ritual
Sarah Drinkwater and
ritual
Sarah Drinkwater and
We still instinctively long for this kind of belonging, as our sacrifices to sports teams, fraternities, or churches demonstrate.
addictive scrolling and swiping can never achieve the sense of closure and boundedness we all crave.
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.