Introduction to This Book

A ritual is the prototype of a structured script, of a scripted action (McCauley and Lawson 1999). Likewise, a script is a cognitive representation of a stereotypical and predetermined sequence that defines a known situation (Schank and Abelson 1975). The script must subsequently be executed frequently and consistently in order to become a tradition (Staal 1979). The instance of each implementation, however—that is, the act of representing the script every time—does not constitute the ritual, but rather an experience of its implementation. Thus, the ritual is not constituted in the collection of these individual experiences but in the generic structure of the knowledge they define (McCauley and Lawson 1999). This sequence of actions generally lacks a specific meaning, although one is given by the social functions and the outside references accompanying it. In other words, the meaning is external to the script and applied to syntax and is not semantically intrinsic to the structure (Staal 1996). Furthermore, not every element of the ritual must have meaning, as established by Eliade (1998), but the whole structure must (Strenski 1991). Even so, each element incorporates meaning or not according to the person implementing it (Eliade 1957).