Some rituals are mere formalities, but there are others which are at the same time essential; weddings belong to the latter class. The following reasons will confirm that they are of the essential type, to be made public by ritual and formally celebrated. 1. A wedding puts an end to the earlier state which began with the engagement; this was primarily a state of the spirit, and the beginning of the subsequent state to be introduced by the marriage, which is a state at once of spirit and of body. For the spirit then enters into the body and acts at that level. Accordingly on that day the bridegroom and bride abandon their engaged state and name, and assume the state and name of husband and wife and become bedfellows. 2. A wedding is the introduction and entry into a new state, which is to make a young woman a wife and the young man a husband, so that the two of them become one flesh. This happens when love unites them at the lowest level. I showed in earlier chapters that marriage really changes a young woman into a wife and a young man into a husband; and also that marriage unites two people into one human form, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh. 3. A wedding is the starting point which leads to the complete separation of sexual love from conjugial love. This happens when through the opportunity for full union the love of one partner becomes restricted and devoted to the love of the other. 4.* It looks as if a wedding is merely the gap between these two states, so that it is a mere formality which can be omitted. But a wedding contains this essential element, that the new state just described is then to be entered upon by a compact, and the parties must declare their consent in the presence of witnesses, and it must be consecrated by a priest, as well as the other means which firmly establish it. Since weddings contain this essential element, and since only after this is a marriage lawful, weddings are therefore also celebrated in the heavens (see 21 and then 27-41 above). * This section is numbered 5 in the original.