If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.
Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.
All barbarous nations are commonly great observers of ceremonies.
Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.
I think with world building, it's important to create a sense of culture even if it is just a fantasy, and the best way to do that is to look at a real human culture and see what makes it cohesive.
In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.
The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy or disaster. The pulse stops apparently, and nothing can be done, and not one move made, until a “nice cup of tea” is quickly made. There is no question that it brings solace and does steady the mind. What a pity all countries are not.
When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.
That is one reason so many of the Japanese pictures are not good, they cannot spare all the footage necessary for that bow, which is repeated over and over again.
Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.
Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
Name me any liquid — except our own blood — that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to mark our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist.
Through my observations, it became clear that most of society's rules and customs are rooted in fear and superstition!
I lived in Indonesia for four years and I understand trance and magic and where it comes from.
Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.
But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom, More honored in the breach than the observance.
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make contracts and attend to their fortune; have friends and enemies, pleasures and pains, are born, grow up, live and die - but asleep!
Cooking meat over a fire is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men.
When the Ngdanga tribe of West Africa hold their moon love ceremonies, the men of the tribe bang their heads on sacred trees until they get a nose bleed, which usually cures them of that.
We adorn graves with flowers and redolent plants, just emblems of the life of man, which has been compared in the Holy Scriptures to those fading beauties whose roots, being buried in dishonor, rise again in glory.
Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses.
It's the same thing as a primitive of Africans, Indians, nomads or whatever - when they start getting up and doing their ritual and doing the dance, it's just what's coming through. It's the spirit. Rock 'n' roll is still primitive.
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.
