Disclaimer: This essay is a philosophical and symbolic exploration of possession, legitimacy, ritual, and the aesthetics of transgression. All terms — including “ideal crime,” “ritual of possession,” and “narrative justice” — are used exclusively in a conceptual and metaphorical sense. The text does not advocate, justify, or promote the violation of law, morality, or social norms. It contains no calls to action and should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any real-world criminal behavior. Its sole purpose is to examine the symbolic structures through which societies construct legitimacy, recognition, and meaning — especially in relation to power, desire, and storytelling. The essay belongs fully to the realm of critical theory and philosophical reflection.
Not Law, but Ritual
Synopsis
Central Thesis
Possession obtained through ritual is perceived as more legitimate than mere legal ownership. A robber who performs a "beautiful" heist earns sympathy; a hero who steals treasure from a villain through trials seems deserving of reward. Ritual transforms crime into a symbolic act that creates new "rights" in the eyes of participants and spectators — not juridical, but sacred.
Architecture of Ritual Possession
From Antiquity to Modernity
Before written codes, people established rights through ceremonies. Among Germanic tribes, the new owner walked the land's perimeter with a torch — afterward, the community recognized ownership. Medieval Europe practiced livery of seisin — the seller handed the buyer a clod of earth before witnesses. The ritual of "turf and twig" served as deed instead of document.
Even violence within ritual generated rights: victor takes the vanquished's armor, raider keeps spoils if the raid was blessed by a priest. Trial by combat (ordeal) allowed the winner to take the loser's property — God supposedly legitimized the outcome.
Literary Archetypes
Ali Baba speaks "Open Sesame!" — and the magical ritual "legitimizes" theft in readers' eyes. Robin Hood robs the rich through the ritual of justice: "takes from rich, gives to poor" — and robbery becomes noble deed. King Arthur pulls sword from stone — ritual trial proves right to throne.
Modern cinema aestheticizes heists: "Ocean's Eleven," "Money Heist" transform crime into performance. Red jumpsuits, Dalí masks, partisan anthem — ritual staging makes robbers heroes to millions.
Philosophical Foundations
Rousseau: The first owner simply fenced land and declared "This is mine!", finding people simple enough to believe. Possession began with ritual of deception.
Stirner: "Whoever can take and defend a thing, to them it belongs." Law is empty phantom, property's reality lies in energy of self-assertion.
Bataille: Crime as sacred violation of taboo. Possession becomes sacralized if forbidden boundaries were transgressed for it.
Fromm: Legal ownership breeds fear of loss. The criminal-aesthete shows contempt for accumulation — freer than the bourgeois fearing for his bank account.
Crime as Initiation Rite
Mafia: Ceremony with blood on holy image transforms newcomer into made man. After ritual, he obeys not state laws but the code of Omertà.
Hackers: System breach as "feat" for earning reputation. In community's eyes, it's initiation rite granting status.
Street gangs: "Blood in — blood out." Newcomer must "spill blood" to prove loyalty. Murder "for the gang" counts as valor within the microworld.
Boundaries of Ritual Justification
Ritual works in local systems but isn't omnipotent. When antihero crosses the line — kills innocents, betrays his own — viewer trust collapses. "Breaking Bad": initially the hero attracted with noble purpose, but went too far.
History shows failures to justify atrocity through ritual: Thuggee in India, Nazi parades. Scale or obvious inhumanity breaks the spell of ceremony.
Provocative Conclusion
We believe ritual over law due to narrative justice effect: if hero suffered and passed trials, he deserves reward. Ritual provides aesthetic satisfaction — beautiful heist captivates like art.
"Property rests on people's belief, not objective law. Ritual creates new rights in participants' eyes — not juridical, but psychologically more convincing."
Question for Contemplation: If modern law inherited theatricality from ritual (judges' robes, oaths, seals), isn't the entire legal system merely formalized ceremony convincing us to obey? And what affects humans more powerfully — the cold letter of law or the vivid ritual of violation?
In myths, legends, and even in the news, one can find examples where breaking the law is perceived as justifiable — if it is carried out through a specific ritual or in accordance with a code of honor. A thief who commits a robbery with style earns the viewer’s sympathy. A fairytale hero who steals treasure from a monstrous villain appears not as a criminal, but as a kind of righteous judge.
A paradox emerges: possession of something acquired illegally is suddenly seen as deserved — not by law, but by ritual. This leads us to the idea of a moral–legal construction in which the crime becomes a performance, a symbolic act through which possession acquires an aura of legitimacy.
This inquiry will explore the phenomenon of ritual possession — why people trust the power of ceremony more than the letter of the law — and how this connects to the idea of the ideal crime.
The Sacralization of Possession
Since ancient times, ritual has served as a way of imbuing ordinary actions with sacred meaning. Anthropologists point out that through rituals, society transforms accidental events into meaningful symbols. When it comes to possession, ritual has the power to sanctify the right to an object or a status. A royal coronation, for instance, is not merely a celebration — it is a ritual act through which a conqueror becomes a “legitimate” monarch and his violence is forgotten. Likewise, an initiation rite can turn an ordinary person into one of “us” — a member of a group endowed with special rights. Émile Durkheim and later researchers emphasized that collective rituals reinforce social bonds and the belief in a shared order of things. The controlled transgression of external prohibitions within a ritual can even give a group the feeling of unity in carrying out a special mission. As Georges Bataille argued, every truly sovereign act is always linked to the violation of a taboo: “Sovereignty demands that we place ourselves above the essence of law... which means that genuine communication is possible only on one condition — by appealing to Evil, that is, by violating the law.”
A ritual that violates the law paradoxically affirms the higher power of the law itself — it is precisely through transgression that the group experiences the sacredness of its act. As a result, possession gained through ritual acquires not a legal, but a sacral justification in the eyes of its participants. Possession that emerges from ritual is seen as deserved, as “right.” If someone has undergone a trial or completed a specific ritual — whether an ancient ceremony or a modern initiation — the community is more likely to recognize their claim to the trophy or the status.
In primitive tribes, initiation rites and symbolic acts of transfer were widely practiced: for example, the ceremonial gifting of a weapon signified the transfer of leadership, and the drinking of blood together sealed an alliance and shared possession of secrets or land. These rituals functioned in place of written contracts. They were a theater in which recognition was enacted: after the ritual, everyone knew — this belongs to him (or to them), and there was no point in disputing it.
Ancient and Medieval Forms of Ownership
Before the emergence of written legal codes, people asserted their claims to property through customs and rituals. Pre-Roman tribal societies had no notaries — but they had possession rituals. Among the Celts and Germanic peoples, for example, a new landowner would walk the boundaries of the territory with a torch or drive a plow around its perimeter — after such a ritual, the community recognized him as the rightful owner.
In medieval Europe, there was a curious ceremony known as livery of seisin — the “delivery of possession.” To transfer land, a signature on parchment was not enough; a symbolic act was required. In the presence of witnesses, the seller and buyer would go to the land itself, and the seller would hand the buyer a clump of earth or a branch, pronouncing words of transfer. This ritual of “turf and twig” served as the act itself in place of a document, and afterward, the community considered the transaction complete. Until you lifted that piece of soil — the land was not yours. But once you did, and in front of everyone — it was yours, and no one would dispute it.
Many ancient cultures share a similar motif: the right to a thing belongs to the one who has performed the proper ritual. Pre-Roman law, de facto, arose from custom: in tribal societies, ownership was often confirmed not by written title but by continuous possession and recurring rituals — such as sacrifices to the spirits of the land or harvest festivals — which demonstrated the owner's ongoing bond with the object or the territory.
Even crime could become a form of establishing rights: the victor would take the armor of the defeated — by today’s standards, this would be theft, but in ancient times, the trophy was regarded as the hero’s lawful possession. “All the rights of the defeated pass to the victor” — this principle runs through epic and history alike. Plunder, war, and duel — violence framed as ritual — were perceived as legitimate sources of new rights.
For example, in the early medieval period, the raid was practiced as a semi-legitimate means of enrichment: if it was carried out according to all the rules — officially declared, blessed by a priest or cleric — the raider’s spoils were considered deserved. Similarly, the ordeal — a ritual of trial by combat or fire — allowed the victor not only to emerge innocent, but also to claim the possessions of the defeated. God, through a sign, was believed to legitimize the outcome. In this way, ritual replaced law.
It is interesting to note that over time, the law adopted many elements of ritual. We still speak of “closing a deal” — as if performing a rite. Legal procedures are saturated with symbolism: the judge’s robe, the solemn oath, the seals and signatures that echo the ancient “clumps of earth.” According to some scholars, the law operates partly as theater — it relies on symbols that generate in people a sense of order and justice. But unlike the living ritual of tribal society, the law is formal and impersonal. That is why, at some deeper level, we are sometimes more persuaded by a vivid ritual — even an illegal one — than by the cold letter of the law.
Literature and Myth
The ritual of possession has long been a theme in myths and adventure stories. In them, heroes often gain treasure or power not through law, but through valor or cunning — that is, through a kind of ritual. Take the tale of Ali Baba. A commoner by birth, Ali Baba had no legal right to the treasure hidden in the robbers’ cave. Yet he learns the sacred words “Open Sesame” — and this magical knowledge becomes his ritual key to wealth. By speaking the correct phrase, the hero undergoes a trial of worthiness. Within the logic of the story, we side with Ali Baba: he fulfilled the condition (he listened, remembered, spoke), and the reward feels deserved. Formally, of course — it is outright theft, even a break-in (albeit magical). But who would condemn Ali Baba? The ritual — in this case magical — legitimizes his success in the eyes of the audience.
Another example is that of buried treasure and treasure hunters. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins and his companions set out in search of a hoard of pirate gold. Legally, the treasure would belong to the heirs of Captain Flint (though Flint himself had plundered it in the first place). But within the logic of adventure, the treasure goes to those who faced danger, deciphered the map, fought off pirates — in other words, those who performed a kind of heroic ritual of quest. One could say that Jim is initiated by the island and the battle, and therefore he and the surviving crew gain the right to take the gold. And the pirate John Silver, though clearly a villain, attracts us precisely because he acts according to a pirate code — he breaks the law, but remains loyal to his own ritual. In literature, such a code of the honorable thief often outweighs formal morality.
The archetype of the noble thief stretches from Robin Hood to the modern antiheroes of cinema. Robin Hood robs the wealthy — a straightforward crime — yet he is honored as a hero because he follows the ritual of justice: he takes from the rich to give to the poor. This moral rite — unwritten yet universally understood — transforms banditry into an act of higher justice. In Ali Baba’s cave, the word was “Sesame”; in Sherwood Forest, the unspoken incantation is “for justice!” — and suddenly, theft becomes a worthy deed.
In chivalric romances, heroes too often earn the right to reward or power through trials. King Arthur pulls the sword from the stone — and through this magical ritual proves his claim to the throne. What sets him apart from the other contenders? The fact that he completed the ritual task — which makes him “worthy.” A knight who slays a dragon takes the dragon’s treasure as his own — and the audience rejoices, for the feat has sanctified the prize. Even when the knight rescues a princess, he is seen as having earned the right to her hand — once again, through the ritual of valor.
The 20th century introduced a wave of cinematic antiheroes whose crimes became romantic through rituals of style and charisma. Think of Alain Delon’s character in The Swimming Pool, or the team of thieves in Ocean’s Eleven. They break the law, but do so with such elegance and by their own rules that we admire them more than we condemn. The viewer delights in the carefully choreographed ritual of the heist — the masks, the lasers, the cleverness, the camaraderie — all of it transforms a banal crime into a kind of art.
This is the aesthetics of the heist — when crime is presented as a performance. A case in point is the series Money Heist (La Casa de Papel), in which a group of adventurers seizes the national mint. By law — it is terrorism and theft, pure crime. But they wear symbolic red jumpsuits, Salvador Dalí masks, and adopt the partisan anthem Bella Ciao as their hymn — they turn the crime into a performance, a challenge to the system. Millions of viewers around the world, including law-abiding citizens, sympathize not with the police but with the criminals — because they have performed their ritual, and thus earned, in our eyes, the right to the money and the escape.
Literature and pop culture are filled with such examples — from Captain Jack Sparrow, a pirate who breaks every law but honors the Pirate’s Code and is therefore beloved, to modern cinematic hackers who act outside the law but follow their own ethical rules. These stories reflect a psychological shift: we acknowledge the hero’s right to the prize if he has passed through a ritual drama and proven himself worthy. What matters most is the performance — one worthy of legend.
Belief in the Ritual Hero
Why do we, as readers and viewers, trust ritual more than law when judging a hero’s actions? Here, deep psychological mechanisms come into play. First, there is the effect of narrative justice: in a compelling story, the world feels ordered not legally, but morally. If the hero has suffered, taken risks, undergone initiation, we want him to receive his reward — even if, by earthly judgment, he is a thief. It echoes an ancient sense of karma or divine judgment: ritual trials seem to show us that the hero has earned it.
Second, ritual provides aesthetic satisfaction. A beautifully executed heist or an elegant act of revenge captivates us like a work of art. And art, as we know, stands above ordinary morality. As we follow the story, we side with the criminal-as-artist because we are enchanted by the style of his ritual. The viewer temporarily suspends ethical judgment — what psychologists call suspension of disbelief — and enters into the logic of the ritual, accepting its terms. Like at a bullfight: the audience is not craving death, but the dangerous beauty of the matador’s dance with the bull.
There is also a third factor — identification with the antihero. The modern viewer is tired of flawless, virtuous protagonists; far more compelling is a character with weaknesses who breaks the rules — just slightly, within the bounds of the “game.” Antiheroes are often appealing precisely because they follow their own moral code and rituals, which we intuitively understand: they take revenge for loved ones, steal from the rich, restore justice where the law is powerless. We sympathize with their personal code rather than with abstract state law. It resembles a childhood game, where there are “our” rules versus “their” rules. And naturally, we root for our side.
Finally, there is the effect of the viewer as a participant in the ritual. A well-staged crime is presented in such a way that we feel part of the conspiracy. We are shown the plan, initiated into the secrets — we are, in a sense, brought into the ritual circle. And once we have become accomplices in the story, we view the heroes with partiality: our own have performed the rite, therefore they deserve success. We become that ancient tribe that recognizes a new chief because he has carried out the ceremony correctly.
Philosophers on Possession
The idea that property rights rest on collective belief rather than on objective law has long been proposed by philosophers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, noted with irony that the first owner was not the most virtuous man, but the most cunning. In his discourse on inequality, he wrote: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, thought of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” Rousseau shows that possession began as a ritual of deception — someone planted stakes, uttered a solemn phrase, and convinced the tribe of its significance. There was no objective right — only suggestion, a ritual accepted by others. In essence, the foundation of property became the community’s belief in someone’s performance. Rousseau goes on to remark, interestingly, how many wars and crimes might have been avoided if someone had torn up those first stakes and shouted to the others: “Beware of believing this impostor!” But people believed — and from that deception, civilization began.
A century after Rousseau, the radical thinker Max Stirner pushed this idea to its extreme. He rejected the very notion of abstract “rights” to property, asserting instead the principle of individual power. Stirner stated bluntly: “Whoever knows how to take and defend a thing — it belongs to him.” Property, for Stirner, is not a moral or legal concept, but simply an extension of personal will and force. What is mine is whatever I am strong enough to make mine. As long as I can hold it — it is mine; if it is taken — then it is no longer mine. For Stirner, law is an empty phantom used to intoxicate the weak; the reality of ownership lies in the energy and self-assertion of the individual. This is, of course, a radical position — but it reveals something essential: belief in law is replaced by the ritual of force. If I am strong enough — physically, mentally, organizationally — to take something, declare “this is mine,” and convince others, then so be it. Here, Stirner discards both law and morality, leaving only the bare fact of possession, upheld by a ritual of self-certainty. Not right, but a conquered place. In this sense, any bold ritual of acquisition — from a war trophy to a provocative art act — is more meaningful to a Stirnerian than entire libraries of law.
Georges Bataille approached possession and crime through the lens of the sacred and the forbidden. He wrote that sacrifice is an act that is both criminal and sacred. The killing of the victim formally violates a fundamental law (“Thou shalt not kill”), yet it is precisely through this violation that the sacred is created. If we apply this idea to property: possession can become “sacred” if a taboo has been broken to obtain it. In his writings on transgression, Bataille argued that the act of crossing a prohibition gives a person the sense of stepping beyond the ordinary — of touching some higher reality.
A crime that becomes a ritual — whether blood vengeance, revolutionary terror, or a provocative artistic act — asserts, in a sense, a new value system in which the object gained through it is sacralized. Consider, for example, the legends of gangsters during Prohibition: for ordinary people, a bottle of whiskey drunk in a speakeasy carried the taste of forbidden fruit — and the gangster who provided it, like Rocky, acquired an aura of romance. Bataille spoke of the power of excessive acts — of festivity, waste, destruction — over human consciousness.
Applied to our theme, this means that possession achieved through an excessive gesture carries a special allure. The ideal crime is aesthetic precisely because it transcends the mundane order of profit and routine. It resembles a sacred sacrifice — a beautiful gesture made for the sake of an idea, not for gain (though gain often follows). In this way, Bataille helps us understand the psychology of possession as performance: transgression and ritual together produce a new “right” in the eyes of those who witness the rite.
Fromm wrote that a person who defines themselves through possession inevitably lives in fear. His famous quote: “If I am what I have, and if what I have is lost, then who am I? No one but a defeated and hollow man...” This thought is central to our theme: lawful ownership of material things does not provide true security — it merely generates anxiety about losing them. People fear thieves, disasters, change — anything that might take away their belongings. Legal property rights, it turns out, are fragile; if circumstances shift, your foundation vanishes. Hence, perhaps, the secret envy of the ordinary citizen toward the outlaw-adventurer who playfully transgresses this zone of fear. He seems to say: it is not things that own me — I own them. I take when I want, I let go when I wish.
Fromm pointed out that consumer culture has turned possession into both an end in itself and a trap: a person obsessed with property becomes a slave to their own belongings. The aesthetic criminal, by contrast, often displays disdain for dull accumulation — he risks everything for the thrill of the game. Paradoxically, the viewer may sense that the thief, performing a beautiful ritual, is inwardly freer than the law-abiding bourgeois, anxiously guarding his bank account. Of course, Fromm would not have endorsed the glorification of criminals, but his analysis helps explain why the romance of “living while playing with the law” holds such appeal: it opposes living being to dead property. Crime, when framed as a game or a challenge, resonates with our subconscious desire to be rather than to have.
Crime as Ritual
Let us consider real-world practices in which crime is transformed into ritual, and ritual becomes a tool of legitimization within a group. A classic example is the mafia’s “Cosa Nostra.” To become a full-fledged member (known as a made man), an initiate must undergo a ceremony of initiation. This ritual is filled with symbolic acts: the newcomer’s finger is pricked, his blood dripped onto a holy image, which is then burned, as he recites an oath of loyalty to the family. The criminal organization, in essence, creates its own form of legitimacy through ritual — after the ceremony, the person is, as it were, reborn into the criminal world, bound by blood and sacred oath.
From that moment on, he no longer obeys the laws of the state, but the code of Omertà. To break this code is the greatest sin; to uphold it is a matter of honor. The mafia thus lives by a ritual code in which murder, extortion, and other crimes are not viewed within the group as evil acts, but as duties fulfilled for the family. To the outside world, such an “ethic” is monstrous — but for the initiated, ritual has replaced law. Crime becomes routine, and more than that — a sacred craft, complete with its own patrons (the saints of the mafia) and its own religious symbols. One could say that the mafia is an extreme case of a society that has declared its ritual higher than common law.
Another contemporary phenomenon is that of hacker and online communities, where ritual elements also exist. In early hacker culture (from the 1970s to the 1990s), there was no formal initiation, but there was a tradition of earning reputation. Hacking into a secure system, creating an elegant virus, or discovering a vulnerability — these acts were regarded as a kind of “feat.” If you made a name for yourself, the community began to respect you. Senior hackers might even offer informal recognition to a newcomer who demonstrated skill — something like a knightly initiation, only taking place in a chatroom or forum. From the standpoint of the law, of course, hacking is a crime. But in the eyes of the community itself, it is an initiation rite — after which one gains status.
In the well-known film Hackers (1995), there is a scene in which the protagonist, still a teenager, hacks into a television station — illegally, but in doing so impresses others and is accepted as one of their own. Similar things have happened in real life: young cyber-intruders were sometimes recruited into elite groups after making a name for themselves with high-profile stunts. In this way, the hacker ethic — “information wants to be free,” “we break systems but don’t harm people” — functions as a code. Those who follow it and demonstrate skill are seen as legitimate members. It is, of course, a dangerous romanticization — but it exists.
Another example is street gangs and criminal groups — less refined than the mafia but with their own customs. In many gangs, there is a concept of initiation through crime: a newcomer must, for instance, "shed blood" (attack an outsider or commit a robbery) to prove loyalty and courage. By doing this, he undergoes a kind of ritual cleansing through crime and becomes part of the "family." There is even a grim saying: "blood in – blood out," meaning that entry requires criminal blood, and the only way out is feet first.
A grim but telling ritual. It works because the psychology of the group reverses the meaning of the act: a killing "for the sake of the gang" is not seen as an evil, but as a mark of honor within that micro-world. In other words, the ritual completely inverts morality for its participants. Such a person is no longer bound by conventional moral law — he lives according to the ritual, blood-bound code of the group.
In contemporary pop culture, there is the notion of the "aesthetics of crime." For example, the image of the rebellious antihero is gaining popularity — someone for whom breaking the law is part of a lifestyle (film noir detectives, comic book characters like Deadpool, and so on). We see an entire aestheticization of the rituals of the criminal world: tattoos as marks of initiation, slang as a secret language, heists as intellectual games. All of this builds an aura around crime as something more than mere profit — as a way of life, a philosophy. Of course, the romance of crime is dangerous, because in reality it is pain and filth, not beauty. But the fact remains: people have a tendency to adorn even the darkest sides of life with ritual.
The Limits of Ritual
Can ritual justify everything? At what point do we, enchanted by ritual, become willing to forgive a hero any evil? And where do we draw the line and say: enough — no pirate code excuses cruelty? Here we should recall examples where ritual ultimately fails to redeem the villain in our eyes. If the antihero crosses a certain boundary — kills the innocent, betrays his own, uses unjustified cruelty — the audience’s trust collapses. Take the series Breaking Bad: the drug-dealing protagonist initially drew sympathy because of his noble goal (providing for his family) and his personal code. But by the end, when he goes too far, many viewers turn away. The antihero’s ritual stops working if he leaves no trace of moral taboo for himself.
History offers cases in which attempts to justify monstrous acts through ritual ultimately failed. The Thuggee cult in India practiced ritual killings in the name of the goddess Kali. This cult existed for centuries, but was eventually eradicated — society (and the colonial authorities) concluded that no religious tradition could legitimize the murder of innocent travelers.
Another example is Nazi Germany: the Nazis also tried to cloak their crimes in ritual — parades, symbols, oaths. For a time, these pseudo-religious ceremonies convinced many that something “righteous” was taking place. But reality broke through, and the judgment of history declared unambiguously: no, ritual does not justify genocide. In other words, the scale or blatant inhumanity of a crime can shatter the spell of ritual. No matter how many torchlit marches are held, mass murder will not become a sacred mission — at least not in the eyes of humanity beyond a certain threshold.
It turns out that ritual is effective for legitimization within a local frame of reference or in cases of moderate transgression, but it is not omnipotent. When ritual attempts to become a new universal code, it either displaces the old one — as a religion might replace another, or a revolution an old regime — or it collapses. Revolutions illustrate this well: as long as the revolutionaries are a small group, their momentum feels romantic — they are the heroes of their own ritual of liberation. But when they win and establish power, yesterday’s ritual becomes the new law — and thus loses its romance. The former heroes risk becoming dogmatists or tyrants. Ritual lives brightly, but briefly — it either becomes institutionalized or burns out.
In modern societies, we observe an interesting duality: on the one hand, the law gradually incorporates practices that were once ritualistic (duels are banned, but regulated sport fighting is accepted; religious weddings once held primacy, now the marriage contract does); on the other hand, there remains a zone of informal rules — business ethics, criminal “codes,” internet memes as rituals of online culture. Society constantly balances between where to allow room for ritual and where to insist firmly on the rule of law.
Ritual operates within a space of symbols and shared agreements — we must at least partially accept its rules in order for it to function. If we do not, it becomes an empty gesture, an act of imposture. That is why even the boldest inventors of ideal crimes take care not to go too far. The antihero usually has principles: “I don’t harm children,” “I don’t kill without cause,” “I only rob corporations.” This gives the audience a point of agreement — a sense of where the boundaries lie within his ritual, allowing us to see him as ethical within his own framework. But when there are no boundaries, darkness falls — and ritual becomes nothing more than a justification for evil.