“
His mate is the light that keeps that darkness at bay. She fills the hole that has been growing ever larger in his soul. When the bond is completed between mates, their very souls merge and the male will be able to leash the darker part of his nature and at last be at peace with his wolf.
”
”
Quinn Loftis (Blood Rites (The Grey Wolves, #2))
“
Thank you for finding her for me,” my saviour said to them, smooth and polished. “Enjoy the Rite.” There was enough of a bite beneath his last words that the faeries stiffened. Without further comment, they scuttled back to the bonfires.
I stepped out of the shelter of my saviour’s arm and turned to thank him.
Standing before me was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.
”
”
Maggie Nelson (Bluets)
“
Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
Grief, my mother once told me, is love’s most honest expression. The last and hardest aspect of truly, truly caring for someone. She said it at her own mother’s funeral rites, tears in her eyes even as she tried to comfort a boy too young to understand why he was so sad, why his grandmother couldn’t be there anymore. She explained through choking sobs that without grief, love would be meaningless. Because it is impossible to truly love something that cannot be lost.
”
”
James Islington (The Strength of the Few (Hierarchy, #2))
“
Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the
thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can
give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare)
“
If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
Not a believer in the mosque am I,
Nor a disbeliever with his rites am I.
I am not the pure amongst the impure,
I am neither Moses nor Pharaoh.
Bulleh, I know not who I am.
Not in the holy books am I,
Nor do I dwell in bhang or wine,
Nor do I live in a drunken haze,
Nor in sleep or waking known.
Bulleh, I know not who I am.
Not in happiness or in sorrow am I found.
I am neither pure nor mired in filthy ground.
Not of water nor of land,
Nor am I in air or fire to be found.
Bulleh, I know not who I am.
Not an Arab nor Lahori,
Not a Hindi or Nagouri,
Nor a Muslim or Peshawari,
Not a Buddhist or a Christian.
Bulleh, I know not who I am.
Secrets of religion have I not unravelled,
I am not of Eve and Adam.
Neither still nor moving on,
I have not chosen my own name!
Bulleh, I know not who I am.
From first to last, I searched myself.
None other did I succeed in knowing.
Not some great thinker am I.
Who is standing in my shoes, alone?
Bulleh, I know not who I am.
”
”
Bulleh Shah
“
fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
The last bed, the last roof, the last floor. The last of everything brings lugs of pain, as though there will be nothing left, but smoke from fires abandoned.
”
”
Hannah Kent (Burial Rites)
“
So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.
In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed.
Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simply humanity to get us through.
We are the humbugs now.
”
”
Salman Rushdie (Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002)
“
When civilization is strong and widespread enough, "culture" will appear and take care of itself.
”
”
John Lukacs (Last Rites)
“
Ahem! Ahem!” As I recalled, Aunt Kathy loved Uncle Dan so much, she went grocery shopping during his funeral and failed to attend his burial as well. Apparently, Ham Hocks, Collard greens, Chitlin, Fatback, and Hog-Head cheesetook higher priority over his Last Rites. Then the reverend proceeded cautiously as he introduced my mom. “Let metell y’all about my Ms. Liza. Sister Kathy kept this one close.”
“Ahem! Ahem! Ar-choo! Ahem!”
Shockingly, there was a lightening blast that rocked the building once again while dimming the lights for more than 10seconds. The crowd turned restless, took a deep breath, and then allowed Pastor Keith to resume. “I’m gonna tell y’all, they were two kernels on a cob. When you saw Sister Kathy, you saw Sister Liza.
“Ahem! Ahem! Ahem!”
“The two of them raised those boys from seeds to bean stalks. We helped nourish them right here in Zion Gate Union. Now they’re just ripe for the harvest. I hope some of you ladies can take a
hint!” For a brief moment, modest laughter filled the church. Yet, it was needed because Pastor Keith had gone into uncharted waters. No one dared to challenge my mom. Yet, Pastor Keith was speaking glowingly about her. Only a fewwanted to see where the Reverend was going. But most didn’t care to re-open that door. Church members were so afraid of Mom, no one dared to call her by name. All parishioners would go mute and head the other way, or simply hit the exits just to avoid all encounters.
”
”
Author Harold Phifer (My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift)
“
You're wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Cat’s Cradle)
“
Logan, you Cavanaughs are like one-stop shopping. Police protection, legal counsel, dinner and last rites—it’s all taken care of in one neat little package. Unbelievable!
”
”
Marie Ferrarella (Cavanaugh's Surrender (Cavanaugh Justice, #23))
“
There was a time when love was the law.
There was a time for the tooth and the claw,
Last rites given, no holds barred.
Heaven express on my credit card.
”
”
Ian Anderson
“
Wesley, you asshole,” Eriksson says. “Aren’t you going to tell us?” “Tell you what?” I growl. My sex life is none of their goddamn business. “How is he? Jesus Christ. The TV news makes it sound like your boyfriend might be getting last rites.” My fingers falter on the buttons of my bright green checked shirt. “W-what?” Our backup goalie Tomilson speaks up wryly. “I think what Mr. Sensitive is trying to ask is, is your partner okay?
”
”
Sarina Bowen (Us (Him, #2))
“
And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.
”
”
Stephen King (’Salem’s Lot)
“
The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies. ‘Control’ is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future.
”
”
Gilles Deleuze (Postscript on the Societies of Control)
“
You mean it's my destiny? she said at last.
Granny shrugged. Something like that. Probably. Who knows?
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
Nesta’s eyes stung as Gwyn said, “So we climb Ramiel. We take the Breaking. We win to prove to everyone that something new can be as powerful and unbreakable as the old rules. That something no one has ever seen before, not entirely Valkyrie nor entirely Illyrian, can win the Blood Rite.” “No,” Nesta said at last. “We win to prove to ourselves that it can be done.” She bared her teeth in a feral grin at the mountain. “We win the whole damn thing.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #5))
“
People with green eyes were close to the fairies, we were told; they were just here for a little while, looking for a human child they could take away. If we ever met anyone with one green and one brown eye we were to cross ourselves, for that was a human child that had been taken over by the fairies. The brown eye was the sign it had been human. When it died, it would go into the fairy mounds that lay behind the Donegal mountains, not to heaven, purgatory, limbo or hell like the rest of us. These strange destinations excited me, especially when a priest came to the house of a dying person to give the last rites, the sacrament of Extreme Unction. That was to stop the person going to hell. Hell was a deep place. You fell into it, turning over and over in mid-air until the blackness sucked you into a great whirlpool of flames and you disappeared forever.
”
”
Seamus Deane (Reading in the Dark)
“
Through many countries and over many seas
I have come, Brother, to these melancholy rites,
to show this final honour to the dead,
and speak (to what purpose?) to your silent ashes,
since now fate takes you, even you, from me.
Oh, Brother, ripped away from me so cruelly,
now at least take these last offerings, blessed
by the tradition of our parents, gifts to the dead.
Accept, by custom, what a brother's tears drown,
and, for eternity, Brother, 'Hail and Farewell'.
”
”
Catullus
“
Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.
”
”
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
“
There you are, I've been looking for you," said a deep, sensual male voice I'd never heard. But I kept my eyes on the three faeries, bracing myself for flight as the male behind me stepped to my side and slipped a casual arm around my shoulders. The Three lesser faeries pales, their dark eyes wide. "Thank you for finding her for me,” my saviour said to them, smooth and polished. “Enjoy the Rite.” There was enough of a bite beneath his last words that the faeries stiffened. Without further comment, they scuttled back to the bonfires.
I stepped out of the shelter of my saviour’s arm and turned to thank him.
Standing before me was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
Sometimes decent people must do indecent things.
”
”
John Hennessy (Last Rites (Dark Winter, #3))
“
The air down here doesn't smell of sugar and coffee. It smells damp, rotten.
”
”
Danielle Vega (The Merciless IV: Last Rites (The Merciless, #4))
“
But life’s never that easy, is it? Even the calmest, bluest ocean has a turd bobbing around in it somewhere. And there was a massive one headed right for me.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
But for an individual human being, moments are the thing. Moments are what we remember and what we cherish. Certainly we might celebrate achieving a goal, such as completing a marathon or landing a significant client—but the achievement is embedded in a moment. Every culture has its prescribed set of big moments: birthdays and weddings and graduations, of course, but also holiday celebrations and funeral rites and political traditions. They seem “natural” to us. But notice that every last one of them was invented, dreamed up by anonymous authors who wanted to give shape to time. This is what we mean by “thinking in moments”: to recognize where the prose of life needs punctuation.
”
”
Chip Heath (The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact)
“
Sex and magic are intertwined experiences—sex is one kind of magic (and can be made more magical without being concerned with sex-magic at any point), and magic can be, while erotic and arousing, not necessarily sexual in the way that is often understood. There is a commonly-held belief that those who practice sex-magic are indulging themselves in wild orgiastic rites at every opportunity. This is rarely the case. After all, if you need to go through lots of occult rigmarole just to get laid, then you're a bit sad, aren't you? Then again, the occult subculture is full of SAD people, desperate to finally get laid and attempting to turn to sex-magic as a last resort.
”
”
Phil Hine (Sex Magic, Tantra & Tarot: The Way of the Secret Lover)
“
It was Valentine's Day and I had spent the day in bed with my life partner, Ketel One. The two of us watched a romance movie marathon on TBS Superstation that made me wonder how people who write romantic comedies can sleep at night.
At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall all-the-time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.
Then, within the two hour time frame of the movie, the couple meet, fall in love, fall out of love, break up, and then just before the end of the movie, they happen to bump into each other by "coincidence" somewhere absolutely absurd, like by the river. This never happens in real life. The last time I bumped into an ex-boyfriend was at three o'clock in the morning at Rite Aid. I was ringing up Gas-X and corn removers.
”
”
Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)
“
Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you, as though you are not there, it passes through you as though it does not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there, licking the grass flat upon the ground, not caring whether the soil is at a freeze or thaw, for it will freeze and thaw again, and soon your bones, now hot with blood and thick-juicy with marrow, will be dry and brittle and flake and freeze and thaw with the weight of the dirt upon you, and the last moisture of your body will be drawn up to the surface by the grass, and the wind will come and knock it down and push you back against the rocks, or it will scrape you up under its nails and take you out to sea in a wild screaming of snow.
”
”
Hannah Kent (Burial Rites)
“
What I couldn’t wrap my head around was why people were panic-buying toilet paper, not food. ‘Do they think we’re being attacked by an army of arseholes?
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection.
”
”
David Axelrod (Believer: My Forty Years in Politics)
“
if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.
”
”
Stephen King ('Salem's Lot)
“
But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you. It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die – migrate or die. Even in your house, behind square walls, the wind beats against the wood and the glass and sends its fleshless pucker against the eaves and sooner or later you have to put down what you were doing and go out and see. And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at mid-afternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen’s pasture and up Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one’s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.
”
”
Stephen King ('Salem's Lot)
“
The whereabouts of Batman remain unknown. And yet… I can see him now, in the grip of implacable forces, innumerable foes. Somewhere without hope. In a place where all seems lost. And I know this… the enemy will look away, for just a moment, underestimating him for that single fraction of a second too long. And no matter how dark the night… there will be no hiding place for evil.
”
”
Grant Morrison (Batman: Last Rites)
“
He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
The zeal and virtue of Ali were never outstripped by any recent proselyte. He united the qualifications of a poet, a soldier, and a saint; his wisdom still breathes in a collection of moral and religious sayings; and every antagonist, in the combats of the tongue or of the sword, was subdued by his eloquence and valour. From the first hour of his mission to the last rites of his funeral, the apostle was never forsaken by a generous friend, whom he delighted to name his brother, his vicegerent, and the faithful Aaron of a second Moses.
”
”
Edward Gibbon
“
My sisters, you, his daughters!
Now that you’ve heard our father’s iron curses,
I implore you in the name of the gods,
if father’s curses all come true at last,
and if some way back to Thebes is found for you,
don’t neglect me, please, give me burial,
the honored rites of death.
”
”
Sophocles (The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus (Annotated))
“
Me pregunta usted qué hice cuando vi a aquella chica. Bueno, pues se lo diré. ¿Ve usted ese armario de ahí, que llena casi toda la habitación? Vine corriendo hasta aquí, me metí dentro y me hice una paja. No vaya a creer que me la hice pensando en la chica. No, no podría soportarlo. Retrocedí en mis recuerdos hasta que medía tres pies de altura. Eso me hizo terminar antes. Veo que piensa que soy sucio y retorcido. Pues después me lavé las manos, cosa que no todos hacen.
”
”
Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites)
“
From a short distance, the few attending mourners under the blue tarp looked on silently as each ritualistic movement necessary to properly complete the last rites of the dead were respectively adhered to. Not surprisingly, only the constant raindrops marred the utter silence of the occasion, and
not a single teardrop fell. Not a whimper or a shudder. Not for this man. Not today. Not ever again. It took all Skye had not to walk over to the hole, lift up her skirt, and piss on the man who had repeatedly raped her as a child. Good riddance, you nasty bastard. Now you are in God’s hands. Have fun with that, you piece of garbage.
”
”
Sahar Abdulaziz (As One Door Closes)
“
Milt Copulos, a friend of Jim Webb, spent three and a half years in the hospital and received the last rites seven times as a result of his Vietnam service. He put it this way: “There’s a wall ten miles high and fifty miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn’t, and that wall is never going to come down.
”
”
Robert Timberg (The Nightingale’s Song)
“
It’s so still on the river, her laugh carries across the water to nowhere.
”
”
Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites)
“
It was strange watching Kate milk herself into a bottle. It made me think how we’re just animals with clothes on doing very peculiar things, like monkeys at a tea party.
”
”
Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites)
“
Teddy Bear’ by Elvis Presley, I can remember, I have always been able to remember,
”
”
Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites)
“
You mean it's my destiny?" she said at last.
Granny shrugged. “Something like that. Probably. Who knows?
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
It’s some kind of Korean immigrant rite of passage. National parks, reasons to wear hats and khaki, stuff like that. It’s like America America.
”
”
Nancy Jooyoun Kim (The Last Story of Mina Lee)
“
We all have secrets.
”
”
Danielle Vega (The Merciless IV: Last Rites (The Merciless, #4))
“
Honestly, I’d have gone to the opening of a fucking envelope just for the change of scenery.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
Meanwhile, whenever Lemmy had a hangover – which was rare for him, ’cos his tolerance was off the charts – he’d say he’d had a ‘heavy night on the chemistry set’.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
I’ve got socks down the back of the sofa that are older than him.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
I’ve honestly lost count of the ways in which getting old sucks.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
It was crazy. Thanks to all the cocaine I'd been doing, I'd spent the best part of a decade avoiding the guy who sang "Cocaine," for no good reason at all. [Eric Clapton]
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue.
”
”
Anthony Powell (The Kindly Ones (A Dance to the Music of Time, #6))
“
It would be idle to propose that the arrangements made in 1815 caused the terrible cataclysms of the twentieth century. But anyone who attempted to argue that what happened in Russia after 1917, in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and in many other parts of central and southern Europe at various other moments of the last century had no connection with them would be exposing themselves to ridicule.
”
”
Adam Zamoyski (Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna)
“
Religion, then, is far from "useless." It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor. Religious misinterpretation is a truly constructive force, for it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis as it actually took place.
To think religiously is to envision the city's destiny in terms of that violence whose mastery over man increases as man believes he has gained mastery over it. To think religiously (in the primitive sense) is to see violence as something superhuman, to be kept always at a distance and ultimately renounced. When the fearful adoration of this power begins to diminish and all distinctions begin to disappear, the ritual sacrifices lose their force; their potency is not longer recognized by the entire community. Each member tries to correct the situation individually, and none succeeds. The withering away of the transcendental influence means that there is no longer the slightest difference between a desire to save the city and unbridled ambition, between genuine piety and the desire to claim divine status for oneself. Everyone looks on a rival enterprise as evidence of blasphemous designs. Men set to quarreling about the gods, and their skepticism leads to a new sacrificial crisis that will appear - retrospectively, in the light of a new manifestation of unanimous violence - as a new act of divine intervention and divine revenge.
Men would not be able to shake loose the violence between them, to make of it a separate entity both sovereign and redemptory, without the surrogate victim. Also, violence itself offers a sort of respite, the fresh beginning of a cycle of ritual after a cycle of violence. Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word and that word has been accepted as divine. The meaning of this word must remain hidden, the mechanism of unanimity remain concealed. For religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed. To drive the monster from its secret lair is to risk loosing it on mankind. To remove men's ignorance is only to risk exposing them to an even greater peril. The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception. In fact, the sacrificial crisis is simply another form of that knowledge which grows grater as the reciprocal violence grows more intense but which never leads to the whole truth. It is the knowledge of violence, along with the violence itself, that the act of expulsion succeeds in shunting outside the realm of consciousness. From the very fact that it belies the overt mythological messages, tragic drama opens a vast abyss before the poet; but he always draws back at the last moment. He is exposed to a form of hubris more dangerous than any contracted by his characters; it has to do with a truth that is felt to be infinitely destructive, even if it is not fully understood - and its destructiveness is as obvious to ancient religious thought as it is to modern philosophers. Thus we are dealing with an interdiction that still applies to ourselves and that modern thought has not yet invalidated. The fact that this secret has been subjected to exceptional pressure in the play [Bacchae] must prompt the following lines:
May our thoughts never aspire to anything higher than laws! What does it cost man to acknowledge the full sovereignty of the gods? That which has always been held as true owes its strength to Nature.
”
”
René Girard (Violence and the Sacred)
“
I wished I’d thought of that last before I’d departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites.
”
”
Jay Lake (Kalimpura (Green Book 3))
“
He asked me about headaches, nausea, vision problems, and when I had my last period. This is apparently the single most vital piece of information concerning a woman’s body. You are asked this question repeatedly and by every person at every doctor’s visit from the time you’re twelve until you’re given your last rites. “I’m sorry,” says the priest, “but before I can absolve you of all sin and allow you to go to heaven, you must first tell me the date of your last menstrual period.
”
”
Kathleen Cosgrove (Engulfed)
“
But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair.
The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.
”
”
Kate Bowler (No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
“
I dreamt of the execution block last night. I dreamt I was alone and crawling through the snow towards the dark stump. My hands and knees were numb from the ice, but I had no choice.
When I came upon the block, its surface was vast and smooth. I could smell the wood. It had none of the saltiness of driftwood, but was like bleeding sap, like blood. Sweeter, heavier.
In my dream I dragged myself up and held my head above it. It began to snow, and I thought to myself: "This is the silence before the drop." And then I wondered at the stump being there, the tree it might have been, when trees do not grow here. There is too much silence, I thought in my dream. Too many stones.
So I addressed the wood out loud. I said: "I will water you as though you still lived." And at this last word I woke.
”
”
Hannah Kent (Burial Rites)
“
Rite To Tyr:
Hail to the One-Handed God!
Hail to Him whose name is Honor
And whose Word is iron,
Who alone never shirks the thankless task
Whose reason is Lawful Necessity.
Hail to the Lord of Swords,
Who gave a weapon-bearing hand
To see that what must be done was done in truth.
Hail God of the sunset, last single ray of light,
Lord of loyal morality, whose name none takes in vain.
Now must I face loss to do what is right,
O Lord Tyr, and I do not ask for your aid
To take away that loss, that I might hope for ease of action.
As you stood forth knowing you must lose to win,
So I ask only that you keep my back straight,
My arm strong, my hand from trembling,
My voice from faltering, my words from vanishing,
My head up, and my resolve unyielding
As I reach into the challenging maw of my own future.
”
”
Galina Krasskova (Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner: A Book of Prayer, Devotional Practice, and the Nine Worlds of Spirit)
“
The triad, being the fundamental principle of the whole Kabalah, or Sacred Tradition of our fathers, was necessarily the fundamental dogma of Christianity, the apparent dualism of which it explains by the intervention of a harmonious and all-powerful unity. Christ did not put His teaching into writing, and only revealed it in secret to His favored disciple, the one Kabalist, and he a great Kabalist, among the apostles. So is the Apocalypse the book of the Gnosis or Secret Doctrine of the first Christians, and the key of this doctrine is indicated by an occult versicle of the Lord's Prayer, which the Vulgate leaves untranslated, while in the Greek Rite, the priests only are permitted to pronounce it. This versicle, completely kabalistic, is found in the Greek text of the Gospel according to St Matthew, and in several Hebrew copies, as follows:
Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εις τοὺς αἰῶνας. ἀμήν.
The sacred word MALKUTH substituted for KETHER, which is its kabalistic correspondent, and the equipoise of GEBURAH and CHESED, repeating itself in the circles of heavens called eons by the Gnostics, provided the keystone of the whole Christian Temple in the occult versicle. It has been retained by Protestants in their New Testament, but they have failed to discern its lofty and wonderful meaning, which would have unveiled to them all the Mysteries of the Apocalypse. There is, however, a tradition in the Church that the manifestation of this mysteries is reserved till the last times.
”
”
Éliphas Lévi (Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual)
“
In 1787, at an inn near Moulins, an old man was dying, a friend of Diderot, trained by the philosophers. The priests of the neighbourhood were nonplussed: they had tried everything in vain; the good man would have no last rites, he was a pantheist. M. de Rollebon, who was passing by and who believed in nothing, bet the Cure of Moulins that he would need less than two hours to bring the sick man back to Christian sentiments. The Cure took the bet and lost: Rollebon began at three in the morning, the sick man confessed at five and died at seven. “Are you so forceful in argument?” asked the Cure, “You outdo even us.” “I did not argue,” answered M. de Rollebon, “I made him fear Hell.
”
”
Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
“
Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism describes how despair
Of the future leads people to fixate on youth. The Rites teach women to
fear our own futures, our own wants. To live in fear of one’s body and
one’s life is not to live at all. The resulting life-fearing neuroses are
everywhere. They are in the woman who will take a lover, go to Nepal,
learn to skydive, swim naked, demand a raise, “when she loses this
weight”—but in the eternal meantime maintains her vow of chastity
or self-denial. They are in the woman who can never enjoy a meal, who
never feels thin enough, or that the occasion is special enough, to drop
her guard and become one with the moment. They are in the woman
whose horror of wrinkles is so great that the lines around her eyes shine
with sacred oil, whether at a party or while making love. Women must
await forever the arrival of the angel of use, the bridegroom who will
dignify the effort and redeem the cost; whose presence will allow us to
inhabit and use our “protected” faces and bodies. The expense is too
high to let us fire the wick, to burn our own fuel to the last drop and
live by our own light in our own time.
Where the Rites of Beauty have instilled these life-fearing neuroses
in modern women, they paralyze in us the implications of our new
freedoms, since it profits women little if we gain the whole world only
to fear ourselves.
”
”
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
A Magnum Paucity by Stewart Stafford
Build the nation's mausoleum,
Light the people's funeral pyre,
For Hibernia's sons and daughters,
In genocide to expire.
Romantic Ireland has no grave,
It died foraging at the roadside for bites,
Or on a coffin ship out of reach of the New World,
An empire's boot on the throat for last rites.
Did you know your identity all along?
Or find it struggling and aghast?
Old Eireann was the first expendable colony,
And egregiously, not Britannia's last.
Constricting stomachs do not growl patriotic oaths,
Freedom is a stranger to a starved mind,
Force-feed our children grapes of wrath,
With liberation dead on the vine.
© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
I would tell you the safe procedure to avoid lightning strikes while on an exposed ridge, but I see no reason you should not learn it as I did. If you get tweaked by God's long electric fingers, I can hardly be to blame. You are a fat-assed nerd anyway, without a pistol within reach and incapable of running more than three miles without the last rites. You, fart-brain, are a reader, and the only thing I despise more is a writer, who simply ought to announce himself a public masturbator and be done with it. But I am telling my story, you are listening, and so we have a truce, if not respect. I am a writer, you a reader, and if there were a God, he might be amused to have mercy on our souls. Or piss on them. In long electric streaks.
”
”
Howard McCord (The Man Who Walked to the Moon: A Novella)
“
Cutangle nodded. He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him. Filling his boots with water while adrift on a flooded river at midnight with what he could only describe as a woman seemed about as logical as anything could be in the circumstances.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
....It was to complete his marriage with Maimuna, the daughter of Al Hareth, the Helalite. He had become betrothed to her on his arrival at Mecca, but had post-poned the nuptials until after he had concluded the rites of pilgrimage. This was doubtless another marriage of policy, for Maimuna was fifty-one years of age, and a widow, but the connection gained him two powerful proselytes. One was Khaled Ibn al Waled, a nephew of the widow, an intrepid warrior who had come near destroy-
ing Mahomet at the battle of Ohod. He now became one of the most victorious champions of Islamism, and by his prowess obtained the appellation of " The Sword of God." The other proselyte was Khaled's friend, Amru Ibn al Aass ; the same who assailed Mahomet with poetry and satire at the commencement of his prophetic career ; who had been an ambassador from the Koreishites to the king of Abyssinia, to obtain the surrender of the fugitive Moslems, and who was henceforth destined with his sword to carry victoriously into foreign lands the faith he had once so strenuously opposed.
Note.— Maimuna was the last spouse of the prophet, and, old as she was at her marriage, survived all his other wives. She died many years after him, in a pavilion at Serif, under the same tree in the shade of which her nuptial tent had been pitched, and was there interred. The pious historian, Al Jannabi, who styles himself "a poor servant of Allah, hoping for the pardon of his sins through the mercy of God," visited her tomb on returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, in the year of the Hegira 963, a.d. 1555. "I saw there," said he, "a dome of black marble erected in memory of Maimuna, on the very spot on which the apostle of God had reposed with her. God knows the truth ! and also the reason of the black color of the stone. There is a place of ablution, and an oratory ; but the building has fallen to decay.
”
”
Washington Irving (Life of Mohammed)
“
The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period.
”
”
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
“
I can’t remember any further back than this place on earth and Christendom. I never tire of seeing myself in that past. But always alone; without family. Even so, what language did I speak? I never see myself among the counselors of Christ; nor in the councils of the Lordly—representatives of Christ. What was I in the last century? I don’t find myself again until today. No more vagabonds, no more vague wars. The subordinate race has spread everywhere—we the people, it’s called, rationality; nationality and science. Oh! Science! Everything’s been made over. For your body and soul—the last rites—here’s medicine and philosophy—old wives’ remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the diversions of princes and the games that they prohibited! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! . . . Science! the latest aristocracy! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it make a turn? This is the vision of harmony. We’re headed for the Spirit. That’s for sure, it’s an oracle, I’m telling you. I understand it, and unable to explain myself without heathen speech, I’d rather keep silent.
”
”
Dennis J. Carlile (Rimbaud: the Works: A Season in Hell; Poems & Prose; Illuminations)
“
Does time really exist, time the destroyer?
When will it break down the castle into mere fragments?
When will this heart which has always been in the service of the gods
Be governed by the Creator, the Demiurge?
Are we really so desperately fragile
As Fate would wish to make us?
Is childhood, which is so deep, so full of promise,
Later stilled at its root?
Oh, the spectre of perishability,
How it infiltrates and passes through the innocently receptive,
As if it were smoke!
And we, we who are drifting,
We still rank as a divine rite
Amongst those lasting Powers.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus)
“
All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his — let us say — nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which — as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times — were offered up to him — do you understand? — to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings — we approach them with the might of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence — of words — of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!
”
”
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
“
Using Holmes’s instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O’Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes’s body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery’s central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded the body overnight. They took turns sleeping in a white pine coffin. The next day workers opened a double grave and filled this too with cement, then inserted Holmes’s coffin. They placed more cement on top and closed the grave. “Holmes’ idea was evidently to guard his remains in every way from scientific enterprise, from the pickling vat and the knife,” the Public Ledger reported. Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.
”
”
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
“
De fapt, nu exista alt sport pe care să-l urmăresc cu mai multă plăcere, cu mai multă bucurie ca o întrecere mişto de cros. Adoram să văd feţele chinuite, contorsionate ale alergătorilor când intrau pe culoarul delimitat de steguleţe, năpustindu-se cu ultimele forţe spre linia de sosire; mă interesau în special cei care soseau cam după primii cincizeci, alergând mai abitir decât ceilalţi şi luptându-se drăceşte pentru locul o sută treisprezece. Mă uitam la ei cum se împleticeau pe culoarul cu steguleţe, ducându-şi mâinile la beregată, ţinându-se să nu vomite, biciuind aerul cu braţele pentru a se prăbuşi într-un final pe iarbă, şi-mi dădeam seama că asistam la spectacolul inutilităţii umane.
”
”
Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites)
“
The buzzards over Pondy Woods
Achieve the blue tense altitudes
Black figments that the woods release,
Obscenity in form and grace,
Drifting high through the pure sunshine
Till the sun in gold decline.
(...)
By the buzzard roost Big Jim Todd
Listened for hoofs on the corduroy road
Or for the foul and sucking sound
A man's foot makes on the marshy ground.
Past midnight, when the moccasin
Slipped from the log and, trailing in
Its obscured waters, broke
The dark algae, one lean bird spoke,
(...)
"[Big Jim] your breed ain't metaphysical."
The buzzard coughed, His words fell
In the darkness, mystic and ambrosial.
"But we maintain our ancient rite,
Eat the gods by day and prophesy by night.
We swing against the sky and wait;
You seize the hour, more passionate
Than strong, and strive with time to die --
With time, the beaked tribe's astute ally.
"The Jew-boy died. The Syrian vulture swung
Remotely above the cross whereon he hung
From dinner-time to supper-time, and all
The people gathered there watched him until
The lean brown chest no longer stirred,
Then idly watched the slow majestic bird
That in the last sun above the twilit hill
Gleamed for a moment at the height and slid
Down the hot wind and in the darkness hid.
[Big Jim], regard the circumstance of breath:
Non omnis moriar, the poet sayeth."
Pedantic, the bird clacked its gray beak,
With a Tennessee accent to the classic phrase;
Jim understood, and was about to speak,
But the buzzard drooped one wing and filmed the eyes.
At dawn unto the Sabbath wheat he came,
That gave to the dew its faithless yellow flame
From kindly loam in recollection of
The fires that in the brutal rock one strove.
To the ripe wheat he came at dawn.
Northward the printed smoke stood quiet above
The distant cabins of Squiggtown.
A train's far whistle blew and drifted away
Coldly; lucid and thin the morning lay
Along the farms, and here no sound
Touched the sweet earth miraculously stilled.
Then down the damp and sudden wood there belled
The musical white-throated hound.
In pondy Woods in the summer's drouth
Lurk fever and the cottonmouth.
And buzzards over Pondy Woods
Achieve the blue tense altitudes,
Drifting high in the pure sunshine
Till the sun in gold decline;
Then golden and hieratic through
The night their eyes burn two by two.
”
”
Robert Penn Warren
“
Oh yes, and compulsory ferret-legging down the pub on Tuesday evenings, for the tourist trade tha’ knows.” “Ferret-legging?” Rachel looked at him incredulously. “Yup. You tie your kilt up around your knees with duct tape—as you probably know, no Yorkshireman would be seen dead wearing anything under his sporran—and take a ferret by the scruff of his neck. A ferret, that’s like, uh, a bit like a mink. Only less friendly. It’s a young man’s initiation rite; you stick the ferret where the sun doesn’t shine and dance the furry dance to the tune of a balalaika. Last man standing and all that, kind of like the ancient Boer aardvark-kissing competition.” Martin shuddered dramatically. “I hate ferrets. The bloody things bite like a cask-strength single malt without the nice after-effects.
”
”
Charles Stross (Singularity Sky (Eschaton, #1))
“
Silent remembering is a form of prayer. No fragrance is more enchanting to re-experience than the aromatic bouquet gleaned from inhaling the cherished memories of our pastimes. We regularly spot elderly citizens sitting alone gently rocking themselves while facing the glowing sun. Although these sun worshipers might appear lonely in their state of serene solitude, they are not alone at all, because they deeply enmesh themselves in recalling the glimmering memories of days gone by. Marcel Proust wrote “In Search of Time Lost,” “As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savors the past.” Test tasting the honeycombed memories of their bygone years, a delicate smile play out on their rose thin lips. The mellow tang of sweet tea memories – childhood adventures, coming of age rituals, wedding rites, recreational jaunts, wilderness explorations, viewing and creating art, literature, music, and poetry, sharing in the mystical experiences of life, and time spent with family – is the brew of irresistible intoxicants that we all long to sip as we grow old. The nectar mashed from a collection of choice memories produces a tray of digestible vignettes that each of us lovingly roll our silky tongues over. On the eve of lying down for the last time in the stillness of our cradled deathbeds, we will swaddle ourselves with a blanket of heartfelt love and whisper a crowning chaplet of affection for all of humanity. After all, we been heaven blessed to take with us to our final resting place an endless scroll amassing the kiss soft memories of time yore.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
I want to make it clear before we begin that I think your purpose is to learn and mine is to help you to learn, or to make you learn, though I doubt either of you has to be made. I have very little interest in writing out progress reports on you, or sticking to form charts, or anything else that interferes with our basic purposes. If there is anything you want to learn and have the necessary background to handle, I'll be ready to help you whether or not it is something that formally falls among the things I'm supposed to teach you. If you don't have the background, I'll help you get it. In return, I want you to do something for me. It's been many years since I was last a tutor, so I expect you to point out to me when I fail to observe some ritual that Mr. Quince holds essential. Fair enough?
”
”
Alexei Panshin (Rite of Passage)
“
Last night it had been merely drink. It was medicine now. He lifted the empty pint to his mouth. One warm drop crawled like slow syrup through the neck of the bottle. It lay on his tongue, useless, all but impossible to swallow. He thought of all the mornings (and as he thought of them he knew he was in for another cycle of harrowing mornings) when, at such times as these, he would drag himself into the kitchen and examine the line-up of empty quarts and pints on the floor under the sink, pick them up separately and hold them upside down over a small glass, one by one for minutes at a time, extracting a last sticky drop from one bottle, two drops from another, maybe nothing from a third, and so on through a long patient nerve-wracking process till he had collected enough, perhaps, to cover the bottom of the glass. It was like a rite—the slow drinking of it still more so; and it was never enough.
”
”
Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend)
“
Punishment had gradually ceased to be a spectacle. And whatever theatrical elements it still retained were now downgraded, as if the functions of the penal ceremony were gradually ceasing to be understood, as if this rite that ‘concluded the crime’ was suspected of being in some undesirable way linked with it. It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not to exceed, in savagery the crime itself, to accustom the spectators to a ferocity from which one wished to divert them, to show them the frequency of crime, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration. As early as 1764, Beccaria remarked: ‘The murder that is depicted as a horrible crime is repeated in cold blood, remorselessly’ (Beccaria, 101). The public execution is now seen as a hearth in which violence bursts again into flame.
”
”
Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
“
Primer of Love [Lesson 6]
Humility is not thinking less of yourself,
it's thinking of yourself less.
~ C. S. Lewis
Lesson 6) The most important element for lasting
love is having the humility to apologize
and the divinity to forgive.
A lasting life together can be little more than a series of fuck ups connected by a filament of forgiveness. First learn like children to apologize even if you don't mean a word of it -- as a child you knew that instinctually when apologizing to your parents (and underscoring the phony apology with a fake cough at the end). This was your rite of passage, your training wheels into acquiring humanity. Forgiveness is that one uniquely paradoxical attribute which makes us at once human and divine in the casting of absolution. Use that Papal power with dignity -- you'll have them kissing your ring and other naughty bits in no time. Pope Francis may be infallible, but your penis makes you inphallible.
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
At this juncture it is important to say something about Exodus 12:7. This verse implies that we are dealing with a ritual that did not involve atoning for sin, but rather was a rite of protection for God’s people, a different though not unrelated matter. It involved a blood ritual to avoid God’s last blow against the firstborn. Thus Passover and atonement were not originally associated, though apparently by Jesus’ day there were some such associations. Notice that nothing at all is said or suggested here about Israel’s sin, or about forgiveness. This ceremony is more like an insurance policy. Yes, the blood is to avert divine wrath, but it is not wrath against Israel’s particular sins. In this case they simply happened to be too close to the danger zone, or in the line of fire. We must assume that this blood ritual arose before there even was a fully formed priesthood, for it is highly unusual to have such a ritual without any mention of involvement of priests.
”
”
Ben Witherington III (Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper)
“
Every primitive society possesses a consistent body of mythical traditions, a 'conception of the world'; and it is this conception that is gradually revealed to the novice in the course of his initiation. What is involved is not simply instruction in the modern sense of the word. In order to become worthy of the sacred teaching, the novice must first be prepared spiritually. For what he learns concerning the world and human life does not constitute knowledge in the modern sense of the term, objective and compartmentalized information, subject to indefinite correction and addition. The world is sacred the work of Supernatural Beings — a divine work and hence in its very structure. Man lives in a universe that is not only supernatural in origin, but is no less sacred in its form, sometimes even in its substance. The world has a 'history': first, its creation by Supernatural Beings; then, everything that took place after that — the coming of the civilizing Hero or the mythical Ancestor, their cultural activities, their demiurgic adventures, and at last their disappearance.
”
”
Mircea Eliade (Rites and Symbols of Initiation)
“
Normally, Bentner would have beamed approvingly at the pretty portrait the girls made, but this morning, as he put out butter and jam, he had grim news to impart and a confession to make. As he swept the cover off the scones he gave his news and made his confession.
“We had a guest last night,” he told Elizabeth. “I slammed the door on him.”
“Who was it?”
“A Mr. Ian Thornton.”
Elizabeth stifled a horrified chuckle at the image that called to mind, but before she could comment Bentner said fiercely, “I regretted my actions afterward! I should have invited him inside, offered him refreshment, and slipped some of that purgative powder into his drink. He’d have had a bellyache that lasted a month!”
“Bentner,” Alex sputtered, “you are a treasure!”
“Do not encourage him in these fantasies,” Elizabeth warned wryly. “Bentner is so addicted to mystery novels that he occasionally forgets that what one does in a novel cannot always be done in real life. He actually did a similar thing to my uncle last year.”
“Yes, and he didn’t return for six months,” Bentner told Alex proudly.
“And when he does come,” Elizabeth reminded him with a frown to sound severe, “he refuses to eat or drink anything.”
“Which is why he never stays long,” Bentner countered, undaunted. As was his habit whenever his mistress’s future was being discussed, as it was now, Bentner hung about to make suggestions as they occurred to him. Since Elizabeth had always seemed to appreciate his advice and assistance, he found nothing odd about a butler sitting down at the table and contributing to the conversation when the only guest was someone he’d known since she was a girl.
“It’s that odious Belhaven we have to rid you of first,” Alexandra said, returning to their earlier conversation. “He hung about last night, glowering at anyone who might have approached you.” She shuddered. “And the way he ogles you. It’s revolting. It’s worse than that; he’s almost frightening.”
Bentner heard that, and his elderly eyes grew thoughtful as he recalled something he’d read about in one of his novels. “As a solution it is a trifle extreme,” he said, “but as a last resort it could work.”
Two pairs of eyes turned to him with interest, and he continued, “I read it in The Nefarious Gentleman. We would have Aaron abduct this Belhaven in our carriage and bring him straightaway to the docks, where we’ll sell him to the press gangs.”
Shaking her head in amused affection, Elizabeth said, “I daresay he wouldn’t just meekly go along with Aaron.”
“And I don’t think,” Alex added, her smiling gaze meeting Elizabeth’s, “a press gang would take him. They’re not that desperate.”
“There’s always black magic,” Bentner continued. “In Deathly Endeavors there was a perpetrator of ancient rites who cast an evil spell. We would require some rats’ tails, as I recall, and tongues of-“
“No,” Elizabeth said with finality.
“-lizards,” Bentner finished determinedly.
“Absolutely not,” his mistress returned.
“And fresh toad old, but procuring that might be tricky. The novel didn’t say how to tell fresh from-“
“Bentner!” Elizabeth exclaimed, laughing. “You’ll cast us all into a swoon if you don’t desist at once.”
When Bentner had padded away to seek privacy for further contemplation of solutions, Elizabeth looked at Alex. “Rats’ tails and lizards’ tongues,” she said, chuckling. “No wonder Bentner insists on having a lighted candle in his room all night.”
“He must be afraid to close his eyes after reading such things,” Alex agreed.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
The Minotaur is really the old matriarchal moon bull, beloved of the Goddess, and sacrificed each year for the fertility of the earth. This tale of the dying and reviving gods...is the Perennial Theme of all true poetry and myth, and the basis of much religious belief today... We come to see that Ariadne is the Goddess Herself, “Most Holy” and “High Fruitful Mother of the Barley” are the original meanings of her beautiful name. Worshipped primarily by women, her rites seem peaceful, and concerned with the womanly cycles of body, mind, and spirit... the labyrinth is her own body, the place of her mysteries, the cave/womb of initiation. We find this spiraling labyrinth in pre-patriarchal cultures around the world, such as that of the Hopis in the American Southwest, or the ancient Celtic peoples of Britain...The monster is not a monster, but only the still heart of woman, that men have so long suppressed and feared... the labyrinth unfolds and folds again upon itself...into our deepest Selves. And if we can keep our hold upon the thread, it will lead us back and out again… ‘til we have found spiritual rebirth, and escaped at last the tangled web of patriarchy.
”
”
Shekhinah Mountainwater (Ariadne's Thread: A Workbook of Goddess Magic)
“
Stalling. Buying time. Gray chuckled, releasing me with one last nudge to my chin. “But are you afraid?” he asked, tilting his head as he knowingly looked at where I’d burrowed my fingers into the base of the tree, melding the wood around me so that I could become one with it. “Or are you just pissed?” “I’m always pissed,” I snapped, clenching my teeth together as I sank into that anger. Into the feeling of being so fucking tired of being somebody else’s puppet. If I’d been stronger, I’d have let Gray take my magic and walked away as soon as I had the chance, but I was too afraid to live with the hole inside me. “You wanting to fuck me when I’m afraid doesn’t exactly put me in a good mood.” “I don’t want to fuck you when you’re afraid, wife,” he said, stressing the word. I flinched, as I suspected I would do every time he called me by the term that I was so certain couldn’t be possible. I didn’t pretend to know the intricacies of demon marriage rites, but it seemed like even for the evil creatures from Hell there should have been some level of consent involved. “I want to fuck you when you’re so mad you try to claw my eyes out. I want to fight you, and then I want to fuck you while you direct all that anger toward me.
”
”
Harper L. Woods (The Cursed (Coven of Bones #2))
“
A look passed between Genevieve, Kaya, and I, a silent knowledge relating back to the warning Anansi had given us that Paine was growing corn here, recalling a vision I had not long ago about acres and acres of the stuff stretching on for miles beneath a moonlit sky, about so many lessons gleaned in the Divine Rite Academy as children regarding the “Devil’s Grain” and how to spot it and its many forms by sight and smell, so that we would always avoid it if it should ever reappear on this earth. That yellow sweet temptress. Its siren song was near impossible to avoid, even though I’d never once tasted it. But somehow I knew exactly how it would taste, how its rough grit would crunch between my teeth like grains of sand, as if it had been imprinted into my genes from so many ancestors going back thousands of years who were gluttons for those kernels of gold. We could drive it to extinction or turn it into a monster that would drive us to extinction, but it would always be a part of us, waiting for resurrection. I could tell by the way the women gazed at the platter of golden medallions that they were having a similar fight in their minds. Just one bite. One little taste. It wouldn’t be so bad. And then we could move on.
”
”
Allison M. Dickson (The Last Supper)
“
It was true. They’d been close enough to recognize him. But they’d hunted down him and Sejanus — Sejanus, who’d treated the tributes so well, fed them, defended them, given them last rites! — even though they could have used that opportunity to kill one another. “I think I underestimated how much they hate us,” said Coriolanus. “And when you realized that, what was your response?” she asked. He thought back to Bobbin, to the escape, to the tributes’ bloodlust even after he’d cleared the bars. “I wanted them dead. I wanted every one of them dead.” Dr. Gaul nodded. “Well, mission accomplished with that little one from Eight. You beat him to a pulp. Have to make up some story for that buffoon Flickerman to tell in the morning. But what a wonderful opportunity for you. Transformative.” “Was it?” Coriolanus remembered the sickening thuds of his board against Bobbin. So he had what? Murdered the boy? No, not that. It was an open-and-shut case of self-defense. But what, then? He had killed him, certainly. There would never be any erasing that. No regaining that innocence. He had taken human life. “Wasn’t it? More than I could’ve hoped. I needed you to get Sejanus out of the arena, of course, but I wanted you to taste that as well,” she said. “Even if it killed me?” asked Coriolanus. “Without the threat of death, it wouldn’t have been much of a lesson,” said Dr. Gaul. “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed. The tributes. And you, too. How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are. A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.” The idea, laid out as such, shocked him, but he attempted a laugh. “Are we really as bad as all that?” “I would say yes, absolutely. But it’s a matter of personal opinion.” Dr. Gaul pulled a roll of gauze from the pocket of her lab coat. “What do you think?” “I think I wouldn’t have beaten anyone to death if you hadn’t stuck me in that arena!” he retorted. “You can blame it on the circumstances, the environment, but you made the choices you made, no one else. It’s a lot to take in all at once, but it’s essential that you make an effort to answer that question. Who are human beings? Because who we are determines the type of governing we need. Later on, I hope you can reflect and be honest with yourself about what you learned tonight.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0))
“
I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty—there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if
it were denounced—stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness—it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of "propaganda." It is because it is beautiful that the girl's murder is so horrible.
”
”
Milan Kundera (Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts)
“
The undercurrent of despair in our society is epitomized in a German word that first appeared in English in 1963, and is now incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary. It is torschlusspanik, (pronounced torshlusspanic), defined as "panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life's opportunities has shut." The doors that were once opened through initiation rites are still crucial thresholds in the human psyche, and when those doors do not open, or when they are not recognized for what they are, life shrinks into a series of rejections fraught with torschlusspanik. Torschlusspanik is now a part of our culture because there are so few rites to which individuals will submit in order to transcend their own selfish drives. Without the broader perspective, they see no meaning in the rejection. The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned. If, instead, they could temper themselves to a point of total concentration, a bursting point where they could either pass over or fall back as in a rite of passage, then they could test who they are. Their passion would be spent in an all-out positive effort, instead of deteriorating into disillusionment and despair. The terror behind that word torschlusspanik is what drives many people into analysis—the last door has shut, the last rejection has taken place. No door will ever open again. Nothing means anything.
”
”
Marion Woodman (The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation)
“
I have noticed that many intellectuals turn themselves off the instant they are confronted with the words witchcraft, magic, occultism, and religion, as if such ideas exert a dangerous power that might weaken their rational faculties. Yet many of these people maintain a generous openness about visionaries, poets, and artists, some of whom may be quite mad according to “rational” standards. They are fascinated by people of diverse professions and lifestyles who have historical ties with, let us say, the Transcendentalists or the Surrealists, as long as the word occult is not mentioned. If Neo-Paganism were presented as an intellectual and artistic movement whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of sexuality, and the meaning of community, academics would flock to study it. Political philosophers would write articles on the Neo-Pagans’ sense of wonder and the minority vision they represent. Literary critics would compare the poetic images in the small magazines published and distributed by the groups with images in the writings of Blake and Whitman. Jungian psychologists would rush to study the Neo-Pagans’ use of ancient archetypes and their love of the classics and ancient lore.
But words like witch and pagan do not rest easily in the mind or on the tongue. Although reporting on Paganism and Wicca has improved in the last decade, pop journalists often still present a Neo-Paganism composed of strange characters and weird rites.
”
”
Margot Adler (Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America)
“
You look... refreshed,' Lucien observed with a glance at Tamlin. I shrugged. 'Sleep well?'
'Like a babe.' I smiled at him and took another bite of food, and felt Lucien's eyes travel inexorably to my neck.
'What is that bruise?' Lucien demanded.
I pointed with my fork at Tamlin. 'Ask him. He did it.'
Lucien looked from Tamlin to me and then back again. 'Why does Feyre have a bruise on her neck from you?' he asked with no small amount of amusement.
'I bit her,' Tamlin said, not pausing as he cut his steak. 'We ran into each other in the hall after the Rite.'
I straightened in my chair.
'She seems to have a death wise,' he went on, cutting his meat. The claws stayed retracted but pushed against the skin above his knuckles. My throat closed up. Oh, he was mad- furious at my foolishness for leaving my room- but somehow managed to keep his anger on a tight, tight leash. 'So, if Feyre can't be bothered to listen to orders, then I can't be held accountable for the consequences.'
'Accountable?' I sputtered, placing my hands flat on the table. 'You cornered me in the hall like a wolf with a rabbit!'
Lucien propped an arm on the table and covered his mouth with his hand, his russet eye bright.
'While I might not have been myself, Lucien and I both told you to stay in your room,' Tamlin said, so calmly that I wanted to rip out my hair.
I couldn't help it. Didn't even try to fight the red-hot temper that razed my senses. 'Faerie pig!' I yelled, and Lucien howled, almost tipping back in his chair. At the sight of Tamlin's growing smile, I left.
It took me a couple of hours to stop painting little portraits of Tamlin and Lucien with pigs' features. But as I finished the last one- Two faerie pigs wallowing in their own filth, I would call it- I smiled into the clear, bright light of my private painting room. The Tamlin I knew had returned.
And it made me... happy.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
Prologue In 1980, a year after my wife leapt to her death from the Silas Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, I moved to Italy to begin life anew, taking our small daughter with me. Our sweet Leah was not quite two when my wife, Shyla, stopped her car on the highest point of the bridge and looked over, for the last time, the city she loved so well. She had put on the emergency brake and opened the door of our car, then lifted herself up to the rail of the bridge with the delicacy and enigmatic grace that was always Shyla’s catlike gift. She was also quick-witted and funny, but she carried within her a dark side that she hid with bright allusions and an irony as finely wrought as lace. She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself. It was nearly sunset and a tape of the Drifters’ Greatest Hits poured out of the car’s stereo. She had recently had our car serviced and the gasoline tank was full. She had paid all the bills and set up an appointment with Dr. Joseph for my teeth to be cleaned. Even in her final moments, her instincts tended toward the orderly and the functional. She had always prided herself in keeping her madness invisible and at bay; and when she could no longer fend off the voices that grew inside her, their evil set to chaos in a minor key, her breakdown enfolded upon her, like a tarpaulin pulled across that part of her brain where once there had been light. Having served her time in mental hospitals, exhausted the wide range of pharmaceuticals, and submitted herself to the priestly rites of therapists of every theoretic persuasion, she was defenseless when the black music of her subconscious sounded its elegy for her time on earth. On the rail, all eyewitnesses agreed, Shyla hesitated and looked out toward the sea and shipping lanes that cut past Fort Sumter, trying to compose herself for the last action of her life. Her beauty had always been a disquieting thing about her and as the wind from the sea caught her black hair, lifting it like streamers behind her,
”
”
Pat Conroy (Beach Music)
“
Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94 Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”95 in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”96 His agents reported back to him97 that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.” The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time98 dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”99 their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Harry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”100 contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.” Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,101 Louis Armstrong,102 and Thelonious Monk,103 and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.104 He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”106 He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”107 But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,108 and whenever one of them was busted,109 they all chipped in to bail him out.
”
”
Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
“
I walked to the painting on the easel. It was an impression, not a lifelike rendering. 'I wanted you to see this one,' I said, pointing to the smear of green and gold and silver and blue. 'It's for you. A gift. For everything you've done.'
Heat flared in my cheeks, my neck, my ears, as he silently approached the painting.
'It's the glen- with the pool of starlight,' I said quickly.
'I know what it is,' he murmured, studying the painting. I backed away a step, unable to bear watching him look at it, wishing I hadn't brought him in here, blaming it on the wine I'd had at dinner, on the stupid dress. He examined the painting for a miserable eternity, then looked away- to the nearest painting leaning against the wall.
My gut tightened. A hazy landscape of snow and skeletal trees and nothing else. It looked like.... like nothing, I supposed, to anyone but me. I opened my mouth to explain, wishing I'd turned the others away from view, but he spoke.
'That was your forest. Where you hunted.' He came close to the painting, gazing at the bleak, empty cold, the white and grey and brown and black. 'This was your life,' he clarified.
I was too mortified, too stunned, to reply. He walked to the next painting I'd left against the wall. Darkness and dense brown, flickers of ruby red and orange squeezing between them. 'Your cottage at night.'
I tried to move, to tell him to stop looking at those ones and look at the others I'd laid out, but I couldn't- couldn't even breathe properly as he moved to the next painting. A tanned, sturdy male hand fisted in the hay, the pale pieces of it entwined among strands of brown coated with gold- my hair. My gut twisted. 'The man you used to see- in your village.' He cocked his head again as he studied the picture, and a low growl slipped out. 'While you made love.' He stepped back, looking at the row of pictures. 'This is the only one with brightness.'
Was that... jealousy? 'It was the only escape I had.' Truth. I wouldn't apologise for Issac. Not when Tamlin had just been in the Great Rite. I didn't hold that against him- but if he was going to be jealous of Issac-
Tamlin must have realised it, too, for he loosed a long, controlled breath before moving to the next painting. Tall shadows of men, bright red dripping off their fists, off their wooden clubs, hovering and filling the edges of the painting as they towered over the curled figure on the floor, the blood leaking from him, the leg at a wrong angle.
Tamlin swore. 'You were there when they wrecked your father's leg.'
'Someone had to beg them to stop.'
Tamlin threw a too-knowing glance in my direction and turned to look at the rest of the paintings. There they were, all the wounds I'd slowly been leeching these few months. I blinked. A few months. Did my family believe that I would be forever away with this so-called dying aunt?
At last, Tamlin looked at the painting of the glen and the starlight. He nodded in appreciation. But he pointed to the painting of the snow-veiled woods. 'That one. I want that one.'
'It's cold and melancholy,' I said, hiding my wince. 'It doesn't suit this place at all.'
He went up to it, and the smile he gave me was more beautiful than any enchanted meadow or pool of stars. 'I want it nonetheless,' he said softly.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
If marriage is the great mystery of the City, the image of the Coinherence - if we do indeed become members one of another in it - then there is obviously going to be a fundamental need in marriage for two people to be able to get along with each other and with themselves. And that is precisely what the rules of human behavior are about. They are concerned with the mortaring of the joints of the City, with the strengthening of the ligatures of the Body. The moral laws are not just a collection of arbitrary parking regulations invented by God to make life complicated; they are the only way for human nature to be natural.
For example, I am told not to lie because in the long run lying destroys my own, and my neighbor's nature. And the same goes for murder and envy, obviously; for gluttony and sloth, not quite so obviously; and for lust and pride not very obviously at all, but just as truly. Marriage is natural, and it demands the fullness of nature if it is to be itself. But human nature. And human nature in one piece, not in twenty-three self-frustrating fragments. A man and a woman schooled in pride cannot simply sit down together and start caring. It takes humility to look wide-eyed at somebody else, to praise, to cherish, to honor. They will have to acquire some before they can succeed. For as long as it lasts, of course, the first throes of romantic love will usually exhort it from them, but when the initial wonder fades and familiarity begins to hobble biology, it's going to take virtue to bring it off.
Again, a husband and a wife cannot long exist as one flesh, if they are habitually unkind, rude, or untruthful. Every sin breaks down the body of the Mystery, puts asunder what God and nature have joined. The marriage rite is aware of this; it binds us to loving, to honoring, to cherishing, for just that reason. This is all obvious in the extreme, but it needs saying loudly and often. The only available candidates for matrimony are, every last one of them, sinners. As sinners, they are in a fair way to wreck themselves and anyone else who gets within arm's length of them. Without virtue, therefore, no marriage will make it. The first of all vocations, the ground line of the walls of the New Jerusalem is made of stuff like truthfulness, patience, love and liberality; of prudence, justice, temperance and courage; and of all their adjuncts and circumstances: manners, consideration, fair speech and the ability to keep one's mouth shut and one's heart open, as needed.
And since this is all so utterly necessary and so highly likely to be in short supply at the crucial moments, it isn't going to be enough to deliver earnest exhortations to uprightness and stalwartness. The parties to matrimony should be prepared for its being, on numerous occasions, no party at all; they should be instructed that they will need both forgiveness and forgivingness if they are to survive the festivities. Neither virtue, nor the ability to forgive the absence of virtue are about to force their presence on us, and therefore we ought to be loudly and frequently forewarned that only the grace of God is sufficient to keep nature from coming unstuck. Fallen man does not rise by his own efforts; there is no balm in Gilead. Our domestic ills demand an imported remedy.
”
”
Robert Farrar Capon (Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage)
“
What then, in the last analysis, is wrong with such a single-minded presentation of the American Revolution as the national coming of age? . . . What I find objectionable about this dominant motif in our historical fiction is, first of all, that it has been prompted by such conservative motives: by defensive nostalgia, by elitism, by national chauvinism, by a sense of our moral superiority as a people, and by a desire to de-revolutionize the American Revolution. Presenting our Revolution as the national rite of passage made it seem historically unique and non-replicable. One comes of age only once. Therefore, having had our revolution . . . we need not have another one—ever again. Besides, they declared, it was a political revolution, and in no respect a social revolution. Moreover, it provided us with such a beautifully structured society, as well as such an ideal frame of government, that we will never require anything more than minor adjustments—some occasional fine-tuning.
”
”
Michael Kammen (A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination)
“
Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one.
In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act.
Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage.
Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.
”
”
Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
“
Before the killing, they summoned a priest. This was not unusual: there were certain priests in that era who grew accustomed to the late-night phone call. They would be summoned outside by gruff men who were about to perform an execution and asked to deliver the last rites. The act of killing itself had a ritual character, a practiced choreography that would have been familiar to McKee. A bag is placed over your head. Your hands are bound behind your back. You kneel in the soft grass. Then you flop forward when the bullet hits your brain.
”
”
Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland)
“
Suburbia Knocks by Stewart Stafford
Covert dawn's surreptitious light,
A magpie sentry's warning song,
Swooping, scanning silent streets,
Cackling danger all night long.
Metallic cross of crucified clothes,
A choir of colours in the breeze,
Waterboarded by lashing rain,
Made them suffer incrementally.
One knock for no, two knocks for yes,
One and a half for uncertainty,
Three knocks for drinks and company,
The rite of suburban courtesy.
37 years ago, down at number 37,
Came the first and last royal visit,
Dizzying anticipation from first light,
Fading fairytale in a curtsying gibbet.
© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
I’ve lived a long time, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that life can be heartbreaking, but as long as it’s given to us, it’s precious despite the pain,
”
”
Sharon Sala (Last Rites (Jubilee, Kentucky #2))
“
Grief, what a son of a bitch, Ariel, we have a surfeit of it, far too much, you and me and most of us in this century and the wreckage of centuries that came before. A son of a bitch, but absolutely necessary. Without pain, life means nothing. The tree needs the sound it makes as it falls, so it can be heard, at least in the future, its way of demanding witnesses. Which is why we need funeral rites, great or small, the outpouring of sorrow, the long and short good-bye, like the one your people have just held for Allende, why the worst sin is to disappear a body and deny the mourning, a crime against life because it doesn't allow life to go on, other trees to grow from the soil of the tree as it dies away. And that's why the refrain, do not speak ill of the dead, makes sense. We're not erasing the bad acts, the mistakes and blindness, the cruelty and selfishness, the damage caused to others. But it's healthy to rescue, at least once in each person's odyssey, what's best for the future. And if we become extinct? No last rites, no words about us, no stories told, death will have the last word. So we have to tell that story now, before it's too late.
”
”
Ariel Dorfman
“
To understand fully what she believed were ‘divine shewings’, she took the seemingly drastic step of being enclosed as an anchoress inside a cell, which was probably to the north side of the Church of St Julian, on King Street in Norwich. Becoming an anchoress around the age of 43, she lived on for up to thirty years in one room, her only door to the world walled up, and her enclosure confirmed by the last rites. This saw her as effectively dead to this world.
”
”
Janina Ramírez (Julian of Norwich: A Very Brief History)
“
The word "Gospel," of course, means the glad tidings of salvation, through the finished work of Jesus Christ, to all the world and all the ages, in so far as the men who hear it are willing to meet the simple conditions. It is, indeed, "glad tidings." It tells rebellious men that God is reconciled, that justice is satisfied, that sin has been atoned for, that the judgment of the guilty may be revoked, the condemnation of the sinner cancelled, the curse of the law blotted out, the gates of hell closed, the portals of heaven opened wide, the power of sin subdued, the guilty conscience healed, the broken heart comforted, the sorrow and misery of the Fall undone, the very King of Terrors himself destroyed, and all the evils and miseries of ruined humanity completely overcome, and transformed into blessings more glorious and lasting than Adam ever lost, Or unfallen man could ever have enjoyed. And the condition of all this blessing is stated in the simplest terms. There is no restriction in the terms, for the message is addressed to every creature, and the only condition is, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned." It is evident, therefore, that the rite of baptism is not a condition - its omission will not bring condemnation, though its acceptance is commanded wherever it is possible. The one essential condition, therefore, is simply believing; that is, believing the "glad tidings.
”
”
A.B. Simpson (The Life and Works of A. B. Simpson, 50-in-1 (Illustrated): The Fourfold Gospel, Wholly Sanctified, Gospel of Healing and many more by the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance)
“
Later, night fell gently as the last of the world’s slow light flowed out of the valley, and a pale, rain-washed moon shone down in a night studded with stars. And in a shadowy orchard behind the forge there was the occasional clink of a spade or a muffled curse.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
What do you want? Why did you come back?” He angled his head to my ear. It was the only thing I had to give him and the last thing I should ever trust him with. “You,” he murmured. “I came back for my mate.
”
”
Geneva Lee (Second Rite (Filthy Rich Vampires, #2))
“
Thank you for finding her for me,” my savior said to them, smooth and polished. “Enjoy the Rite.” There was enough of a bite beneath his last words that the faeries stiffened. Without further comment, they scuttled back to the bonfires.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”
Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore. She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.
”
”
Cornell Woolrich
“
I have noticed that many intellectuals turn themselves off the instant they are
confronted with the words witchcraft, magic, occultism, and religion, as if such
ideas exert a dangerous power that might weaken their rational faculties. Yet
many of these people maintain a generous openness about visionaries, poets, and
artists, some of whom may be quite mad according to “rational” standards. They
are fascinated by people of diverse professions and lifestyles who have historical
ties with, let us say, the Transcendentalists or the Surrealists, as long as the word
occult is not mentioned.
If Neo-Paganism were presented as an intellectual and artistic movement
whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of
whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of
sexuality, and the meaning of community, academics would flock to study it.
Political philosophers would write articles on the Neo-Pagans’ sense of wonder
and the minority vision they represent. Literary critics would compare the poetic
images in the small magazines published and distributed by the groups with
images in the writings of Blake and Whitman. Jungian psychologists would rush
to study the Neo-Pagans’ use of ancient archetypes and their love of the classics
and ancient lore.
But words like witch and pagan do not rest easily in the mind or on the
tongue. Although reporting on Paganism and Wicca has improved in the last
decade, pop journalists often still present a Neo-Paganism composed of strange
characters and weird rites
”
”
Margot Adler (Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America)
“
My mother had been a Lady in Wait, given to the Court during her Rite, but my father had not been a Lord. She had chosen my father over the Blessing of the gods, and that kind of love…it was, well, I didn’t have any experience with that. Probably never would, and I doubted most people did, no matter what their futures held. What my mom had done was unheard of. She’d been the first and the last to ever do so. Queen Ileana had said more than once that if my mother had Ascended, she might’ve survived that night, but that night may have never come. I wouldn’t be standing here. Neither would Ian. She wouldn’t have married our father, and if she had Ascended, she would bear no children. The Queen’s beliefs were irrelevant.
”
”
Jennifer L. Armentrout (From Blood and Ash (Blood and Ash, #1))
“
The bishop had no desire to alienate the count and and accept his requirements. It was a time of great spiritual Independence in france, and of hypocrisy. Many were anti-religious, but followed the forms: They had their children baptized, and married in the Church, and were desperate to receive the last rites from a priest. It was spiritual insurance they sought- the comfort of tradition without restraints on their behavior. It was the sort of transaction the bishop understood perfectly and exploited for his treasury. If the count wanted to keep a pagan woman but remain in the Church and give it money, then the bishop would certainly not deny him his wish. But he must try for the woman's conversion. It was the proper form.
”
”
David Ball (Empires of Sand by David Ball (2001-03-06))
“
If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,’ said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3))
“
On Sunday morning, before a live in-person audience of eight thousand and a live television audience of perhaps two and a half million, the Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter preached a fire and brimstone sermon so bone-rattling that members of the audience in the Palace of Worship were on their feet and speaking in tongues while those at home were on their phones and giving their Visa and Master Charge numbers to waiting pledge takers. The televised worship service lasted ninety minutes and seventy-two minutes of it consisted of the Reverend Sutter’s sermon. Jimmy Wayne read excerpts from the Letters to the Corinthians to the faithful, and then followed that with a much longer segment where he imagined Paul writing updated letters to the Corinthians in which he reported on the moral tone and prospects in the United States. To hear the Reverend Jimmy Wayne put words in Paul’s mouth, the current climate in the U.S. was one of prayerlessness, pornography, creeping secular humanism inculcating defenseless youth in the secret rites of sinful socialism, permissiveness, promiscuity, demonic possession advanced by rock videos and by Dungeons and Dragons games, and a general and pervasive rottenness manifested most visibly by the sinfuls’ refusal to accept Christ as their personal Savior while giving generously to such urgent Christian causes as Bible Outreach, 1-800-555-6444.
”
”
Dan Simmons (Carrion Comfort)
“
At last he swallowed, appeared to reach a decision, turned solemnly to Esk, and said, “Hwarl, ish gnish saaarghs ishghs oorgsh?
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
A brilliant fall sun poked long fingers through the empty branches, administering the last rites of seasonal consolation, blessing the dying earth with a final touch of warmth.
”
”
Diana Gabaldon (The Fiery Cross / A Breath of Snow and Ashes / An Echo in the Bone / Written in My Own Heart's Blood (Outlander #5-8))
“
Marriage is one of the last ancient rites of civilization, I guess. Everyone wants someone who loves them so much they'd wear a gold ring. You know, to show everyone else their heart is taken.
”
”
Sally Thorne
“
One exceptional morning, the Dalai Lama even introduced the Archbishop to his meditation practice in his private residence, and the Archbishop gave the Dalai Lama communion, a rite generally reserved for those who are within the Christian faith.
”
”
Dalai Lama XIV (The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World)
“
As ok as I can be. Just last week, my biggest concern was putting my next order in for alcohol and choosing what outfit I would wear to dance in. This week, I’m the fucking Arbiter. Damned are being kidnapped, tortured, and killed. Also, two races are fighting in my club for the first time in centuries. Let’s not forget the fact that I’m at war with myself; stuck between a rock and a hard place with two Infernal Lieges and a Rite.” “Yes, I can see where you’d be frustrated at being lavished in so much attention,” he says,
”
”
K.B. Everly (The Arbiter (Divinely Damned #1))
“
What’s so funny? Stop chuckling at me.” Her eyes flared. “It’s only two years away! Besides, engaged is as good as being married… it’s like prison. Nobody breaks their engagement—well there was Lady Macela—poor thing, and she never got married. Isn’t she all on her own now? But to that old pig? What are my parents thinking? I truly despise them.” “Just tell them you don’t want to marry him. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.” “I already did. You know they never listen to me. They claim they know what’s best. I’d rather run away than marry him. I simply won’t do it.” She cast a venomous glare at her soup, then sighed and looked up at Talis, raising a finger as if she had an idea. “Let’s win the Blood Dagger competition. If we win, we’re allowed any wish we choose. That’ll keep me away from that ridiculous man.” “But Rikar and Nikulo are undefeated… and they’re brutal—” “I don’t care! We can do it, I know we can. Ever since that old witch made me drink all her potions and tea I feel strangely powerful… like I can do anything.” “We’ve had a string of bad luck, though. We lost two times in a row in the training arena. And then you almost got killed by the boar.” Talis lowered his voice to a whisper. “It’s like the gods are angry with us.” “Don’t say that,” she hissed. “Besides, there are rites of initiation we could try… a blood oath.” “A blood oath? You’ve got to be kidding! First you wanted to go after the boar, and now this?” Talis swallowed, not liking whatever she meant by the suggestion. “Don’t be a child. And look, we’re right here. We can do it now.” She looked at the vines covering the walls surrounding the Temple of Nyx, the God of War. Talis followed her gaze and felt a chill prickling along the back of his neck. “What? You want to make a blood oath at the Temple of Nyx?” The last time he’d been inside was when his brother Xhan had died. A painful memory. “No, don’t you know anything? I’ve got it all figured out. We must pray to Zagros, who favors the weak and fallen.” Zagros? What insanity would cause them to pray to the God of the Underworld? “I don’t think that’s a good idea… actually I think it is a terrible idea.” “Listen, we know the rites of initiation. We’ve been trained, right? What are you afraid of?” At her determined gaze Talis felt a clammy coldness creep
”
”
John Forrester (Fire Mage (Blacklight Chronicles, #1))
“
If that was the last event of the night, it would have made a terrible ending. It was just the beginning, though.
”
”
John duover (Rites)
“
This is a classic example of the type of literary blind that Crowley loved to utilize when he wished to publish, in a public medium, sensitive or secret information that had heretofore been reserved for high initiates while, at the same time, shocking and outraging the public at large. Today the sexual connotations are obvious to all but the most mentally or emotionally disadvantaged. For such unfortunates we advise they read the last sentence of this chapter first: "You are likely to get into trouble over this chapter unless you truly comprehend its meaning. " OF THE BLOODY SACRIFICE: AND MATTERS COGNATE by The Master Therion Aleister Crowley It is necessary for us to consider carefully the problems connected with the bloody sacrifice, for this question is indeed traditionally important in Magick. Nigh all ancient Magick revolves around this matter. In particular all the Osirian religions-the rites of the Dying God-refer to this. The slaying of Osiris and Adonis the mutilation of Attis; the cults of Mexico and Peru; the story of Hercules or Melcarth; the legends of Dionysus and of Mithra, are all connected with this one idea. In the Hebrew religion we find the same thing inculcated. The first ethical lesson in the Bible is that the only sacrifice pleasing to the Lord is the sacrifice of blood; Abel, who made this, finding favour with the Lord, while Cain, who offered cabbages, was
”
”
Christopher S. Hyatt (Taboo: Sex, Religion & Magick)
“
Sometimes,” Father Dibue said, “though everything is in the Lord’s Hands, undoubtedly, there’s the urgent need to administer the Holy Sacrament of the Last Rites. Otherwise, the humble servant of the Lord lingers, such as now, waiting for grace, for absolution.
”
”
Vera Nazarian (Cobweb Bride (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, #1))
“
I’m not a priest,” Cletus stood up, indignant. “I follow no Pope. I am a Reverend in the Universal Life Church. We don’t perform last rites.” Jasper snorted. “Universal Life my ass. You are a Reverend in the church of send in your ten dollars and a coupon.” “Amounts to the same, in the eyes of the Lord,” Cletus replied with a wink. “Folks don’t really mind who saves them, as long as they can go on sinning until their cards are punched.
”
”
David Niall Wilson (The DeChance Chronicles Omnibus: Books I - IV)
“
They have many rites-of-passage when their men become of age, like drinking hoasca made from the sap of cipó vine that will force you to listen to the voices of dead ancestors for many days, or withstanding the beatings of the tribe’s females using a whip made of thin tree branches.
”
”
Mark Paul Jacobs (How Teddy Roosevelt Slew the Last Mighty T-Rex)
“
the idea of demonic transmigration. There were the expected Catholic texts from the Rituale Romanum, containing the rites and guidelines for major exorcisms, but also a host of more arcane materials whose origins ranged from India to Egypt. She found passages copied from the Zohar, the Jewish mystical text of Kabbalistic teachings, describing the ways in which a demon could secretly slip into a victim’s soul, and how it could only be dislodged by a minyan reciting Psalm 91 three times; if the rabbi then blew a certain melody on the shofar, or ram’s horn, the sound would in effect “shatter the body” and shake the evil spirit loose. Even the Muslims had their methods for disposing of wandering demons. The prophet Muhammad instructed his followers to read the last three suras from the Koran—the Surat al-Ikhlas (the Fidelity), the Surat al-Falaq (the Dawn), and the Surat an-Nas (Mankind)—and drink water from the holy well of Zamzam.
”
”
Robert Masello (The Einstein Prophecy)
“
Then, in 1632, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) published his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), wherein he established the superiority of the Copernican model. For this, as well as for the disrespectful tone of the book toward Pope Urban VIII (1568-1644), Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy, forced to recant his championing of the heliocentric model, and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Nevertheless,
”
”
Stephen Penner (Last Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 3))
“
The last time I bumped into an ex-boyfriend was at three o’clock in the morning at Rite Aid. I was ringing up Gas-X and corn removers.
”
”
Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life)
“
If brute force wouldn't suffice, however, there was always the famous Viking cunning. The fleet was put to anchor and under a flag of truce some Vikings approached the gate. Their leader, they claimed, was dying and wished to be baptized as a Christian. As proof, they had brought along the ailing Hastein on a litter, groaning and sweating. The request presented a moral dilemma for the Italians. As Christians they could hardly turn away a dying penitent, but they didn't trust the Vikings and expected a trick. The local count, in consultation with the bishop, warily decided to admit Hastein, but made sure that he was heavily guarded. A detachment of soldiers was sent to collect Hastein and a small retinue while the rest of the Vikings waited outside. Despite the misgivings, the people of Luna flocked to see the curiosity of a dreaded barbarian peacefully inside their city. The Vikings were on their best behavior as they were escorted to the cathedral, remaining silent and respectful. Throughout the service, which probably lasted a few hours, Hastein was a picture of reverence and weakness, a dying man who had finally seen the light. The bishop performed the baptism, and the count stood in as godfather, christening Hastein with a new name. When the rite had concluded, the Vikings respectfully picked up the litter and carried their stricken leader back to the ships. That night, a Viking messenger reappeared at the gates, and after thanking the count for allowing the baptism, sadly informed him that Hastein had died. Before he expired, however, he had asked to be given a funeral mass and to be buried in the holy ground of the cathedral cemetery. The next day a solemn procession of fifty Vikings, each dressed in long robes of mourning, entered the city carrying Hastein's corpse on a bier. Virtually all the inhabitants of the city had turned out to witness the event, joining the cavalcade all the way to the cathedral. The bishop, surrounded by a crowd of monks and priests bearing candles, blessed the coffin with holy water, and led the entire procession inside. As the bishop launched into the funerary Mass, reminding all good Christians to look forward to the day of resurrection, the coffin lid was abruptly thrown to the ground and a very much alive Hastein leapt out. As he cut down the bishop, his men threw off their cloaks and drew their weapons. A few ran to bar the doors, the rest set about slaughtering the congregation. At the same time – perhaps alerted by the tolling bell – Bjorn Ironside led the remaining Vikings into the city and they fanned out, looking for treasure. The plundering lasted for the entire day. Portable goods were loaded onto the ships, the younger citizens were spared to be sold as slaves, and the rest were killed. Finally, when night began to fall, Hastein called off the attack. Since nothing more could fit on their ships, they set fire to the city and sailed away.97 For the next two years, the Norsemen criss-crossed the Mediterranean, raiding both the African and European coasts. There are even rumors that they tried to sack Alexandria in Egypt, but were apparently unable to take it by force or stealth.
”
”
Lars Brownworth (The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings)
“
If I must die young, bury me
in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirt
in her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs
and open the lid when you visit.
Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling
the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars
melt and spiral into a halo over my head
and I’ve stirred my death into the sky.
”
”
Jalina Mhyana (The Wishing Bones)
“
Anecdotal tales of combat are meaningless to Americans, we absorb tales of violence like a sponge. Mythological violence is second nature to us. The real thing is not. War begins long before battle. It begins when we are boys longing for the initiation rite of the warrior and everything it promises: sexual prowess and sexual license. War lasts long after the last bullet is fired; into old age and death we go carrying a secret knowledge that no one wants to know about. War is the opposite of sexual prowess. War is desire stripped of humanity.
”
”
Alfredo Véa
“
And it is: a true temple of suffering, and tonight we are its priest, master of the rites, and we will lead him through our ritual and into the last epiphany, to the final release into grace. We
”
”
Jeff Lindsay (Dexter is Delicious (Dexter, #5))
“
Nurse, nurse,” the soldier reached out toward her with his uninjured hand, “Nurse, could you hold my hand?” And as Maisie took his hand in hers, the young man smiled. “Thank you, nurse.” Suddenly Maisie was aware that someone was bending back the soldier’s fingers and moving his arm to his side, and she looked up at the nursing Sister in charge. An army chaplain placed his hand on her shoulder for barely a second before lifting it to perform last rites over the young soldier’s not-yet-cold body, while two stretcher-bearers waited to remove him to allow room for more wounded.
”
”
Jacqueline Winspear (Maisie Dobbs (Maisie Dobbs, #1))
“
But I had planted a flag here. Answering a question about the Confederacy was even more foolhardy than investing campaign time. We had convened in the shadow of a Civil War battle, but I had every intention of responding to a question that might undo the goodwill I’d accrued. Patiently, I explained my deep animosity toward the Confederate generals’ carvings. The men glorified in the etchings had fought to keep blacks as slaves, and they had been willing to terrorize a nation to achieve their ends. I had grown up in a town where visiting the last home of the president of the Confederacy was a rite of passage for some, even though it meant tourists tromping around shacks where enslaved black men and women had lived in squalor and horror. Still, I explained, while I despised the monument to their evil, its removal wasn’t top of my to-do list. I’d not campaigned on the issue, but I refused to mince words when the question had been put to me in the wake of the tragic death in Charlottesville, Virginia. My beliefs and my biography could not change because of controversy.
”
”
Stacey Abrams (Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America)
“
We are entering a period of intense cadaverousness and our imaginations are simply not up to it. Here too we must choose and make our own personal obituaries. Is this a foretaste of the end of the century?
Everything today - the launching of a newspaper, a ship, a commercially ruinous aircraft, a road network, a new missile or a cultural programme - is justified in the last instance by the fact that it creates jobs. This argument, which is itself devoid of meaning, is our alibi, our last rites, our Extreme Unction.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
“
Marriage is one of the last ancient rites of civiliza tion, I guess. Everyone wants someone who loves them so much they'd wear a gold ring. You know, to show everyone else their heart is taken.
”
”
Sally Thorne, The Hating Game
“
You could light it much better.” “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” said Granny, fleeing into aphorisms, the last refuge of an adult under siege.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
traditional Norse blessing. Facing in each direction as he speaks, he forbids all evil from entering our lives from this point forward. After invoking the gods, our ancestors, and everyone gathered here today as our witnesses, he lights a symbolic candle to purify us so that we may enter our marriage with unadulterated love. Dipping an evergreen sprig into a bowl of holy water, he anoints Ella and me, offering his blessings before binding our hands together with the rite of the white ribbon. We recite a prayer to Frigga, the goddess of marriage, followed by our vows promising to love, honor, and cherish each other. The rings we exchange were personally chosen by Ella. A moonstone set into oxidized silver for her, and a brushed silver Tungsten band for me. As the final rite of passage into married life, the Gothi pours a goblet of mead wine and brings our free hands together around the stem, encouraging each of us to drink. Once we do, he declares us bound for eternity as husband and wife. He removes the goblet, and I bring my hand to Ella’s face, sealing our marriage with a kiss. Around us, bells begin to ring, a salute from the witnesses. But Ella and I only have eyes for each other as we seal our commitment to one another. When the Gothi opens the circle again with one last symbolic prayer, we exit to our new life amongst our family and friends. Celebrations are in order, and the chef has prepared a feast of traditional foods.
”
”
A. Zavarelli (Stealing Cinderella)
“
On the other hand, in ancient, and modern, tribal cultures, everything given is already known by everyone you know. Manhood, womanhood, your first trinket, your last rite. Back then, and over there, they expected happiness and therefore achieved that state.
”
”
Walter Mosley (Every Man a King: A King Oliver Novel)
“
Brilliant. And how do you know he’s a saint?” “He’s got a halo?” “Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?” Hitzrot broke into a smile. “Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun disks!” “Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep.” Langdon turned back to the class. “Halos, like much of Christian symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with examples of sun worship.” “Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!” “Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?” “Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.” “And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?” Silence. Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus—Unconquered Sun—coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.” Langdon took another bite of apple. “Conquering religions,” he continued, “often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It’s called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a different god.” Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.” The girl glared. “So, is anything in Christianity original?” “Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man’s quest to understand the divine.
”
”
Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1))
“
I would tell you the safe procedure to avoid lightning while on an exposed ridge, but I see no reason you should not learn it as I did. If you get tweaked by God’s electric finger, I can hardly be to blame. You are a fat-assed nerd anyway, incapable of running more than three miles without the last rites. You, fart-brain, are a reader, and the only thing I despise more, is a writer, who simply ought to announce himself as a public masturbator and be done with it. But I am telling you my story, you are listening, so we have a truce, if not respect. I am a writer, you are a reader, and if there were a God, he might be amused to have mercy on our souls. Or piss on them. In long electric streaks.
”
”
Howard McCord (The Man Who Walked to the Moon: A Novella)
“
After a hurried inquiry established that he was telling the truth the protester was appeased by an immediate cash payment and the service continued. But the greatest indignity was reserved until last. When William was finally lowered into the ground, it became clear that his bloated corpse was too big for its stone sarcophagus, and efforts to press on regardless caused his swollen bowels to burst. No amount of frankincense and spices could hide the resultant stench, and the clergy therefore raced through the rest of the funeral rite before rushing back to their houses.7
”
”
Marc Morris (The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England)
“
You look... refreshed,' Lucien observed with a glance at Tamlin. I shrugged. 'Sleep well?'
'Like a babe.' I smiled at him and took another bite of food, and felt Lucien's eyes travel inexorably to my neck.
'What is that bruise?' Lucien demanded.
I pointed with my fork at Tamlin. 'Ask him. He did it.'
Lucien looked from Tamlin to me and then back again. 'Why does Feyre have a bruise on her neck from you?' he asked with no small amount of amusement.
'I bit her,' Tamlin said, not pausing as he cut his steak. 'We ran into each other in the hall after the Rite.'
I straightened in my chair.
'She seems to have a death wish,' he went on, cutting his meat. The claws stayed retracted but pushed against the skin above his knuckles. My throat closed up. Oh, he was mad- furious at my foolishness for leaving my room- but somehow managed to keep his anger on a tight, tight leash. 'So, if Feyre can't be bothered to listen to orders, then I can't be held accountable for the consequences.'
'Accountable?' I sputtered, placing my hands flat on the table. 'You cornered me in the hall like a wolf with a rabbit!'
Lucien propped an arm on the table and covered his mouth with his hand, his russet eye bright.
'While I might not have been myself, Lucien and I both told you to stay in your room,' Tamlin said, so calmly that I wanted to rip out my hair.
I couldn't help it. Didn't even try to fight the red-hot temper that razed my senses. 'Faerie pig!' I yelled, and Lucien howled, almost tipping back in his chair. At the sight of Tamlin's growing smile, I left.
It took me a couple of hours to stop painting little portraits of Tamlin and Lucien with pigs' features. But as I finished the last one- Two faerie pigs wallowing in their own filth, I would call it- I smiled into the clear, bright light of my private painting room. The Tamlin I knew had returned.
And it made me... happy.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
Immediately after his ordination, Dowd startled his parents and the Fathers by riding past on his new racehorse, a brace of six-shooters strapped over his cassock. That night, in Sausalito, he had the pleasure—a pleasure he had long savoured—of giving last rites to the first man he shot.
”
”
Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia)
“
Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1))
“
Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.
”
”
Marion Woodman (The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation)
“
A Crow's Elegy for the Farmer's Daughter”
We gathered in the fern-thin treetops at dusk
or in the flat sear of noon
strutted among puddles and spoke only
of the sky's empty torment
or ourselves. Once in awhile
we flapped in the dust and silver rain
and disparaged wind with our bevel-winged plummetings
and soundless glides.
We did not care
who shot at us for our raucous predawn menacing
or for settling like a plague of black books in fields
under the blindness of those homespun effigies
leering and motionless and coming unstuffed.
We did not care for you
though we saw the cortege winding past the arbor
and drunken berry rows, the ghosts of peach trees bowing
to acknowledge death's grand simplicity at last
revealed.
We were pieces of a blackboard
upon which last rites were written and did not care
who could or could not see
that we were gods and you were not
ever coming home,
in spite of the mourners' deeply foolish love
we could imagine only by flying
into the sun, where every grief is charred
and finally burned away.
—Christopher Howell, Gaze. (Milkweed Editions; Original edition February 7, 2012)
”
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Christopher Howell (Gaze)
“
appendicitis, jaundice, hepatitis, and malaria, as well as having problems hearing in his left ear and being allergic to dogs. In fact, Kennedy was so ill that he received the last rites three times during his life.
”
”
Hourly History (John F. Kennedy: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of US Presidents))
David Wishart (Last Rites (Marcus Corvinus #6))
“
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The stages birth parents go through are very real and need to be understood. Many adoptive parents who make plans for some open contact through letters, etc., are gravely disappointed and feel betrayed when the birth mother does not write back. It may be that it is too painful for the birth mother at that particular time and that, like Susan, she can’t always respond on schedule. The initial period of grieving lasts roughly five to seven years. Remember that for the birth parents there are no rites of passage and no ceremonies that include one’s friends and family, that gather around them in the grieving process. For the most part their grieving is done alone. And this is true in open, semi-open, and closed adoptions. The best thing adoptive parents who hope for contact can do is to keep the lines of communication open. Adoptive parents are wise to continue sending letters and pictures, even if there is no response at the moment. Many birth parents spend the early period, after the surrender, as do people who have other kinds of posttraumatic stress. There is a period of emotional moratorium, and often there is no interest in opening up the intense pain of the initial loss, even in the planned open adoptions that are being done more frequently these days. In some instances, the adoptive parents understand the need for connections and are trying to make the relationship more open while the birth parents are holding back. This can be frustrating if adoptive parents do not know that this period of separation is a normal part of healing rites for many birth parents.
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Joyce Maguire Pavao (The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated)
“
Being dead had it's advantages
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Kevin Given (Last Rites: The Return of Sebastian Vasilis)
“
The notion, popularized by classicist and romanticist critics alike, of the Attic theatre as the perfect example of a national theatre, and of its audiences as realizing the ideal of a whole people united in support of art, is a falsification of historical truth.33 The festival theatre of Athenian democracy was certainly no ‘people’s theatre’ —the German classical and romantic theorists could only represent it as such, because they conceived the theatre to be an educational institution. The true ‘people’s theatre’ of ancient times was the mime, which received no subvention from the state, in consequence did not have to take instructions from above, and so worked out its artistic principles simply and solely from its own immediate experience with the audiences. It offered its public not artistically constructed dramas of tragi-heroic manners and noble or even sublime personages, but short, sketchy, naturalistic scenes with subjects and persons drawn from the most trivial, everyday life. Here at last we have to do with an art which has been created not merely for the people but also in a sense by the people. Mimers may have been professional actors, but they remained popular and had nothing to do with the educated élite, at least until the mime came into fashion. They came from the people, shared their taste and drew upon their common sense. They wanted neither to educate nor to instruct, but to entertain their audience. This unpretentious, naturalistic, popular theatre was the product of a much longer and more continuous development, and had to its credit a much richer and more varied output than the official classical theatre; unfortunately, this output has been almost completely lost to us. Had these plays been preserved, we should certainly take quite a different view of Greek literature and probably of the whole of Greek culture from that taken now. The mime is not merely much older than tragedy; it is probably prehistoric in origin and directly connected with the symbolic-magical dances, vegetation rites, hunting magic, and the cult of the dead. Tragedy originates in the dithyramb, an undramatic art form, and to all appearances it got its dramatic form—involving the transformation of the performers into fictitious personages and the transposition of the epic past into present —from the mime. In tragedy, the dramatic element certainly always remained subordinate to the lyrical and didactic element; the fact that the chorus was able to survive shows that tragedy was not exclusively concerned to get dramatic effect and so was intended to serve other ends than mere entertainment.
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Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages)
“
WOW!” A GALVANIZED Igor Stravinsky reportedly exclaimed after listening to Leonard Bernstein’s astonishing recording of The Rite of Spring—a still-unsurpassed performance that Columbia Records captured more than fifty years ago in a single inspired and electrically charged recording session on January 20, 1958, in New York City.
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Jonathan Cott (Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein)
“
Unlike other Arab governments, who publicly supported the jihad while privately discouraging their young men from traveling to Afghanistan, North Yemen, then a separate state, sent scores of its best and brightest. For an entire generation of young Yemenis, a trip to the front lines in Afghanistan became a rite of passage.
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Gregory D. Johnsen (The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia)
“
It was an exhilarating time to be involved in the art world, in any capacity. At last, individualism was encouraged, not condemned. By the 1880s, Impressionism was yesterday’s news. Artists had already gone beyond it, and were experimenting with new forms, content and techniques. Diversity was the modus vivendi. Accordingly, 1880s Paris became the birthplace of some radically different movements, including Divisionism, Symbolism, Synthesism and Nabis. Furthermore, the proliferation of alternative exhibiting bodies offered real grounds for hope for avant-garde painters and those hailing from the fringes of society. The Salon was no longer the sole and hazardous rite of passage lying between a painter and success. There were now other organisations where reputations could be forged, such as the Société des Aquarellistes Français. But by far the most notable and innovative artistic venture in 1884 was the Salon des Artistes Indépendants.
When his technically daring composition Bathers at Asnières (1884) was rejected by the jury of the 1884 Salon, former pupil of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts Georges Seurat was spurred to retaliate. Joining forces with a number of other disgruntled painters, among them Symbolist Odilon Redon and self-taught artist Albert Dubois-Pillet, Seurat helped found the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants. With Redon acting as chairman, the group proposed to do something unprecedented: they would mount a show whose organisers were not answerable to any official institution, and where there would be no prizes and, significantly, no jury. The venture introduced a radically new concept onto the Parisian art scene: freedom. The first exhibition, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, was held from May to July in a temporary building in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre.
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Catherine Hewitt (Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon)
“
Timor mortis conturbat me. He thought: In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural, whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage. Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath. How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend.
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P.D. James (Devices And Desires (Adam Dalgliesh, #8))
“
Cutangle lit his third rollup from the stub of the second. This last cigarette owed a lot to the creative powers of nervous energy, and looked like a camel with the legs cut off.
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Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3))
“
So I was privileged to see the last rites of the Bokononist faith. We made an effort to find someone among the soldiers and the household staff who would admit that he knew the rites and would give them to "Papa".
We got no volunteers. That was hardly surprising, with a hook and an oubliette so near. So Dr. von Koenigswald said that he would have a go at the job. He had never administered the rites before, but he had seen Julian Castle do it hundreds of times.
"Are you a Bokononist?" I asked him.
"I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies."
"Will this bother you as a scientist," I inquired, "to go through a ritual like this?"
"I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing."
And he climbed into the golden boat with "Papa". He sat in the stern. Cramped quarters obliged him to have the golden tiller under one arm. He wore sandals without socks, and he took these off. And then he rolled back the covers at the foot of the bed, exposing "Papa's" bare feet. He put the soles of his feet against "Papa's" feet, assuming the classical position for boko-maru.
"Gott mate mutt," crooned Dr. von Koenigswald.
"Dyot meet mat," echoed "Papa" Monzano.
"God made mud," was what they'd said, each in his own dialect. I will here abandon the dialects of the litany.
"God got lonesome," said Von Koenigswald.
"God got lonesome."
"So God said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!'" - "So God said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!'"
"'See all I've made,' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.'" - "'See all I've made,' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.'"
"And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around." - "And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around."
"Lucky me; lucky mud."
"Lucky me, lucky mud." Tears were streaming down "Papa's" cheeks.
"I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done." - "I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done."
"Nice going, God!"
"Nice going, God!" "Papa" said it with all his heart.
"Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have." - "Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have."
"I feel very unimportant compared to You." - "I feel very unimportant compared to You."
"The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around." - "The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."
"I got so much, and most mud got so little." - "I got so much, and most mud got so little."
"Deng you vore da on-oh!" cried Von Koenigswald.
"Tz-yenk voo vore lo yon-yo!" wheezed "Papa". What they had said was, "Thank you for the honor!"
"Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep." - "Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep."
"What memories for mud to have!" - "What memories for mud to have!"
"What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!" - "What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!"
"I loved everything I saw!" - "I loved everything I saw!"
"Good night." - "Good night."
"I will go to heaven now." - "I will go to heaven now."
"I can hardly wait..." - "I can hardly wait..."
"To find out for certain what my wampeter was..." - "To find out for certain what my wampeter was..."
"And who was in my karass..." - "And who was in my karass..."
"And all the good things our karass did for you." - "And all the good things our karass did for you."
"Amen." - "Amen.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Cat’s Cradle)
“
Someone?” he said, even though he knew what I meant, but I pressed on, fulfilling my obligations, trying to get everything down according to procedure. “Someone,” I said. “A priest. To do last rites.” He laughed, with effort, a low, gasping chuckle. “Henry,” he said. “Dig a hole.
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Ben H. Winters (World of Trouble (The Last Policeman Book, #3))
“
12 Many uninformed persons speak of yoga as Hatha Yoga or consider yoga to be “magic,” dark mysterious rites for attaining spectacular powers. When scholars, however, speak of yoga they mean the system expounded in Yoga Sutras (also known as Patanjali’s Aphorisms): Raja (“royal”) Yoga. The treatise embodies philosophic concepts of such grandeur as to have inspired commentaries by some of India’s greatest thinkers, including the illumined master Sadasivendra. Like the other five orthodox (Vedas-based) philosophical systems, Yoga Sutras considers the “magic” of moral purity (the “ten commandments” of yama and niyama) to be the indispensable preliminary for sound philosophical investigation. This personal demand, not insisted on in the West, has bestowed lasting vitality on the six Indian disciplines. The cosmic order (rita) that upholds the universe is not different from the moral order that rules man’s destiny. He who is unwilling to observe the universal moral precepts is not seriously determined to pursue truth. Section III of Yoga Sutras mentions various yogic miraculous powers (vibhutis and siddhis). True knowledge is always power. The path of yoga is divided into four stages, each with its vibhuti expression. Achieving a certain power, the yogi knows that he has successfully passed the tests of one of the four stages. Emergence of the characteristic powers is evidence of the scientific structure of the yoga system, wherein delusive imaginations about one’s “spiritual progress” are banished; proof is required! Patanjali warns the devotee that unity with Spirit should be the sole goal, not the possession of vibhutis — the merely incidental flowers along the sacred path. May the Eternal Giver be sought, not His phenomenal gifts! God does not reveal Himself to a seeker who is satisfied with any lesser attainment. The striving yogi is therefore careful not to exercise his phenomenal powers, lest they arouse false pride and distract him from entering the ultimate state of Kaivalya. When the yogi has reached his Infinite Goal, he exercises the vibhutis, or refrains from exercising them, just as he pleases. All his actions, miraculous or otherwise, are then performed without karmic involvement. The iron filings of karma are attracted only where a magnet of the personal ego still exists.
”
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Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Self-Realization Fellowship))
“
Just another rite of passage, another of childhood’s puzzling and uncertain moments. American writers are mesmerized by childhood, the quizzical journey from innocence to adulthood. What a journey it is, too: precarious and wonderful; frightening and alluring; delightful and tragic. Not one journey, but many, and every one of them different. I am told that money and privilege sometimes make for a smoother passage. I would not know. I only know about being a soldier’s son: the military life and the unexpected fortunes such a life brings. Luck has a lot to do with it, and I was lucky in that my luck went sour early and put me on another road altogether, a road that took me deep into the mountains, a road that led to a trout stream and into the curious and captivating lives of three old men who, by having so little, laid claim to having everything that mattered, was worthwhile, and would last.
”
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Harry Middleton (The Earth Is Enough: Growing Up in a World of Flyfishing, Trout & Old Men (The Pruett Series))
“
Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite—the last “natural sacrament” of family and friendship, of life that is more than “eating” and “drinking.” To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that “something more” is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.
”
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Alexander Schmemann (For the Life of the World)
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crossed himself, wiped the tears from his cheeks, and gave his daughter the last rites.
”
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Patrick Logan (Daughter (Family Values Trilogy #3))
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The Church was not born with an institution; it was born with relationships ... The Sacraments are all about relationships, not about the individual recipients. The Sacraments don’t just change the individual; the individual’s participation in the Sacraments changes the Church. When a dying person is given the Last Rites, the entire Church is changed. When a baby is baptized, the entire Church is changed. When a couple is married or a priest is ordained, the entire Church is changed.
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Francis E. George
“
Estonian religion has been characterised as a form of animism – or indeed ‘animatism’, to use Ivar Paulson’s term for the Estonian anthropomorphism of the forest as a singular being, as opposed to animistic veneration of the spirits within individual living things.91 The spirits of the forest could appear to people in animal, human, or therianthropic (half-human, half-animal) forms.92 Certain stones in the forest were deemed sacred, and these hiis sites were where Estonians made offerings of berries, feathers, or bones for the forest spirits (or the forest itself) – although in later times, these ‘offerings’ or sacrifices came to resemble something more like a magical rite practised by hunters to ensure success.
”
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Francis Young (Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples)
“
The Maris also venerated lower spirits linked to the cult of the ancestors called kugyzha, and rites honouring the ancestors were and are central to Mari religion.
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Francis Young (Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples)
“
As Kurisoo and Jonuks note, we do not really have a word for this sort of relationship with Christianity,39 although I propose we could refer to it as the ‘Christianesque’: a cosmetic adoption of features of Christianity without adoption of the Christian faith in a way recognisable to the church authorities. And just as there were ‘Christianesque’ unchristianised people incorporating Christian themes into pre-Christian belief worldviews and belief systems, there were also ‘paganesque’ Christians who continued to use pre-Christian rites but whose overall belief system was Christian,
”
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Francis Young (Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples)
“
According to Długosz, it was seeing Polish soldiers cutting down the sacred forests and groves without suffering retribution from the gods that impressed the Samogitians. An elder agreed to baptism, albeit not on the basis of any understanding of the Christian faith, but rather because the Christian God had proved his strength: On account of the fact that our gods, whose cults and rites we received from our ancestors, were destroyed by you and your soldiers, most serene king, and were defeated by the God of the Poles as if they were inert and powerless, we desert our gods and their rites, and adhere to your God and that of the Poles as stronger.
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Francis Young (Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples)
“
In the spring of 1969, the sword struck from Rome. Pope Paul VI decreed a new Mass would be instituted. The letter carrying the news pierced the bishop's heart. This was not just a scandal; the preface to the description of the novus ordo missae gave a new definition of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that bordered on an unthinkable lapse into heresy. The Great Sacrifice of the Mass became a simple supper. The change in the nature of the sacrament can be understood quickly by simply counting the number of references to "sacrifice" in the Tridentine rite and comparing that number with the number of references in the new Mass. This was not only new; this was the smashing of the ancient ritual of sacrifice and the replacement with a new version.
”
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David Allen White (The Mouth of the Lion: Bishop Antonio De Castro Mayer & the Last Catholic Diocese)
“
There you are. I’ve been looking for you,” said a deep, sensual male voice I’d never heard. But I kept my eyes on the three faeries, bracing myself for flight as the male behind me stepped to my side and slipped a casual arm around my shoulders. The three lesser faeries paled, their dark eyes wide. “Thank you for finding her for me,” my savior said to them, smooth and polished. “Enjoy the Rite.” There was enough of a bite beneath his last words that the faeries stiffened. Without further comment, they scuttled back to the bonfires.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep coined the expression ‘rites of passage’ after noticing the important structural analogy between ceremonies of birth, puberty, initiation, marriage and death. The ceremonies, he argued, involve three components, ordered successively: separation of the individuals or groups from their previous condition; existence on the margin (marge) during which they remain suspended in limbo, and incorporation (agrégation) as participants in their new condition. Thus the initiation into full membership is preceded by a period of alienation, as the youth is cast out from childhood and care, and forced to earn the fruits of adult freedom.
Imagine, however, a situation in which the adult world is clouded over: everything pertaining to adulthood has become dark, forbidding, treacherous. The only freedom lies in youth itself. Identity must be forged by the youth from his own adolescent experience – the experience of alienation, in which the protection of the adult world has been withdrawn, and nothing put in place of it. The traditional totems, which represent the continuity and longevity of the tribe, now lose their significance. The youth must construct his own totem, his own ceremonies of initiation and membership, his own sense of togetherness, while borrowing nothing at all from the expertise and knowledge of his forefathers. His dances must be formless and violent, so that only youth can dance to them; sexual pleasure, the mark of youth, must occupy the foreground of the ritual, but sex must be meticulously divorced from marriage and the birth of children. His totems must be formed in his own image – perpetually young, perpetually transgressive, perpetually incompetent.
As he dances among his kind, such a youth will be conscious of a lack. All this commotion ought to mean something; it ought to be lifting him to a higher plane. But it leaves him exactly where he was – on the margin of society, enjoying a freedom that is empty since it has no goal. He tries to lift himself with drugs, and as a result sinks further into the void. His protest resolves itself at last in a strangulated cry – a song which sounds like music only when the drumming feet of adolescents sound along with it. And if he discovers words for this song, they will probably be these:
I can’t find words to say
About the things caught in my mind.
”
”
Roger Scruton (An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture)
“
the night of the Moth Festival, graduating seniors and their friends go to the place in the Forest where Elam McCoy is said to have disappeared and call out to the Moth-Winged Man three times. If he appears, he might grant you your deepest desire. Or he might mark you for death. It’s become more than a tradition; it’s a rite of passage. Everyone dares each other to do it, but last year I was the only one foolish enough to try.
”
”
Kate Pearsall (Bittersweet in the Hollow)
“
So God shall ease thy heart,' sang Sintram softly to himself, and they made ready the warden's last resting-place, and lowered him into it with all due and solemn rites. Immediately afterwards the chaplain was obliged to depart, but he was able to say to Sintram, as he bade him an affectionate farewell: 'Now that you have become so gentle and quiet and devout, be sure your beloved mother knows it.
”
”
La Motte-Fou Freiherr de, 1777-1843; Sullivan, Edmund J. (Edmund Joseph), 1869-1933, ill
“
The ancient Egyptian religion lasted from somewhere around 3100 BCE until the suppression of ‘pagan’ religion in the country was apparently accomplished during the 6th century CE, meaning that there was only about a century of unquestioned Christian dominion over Egypt before the Muslim conquest in 639-46 CE. Damascius, the Platonist philosopher and pagan activist who died in 538 CE, in his memoirs recounting his time studying in Alexandria, indicates that the native religion, though embattled, was still vibrant and resistance to Christian hegemony was militant. We have evidence of pagan worship continuing at and around certain Egyptian temples as late as 567 CE, in the face of enforcement action. The last known hieroglyphic inscription, the graffito of Esmet-Akhom, is dated to 394 CE, and is a moving testament of devotion to the God Mandulis by a priest of Isis. Inscriptions from the temple of Isis at Philae indicate that it was staffed by a Nubian priesthood well into the fifth century CE, when Proclus, another Platonic philosopher, wrote a hymn, no longer extant, to Isis of Philae, likely because the cult was an outstanding example of polytheist resistance. Procopius tells us of an agreement with the Blemmyes, a tribe in the region, permitting them to host the sacred icon of Isis from this temple for annual rites; this tribe is the ancestors of today’s Beja people, who still speak a language closely related to ancient Egyptian
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Edward P. Butler (The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World)
“
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Zedichorah Occult
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Mitchell’s never known grief before. Oh, he’s seen others grieving, but he’s never experienced it himself. That’s the curse of the 22nd century. Medical advances have banished most diseases. Aging has been slowed but not stopped. When it comes to the end-of-life experience, most people go out on psilocybin. Magic mushrooms make death a psychedelic trip complete with hallucinations—a voyage of discovery into the unknown. Joy has replaced sorrow. Oh, relatives still miss their loved ones, but death has been sterilized. Death has been scheduled. Death is now seen as a last rite of passage. It completes a life. None of that is true, but it makes the existential fear palatable. Accidents, though, still claim lives.
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Peter Cawdron (The Minotaur)
“
He looked up at the church portico. The arches were carved with images of the Last Judgment worn by the elements. Beneath them, dividing the door in two, a niche sheltered an angry-looking Pantocrator. His raised right hand suggested punishment rather than mercy. In his left hand he held an open book, and Corso could not help drawing parallels. He looked around at the church tower and the surrounding buildings. The facades still bore bishops’ coats of arms, and he reflected that this square too had once witnessed the bonfires of the Inquisition. After all, this was Toledo. A crucible for underground cults, initiation rites, false converts. And heretics.
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Arturo Pérez-Reverte (The Club Dumas)
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two people clinging to a life raft, big breaths that feel like last rites.
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”
Jessa Hastings (Daisy Haites: The Great Undoing (The Magnolia Parks Universe, #4))
“
But when I think of the horrors and hazards of TV crews, I most vividly remember a story, admittedly told me at second hand, but true, of the British crew in Nigeria filming there shortly after the collapse of the Biafra secessionists. A wave of robberies was being repressed by the government in the most brutal way possible-by capital punishment-and the crew was filming an execution. The unfortunate victim, convicted of some particularly modest robbery, had been tied to a tree and blindfold ed. A priest had administered last rites. An army squad, its rifles loaded, took aim. At this point the proceedings were interrupted by the sound engineer. "Stop everything, please," he said. uThere's something wrong with the set."
The execution squad commander courteously obeyed; the troops grounded arms until the tinkering with the recording machine was completed. "Now let's have a test," the sound engineer said, completely oblivious of his surroundings. "Okay, you can go ahead now.
”
”
Edward Samuel Behr (Anyone here been raped & speaks English?)
“
People are people. Life’s messy. And the longer you live, the messier it gets.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
people should do what they’ve gotta do, man. And more important than that, they should make sure to have some fun while they’re at it – ’cos you never know when or how your ride’s gonna end.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
Cleopatra,” Zia said, “the seventh queen of that name. She tried to stand against the might of Rome, and she lost. When she took her life, the last line of pharaohs ended. Egypt, the great nation, faded. Our language was forgotten. The ancient rites were suppressed. The House of Life survived, but we were forced into hiding.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Red Pyramid (Kane Chronicles, #1))
“
The doc gave me a look like he wanted to punch a hole in the wall.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
The forms and rites of Christmas Day are meant merely to give the last push to people who are afraid to be festive. Father Christmas exists to haul us out of bed and make us partake of meals too beautiful to be called breakfasts. He exists to fling us out of the bathing-machine into the heady happiness of the sea.
”
”
Ryan Whitaker Smith (Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton)
“
* * * The week wore on, and the vigilance Fleck had always called for was now a matter of course for all the rabbits in the king’s service. As he recovered his strength, he worked on the boats, giving orders and drilling the bucks. In the early days of Black Star Company, before the fateful first voyage, Fleck had always ended each exercise by reciting the vow. When that time came on his first day back, the rabbits were reluctant, awkward. It was clear that Galt had not continued this rite during Fleck’s absence. As their drills ended, they began to break up and walk off. “The vow!” Fleck shouted, and he drew his sword. They slowly reformed and raised their swords, Galt last of all. “My place beside you! My blood for yours!” they called, though less enthusiastic than in the past. “I know, bucks,” Fleck said. “I know we all feel we let Gavin
”
”
S.D. Smith (The Black Star of Kingston (Green Ember: Old Natalia #1))
“
I was close enough friends with John that I once trusted him with my entire stash of coke. (Referring to John Bonham, drummer for Led Zeppelin)
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
She washed them quickly in the sink—the water ran red, then pink,
”
”
Chase Austin (Monk Last Rite: An Assassin’s Final Sin (Axel Monk Thrillers Book 4))
“
I felt like I was about a foot off the ground with a double rainbow shooting out of my arse.
[Right after Ozzy did a bump after waiting for the cop in the stall next to him to finish his business and he did it when the cop flushed the toilet. At the airport in Texas. He called the cop "Captain Crapper"]
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
I was a lot closer with John Bonham than I ever was with Bon. In fact, I knew all the guys in Zeppelin from way back.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
Why the fuck had I ever thought John Bonham was the best custodian for a pile of cocaine big enough to march the Bolivian army to the moon and back?
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)
“
We eventually got to the point where we were flying everywhere with our dealer. That's how relaxed we were about carrying drugs around. He was basically a member of the band.....
The guy never left our side. He was like our own personal blow butler.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (Last Rites)