Make Every Rite of Passage Sacred and Meaningful Dozens of group and solitary activities for ritualizing life's changes Commemorate the moments that shape who you are with this book of rituals designed for rites of passage, no matter how big or small. Drawing on almost thirty years of experience in Witchcraft and Paganism, Phoenix LeFae and Gwion Raven offer powerful activities to honor everything from getting a driver's license to starting a coven to retiring. Life Ritualized offers clear instructions and inspiring stories to deepen your spirituality. Whether it's a weighty occasion like birth, marriage, or death, or a more private one like blessing a new house or changing jobs, this book provides everything you need to make it a moment of reflection and reverence. These rituals create stronger connections between you and your loved ones, and they also strengthen your relationship with yourself. Featuring guidance on using correspondences and creating unique rites, Life Ritualized helps you celebrate the adventure of life.

Build Powerful, Transformative Rituals for a Deeply Meaningful Life Rituals are a part of our breath, blood, and bone. They're a part of our human makeup, and they provide us with confidence, reassurance, and stronger social bonds. A ritualist with nearly thirty years of experience, Phoenix LeFae teaches you how to build a solid foundation of ritual practice while also leaving room for your own creative exploration. She covers not only how to craft rituals, but also why they are important. This inspiring book walks you through every step of ritual work, from setting your intentions to creating sacred space to closing the ceremony. You will find a variety of exercises, meditations, and activities, as well as guidelines for making unique rituals from scratch. Phoenix helps you design solitary and group rituals that are the perfect fit. Includes a foreword by Laura Tempest Zakroff, author of Anatomy of a Witch

How does the faculty of a small liberal arts college make meaning of their professional careers and their personal lives? In this book, based on a particular study at one small college in the Midwest, author Shah Hasan explores the narrative contours of the lives of four faculty membersFrancesca, Charles, Paula, and Rebecca. Utilizing the qualitative research approaches of extended interviews, narrative analysis, and narrative inquiry, the stories of their service at the college are excavated for patterns of ritualization and leadership.

Medieval images and their content, intentions, and functions regularly followed specific strategies, rituals, and symbols of communication. This is true for religious as well as for secular images. One can recognize these strategies and rituals through analyzing the patterns that occur in the varieties of image construction, image space, image messages, and their perception. This book contains contributions by international specialists whose research interests concentrate on these patterns, the rituals associated with them, and the influences of these phenomena on the daily life of the image audience. (Series: History: Research and Science / Geschichte: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Vol. 39)

This fascinating study explores how our prehistoric ancestors developed rituals from everyday life and domestic activities. Richard Bradley contends that for much of the prehistoric period, ritual was not a distinct sphere of activity. Rather it was the way in which different features of the domestic world were played out until they took on qualities of theatrical performance. With extensive illustrated case-studies, this book examines farming, craft production and the occupation of houses, all of which were ritualized in prehistoric Europe. Successive chapters discuss the ways in which ritual has been studied, drawing on a series of examples that range from Greece to Norway and from Romania to Portugal. They consider practices that extend from the Mesolithic period to the Early Middle Ages and discuss the ways in which ritual and domestic life were intertwined.

Aristotle said 'you are what you repeatedly do'. Most of us have no idea that what we repeatedly do creates our lives, we think our future is shaped by big events, the decisions we make, the thoughts we have but, this book will show you that it is your daily actions that are the key. Over the last few decades neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that there is more power in 'I do' than 'I think'. However, if an action is repeated enough times it becomes habit but habits lack thought, consideration and presence. To effect long-lasting meaningful change our actions need to be filled with a sense of personal meaning and power – they need to be ritualized. Creating personal ritual in our lives allows us to bring the presence of the sacred into the everyday. The rituals in this book have been designed as symbolic acts providing a framework for anyone to use to create positive change in their lives. The 7 morning rituals are designed to help you 'wake with determination', the 7 afternoon rituals focus on 'living on purpose', and the 7 evening rituals are about 'retiring with satisfaction'.

Late in the nineteenth century, many Americans were troubled by the theories of Charles Darwin, which contradicted both traditional Christian teachings and the idea of human supremacy over nature, and by an influx of foreign immigrants, who challenged the supremacy of the old Anglo-Saxon elite. In response, many people drew comfort from the theories of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who held that human society inevitably develops towards higher and more spiritual forms. In this illuminating study, Kathleen Pyne explores how Spencer's theories influenced a generation of American artists. She shows how the painters of the 1880s and 1890s, particularly John La Farge, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Dewing and the Boston school, and the impressionist painters of the Ten, developed an art dedicated to social refinement and spiritual ideals and to defending the Anglo-Saxon elite of which they were members. This linking of visual culture to the problematic conditions of American life radically reinterprets the most important trends in late nineteenth-century American painting.