The prophet's dictionary guide to the supernatural

her invisible culture in action. They reminded the divine one’s people from whom their cult sprang and reiterated the fundamental premises that lay behind their human acts in the first place. Rituals served several essential purposes in the life of a worshipper. They enabled worshippers to approach their god and prepared the way for them to receive private and public audience with it. The rituals also allowed errant believers to appease their deity and qualify to petition it for favors, aid, or protection. As such, they served as the groundwork for answered prayer and granted requests. Ceremonial rituals further permitted worshippers to present themselves as devotees of the deity. Moreover, through them the servants elect were to be consecrated into his or her official service. Vows, thank offerings, consecrations, and communion were all conducted according to the prescript of the deity based upon its cult’s covenant relationship. Rituals, however, were not only required of cults or communities. Many families venerated them, in union with the familiar spirits their genealogy served as ancestral deities or tribal totems. Routinely, under the auspices of the head of the household, these were supplicated with ancestral worship rituals. In addition, various cultural observances, holidays, and traditional family celebrations were nostalgic of this practice. Priests, kings, prophets, and certain nobles assigned to state and temple were inaugurated into their positions by appointed rituals that were thought to transmute them physiologically from lowly peasant humans to exalted rulers metamorphosed into the essence of their god. Frequently, this was signified by a change in outer attire that symbolized their inner spiritual transformation. All inaugurations were accompanied by a name change assigned by the god and assumed by the initiate to indicate their ceasing to exist as their former selves. The new appellation marked the beginning of their living out their new life as a functionary and representative of the god who had chosen them. The entire ritualistic process, then, was for the installation rite to cause the death of the initiate and the new birth of the noble, prophet, regent, or priest anointed by the god. Under the New Testament covenant of the Lord Jesus Christ, the rituals that called for sacrifices, the slaughter of innocent victims, divination, reading their entrails and severed organs, intoxicated prophetics, and the like are eliminated in Christ. Initiation to His offices call for anointing with oil, laying on of the hands of the presbytery, and prophesying the word of the Lord. The novitiate’s vow