I like this quote which I found as the opener to a paper called “Ritual and the Symbolic Function: A Summary of Biogenetic Structural Theory“. The quote itself, however, is attributed to Victor Turner’s, From Ritual to Theatre:

I like to think of ritual essentially as performance, enactment, not primarily as rules or rubrics. The rules “frame” the ritual process, but the ritual process transcends its frame. A river needs banks or it will be a dangerous flood, but banks without a river epitomize aridity.