It requires that you be subjectively pulled into it, that you experience, that you die and are resurrected with the hero or the heroine, that you undergo the great betrayals, that you take the road of trials, that are part of the great meeting with the beloved of the soul, and you do this experientially. You can do this in a group too, because there's just more energy in a group. Then the myth starts to tell you all kinds of things that it kept under wraps while it was just looked at and studied objectively. It seems that we must have these rituals, whether they are ancient rituals or just things that you do. Many of them seem somewhat archetypal.
Rituals actually key off parts of the brain.
The old reptilian brain is a ritual brain, and it needs that level of repetition to go on to the next stage. I went to 29 schools before I was 12 years old, because my father was a writer for the Bob Hope show, and we were always on the road. What kept me more or less sane is that regardless of whether I went to school one day in Bemidji, Minnesota, and Biloxi, Mississippi, the next, in school we always had the pledge to the flag, singing of the anthem, and collecting the milk money. That was ritual. Many rituals in America are rituals around sports.