So what goes into creating effective rituals? This thread is to develop general knowledge of considerations for ritual creation.

I'll start it off by throwing out a few ideas, and these can be shot down or added to as you please.

Not in any particular order of importance:

(1) Intent of the ritual. Each ritual needs to have some focus; it needs to fulfill some need or other. Too many bad rituals fail because they are written for no other purpose than for the sake of writing a ritual. When the purpose of the ritual is clear, its construction will be helped, and its use assured. Examples of ritual intent include (but please add to this list);
(A) Initiation (baptisms, confirmations, grade conferrals, holy orders, rites of passage, puberty rites, start of retreats...)
(B) Purification (baptisms, banishings, cleaning oneself/one's environment of disruptive influences/forces/things, re-entering society after some event which may be accretive of things we dont wish to keep, but which have to be encountered, confessions, atonements...)
(C) Celebration (New year celebrations, return of the Sun, wedding feasts, general social events...)
(D) Union with the Divine

(2) Underlying Cosmology
This would be the context in which the rituals take place; it can include anything from the idea that people need to be purified after childbirth, to the idea that the earth is a goddess with a unified spirit, to belief in the collective unconscious, space aliens, or the divinity of Bob. Most rituals have some underlying assumptions, overt, covert, intrinsic or extrinsic, and its important that these be worked out explicitly - although their inclusion in the actual rituals themselves may be better off remaining implicit (even unknown to the majority of the celebrants).

(3) The existence of Sacred Texts as a source for inclusion into the language of the rituals. For example; Thelemites use the Book of the Law in the construction of their rituals, Christians use quotes from the Bible, frequently Psalms, as texts in the ritual, and so on. Apart from being a handy source of clips to insert, the inclusion of sacred texts serves to provide an element of Authenticity into the rituals. A feeling that the ritual isnt just a made-up ceremony, but rather that its based on something deeper.

The question then comes; which sacred texts to use: Should we
(A) Use prexisting texts from (i) one religion (or other source, such as the cthulu stories), (ii) many religions, syncretically, or
(B) Create new texts ab initio.
(C) For the sake of completeness, (A) and (B).

(4) Physical actions which will create effects on the participant.
These include the use of various drugs (wine, coffee... .....) meditation, dancing, drumming in certain ways, sexuality, sensory enhancement/deprivation, strange environments (Moonlight naked in the forest, robed in temples before a fire...); bells to draw the attention at important moments, the use of repetitive texts and actions, and so on.

So what else is required to create an effective ritual? Feel free to add more sections (1,2,3,4...) or more subsections (A,B,C) or examples.

Would it be useful to create a wiki for this purpose?