I have used the term “liturgical order” to refer not only to individual rituals, but to the more or less invariant sequences of rituals that make up cycles and other series as well. My terminology differs from Van Gennep's (1960 [1909]), but my usage is similar to his, for he too was as much concerned with such sequences as he was with single rituals.

I refer to rituals and sequences of rituals as “liturgical orders” because I take them to be orders in virtually every sense of the word. First, they constitute orders in the sense of such phrases as “the moral order” or “the economic order” or “the natural order” – more or less coherent domains within which generally commensurable processes are governed by common principles and rules. As such they represent and maintain enduring relations among the elements they include, keeping them “in order,” and thus establishing or constituting order as opposed to disorder or chaos. In so doing they may also distinguish orders of persons, for instance, those “in orders,” such as Benedictine monks, from others. These orders may be ranked, and rank or hierarchy is implicit in some usages. Architects, for instance, speak of elaborate arches composed of four or five orders, one above the other. Further, inasmuch as liturgical orders are more or less invariant sequences encoded by persons other than the performers their performance entails conformity.