Quotes About Ritual

Ghosts require ceremony.

Mackenzies buried a rapist at a crossroads, with a spear thrust in the soil above; and they buried him living when they could, as a sacrifice to turn aside the anger of the Earth Powers.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

He ate breakfast like a savage: quantities of leavened bread, chunks of cheese made from cows' milk, and coffee drowned in cows' milk too, which he called galão – things that no right-minded person would eat at the beginning of the day.)

Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.

Both success and failure are largely the results of HABIT!

hands are indispensable for priests of the inferior orders, when they bestow the benediction.

The hymn,' with which the Paschal Supper ended, had been sung. Probably we are to understand this of the second portion of the Hallel, [5818] sung some time after the third Cup, or else of Psalm cxxxvi., which, in the present Ritual, stands near the end of the service.

Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

For women who wanted a child, mistletoe was to be strung over their beds. If that had no effect, they must tie nine knots in a strong rope, then burn the rope and eat the ashes and soon enough they would conceive.

name was Tom Smith and he had performed so many marriages he could recite the service in his sleep. Sometimes he did and his wife would lie in bed and listen to him, the whole service through, comforted that someone could know the words of love by heart.

She had packed two china teacups, wrapped in paper towels. She would not drink from anything else. He

En su momento pensó que no podría vivir sin café, pero resulta que en realidad lo que quiere entre las manos es el tazón caliente; eso es lo que ayuda a pensar o a hacer lo que haga durante la sucesión de las horas, o de los días.

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

I think of the meaning of the word testimony. Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other's testicles in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake.

A king was the Lord's anointed, hallowed at his coronation with holy oil.

HABIT, n. A shackle for the free.

Our point of departure must be the conception of an almost childlike play-sense expressing itself in various play-forms, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and productive of culture by allowing the innate human need of rhythm, harmony, change, alternation, contrast and climax, etc., to unfold in full richness.

U krš?anstvu doduše poznajemo kultnu anamnezu; no imamo li - barem u za?ecima - doista anamneti?ku kulturu koja kultski spomen muke povezuje s našim povijesnim iskustvima te tako sprje?ava da muka na koncu bude slavljena samo kao od povijesti udaljeni mit?

Life is but a collection of habits.

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

Few of us go through life without taking part in some kind of rite of passage.

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.