Ritual Walkthroughs

Concept

Scroll-driven, graphic-documentary reconstructions of documented ancient rituals, one step at a time. Each walkthrough is a vertical sequence of full-bleed photorealistic frames. As you scroll, each frame pins to the viewport and two text panes fade in beside it — never blended, per AGENTS.md §1.2:

• EMIC pane — what the participant believed was happening, in the tradition's own terms, sourced to inscriptions/ritual texts ("The cracks are the ancestor Father Yi answering the charge").
• ETIC pane — what historians infer, with the scholar named and the evidence class stated ("Keightley: crack-reading institutionalized royal decision-making under uncertainty; the verification records show outcomes were tracked").

Four launch rituals, chosen so each has a real procedural source, not a guess:

1. A Shang oracle-bone divination (Anyang, reign of Wu Ding, c. 1250 BCE) — the procedure is literally written on the artifact: charge → heat → crack → reading → (sometimes) verification. Best-documented step sequence in the vault.

2. A day of the Babylonian Akitu festival (Babylon, 1st millennium BCE) — day 4, when the Enūma Eliš was recited before Marduk; ritual-text attested (enuma-elish-creation-myth-tablets).

3. A Vedic fire offering (agnihotra/yajña) (NW South Asia, c. 1200–900 BCE) — kindling Agni, ghee oblations, priestly roles; procedure preserved by the śrauta tradition (vedic-religion).

4. An Egyptian Opening of the Mouth ceremony (New Kingdom tomb context) — the adze touching the mummy's mouth so the deceased can breathe, eat, and speak again; scene-sequences preserved in tomb depictions (vault gap — see Data below).

Every step cites the tier-1/2 note it rests on. Where the sequence is reconstructed rather than attested, the etic pane says so explicitly (speculative labeling carries over from the frontmatter contract). No devotional framing, no truth-claims asserted or denied — we show what was done and what it meant to them, next to what we can actually demonstrate.

Why it takes you back in time

Reading "the Shang practiced pyromantic divination" is a fact. *Standing in the diviner's workshop while the heat-rod touches the prepared plastron and the crack goes pu — and being told, in the same breath, what the diviner believed that sound was — is an experience.* The walkthrough format exploits three things stills and essays can't:

• Procedure is time. A ritual is the one religious artifact that is inherently sequential — following its steps in order is the closest thing to being present that scholarship permits. Scroll position becomes ritual time.
• The split-screen belief. The emic/etic pair on every frame produces the signature sensation of this vault: simultaneous immersion and analysis. You feel the king's anxiety about the harvest and see Keightley's argument about legitimation — without either erasing the other.
• Verifiable intimacy. These are not "ancient people probably…" montages. The Shang sequence comes off the bones themselves; the Akitu day comes from ritual tablets; the Opening of the Mouth from tomb scene-cycles. The captions can say we know this step happened — and that honesty is what makes the immersion land.

Experience walkthrough

You're on the Shang religion page and click "Witness a divination — Anyang, c. 1250 BCE." The screen goes near-black; a date-line fades in: Yinxu, royal precinct. A question about the coming harvest.

Scroll. Frame 1 pins: a workshop interior at dawn, cattle scapulae stacked, a craftsman drilling neat hollows into a turtle plastron. EMIC pane (left): "The bone must be prepared to receive the answer; the hollows thin the bone so the power can speak through it." ETIC pane (right): "Hollows are chiseled so cracks propagate predictably — thousands of prepared, unused plastrons found at Yinxu show industrial-scale production. (1-archaeology; keightley-sources-of-shang-history)"

Scroll. Frame 2: the diviner kneels, the king watching, as the formal charge is posed — "This season, we will receive millet harvest." Emic: the charge addresses the ancestors as live, causally effective powers (shang-religion — emic section). Etic: charges are framed as statements, not questions; Keightley reads this as ritual control of outcomes.

Scroll. Frame 3: the glowing hardwood rod touches the hollow; the crack jumps across the bone. The page's only sound-adjacent moment: the caption simply reads pu — the crack-sound the graph 卜 (bu, "to divine") is thought to picture. Scroll. Frame 4: the king reads the crack — only he prognosticates. Scroll. Frame 5: an engraver cuts the record into the bone; the verification — "It really did rain" — added later. Final frame: the same plastron, photographed today, 3,200 years on, lit on black like museum glass. Closing line: Everything you just watched is written on this object.

A progress rail shows the five steps; a "Sources for this step" footer expands to the tier-1 notes; "Next ritual →" hands you to Babylon, eleven centuries earlier and 7,000 km west.

Data from the vault

This idea therefore drives the gathering loop (AGENTS.md §3.6): three concrete tier-1 gaps go to 00_meta/OPEN_QUESTIONS.md as experience-blocking questions.

Implementation sketch

All inside the existing bun, zero-npm-deps explorer (tools/server.ts); the server stays read-only, 127.0.0.1.

• Content as markdown, like everything else. Each walkthrough is one file, e.g. 00_meta/ideas/walkthroughs/shang-divination.md, with steps as ## Step N — title sections each containing ### Emic and ### Etic subsections plus a sources: line. The existing frontmatter contract applies (type: experience, status, per-step source links). No new database, no build step.
• One new route in server.ts: /ritual/<slug> parses the step file with the existing mdToHtml/frontmatter machinery and emits the walkthrough page; an index of available walkthroughs is linked from INDEX and from each tradition page (auto-link when tradition_id matches).
• Scroll mechanics, CSS-first: each step is a <section class="rstep"> with min-height: 200vh; the frame image is position: sticky; top: 0; height: 100vh; object-fit: cover. Emic/etic panes are absolutely positioned cards revealed by a single IntersectionObserver (~15 lines of vanilla JS toggling a .live class — works with the existing scroll-behavior:smooth base style). animation-timeline: scroll() used progressively where supported; the page is fully readable with JS off (panes simply always visible).
• Frames live in assets/rituals/<slug>/01.png … served by the existing /assets/ static handler; loading="lazy" + decoding="async", dark background:#0c0e13 placeholder so scroll never shows white. Progress rail = pure CSS counters on the step list.
• No deps, no framework, no client fetch beyond the existing version-poll. Estimated diff: ~120 lines server/CSS/JS + 4 markdown step-files.

Images needed

GPT-5.5 via codex CLI per AGENTS.md §5. Shared suffix for all prompts: photorealistic, cinematic 35mm documentary still, archaeologically grounded material culture, natural light, no text or writing legible as modern script, no recognizable living people, no devotional or supernatural visual effects — only what a camera would see. Aspect 16:9.

Shang divination (ships first):

1. Interior of a Late Shang bone workshop at Yinxu at dawn, c. 1250 BCE: stacked cattle scapulae and turtle plastrons, a kneeling craftsman drilling rows of oval hollows into a polished plastron with a bronze tool, hard-packed earth floor, rammed-earth walls, early light through a doorway.

2. A Shang royal diviner in court dress kneeling before a low table holding a prepared turtle plastron, the king seated behind in silk and bronze ornament, attendants in shadow, bronze ritual vessels at the edge of frame, lamplit hall interior.

3. Extreme close-up: a glowing hardwood rod pressed into a chiseled hollow on the back of a turtle plastron, a fine crack visibly propagating across the bone surface, smoke wisp, shallow depth of field.

4. The Shang king leaning over the cracked plastron, studying the crack pattern by lamplight, his face lit from below by the lamp, diviner waiting at a respectful distance.

5. A Shang engraver incising small columns of archaic characters into the cracked plastron with a bronze graver, bone dust on the table, finished inscribed bones in a basket beside him.

6. Museum-style hero shot: an authentic inscribed Shang oracle plastron with burn hollows and cracks, lit dramatically against pure black, 3,200 years of patina visible.

Akitu day 4 (Babylon):

7. Dawn over the Etemenanki ziggurat precinct of Neo-Babylonian Babylon, mudbrick mass against pale sky, priests crossing a vast courtyard, glazed-brick walls with bull and mušḫuššu reliefs at frame edge.

8. Interior of the Esagila cella: a high priest reciting from a clay tablet held in both hands before the lamplit cult statue's dais (statue itself in deep shadow, not depicted distinctly), incense smoke, gold and lapis fittings catching lamplight.

9. Close-up of weathered hands holding a dense cuneiform tablet at reading angle, lamplight raking the wedge impressions, blurred temple interior behind.

Vedic fire offering:

10. Pre-dawn on a NW South Asian plain, c. 1000 BCE: a small group of priests around a freshly built clay fire altar, one churning fire with a wooden fire-drill, sparks beginning, reed shelter and tethered cattle in background.

11. A hotṛ priest mid-recitation pouring a stream of clarified butter from a long wooden ladle (sruva) into a low altar fire, flame flaring at the moment of the oblation, other priests seated on grass mats, dawn sky.

12. Close-up over the fire: ghee igniting on embers, smoke rising straight in still morning air, the wooden ladle and a grass-strewn altar rim in shallow focus.

Opening of the Mouth (blocked on tier-1 note; prompts drafted now):

13. New Kingdom Theban tomb forecourt: a mummiform coffin held upright by an embalmer-priest, a sem-priest in leopard skin facing it, mourners and offering tables in the background, limestone cliffs and hard Egyptian daylight.

14. Close-up: a priest's hands raising a forked pesesh-kef blade and an iron adze toward the gilded face of the upright coffin, instruments and offering vessels laid out on a reed mat below.

15. Interior of the tomb chapel after the rite: offering table heaped with bread, beeswax cones, and lotus, painted wall scenes behind, a single shaft of light from the entrance, the coffin resting in shadow.

Effort

M overall — S for the first shippable slice.

• Ships first (S, ~1 day): the Shang divination walkthrough end-to-end — 6 images, one step-file, the /ritual/ route + scroll CSS/JS, linked from shang-religion and INDEX. The vault already contains every fact the captions need; nothing is blocked.
• Second (S each): Akitu and Vedic walkthroughs after one tier-1 note each lands (Akitu ritual tablets; śrauta procedure) — the route and template are already built, so each is images + one markdown file.
• Third (M): Opening of the Mouth — requires fresh tier-1 gathering (Otto edition, tomb-scene attestations) before any caption can be sourced; do not ship it earlier on vibes.
• Later (not in scope): ambient audio, per-step crack/fire sound design, and a "compare rituals" cross-cut view once ≥3 walkthroughs exist.