Procession

A procession is an organized body of people walking in a formal or ceremonial manner. A procession may be arranged for a variety of purposes, including to advertise something, signal a change in government, display a group's power, show solidarity for a cause, mark the beginning or end of an event such as a wedding or funeral, entertain a crowd, or practice a religion. Processions have been an aspect of celebrations and ceremonies since ancient times, and they are practiced in some form throughout all cultures. They often involve a mode of transport, such as a carriage or a car; music or vocalizations, including a choir or a marching band; a visual signal of a hierarchy within the precession; and the display of eye-catching items like banners.

Processions have in all peoples and at all times been a natural form of public celebration, as forming an orderly and impressive ceremony. Religious and triumphal processions are abundantly illustrated by ancient monuments, e.g. the religious processions of Egypt, those illustrated by the rock-carvings of Boghaz-Keui, the many representations of processions in Greek art, culminating in the great Panathenaic procession of the Parthenon Frieze, and Roman triumphal reliefs, such as those of the arch of Titus.

Processions played a prominent part in the great festivals of Greece, where they were always religious in character. The games were either opened or accompanied by more or less elaborate processions and sacrifices, while processions from the earliest times formed part of the worship of the old nature gods, as those connected with the cult of Dionysus and the Phallic processions, and later formed an essential part of the celebration of the great religious festivals (e.g. the processions of the Thesmophoria, and that of the Great Dionysia), and of the mysteries (e.g. the great procession from Athens to Eleusis, in connection with the Eleusinia).

The most prominent of the Roman processions was that of the Triumph, which had its origin in the return of a victorious army headed by their general, who accompanied by the army, captives, spoils, the chief magistrate, priests bearing the images of the gods, amidst strewing of flowers, burning of incense and the like (Ovid, Trist. iv. 2, 3 and 6), proceeded in great pomp from the Campus to the Capitol to offer sacrifice.

Connected with the triumph was the pompa circensis, or solemn procession that preceded the games in the circus. It first came into use at the Ludi Romani, when the games were preceded by a great procession from the Capitol to the Circus. The praetor or consul who appeared in the ponipa circensis wore the robes of a triumphing general (see Mommsen, Staatsrec/zt I. 397 for the connection of the triumph with the ludi). Thus, when it became customary for the consul to celebrate games at the opening of the consular year, he came, under the empire, to appear in triumphal robes in the processus consularis, or procession of the consul to the Capitol to sacrifice to Jupiter.

After the ascendency of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the consular processions in Constantinople retained their religious character, now proceeding to Hagia Sophia, where prayers and offerings were made; but in Rome, where Christianity was not so widely spread among the upper classes, at first the tendency was to convert the procession into a purely civil function, omitting the pagan rites and prayers, without substituting Christian ones.

Only after Theodosius did the processions become a religious event, replete with icons, crosses, and banners. There were other local processions connected with the primitive worship of the country people, which remained unchanged, but they were eventually overshadowed by the popular piety of the Church. Such were those of the Ambarvalia, Robigalia, which were essentially rustic festivals, lustrations of the fields, consisting in a procession round the spot to be purified, leading the sacrificial victims with prayers, hymns, and ceremonies to protect the young crops from evil influence.

Tertullian (2nd century) uses processio and procedere in the sense of to go out, appear in public, and, as applied to a church function, processio was first used in the same way as collecta, i.e. for the assembly of the people in a church. In this sense it appears to be used by Pope Leo I, while in the version by Dionysius Exiguus of the 17th canon of the Council of Laodicea (about 363–364) Ancient Greek: σονάξεσι, is translated by processionibus.