“The stories that provide us with meaning and identity are all fictional, but humans need to believe in them. It’s obvious why humans want to believe the story, but how do they actually believe? How do we make the story feel real? Priests and shamans discovered the answer to this question thousands of years ago: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real. The essence of ritual is the magical spell “Hocus-pocus, X is Y!”
