One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy
nytimes.com
One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy
Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. That’s at the core of language, math, music, and even ritual, which is the repetition of words or actions deemed worthy of representing something bigger than ourselves. Some rituals are very private, some are very public. Some are so commonplace we don’t even
... See moreSince time immemorial, people have attempted to cope with powerful and terrifying feelings by doing things that contradict perceptions of fear and helplessness: religious rituals, theater, dance, music, meditation and
The history of sin eaters is hazy, but we have evidence of the funereal practice from the 18th century in Wales and its border region. Grieving families would place bread on the chest of the deceased, the corpse an altar of sorts. Believing the bread absorbed the sins of the deceased, the family would hire a professional sin eater to consume the br
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