ABSTRACT
There are some parallels between ritual actions and those performed in everyday life. Children enjoy counting and rhyming songs and games, often played repetitively. Many go through a stage of minor superstitious rituals, like avoiding the cracks between paving stones, which seem to stave off imagined terrors: comparable practices occur not infrequently in adults. Whether these have any relation to the obsessive/compulsive rituals of some adults, and whether either have any relation to religious rituals, is uncertain, but some similarities are worth noting. Both young children and sufferers from obsessive/compulsive disorders may exhibit the ‘just right’ syndrome: this includes strictly circumscribed ways of arranging objects, doing things in precisely the ‘right’ way, preferences for symmetry, wholeness, and so on (Evans et al., 1997). Obsessive/compulsive rituals are often repetitive in the same way as repetitive chanting or the manipulation of a rosary. (The latter has been compared to the use of worry-beads in some Mediterranean countries to overcome anxiety, though the
successive beads of a rosary may be associated with a specific series of meanings or meditations.) Obsessive/ compulsive rituals, especially those used by women, often involve repetitive washing or cleansing, and this seems to be related to indiscriminate fears. Often such rituals are accompanied by magical or superstitious beliefs that have become fixed and are carried to extremes. They may involve checking that tasks have been done or possible dangers monitored, and their performance is believed to avert harm. The sufferers are more likely to ritualise when they feel tense, and usually feel better afterwards. They suppose their behaviour to be normal (Marks, 1987). All of these characteristics have echoes in at least some religious rituals, though the similarities may be superficial.
