Ritual

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

A ritual is a prescribed formal act, usually religious in nature, that is carried out or performed for a specific reason. There are many types of ritual, and these include those for worship, rites of passage and so forth. Rituals may also be a series of preliminary actions necessary for the achievement of another thing, such as the rites that some carry out before the harvesting of plants, or the manner of approach when beseeching aid from a holy well etc.

Ritual derives from the word rite, meaning "religious observance" or "custom", which is speculated to come from the Proto Indo-European root *rei, meaning "to count or number", thereby identifying rites with actions carried out a specific number of times or on specific dates/times of day.