Jenett
October 7th, 2003, 01:20 PM
(This thread brought to you by a bit of discussion in the Ecclectic + Traditional thread)
I know one thing that people sometimes have problems with (and heck, I have problems with it myself) is figuring out what to put in as the 'working' part of a ritual. So I thought I'd start this, and share some thoughts, and some stuff I've done (and the group I work with has done) at various times, and anyone who wants can chime in with questions/other ideas/etc. I've tried to suggest stuff that works both for people on their own, and for groups (though large group ritual (more than 20 people or so) has some specific issues I'm not getting into here.)
First, if you're interested in looking at *why* different bits of ritual might be done, or some different ways to do them, let me start by recommending Deborah Lipp's book "Elements of Ritual" - I don't necessarily agree with her end conclusions in some places, but I think she does an excellent job of explaining a number of different possibilities and ways to think about why you might do certain ritual steps (or do them in specific ways or in a given order.)
Second, a quick bit of background: I'm an initiate in a local tradition to me (whose style loosely and quickly is best described as ecclectic Alexandrian: we like formal ritual structure, including ritual drama, and we have a formal training system). Part of that training includes, for initiates, helping to write ritual - both assisting with planning Sabbats, and writing Esbat rituals, roughly in rotation. (I've come up with 2 so far, and am currently thinking about what will probably be our December full moon: there's something else in the works for November).
In other words, I don't have huge amounts of experience with this, yet, but I do have some, and I definitely struggle with some of the "What do we do in the 'insert working here' part of the ritual"
These suggestions do come from a Wiccan perspective, but I think a lot of the ideas are adaptable to other paths - or at least might give you some ideas of other options.
So, what can you do in a ritual?
1) You can do a magical working - most of what the group I work with does are things for self-improvement in various senses. In the last few months, we've done charms to help bring us information we need to make decisions about goals. We've done magical workings to reflect on the harvest, and what we've harvested this year in our lives, and what we might want to look for next year. We've done a short meditation followed by making an amulet (out of no-bake clay: it hardens after you let it sit for a few days) that represented what we did. Protection, blessing, and similar charms/amulets/talismans also fall in this category. If we've made something, it's generally charged by a circle dance and chanting, but there are other methods out there.
One note about magical workings and groups: you want the goals to be something everyone can participate in. Not everyone may have the same need for money or romance or something else specific - if you make it so the magical working is focused on an individual goal designated by the person, it tends to work out better (and avoids some ethical issues.)
2) Guided meditations: you can do these on your own, if you record them first, or if you're working with a group, you can have someone read them. You can write your own, or there's a number in various sources - Yasmine Galenorn has a couple of books which have them. (Trancing the Witch's Wheel which has a decent selection, has been re-released as Magical Meditations - from her description, it's slightly edited, but probably not enough to make it worth picking up one copy over another.)
Some people really like them. Others really dislike them, or don't get much out of them. When picking a meditation, it's also very useful to keep in mind that not everyone is strong at image visualisation. (I, for example, tend to do a lot better with guided meditations if there's a lot of spatial and tactile information - what kind of sounds I hear, what the ground under my feet feels like, etc.)
It's also good not to make it too long, if you're working with people who aren't familiar with them. 15-20 minutes is probably fine.
3) Other kinds of meditation: the last ritual I wrote up explored sensory meditation and focused on the four elements - I picked four pieces of music that all had meaningful lyrics to the element in question, and put those on, while handing around things for people to smell, taste, touch, and so on. Some of making that work involved knowing the people who would likely be there (including that there weren't food allergies I needed to worry about) but it was a nice low-key ritual that a lot of people found very thought provoking.
(Coming up with the details for this one, however, took me about 15-20 hours of work, and about $25 for materials. I'd definitely do it again, but it's rather labor intensive. You could obviously do simpler versions, though, such as just focusing on one element.)
4) Thematic stuff: you might spend a series of rituals focusing on each element in turn, a particular season, different things in your lives (work, family, friends), or other things of this kind.
I've been toying with the idea of picking a word (such as 'corn', 'wine', 'moon', 'sun', and some more conceptual stuff, like 'sacrifice') and doing some personal work with them each week/month (my current idea is to pick a word each week, and do some general research - etymology of the word, folklore I find relating to it, symbolism, etc. Time period variable, of course, though I want to map the words to the concepts of the Wheel of the Year that the group I work in follows.) and then save the results, and add to them when I find new information.
But then - and this is the relevant part - I'd be able to go back to that information, and use it as the seed of a possible ritual theme. I'm hoping that if I do this over time, I'll end up with a lot of material that might spark new ideas and that I can use to get me started.
5) Specific changes in your life or the people you're working with: initiations, dedications, rites of passage, ritual work to help you find a new job or give thanks for the one you've got, relationship changes.
6) Seasonal celebrations. These can include sort of general ones (harvest, planting, winter), or, if you use something like the Wheel of the Year, you might focus on a given bit of mythology. For example, Pesephone's abduction by Hades is traditionally considered to happen at the Fall equinox in some traditions, so a ritual might retell (or create through drama) that story, along with some other ritual activities.
7) Psychic work of various kinds: this might include sensing energy flows, working on shielding, grounding, centering, or other skills, or things like psychometry (handing around an object and seeing what impressions everyone else gets off of it: it tends to be harder to do with objects you know well yourself.) For me, this isn't something I commonly do in group ritual, but it is a part of personal ritual work I do.
8) Just plain spending time with deities you're developing (or have developed) a relationship with. Every so often, I cast circle, say "Feel free to come hang out if you'd like." (though the actual invitation is usually a bit more formal), and I'll dance, put on music, sing, or do any number of other things. This one doesn't generally work as well on its own in a group setting: people often feel somewhat self-conscious, I think, and groups tend to need a little more structure.
9) Making offerings/asking for guidance: I'd throw divination in this category, too. Some of what you can do in ritual is say 'thanks' by offering some token of gratitude (at our recent Mabon, we did this: each person wrote things tehy were grateful for this year on paper, to be burned, but also promised to do something to show their gratitude for the gifts. I'm writing music, but one of the examples we suggested was "Light a candle every day for a month and spend five minutes in quiet communion.")
For divination, you can draw cards, or runes, do full readings, scry, or any number of other options.
Ok. That's all the basic categories I can think of right now, but I'm sure I've forgotten stuff. Please feel free to chime in with other ideas or questions, or what have you.
I know one thing that people sometimes have problems with (and heck, I have problems with it myself) is figuring out what to put in as the 'working' part of a ritual. So I thought I'd start this, and share some thoughts, and some stuff I've done (and the group I work with has done) at various times, and anyone who wants can chime in with questions/other ideas/etc. I've tried to suggest stuff that works both for people on their own, and for groups (though large group ritual (more than 20 people or so) has some specific issues I'm not getting into here.)
First, if you're interested in looking at *why* different bits of ritual might be done, or some different ways to do them, let me start by recommending Deborah Lipp's book "Elements of Ritual" - I don't necessarily agree with her end conclusions in some places, but I think she does an excellent job of explaining a number of different possibilities and ways to think about why you might do certain ritual steps (or do them in specific ways or in a given order.)
Second, a quick bit of background: I'm an initiate in a local tradition to me (whose style loosely and quickly is best described as ecclectic Alexandrian: we like formal ritual structure, including ritual drama, and we have a formal training system). Part of that training includes, for initiates, helping to write ritual - both assisting with planning Sabbats, and writing Esbat rituals, roughly in rotation. (I've come up with 2 so far, and am currently thinking about what will probably be our December full moon: there's something else in the works for November).
In other words, I don't have huge amounts of experience with this, yet, but I do have some, and I definitely struggle with some of the "What do we do in the 'insert working here' part of the ritual"
These suggestions do come from a Wiccan perspective, but I think a lot of the ideas are adaptable to other paths - or at least might give you some ideas of other options.
So, what can you do in a ritual?
1) You can do a magical working - most of what the group I work with does are things for self-improvement in various senses. In the last few months, we've done charms to help bring us information we need to make decisions about goals. We've done magical workings to reflect on the harvest, and what we've harvested this year in our lives, and what we might want to look for next year. We've done a short meditation followed by making an amulet (out of no-bake clay: it hardens after you let it sit for a few days) that represented what we did. Protection, blessing, and similar charms/amulets/talismans also fall in this category. If we've made something, it's generally charged by a circle dance and chanting, but there are other methods out there.
One note about magical workings and groups: you want the goals to be something everyone can participate in. Not everyone may have the same need for money or romance or something else specific - if you make it so the magical working is focused on an individual goal designated by the person, it tends to work out better (and avoids some ethical issues.)
2) Guided meditations: you can do these on your own, if you record them first, or if you're working with a group, you can have someone read them. You can write your own, or there's a number in various sources - Yasmine Galenorn has a couple of books which have them. (Trancing the Witch's Wheel which has a decent selection, has been re-released as Magical Meditations - from her description, it's slightly edited, but probably not enough to make it worth picking up one copy over another.)
Some people really like them. Others really dislike them, or don't get much out of them. When picking a meditation, it's also very useful to keep in mind that not everyone is strong at image visualisation. (I, for example, tend to do a lot better with guided meditations if there's a lot of spatial and tactile information - what kind of sounds I hear, what the ground under my feet feels like, etc.)
It's also good not to make it too long, if you're working with people who aren't familiar with them. 15-20 minutes is probably fine.
3) Other kinds of meditation: the last ritual I wrote up explored sensory meditation and focused on the four elements - I picked four pieces of music that all had meaningful lyrics to the element in question, and put those on, while handing around things for people to smell, taste, touch, and so on. Some of making that work involved knowing the people who would likely be there (including that there weren't food allergies I needed to worry about) but it was a nice low-key ritual that a lot of people found very thought provoking.
(Coming up with the details for this one, however, took me about 15-20 hours of work, and about $25 for materials. I'd definitely do it again, but it's rather labor intensive. You could obviously do simpler versions, though, such as just focusing on one element.)
4) Thematic stuff: you might spend a series of rituals focusing on each element in turn, a particular season, different things in your lives (work, family, friends), or other things of this kind.
I've been toying with the idea of picking a word (such as 'corn', 'wine', 'moon', 'sun', and some more conceptual stuff, like 'sacrifice') and doing some personal work with them each week/month (my current idea is to pick a word each week, and do some general research - etymology of the word, folklore I find relating to it, symbolism, etc. Time period variable, of course, though I want to map the words to the concepts of the Wheel of the Year that the group I work in follows.) and then save the results, and add to them when I find new information.
But then - and this is the relevant part - I'd be able to go back to that information, and use it as the seed of a possible ritual theme. I'm hoping that if I do this over time, I'll end up with a lot of material that might spark new ideas and that I can use to get me started.
5) Specific changes in your life or the people you're working with: initiations, dedications, rites of passage, ritual work to help you find a new job or give thanks for the one you've got, relationship changes.
6) Seasonal celebrations. These can include sort of general ones (harvest, planting, winter), or, if you use something like the Wheel of the Year, you might focus on a given bit of mythology. For example, Pesephone's abduction by Hades is traditionally considered to happen at the Fall equinox in some traditions, so a ritual might retell (or create through drama) that story, along with some other ritual activities.
7) Psychic work of various kinds: this might include sensing energy flows, working on shielding, grounding, centering, or other skills, or things like psychometry (handing around an object and seeing what impressions everyone else gets off of it: it tends to be harder to do with objects you know well yourself.) For me, this isn't something I commonly do in group ritual, but it is a part of personal ritual work I do.
8) Just plain spending time with deities you're developing (or have developed) a relationship with. Every so often, I cast circle, say "Feel free to come hang out if you'd like." (though the actual invitation is usually a bit more formal), and I'll dance, put on music, sing, or do any number of other things. This one doesn't generally work as well on its own in a group setting: people often feel somewhat self-conscious, I think, and groups tend to need a little more structure.
9) Making offerings/asking for guidance: I'd throw divination in this category, too. Some of what you can do in ritual is say 'thanks' by offering some token of gratitude (at our recent Mabon, we did this: each person wrote things tehy were grateful for this year on paper, to be burned, but also promised to do something to show their gratitude for the gifts. I'm writing music, but one of the examples we suggested was "Light a candle every day for a month and spend five minutes in quiet communion.")
For divination, you can draw cards, or runes, do full readings, scry, or any number of other options.
Ok. That's all the basic categories I can think of right now, but I'm sure I've forgotten stuff. Please feel free to chime in with other ideas or questions, or what have you.