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Ceremonial behaviorism as distinguished from actions that are rationally motivated by concrete thinking, or from those that are automatically caused by physiological stimuli and reactions, might be said to embody the dramatization of certain superstitious beliefs, mystical understandings, vague religious doctrines, clouded traditions and unformulated philosophical ideas that appear to obtain in or even obsess that mind of man, or that precinct of the mind that has been termed by some the Unconscious.
The writer not being a psychoanalyst, and not having more than a very limited knowledge of the literature pertaining to such studies, is almost certain to make use of some terms such as the Unconscious in a manner that will be loose and technically incorrect.
Ceremonial behaviorism where it is based on unconscious mentation, as opposed to rationalistic thinking, can be analyzed for its meaning with little trouble, and the various steps or rites in a ceremony can be explained rather meticulously, and elucidated sequentially so that the underlying thought or philosophy can be brought to light. On the other hand, when a ceremony has been consciously invented and staged as a ballet revue, a political meeting, a street opening function, or as a mortgage burning celebration, there will rarely be anything in the ceremony other than the obvious and literal, both in actions and in words.
The ruling ideas that are dramatized in ceremonial behaviorism are those of death, burial, and resurrection. These three basic motives commonly find expression in greatly varied symbolization that has reference to coition, gestation, and birth. This makes for a three-fold masking of the deeper meaning in ceremonials, for coition is supposed to be a suicidal act, and is therefore equated to or is symbolical of death. Likewise, burial and gestation are paired, and are surrogates of each other; and lastly resurrection and birth make an equivalent pair of experiences. Since coition is taken to be suici