The people of the Aran Islands live by the sea, and the power of the sea in their lives has become a supernatural power that God uses to both reward (in the form of bountiful fish harvests) and punish the community (in the form of danger and death fighting the sea’s forces.) We in the sophisticated culture of the European and American civilization dismiss the beliefs of the Island people as “superstition” – witness the belief that a drowned man's ghostly visage can ride across the horizon on a pale horse – while most of the allusions are actually from the Bible. To call the beliefs of Mauyra and her daughters “superstitions” would be akin to calling the Christian rituals and beliefs “superstitious” also. Primitive people (that is, societies where geography or other circumstances have separated their lives from the larger communities) almost always concentrate their spiritual symbolism on natural phenomena that affect their daily lives -- the sun, volcanoes, winds, etc. Riders to the Sea, in Synge’s hands, becomes a microcosm of all religious explanations for life’s circumstances.
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