Ritual: Did you mean...?

A "hu" is a type of wine vessel which displays a pear-shaped cross-section. This bronze carries a fine example of the monster face, known as taotie, shown in the main central panel, with its eyes on each side of the central vertical line...

The Sun Dance is a ritual ceremony observed by the Plains Indians of the regions of modern Canada and the United States to awaken the earth, renew the community, give thanks for the sun, and petition or give thanks for favors from the Great...

The religious practices of the early Indo-Aryans, known as the Vedic religion (1500 BCE to 500 BCE) were written down and later redacted into the Samhitas, four canonical collections of hymns or mantras, called the Veda, in archaic Sanskrit...

The king’s evil (from the Latin morbus regius meaning royal sickness), more commonly known as scrofula or medically tuberculous lymphadenitis, was a skin disease believed to be cured by the touch of the monarch as part of their inherited...

Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul's fate after death. Instead, ancient Mesopotamian views of the afterlife must be pieced together from a variety...

As early as the 10th century BCE, Israelite and Judean religion began to emerge within the broader West Semitic culture, otherwise known as Canaanite culture. Between the 10th century and 7th centuries BCE, ancient Israelite and Judean religion...

Magic was an integral aspect of life in ancient Egypt. The world was created through the power of heka (magic) as Atum stood on the primordial mound of the ben-ben in the middle of the endless waters of chaos with the god Heka, who personified...

The Sioux are a native North American nation who inhabited the Great Plains region of, roughly, modern Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. They are one of the many nations referred to as Plains Indians who...

Easter is the Christian holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth three days after he died from crucifixion by the Roman magistrate Pontius Pilate (c. 30 CE). Easter Sunday is the culmination of the week-long events that...

The Pawnee are a Native American nation of the Plains Indians culture originally from the region of modern Nebraska. Prior to the European colonization of the Americas, they were among the most powerful of the Plains Indian tribes numbering...