Right. I probably am going for a bit of a selective reduction here with my kneejerk reactions. There's all sorts of quite strange when you think about it stuff going on with playing board games too, for instance, which I'm not being concerned about.

Still, I think we have a mutual appreciation here that rituals are powerful stuff. I worry a bit when I see a not that broad culture (compared to society at large, or the academia as a whole, for example) like LW picking up on a ritual and taking it up as its own, and thinking about what role rituals end up having everywhere in human history. I'm seeing things getting on a path to ending up as something like Freemasonry (assuming for the moment that they're more secular than they are), where there might be an understanding that the rituals are just a formality, but participating in the culture without participating in the rituals still basically doesn't work.

I might also notice that all the subcultures that stick around for more than a generation or two seem to come with rituals running the show. It might be that the actual problem I'm pattern matching isn't about adopting rituals at all, but about subcultures sticking around past their expiration date instead. Subcultures that go bad quickly tend to have more overt badness indicators.

Maybe we should just bill it as "Come and sing and feel emotions."

"Come join the Solstice Ritual" sounds like just people being silly to me, while this sounds like something from a Grant Morrison comic book that will end with someone's head being carved open by robed creatures with giant insect heads.