performing rituals creates the opportunity to restore balance and harmony in your life. Performing ritual also gives you a method of self-expression and a safety valve for blowing off emotional steam. Designing ritual is a wonderfully creative experience that offers everyone the opportunity to try something different. It is important to remember that rituals are fluid and flexible; this book isn’t one of those books that will tell you what you must or must not do every time you set up a ritual. A personal ritual benefits us the most when it adapts to our current needs. There are times for traditional ritual as well, but the rituals in this book are designed to supplement them, not supplant them.
This book was created for intermediate practitioners. This means certain things have been assumed: that you have read and introductory book on rituals before or have at least some experience with ritual. Cerridwen doesn’t spend a lot of time going over the basics. Instead, she emphasizes rites and rituals from several cultures, offers templates to get your mind going, and provides information to help you design your own rituals. You’ll discover that by drawing certain things together—a feather, a candle, a flower—you can create an atmosphere that enhances your mood. Play with color on the altar and in your ritual clothing. Research deities from various mythologies and discover their spheres of influence. Ask for the help of Mother Nature or the spirits of the four elements. The examples in this book provide you with wonderful ideas to experiment with and to serve as a starting point for your own explorations.
These practices are meant to be accessible to people of all faiths and paths who seek to enrich their spiritual practices and add meaning to their lives. You hold in your hands a treasure trove of information gathered from ceremonies throughout history and from all over the world. Let this information inspire you and excite you. Let your imagination take flight. Trust your intuition, go with your instincts, and listen to your heart. By following these three simple guidelines, you will be able to craft beautiful, and more important, meaningful rituals to enrich your life, provide comfort, and maintain harmony and balance in your life.
Welcome to Rituals for Magic and Meaning!
Introduction: Calling the Circle
I once had the pleasure of attending a talk by Huston Smith, a preeminent scholar of the world’s religions who first came to the attention of the world when he brought a young Tibetan Buddhist monk—His Holiness, the Dalai Lama—to America for the first time. Smith spoke about the continuing impact of religion in our world, most notably, the strife in the Middle East over religious differences. He was at his most joyous when he spoke about his own spiritual practices, which he described to us. They were beautiful in their simplicity. Smith said that, upon rising each day, he did Hatha yoga for some minutes, followed by reading a few pages of sacred text, after which he meditated or prayed for at least five minutes. He would finish his morning ritual by doing a bit of yard work and some composting, which resulted in rich, dark soil and a beautiful garden that he greatly enjoys.
The entire audience smiled as they listened to this great and humble man describe the simple spiritual practices with which he began each day. These were Huston Smith’s personal morning rituals. I loved the irony that this premier academic, who has such a deep understanding of all the religious rituals throughout history, had created such an uncomplicated practice for himself. I left the talk inspired and soon felt compelled to write a book of rituals that add meaning into our lives.
Whether people are conscious of it or not, our lives are centered upon ritual. The Wednesday night pizza and movie with the kids is a family ritual. It could be greatly enriched by adding a spiritual aspect—perhaps children could share the highlight of their week so far, and photos or memories could be added to a family album to be treasured for generations to come. The Saturday night date is a romantic ritual, knitting circles are a growing trend, and doing yoga is replacing going to the gym as a spiritual and physical workout. People need ritual to inform and enrich their lives, to deal with stress, and above all, to create meaning in their lives.
Becoming conscious of the possibilities of ritual is the first step in Rituals for Magic and Meaning. Daily spiritual practices and seasonal rituals create a life filled with blessings. Many of us were brought up with specific religious practices. Although I was brought up as a First Day Adventist, when I studied history, I kept discovering practices from the past that I felt were just as relevant today. One ancient ritual I discovered was bibliomancy, which is a form of divination developed when books were precious objects made of papyrus or vellum. Bibliomancy is a simple ritual that I have incorporated into my daily life for inspiration “from the gods.” You simply open a book at random and let a word or phrase come to your attention. You thus become inspired in the true meaning of the word, which is simply to breathe in.
The beauty of knowing history is that we can learn from the past and take the best to heart by applying it to our lives. Ritual is very much a part of our history and should be studied and applied to our lives today. Ritual gets us out of or heads and back into our bodies. It gets us into a place of spirit. By participating in rituals on a regular basis, you can grow in wisdom and feel an increasing sense of your aliveness.
For the Good of All: The History and Use of Ritual
Noted anthropologist Margaret Mead states in her groundbreaking text Ritual and Social Crises that “throughout human history man has employed ritual behavior,” that ritual is an important part of the socialization of our species. In his excellent Magic of Ritual, author and ritual scholar Tom Driver states that “everything points to the supposition that our remote ancestors were ritualizing before they became human. This activity became a pathway to our human condition.” Other great thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein agree with Driver’s theory, but also emphasize the importance of ritual in human history with a link to the expressive and performing arts. In addition, there are interesting theories that rituals honoring the gods and goddesses were the progenitors to the arts. Ritual is a source of culture for the religions of the world as well as for speech.
Medieval historian J. Huizinga claimed that ritualizing play provided a foundation for culture. Huizinga is most noted for his seminal text, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, in which he asserts that ritual and play were given an important role in the Middle Ages and kept people connected to each other. “Every event,” he writes, “every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of marriage, death—by virtue of the sacraments, basking in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events—a journey, a labor, a visit—were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings and conventions.”
The great academic Roy Rappaport undertook some of the most thorough studies of rites and ceremony among the tribes in Papua, New Guinea. Based on extensive research, he found that ritual stemming from the marking of time in the context of cyclical celebrations is based on the natural world, and creates and maintains order in societies. Rappaport calls this “context making” and states that “annual rounds of festival” surely distinguish the seasons from each other more clearly that the weather does. Rappaport goes so far as to say that the seasonal festivals and their accompanying ceremonies created the foundation and ordering of our lives and communities. He states most emphatically, “I take ritual to be the basic social act.”
We are experiencing a renaissance of ritual at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Perhaps a new society is emerging from the creative kiln of ritual. Ritual processes regulate our lives, individually and as groups. Anthropologists, psychologists, and other students of the human race have shown that ritual has existed since the dawn of humanity and has always played an important role in culture. Scholars of the psyche, including Freud, who eloquently addressed the role of ritual, speak of the power of ritual and how it brings people together physically and emotionally. Ritual