Building Religions 24: Orgy and Ecstasy

"There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell."—H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Categories: an Overview

Early on in Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life, there's a detour into philosophy as he considers the question of how human beings organize their experiences of the world. He starts with two possibilities: one, that we order them according to pre-existing categories, some sort of transcendent framework by which we intuitively arrange the things that we know; two, that we each create our categories ourselves, building them up piece by piece until we have a more complete system. He dismisses both of these choices, though, once he's explained them.

Building Religions 6: Ritual

Building Religions 6: Ritual

I haven't done much work in ritual studies, so I'm only going to cover a few scholars and their theories -- the classics, so to speak. Most of what I have to say will be applicable primarily to fantasy settings, which tend to be a bit more ritual-heavy, and they can apply equally well to descriptions of religious or magical rites. As I've mentioned before, the boundary between the two can be fluid. Let's start by running through the authors that I've covered already and what they have to say.

Building Religions 3: Émile Durkheim

Building Religions, part 3: Émile Durkheim

I'm not going to deal with all of Durkheim here -- just the parts that I consider fun, which can be found in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim was basically the founder of the field of the sociology of religion, so it should be no surprise that he examines religions as purely social phenomena. He makes the point early on in The Elementary Forms that there are no false religions, but gradually, it becomes clear that what he means by that is that they can all perform their social function properly, not that there's any underlying Truth to them.