- [!] Status - status-updated:: begun 2021-06-24 There's this notion that rituals are solemn, because so many of the religious rituals that people partake in our past pastors giving sermons and, you know weddings where the Catholics take four hours to solidly go through everything, and the taking of the Crown to, you know, Walk around people with the Greek Orthodox, and just how do we have these very solemn occasions that we consider ritual but on worldbuilding it's important to remember that not all rituals are those very specific kinds of solemn occasions. There's a joke in the archaeologists and anthropology community, that if you don't know what something is, we just call it a ritual. And when you think of ritual and that broad and contexts. Rituals are things like going to watch Sunday football at your friend's house and always buying the purple colored vodka or Thanksgiving with your family, where people again watch football, there's a lot of football in my early life, but not just football but also, you know, things like, it becomes a ritual to have a particular party on a particular day, whether that's Fourth of July or an annual event that you host for a birthday or an on birthday party or a croquet tournament, all of those from an anthropological perspective are ritualized. And when you dig down into how these things work, even a game like tennis is "a ritual." Think about the white clothes and the quietness, and the distinctions, there's an article on this summer that I should pull up. So when you're thinking about religious rituals, even though some of those are fun. Something as wholesome as neighborhood kids hunting for Easter eggs, or as basic as saying "namaste" at the end of a yoga session ---- those are rituals. But most "rituals" that come up in fantasy stories are like the one above. It's always some kind of ritual dismemberment or black-robed monks chanting some dark ritual, eye of newt to perform the ritual of making a witch's brew ---- rarely do we see "and the sorceress performed the ritual necessary to kick off the chariot races." The Romans certainly had big festivals where they slaughtered a goat, but we have this notion that these sort of events are, you know, a big climb up on the tower, or the pedestal or the temple, or the pyramid and rip out the heart and holds up. We rarely think about what happens afterwards. Consider a "ritually sacrificed animal." Imagine you're a powerful magistrate and you've just finished examining a fat cow's liver to make sure there isn't anything wrong with it that might indicate a coming problem. You've got all this burnt animal meat, right? And all these people gathered around to see what the outcome of the ritual is, right? Anthropologists usually call that kind of event a "religious festival" or "ritual feast." Where I come from, we call it a bull roast. Then, anything we really see in the movies where it's this big overdone ordeal, but when you think about the clothes and stuff that people were wearing at the time, it's not that different from dressing up to go to a bull roast or an oyster roast or crab feast for a lobster boil or crawfish boil or whatever your particular region does in my region of town for you, it's not that you would dress up flat because that will be a great way to get messy but you do wear sort of very particular clothes for something like Preakness with your fancy hats, and that's a ritual and it's an event and it's a festival but it's, it's the sort of thing that people don't think about when they're world building because they're not used to reading it so they get into these patterns and tropes and I'm not saying the tropes are bad tropes are definitely not that there's a link somewhere to Trump's are not that. I'm not saying that tropes are bad. What I'm saying is, I want to broaden and freshen and alter the ways we think about the past by pulling "rituals" out of the highly academic contexts in which they usually appear, and move away from the very academic phrasings and imagine what it might actually look like by analogizing something to our real lives. But not this week, because I like to So when you're reading about an ancient festival that the Mesopotamians had, in order to, you know, ritually remove mold from a house, there's a link for that in the fungus newsletter, when you're thinking about that, think about it less as some stodgy old priest, waving, you know incense around and being useless and more like hiring an expert for getting your house cleaned in a very particular way using chemicals that you don't super understand because hey, Maybe you don't know whether or not it's safe to put boiling hot water down your pipes, but you're pretty sure that your plumber isn't going to break anything, PS, don't put boiling hot water down your pipes, link to that Reddit thread, what I'm really asked me people do here is don't other the past. Don't imagine that people in ancient times are so very, very different from you that they're incomprehensible and stodgy, because while yes people in the ancient times had different perspectives than you personally, there is probably a group of people in modern times, that has a very similar perspective, for example, the Greeks really were very religious linked to that Reddit thread, but they're absolutely devout people and devout communities in modern day America and certainly globally. So it's not that people fundamentally in their very natures have changed also very much because of the modern era, because to be quite frank, we haven't. For example, the notion that there's too much to read and too much knowledge to be had goes back to the invention of the printing press the very first books had people freaking out about how they were they possibly going to be organizing their information this is a good place to link to Bri’s classification YouTube video.