35 Metaphors for ceremonies

" The ceremony of the dinners and levees and the liveried servants were favorite impeachments of the President among the early Democrats before they had better material, and Washington was charged with trying to constitute a court, and with conducting himself like a king.

The legal ceremony must be the outcome of a morality which makes you realize that what you do affects other people, that what you do most profoundly affects the children that you hope to have, and that the community has both an interest and a responsibility in all this.

That woman is already my wife; I have married her by civil contract; and the ceremony that is about to be performed presently is a mere formality.

[Footnote 15: From a brief account of the Fire Ceremony, or Engwurra of certain tribes in Central Australia, it seems that religious ceremonies connected with Totems are the most notable performances.

The ceremony of installation is not a mere vain and idle one, but is productive of important results.

The following important distinctions must be observed: (a) Drills executed AT ATTENTION and the ceremonies are DISCIPLINARY EXERCISES designed to teach precise and soldierly movement, and to inculcate that prompt and subconscious obedience which is essential to proper military control.

The ceremony is purely Pagan, and without any form, except that of the females of the family of the deceased and their friends making a mournful lamentation; and in some instances they work their feelings up to such a degree of apparent sorrow, that their conduct has every symptom of insanity.

Another very impressive ceremony was the Midnight Mass on New Year's Eve, when we climbed at midnight, through some close, dark passages in the vast church edifice, into a sort of concealed opera-box above the high altar, and suddenly opened windows looking down into the brilliantly lighted cathedral, crammed with kneeling people and throbbing with loud music.

Thus they continued in such error, blindness, decrees, sophisms, superstitions; idle ceremonies and traditions were the sum of their new-coined holiness and religion, and by these knaveries and stratagems they were able to involve multitudes, to deceive the most sanctified souls, and, if it were possible, the very elect.

The only ceremony over the fallen adventurers was the firing of a volley of six pistol-shots.

The people, who were highly amused, I dare say, conceived the whole ceremony to be a rejoicing, and at every repetition that the country was in danger, joined with great glee in the chorus of ca ira.

And as if a sudden frost had nipped all my thoughts, I grew suddenly conscious that the first ceremony I assisted at with Aniela was a funeral.

[Thus the ceremony of the new fire in the Eastern and Western Church is probably a relic of an old heathen rite.]

The candidate was at first called an aspirant, or seeker of the truth, and the initial ceremony which he underwent was a lustration or purification by water.

For whatever may have been the faults of this dashing Whig, he had the courage of his sins, and took up his abode with Anne in the full light of day, as though a marriage ceremony were a bagatelle not worth the recollecting.

I thought that marriage ceremony was a miserably inadequate affair!...

The previous ceremony on the Grandissime back piazza need be no impediment; all slave-owners understood those things.

But it must be always remembered that the ceremony is not the substance.

This splendid ceremony of inspection by the Doge was a day of annual triumph, for nowhere in all the world was there such an arsenal, and nowhere such an army of workmen,thirty-five thousand men trained to the cunning from father to son in lifelong service,with sailors, sixteen thousand more, who should presently make a brave review within those battlemented walls, to tickle the fancy of the Serenissimo and his guests.

Its ceremonies are external additions, which affect not its substance.

Its ceremony is to them a marriage feast: and decapitation, what a black job was to Lord Portsmouth,the only variety and excitement that could give a spur to their heavy and painful existence.

After the religious ceremony there still remained the task of settling the terms upon which the victors and vanquished were hereafter to live together side by side in the same island; for Alfred had the wisdom, even in his enemy's humiliation, to accept the accomplished fact, and to acknowledge East Anglia as a Danish kingdom.

He very coolly informed her that the marriage-ceremony between them was a mere sham; the person who performed it not having been invested with any legal authority.

But the great ceremony was the distributing by the Governor of red and yellow sweetmeats to the children out of a huge dish held up by the Hindoo butler, while Franky, in a long night-shirt of crimson cotton velvet, acted as aide-de-camp, and took his perquisites freely.

The old ceremony of "rush-bearing," dating from the time of Gregory IV., is still, in a modified form, an annual function in Ambleside, which, with one or two Westmorland villages, can claim the custom as unique.

35 Metaphors for  ceremonies