Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Florida's Cape Canaveral missile test center one murky night last week to give the Atlas its final preening before flight. In a blockhouse a few hundred feet from the launching pad, physicists and engineers started radioing to foremen the long lists that comprised the exquisitely detailed ritual of inspection. Fitted together in the great steel bird's innards were some 300,000 parts, and a failure in one of them could cause a misfire...
...Father Davis sees it, are involved in human history through centuries of what he calls "coexistence" in Spain, back to the Dark Ages, the Roman arenas, "and on to Abraham." And in the modern world both share many common characteristics: dietary rules, a sense of the sacredness of ritual and the transcendence of God, respect for learning and human reason. Both have been discriminated against and, "in some circles, are still regarded as aliens...
...Calabrian village of Presinaci, whose 100-odd mud-floored houses swarm with flies, black pigs and naked children, the Mafia leaders, in his telling, were a loutish collection of bullyboys dedicated to thievery, twisted honor and senseless violence. But the ritual they practiced was ominous with medieval significance. One night in 1941 Serafino Castagna was taken to a dimly lit hut for induction into the order. His arm was ritually slashed and his blood sucked by all the members present. With his wound still throbbing, he took the oath: "I swear by our noble ancestors, the Spanish Knights Osso, Mastrosso...
...favorite pastime lay in avenging insults. Once Serafino was ordered to execute a fellow member for failing to pay a fine leveled by the Mafia. He succeeded only in wounding the offender, and though for his pains he went to jail for four years-and kept his ritual silence-the Mafia was not satisfied. After his release from prison, Serafino was ordered to kill a policeman who was being too nosy about slaughtered pigs. Serafino, out on three-year parole, pleaded for time...
Clausen offers his ritual bull's-eyes to Colquhoun, but later makes the agonized confession that he has been an all-night sucker for the beastly magic of a local witch doctor. Hoping to bridge the gulf between European and African knowledge, he has dabbled in mysterious rites (in one, a man was burned to death by no visible flame) and is now desperately afraid for his soul. The fate of this jungle Dr. Faustus is sealed in what the press calls "the great Clausen scandal." Kenya-raised Novelist Huxley (Red Strangers, The Walled City) has written a literate...