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Ritual sacrifice and self bloodletting were key offerings to Huitzilopochtli. The Aztecs performed ritual self-sacrifice (also called autosacrifice or blood-letting) on a daily basis. [ 17 ] The Aztecs believed that Huitzilopochtli needed daily nourishment ( tlaxcaltiliztli ) in the form of human blood and hearts and that they, as “people of ...
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 ...
[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."
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.
[5] [6] The Greeks made offerings to the "averting gods" (ἀποτρόπαιοι θεοί, apotropaioi theoi), chthonic deities and heroes who grant safety and deflect evil [7] and for the protection of the infants they wore on them amulets with apotropaic powers and committed the child to the care of kourotrophic (child-nurturing) deities. [8]
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 ...
[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 ...