Ritual

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.

Quotes

• There is perfection in the presence of the lady. Lagac thrives in abundance in the presence of Nance. She chose the cennu in her holy heart and seated Ur-Nance, the beloved lord of Lagac, on the throne. She gave the lofty sceptre to the shepherd. She adorned Gudea with all her precious divine powers. The shepherd chosen by her in her holy heart, Gudea, the ruler of Lagac, placed the lyre Cow-of-Abundance among the tigi drums and placed the holy balaj drum at its side. While sacred songs and harmonious songs were performed before her, the kintur instrument praised the temple. The chief musician played the ibex horn for her: the song 'The house has been granted powers from the abzu', the sacred song of the house of Sirara about the princely powers was performed.
  • A hymn to Nanshe, late 3rd millennium BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

• Ritual. One more gaudy emptiness in place of the real thing. One more hope gone.
  • Nancy Kress, Words Like Pale Stones, in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (eds.) Black Thorn, White Rose (1994), ISBN 0-380-77129-2, p. 25

• Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.
  • Terry Pratchett, Discworld, Pyramids (1989).

• The far-from-original point I will try to make now should seem obvious: There is an unsettling similarity between the rituals of the obsessive-compulsive and the rituals of the observantly religious.
  • Robert Sapolsky, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (New York: A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 263.

See also

• Baptism
• Ceremony
• Chant
• Festival
• Libation
• Rite
• Ritual purification
• Worship

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Ritual on Wikipedia
• The dictionary definition of ritual on Wiktionary
• Media related to Rituals on Wikimedia Commons

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