Symbology and ritual, at best, can only mimic the Truth … and cannot, and never has had, any mastery over the manifestations of Divinity.

My Ten Commandments:1. God is a verb, not a noun.2. Prayers are important only if they lead to corresponding actions.3. Creation is an art. Science provides the tools for the artist. Anybody with the tools...

By using repetition, images, and other strategies – all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional – marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer...

The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.

Thanks to Karen Connelly who read earlier versions of this manuscript and to Ronald Hatch my editor and publisher.

Our comfort in theological traditions should never usurp our desire for spiritual Truth. If we vigorously pursue the rituals rather than a relational experience with God then we’ve missed His message entirely.

Virtual worlds are places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity and ritual.

Humans are amazing ritual animals, and it must be understood that the Tzutujil, nor any other real intact people, do not ‘practice’ rituals. Just as a bear must turn over stumps searching for beetles, real...

Through many waters borne, brother, I am come to thy sad grave, that I may give these last gifts to the dead. Forever and ever, brother, hail. Forever and ever, farewell.

Don’t confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.

Prayer isn’t about repeating rituals; it’s about spending time with Dad.

Religion is more than rite and ritual.

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed...

Unanimous hatred is the greatest medicine for a human community.

Les représentations thé trales, 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...

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service–the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back...

Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are...

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human – in the fact that so much of what we...

Dr. Murray points to the Nazarite system as what he calls an external scaffolding supporting human efforts at righteousness, reminding the participant that he is set apart. Christ, he said, needed no external reminder that...

It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating...

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I...

Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.

Everything ritualistic must be strictly avoided, because it immediately turns rotten. Of course a kiss is a ritual too and it isn’t rotten, but ritual is permissible only to the extent that it is as...

mistake.’ That’s insulting. I’m not a mistake.

The mystery religions were instituted in order to protect the marvels of the commonplace from those who would devalue them.

Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just...

And those who will carefully study the so-called ‘Mosaic code’ contained in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, will see that, though Jahveh’s prohibitions of certain forms of immorality are strict and sweeping, his...

If blood can produce money through rituals or the so-called human sacrifice, then it is the basis on which we live, so it is very essential to save and protect it from the fiendish eyes...

abuse seminar” together some place, somehow? Was it taught in the seminary? In some dark corner? It goes beyond coincidence—the similarities in deeds and verbiage that these predators use on us. It truly chilled me...

Prayer is a path where there is none.

When a witch embodies self-love, her energy becomes magnetic and her sense of possibility becomes contagious.

Life is a ritual of loveLife is a ritual of union, and Life is a dance of the divine

As a child of the Goddess, I know that when a being dies, the soul lives on. That dying is only a way of forgetting pain and suffering–that it is a pathway to travel back...

I reflected on other victims I had met and how they were raped right on the altars of their own churches. Some of them were altar boys, and they were abused before or after mass....

I’m back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She’s lying on an alter, and they’re hurting her. The bastards. They’re hurting her. There is blood all over...

Ritual may be vital to reaction, but it is also the life blood of revolution.

Everything depends on what is being enacted. Enactment itself, since it is almost synonymous with ceremony, is, as we have seen, part of the very fabric of our human life. We do enact things. We...

Above me I feel your lovemy GoddessFull of the promise that through youmy GoddessAll things ripen and come to fruitionmy GoddessAs the diaphanous boundary between worldsmy GoddessIs illuminated by the white light of your signmy...

I’m not particularly in favor of doctrine or creed, ordination, the elevation of holy texts, the institution of church, or, for that matter, Christianity. Like most religions, it has irreconcilable shortcomings and an unforgivable history....

A prayer couched in the words of the soul, is far more powerful than any ritual.

Like all magical mysteries, the secrets of the Great Work have a triple meaning: they are religious, philosophical and natural. Philosophical gold in religion is the Absolute and Supreme Reason; in philosophy, it is truth;...

[The Lord’s Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to ‘connect’ his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of...

His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided...

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...

{Wells discussing his experiences with Christianity}I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at...

If theater is ritual, then dance is too… It’s as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the...

If it’s God you’re worried about, the Lord Jesus said that we needn’t keep to the old ways anymore. They had their day years ago.

Repetition and familiarity work. What is repeated becomes familiar, and this becomes a part of us. Our own culture understands this, but alas, not always the church. Far too many equate ritual with spiritual dryness....

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the...

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generatly it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance....