This page groups practices by whether they are a required duty or a voluntary devotion. Wikipedia notes that cultus "implies the necessity of active maintenance beyond passive adoration," a distinction between merely believing and actually being obliged to act. Browsing this way lets a visitor separate a commanded practice from one an adherent may take up or leave off freely.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingPreparations and disciplines undertaken to enter, or in the course of entering, a status a tradition confers by transmission - preliminary practices before tantric instruction, formal ordination, the seeking of a vision under a people's own law. The atlas records that they exist and on whose authority; it does not set out what is transmitted, which in several of these traditions is closed. 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseSourced to the subject's own accountSeveral practices grouped here are closed by the traditions that hold them and have been widely imitated by people without standing. The Lakota Summit V declaration of June 1993 objected by name to the conduct of the vision quest by outsiders. A published ethnographic account is a description, not a licence. 3 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 2 Learn More
The initiatory practices
This group gathers initiatory practices, the rites and disciplines by which a person is admitted into a tradition, order or stage of spiritual life, marking a passage from outsider to insider or from one level of attainment to the next.
The browser will find initiatory practices from various traditions. The entries describe each practice's form and meaning, noting the tradition and the transition it marks.
Obligation
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions
Catherine Bell, Oxford University Press, 1997Basic Genres of Ritual ActionView the Source 3. Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality
Lakota Summit V, 1993the holders' own account
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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