Rituals
codes and portals
There’s a good chance that this will be my last post for 2025. If I post again, it will be to give you my annual playlist, my top 13 songs for the year.
I started publishing my annual top 13 playlist here a couple of years ago, because “Life without music would be a mistake.” This collation of musical enjoyments is an annual ritual. I have “Top 13” playlists going back to 2012. It’s a sure sign that another year is ending, and another about to begin, when I start to curate the orgy of music from a calendar year into this all-too short format.
As it happens, I have spent most of 2025 thinking and reading about ritual.1 Rituals, it seems, have many functions. Daily rituals, for example, reduce stress by increasing predictability. Communal rituals create a sense of community by binding people together through shared experiences.
Codes or Portals
But these are not the aspects of ritual that fascinate me, as important as they might be. I’m interested in the way that rituals have a particular k…
