What is the role of ritual? Have we moved beyond the need for such ceremony and tradition? Or are rituals necessary to a sense of connection and deeper meaning?

From the royal engagement to athletes kneeling in protest at Trump’s America, ritual, ceremony and tradition can both bolster and subvert authority. Yet Foucault argued that “We must uncover rituals for what they are; completely arbitrary things”. Wittgenstein went further: “Everything ritualistic…immediately turns rotten.”

In a largely secular society, many dismiss rituals as superstitious and outdated. Yet traditions and ceremony are far from absent in our daily lives. Funerals, weddings, the gift-giving of Christmas, the hedonism of music festivals, even the pomp and ceremony of Westminster politics: it seems rituals still play an important part in modern life. .

Are such rites really irrational and superficial? Is the poetry and magic of ritual essential to create a sense of belonging and meaning, secular or sacred? Might it be true that, as Shakespeare said, “The sauce to meat is ceremony; meeting were bare without it”? Or is ritual a hangover from archaic traditions and an accessory to dogma?