Every tradition has its images, Goddesses, Gods, spirits and cosmology for its practices. Ritual is both an internal and external practice. It is a way of structured actions to bring mind, emotions, body and spirit together with other dimensions of being to achieve something for yourself and your loved ones and to affect your world. Ritual is neither good nor evil but can be used for both. It seems to be a natural part of human communication and self-organisation, whether you are talking to other humans or the spirit world. It can be unpredictable because the universe has a sense of humour (some say). Still, mostly, it’s because we are unclear about who we are and what we really want in the unconscious, subconscious part of our being, and this impulse can derail our ritual.
Ritual has many purposes ranging from the very ordinary to the profound and everything in between. Celebrating birthdays, naming ceremonies, weddings, initiations, and empowerments are profound life-changing moments. Whilst your routine to prepare yourself for your day, brushing teeth, cleansing, dressing and entering your workplace or home building using a key or security pass are ordinary things that we do in habitual ways that have the effect of ritual and could benefit from the conscious awareness and empowerment that ritual brings to them.
This article presents one version of the essential ingredients of ritual with an application of them. It seeks to analyse what is taught in various traditions so you can apply them to any tradition and help understand why rituals can be a powerful part of your approach to life. These ingredients are very practical you could write a business plan using them, or plan a holiday or any event, because as the old magical saying goes “as above, so below” meaning that which applies to the highest most powerful knowledge should work in the simplest most ordinary situations.
The seven principles of ritual:
Background, space, history, boundaries
Desire, goal, motivation
Resources, form, structure, plan
Action, doing it, passion, power/love expressed
Reception, listening, responsiveness in the moment
Meanings, Broader effects, Consequences to your story of yourself and your context/culture, myth
Unexpected, limitations, humility, Spirit
Background, space, history, boundaries. On the immediate physical level, this refers to the room, space or temple in which you will conduct your ritual. “Setting the Space” makes the place sacred by arranging it to suit the ritual. Setting the space is also the internal process of getting your body/mind into the right state to put the physical place into a place of power. It is concentrating the spirit in that place. You also draw a boundary around it to make it special so that you even conduct a ritual to enter it when it is being used for ritual. This sets your inner space and state of mind for the work you are about to do, so it becomes a place of power so that even before you have done anything, your psychic and group resources are all focused and ready for the work you are about to do. In NLP, they would say you are anchoring your emotions to immediately be “in the state” or a power state when you enter the space with the entry ritual. The space should bring all your senses into play – colours (vision), objects for texture (touch) and symbolism (emotionally powerful for you), music or sounds (hearing), smells, the feel and shape of the space (proprioception) and course food for taste. The personal background you bring to the work and your emotional and cultural history will define your interests, roles, and the traditions you will use/participate in for the ritual.
Desire, goal, motivation. Why are you doing the ritual? What are your motivations? What do you want from it, and what are your goals? Some of these are obvious in front of your consciousness, like money, love, rain, celebration, worship, contacting the other side, invocation or evocation. You could want to consolidate a group for a non-esoteric purpose, like doing a fitness workout together or a work meeting to improve performance or make a plan to make something happen. But the more important motivations (especially when doing esoteric or magick rituals) are those hidden from you, subconscious desires, and attitudes that drive the surface ones. For example, why would you want to use a magick ritual to do something that you can do in more practical ways? Or, Why do you want to use a shortcut to manifest wealth using personal rituals rather than getting money by participating in value-exchange relationships like working and saving or going into business after doing business courses? You could use these ritual principles for non-magical goals as a ground for communication, doing business, designing a dance party, or having a birthday gathering, all worthy goals. This doesn’t mean you can’t use magic(k) rituals for practical goals (like money). You need to be clear about your motivations and align your conscious and subconscious desires and motivations so all your power is behind them.
Resources, form, structure, plan. What will be the structure of your ritual? What will you use as tools, instruments, and weapons for it? Who will participate? What actions, symbols, thought-forms will be involved? There are material representations of the symbols and their astral, spiritual or magical meanings of them. On a material level, you’ll need to buy candles and special paper if they are what you will use. You’ll need a partner if it is going to a sex magick ritual. Will you be sky-clad (naked)? Will you evoke the spirits you are going to invoke by using costumes? Will you need to make them (better than buying them)? Buying anything you will use in ritual CAN (meaning they don’t have to) be a problem. This is where your symbols' Astral/Spiritual/Magical meaning and existence come in. A “thought-form” is an Astral or spiritual existence (depending on who you listen to). It is a thought that is given form and life through action, emotion (trust/faith/belief but others as well), collective imagination, energy and attachment. Thought-forms are affected by the feelings and thoughts of those participating in them. This is why some traditions use secrecy to control the quality of the input to their thought forms. Thought-forms can become attached to objects which are used as symbols. An everyday example of a thought-form is a corporate name, symbol, and the corporation it represents. The symbols and name of the corporation are given a life of their own beyond any individual or group. In the ritual system, which is the law of the land, the symbols are given personhood with many of the same rights as we have as embodied people. Most people in the West, around the world, treat these symbols and names as real entities that pay our wages and take responsibility for our lives, move mountains if they are mining companies and build bridges if they are engineering companies. However, they only exist as symbols in the collective minds of our society. When you buy symbols for ritual, you won’t know who has touched it, what they were feeling, what energy they put into it with their emotions and how these will affect your ritual. There are a few ways of dealing with the unpredictability of other people touching, thinking about, and feeling attachment to objects and thought-forms you will use in your rituals. You can use rituals of cleansing to make bought costumes and objects useable. You can accept energy is energy, and it’s all good and helpful because their involvement makes the thought-form all the more real. It depends on your cosmology as to what works for you.
Action, doing it, passion, power/love expressed. Carrying out the ritual, the working, whatever form it takes with all the intense focus passion can pull from you or push you to. It is said that the intensity of experience comes when there are high stakes in your life, and love is on the line. Ritual is most potent and effective in this case. It can mean that your body is at stake because there is a real danger to it, as in many tribal initiations. It can mean that your identity is at stake, like doing something that redefines how you will experience yourself. You can symbolically act out an intense situation where, through the suspension of disbelief (where movies get their power), you can feel the danger as an emotional rather than a physical reality. On the other hand, having your identity endangered can come from all sorts of more gentle situations like changing habits, falling in love and having to rethink and reorganise your life around a new person, like changing your job or changing spiritual traditions. Rituals can used to transmute these situations by empowering you to feel choice and some control of the change process.
Reception, listening, and responsiveness in the moment. As you do anything, you need to be focused on your sensual and emotional experiences. In ritual, this is heightened and intensified. For example, during a simple ritual with a limited time frame and prescribed set of actions and goals, your awareness is for the emotional and physical effects and the aftermath/consequence of the ritual in the moments you are doing it. In the case of a longer-term working ritual where you may need to adjust and adapt the ritual as you go to respond to the changing circumstances created by it, then sensual in-the-moment mindfulness will be important to the achievement of your goals. Some rituals, such as invocations and channelling, are communication processes that need to be flexible and responsive to the events of the ritual. Focused awareness is fundamental to success.
Meanings, Broader effects, Consequences to your story of yourself and your context/culture, myth. Meaning comes from the larger context and consequences of the ritual, of any activity and thought or feeling. On one level, these mythic archetypes evoke and invoke power for you as the symbols that will empower you. On another level, it is the meaning of the ritual in your life and culture. How will it change your life, sense of yourself, and personal, political, and professional relationships? How will it affect your psychic, material, intimate, and cultural environment?
Unexpected, limitations, humility, Spirit. You always have to allow for the unexpected, the improbable, worst case and best case instead of the wished-for and most likely scenarios. You need to allow for your limitations, which are where the unpredicted and unexpected come from: limitations in knowledge, limitations in talent, limitations in strength, and just the simple fact that you are in a skin, which means you have limitations on your point of view. Most call on spirit and other higher powers when they are faced with these limitations, when they feel overwhelmed, and when faced with death and loss (even smaller losses like the car keys). This involves keeping a reserve of energy and resources and being balanced and moderate in your approach. This is where the cycle of life comes in because when you face this aspect of your life and ritual, it usually inspires further rituals, and so you go back to the beginning.
