Rituals & Madness
Rituals test one's force of will. The alignment of metaphysical forces through the use of objects, persons, cants, and trappings creates a vortex of waking lucidity among the witnesses involved, inducing an intense nausea -- like a dehydrated drunkenness that makes you feel utterly sick yet unable to find relief in expulsion.
Witnesses driven to madness are those who become swallowed up in their own lucidity. Most such witnesses are not even noticeably mad, because they are comatose -- having found a way to lock themselves permanently in their somnolent realms. Those witnesses who succumb to their fascinations while remaining in the waking world become like drunkards consumed by their primary suppressed emotion. These madmen have lost the inhibitions granted by an obscure brain, and their primary suppression-- mirth, violence, sorrow, hunger, lust, etc --runs through them like a torrential river. These who drown in their own emotion, who sink so deeply that the world around them is dis[tant/torted] -- these are witnesses driven mad by reck-less lucidity.