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 moreSasha Sagan • For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
The Greeks knew that the more rational we usually are, the more important it is—at points—to fling ourselves around to the wild rhythms of pipes and drums. At the festivals of Dionysus, held in Athens in March every year, even the most venerable and dignified members of the community would join in with unrestrained dancing that, irrigated by
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