ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the incorporation of offerings and activities associated with the toilet and the meal into festival occasions. Simple offerings like food, drink, incense, and clothing were woven throughout festival ritual cycles in a non-narrative fashion for apotropaic reasons. This repetition also stabilized the festival celebration by incorporating the powerful—and potentially dangerous—elements of the festival into the predictable fabric of everyday life.
Opening the door to the uncreated was no simple operation and was fraught with danger. Improperly done, it could unleash the full destructive potential of disorder. But properly done, through the prescribed rituals of the Opet-festival presided over by the divine king, the opening could produce rebirth and recreation.
(L. Bell 1997:157)