These included portraits of spiritual heroes, ritual tools and paintings of diagrammatic cosmic maps called mandalas.
Details like slender fingers, baskets holding ritual tools, stylised flames and pictograms are executed with calm confidence.
Six men and seven women settled onto silk cushions arranged in a circle around a low altar set with ritual tools, including a vase of Queen Anne's lace, a small dagger and a crystal chalice.
The preparation (e.g., manufacturing ritual tools and preparing offerings) will consume great manpower and materials.
Live animals are common — as weapons, as ritual tools, or both.
But they are not intended foremost as art and may or may not be made by artists; they are created as aids to meditation rituals, tools for the pursuit of enlightenment offered to followers of Tantrism, in this context a subcategory of Hinduism.
Over time, various communities emerged with their own deities, rituals and tools.
But the ritual quickly became the tool of partisan memory as well, at least through the violent Reconstruction years.
With so much effort, we are fortunate to continue to use the ritual as an analytical tool.
This is ritual used as a tool to create meaning: deciding to do five sun salutes every morning or sitting to meditate when we get out of bed, writing and writing until something changes, shifts, and clarifies.
