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Manning explores the reasons why colleges and universities across the nation often carry on the same traditions within their social structure, including inauguration ceremonies of presidents and chancellors, establishing days which recognize the founding of the institution and myth-making behind the founding itself, and how types of behaviors (protests, initiation rites, honors ceremonies, religious displays) are similarly conducted.
For more than three hundred years the practice of Masonic rituals of initiation has been part of Western culture, spreading far beyond the boundaries of traditional Freemasonry. Henrik Bogdan explores the historical development of these rituals and their relationship with Western esotericism. Beginning with the Craft degrees of Freemasonry—the blueprints, as it were, of all later Masonic rituals of initiation—Bogdan examines the development of the Masonic High Degrees, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—the most influential of all nineteenth-century occultist initiatory societies—and Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft movement of the 1950s, one of the first large-scale Western esoteric New Religions Movements.
Winner of the Book of the Year Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.--Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College "CHOICE"
Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.