“The statement is made with certainty: a festival that does not get its life from worship, even though the connection in human consciousness be ever so small, is not to be found. To be sure, since the French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against such worship, such as the "Brutus Festival" or "Labor Day," but they all demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity, what religious worship provides to a festival. […] Clearer than the light of day is the difference between the living, rooted trees of genuine cultic festival and our artificial festivals that resemble those "maypoles," cut at the roots, and carted here and there, to be planted for some definite purpose. Of course we may have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we are only at the dawn of an age of artificial festivals. Were we [in Germany] prepared for the possibility that the official forces, and especially the bearers of political power, would artificially create the appearance of the festive with so huge an expense in external arrangements? And that this seductive, scarcely delectable appearance of artificial "holidays" would be so totally lacking in the essential quality, that true and ultimate harmony with the world? And that such holidays would in fact depend on the suppression of that harmony and derive their dangerous seduction from that very fact?”

Veeramani, Collected Works of Periyar, p. 513.
Reform

At his speech in Moria, on 20 April 1992.
1990s, Speech at the Zionist Christian Church Easter Conference (1992)

Essay 2, Section 6
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Source: On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo

2000, The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000)

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, pp. 33–34
The Kerenyi quote is from Karl Kerenyi, Die antike Religion (Amsterdam, 1940), p. 66.

page 75
Dark Rooms (2002)

Vom Schmetterling zur Doppelaxt, p. 22-23.
Vom Schmetterling zur Doppelaxt (1990)
Context: The proto-historic religious festivities [of the Maternal Megalith Culture] were strongly sexual in nature. They commonly culminated in what today is referred to as group sex and is socially regarded as extremely negative nowadays. In fact, the inherent potential of sexuality is to decrease social conflict, for indeed sexual activity not only gratifies, it pacifies as well. Our biological anthropological heritage disposes humanity to far more diverse varieties of sexual behaviours than our modern repressive culture permits or deems 'socially acceptable'. Abhorring them as unmentionable immoralities, white colonial masters often gladly took to using all the sexual customs of many autochtonous peoples as excuses to oppress and severely decimate the tribes in question, even doing so with a perfect peace of conscience. Islam's campaigners in the Orient, pioneers of Confucianism in China, and Caucasian Christians used their best endeavours to destroy root and branch of all surviving sexual rites they came across; that which had priorly been sacred practice became re-defined as sinful lewdness and perversion. These religious processes yielded widespread absence of such customs even in many primitive cultures by the modern period. Similar proto-historic customs [of the Maternal Megalith Culture] were wiped out in a comparable fashion [by Indo-Europeans], with structurally similar yet not identical reasonings given, for all patriarchal ethnics regard orgiastic indulgences as corruptive to their social fabric.

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

"Scope of 1951 Festival". The Times: p. 3a. 9 June 1949.