Final answer:
Rites of affliction are non-calendrical and unplanned rituals seeking healing or blessings from spirits or deities. Examples include shamanic journeys, religious leader mediations, witchcraft, exorcisms, and divination.
Step-by-step explanation:
Rites of affliction, also known as healing rituals or petitions for supernatural intervention, are non-calendrical and unplanned. They seek remedy or compensation for afflictions and are performed to ask for healing or blessings from spirits or deities. Examples of rites of affliction include shamanic journeys, religious leader mediations, witchcraft and sorcery to find the source of affliction, exorcism to remove adverse spirits, and divination to identify the harm's source.
Despite skeptics considering these rituals as superstition, they hold great importance for believers, allowing them to plead for help and potentially influence threatening life events' outcomes. Rites of affliction play a key role in non-Western societies and localized religious traditions, where well-being is seen as a relationship between body and soul with a religious component.