Quotes About Rituals

How, then, can the Temple be cleansed so that humans, with the polluting smell of death upon them, can nevertheless come into God's Presence? The answer supplied by the levitical rituals is that the sacrificial blood is the sign of God-given life, a life more powerful than death, a life therefore that purifies both sanctuary and worshipper.

The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

All religions have been made by men.

We lived so long and so self-consciously that we assumed we must live forever, and we buried our dead with enough talismans and spare change for eternity.

I don't have any superstitions, but what I always travel with is my pillow and my coffee.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.

My good Harper, I have no notion. Fortunately I was becalmed near a garage. The fellow thrust his head among her smoking entrails, uttered some mumbojumbo, performed suitable rites with oil and water, and I was able to continue

software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless "rituals" whose steps are "encoded in the logic of web pages."33

Both the Hopi and Zuni Indians, who have used the venom in purification rituals, assert that it effectively reduces the human soul to its rarest elements, stripping away all that is false, illusory, or fearful.

The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past. It certainly isn't a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint.

Human cultures kept the oddest gestures.

Al repudiar los ritos, el hombre se reduce a animal que copula y come.

When he repudiates rites, man reduces himself to an animal that copulates and eats.

We reveal to ourselves and others what is important to us by the way we celebrate.

The key to the Jewish calendar is Nature.

In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends. We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them. We wed and christen with flowers. We dare not die without them. We have worshipped with the lily, we have meditated with the lotus, we have charged in battle array with the rose and the chrysanthemum. We have even attempted to speak in the language of flowers. How could we live without them? It frightens one to conceive of a world bereft of their presence.

Magic rituals provided emotional empowerment in the face of danger, and inspired solutions when alternative sources of knowledge (including science) were inadequate.

because we live in Mexico City, we make rounds with the spirits of Huitzilopochtli

From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Durga, to dividing the prasadam or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminity, but also with purity and divinity.

There was a deep wisdom behind the orgiastic and hysterical aspects of ancient religion; there is much to be said in favour of this flinging open of the floodgates to grief. It might be argued that the decorous little services of the West, the hushed voices, the self-control, our brave smiles and calmness either stifle the emotion of sorrow completely, or drive it underground where it lodges and proliferates in a malign and dangerous growth that festers for a lifetime.

Every place has its little superstitions, and everyone laughs at what the folk across the river think.

Dimitris Xygalatas finds that those who engage in high-pain rituals become more loving to their group and more generous as a result. And the more pain they experience, the more group-oriented they get. Importantly, this growing attachment to the group holds true not only for the participants themselves but also for those who watch their performance, who watch them on the long trek up the hill. These observers report feeling vicarious pain, and this brings them closer to their community.

It has been said with some truth that religion is, basically, humankind's attempt to communicate with the weather.

I smiled ruefully to myself, knowing I had already experienced a far greater and deeper union with this man than that which propriety was so busy guarding against. I had seen and accepted our fate here, tonight, on the crest of this ancient hill, and all other ceremonies would be just that: rituals to please the people and make public the commitment that had been made in the privacy of my own heart.