What strange traditions or rituals of any culture have you ever seen or heard?

A religion out of the middle east that consumes the flesh and blood of its leader every time it meets. The cannibalism is their highest sacrament.

Anything involving infant genital mutilation.

I traveled in the mountains of Taiwan a few years ago in the Toroko gorge area of Toroko national park where the native peoples were still head hunting until only 100 years ago!

Amazing place. Had this crazy native dinner in the jungle of rice steamed in bamboo tubes and other bizarre food items. Still not sure exactly what I ate. lol

Weddings. They have always seemed weird to me.

There’s this thing where children are compelled to swear fealty to their land. What’s really weird is they have to do it almost every day, like oath is so meaningless it expires every 24 hours.

There was this perverted cult that cut off pieces of the genitals of their babies to control their sexual urges.

NASCAR

Texan citizenship :p

Nacirema tribe

Marriage.

When my wife was about to have her first baby, she got a book about birthing traditions around the world. The one that impressed me the most was a native tribe in the Andes, I think. Or maybe Mexico. Could it have been the Huichol?

Anyway, in this tribe, when a woman was having a baby, her husband climbed up in the rafters above her. A string was tied around his balls and the other end of the string was in the hand of his wife. Whenever she had a contraction, she might tug on the string, and the man’s cries would echo as loudly as the woman’s.

I don’t suppose there’s any surprise that the birthrate in this tribe was such that they no longer exist. [Naw. Just made that last part up.]

Tibetan Buddhists sometimes conduct sky burials (there are images), in which a corpse is presented to wild vultures that feed on the remains. This was strange to me at first, but it now seems no more or less reasonable than burying a body in the earth or at sea.

Those dancing snake people in the Appalachians.

Come to think of it baptism is pretty weird. Even weirder when it’s posthumous.

@fundevogel Baptisms came to mind for me as well. And during a recent conversation with my brother, he mentioned that he was planning to have his dog baptized. Oh my…

@Pied_Pfeffer That, I have never heard of before. But people do crazy things to/for their pets.

@ragingloli: If by “perverted cult” you mean “a sickeningly large portion of the world” then, sadly, that still happens today.

@vine With regards to your post…wow, just wow. Now I wonder if a Tibetan monk before he dies is given the option not to get a sky burial if he refuses. Maybe not. It seems clear a dead body is a dead body, nothing more. And they don’t have resources to do ground burials anyway.

The slaughter of Pilot Whales in Denmark. One link I found said that this story was a hoax and this doesn’t happen, I really hope that’s true but if it does happen then, not only is it strange and uneccessary but it also sickens me to the core.