Rituals

272 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

The formal rites of religious and esoteric practice: sacraments, initiations, calendrical observances, rites of passage and consecrations. Each entry records what the rite consists of, the tradition that performs it and what it is held to accomplish. Rites with similar shapes recur across unrelated traditions, which the correspondences here make visible without implying a common origin.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 272
What Defines This Grouping: Formal, patterned rites performed on set occasions - sacraments, initiations, rites of passage, calendrical observances - as distinct from the disciplines sustained over time, which the atlas treats as practices. Ritual is the most heavily theorised category in the study of religion, and the line it draws is analytic: no tradition sorts its own acts into these classes. 1

Origins

Whose Classification This Is: The modern comparative category was assembled in the nineteenth century out of Protestant polemic against ceremony and evolutionist anthropology's myth-and-rite debate. Its present shape owes most to van Gennep's rites of passage (1909), Turner's liminality (1969) and Bell's six genres of ritual action (1997). These are scholars' frames, not the traditions' own. 1

Status

Standing as a Comparative Category: A standard analytic category in the study of religion 1

Sources

Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions Catherine Bell, 1997

Learn More

The Formal Rites

A ritual is a formal, patterned rite performed on an occasion: a sacrament, an initiation, a calendrical observance, a rite of passage, a consecration. This category gathers the set rites of religious and esoteric practice, recording for each what the rite consists of, the tradition that performs it, and what it is held to accomplish.

Rites tend to be prescribed and repeatable, done in a set way, at set times or on set occasions, and much of a tradition's life is carried in them: birth, initiation, marriage and death are marked by rite in nearly every tradition, as are the turning-points of the year.

What Rites Do

Traditions understand their rites in different ways, as effecting a real change (a sacrament that conveys grace, an initiation that alters status), as commemorating an event, as maintaining a cosmic or social order, or as a means of purification or protection, and the entries record the tradition's own understanding.

The rituals group by function (initiatory, calendrical, funerary, purification, sacrificial, devotional and the rest), so a reader can compare how different traditions mark the same passage. The ongoing disciplines of religious life, as opposed to set rites, are treated as practices.