What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionDelight as a religious act — celebration reaches where solemnity cannot.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Islam and The Twelve Tribes are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfThe practices
Travels across15 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderOrdinary Time · 2026 CE
Turns up as25 rites · 10 experiences · 7 figures · 7 tenets
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 24 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
Sukkot — the fragile hut.
A week of meals in a temporary shelter with a roof you can see stars through: prosperity interrupted annually to rehearse dependence.
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Purim — the scroll, the parcels, the drink.
The Talmud says to drink until you cannot tell cursed Haman from blessed Mordechai, and later authorities spent centuries walking that back. Money for the poor is given the same day and the law says not to investigate whether they deserve it.
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The dining hall, every day, guests included.
Meals are the structure of the day and the point at which the community is visible to itself. Singing in four parts comes before eating; several evenings a week the meal is followed by a gathering where letters from the other communities are read aloud.
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Vedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Holi — the festival of color.
Winter's end celebrated by abolishing dignity for a day: powder in the air, hierarchy suspended, everyone dyed the same dozen colors.
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The return to Ayodhya.
Fourteen years of exile, a stolen wife, a war across the water — and then the homecoming, with every window lit to guide the way. Diwali is this story practiced annually.
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Kiirtan — Baba Nam Kevalam.
Three words, one tune, danced rather than sat through, and always before meditation rather than after. Anyone may join; no initiation is needed to sing.
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Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The two Eids.
Eid al-Fitr breaks the month of fasting with feast and alms; Eid al-Adha remembers Abraham's ram with a sacrifice shared three ways — family, friends, poor.
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Naw-Rúz.
The Persian new year at the spring equinox, kept as the Bahá'í new year and as the end of the Fast. The Bahá'í calendar runs nineteen months of nineteen days, with four or five intercalary days before the fasting month — a structure the Báb devised, in which every month and every day carries a name of God.
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The garden by the Tigris.
On the eve of being exiled from Baghdad to Constantinople in April 1863, Bahá'u'lláh crossed the river to a garden and told his companions who he was. He stayed twelve days. The garden was called Najíbíyyih; Bahá'ís call it Ridván, paradise, and the twelve days are the holiest period in the calendar.
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Shinto
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Shichi-go-san.
Girls at three and seven and boys at three and five, dressed up on 15 November and taken to the shrine, then given chitose-ame — thousand-year candy, in a long bag printed with cranes and turtles. The ages are odd because odd numbers are auspicious, and the candy is long because the wish is for a long life.
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Setsubun.
On 3 February you throw roasted soybeans out of the door shouting demons out, fortune in, and then eat one bean for each year you have lived plus one for the year coming. Somebody has to wear the ogre mask, and it is almost always the father.
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also here
Tenrikyo
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Book of Songs.
Three hundred and five poems — courtship, harvest, complaint about being conscripted, and court hymns. Confucius said the whole collection comes down to one line: no twisty thoughts. Being able to quote it aptly was a working diplomatic skill, and he told his own son that without it he would have nothing to say.
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The pleasure of it.
The first line of the Analects is that to learn and to return to it at intervals is a pleasure. Not a duty, not a discipline — enjoyable. It is a striking thing to put first, and everything demanding that follows in the book depends on the claim being true.
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Discordianism
— one faith of this family holds it
E
Eris — the guest who was not invited.
The Greek goddess of discord, adopted rather than inherited: Discordianism did not come down from any Greek cult and says so. She is honoured for the snub she suffered and for what she did about it.
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Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
The rug.
The rug that tied the room together is ruined in the first ten minutes and the attempt to replace it produces every disaster that follows. Dudeists read it as the whole doctrine compressed: the loss was small, the response was not, and the response was the problem.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Eikas — dinner on the twentieth.
Epicurus endowed it in his will: money set aside for a monthly gathering of the school in memory of himself and Metrodorus. It is the oldest continuously named observance in Western philosophy and it is still kept.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Three drums.
Manman, segon and boula, interlocking, with each nanchon of lwa having its own rhythms and each lwa its own within them. The kase — the deliberate break in the pattern, aimed at a particular dancer — is the technical instrument of possession, and a drummer who cannot place one is not a drummer.
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Fèt Gede.
The first two days of November, in the cemeteries, in black and purple. The Gede mount people by the dozen, drink rum steeped with scotch bonnets, dance the banda explicitly, and mock everyone including the priest and the bereaved. It is the largest religious event in the Haitian year and it is very funny.
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Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
Pleasure without guilt, and no sin to confess.
The ethic is short: harm no one, use science, enjoy what the body is for. There is no punishment in the system because there is no judge in it.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
The world is real, and it is where the work happens.
Nanak kept the vocabulary of maya and refused its usual conclusion: creation is the One at play, not an error to escape. The householder is the model, not the renunciant — Sikhs who left for the forest were sent home to their fields.
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Bandi Chhor Divas.
The night Guru Hargobind walked out of Gwalior fort with fifty-two princes holding his cloak, which happens to fall on Diwali. Sikhs light the Golden Temple to the waterline and are careful to say what they are celebrating, because the coincidence has been used to fold them into someone else's festival.
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The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
— one faith of this family holds it
Friday.
The weekly holy day. It requires nothing — no fast, no attendance, no abstention — which is the point being made about weekly holy days that require a great deal.
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T
The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Created the universe while drunk, which the Gospel offers as the explanation for its condition. He touches with a Noodly Appendage, and being touched by it is how Pastafarians describe conversion.
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The Sunday Assembly
— one faith of this family holds it
One life, and this is it.
The Assembly describes itself as a network of secular communities gathered to celebrate the one life we know we have. That is the closest thing it has to a doctrinal statement and it is doing a lot of work.
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The assembly.
Singing, a talk, a reading, a silence, tea. It is the shape of a church service with the theology taken out and the hymns replaced by songs everyone already knows.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
The drum knows your name.
Bata drums reproduce the tones of Yoruba words, so a drum can say a praise name, and each orisha has rhythms belonging to no other. Devotees describe recognising their own orisha's rhythm in a crowded room before consciously registering that they have heard it. The drumming is not accompaniment — it is the summons.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The world is good, and enjoying it is correct.
Matter is not a trap and the body is not a prison. There is no fasting from food, no celibacy, no monasticism and no virtue in poverty. The tradition treats gloom as collaboration with the enemy and holds that a person who weakens themselves has removed a soldier from the field.
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Nowruz.
The spring equinox, the Zoroastrian new year, and now the new year of some three hundred million people from the Balkans to Xinjiang, the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslim. Islamic authorities in Iran have periodically tried to discourage it and have never come close to succeeding.
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