I was recently asked to give a talk on the subject of “The Power and Purpose of Ritual,” and I thought a good place to start that talk would be considering what ritual is in the first place.

Viewed in the broadest possible context, ritual can be understood as being a set of repeated and structured actions that alters the internal and/or external state of an individual or group. Many things we may not think of as ritual fall under this umbrella. Shaking hands can be viewed as a form of ritual, as can giving a toast. And it’s not even limited to human beings.

Elephants, for example, will stand vigil over deceased members of the herd and may revisit the death site for a period of years. Indeed, rituals pervade our everyday lives so thoroughly that we don’t even recognize most of them as such. That cup of coffee you have every morning before you leave for work? That’s a morning ritual. Organizing your desk every Friday afternoon before you leave work for the weekend? That’s a ritual too. These little rituals of habit help us structure our lives and, to a large extent, are unlikely to be consciously ritualized but rather simply become “things that we do” or “the way we do things.”

This may not seem like such a big deal, but when we understand the extent to which they are present in our lives, the power and purpose of these ritualized behaviors becomes clear.

That’s ritual writ small, of course, and as Masons we are more interested in ritual writ large—in particular with Masonic ritual, and more specifically with Masonic ritual ceremony. If a ritual in its smallest and most fundamental form is a prescribed or systematized set of behaviors, what you get when you put a bunch of these rituals together into a formalized public or semipublic event is a ceremony.

So there’s ritual and ceremony, but we also refer to rites, as in “rites, light and benefits.” This term is a bit slippery as it can be used to describe the specific prescribed actions—a.k.a. rituals—that take place within a ceremony, such as the so-called rite of divestiture when candidates set aside all metallic objects or, more obviously, the Apron Presentation; or it can describe the body of ritual and ceremonial customs practiced by a denomination or group, such as the York and Scottish Rites.

Following this logic our Standard Work and Lectures in the Grand Lodge of New York can be described as a rite made up of various ceremonies, each of which is comprised of various rituals.