Religion and ritual
Offering, festival, liturgy and observance, each attached to a named tradition and a period rather than to a religion in the abstract.
15 practices · what it is for
- Maya meliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · Practised, decliningKeeping Melipona beecheii in hollow-log hives across the Yucatán peninsula: a fully documented pre-Columbian apiculture with its own hive, its own ceremonies and its own colonial tribute record, now reduced to a fraction of the colonies recorded two generations ago.
- BalchéRitual and ceremony · Local living practiceA fermented drink of stingless bee honey and the bark of the balché tree, used ceremonially in the Maya lowlands. Suppressed under colonial rule, documented across several centuries, and still made.
- Honey in ancient Greek food and drinkCultural use · HistoricalHoney in Greek eating and drinking: cakes for festivals and offerings, honey with cheese, honeyed wine, and a named regional honey treated as better than the rest.
- Honey in funerary practiceCultural use · HistoricalHoney poured as a libation to the dead, placed in graves and used in funerary meals across several ancient traditions — kept firmly apart from the much weaker claims about preserving bodies.
- Honey in Hindu ritualRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceHoney in the reception of an honoured guest, in the five-nectar offering, and poured over images in temple ritual — a living practice with an unusually deep and continuous textual record.
- Honey in Jewish practiceRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceApple dipped in honey at the new year, honey and the sweetness of learning, and the questions of law that arise when honey is made by an insect that may not be eaten.
- Beeswax in Christian liturgyRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceThe requirement that liturgical candles be made of beeswax, the Easter proclamation that praises the bees who made it, and the enormous demand that requirement placed on medieval beekeeping.
- Honey in Islamic traditionCultural use · Widespread living practiceA chapter of the Qur'an named for the bee, honey in the prophetic medical tradition, and the effect both have had on a modern trade in high-value regional honeys.
- Honey in Buddhist traditionCultural use · Widespread living practiceHoney among the substances monastics may store as medicine, an offering narrative attached to a festival, and a modern argument about whether honey is ethically consumable that reaches different conclusions.
- Honey in ancient Egyptian religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney as a temple offering in a state that ran its own apiaries, the bee as a royal symbol, and the solar origin myth that is quoted far more confidently than its source supports.
- Honey offerings in Greek religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney poured to the dead and to the powers below, honey cakes as offerings, and the priestesses and prophetic figures Greek writers associated with bees.
- Maya ceremonies for the beesRitual and ceremony · Current status unknownCeremonies performed for the increase and wellbeing of stingless-bee colonies in Yucatán, recorded in colonial description and in twentieth-century ethnography, and part of a religious complex built around a managed insect.
- Wax votives and figuresRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceWax objects left at shrines — limbs, bodies, animals, whole figures — offered for healing or in thanks. A devotional practice that consumed wax in quantity and is still carried on.
- Bee omens and household customCultural use · HistoricalA body of recorded custom treating bees as household members whose behaviour carried meaning: swarms read as omens, bees never sold for money, and the hive kept informed of family events.
- Slavic and Baltic bee customsCultural use · HistoricalIn parts of eastern Europe and the Baltic, keeping bees together created a formal relationship between the keepers — a recorded kinship with obligations, and a word for it that still means friendship.