# Ritual

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.

## Quotes

* There is perfection in the presence of the lady. Lagac thrives in abundance in the presence of Nance. She chose the cennu in her holy heart and seated Ur-Nance, the beloved lord of Lagac, on the throne. She gave the lofty sceptre to the shepherd. She adorned Gudea with all her precious divine powers. The shepherd chosen by her in her holy heart, Gudea, the ruler of Lagac, placed the lyre Cow-of-Abundance among the tigi drums and placed the holy balaj drum at its side. While sacred songs and harmonious songs were performed before her, the kintur instrument praised the temple. The chief musician played the ibex horn for her: the song 'The house has been granted powers from the abzu', the sacred song of the house of Sirara about the princely powers was performed.
** A hymn to Nanshe, late 3rd millennium BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
* Ritual provides coherence and significance to traditional narrative as it does to traditional life. Ritual can be defined as a procedure whose purpose is to transform someone or something from one condition or state to another. While most rituals are related in some way to communitas, not all have social relationship and communication as their purpose. Their communitarian aspect derives simply from the nature of the tribal community, which is assumed to be intact as long as the ritual or sacred center of the community is intact. [...] It is not so much an idea of community as it is a tangible object seen as possessing nonrational powers to unite or bind diverse elements into a community, a psychic and spiritual whole. Thus a healing ritual changes a person from an isolated (diseased) state to one of incorporation (health); a solstice ritual turns the sun’s path from a northerly direction to a southerly one or vice versa; a hunting ritual turns the hunted animal’s thoughts away from the individual consciousness of physical life to total immersion in collective consciousness. In tribal traditions beings such as certain people and beasts, the sun, the earth, and sacred plants like corn are in a constant state of transformation, and that transformative process engenders the ritual cycle of dying, birth, growth, ripening, dying, and rebirth. In the transformation from one state to another, the prior state or condition must cease to exist. It must die.
** Paula Gunn Allen, on the rituals of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Beacon Press. 1 September 1992. ISBN 978-0-8070-4617-3. Chapter Two
* Ritual-based cultures are founded on the primary assumption that the universe is alive and that it is supernaturally ordered. That is, they do not perceive economic, social, or political elements as central; rather, they organize their lives around a sacred, metaphysical principle. If they see a cause-and-effect relationship between events, they would ascribe the cause to the operation of nonmaterial energies or forces. They perceive the universe not as blind or mechanical, but as aware and organic. Thus ritual—organized activity that strives to manipulate or direct nonmaterial energies toward some larger goal—forms the foundation of tribal culture. It is also the basis of cultural artifacts such as crafts, agriculture, hunting, architecture, art, music, and literature. These all take shape and authority from the ritual tradition. Literature, which includes ceremony, myth, tale, and song, is the primary mode of the ritual tradition. The tribal rituals necessarily include a verbal element, and contemporary novelists draw from that verbal aspect in their work.
** Paula Gunn Allen, on the rituals of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Beacon Press. 1 September 1992. ISBN 978-0-8070-4617-3. Chapter Two
* A prayer couched in the words of the soul, is far more powerful than any ritual.
** Paulo Coelho, Brida
* If theater is ritual, then dance is too... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.
** Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello
* Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.
** Neil Gaiman, Stardust
* Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.
** Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
* Leopards break in¬to the tem¬ple and drink all the sac¬ri¬fi¬cial ves¬sels dry; it keeps hap¬pen¬ing; in the end, it can be cal¬cu¬lat¬ed in ad¬vance and is in¬cor¬po¬rat¬ed in¬to the rit¬ual.
** Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms
* Ritual. One more gaudy emptiness in place of the real thing. One more hope gone.
** Nancy Kress, Words Like Pale Stones, in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (eds.) Black Thorn, White Rose (1994), ISBN 0-380-77129-2, p. 25
* Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.
** Anne Lamott
* Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
** Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
* Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
** Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
* Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.
** Terry Pratchett, Discworld, Pyramids (1989).
* May the another (one part me) still stay repeating the news of the relatives and acquaintances fulfilling formalities of wellbeing embroiling in the phatic– where? what? how? participating in all of sixteen rituals and birthdays.
** Suman Pokhrel, Song of Soul
* A daughter who respects you while you’re alive is far better than a son who performs the rites and rituals after you’re gone.
** Sanu Sharma, Daughter
* The far-from-original point I will try to make now should seem obvious: There is an unsettling similarity between the rituals of the obsessive-compulsive and the rituals of the observantly religious.
** Robert Sapolsky, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (New York: A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 263.
* And in the belly of this story the rituals and the ceremony are still growing.
** Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. Viking Press. 1977. ISBN 978-0-670-20986-6.
* Making tea is a ritual that stops the world from falling in on you.
** Jonathan Stroud, The Creeping Shadow
* Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
** Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

## See also

* Baptism
* Ceremony
* Chant
* Festival
* Libation
* Rite
* Ritual purification
* Worship

## External links

* Encyclopedic article on Ritual on Wikipedia
* The dictionary definition of ritual on Wiktionary
* Media related to Rituals on Wikimedia Commons
* Authority control: WorldCat search