Ritual

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I think I visualise quite strongly. Sometimes with eyes closed I feel i can literally see things I imagine, but I think a lot of people get that. I have astigmatism in one eye and I often think how things like that shape your perceptions of the world beyond just forming an image of the immediate environment
I find this fascinating, assuming we have the same thing in mind. How mental abstractions seem to be congruent with elements of your physical environment you detect visually.

Every once in a while I catch this in a very palpable way. Thinking about something remote and ostensibly unrelated to my current physical environment, I formulate a certain function, graph, distribution, and the shape of it maps onto some element of my environment. Like imagining some kind of bell curve, with valid and useful data, then noticing that you've been looking at a bell-shaped object the whole time.

Sometimes it's not even mathematical, but more poetic/philosophic, such as gyres, strata, and other such images that can be loaded with information, all the while looking at something that prompts/inspires such mental images.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
The year of the Iranian embassy siege, my catholic school took volunteers to Lourdes to support and assist disabled people from the local church find whatever it is you find in a bunk shrine.

One specific Mass stood out. We’d just done the stations of the cross walk, pretty knackering for a primary school kid. You walk past these tented baths, choc full of the dying, cuing in line to be immersed in a watery cure. Proceed to cathedral for the big off. Every conceivable form of catholic style and imagery was present that day, but the most unnerving was the extremely heightened state of emotion among the throng outside waiting. You could feel it in the air, crackling, merciless abandon.

When they started the service, the biggest swaying incense orb imaginable was swung black and forth from the ceiling in front of the pulpit. I can still smell it. Then about 2000 people, everyone apart from myself and a few other confused souls, spontaneously started crying. And not just any normal form of emoting. I mean hysterical, unannounced, heaving, snot-heavy, air-gulping tears of something I’ve never come close to understanding (or wanting to understand). If there was a cue, a trigger, or whatever, for this I definitely missed it. The epitome of manipulation of the weird imho.

When I got home never went to mass or confession again, got into a secular comprehensive school asap. Ritual has a place, but, just leave the kids at home eh.
That sounds incredibly heavy. It reminds me of footage of some of Werner Erdard's EST sessions - some of which made it into Adam Curtis's Century of the Self. The context is different but the physical expression sounds similar.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
@DannyL proper fuckin weird. The relationship between ritual and movement stuck. It seemed reasonably natural because the stations are outside. But then that specific mass. Too much. If you’re 8-9 years old, utterly baffled at a throng of adults completely falling apart over a dead bloke who was just joking about being dead while nailed to a cross, it can only go on unquestioned for so long. In this case, about ten minutes. I remember looking across the line at my mate at the time and we both looked at each other with bewildered expressions of what the fuck is going on here?

@shiels confession is weird, on the one hand it def serves a purpose but the trivial, mundane aspects of human behaviour aren’t really anyone’s business, unless you’re Dennis Nilson. That consumption of thought control though, the sanctity undermined by wanking sounds coming from the other side of the booth. Swearing as curses reminded me of Bath’s museum, specifically the curse tablets called Defixiones. The curser would travel to Sulis Minerva because eg someone had stolen their favourite coat, pay a scribe to write their hate, loathing and retribution on the tablet, which would then be deposited in the liminal hot spring. Found these mind blowing in their unintended humour. The separation from morality and ritual an organisation like the catholic church sought to paint over with a veneer of chastity.

I think we’re surrounded by lost rituals often overlooked as habits. There was a news junket ages ago about how Tony Blair liked to make a cup of tea. Revealed a lot, borderline Golden Dawn (eg fresh water for every boil up), but Google’s just saying he couldn’t find a decent brew in London.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's something to be said for regarding all number of basic acts as, to use your phrase, lost rituals. Washing. Eating (saying grace sacralises the act of eating a sandwich I suppose). Getting drunk.
 

luka

Well-known member
Me and Shiels both do a 10 minute ersatz 'meditation' to start the day which is a failed attempt at ritual.
 

luka

Well-known member
“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound


Reading as ritual. The Harmonising the Frequencies Ritual will re-sacralise the debased act of listening to music
 

luka

Well-known member
Once on acid, down at floor level, I thought housework properly conceived is a kind of ritual to household deities
 

luka

Well-known member
There's something about ritual that connects you with every other celebrant of the ritual from now till the very first devotee. That's why I sometimes say there's only one writer. Or there's only one reader. Or there's only one listener.
 

luka

Well-known member
No. That was acid but that was more the horror of seeing thick dust on dado rails like some living growing death
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Once on acid, down at floor level, I thought housework properly conceived is a kind of ritual to household deities

Lots of the hoodoo stuff is like this (hoodoo being American folk magic, that survived in black communities, post-slavery). Floorwashes to sanctify the house. Wash all the bad stuff out first, washing towards the door, chuck water away at a crossroads, don't look back. Wash again with blessed water to bring in blessings, money, luck etc. The water might have herbs, holy water etc added and appropriate psalms said over it.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Me and Shiels both do a 10 minute ersatz 'meditation' to start the day which is a failed attempt at ritual.
I saw you mention this in the other thread and honestly couldn't tell whether it was a humorous euphemism for wanking.
 
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luka

Well-known member
I like it 'cos it's use of the domestic sphere, its everydayness.

i felt like a kind of Grand Director of Reality usually too self-important, vainglorious and preoccupied to notice and concern my lofty self with the lives and concerns and hardships of the little ones who share the house with me.
 
There was a fair bit of sneering at my mum cleaning as a teenager. Why? Who is this for? Who cares!? I was missing the importance of tidiness, the joy in the process and ritual as duty to an omnipresent observer: be it god, the joneses, the Big Other
 
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