The Psychology of Religious Practices - Worship

Although worship and prayer are intimately related activities of the soul, the sense of the numinous is more obvious in worship than it generally is in prayer. In worship, adoration replaces intercession, praise, petition. Man from the beginning of his planetary experience has had feelings of an indefinable Something which, whether it be associated with mana or some form of animism, totemism or nature, have found their communal expression in ritual patterns which, once established, admit of little variation. The communal nature of worship arose from the fact that the life of primitive man was so closely identified with the life of the group that his conscious activities were dominated by the collective psyche. ‘Religious acts are themselves an organic part of the activities of the social body. They are, in fact, social acts.’ 1 But it must be noted that these social acts are of a particular kind since they involve, as other social activities do not, a peculiarly vivid appreciation of the Sacred.