Ritual Offerings by Aaron Leitch Ritual Offerings unites 12 practicing occultists who share their knowledge and experience with this fascinating and important subject. Traditions from around the world, such as Solomonic magick, Tibetan Buddhism, New Orleans and Hatian Voudou, Western Hermetic Theurgy and more, are discussed in great detail.

Propitiating the supernatural forces that could grant bountiful crops or wipe out whole villages through natural disasters was a sacred duty in ancient Peruvian societies, as in many premodern cultures. Ritual sacrifices were considered necessary for this propitiation and for maintaining a proper reciprocal relationship between humans and the supernatural world. The essays in this book examine the archaeological evidence for ancient Peruvian sacrificial offerings of human beings, animals, and objects, as well as the cultural contexts in which the offerings occurred, from around 2500 B.C. until Inca times just before the Spanish Conquest. Major contributions come from the recent archaeological fieldwork of Steve Bourget, Anita Cook, and Alana Cordy-Collins, as well as from John Verano's laboratory work on skeletal material from recent excavations. Mary Frame, who is a weaver as well as a scholar, offers rich new interpretations of Paracas burial garments, and Donald Proulx presents a fresh view of the nature of Nasca warfare. Elizabeth Benson's essay provides a summary of sacrificial practices.

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

The Ritual Fire Offering, which is derived from Indian tradition, plays an important part in buddhist Tantric Practice. The Ritual Fire Offering for Peace is commonly performed at the conclusion of the prescribed meditation retreat associated with specific meditational deities, in order to compensate for any errors that may have occurred during the practice. The Ritual Fire Offering for Increase may be Performed to increase merit, wealth, life span and so forth. This manual contains translations of texts required to perform the Ritual Fire Offering for Peace associated with six meditational deities: Thirteen Deity Vajrabhairava, Solitary Hero Vajrabhairava, Guhyasamaja, Heruka, Vajra Yogini, and Cittamani Tara, according to the Gelugpa traditon of Tibetan Buddhism. It further includes a description of the changes required to convert the ritual for peace to the ritual for increase in association with Guhyasamaja. The texts have been clearly presented in English to enable people who are qualified by initiation, but who do not know Tibetan, to understand the stages and Procedures of Ritual Fire Offerings so that they may perform them effectively.

The principle of sacrifice is as old as human life itself. This book provides an overview of sacrificial practices around the world since prehistoric times. It also examines the reasons behind these rituals, and in the case of human sacrifice an attempt is made to understand the mentality of the 'victims' who often willingly went to their deaths.