Word: ritually
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...King arrived for his coronation. Merely by waving at Wife Nancy on a giant closed-circuit television monitor visible throughout the hall, Ronald Reagan, Rex Republicans, brought his G.O.P. court roaring to its feet. Formally accepting his nomination to a second term, Reagan could hardly restrain the ecstatic ritual chants of "Four more years!" that repeatedly interrupted his speech. While savoring the moment, he finally pointed to his watch and reminded his audience, "It's getting late...
...pompous, adenoidal, often petulantly childish; he reveres Tartuffe in or der to assert his moral superiority over a family that has grown fractious. Harris Yulin's Tartuffe is cold and cobra-like, vengeful and vain. He has a genuine element of fervor: he endures ritual flogging, dispenses alms, even appears to heal the halt and lame. But there is nothing inspirational in him and nothing ennobling in his impact. In the opening scenes, the actors appear in clownish whiteface and lurch like robots. The playing reaches its tenderest pitch at an utterly perverse moment: Harriet Harris, as Orgon...
...hauled out a fishing-tackle box that contained his magic tricks. That is his ritual these days. He waved a black wand. At his cry of "Hah!" it turned into a red flag. "Pretty good?" A white cone snapped into life as a handkerchief. Balls appeared and vanished. A dime disappeared into a penny...
...night before the finals in women's gymnastics last week, Mary Lou Retton, 16, lay in bed at the Olympic Village, conjuring. It was an established ritual for her, no different from the imaginings of a hundred other nights. "I see myself hitting all my routines, doing everything perfectly," says Retton. "I imagine all the moves and go through them with the image in my mind." The following day, the spunky Retton led the U.S. team through a stylish and rousingly high-flying performance. The Americans could not quite match the lavishly talented and seasoned Rumanian team, but their...
...curse bequeathed to Mexico City by the Aztecs was the curse of human sacrifice. That ritual, in which a priest bent over the recumbent victim and cut out his throbbing heart with an obsidian knife, was central to the Aztecs' religion. The war god Huitzilopochtli required blood as the price of Aztec victory and the rain god Tlaloc required it as the price of the harvest; if these gods remained unpropitiated, the world would end. Exactly how many victims were thus sacrificed (and later eaten) remains uncertain, but it is believed that 20,000 prisoners were offered...