Quotes About Ritual

I always went to bed like someone getting ready for a long trip: books, pills, glasses of water, clocks, a light, pencils, notebooks. To go to bed and switch off the light has been for me to submit to a totally unknown world, full of delicious as well as sinister promises.

The single most important factor in the performance of any Muslim ritual is the believer's intention, which must be consciously proclaimed before the ritual can begin.

The Ka'ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a "navel spot": a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven.

Acesta este locul in care vei fi cel mai aproape de Dumnezeu. Duhoarea carnagiului este imposibil de ignorat. Intra in piele si in par ca o povara otravitoare de care vei scapa cu greu. Preotii ard tamaie pentru a alunga duhoarea si boala, dar amestecul de mirt, scortisoara, sofran si tamaie nu poate masca mirosul pestilential al macelului.

only the high priest can enter the Holy of Holies, and on only one day a year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when all sins of Israel are wiped clean. On this day, the high priest comes into presence of God to atone for the whole nation. If he is worthy of God's blessing, Israel's sins are forgiven. If he is not, a rope tied to his waist ensures that when God strikes him dead, he can be dragged out of the Holy of Holies without anyone else defiling the sanctuary.

Athena was originally worshiped as a flat piece of olive wood that was washed and bejeweled, wrapped in garments, and carefully tended by a cadre of her priestesses.16

He spoke of very simple things- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form. Set aside, came a voice from the multitude, even if it be the Law of the Flock? The only true law is that which leads to freedom, Jonathan said. There is no other.

whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.

the forces of rulers and ritual slowly, slowly will kill our freedom to live as we choose.

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

How dare they invite us—in our sitting rooms, watching television—to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of stupid, puffed up, superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?

Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It's not—it's a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an 'I dunno' dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is that they haven't a clue, so they're attributing it to an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy

Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

History is precious; ritual is precious. Lose that and we lose the knowledge of our own being, Lose the thread of ancestry, lose the tales, and we are adrift without identity.

Moses explained, "the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place."1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community.2

Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual.

This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.

Ultimately, however, he held that a person's theology or beliefs, like the ritual he took part in, were unimportant. They could be interesting but not a matter of final significance. The only thing that counted was the good life;

Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

Animal sacrifice, for example, the central rite of nearly every religious system in antiquity, preserved prehistoric hunting ceremonies and continued to honor a beast that gave its life for the sake of humankind. One of the functions of ritual is to evoke an anxiety in such a way that the community is forced to confront and control it. From the very beginning, it seems, religious life was rooted in acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other creatures.

man of the Axial Age, Confucius wanted people to become fully conscious of what they were doing. Performance of the li was

He shrugged. "It's always the Sunday following the first full moon that occurs after the spring equinox." Will took a minute to realize he was speaking English.

O happy, happy each man whom predestined fate leads to the holy rite of hill and mountain worship.