Ritual, Symbol & Meaning

There is a moment, just before a wedding begins, when the room falls quiet. Nobody organised the silence. No announcement was made. Yet everyone present feels it — a thickening of the air, a sense that ordinary time has been suspended and something else is about to occur. You could explain this away. You could say it is only social convention, only nerves, only the choreography of a familiar event. But you would be missing what is actually happening. A threshold is being crossed, and the human animals in that room know it in their bodies before they know it in their minds. This book is about that knowing. It is about the oldest technology ou…