"All ritual takes ordinary things and makes them extraordinary. The means it uses are everywhere the same. Whether it's an African initiation ceremony in Botswana or a Jewish storytelling session in Los Angeles, ritual sets the ordinary apart by its use of language, gesture, costume, posture--sensuous things. And those sensuous things are very persuasive and invite us to suspend disbelief, exactly as we do in a theater; ritual induces the same willing suspension of disbelief. The 'as if' fades away, and we enter into the story, and it becomes, then, something that has its own reality; an imaginary life, an imagined reality, comes to life and its our own."

Notes:

1. Barbara Myerhoff, "The Ritual Telling of the Great Story that Shapes Individual Lives," transcript of lecture, ts, box 55, folder 5, Barbara Myerhoff Papers, U of Southern California, 6.