Solstice Eve

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Solstice Eve

? Book of Rituals ?

(Extended Edition, 2012)

Edited by Raymond Arnold

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For my friends, who taught me what it means to have a community of people who share big ideas, big dreams and who care about truth. For Nay Petrucelli, Joseph Capriotti, Eliezer Yudkosky, and Geoffrey Anders, who taught me to care, to believe in humanity, to act on that belief.

Who taught me that something more is possible. For my family,

who taught me what it means to come together during the winter, to love each other, and to sing. For anybody who strives to make their world a little less ugly. Less a sea of blood and violence and mindless replication.

For a child, who might or might not be born, five thousand years from now.

Who might or might not think to ask their parents: "Where does love come from?"

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This book contains a collection of traditions and rituals, to be performed by aspiring rationalists on Solstice Eve.

Ritual is a complex, interesting and potentially powerful force. It's difficult to create from scratch - it order to be effective, it needs to have a timeless quality about it.

It doesn't have to actually BE timeless there are some good Christmas songs that are only 50 years old. But it needs to have the feel of something that's extremely familiar,

and personal. In the wild, rituals evolve from family to family, adapting in the face of memetic selection pressure to

fill specific niches, often with bizarre injokes and absurdities. The absurdities help bind a community together.

"We care about our tribe so much, we are willing to do some weird stuff. We're going to pretend that a giant fat man is coming on a sleigh led by flying reindeer."

`Real' rituals are not created. They evolve. Memetic evolution is not quite so blind or mindless as organic evolution, but it is still a complex process, often producing valuable subtleties that nobody intended, yet which would

have been very difficult create by intelligent design.

But sometimes, you just don't have access to the tradition and ritual you want. You want something timeless and powerful that speaks to YOUR highly specific, complex, nuanced and slightly weird beliefs.

I believe some oddly specific, complex, nuanced weird things, and I had the hubris to arrange a night of carefully designed

ritual for myself and my friends to celebrate them.

Perhaps others may learn from my example, for good or for ill.

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