All barbarous nations are commonly great observers of ceremonies.
In Japan, you can learn how to make a bunch of flowers. This is an art. Tea ceremony, it's an art.
I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
I go to South Dakota for ceremonies when I have the time. And when you learn what the Indian peoples have gone through to hold onto their culture and traditions... wow, it's an amazing story.
Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.
When I'm near a native community, I visit it. If I hear there's a spiritual person in the neighborhood, I'll seek them out.
If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.
Ritual is important to us as human beings. It ties us to our traditions and our histories.
The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life.
The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once.
I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Rituals are important.
We say that if a temple, or a symbol, or an image helps you to realize the Divine within, you are welcome to it. Have two hundred images if you like. If certain forms and formulas help you to realize the Divine, God speed you; have, by all means, whatever forms, temples, whatever ceremonies you want to bring you nearer to God. But do not quarrel about them; the moment you quarrel, you are not going Godward, you are going backward towards the brutes.
Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together. Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us.
The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.
The first thing we complain of here is, that the people are entertained with showy ceremonies, while not a word is said of their significance and truth.
Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.
History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.
The need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a nonclerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education.
Ceremony is necessary in Courts, as the outwork and defense of manners.
In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar - a practice which is still continued.
I am not accustomed to protocol.
I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to oneform a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ.
