Miserere. When night falls they will be covered by it is pandemonium, mourning, liturgy and rite of passage: a pagan ceremony involving the figure of the sacrificial lamb, where violence is celebrated as an anthropological mechanism needed for the construction of a group identity: a belief system and its folklore are always rooted in, and are strengthened by, the dead.
Inspired by Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power and Violence and the Sacred by René Girard, we look at rites (from prehistoric times to more recent times), ceremonies (from religious to sporting and military) as well as in folklore across times and cultures to explore the universal, internal workings of collective thought.