97 Ritual Quotes

There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God.

The first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.

Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.

The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers.

I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.

Let the blue sky overhead, The green earth on which ye tread, All that must eternal be Witness the solemnity.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

'Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea,' said Japhy. 'Remember that book I told you about; the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.'

Before they committed the crime of crimes, before they killed their Master, before the cross, before the slaying of Christ, [Jewish sacrifices were] an abomination.

I can see lights in the distance Trembling in the dark cloak of night Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing A waltz on All Souls Night.

Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

For the current of our spiritual life, creeds and rituals are channels that may thwart or help, according to their fixity or openness. When a symbol or spiritual idea becomes rigidly elaborate in its construction, it supplants the idea which it should support.

Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home - and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed - breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert:. Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music:. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren, Since o'er shady groves they hover, And with leaves and flowers do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men.

I like vending machines 'cuz snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it so that it achieves it's maximum flavor potential.

Here's to the maiden of bashful fifteen; Here's to the widow of fifty; Here's to the flaunting, extravegant quean, And here's to the housewife that's thrifty. Let the toast pass- Drink to the lass; I'll warrant she'll prove an excuse for the glass.

In these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotions towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion; which by reason of the different fancies, judgements, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.

Michael: 'March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?' - you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers.

The essence of MAGICK is simple enough in all conscience. It is not otherwise with the art of government. The Aim is simply prosperity; but the theory is tangled, and the practice beset with briars. In the same way MAGICK is merely to be and to do. I should add: 'to suffer'. For Magick is the verb; and it is part of the Training to use the passive voice. This is, however, a matter of Initiation rather than of Magick in its ordinary sense. It is not my fault if being is baffling, and doing desperate!

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and had better come first. Purity means singleness. God is one. The Wand is not a Wand if it has something sticking to it which is not an essential part of itself. If you wish to invoke Venus, you do not succeed if there are traces of Saturn mixed up with it.

I believe in the communion of Saints. And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass. And I confess one Baptism of Wisdom, whereby we accomplish the Miracle of Incarnation. And I confess my life one, individual and eternal that was, and is, and is to come.

I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night - as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.

My Brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson:At a little after 8 o'clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the Church. William had parted from me upstairs. [deleted: I gave him the wedding ring - with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before - he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently].

Hitler remained in his closely-guarded suite. It was long after midnight when he left the Imperial Hotel in the company of Heinrich Himmler to make the long-awaited visit to the Weltliche Schatzkammer to claim the Spear of Destiny as his own personal possession. Awaiting him at the Hofburg were Wolfram von Sievers, head of the Nazi Occult Bureau, Major Walter Buch, Nazi legal expert and chief of the USCHLA, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS Obergruppenfuhrer, Austria. All three, along with Reinhard Heydrich's Sicherheitspolizei, had played a separate role in helping to secure the Spear for him.

A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.

What, in substance, both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this: the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud: 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.' ... 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'

Deep in the heart of both critical Christian and alienated Jew, there is : a feeling, not even a feeling, a shadow of a notion, nothing more substantial than the pointless but compelling impulse to knock on wood when one talks of the health of children-something that says there is more to Jews than meets the eye.

Narrated Abu Qatadah: 'The Messenger of Allah came towards us while carrying Umamah the daughter of Abi Al-`As (Prophet's granddaughter) over his shoulder. He prayed, and when he wanted to bow, he put her down, and when he stood up he lifted her up.'

'The first thing that Allah made obligatory upon my Ummah was the five prayers; and the first thing from their acts of worship that shall be taken up will be the five prayers; and the first thing that they will be questioned about will be the five prayers.'

'Perform the tawaaf of the House and rub your hand over the Corner which has the Hajr al-Aswad because this is the right hand of Allah on His Earth which He shakes with His creations.'

'A person seeing (visiting) my grave deserves my intercession. And a person who visits me after my death is like a person who visited me during my lifetime.'

I held his hand all the time the priest was saying extreme unction.

You bid me burn your letters. But I must forget you first.

Gabriel before me Raphael behind me Michael to my right Uriel on my left side In the circle of fire.

I don't much care about tea-drinking in the afternoon; in the morning the stuff Jock brings to me in bed is like that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone gave to Jove-born Helena, but in the p.m. it always makes me think of Ganges mud in which crocodiles have been coupling.

All farewells should be sudden.

Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides Figures dance around and around To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness And moving to the pagan sound.

Revolutionary Leader(Cloris Leachman):And now, let us end this meeting on a high note. (Proceeds to sing a sharp high note, followed by the rest of the revolutionaries.

This day (to the stupendous and inscrutable Judgements of God) were the Carcasses of that arch-rebell Cromwell and Bradshaw the judge who condemned his Majestie & Ireton, son-in-law to the Usurper, dragged out of their superbe tombs (in Westminster among the Kings), to Tyburn & hanged on the Gallows there from 9 in the morning til 6 at night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monument, in a deepe pitt: Thousands of people who (who had seen them in all their pride and pompous insults) being spectators: look back at November 22, 1658, & be astonish'd - And fear God & honour the King, but meddle not with those who are given to change.

Doff your cap and raise your glasses, Make a toast to the boring classes I'm burning your secrets to keep me warm.

Thou hast confessions to listen, And bells to christen, And altars and dolls to dress; And fools to coax, And sinners to hoax, And beads and bones to bless; And great pardons to sell For those who pay well, And small ones for those who pay less.

I was persuaded and am, that God's way is first to turn a soul from its idols, both of heart, worship, and conversation, before it is capable of worship to the true and living God... the two first principles and foundations of true religion, or worship of the true God in Christ, are repentance from dead works, and faith towards God, before the doctrine of baptism or washing, and the laying on of hands, which contain the ordinances and practices of worship; the want of which I conceive is the bane of millions of souls in England and all other nations professing to be Christian nations, who are brought by public authority to baptism and fellowship with God in ordinances of worship, before the saving work of repentance and a true turning to God.

But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature.

His death which happened in his berth, At forty-odd befell: They went and told the sexton, and The sexton tolled the bell.

She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.

The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.

My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant.

We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began.

The chant was audible but at that distance still wordless. Behind Jack walked the twins, carrying a great stake on their shoulders. The gutted carcass of a pig swung from the stake, swinging heavily as the twins toiled over the uneven ground. The pig's head hung down with gaping neck and seemed to search for something on the ground. At last the words of the chant floated up to them, across the bowl of blackened wood and ashes. 'Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill the blood!' Yet as the words became audible, the procession reached the steepest part of the mountain, and in a minute or two the chant had died away.

Carley: I was wondering if there are any pre performance habits that you have before you go on stage.

He gathered up his loved ones And he brought them all around To say, 'Goodbye, nice try.'

'The folk are peculiar in many ways,' said Erwig. 'They preen themselves upon the gentility of their habits, yet they refuse to whitewash their hair, and they are slack in their religious observances. For instance, they make obeisance to Divine Wiulio with the right hand, not on the buttock, but on the abdomen, which we here consider a slipshod practice.' in 'The Bagful of Dreams' from Cugel's Saga

Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity-such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.

I do not take any credit to my better-balanced head because I never went crazy on Presbyterianism. We go too slow for that. You never see us ranting and shouting and tearing up the ground, You never heard of a Presbyterian going crazy on religion. Notice us, and you will see how we do. We get up of a Sunday morning and put on the best harness we have got and trip cheerfully down town; we subside into solemnity and enter the church; we stand up and duck our heads and bear down on a hymn book propped on the pew in front when the minister prays; we stand up again while our hired choir are singing, and look in the hymn book and check off the verses to see that they don't shirk any of the stanzas; we sit silent and grave while the minister is preaching, and count the waterfalls and bonnets furtively, and catch flies; we grab our hats and bonnets when the benediction is begun; when it is finished, we shove, so to speak. No frenzy, no fanaticism --no skirmishing; everything perfectly serene. You never see any of us Presbyterians getting in a sweat about religion and trying to massacre the neighbors. Let us all be content with the tried and safe old regular religions, and take no chances on wildcat.

... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game.

I give a holla to my niggaz in the darkest corners/Roll a perfect blunt, and let me spark it for ya

The meaning of the word 'true' here is similar to the word Amen said after a blessing. It is an act of affirmation and ratification, reminding us that the Shema is less a prayer than a declaration of faith.

I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly

Freemason, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucious, Thothmes, and Buddha.

How can you worship leeks and onions? we shall suppose a SORBONNIST to say to a priest of SAIS. If we worship them, replies the latter; at least, we do not, at the same time, eat them. But what strange object of adoration are cats and monkeys? says the learned doctor. They are at least as good as the relics or rotten bones of martyrs, answers his no less learned antagonist. Are you not mad, insists the Catholic, to cut one another's throat about the preference of a cabbage or a cucumber? Yes, says the pagan; I allow it, if you will confess, that those are still madder, who fight about the preference among volumes of sophistry, ten thousand of which are not equal in value to one cabbage or cucumber.

'Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy.'

'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I did an original sin. I poked a badger with a spoon.' 'Say five Hail Mary's and six Hello Dolly's!'

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches - and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.

So touch my dying lip: so bridge that deep: So pledge my waking from the gift of sleep, And, sacramental, raise me the Divine: Strong brother in God and last companion, Wine.

Both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands, uttering a special blessing. On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God, by promoting the divine union of Son and Daughter; but on the other he is worshiping Satan, who likes Jewish prayers and ritual acts so much that when he is offered a few of them it keeps him busy for a while and he forgets to pester the divine daughter.

Before the Barn-Door crowing, The Cock by Hens attended, His Eyes around him throwing, Stands for a while suspended: Then One he singles from the Crew, And cheers the happy Hen; With how do you do, and how do you do, And how do you do again.

Religion in some form is a universal function of man in society, the organ for dealing with the problems of destiny, the destiny of individual men and women, of societies and nations, and of the human species as a whole. Religions always have some intellectual or ideological framework, whether myth or theological doctrine; some morality or code of behaviour, whether barbaric or ethically rationalized; and some mode of ritualized or symbolic expression, in the form of ceremonial or celebration, collective devotion or thanksgiving, or religious art...

When the bride is one with her lover, who cares about the wedding party?

Kabir says that I start and end all my rituals by chanting 'Ram' for since the very begining of this world it is this word that has protected all Ram's disciples.

Discussing coronation ceremonies with Vidal, 'I quickly moved on to...the moment when two masons appear and ask the newly crowned king for instructions as to his tomb. 'Masons? Masons! Yes. You one? I'm one. But I've forgotten all the odds and ends. Dull, really.' (Vidal, Palimpsest, 206)

As a boy I remember how terribly real the statues of the saints would seem at 7 o'clock Mass-before I'd had breakfast. From that I learned always to conduct hungry.

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied. (p. 123)

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety. (p. 127)

When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything... And all rites are of this kind. (p. 137)

As happens with sports and hobbies, his enjoyment was solemnized by expertise, the rites of comparing, collating, a half-deliberate parody of scholarship like the recitation of batting averages.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but then maybe that's what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in - also that you're mine and not theirs.... Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living 'naturally,' unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own.

Down in adoration falling, Lo! the sacred Host we hail; Lo! o'er ancient forms departing, Newer rites of grace prevail; Faith for all defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail.

That spirit, that feeling for one's comrades in the snow, the moonlight, under the blossoms, is also basic to the tea ceremony. A tea ceremony is a coming together in feeling, a meeting of good comrades in a good season. I may say in passing, that to see my novel Thousand Cranes as an evocation of the formal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony is a misreading. It is a negative work, and expression of doubt about and warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen.

That original intelligence, say the MAGIANS, who is the first principle of all things, discovers himself immediately to the mind and understanding alone; but has placed the sun as his image in the visible universe; and when that bright luminary diffuses its beams over the earth and the firmament, it is a faint copy of the glory which resides in the higher heavens. If you would escape the displeasure of this divine being, you must be careful never to set your bare foot upon the ground, nor spit into a fire, nor throw any water upon it, even though it were consuming a whole city. Who can express the perfections of the Almighty? say the Mahometans. Even the noblest of his works, if compared to him, are but dust and rubbish. How much more must human conception fall short of his infinite perfections? His smile and favour renders men for ever happy; and to obtain it for your children, the best method is to cut off from them, while infants, a little bit of skin, about half the breadth of a farthing. Take two bits of cloth, say the Roman catholics, about an inch or an inch and a half square, join them by the corners with two strings or pieces of tape about sixteen inches long, throw this over your head, and make one of the bits of cloth lie upon your breast, and the other upon your back, keeping them next your skin: There is not a better secret for recommending yourself to that infinite Being, who exists from eternity to eternity.

Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again - all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and - I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.

Americans tend to celebrate even the most mediocre or basic accomplishments... It's like weddings to me. Why is that a big deal?... Why do you have to have a big shin-dig were you're like 'look we're doing it' and everybody applauds and throws shit in your face. - SModcast 1: Fisting Flipper