Following Magical Ceremony The magical ceremony came to a close as the enchanting lights slowly dimmed and the participants began to disperse. The air was charged with a sense of wonder and excitement, as if the very essence of magic still lingered around. As the onlookers scattered, a small group of individuals gathered around the center of the ceremonial grounds. They were deeply engrossed in a hushed conversation, their eyes shining with anticipation. They had discovered a hidden secret, an ancient ritual to follow in the aftermath of the magical ceremony. This secret ritual was said to awaken dormant magical abilities within those who were touched by the energies of the ceremony.
One of the key pieces that makes our B Mitzvah ceremonies so compelling as a model is part of what makes Secular Humanistic Judaism so distinct: changing the liturgy to match what we believe and the goals of the ceremony. A B Mitzvah celebration in many congregations outside our movement often makes the youth’s growing maturity somewhat secondary to the ceremony by embedding the B Mitzvah rituals within a “regular” liturgy. The student may read from the Torah or read a haftarah, and may help lead services, and those achievements are recognized. But if the ceremony is on a Shabbat morning, the liturgy is largely the same as if there were no B Mitzvah being celebrated at all. The youth whose B Mitzvah is being celebrated is in some respects a drop-in: the youth is recognized, but the liturgy is not reworked to recognize how momentous the occasion truly is.
, and other large public events that involve no national holidays, like sporting events, all must be given strong ceremonial marking to underline that each is an occasion. Join Paul, an initiate in a large number of magical and mystical systems, as we explore the fundamental skills, practices and activities of the Ceremonial Magician.
This secret ritual was said to awaken dormant magical abilities within those who were touched by the energies of the ceremony. It was believed that this ceremony could unlock the true potential of individuals, giving them access to powers beyond their comprehension. With the night sky as their witness, the group made their way to a secluded grove, far from prying eyes.
Following magical ceremony
Most cultures exhibit a particular configuration or style. A single value or pattern of perceiving the world often leaves its stamp on several institutions in the society. Examples are “machismo” in Spanish-influenced cultures, “face” in Japanese culture, and “pollution by females” in some highland New Guinea cultures. Here Horace Miner demonstrates that “attitudes about the body” have a pervasive influence on many institutions in Nacirema society.
The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different people behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. The point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock [1] . In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.
Professor Linton [2] first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east. According to Nacirema mythology, their nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw, who is otherwise known for two great feats of strength—the throwing of a piece of wampum across the river Pa-To-Mac and the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the Spirit of Truth resided.
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people’s time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.
The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.
While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.
The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charmbox of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.
Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution [3] . The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.
In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as “holy-mouth-men.” The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.
The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious [4] about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures. [5]
In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these items in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client’s mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client’s view, the purpose of these ministrations [6] is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.
It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there will be careful inquiry into the personality structure of these people. One has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into an exposed nerve, to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is involved. If this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges, for most of the population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to these that Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite includes scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special women’s rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour. The theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.
The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturge [7] but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress.
The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple ever recover. Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist attempts to take them to the temple because “that is where you go to die.” Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.
The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her clothes. In everyday life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its natural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the secrecy of the household shrine, where they are ritualized as part of the body-rites. Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso. A man, whose own wife has never seen him in an excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted by a vestal maiden while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel. This sort of ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the client’s sickness. Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subjected to the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the medicine men.
Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, involve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant’s mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people’s faith in the medicine men.
There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a “listener.” This witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-magic of the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells the “listener” all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.
In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.
Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon. Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, without friends or relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants.
Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed with the insight provided by Malinowski [8] when he wrote:
Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilization.
Footnotes are added by Dowell as modified by Chase
- Murdock, George P. 1949. Social Structure. NY: The Macmillan Co., page 71. George Peter Murdock (1897-1996 [?]) is a famous ethnographer. ↵
- Linton, Ralph. 1936. The Study of Man. NY: D. Appleton-Century Co. page 326. Ralph Linton (1893-1953) is best known for studies of enculturation (maintaining that all culture is learned rather than inherited; the process by which a society's culture is transmitted from one generation to the next), claiming culture is humanity's "social heredity." ↵
- A washing or cleansing of the body or a part of the body. From the Latin abluere, to wash away ↵
- Marked by precise observance of the finer points of etiquette and formal conduct. ↵
- It is worthy of note that since Prof. Miner's original research was conducted, the Nacirema have almost universally abandoned the natural bristles of their private mouth-rite in favor of oil-based polymerized synthetics. Additionally, the powders associated with this ritual have generally been semi-liquefied. Other updates to the Nacirema culture shall be eschewed in this document for the sake of parsimony. ↵
- Tending to religious or other important functions ↵
- A miracle-worker. ↵
- Malinowski, Bronislaw. Magic, Science, and Religion. Glencoe: The Free Press, page 70. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) is a famous cultural anthropologist best known for his argument that people everywhere share common biological and psychological needs and that the function of all cultural institutions is to fulfill such needs; the nature of the institution is determined by its function. ↵
Most cultures exhibit a particular configuration or style. A single value or pattern of perceiving the world often leaves its stamp on several institutions in the society. Examples are “machismo” in Spanish-influenced cultures, “face” in Japanese culture, and “pollution by females” in some highland New Guinea cultures. Here Horace Miner demonstrates that “attitudes about the body” have a pervasive influence on many institutions in Nacirema society.
Here, in the heart of nature, they would perform the following magical ceremony. They began by creating an intricate circle, carefully etching symbols into the ground. These symbols were said to connect them to the source of magic itself, allowing them to tap into its boundless power. The group then lit candles, their flickering flames casting dancing shadows across their faces. The flames represented the passion and determination required to channel their newfound abilities. Next, each member of the group took turns invoking ancient incantations, reciting words that had been passed down through generations. Each incantation was unique to the individual, reflecting their own desires, hopes, and dreams. It was believed that by speaking these words aloud, they would align their intentions with the forces of magic. As they chanted, the atmosphere around them began to shift. The air crackled with energy, and the grove seemed to pulsate with an otherworldly glow. It was a moment of absolute connection, where the boundaries between the physical and spiritual realms blurred. Finally, the group came together, each person extending their hands towards the center of the circle. In unison, they channeled their energy, letting their intentions flow through their fingertips and into a shared vessel. This vessel, an ancient artifact, served as a conduit to amplify their collective power. With a surge of energy, the artifact glowed with an intense light, illuminating the entire grove. For a fleeting moment, time seemed to stand still as the group basked in the presence of pure magic. And then, as quickly as it had come, the light subsided, leaving the group in awe of what they had achieved. As they left the grove, their hearts were filled with both excitement and trepidation. The following magical ceremony had granted them the potential to harness incredible powers, but what lay ahead was still unknown. They knew that their journey had only just begun, and it would require dedication, discipline, and perhaps even sacrifice. Together, they embarked on a path of discovery, venturing into the uncharted territories of their own magic. Their lives would never be the same again, and with each step they took, they were filled with a sense of gratitude for the mystical ceremony that had set them on this extraordinary path..
Reviews for "From Fairy Tales to Reality: Experiencing a Magical Ceremony"
1. Emma Thompson - 2/5
I found "Following magical ceremony" to be quite disappointing. The plot lacked depth and the characters felt one-dimensional. The magical elements of the story were not well-developed and left me feeling confused and disconnected from the narrative. Additionally, the pacing was uneven, with slow and monotonous sections followed by rushed and chaotic moments. Overall, I did not find the film engaging or enjoyable.
2. John Smith - 1/5
"Following magical ceremony" was a complete waste of time. The story was convoluted and nonsensical, making it difficult to follow and understand. The acting was subpar, with none of the characters evoking any real emotion or empathy. The film seemed to rely heavily on special effects, but even those were poorly executed and unimpressive. I cannot recommend this film to anyone looking for an enjoyable movie-watching experience.
3. Sarah Johnson - 2/5
I had high hopes for "Following magical ceremony," but unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations. The storyline had potential, but it was poorly executed, leaving me feeling underwhelmed and disconnected from the characters and their journey. The pacing was also a major issue, with long, dragged-out scenes that added little to the overall plot. While the concept of magic was intriguing, it was not fully explored or developed, which left me feeling unsatisfied. Overall, I would not recommend this film unless you're a die-hard fan of the genre.