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Heka was a fundamental power that the creator god used to form the world and the gods themselves. [9] Magic (personified as the god heka) was an integral part of religion and culture which is known to us through a substantial corpus of texts which are products of the Egyptian tradition. [10]
The other ritual, The Gnostic Mass, is a very popular public ritual (although it can be practiced privately) that involves a team of participants, including a Priest and Priestess. This ritual is an enactment of the mystical journey that culminates with the Mystic Marriage and the consumption of a Cake of Light and a goblet of wine (a process ...
The act of speaking a ritual formula was an act of creation; [41] there is a sense in which action and speech were one and the same thing. [40] The magical power of words extended to the written word. Hieroglyphic script was held to have been invented by the god Thoth, and the hieroglyphs themselves were powerful.
Fire was used in rituals of protection in many parts of Europe up to the early modern era. The need-fire or force-fire was a special fire kindled to ward off plague and murrain (infectious diseases affecting livestock) in parts of western, northern and eastern Europe.
[3] Some of these scholars (e.g., W. Robertson-Smith, James George Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, S. H. Hooke) supported the "primacy of ritual" hypothesis, which claimed that "every myth is derived from a particular ritual and that the syntagmatic quality of myth is a reproduction of the succession of ritual act."
[6] [7] The model of the magician in Christian thought was provided by Simon Magus, (Simon the Magician), a figure who opposed Saint Peter in both the Acts of the Apostles and the apocryphal yet influential Acts of Peter. [8] The historian Michael D. Bailey stated that in medieval Europe, magic was a "relatively broad and encompassing category ...
Religion may be defined as "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs," [1] whereas ritual is "an established or prescribed procedure for a religious or ...
The English word ritual derives from the Latin ritualis, "that which pertains to rite ". In Roman juridical and religious usage, ritus was the proven way of doing something, [6] or "correct performance, custom". [7]