Ritual is active wishful thinking — acting out desired outcomes

Evidence

And rituals were more than balms. They were also directed toward altering dire circumstances, because the essence of ritual is wishful thinking in action. We act out what we want to happen. Everyone does this quite naturally, as when we stamp on an imaginary brake pedal while riding in a car driven by a teenager accelerating toward a stop sign, or lean toward the center of a bowling alley lane to coax the gutter-bound ball to follow suit. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 301

Categorization

• DEFINE: The essence-of-ritual formulation, grounded in universal bodily habits everyone recognizes.
• XREF: connects to: Adolescent daydreaming is a narcissistic compensation for felt inadequacy; The wish-fulfilling device doubles as the obscurity of other minds — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 618; Ceremony functions as a deliberate mnemonic device for sustaining the gift ethic — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1424