The subjects, touched on in a libretto by Deborah Artman, include everything from extinct species and languages to abandoned technologies and lost rituals.
One of the reasons "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" lost their ritual status with me is that they are now shown in August -- or at least way too soon for Linus to be reciting the Nativity story.
But in his writing he recreated the city he'd lost — its rituals, its superstitions, its political movements, its people.
The end of tipping means one more irrational thing rationalized, one more odd little ritual lost.
Archaeologists had believed that by the time the Romans arrived in Britain, Stonehenge was just a towering enigma, too huge ever to be lost but its ritual importance entirely forgotten.
The book is filled with similar vivid descriptions garnered from interviews with melancholic courtiers after the downfall of the emperor, painting an elegiac picture of a lost world of ritual and intrigue.
The French government's dedicated sect-watchdog, known as Miviludes, was soon on the case, keen to prevent any apocalyptic sect activity, or ritualised suicide by doomsday cults such as the Order of the Solar Temple, which lost members in ritual killings in the Alps in 1995.
By the time these stories reached the form we know today, they had long lost their original ritual significance, which probably goes back to the very remote period when matriarchal societies were giving way to male-dominated cultures, with Medea's repeated expulsions or flights reflecting the suppression of Earth-goddess cults.
AS travelers adapt to the inconvenience of climbing into airplane cabins without their makeup, toothpaste and mocha lattes close at hand, they are also discovering another consequence of the new security rules: more time lost to the rituals of checked bags.
Over time, many rituals lost their original meaning, and nowadays most people have stopped praying to the gods for rain.
With the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in ad 70, many laws of ritual purity lost their relevance.
