Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dominguin was maneuvering his bull for the picadors when it suddenly charged, sank a horn into his lower abdomen. Struggling up off the sand, Dominguin was doggedly advancing again on the bull, dripping blood, when his helpers scooped him up and carried him to the infirmary. True to the ritual of their craft, Ordonez killed Dominguin's bull, while doctors were examining the battered matador and deciding that he would not be able to resume the mano a mano "for 20 or 30 days...
Actually, the Nabakalebara Yatra (ancient ritual of changing the bodies of the god) can be performed every 20 years. But the interesting thing about it is that no one is allowed to see the sacred thing which forms the "soul," and surely anyone who touches it must die. The priest whose task it is to switch the soul from the old to the new body is chosen for his outstanding sanctity, but he never survives the ordeal. It is a fact that the Bhitarachha Mahapatra died immediately after this duty was last performed...
...They resemble Stone Age art found in eastern Spain, the Tassili mountains of North Africa, in India and Indonesia. They depict tall, slender, square-shouldered people quite unlike the present-day aborigines. Sharply designed and hauntingly evocative, they suggest a lost civilization with its own unnamed gods and elaborate ritual. Some paintings show boomerangs, the aborigine's weapon, but boomerangs were used in several parts of the prehistoric world. Lommel has not the slightest notion what the pictures signify, but believes they prove Australia must have been in contact during prehistoric times with other continents. Possibly the rock pictures...
...until the crop was full grown. As centuries passed, the practice turned into a kind of spiritual excursion that every Buddhist layman tried to enjoy, and eventually entering the temporary priesthood became a matter of course; laborers, businessmen, monarchs (King Phumiphon in 1956) went through the 90-day ritual. "It's like going to college in the United States," explains a Thai. "Every boy wants...
Whiplash Currents. Why does Mizoguchi hate the Golden Temple? Novelist Mishima answers in many ways, none completely successful. The gist of it is that Japan, Author Mishima implies, has been hemmed in to the point of impotence by the worship of ancestors, ritual and beauty. In this sense, Temple belongs to recent, agonizing reason-why literature, in which Japanese writers are still covertly psychoanalyzing the loss of World War II. Mizoguchi is both poor and common, and Temple champions a kind of cultural revolt of the masses, with its rejection of all that is feudal and aristocratic. There...