What Makes a Good Ritualist? No Idea

What Makes a Good Ritualist? No Idea, But Here Are Some Things I Do. (This title was too long for Patheos, so here it is in its entirety.)

John Beckett recently wrote a piece on ritual and was kind enough to mention me in the article. As John lives in Texas and I’m in California, John’s only experience with my rituals has tended to be at large conferences and similar events. Those rituals are always very different than what I do at home, and if he caught me in my coven’s ritual circle he would probably think he was watching an entirely different person. Because I’m going to write about what John said about me, it’s worth repeating here:

Most of Jason’s rituals I’ve seen have been at conventions and gatherings where he had no temple, no decorations, no props, and no co-leaders. It was just Jason and an outline, that may or may not have been written down. And people still walked away feeling like they had experienced something sacred and magical, because Jason knows how to do witchcraft.

I’m still trying to figure out how to adapt his methods to my style of rituals.

The first paragraph really does sum up the rituals I do at places like Paganicon, ConVocation, and Austin Witchfest. When you are traveling and putting on rituals you can’t take a whole lot of stuff with you, so the rituals are mostly me, a book with some notes, and Black Philip. I’ve also gotten pretty good at scrounging around for things, if you are at an indoor festival there are usually lots of (plastic) cups lying around that you can use for offerings, rituals sips, and libations. You’d also be surprised at the amount of glass glasses you can find if you know where to look, but those things don’t have a whole lot to do with ritual.

One thing John gets wrong in his description of me as a ritualistic is when he writes of “my methods.” I’ve certainly adapted a few things and created my own style, but that style is due in large part to the rituals of Phoenix LeFae. Phoenix is simply one of the absolute best ritualists I’ve ever met, and after watching her work with no real script I decided to see if I could do something similar. And it turns out that I could, but with caveats. Unlike Phoenix I can’t sing and I have no rhythm, so a lot of the more musical stuff she slides into rituals I just can’t do. But I figured out other things I can do, and have been doing those things for eight years now. (I wish Phoenix went to more events so you all could see how awesome she is!)

What follows are a few pieces of ritual advice that you may (or may not) find useful.

RITUAL IS ABOUT CONNECTION

This caveat is the most important one, ritual is overwhelmingly about connection. What we might connect to during a ritual will change, but the idea of connection essentially stays the same. In public spaces I’m most often attempting to connect to a deity, like Pan or Cernunnos, but in other spaces we might be connecting with: the seasons, a magickal current, community, the dead, other higher powers, or something from folklore. Once you know what you are connecting with everything else should be in service to connecting with your “thing” or idea.

RITUAL IS AN ENERGY EXCHANGE ON SEVERAL LEVELS

I hate sleepy ritual. I hate rituals that don’t involve everyone in the circle. And I especially hate throwing all of my energy out into a circle and getting nothing in return. A great ritual arises when everyone is engaged in the working and everyone is contributing energy and power into what we are doing.

For the last couple of years when calling the quarters I’ve just had everybody at the ritual turn to the East and say: “The East! The East! The East! The Air! The Air! The Air!” It’s simple (no one is stumbling over words because they can’t remember a chant with six stanzas), and most importantly everyone is doing it together. I might be the first person to say “The,” but everyone else falls in quite quickly after that. Even more so, the rhythm of the chant most often ends up determined by the ritual participants. Every part of the country chants a little bit different, some go faster, some go slower, some draw out the vowel sounds, others make them short and sweet. And then here we all are raising energy together, with everyone contributing.

I think too often when people do things like “call deity” it’s just one person talking to deity instead of the whole group participating. I like to find moments where everyone can say (or better yet yell) something. If you are inviting Pan to your ritual, everyone should get a chance to make their excitement that Pan is visiting known. This is the other level of energy exchange, certainly deities are going to fill a ritual space with their energy if they show up, but I also think deity is a lot like us. Deity is going to be stronger if we are giving them energy. Our relationships with the gods are reciprocal, I think most of them want more than a sip of wine at the end of a rite, give them your joy and energy!

LET THE SPIRIT MOVE YOU, IMPROVISE

Ritual is a journey and not a destination, in other words, sometimes in the middle of a ritual things can change suddenly! I believe there should always be room for improvisation in ritual. If something is not working there’s no reason to continue doing that thing, step in and fix it. Every group is different too, and sometimes it becomes clear that the group wants to move in a direction that’s different from the one you envisioned, and that’s OK! Maybe people needed that ecstatic moment! Or maybe the energy was already so good that there was no reason to pour a libation, sometimes the energy we raise for a deity is a gift in and of itself!

When you do ritual for a long while too, you usually have smaller bits you can add to a ritual at a moment’s notice. I know in my case there are five or six little things I can always sprinkle into a ritual even if I wasn’t really planning to. I like having a loose outline, but if there’s something I really want to say in a ritual I will write it down, or print it up and glue it into my BoS.

I used to do “The Jim Morrison Ritual” at a lot of Pagan events. That was a ritual honoring Dionysus through the music and poetry of Jim Morrison all set to the music of the Doors. Once, when the ritual was not on the schedule at an event, a bunch of friends asked me to do one anyways, but during the evening (in daylight). The energy was really different and I turned one part of the ritual into a Dionysian revival, preaching the good word of Dionysus like a Baptist preacher. Having grown up in the American South I’m well versed in that type of speaking and language, and it’s always fun to do. Not everyone is ready to go completely off the cuff like that, but it’s fun to do! And you don’t have to wing the whole thing from scratch either, you can practice those types of things before you do them, knowing they will probably go to places you might not have intended.

TRUST THE GODS

The Higher Powers we honor are real. Magick is real. I like to trust those truths. If I’m doing a Pan Ritual I just have a lot of faith that he’s going to show up and lead me to where I need to go! I know the gods are active in my life, which is one of the reasons I like honoring them in ritual so much! There are times when I don’t know how a rite is going to end, but they have never led me astray.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT!

The more you do ritual, the better you get at it. But ritual for most of us, especially group rituals, is something that only happens a few times a year, so what’s a person to do? Practice. Practice outloud what you are going to say in the shower. Practice it outloud in your living room. Visualize and thing about what you want to do while out on a walk or at the gym. Day dream about what you want to do at work. Those are all legitimate forms of practice. If you are doing ritual with a group and have a script, get together with everyone and go through the ritual saying all your words. When it then comes time to actually do the ritual you’ll be awesome.