Many 'ancient' royal ceremonies in Britain date from the late 1800s
Rituals turn up everywhere, from coronations and funerals to a simple handshake, and even elephants and crows perform them. Their power often rests on a claim to great age that is not strictly true: historians have shown that much British royal pageantry, sold as a thousand years old, took its present form in the late nineteenth century.
A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions that changes the state of a person, a group or its surroundings, whether or not anyone consciously grasps its meaning. Every known human society has them, including sacraments, rites of passage, oaths, inaugurations, weddings and purification ceremonies. The English word, recorded from 1570, comes from Latin ritus, the proven or customary way of doing something, and may be related to the Vedic Sanskrit rta, the proper order of the cosmos. Psychologists also use the term for repetitive acts that ward off anxiety, which can be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Catherine Bell identified several hallmarks: formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacred symbolism and performance. Invariance depends on bodily discipline, such as monks praying and meditating together in unison to shape their moods. Rules can reach unexpected places; in most societies, war itself was historically hemmed in by ritual limits on acceptable ways to fight.
Maurice Bloch focused on speech. Ritual confines participants to a restricted code, with fixed vocabulary, intonation and order, so a leader's words become more style than substance. Because such language leaves no room to argue, it encourages compliance; Bloch concluded that it makes rebellion impossible and leaves revolution as the only alternative. Ritual therefore tends to prop up existing hierarchies.
Tradition matters more as a claim than as a fact. An American Thanksgiving dinner is informal yet points back to the Puritan settlers. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger called many such customs invented traditions, the monarchy's ceremonies among them, partly reviving medieval forms that had lapsed. Symbols work similarly: anthropologist Sherry Ortner treats a national flag as standing for sweeping ideas such as freedom or national superiority, far beyond a simple marker of a country.
Source: Ritual
