Invoking the Spirit, Beauty, and Celebration of Life

The chapter highlights the belief system of the ethnocenes about life, death, and the life after death. It also engages with ritual engineering in managing death, and how human imagination and intuition have conceived the ideas of heaven and hell and employ devices to perform rituals to navigate the journey of life. Modes of prayer, appeasement and celebration introduced by the ethnocenes have been illustrated. Even if rituals are performed out of fear or sadness, the performance enables one to transcend the specific state of feeling. The presence of aesthetic sensibility in ritual performance with normative guidelines have been explored. Both the ritual and the non-ritual performances are carried out with specific purposes. Performance in general is expected to bring wellbeing and prosperity to the community. Rituals are performed neither out of disinterestedness nor out of personal leisure. Even if one does not accept the aspect of ritual engineering, it works minimally as means to bring catharsis! The ultimate goal of life in community wellbeing and prosperity has been highlighted.