What Is A Ritual
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
Ritual and ritualization are defined in practice as some set of actions carried on in some structured form. The term "rite" is analogous to ritual, and both are defined in Webster's Dictionary as "A ceremonial act or action." The process of performing a ritual leads to its ceremonialization, by way of drawing away from ordinary processes to enact some special display. Serge Kahili King, Ph.D. in his book Urban Shaman: The Healing Rites Of Ceremony And Ritual (1990), writes "I know that the word ritual can be used to mean any set pattern of behavior that may be carried out consciously or unconsciously (i.e., smoking, driving, exercise), but I'm using it...to refer to consciously organized behavior intended to impress and influence." This is also how we will use the term for the purpose of this course.
Some of the most common rituals modern people enact include: going to church services, creating personal worship outlets, marriages, funerals, baby showers, graduations and the like. These events like most rituals are created for and carried out to be meaningful delineation's of pastimes during one's ordinary life. Similar to the way altars are set aside in order to be special, rituals stand apart to denote meaning.
Ritual is part of the human condition. Tom Driver explains in The Magic Of Ritual (1991), "All over the world people perform rituals; and, from the archaeological evidence, it looks as if they always have...Most people in our society are not educated to think that the performance of ritual is a characteristic of human beings as is speaking language and living in social groups; yet this is what the record seems to show."