Main articles: Myth and ritual and Metatheories of religion in the social sciencesIn religion, a ritual can comprise the prescribed outward forms of performing the cultus, or cult, of a particular obs ...
Functionalism Main article: Structural functionalismNineteenth century "armchair anthropologists" were concerned with the basic question of how religion originated in human history. In the twentieth c ...
For simplicity's sake, the range of diverse rituals can be divided into categories with common characteristics. Rituals can fall in more than one genre.Rites of passage Main articles: Rites of passage ...
There are hardly any limits to the kind of actions that may be incorporated into a ritual. The rites of past and present societies have typically involved special gestures and words, recitation of fix ...
The English word "ritual" derives from the Latin ritualis, "that which pertains to rite (ritus)". In Roman juridical and religious usage, ritus was the proven way (mos) of doing something, or "correct ...
A ritual "is asequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence." Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of ...
Bahá'í Main articles: Bahá'í literature and Progressive revelation (Bahá'í)'Revelation writing': The first draft of a tablet of Bahá'u'lláhThe Báb, Bahá'u'lláh and `Abdu'l-Bahá received th ...
Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, take it as a matter of faith that God exists, and in some way can reveal his will to people. Members of those faiths distinguish between ...
Some people hold that God can communicate with man in a way that gives direct, propositional content: This is termed verbal revelation. Orthodox Judaism and traditional Christianity hold that the firs ...
Some religions have religious texts which they view as divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired. For instance, Orthodox Jews believe that the Torah was received from Yahweh on biblical Mount Si ...
The phenomenon of prophecy is not well understood in psychology research literature. Psychiatrist and neurologist Arthur Deikman describes the phenomenon as an "intuitive knowing, a type of perception ...
According to skeptics, many apparently fulfilled prophecies can be explained as coincidences (possibly aided by the prophecy's own vagueness), or that some prophecies were actually invented after the ...
Esoteric prophecy has been claimed for, but not by, Michel de Nostredame popularly referred to as Nostradamus who claimed to be a converted Christian. It is known that he had suffered several tragedie ...
There exists a problem in verifying most Native American prophecy, in that they remain primarily an oral tradition, and thus there is no way to cite references of where writings have been committed to ...
In the Torah, prophecy often consisted of a conditioned warning by God of the consequences should the society, specific communities, or their leaders not adhere to Torah's instructions in the time con ...
