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Creation of the Sacred

Author: Walter Burkert

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998-01-13

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780674175709

Sacrifice is essential to all religions. Could there be a natural, even biological, reason? Why are sacrifice and numerous other religious rituals and concepts shared by so many different cultures? In this extraordinary book, one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient religions explores the possibility of natural religion.

Tending to the Sacred

Author: Ashley River Brant

Publisher: Sounds True

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9781683646785

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Return to living a fully embodied life with 50 rituals to improve your health, well-being, and confidence on your Sacred Path. As humans, rituals have fed our hearts, minds, and souls since the dawn of our species on this planet. “Everyone in the world has a ritual, whether they realize it or not,” writes author Ashley River Brant. Far from being a relic of simpler times, these rituals align us with our intentions to heal and evolve. They help us tap into our own deep wells of wisdom, connect back to the earth and our bodies, and remember that the sacred is ever present in our lives. In Tending to the Sacred, Brant shares a curated collection of accessible yet profound rituals to help you awaken your true connection with the earth, Spirit, and yourself. As you engage with each ritual, you’ll begin to lovingly peel back the layers that keep you from being fully embodied and empowered in your life, leading to greater emotional balance, ease, purpose, and resilience on your Sacred Path. Used by the author in her personal life and healing arts practice, each ritual is woven from an abundance of ancient wisdom, medicine, and creativity. Plant healing recipes (including elixirs, oils, essences, and teas), elemental rituals, journal prompts, mantras, and visualizations are all included in this beautifully illustrated guide. Ritual is a powerful way to become more present with yourself, the earth, and the love all around you. Explore the simple yet transformative impacts of ritual with Tending to the Sacred.

Religious and Social Ritual

Author: Michael Bjerknes Aune

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780791428252

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Examines particular rituals (social and religious) as a special kind of cultural performance or interaction in a wide variety of traditions and locations.

Religion, Ritual and Ritualistic Objects

Author: Albertina (Tineke) Nugteren

Publisher: MDPI

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 3038977527

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This is a volume about the life and power of ritual objects in their religious ritual settings. In this Special Issue, we see a wide range of contributions on material culture and ritual practices across religions. By focusing on the dynamic interrelations between objects, ritual, and belief, it explores how religion happens through symbolic materiality. The ritual objects presented in this volume include: masks worn in the Dogon dance; antique ecclesiastical silver objects carried around in festive processions and shown in shrines in the southern Andes; funerary photographs and films functioning as mnemonic objects for grieving children; a dented rock surface perceived to be the god’s footprint in the archaic place of pilgrimage, Gaya (India); a recovered manual of rituals (from Xiapu county) for Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, juxtaposed to a Manichaean painting from southern China; sacred stories and related sacred stones in the Alor–Pantar archipelago, Indonesia; lotus symbolism, indicating immortalizing plants in the mythic traditions of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia; lavishly illustrated variations of portrayals of Ravana, a Sinhalese god-king-demon; figurines made of cow dung sculptured by rural women in Rajasthan (India); and mythical artifacts called ‘Apples of Eden’ in a well-known interactive game series.

Sacred Ritual, Profane Space

Author: Jenn Cianca

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2018-05-23

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0773554246

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The first three centuries of Christianity are increasingly seen in modern scholarship as sites of complexity. Sacred Ritual, Profane Space examines the Christian meeting places of the time and overturns long-held notions about the earliest Christians as utopian rather than place-bound people. By mapping what is known from early Christian texts onto the archaeological data for Roman domestic spaces, Jenn Cianca provides a new lens for examining the relationship between early Christianity and sites of worship. She proposes that not only were Roman homes sacred sites in their own right but they were also considered sacred by the Christian communities that used them. In many cases, meeting space would have included the presence of the Roman domestic cult shrines. Despite the fact that the domestic cult was polytheistic, Cianca asserts that its practices likely continued in places used for worship by Christians. She also argues that continued practice of the domestic cult in Roman domestic spaces did not preclude Christians from using houses as churches or from understanding their rituals or their meeting places as sacred. Raising a host of questions about identity, ritual affiliation, and domestic practice, Sacred Ritual, Profane Space demonstrates how sacred space was constructed through ritual enactment in early Christian communities.

Sacred Consumption

Author: Elizabeth Morán

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2016-12-06

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1477310711

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Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptural works, as well as indigenous and Spanish sixteenth-century texts, were filled with images of foodstuffs and food processing and consumption. Both gods and humans were depicted feasting, and food and eating clearly played a pervasive, integral role in Aztec rituals. Basic foods were transformed into sacred elements within particular rituals, while food in turn gave meaning to the ritual performance. This pioneering book offers the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art. Elizabeth Morán asserts that while feasting and consumption are often seen as a secondary aspect of ritual performance, a close examination of images of food rites in Aztec ceremonies demonstrates that the presence—or, in some cases, the absence—of food in the rituals gave them significance. She traces the ritual use of food from the beginning of Aztec mythic history through contact with Europeans, demonstrating how food and ritual activity, the everyday and the sacred, blended in ceremonies that ranged from observances of births, marriages, and deaths to sacrificial offerings of human hearts and blood to feed the gods and maintain the cosmic order. Morán also briefly considers continuities in the use of pre-Hispanic foods in the daily life and ritual practices of contemporary Mexico. Bringing together two domains that have previously been studied in isolation, Sacred Consumption promises to be a foundational work in Mesoamerican studies.

Imagery, Ritual, and Birth

Author: Anna M. Hennessey

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-12-11

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1498548741

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Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. This book explores how imagery is used in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during the contemporary rituals of birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture.

Bringing the Sacred to Life

Author: John Daido Loori

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 2008-03-11

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0834823500

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Zen rituals—such as chanting, bowing, lighting incense before the Buddha statue—are ways of recognizing the sacredness in all of life. A ritual is simply a deliberate and focused moment that symbolizes the care with which we should be approaching all of life, and practicing the Zen liturgy is a way of cultivating this quality of attention in order to bring it to everything we do. Here, John Daido Loori demystifies the details of the Zen rituals and highlights their deeper meaning and purpose. We humans are all creatures of ritual, he teaches, whether we recognize it or not. Even if we don’t make ritual part of some religious observance, we still fall into ritual behavior, whether it be our daily grooming sequence or the way we have our morning coffee and paper. We run through our personal rituals unconsciously most of the time, but there is great value to introducing meaningful symbolic rituals into our lives and to performing them deliberately and mindfully—because the way we do ritual affects the way we live the rest of our lives. The book includes instructions for a simple Zen home liturgy, as it is practiced by students of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen.

How to Create Sacred Water

Author: Kathryn W. Ravenwood

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-10-03

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1591438039

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A hands-on method to heal the waters of Gaia using powerful elixirs created with a sacred altar and consecrated crystals • Reveals, step by step, the shamanic rituals and techniques to prepare crystal homeopathic elixirs to heal the waters of the Earth • Explains how to create a sacred water altar in your home for elixir preparation as well as program the crystals used with healing intentions • Includes shamanic journey meditations to connect with ancient water spirits and infuse your water-healing work with sacred intention When Hurricane Floyd ravaged the North Carolina coast in 1999, Kathryn Ravenwood--living thousands of miles away in Seattle--was called by Spirit to help heal the toxic waters left behind. Combining her longtime devotion to sacred altars with her newfound connection to crystals, she developed a process to make crystal homeopathic elixirs to cleanse bodies of water both near and far. Sharing her journey of spiritual calling and discovery, Ravenwood explains how to create crystal homeopathic elixirs using a sacred water altar and attuned crystals. Detailing how to create a personal altar in your home, the crystals most suitable for this work (such as amethyst and selenite), as well as how to program them with your healing intentions, she describes the month-long cycle--from full moon to full moon--of ritual and prayer at the core of the process that infuses the elixirs with their cleansing and healing powers. Ravenwood provides shamanic journey meditations based on Native American and Egyptian traditions to help you connect with ancient water spirits and guides and instill your water-healing work with sacred purpose. She explains how to ceremonially apply an elixir to a body of water and how the remedy will propagate outward to the ocean, bringing healing to the waters it spans as well as to the animals it encounters. Bringing spirituality into physicality and providing a practical application for the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, this hands-on shamanic method enables each of us to take part in transforming our planet as well as our selves--for the health of Gaia and our own bodies is directly tied to the health of the waters that surround and are within us.