Worldly Things | Are.na Editorial

In addressing the meaning crisis — the vacuum left by the failures of religion, modernism, postmodernism, and today’s online alternatives — it takes a return to what bona fide religion really captures. The communitas. The ecstasy. The ritual.

In magically operative communities throughout the world, we find the idea that like attracts like. This is especially true when it comes to scent, perhaps because smell is the sense that is most closely related to our capacity for memory. Thus, evil spirits are often believed to be attracted to foul odors. These spirits are generally avoided in dai

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In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the nonlin... See more

What a truly poetic way of measuring the passing of time:

“In the old days (...) every time a geisha arrived at a party to entertain, the mistress of the teahouse lit a stick of one-hour incense—called one ohana , or “flower”. The geisha’s fees were based on how many sticks of incense had burned by the time she left.”

Although incense was commonly

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