanukkah is from the prophet Zechariah, who proclaimed, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.” These words succinctly capture the meaning of Hanukkah and express what Jews might think about while lighting the Hanukkah candles: our responsibility to act in the spirit of God to create the miracles the world needs to become a place of beauty, equity and freedom.

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Alan Avery-Peck, Kraft-Hiatt Professor in Judaic Studies, College of the Holy Cross

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Indian festival of lights Diwali joins UNESCO heritage list


By AFP
December 10, 2025


People watch fireworks light up the sky as part of Diwali celebrations in Mumbai in October - Copyright AFP

 Odd ANDERSEN

India’s festival of lights, Diwali, was on Wednesday announced as an addition to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list, sparking celebrations.

The United Nations cultural agency, meeting in the Indian capital New Delhi from Tuesday to Thursday, is examining dozens of nominations from as many as 78 countries.

The new announcements will join UNESCO’s list of cultural heritage, whose purpose is to “raise awareness of the diversity of these traditions” and protect them in future.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed the announcement, saying the festival was “very closely linked to our culture and ethos”.

“It is the soul of our civilisation. It personifies illumination and righteousness,” he said in a statement on social media, adding the move “will contribute to the festival’s global popularity even further”.

The Delhi government is organising several events, including special illumination of buildings and decoration across major roads, along with a massive lamp-lighting ceremony.

As one of Hinduism’s most significant festivals, millions of Indians celebrate Diwali, also known as Deepavali, not just in India but globally.

Many people, including those from the Sikh and Jain religious communities, observe it as a five-day festival which symbolises the triumph of good over evil.

Celebrations, which happen on the new moon day in either late October or November, usually see lighting of lamps and bursting of firecrackers.

In much of north India, Diwali marks the return of Hindu Lord Rama to Ayodhya after defeating the demon king Ravana.

The festival is also strongly associated with worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity.

India’s foreign ministry said Diwali’s addition to the UNESCO list was a “joyous moment” for the country.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SOLSTICE

The Ritual Roots of Animism, Drama and Sports: The Work of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists

by Bruce Lerro / November 13th, 2025

LONG READ

My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to mirror human individuality. The Olympians, in their triumph of humanity kicked down the ladder from earth to heaven by which they arose….The Olympias seemed like a bouquet of cut flowers whose bloom is brief because they have been severed from their roots.

— Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

Orientation

The diversity or unity of animism, drama and sports

In the modern world we think of the world of art, whether it be drama, tragedy or comedy, sports and religion as all different endeavors. After all, the arts and sports are secular while religion is sacred. Therefore, all must seem to have different roots. Some historians might say that they come after each other in linear time: first religion, then arts and then sports. But where does ritual come in? A ritualist seems to be, for the secularist of today someone who might be obsessed with fixed forms and ceremonies, rigidity and mindlessness. Furthermore, rituals are seen as most prominent in the sacred world. At the other extreme, the artist – whether in drama or sculpture – is someone who would seem to be free in thought and less inhibited  in convention and practice. Lastly, it would seem that art and ritual have diverged today and have little to do with each other. The same seems to be true of sports.

My argument chain
My argument chain in this article is that:

• religion (specifically animism), drama, and sports closely follow each other in history,
• it doesn’t matter whether these activities have come down to us as secular or sacred,
• they all have a common root in ritual,
• ritual is rooted in Sir James Frazer’s agricultural cycle of an ever present goddess and finite dying god,
• the theorists who supported ritual origins of animism, drama and sports were called the Cambridge rituals led by Jane Harrison with the support of Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford. Harrison was the center of the group because she always seemed to have a broader conception of their common subject matter than any of the others and
• the polytheism of the skygod Olympians which were the darlings of the Greek classists were a rather superficial interpretation of a deeper Greek animism and which had chthonic roots.

What Does the Ritual School Advocate?
Ritual precedes myth
When discussing sacred experience we must consider the rituals that are performed, the myths that are the foundation of sacred worlds and the sacred beings that inhabit that world.
Theorists of comparative religion have argued historically which of these three came first. Some theorists argue that storytelling (myth) came first and then primitive societies acted out the myths in ritual.  Sounds pretty rational. First you think of a story and then you act it out. The Cambridge ritualists were materialists. For them as for Goethe, in the beginning was the deed, or the ritual dance. The stories followed from the dance. But what were they dancing about? The Cambridge ritualists argued that initially their first activities were hunting and gathering or some kind of planting. The rituals that followed, were stylized re-enactments of their labor, the successful hunts or harvests. Only later did they make up story myths of how their collective actions were meant to be about.

Sacred roots are chthonic, not sky bound
When we speak of sacred presences the Greek classists begin and end with the polytheism of the Olympians. The Cambridge ritualists challenged the serenity of the almost playful depiction of the gods as ignoring the thunder and lightning of what occurred in the sacred realm in the Archaic iron Age. Jane Harrison dismissed theology and emphasized the prerational, socioemotional dimensions of the sacred. Her sense of the superficiality of Homer’s gods had been so deep that she no longer felt them to have any religious content at all. Instead, she was drawn to the mystery cults of Dionysus and Orpheus which seemed genuinely and deeply serious. By that time her partner in crime, Gilbert Murray had come out with The Rise of the Greek Epic which had shown that Homer represented a smoothing out of the old, rough sacred presences into a more civilized Olympian from.

Sacred world is animistic before it was polytheist
Harrison argued that Zeus is a later projection of the group of dancing participants ritual frozen into a being. The sacred spirits are really dancers embodying movement more than they are beings with stable characteristics. It is safe to say that the Cambridge ritualists saw sacred presences as verbs rather than nouns, animists rather than polytheists. In her book Themis basing themselves on the work of Sir James Frazer, the Cambridge ritualists argued all rituals were enactment of the cycles of the year with the female goddesses giving birth to gods, mating and then the males dying in the Autumn.

On the other hand, Homer’s poems were the summing up of a later heroic age in which outstanding individualsdistinguished themselves as being opposed to the collectives of earlier times before the invaders descended on Mycenean Greece. The first primitive gods are personifications of the rite as in Dionysius.  Harrison says the Olympian gods are cut clean from earth and from local bits of earth out of which they grew like sacred trees, the holy stones, rivers and still holier beasts. The Olympian skygods stand back far enough to see the picture of the earth from a distance. They are not lost in the earth ritual as it was earlier in the Dionysius ritual. Metaphorically, the dancing ritual is like a verb which later becomes a noun in the static image of the Olympians.

Rituals have roots not only in animism but also in theater and sports

Lastly, the Cambridge ritualists were ambitious. They believed the ritual origin of human activities was deeper than just their sacred practices. They applied ritual origins to the arts and even  sports. The Cambridge ritualists started around the turn of the 20^th century. Their work permanently transformed and revitalized the field of the classics.

Why should Socialists Care?
Primitive communism is the foundation of material social evolution
If you can remember a high school or college class in world history you might recall that it usually begins with the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. These agricultural states are considered  “civilizations” which is synonymous with the growth of cities. But anthropologists have pointed out that the history of civilizations is not the origin of human societies. Long before agricultural states there were hunter-gatherers and physical anthropologists who told us that they go back from100,000 to 200,000 years ago. As it turns out, Marx was right that these “primitives” practiced primitive communism where resources were shared and there was no private property or social classes. We have been robbed of the knowledge of this history. For Marxists, the discovery of primitive communism nicely fits with our dialectical view of history In the beginning as a primitive whole – communist society. Then there are 5000 years of alienation moving from the emergence of social classes, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. What is happening today is the emergence of a seeds of a communist society  most exemplified in China. Chinese socialism is a return of primitive communism but on a higher level. Advanced communism is a synthesis because it is based on the wealth, technological, economic and political that has been inherited from the long antithetical alienation of class societies.

Animism is the foundation for sacred social evolution
Just as we have been robbed of our material history we have been robbed of our real sacred  evolution. Textbooks on the history of religion used to begin with Judaism and a short nod to the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. The long magical practices of tribal societies were never taken seriously. While modern historians of religion insist for politically correct reasons that tribal religion be included, they present these traditions as existing next to the “People” of the book. They are less willing to examine the sacred evolution from animism to polytheism to monotheism and why they might have evolved in the direction they did. The Cambridge Ritualists not only defend the existence of animism but they defend it as a sacred life which  was filled with life, movement, participation and self-confidence. Animism like primitive communism involves no class of priests, no private property in the use of sacred objects.  If Marxian socialists want to see material history as a dialectical spiral we owe it to ourselves to see our sacred history as also a dialectical process. The Cambridge ritualists help us to understand and appreciate animism, not just as a worthy in interesting way of life. We Marxists need to appreciate the relationship between animism and primitive communism.

Precursor of Cambridge Ritualists in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy
On the European continent the earliest and most important theorist of the sacred roots of tragedy was Nietzsche. Thirty years before the Cambridge ritualists formed as a school Nietzsche grasped the sacred origins of drama. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music was written in 1872. Nietzsche sensed that the famous serenity of the Greeks gods was only superficial.  For him, tragedy is the product of the Dionysian spirit that is collective in origin. Tragedy did not begin with spectators, stages and playwrights. Tragedy starts with of the chorus. Dionysian dancers were attempting to break through encapsulating egos and merge with the power than animates the world. The chorus in which the tragedy interlaced constitute a matrix of a future dialogue, the entire stage world of the actual drama.  In the first stage tragedy was acted out the in chorus before drama even existed. There was no audience but only participating dancers. Only when there was a separation between the active celebrant of Dionysius and those who looked on as necessary to demonstrate the reality of a god to those who were not possessed by the god. Nietzsche anticipated the direction which the Cambridge rationalists were going to move. It began a trend in classical studies toward searching for and emphasizing nonrational factors in determining human behavior. We will begin by discussing drama and then proceed backwards to talk about sacred animism.

Ancient vs Modern Theatre
Probably people tend to imagine that modern theatre and ancient theatre are more or less the same. But in her book Ancient Art and Ritual Jane Harrison points out how different they are. To begin with, the entrance gate of the theatre was sacred ground dedicated to various gods such as Dionysus, Apollo and Zeus. Modern theatres are housed in secular buildings. When you enter the building, you pay for your ticket – right? However, in ancient theatre there was no payment. In ancient theatre the whole purpose of entering was to participate in an act of reverence. Making a monetary payment would undermine the altered state of consciousness that is being cultivated. Money and ritual don’t mix. In modern theatre what are you paying for? Entertainment at worst, inspired contemplation at best.

In modern theatre the seating arrangements are dictated by social class, but where people sit is not controlled by the sacred and state officials as in ancient theatre. In modern theatre if you want to attend, you can go at least on Friday, Saturday and Sunday throughout the year. Ancient theatre was only open during festivals which were tied to the agricultural seasons of the year. Even before entering the theatre in the ancient world, you participated in a great procession by torchlight which was the necessary preliminary to the sacredness of the play. Modern theater has no preliminary ceremonies. Spectators enter on their own and the play begins only when the lights are dimmed. In ancient theatre everyone participates because the theatre itself is sacred activity. In modern theatre people come in and leave as spectators. They have no responsibility to anyone else. Who are the participants in the theatre?

In modern theatre there are playwrights, actors and actresses, along with lighting and stage direction all of which are perceived as secular jobs. In ancient theatre, the gods are evoked by those magicians who have prepared the ritual. The clothes of the participants of the ancient ritual were vestments like those who celebrated the Eleusinian mysteries. In modern theatre the clothes worn by the actors have nothing sacred about them. They are the clothes which are consistent with the time period of the play, together with the roles they are in. Here is a summary of the differences between ancient and modern theatre.

Table 1 Ancient vs Modern Theatre

Ancient Theatre	Category of comparison	Modern Theatre
Holy ground dedicated to a god – Dionysus, Apollo or Zeus	Entrance gate	Secular building
No payment	Cost of entry	Pay for a ticket to get in
Act of reverence	Purpose	Entertainment
Seating controlled by sacred and state officials	Seating arrangements	Based on social class
Only at certain festivals of the year	When is it open?	Year-round mostly at night
Torchlight, great procession	Preliminaries activities	None – individuals enter theatre on their own without fanfare
Gods, young men from Athens	Practitioners	Playwrights, actors, actresses
Use of ritual vestments like those of the celebrates of the Eleusinian mysteries	Vestments	The clothes are rooted in the script and the role being played
No spectators, all are participants	Participation	Spectators

I hope it is clear that ancient theatre was much more sacred and special but why could it be? Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray argued this theatre was once part of a magical ritual

From Human Laboring to Rituals
Jane Harrison points out that the two great interests in primitive humanity are food and children. The tribesperson must eat so that they and their tribe must grow and multiply. The seasons are related to this food supply. Forest people depend on the fruit trees and berries. They will construct a maypole and imagine a tree spirit is responsible for life. Agriculturalists will look to the earth for its returning life and food. At certain times of the year the animals and the plants which form their food base are appearing and disappearing. It makes little sense to study a ritual of a people without knowing facts about their climate and their surroundings. Seasons vary from place to place. In some places there is no sign of animate life but thousands of ants. Later in the year suddenly the rainy season kicks in. These hunting and planting procedures are re-enacted in stylized ritual and then retold as myths. Tribespeople perform rites to the sun and moon when they notice their relationship to the seasons

When humans go out to hunt some hunts are successful and some aren’t. Naturally, the band or tribe wants to remember the successful hunts. The way you increase the collective memory of the act is to capture a simulation of it in a ritual. So, they will hunt and catch their game in pantomime. For primitive humanity, beast, bird and plant and humans were not sharply divided. The men acting as kangaroos danced and leaped. They did not imitate, they were kangaroos. The mimes are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making thunder and enacting it. The dancers of the dance got generalized and  many were a re-combination of actual hunts and battles which arose during a hunt dance and war dance. Many men dressed up as trees facing men dancing as tree spirits. The rite is performed by a band or chorus who dance together with a common leader (the protagonist.) From a being perceived by the senses year by year, they are eventually conceived more abstractly as an image or being.

Ancient Traditions of Spell-Casting and Movement
Jane Harrison writes that the tribespeople are people of action who do not ask a monothetic deity  to do what they want done. They do it or try to do it themselves. When a tribesperson wants sun or wind or rain, they do not go to a church and prostate themself before God. They don’t even go to the Oracle of Delphi and ask Apollo about the future. Instead they summon their tribe and dance a sun or a rain dance. In the monotheist religions dancing is either frowned upon or kept in the background. On the contrary, tribespeople are dancing fools. A tribesperson passes from childhood to youth to mature manhood, so the number of their dances increase. For example, when dancing within the hoop, each girl has to waver her arms vigorously and crow “flax grow”. When she is done, she leaps out of the hoop or is lifted out of it by her partner.

Dromenon as a Sacred Animistic Rite
The Greek word for a rite is Dromenon, but Dromenon is also the physical site in which the ritual takes place. Dromenon, Harrison tells us is called the “thing done”. But what is it? A magical enactment for altering consciousness. It is the rite that can be done collectively by a number of people feeling the common emotions about a successful hunt or harvest. Unless these movements are made by the tribe together they will not become rhythmical intense for a successful ritual. All things done are not rites. You may shrink back over and over again in reaction to a fire – that is an expression of emotion and a reaction to a stimulus, but that is not a rite. You might digest your dinner every night but is not a rite. It is a routine.

Dromenon, Dithyramb and the Dancing Dionysus
The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all performed in Athens at a festival known as the Great Dionysus. Aristotle in his treatise on the Art of Poetry raised the question of the origins of drama. He declared that a structure so complex and a Greek tragedy must have arisen from a simpler from of ritual. So what is the relationship between Dionysius and drama? Dionysius dances in what is called the dithyramb. The dithyramb was the song and dance of the new birth of Dionysius in the Spring. In the beginning there were the dancing ritualists. Over the course of history this dancing “cools” and assumes a concentrated form of maypole. A more abstract concentration of the maypole leads the god Dionysius. On the whole The evolution moves from:

• the laboring of hunting or planting perception;
• dancing ritualists – perception;
• maypole – concentrated conception and
• god Dionysius – more abstract conception.

Dionysius, the tree god, the spirit of vegetation, was once but a maypole perceived and then conceived as a god. The dithyramb is also the song of the second or new birth. The dithyramb is twice born. In the first birth he comes into the world; by the second birth he is born into his tribe.

Jane Harrison tells us at first birth the initiate belongs to his mother and the women folk. There is then a second birth where he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the warriors of his tribe. In preparation for his second birth the boy is to put away childish things in order to prepare to become a grown and competent tribesman. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet. She pretends to go through all the labor pains and the boy metaphorically being reborn cries like a baby and is washed.  In totemistic societies and secret societies that seems to grow out of them the novice is born again as the sacred animal.

The rites of birth, marriage and death, which to us seem so different from each other are to tribal humanity all similar. For the most part they were family rituals needing little or no social emphasis. But the rite that concerned the whole tribe was the rite of initiation at puberty or the hunting, planting and war rituals. Harrison informs us in her book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion that the magical dance of the Kouretas is a primitive form of dromenon. It is from these that both drama and sports arose. Gilbert Murray’s Excursus explains the relation between Homer, who supplied the tragedians with their plots and the spring dromenon which determines the form of tragedy. Francis Cornford in his book The Origin of Attic Comedy explains the ritual origins of comedy.

From Dromenon to Drama
The centrality of the chorus and the orchestra
So how does Jane Harrison answer the question about how drama arose out of ritual? After all, art in most people’s mind is a sort of luxury, not a necessity. Drawing, music and dancing are no part of training for ordinary life. When we say art is impractical, we mean the art is cut loose from immediate necessary action. This wasn’t always the case. For example, how do we make sense of the chorus? In modern theatre there is no chorus. If there is a chorus as in opera in the ballet, the chorus dances are to amuse and excite in the intervals of operatic action. But what’s left are prologues and messengers’ speeches, which were once rituals, still surviving at a time when drama has not fully developed out of the dromenon. Central to this is the chorus and the orchestra. There was once a rude platform from which the prologue was spoken. There was no need to look at a distance as in drama. They were too busy dancing together to contemplate from a distance.

Believe it or not it was not the stage on which the chorus danced. They danced in the orchestra. What is the relationship of that space to the rest of the theatre, to the stage and place where the spectators sat? Originally the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were not played on a stage and not in the theatre but in the orchestra. The stage and the theatre were to the Greek a place of seeing—where the spectators sat – the scene, the tent. But the kernel and center of the whole was the orchestra, the circle and dancing place of the chorus. The orchestra was the kernel and center of the theatre. There were no divisions at first between the actors and spectators. All were actors, dancing the dance danced. The drama, like ritual, is a thing done but abstracted (represented) from hunting, planting or warring.

The rise of the theatre and the stage
In drama the theatre or spectator place is added to the orchestra. Not only was there a place for the orchestra and spectators, but there was also a stage. Originally the word for stage was “scene”. It was a tent in which players could put on their ritual dresses. At first, a stage is not necessarily a raised stage, but a place apart from the dancers when you have new material for your players, something you need to look at, attend to. There new plots were introduced, not of spirits but of individual heroes. This was the death of dromenon and ritual. The new wine that was poured into the old bottes of the dromenon at the Spring festival and was the heroic saga. The history of the Greek stage is a long story of the encroachment of the stage on the orchestra. The stage first stands outside the orchestra. Then bit by bit the scene encroaches till the sacred circle of the dancing place is cut clean across the orchestra. As the theater and stage expand the orchestra and the chorus wane.

The drama is based on a decay in the belief of certain magical rites. Yet in a tragedy there must be pathos. However, it is still rooted in the cycle of the year because in the Winter, the Old year must die. There must be a swift transition from sorrow to joy. All these old ritual forms haunt and shadow the play, whatever its plot like the ancient traditions of ghosts.

The Emergence of the Heroic Saga

Aeschylus was born in 456 BCE. His first play was a plot from the heroic saga, Seven Against Thebes. The word “hero” calls up such figures as Achilles and Hector, figures of passion and adventure. They occur in every heroic age. What are the conditions that produce a heroic age? In Heroic poems almost no one is safely and quietly at home. The heroes are fighting in far-off lands or voyaging by sea. We hear little of tribal or family ties. The real center is not the hearth but the leader’s tent or ship. The epic poet is all taken up with what heroes’ authors called glorious deeds of men. The hero acquired deathless fame for their great deeds. The hero must win his followers by bravery and keep them by generosity. The heroic spirit, as seen in heroic poetry is the outcome of a society cut loose from its earthly roots. It is about migrations of the shifting of populations as seen in Chadwick’s Heroic Age. The amazing development of the 5^th century drama is the old vessel of the ritual of dithyramb filled with the new wine of heroic saga. Such were the attitudes of the Athenians towards the doings and sufferings of Homeric heroes. The right distance for them would be remote, but not too remote. Heroes should be in between humanity and the gods. In the old ritual dance of tribal society the individual was insignificant. The chorus, the group, was everything. In the heroic saga the individual is everything. The group is but a shadowy background.

From Drama to Sculpture

Hopefully you have come to be convinced that drama was once rooted in sacred ritual. After all, drama is also a social art. But painting and sculpture are the private acts of individuals. Surely, they have no roots in ritual. It might seem that here at last we have nothing primitive; we have art pure and simple, the ideal art cut loose from ritual. Finally we have secular art. After all, we pass from the living thing, the thing done in ritual or in the play, acted by real people, whether it be dromenon or drama to a thing made a painting or sculpture. How can a sculpture or painting be part of a ritual? We must at last differentiate the artist, the work of art and the spectator.

However Jane Harrison tells us that the Greek sculpture of Apollo, like Dionysus arose as part  of a rite. The ancient Apollo wore wreaths and carried boughs, not because the sculptor wanted to be artistic or poetic but because the sculpture was part of a ritual. For the place of sculpture was inside the shrine, dwelling with the gods and goddesses themselves. For the frieze is nothing but a great ritual procession transferred into stone. The Panathenaic procession or the procession of all the Athenians was rituals turned into stone. This was the purpose of the Panathenaic procession. Drawing is at bottom like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper either preparing for a ritual but ever separate from it.

Table 2 Transition from Ritual to Art: From The Dromenon to the Drama

Dromenon	Category of Comparison	Drama
Mimesis embodiment of person or thing that is an identity	Mimesis vs Masquerade	Masquerade A copy of something that is separate
Presentational	Making sense of repeated actions	Representations
Dithyramb—spring ritual inspiring dance	Type of festival	Panathenaic procession in the summer
Chorus dances in orchestra	Relationship between orchestra, stage and theatre	Spectators in theatre, actors on stage, Chorus gets smaller
No division between actors and participants	Relationship between actors and spectators	Actors separated out from spectators
Group is everything, individual is nothing	Relationship  between the group and the individual	Heroic sage individual Group a shadowy background. Epic poet
Magical circle	Where might it be done/?	Hero’s tent
Magical is important	Place of magic	Confidence in it wanes

The Ritual Origins of Sports
Besides the ritual aspects of animism and drama the third area that has its roots in ritual is sports. Again, as in drama, sports seem like a completely autonomous and secular endeavor. But Allen Guttman in From Ritual to Record points out that primitive cultures rarely have a word for sports in our sense. He references Carl Diem in his world history of sports said that all physical exercises were originally cultic. Running, jumping, throwing, wrestling and ball playing were organized so as to please the gods with the object of securing fertility, causing rain, giving and prolonging life, expelling demons or curing sickness. The Apache of the American Southwest used sports in conjunction with solar-lunar symbolism as part of a yearly fertility rite. Apache myth dramatizes the delicate balance between the two main sources of food: animal sources that were associated with the sun and male while vegetable sources are connected with the moon and female.

There is an  enactment of a kind of relay race in which all males participated at least once between puberty and marriage. One side represented the sun the other side the moon. Abstinence from meat and sex was required prior to the race. The track was called the Milky Way after the heavenly path over which the sun and moon had originally raced. The Milky way connected two circles around whose circumference small holes were dug clockwise. Trees were then planted in the holes. This was accompanied by drums representing the sun and the moon, by flags, dances, songs and feasts. The race was on the third day of the festival at which time a fire was ignited in the center of each circle. The boys were painted and adorned with feathers and led to their circles by two young girls carrying an ear of corn in one hand and an eagle feather in another. The ceremony was clearly more important than the question of winning or losing

Among the Zulus there is a preseason and post season sacrifice of a goat. Pregame ritual requires that coaches and dedicated supporters of the team spend the night before the game together in a special place sleeping in a huge group around the campfire, all naked but there are no sexual relations. Among the Aztecs there are ball courts in Guatemala and Honduras which were considered symbols of the heavens. In Aztec times the game itself was under the protection of the goddess Xochiquetzal. Archeological evidence indicated that the game was literally for life or death. Each of the six reliefs at the great ball court of Chichén Itzá shows the decapitation of a player. Every tennis court was a temple.

When we turn to the Greeks, Guttmann claims the physical contests of Olympia and Delphi were culturally closer to those of primitive peoples than to our own Olympics. The Olympic games were sacred games, stages in a sacred place and at a sacred festival. They were a religious act in honor of a deity. Those who took part did so in order of reverence to the god or goddess and the prizes which they won were thought to come from a god. Olympic games had their roots in Greek polytheism and the games at Olympia were a homage to them.

The fertility myth is the common thread of every version of the founding of the games. The athletic events were held to persuade the god to return from the dead to reappear in the form of a new shoot emerging from the dark womb of the earth into the light of day. The time of the games was as sacred to the Greeks as the place in which the games occurred at the time of the second or third full moon, after the summer solstice. The athletes gathered at the nearby town of Elis and spent thirty days in the final preparation for their exertion.

Richard Mandell, author of Sport: A Cultural History agrees with Guttmann. He points out that the first sport was spear throwing, obviously connected to practicing for a successful hunt. But this practice was all in the service of a magical ritual. Formal games were like theatre and dance and ritual. Native American board games with victors and losers were treated as signs of the players’ status with the gods. Early ball games were preceded by processions of priest and accompanied by musicians and dancers. The subjection of an actor or dancer in theatre to director or choreographer with costumes and masks is paralleled in sports today. The adaptation by players to coaches and managers whose baseball uniforms and team names parallels theatrical role. The participants in early sports games and theatre might be in trances induced by rhythmic dance, breath control, drugs or hypnotic suggestion of animistic sacred dancers. For the Aztecs winners of the games were celebrated as the favorites of the gods while were losers punished or even sacrificed.

When we look at professional sports today its connection with theatre and the animistic rituals of Harrison are not hard to find just a little way below the surface. The baseball or football field is a large-scale magical dancing ground or the orchestral set. The crowd agrees to suspend judgment and make believe what is going on in the field is more real than their lives. They identify with certain players who easily qualify as gods and goddesses. Each team has a history or mythology of having had a “dynasty” if they have a history of winning and a reputation for losing. In both baseball and football there is a Hall of Fame which fans reverently attend. The degree of loyalty of fans to their team today goes way beyond loyalty to religion or politics. Fans memorize statistics in baseball and football and can be strategically very sharp at analyzing what went right or wrong in a game. Attending a game is full of theatrics with food, music, chanting and singing that helps to alter the state of consciousness of the spectators. The players in turn are impacted by the joy or loathing of a crowd.

Conclusion
I began this article by asking about how diverse religion, theatre and sports were from each other. I claimed that surprisingly that if we go back far enough animism, drama and sports are all rooted in ritual that follows Sir James Frazer’s goddess and dying god. The major theorists of the ritualistic school are called the Cambridge Ritualists who included Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray and Frances Cornford. I claim that the polytheism of the Greek Olympians was a late development of the animism that was part of Greek culture before and during the Archaic Iron Age.

Before proceeding I make a case briefly about why socialists should care about these ritualistic origins of animism, drama and sports. Just as the full story of material world history was suppressed by capitalist historians, so the full story of sacred world history is suppressed by monotheist theologians and Greek classical scholars who sing the praises of the Olympians.
Marxist historians claim that knowing about primitive communism gives us ground for claiming there is a dialectic in history moving from primitive to advanced communism. So too, I argue that knowing that animism preceded polytheism and monotheism in sacred evolution shows that very early sacred practices were lively, interactive and confident. The sacred world of animism has the same lack of hierarchy, obedience, private property or reification of polytheism and monotheism. Animism provided real meaning and that less emotional, patriarchal later religions did not.

I begin with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and show how his insistence on the sacred origins of tragedy was the chorus and with Dionysius, not with the Olympians. I then contrast nine different ways of how different ancient theatre is from today’s secular form. I then begin at the beginning by arguing that ritual itself is a reenactment of successful hunting or planting rituals in the hopes of adding predictably to human life. I discuss the animistic dancing ground which is called Dromenon. I discuss how gradually the dancing rituals of the participants becomes congealed over time, first in their form of the Maypole and later into the form of the god Dionysius.

I then turn to the question of how the drama came out of the animistic ritual. I discuss how the roots of drama lay not in theatre of spectators nor the stage, but in the orchestra. It was only as drama evolved out of animism that the stage and the theatre became primary and the orchestra became mere background. The heroic sagas that emerged with the Olympian gods were a late development and by no means the beginning of Greek sacred life. I also point out that it was not just drama that emerged from ritual but also even the seemingly individual arts such as sculpture and drawing which were also once in the service of animistic ritual even as a method of “dancing” on stone or paper.

I close my article by arguing that just as Greek sacred practices and art are ultimately connected to ritual, so is sports. I use the work of Allen Guttmann and Richard Mandell to back me up.

This movement of from ritual to sports happens in this sequence:

• the laboring of hunting or planting perception,
• dancing ritualists – perception,
• the emergence of Maypoles – conception,
• the emergence of the god Dionysius – further conceptions and
• the emergence of drama—conception,
• sculpture – conception and
• sports – conception.

Below is a summary of the areas in which the Cambridge ritualists did their work. Though theoreticians of sports were not part of the Cambridge ritualists, these sports historians confirmed the Cambridge ritualists arguments.

Origins of Drama/ Tragedy	Origin of Comedy	Origin of Religion	Origin of Art	Origin of Philosophy	Origin of Sports
Gilbert Murray	Frances Cornford	Gilbert Murray	Jane Harrison	Francis Cornford	Allen Guttman
Rise of the Greek Epic	Origin of Attic Comedy	Five stages of Greek Religion	Ancient  Art and Ritual	From Religion to Philosophy	From Ritual to Record
		Harrison			Richard Mandell
		Prolegomena			Sport, a Cultural History
		Themis

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Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.