Ritual purification in the context of "Lustral basin"

A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment, regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. Traditionally associated with gestures, words, or revered objects, rituals also occur in non-human species, such as elephant mourning or corvid object-leaving. They may be prescribed by tradition, including religious practices, and are often characterized by formalism, traditionalism, rule-governance, and performance.

Rituals are a feature of all known human societies. They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages, funerals and more. Even common actions like hand-shaking and saying "hello" may be termed as rituals.

Wuduʾ (Arabic: الوضوء, romanized: al-wuḍūʼ, lit. 'ablution' [wuˈdˤuːʔ] ) is the Islamic procedure for cleansing parts of the body, a type of ritual purification, or ablution. The steps of wudu are washing the hands, rinsing the mouth and nose, washing the face, then the forearms, then wiping the head, the ears, then washing or wiping the feet, while doing them in order without any big breaks between them.

Wudu is an important part of ritual purity in Islam that is governed by fiqh, which specifies hygienical jurisprudence and defines the rituals that constitute it. Ritual purity is called tahara.

Water is considered a purifier in most religions.

A hammam (Arabic: حمّام, romanized: ḥammām), also often called a Turkish bath by Westerners, is a type of steam bath or a place of public bathing associated with the Islamic world. It is a prominent feature in the culture of the Muslim world and was inherited from the model of the Roman thermae. Muslim bathhouses or hammams were historically found across the Middle East, North Africa, al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia, i.e. Spain and Portugal), Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and in Southeastern Europe (notably Balkans and Hungary) under Ottoman rule.

In Islamic cultures the significance of the hammam was both religious and civic: it provided for the needs of ritual ablutions but also provided for general hygiene in an era before private plumbing and served other social functions such as offering a gendered meeting place for men and for women. Archeological remains attest to the existence of bathhouses in the Islamic world as early as the Umayyad period (7th–8th centuries) and their importance has persisted up to modern times. Their architecture evolved from the layout of Roman and Greek bathhouses and featured a regular sequence of rooms: an undressing room, a cold room, a warm room, and a hot room. Heat was produced by furnaces which provided hot water and steam, while smoke and hot air was channeled through conduits under the floor.

Ghusl (Arabic: غسل ġusl, IPA: [ˈɣʊsl]) is an Arabic term that means the full-body ritual purification which is mandatory before the performance of various Islamic activities and prayers. For any Muslim, it is performed after sexual intercourse (i.e. it is fardh), before Friday prayer and prayers for Islamic holidays, before entering the ihram in preparation for Hajj, after having lost consciousness, and after formally converting to Islam. Sunni Muslims also perform the ablution before Salat al-Tawba "Prayer of Repentance".

Ghusl is often translated as "full ablution", as opposed to the "partial ablution" or wudu وضوء that Muslims perform after lesser impurities such as urination, defecation, flatulence, deep sleep, and light bleeding (depending on the madhhab).

Misogi (禊) is a Japanese Shinto practice of ritual purification by washing the entire body. Misogi is related to another Shinto purification ritual, harae. Thus, both are collectively referred to as misogiharae (禊祓).

The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by King George I on 18 May 1725. Recipients of the Order are usually senior military officers or senior civil servants, and the monarch awards it on the advice of His Majesty's Government. The name derives from an elaborate medieval ceremony for preparing a candidate to receive his knighthood, of which ritual bathing (as a symbol of purification) was an element. While not all knights went through such an elaborate ceremony, knights so created were known as "knights of the Bath".

George I constituted the Knights of the Bath as a regular military order. He did not revive the order, which did not previously exist, in the sense of a body of knights governed by a set of statutes and whose numbers were replenished when vacancies occurred.

Candlemas, also known as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the Feast of the Holy Encounter, is a Christian feast day commemorating the presentation of Jesus at the Temple by Joseph and Mary. It is based upon the account of the presentation of Jesus in Luke 2:22–40.

According to the Old Testament rules in Leviticus 12, a woman was to be purified by presenting a lamb as a burnt offering, and either a young pigeon or dove as sin offering, 33 days after a boy's circumcision. The feast falls on 2 February, which is traditionally the 40th day of and the conclusion of the Christmas–Epiphany season.