ABSTRACT
Ritual forms part of nearly all religious systems. In this and the next two chapters (Chapters 10 and 11) we ask why that should be. What is the relation of religious to secular ritual? Does it bring advantage to those who participate? Is it related to behaviour in secular contexts? Does it contribute to the persistence of the religious system? The term ‘ritual’ has been used for a wide spectrum of behaviour from
primarily social, public occasions to private worship and meditation. To an outsider, ritual often seems special because the actions of the participants cannot be easily understood without explanation from someone in the know. The form of the ritual is not determined by the individual intentions of the actor and is not reducible to a set of technical motivations (see pp. 125-33). The focus of religious rituals may be on the performance itself, on a specific more or less tangible goal such as the marriage of two persons or the curing of a sick person, or on the interpretation made by the participant and the resulting cognitive changes and subjective state induced in him/her. And that subjective state may seem to be primarily cognitive, as in meditation or prayer, or emotional, as in ecstatic performances and many initiation rituals, though of course the two overlap and are interrelated. This chapter begins with a digression concerning the relations between cause and consequence, as a lack of clarity on that issue can lead to misunderstandings of the ‘meaning’ of ritual. That is followed by a brief discussion of the nature of ritual, intended as background to the material in the next two chapters.
