Rituals are moments of designation. The very nature of ritual is to separate some transition from normal daily life. Our human need to create religion seems beyond question, Roy Rappaport begins his book Ritual And Religion In The Making Of Humanity (1999), "...humanity could not have emerged from its pre- or proto-human condition...in the absence of what we, in a common sense way call religion...The absolute ubiquity of religion, however defined, supports the attribution of such profound significance to it." Religion can only become overt with the enactment of ritual. The inner landscape of belief can only be witnessed outside of the self through enactment. In the book Spirals: A Study In Symbol, Myth And Ritual (1979), Walter L. Brenneman, Jr. writes, "Ritual plays the role of an instinctual action and myth of the psychic image which apprehends that action. Myth, then, could be understood as archetypal image expressed in word, and ritual, as archetypal image expressed in gesture. Both are stylized, abstracted and iconified from the life-world and thus function as models..."

In the human personal quest for peace of mind and spirit throughout life, while using the maps of religion and spirituality, rituals become the milestones and signs along the way. Through times of celebration, times of challenge, and times of growth and change, ritual allows specific set aside moments that become helpful because of the dynamics of our psyches which embrace ritual. In the text Religious And Social Ritual (1996), edited by Michael B. Aune and Valerie DeMarinis, Richard K. Payne writes, "It is a widespread popular prejudice that, unlike science, ritual is not effective...ritual tended to be assigned to the lower, more primitive level called magic. The usual explanation is that magic's failure led on the one hand to science as a true technological mastery of the natural world, and on the other hand to religion as a true spiritual relation to the transcendent. If such a view of ritual were true, the advance of the science and secular institutions should have led to the disappearance of ritual... On the contrary, ritual remains a part of modern society... If we do see people as fundamentally pragmatic, then the retention of ritual would indicate that ritual continues to serve some useful function in contemporary society..." In other words ritual works, and is natural, Peggy Papp in the Forward to Rituals In Psychotherapy: Transition And Continuity (1993), by Onno van der Hart, writes, "Throughout history mankind has used rituals and ceremonies to mark the passage from one state of experience to another. It is an innate characteristic of human beings to dramatize important experience in this fashion."

Explaining exactly why altars and rituals work for people could fill many books. Suffice it to say that they both enable us to feel connected and contented on some deep level. As part of the learning process of this course the student is expected to create an altar of sorts, and to conduct a ritual. This will allow the truths within each student to be added to the many other personal truths that explain why they work.

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