ritual
Sarah Drinkwater and
ritual
Sarah Drinkwater and
The magic circle, a term I have borrowed directly from game studies, is the invisible perimeter between everyday life and an experience where different rules of engagement are at play. (Anthropologists call it the “ritual frame” and contemporary mystical practices call it the “container”.) The magic circle describes the limits of both the formal rules of an experience, and the informal norms that an experience allows for. It can literally feel like magic to be inside one thanks to the seemingly inexplicable shift in logic for how things happen and what is meaningful.
I’ve noticed that the people who lament that we “have no rituals left” in our society are often the same people who are anti-marriage, or just go to the courthouse. Who don’t walk at their graduation ceremonies. Who don’t wear black lace to funerals. Who don’t own a suit. Who don’t send Christmas cards or take off shoes at the door or take into acc
... See moreWhat interests him is the exhibition as ritual. "A crowd of people is not a crowd but rather a number of individuals gathered in a space who are, contra the experience of an opera or a theatrical performance, not subject to a collective control of attention....Attention is neither monopolized nor homogenized. The exhibition is a very democrati
... See morethe disappearance of ritual “as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present.” RS seems to emerge in the empty space of rituals, as it uses different techniques, from meditation, visualization, frequency matching to self-hypnosis, to reach this kind of transcendent experience. some compare it to daydreaming or astral projections.
We still instinctively long for this kind of belonging, as our sacrifices to sports teams, fraternities, or churches demonstrate.