The abundance of ritual descriptions in the Gospel of Mark suggests a discourse about ritual between the narrator and early audiences of the Gospel. The prominence of the ritual of baptism at the beginning (Mark 1:9–11) and anointing at the end...
The zhuiniu 椎牛 ritual is one of the most elaborate of the Miao people of western Hunan, China. Zhuiniu means “kill the buffalo with a spear” and traces its origins to the worship of spirits and natural elements. Sponsored by...
Violence is a characteristic that has somewhat become definitional for the Hindu goddess Kālī. But looking at it through the lens of folk narrative and the popular, devotion-infused and highly personalised opinions of her devotees shows that not only...
This paper critically explores Kṛṣṇanāṭṭam, a Sanskrit ritual dance-theater tradition from Kerala, as a product of socio-political and religious transformations in early modern South India. Conceived in the mid-17th...
Xiud Yax Lus Qim or Yalu wang 亞魯王 (Ode to the King Yalu) is a type of oral performance inherited verbally and transmitted orally by dongb langf (donglang 東郎, chanters of Yalu wang) at funerals and festive occasions. As one of the most representative...
Deaths provide an important setting for Dimasas in Assam to engage in collective ritual performance. These rituals not only allow the people to affirm their identities, but also provide a space to create strategies to adapt to the changing urban land...
This article documents and analyzes a three-month intercultural performance collaboration with Metamorphosis Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer of 1992—a pivotal moment following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on...
One of the basic features of shamanic rituals cross-culturally in East and Southeast Asia is that the ritual itself is structured as a journey up to the sky, climbing the world mountain or the world tree, or else a journey down to the bottom of the s...
Studies of ancient Israelite religion have long assumed that texts played some role in its public expression. This role is often reconstructed using depictions in the Hebrew Bible and ritual texts from neighboring regions or the Bronze Age Levant. Ho...
Contrary to the widespread assumption in the study of Japanese religions that Kagura is historically the main genre of performing arts at Shintō festivals, something dating back to the beginning of Japanese history, in this article I focus inste...
The green behavior of civil servants in the workplace is influenced by personal moral reflectiveness and green conscientiousness. Group discussions and initiatives within organizations can also influence individual green behavior. Civil servants with...
Performance has long been recognized to be a meaningful component in the worship of the Jina. This paper will focus on a particular aspect of devotional performance and historicize the phenomenon of ritual re-enactment of the Jina’s biography,...
Votive offerings are one of the most common devotional practices in Hindu temples of Kerala and are today resorted to by an ever-growing number of worshippers seeking divine help in times of need. As this article will show, these offerings are deeply...
This essay explores a remarkable manuscript, the so-called Hileq and Bileq Haggadah (Paris, BnF Ms. Hébreu 1333), illuminated in southern Germany in the fifteenth century. Our focus, in particular, is on the image that accompanies the Shefokh ...
This article examines Daoist ritual and meditative practices, primarily developed between the fourth and twelft centuries, as cosmotechniques: methods for engaging, recalibrating, and occasionally overturning the spatial and temporal order. It first...
This article explores the connection between habits and the performing arts, arguing that habits are not only fundamental to the practice and appreciation of these arts but also inherently performative in nature. Drawing on insights from various phil...
This work aims to show that the sacrificial status of the victims of acts of terrorism, such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings (“11-M”) and ETA (Basque Homeland and Liberty) attacks in Spain, is determined by how it is interpreted by the communities...
The Mañjuśrībhāṣita-Citrakarmaśāstra, a Sanskrit śilpa work discovered in Sri Lanka, deals exclusively with Buddhist image making. It provides technical instructions for the fabrication of Buddhist images as...
In this paper, we analyze relations between rituals and algorithms with the goal of achieving better knowledge of both phenomena as systems of control information about processes. Similarities and dissimilarities between rituals and algorithms are ex...
Many Chinese temples in Singapore provide live streaming of getai (English: a stage for songs) during the Hungry Ghost Month as well as deities’ birthday celebrations and spirit possessions—a recent phenomenon. For instance, Sheng Hong Te...
American Folklore consists of traditional knowledge and cultural practices engaged by inhabitants of the United States below Canada and above Mexico. American folklorists were influenced by nineteenth-century European humanistic scholarship that iden...
Recent scholarship has challenged the anachronistic projection of the modern category of the poem onto premodern texts. This article attempts to theorize how one might construct an alternative to modern conceptualizations of “the poem” th...
The electronic tourism era has rapidly emerged during the explosive spread of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. The role of information technology was also evident in the religious tourism sector, and this facilitated the organization of religious eve...
Chinese Buddhists in the Eastern Han initially employed the term libai to denote a supreme ritual performed by believers and disciples when meeting the Buddha. Deeply rooted in an Indian ritual greeting tradition, libai consisted of the action of tou...
Initiation into the Bektashi Sufi order is formalized as the initiate is led through a complex ritual form replete with symbols of death and rebirth, sacrifice, and integration that are enacted as the ritual is performed and in various ways experienc...
Then is the designation in Vietnamese and Tày given to shamanic practitioners of the Tày ethnicity, who reside mainly in the northern provinces of Vietnam. Scholars are long aware that the predominantly female spirit mediums among the Z...
The Eastern Minyag is a small community located east of Gangkar Mountain (Chinese: gongga shan) in Southwest China. Their complex rituals, performed by ritual specialists (sutcywu), serve various purposes: diagnosing the causes of individual psycho-p...
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mianning County, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture between 2023 and 2024, this paper analyzes the “xiō bū” (ꑭꁮ) ritual of the Liangshan Yi people. Framed with...
Previous studies on the Nanhaishen Temple 南海神廟 (Temple of the South Sea God) in Guangzhou in the Tang dynasty focus mainly on the South Sea God as the patron of the Maritime Silk Road, without thoroughly discussing the state ritual and the sacrificia...
Lindsay Jones developed the concept of “ritual-architectural event”, according to which the meaning of a sacred building depends upon the participant’s experience of it in the course of the rituals they perform. Starting from such a...
Most models on the origins of tantrism have been either inattentive to or dismissive of non-literate, non-sectarian ritual systems. Groups of magicians, sorcerers or witches operated in India since before the advent of tantrism and continued to perfo...
There are endless lists of academic publications on pilgrimage and on nonverbal communication, but very rarely if at all, do these two phenomena meet together in the same one, hence the author’s attempt to bring them together here. In this arti...
This paper examines the Xiaoshi Jingang Keyi as a case of textual re-ritualization in the later history of Chinese Buddhism. Originally compiled by the Song dynasty monk Zongjing 宗鏡, the text transformed the exegetical reading of the Di...
In the nineteenth century, Protestant reformers declared: Sport builds character. They described sport as ethically valuable and as an experiential tool to teach values and cooperation. However, sports have long raised ethical challenges when it come...
Although Tibetan rainmaking rituals speak of important aspects of both history and religion, scholars thus far have paid only biased attention to the rituals and performative aspects rather than the abundant textual materials available. To address th...
Analyzing two women’s rituals in which verbal art on family and kinship is prominent, this article explores situations in which tales and songs in Assamese are staged by newly married and about-to-be-married young women. Active participation in...
Yingshen saishe or saishe is a general name for all types of temple festivals held to offer sacrifices to deities of local communities. With its roots traceable to ancient shamanic beliefs and practices, saishe demonstrates itself as a closely i...
Âşıks, renowned for their adeptness at improvisational poetry, are viewed as the inheritors of certain shamanic functions within historical contexts. Originally, shamans assumed diverse roles encompassing poetry, medicine, and priesth...
It is now widely accepted that religious tourism encapsulates the essence of contemporary patterns of travel to sacred and religious sites [...]
In the 21st century, the Church of Sweden has lost its dominant position regarding the ritualization of births, marriages, and deaths in Sweden. Above all, name giving ceremonies, civil weddings, and civil funerals have become more common. The purpos...
Dogon masks have been famous for a long time—and none more so than the kanaga mask, the so-called croix de Lorraine. A host of interpretations of this particular mask circulate in the literature, ranging from moderately exotic to extremely exot...
In contemporary India and Nepal, Buddhist pilgrimage spaces constitute a ritual ecology. Not only is pilgrimage a form of ritual practice that is central to placemaking and the construction of a Buddhist sacred geography, but the actions of religious...
Human populations confront three distinct climate challenges: (1) seasonal climate fluctuations, (2) sporadic climate crises, and (3) long term climate change. Religious systems often attribute climate crises to the behavior of invisible spirits. The...
Although ritual participation in Christian churches is decreasing in the Netherlands, one of the most secularised countries in the world, monasteries are increasingly attractive to people not committed to a life in an abbey, but who rather transfer m...
Indic rites of purification aim to negate the law of karma by removing the residues of malignant past actions from their patrons. This principle is exemplified in the Kahika Mela, a rarely studied religious festival of the West Himalayan highlands (H...
Although the relationship between religion and football has gained considerable interest during the last twenty years, scant attention has been paid to the relationship between pilgrimage and football. This paper seeks to advance the study of this re...
Every year, diverse Jewish communities around the world observe Tashlich (casting off), a customary atonement ritual performed the day after Rosh Hashanah. This performative ritual is conducted next to a body of water to symbolize atonement and purif...
The article’s purpose is to discuss on a cross-disciplinary plane whether the space’s changing dimension (in terms of social distancing), caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, could affect religious symbols’ characteristics and rituals,...
In this paper, we study the role of power animals in contemporary Saami shamanism and how past and present are entwined in the presentation of power animals. In the old Saami worldviews, in addition to animals, spirits and sacred rocks (sieidi, SaaN)...
Like most tribal societies, the socio-religious system of the Karbis of Assam also largely conforms to the belief in magic, spirits, and the ancestor cult. The Chomangkan is one of the most important rituals of the Karbis and mirrors their philosophy...
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