Rituals create community by translating our love into action

The ritual prenoscriptions transmitted from the ancients are authoritative, not because they represent traditions passed down from time immemorial, but because the proper performance of ritual ceremonies represents the optimal way for people to enact their love towards members of their affective community – most especially, towards their ancestors.


Emotions such as love and gratitude are not just feelings in response to events – things that happen to us – but possibilities for action.

Emotions, are essentially ‘without form’: they are not physically discrete things, with fixed properties and contained within the boundaries of the self.
Instead, they remain ‘raw’ and inchoate until they take form, and it is ritual that represents their proper fulfilment.

Through ritual, we ‘give a shape to that which is without physical substance and magnificently accomplish proper form’.

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