section_path: Genres
section_name: Genres
paragraph_text: Genres
  
  For simplicity's sake, the range of diverse rituals can be divided into categories with common characteristics, generally falling into one three major categories:
  
  However, rituals can fall in more than one category or genre, and may be grouped in a variety of other ways. For example, the anthropologist Victor Turner writes:
  
  Rituals may be seasonal,... or they may be contingent, held in response to an individual or collective crisis.... Other classes of rituals include divinatory rituals; ceremonies performed by political authorities to ensure the health and fertility of human beings, animals, and crops in their territories; initiation into priesthoods devoted to certain deities, into religious associations, or into secret societies; and those accompanying the daily offering of food and libations to deities or ancestral spirits or both.