Roy Rappaport's theory

At the heart of ritual – its "atom" so to speak – is the relationship of performers to their own performances of invariant sequences of acts and utterances which they did not encode.

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Rappaport’s book does a more rigorous job with a lot more precision.

I believe he gets quite far in assembling evidence and arguments in support of his stated objective below:

I will argue that the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers logically entails the establishment of convention, the sealing of social contract, the construction of the integrated conventional orders we shall call Logoi, the investment of whatever it encodes with morality, the construction of time and eternity; the representation of a paradigm of creation, the generation of the concept of the sacred and the sanctification of conventional order, the generation of theories of the occult, the evocation of numinous experience, the awareness of the divine, the grasp of the holy, and the construction of orders of meaning transcending the semantic

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Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology Book 110) by Roy A. Rappaport⁠

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