Main articles: Myth and ritual and Metatheories of religion in the social sciencesIn religion, a ritual can comprise the prescribed outward forms of performing the cultus, or cult, of a particular obs ...
Functionalism Main article: Structural functionalismNineteenth century "armchair anthropologists" were concerned with the basic question of how religion originated in human history. In the twentieth c ...
For simplicity's sake, the range of diverse rituals can be divided into categories with common characteristics. Rituals can fall in more than one genre.Rites of passage Main articles: Rites of passage ...
There are hardly any limits to the kind of actions that may be incorporated into a ritual. The rites of past and present societies have typically involved special gestures and words, recitation of fix ...
The English word "ritual" derives from the Latin ritualis, "that which pertains to rite (ritus)". In Roman juridical and religious usage, ritus was the proven way (mos) of doing something, or "correct ...
A ritual "is asequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence." Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of ...
