Quotes About Rituals

I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India.

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

Les représentations théâtrales, elles aussi, sont enracinées dans la violence collective et ce sont des espèces de rites, mais plus nettoyés encore de leur violence que les sacrifices animaux, et plus riches sur le rapport culturel, puisque ce sont toujours, au moins indirectement, des méditations sur l'origine du religieux et de la culture tout entière, des sources potentielles de savoir.

Rituals are routines that force us to move faithfully even when we no longer feel like being faithful. Until our heart has the time to arouse itself and find its way back to those we love, rituals make us show up for duty.

Personal measurements provide an opportunity to be wildly creative. If you're doing a spell for mental clarity, find a way to incorporate your head measurement. If your spellwork is aimed at expressing your feelings more clearly, try incorporating the distance from your heart to your mouth. Talismans, charms, garments, and tools: When we personalize these items, we imbue them with powerful ties to our own imaginations, associations, bodies, and beliefs.

On Earth, when anthropologists can't find instant meaning in any cultural artifact, they say "This obviously had deep religious significance.")

no word in the Hebrew language of that period for "religion." Religion was not a separate, identifiable category of beliefs and activities. It was an inseparable, pervasive part of life.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

Religion is best when it points beyond itself, like Isaiah or John the Baptist. It is worst when it gives you just enough of the forms to inoculate you against the substance, when it substitutes rituals for reality, the container for the contents, the wineskins for the ecstatic wine.

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

I'm the god of funerals. I know every death custom in the world—how to die properly, how to prepare the body and soul for the afterlife. I live for death." "You must be fun at parties," I said.

cast their babes to the crocodiles in the Ganges.

Keepers and Seekers were not permitted to do more than trim their hair to elbow length. Ashyn said they ought to be grateful they weren't like the spirit talkers, who weren't ever allowed to cut their hair or their nails. Personally, Moria would be more concerned with the eyes plucked out, tongue cut off, and nostrils seared part of being a spirit talker, but she could see that the uncut nails might be inconvenient as well.

Even lords ought to follow the customs.

People said that bathing was bad for your health, and Edgar never bathed in winter, but those who never bathed at all stank all their lives. Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.

A citizenship of wholesale delegation and abdication to public and private power systems, such as prevails now, makes such periodic checks as elections little more than rituals.

All kinds of performance practices have a certain register of power or solemnity.

Any church that operates in prayerless and powerless Christianity spend their days and years conducting dust to dust rites in the burial grounds.

Prayers without wine are perfectly pointless.

Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.

All those football coaches who hold dressing-room prayers before a game should be forced to attend church once a week.

Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.