Magical Practices and its Modern Trends in Sri Lankan Urban Life

Abstract

Since the time they lived with simple human thought in the highly complex ultra-modern society today, rituals have been cohesive with the human life as an inseparable entity. It is seen as a pseudoscience, for they are used to make some expectations a reality and as a pseudo-art for they are subservient to superstition when represent a particular purpose. In any society a man because of fear that he is not receiving expected result in various special occasion of human society. Thus, the purpose of this research, which was conducted on the basis of rituals seen in every social community, was based on the fact “How are the leaning of rituals of the urban community?”. For the task conducted as qualitative research, subsequently used the functional method and the case study method. When collecting data through the above mentioned methods, mainly used observational methods such as interviews. This research conducted most of its data gathering from places such as the Gampaha district, which is one of the highly urbanized area of the Western province that proved to be a worthy field to research. Here, ten cases pre-selected were analyzed through qualitative methods of analysis. There I was able to be familiar with a bundle of modern drifts of rituals practiced in the urban society. Fenshui rituals, the worship of Ganadevi, rituals regarding walampuri, a precious conch, rituals based on numerology were found to be the most popular. In addition, various types of sacraments were being performed as panacea for some issues such as deferment of marriage, visual and verbal curse, domestic safety, and for those who live in abroad. In religious spheres, Buddhists, Catholics, Christians, and Muslims gave priority to these functions. Furthermore, it can be said that even as of today, the same rituals performed for various purposes and its performers are named differently in different regions and also a huge difference can be seen in its setting. Moreover, it further became obvious that they had been commercialized. The interference of the media and the politics were significantly responsible. The symbols traditionally used for such rituals had been fully refined so as to go with the modern society. The process of these rituals had been made easy, efficient with the progression of modern Technology. It can be said that the means of communication have been the main cause of its popularity