Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...down on their knees," runs an old academy jingle. However talented and rebellious, aspirants to this particular Olympus must first appease the gods-in-being by eating a certain amount of literary humble pie. An applicant must beg for admission in terms as carefully prescribed as an ancient Hittite ritual; his friends must sedulously woo the Immortals in his behalf. "Is your poetry any good?" snapped a windy old Immortal at Victor Hugo when he was seeking entrance. "I have been told, sir," answered Hugo, "that it is as fine as your speeches, but I don't believe...
Savage Shrine. Stonehenge was a center of a savage religion, and like the many cathedrals of medieval Europe, it took centuries to build. The first shrine, says Atkinson, was built about 1800 B.C. It was chiefly a circle of 56 "ritual pits," some of them containing cremated human remains, perhaps of ritual victims. A single stone stood upright at the circle's entrance, and near it was a wooden structure whose traces still remain...
...religion, they improved the Stonehenge shrine instead of destroying it. Their contribution was 82 "blue-stones," arranged in a double circle with stones flanking an axis that points toward the midsummer sunrise. This was a step forward in religious technology; it showed that the Beaker People had tied their ritual to the movements...
...Wouk believes, have most influenced his life (the other: Columbia's late Philosopher Irwin Edman). "For 23 years," recalls Wouk, "my grandfather never ate any meat except fowl, because he insisted on personally seeing the slaughtering done according to the prescribed ritual...
...white man's demand for the sea otter had all but exterminated the Indian's main trading staple. Gone with the sea otter were prosperity and the passion for the potlatch. The gradual loss of ritual meaning stultified Northwest Indian art, turned its craftsmen into little more than manufacturers of tourist curios...