It is not the case that primitive rituals are simply social projections of individual neuroses. Rather, ritual is an “attempt to create and maintain a particular culture, a particular set of assumptions by which experience is controlled” (158). The object of ritual is not to withdraw from reality but to engage with it by enacting social relations in a symbolic form: “[M]y impression is that those rituals which most explicitly credit corrupt matter with power are making the greatest effort to affirm the physical fullness of reality” (148). Oftentimes, the physical body is used as a symbol of the society. Rituals “work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body” (159).