Remember that experiment with monkeys where every newcomer gets beaten? I think all rituals are like that: most participants have no clue why the rituals are being held and why they're carried out in such particular manners.
Yes to all of you, but I raised the point that the strongest rituals, being archetypes, are remnants of instinctive behaviors that once increased the chance of survival.
The aquatic ape theory suggests that during the period when we (hypothetically) spent most of our waking hours in bodies of water, where the competition is less fierce and...
Or because we emerge from the womb during our original birth into the world, and these rituals hearken back to that? Submergence in water, abandonment of self-will to the control of another, and then energence back into the dry, bright, and self-controlled life of the everyday.
Certainly stylized into ritual for other reasons (a la the monkey experiment), but the design seems purpseful, at least for the intelectual connection to starting one's life anew.
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