The Celestial Church of Christ: Syncretism, ritual practice and the invention of tradition in a new religious movement

This dissertation presents a detailed systematic account of the history, beliefs and practices of the Celestial Church of Christ, a new Aladura religious movement concentrated in southwestern Nigeria. Beginning with the movement's origins in Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) and the prophetic visions in 1947 of its founder Samuel Bilewu Joseph Oshoffa, the dissertation describes the events and processes which led to the Church's growth and international expansion. It details the social and administrative organization of the Celestial Church, highlighting how its notion of a "spiritual hierarchy" informs its bureaucracy, finances, and local parish government. The work emphasizes the nature of Celestial angels and points out their central role in Church cosmology, doctrinal tenets, and religious assumptions. The dissertation depicts the spatial context for Celestial Church ritual activity, its iconography, the constitution of its worship altars, and the design of its "Holy Land." It characterizes the style of ritual dress worn by Celestians, and the symbolic nature of the various substances and elements employed in Celestial ritual. The work presents the forms of ritual invocation, speech, bodily postures and gestures, offerings, spirit possession, and healing techniques in the Church, and then demonstrates how each, as different units of practice, cohere into complete Celestial Church worship services.;Beyond ethnographic description, this dissertation also develops an explicit theory of ritual which accounts for how members of particularly new, and apparently syncretic, religious movements like the Celestial Church of Christ can successfully invent a sense of tradition. Drawing upon measurement theory with its distinction between accuracy and precision, practice theory with its understanding of ritual as practice, and numerical taxonomy with its distinction between monothetic and polythetic classification, the thesis argues that ritual practice has significant taxonomic consequences. The argument submits that being implicated in ritual practice defines for participating agents, objects, and spaces a context dependent "operational identity" which includes a monothetic status of tradition. Finally, by emphasizing the centrality of ritual for the Church, this dissertation also proposes a novel explanation for the extraordinary popularity of the Celestial Church of Christ.