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 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 ...

www.ritualdynamik.de Hand over the pūjā plate with the siddhir astu. ācamana. Make the purification for the clay of the guru reciting the rakṣohanaṃ. Sacrifice bali, reciting the adhy avocad. Light reciting the tejo ʼsi. Ritual bath reciting the svasti na indro. • Rituals exist in all human cultures across all times. • Similarities between rituals from very distant cultures can be observed. • I...

The possibility that victims of child abuse can repress or otherwise lose memories of early traumatic experiences and then recover them years later is currently the subject of heated debate (Alpert et al., 1996). Concerns about false memories are particularly intense in cases involving repressed memory of alleged acts of satanic ritual abuse (Wright, 1994). Allegations of ritual abuse, which of...

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of men's experiences of pregnancy, birth and early fatherhood. It does so using a framework of ritual transition theory and argues that despite its earlier structural-functionalist roots, transition theory remains a valuable framework, illuminating contemporary transitions across the life course. The paper discusses the historical development of transi...

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...

Drawing upon James Carey’s ritual model of communication as a framework, we argue that rituals, especially religious rituals, are important resources for technology design. We suggest that a ritual view of ICT interaction represents an alternative and significant model for ICT development and evaluation, and that the observance of religious rituals affords researchers the opportunity to see cul...

In this paper, a new automatic system for classifying ritual locations in diverse Hajj and Umrah video scenes is investigated. This challenging subject has mostly been ignored in the past due to several problems one of which is the lack of realistic annotated video datasets. HUER Dataset is defined to model six different Hajj and Umrah ritual locations [26]. The proposed Hajj and Umrah ritual l...

We automatically represent others’ actions in terms of their goal—for actions with concrete external goals (e.g. reaching for an object; Woodward, 1998). Is this true for actions without concrete external goals? We hypothesized that movement itself could be considered a goal, and that this inference forms part of concepts like dance, exercise and ritual. In a between-subject experiment, partici...