Which brings us, at length, to ritual. For it is in ritual-that is, consecrated behavior-that this conviction that religious conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated . It is i n some sort of ceremonial form-even if that. form be hardly more than the recitation of a myth, the consultation of an oracle, or the decoration of a grave-that the moods and motivations which sacred symbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of existence which they formulate for men meet and reinforce one another. In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world, producing thus that idiosyncratic transformation in one's sense of reality to which Santayana refers in my epigraph.
- Geertz Clifford
