Quotes About Ritual

But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him, not to "sacrifice" him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him, live by him and through him, by his grace.

The Dithyramb was the Song and Dance of the New Birth.

But if the Dithyrambos, the young Dionysos, like the Bull-God, the Tree-God, arises from a dromenon, a rite, what is the rite of second birth from which it arises?

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually perceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or "Summer," or Death, a thing never actually seen but conceived.

Thus among the Carrier Indians 33 when a man wants to become a Lulem, or Bear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on a bearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days.

The word t?l?t? means rite of growing up, becoming complete.

Throughout the ages, humans have had a need to mark the time and place when and where people make the final stop on their journey from this world to the next.

The whole concept of God taking on human shape, and all the liturgy and ritual around that, had simply never made any sense to me. That was because, I realized one wonderful day, it was so simple. For people with bodies, important things like love have to be embodied. That's all. God had to be embodied or else people with bodies would never in a trillion years understand about love.

The triumphal procession air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset—that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun.

My father was a Catholic, but my mother wasn't. She had to do that weird deal you do as a Catholic - they deign to sanction your marriage and you have to bring your children up as Catholics.

pamamanhikan,

Aunque no se crea en ellas, aunque sean sencillas y se les dé apariencia de trámite, las ceremonias producen su efecto, y por eso se inventaron, supongo: para marcar una línea divisoria, establecer un antes y un después, para convertir en serio lo que no lo era, para subrayar y solemnizar. Para dar una noticia y que así ésta sea asumida, sancionada por la comunidad.

la costumbre obra milagros y confiere rango de necesidad a lo antojadizo y superfluo.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.

The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

Nothing about his betrothed please him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the unpleasant in which they had both been brought up.

Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit

According to their national custom, the Barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors.

I gather that when people are cremated one never really gets their ashes, just some communal rakings from the bottom of the oven. As you can imagine, I regard that as good news. Ideally, all ashes would belong to somebody else, but we don't live in a perfect world.

There is something about uncleanness that asks for blood.

porque sabiduría, fuerza y belleza, son la perfección de todo, y nada puede durar sin ellas." "Porque," el Rito de York dice, "es necesario que haya Sabiduría para concebir, fuerza para soportar y belleza para adornar todas las grandes e importantes empresas.