Ritual Reform and Ritual Behavior

Ritual Process

iii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Bill and Barbara, my brother, Peter, sister-in-law, Sharon, my girlfriend, Sylvia, my cat, Oli, and all the other family and friends that have supported me in the pursuit of my dreams. iv Acknowledgement I am grateful to my thesis committee members, Aaron McNamee, Dan Rule and Kathy Rodriguez for all their help and guidance. I appreciate th...

Ritual, Masks, and Sacrifice

INTRODUCTION Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face. The mask makes the disengagement from ordinary time and the connection to the ancient and repetitive, which is the heart of ritual, psychologically acceptable. Together, ritual and mask facilitate the apprehension of identity and its connections with pa...

Prisoners of ritual.

The indelible memories of my medical undergraduate days include one of a lecture delivered by the late Karl Stern, then professor of psychiatry at McGill. His topic was the role of ritual in preventing anxiety. He began by asking us to recall the silly games we had played as children — avoiding cracks in the sidewalk (“step on a crack, break your mother’s back”) or holding your breath when you ...

The Daily Ritual

The Daily Ritual was one of a series of cultic rituals performed for the statue of the god by temple priests each day. Performed in the morning after the fi rst light of dawn, it was complemented by similar but more abbreviated rituals in the afternoon and evening. The Egyptians believed that the gods themselves had established the correct form of the rituals, and along with the celebration of ...

Bringing Ritual to Mind