All rituals, religious, celebratory, or personal, have symbols, actions, and meanings that gather to them over time. Costumes, songs, chants, dances, and all sorts of qualiadelic paraphernalia cling to them, seemingly making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
But at the beginning, ritual doesn’t have all that costuming and paraphernalia. It is just a simple three part pattern of behavior: a beginning, middle, and end, free of accoutrements.
We love our rituals. However, the trappings that cling to them often become mere sentimental knick-knacks. Clutter. We all know that from personal experience, and we ought to know that we should be less attached to the stuff and more attached to ritualing itself.
Sometimes we have to leave all that junk behind, throw it away, and start over again, running our rituals naked.