- Unity of the material and supernatural worlds
- The importance of physical place as a spiritual focus.
- Orality: the spoken word has a real power: it expresses metaphor and not simile, that is there is no difference between the word and the thing it represents.
- Time is cyclical not linear. This means that there is a recurring cycle of birth, growth, death, rebirth and so on.
- Ritual: rituals are not mere ‘plays’ or re-enactments, but the making of a spiritual event of the past exist in the present, a ‘re-present’, or being present again.
- Liminality: the state when an individual or society is in transition, usually from childhood to adulthood.
- Numinosity: the sense of the sacred infusing existence.
