RITUAL, MYTH & MAGIC
Sex, birth, death, and burial. Sorcery, shamanism, and spirit possession. Animism, cannibalism, and sacrifice. Mythology, drugs, rites, and reincarnation. These topics titillate the Western mainstream. “Witchcraft!,” we whisper, in equal parts fascination and disgust. “Can you imagine?!,” salacious documentaries about ancient Mayan sacrifice ask. “Not in God’s house!,” watchdogs cry. But consider: ritual, the repetitive, culturally mediated behavior that constitutes religious practice and also simply paces and orders our daily social lives, shares common elements across the world and throughout history. Ritual can involve high pageantry or mundane repetition and range from the rare to the everyday. Ritualistic practices include rites of naming, birthing, coming of age, eating, sex, marriage, kinship, music, art, dance, hygiene and body care, appeals to the supernatural, religious artifacts, dying, and treatment of the dead. Taking Communion in a Catholic church and consulting the poison oracle through Azande witchcraft both do similar things: they insure proper cosmological balance and spirituality, solidify group cohesion and reproduce group beliefs, revere the supernatural, and craft and reify power dynamics. From witch’s brews to shamans’ rituals, from priests’ incantations to the faith-healer’s illusions, all magical and religious practices seek to influence events and evoke the supernatural. Our desires to cure, succeed, love, communicate with the great beyond, connect to ancestors, take revenge, and even brush our teeth are ritualized. We perform culturally specific rituals that craft the very fabric of the social world, from mundane daily habits like toasting over drinks to formal practices like pall-bearing at a funeral. But how? This podcast explores ancient and contemporary beliefs, behaviors, and physicality to answer. We investigate how rituals mediate many things through practice: identities like gender, age, and sexuality; immanence and transcendence; life and death; continuity and change; power and powerlessness; the local and the global; the natural and the supernatural. We ask how our shared stories, practices, and material culture shape ritual as it simultaneously shapes them. This podcast is produced and hosted by Lewis Honors College students as a class project for HON 251: Ritual, Myth & Magic.
Listen on:
Episodes
Sunday Jan 28, 2024
Sunday Jan 28, 2024
Lauren and Elise discuss women's political and activist movements in contemporary religion, including case studies about female circumcision in Somalia and headcovering and hijabs in Islamic Iran. Content warning for graphic depiction of infibulation and discussion of pain and suffering.
Sunday Jan 28, 2024
Sunday Jan 28, 2024
Laura and Ander discuss shamanic tourism and hallucinogenic drug use as market commodities in the Americas and India. Content warning for discussions of hallucinogenic drug use, addiction, cultural appropriation, ethnocide, and colonialism.
Saturday Jan 27, 2024
Saturday Jan 27, 2024
Margaret and Alyssa discuss witchcraft accusations and gender in the European Middle Ages and in contemporary Nigeria and India. Content warning for discussions of Satanism, torture, sexual assault, abuse, conspiracy thinking, murder, and immolation.
Saturday Jan 27, 2024
Saturday Jan 27, 2024
Ejemen and Shreya discuss the transhumanism movement and the quest for immortality via cryonics. Context warning for discussions of death, cryogenic technology, and corpses.
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
Madaline, Abby, and Noor discuss coming-of-age rituals (rites of passage) including the Apache Sunrise Ceremony and Sambian nosebleeding as men's puberty initiation. Content warning for discussion of violence, blood, and pain.
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
Ava and Charles discuss the link between sexual reproduction and social reproduction, including the famous ancient Moche "sexpots," ancient Egyptian representations of sexuality, and Medieval nuns' fetishism of the body of Christ. Content warning for graphic discussion of sexual acts, contemporary homophobia, and discussion of death and funerary practices.
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
Tuesday Jan 23, 2024
Olivia and Morgan discuss ethnomedicine in Appalachia, including patent medicine, over-the-counter medicine, and herbalism. Content warning for discussion of regional stereotypes and "hillbilly" tropes.
About the Podcast:
This podcast is produced and hosted by University of Kentucky Lewis Honors College students as a class project for HON 251: Ritual, Myth & Magic with Dr. Zada Komara. Theme music by Dr. Kondwani Pwandapwanda.