Title: Ritual Design, Lesson 1

What is ritual?
● Ritual is not magic.
○ Crowley’s definition of magic is that it is the Science and Art of causing Change
to occur in conformity with Will
○ But that’s not ritual. That’s magic. Ritual is a structured context for magic.
● Ritual is, technically defined, a contextual structure.
● Is there a difference between ritual, and ceremony? Technically, no - but, in Indigenous
North American practices, Ceremony is used for healing, and not all ritual acts are
Ceremony.
Do you need training in ritual?
● It’s like cooking.
● You can follow a recipe, and make good food at home, and you don’t really need
someone to train you in that.
● But as an art, making great food is benefited by being trained by someone else who
makes great food. They don’t have to be trained as a Chef in order for you to learn to
make really great food.
● Likewise with ritual, you don’t need to learn from someone who is “certified” in any way,
but you might benefit from contact with someone who has designed, and performed a lot
of ritual.
Key Elements
● Intent - what’s the ritual meant to accomplish? Don’t hold your intent so tightly that the
Spirits can’t flow through your ritual, and give you awesome, unexpected outcomes. Stay
open to the unexpected; clear intent can give you a metric by which to gage whether a
ritual worked
○ Prayer/meditation/aligning self with Deity/renewing or feeding relationships with
Deity or Spirits
○ Actively manifesting change
○ Honoring cycles/celebrations/Sabbats/Esbats
○ Rites of passage (marriages, joining or leaving groups, becoming an adult, and
so on)
○ Healing or harming of self/others/culture (can be offensive or defensive magic,
and possibly part of dire situations, like war, and so on)
○ Creation of charms/talismans/etc
● Motivation - why do you feel the need to accomplish that?
● Ritual Scale of Structured vs Free Flow
○ On a scale of 1-10, sometimes a ritual is 1, and you shouldn’t change it because
it’s power is it’s repeated form. There’s a potency in standing in the same space
as the Ancestors who practiced it did, which you do when you perform the ritual
as-is.
 ○ There’s 2-6, which is changeable stuff, but it’s within a certain form or structure.
There’s choice within the ritual, and what is going to happen, and so on, but it’s
within a set skeletal structure.
○ 7-8 there’s a lot of room for play and freedom, but you can’t diverge too much
from what’s normal; it’s prescribed, and it’s kind of like learning forms, but
improvising using the forms; it takes more up-front learning, and it’s more like a
style-guide than a structure; you have to be creative, and there’s a shared style,
and language, but the ritual is primarily new every time you perform it
○ 9-10 is NO set form. There’s a lot of freedom, but in groups, it’s super challenging
because you need a very good understanding of form in order to get a flow going.
● Are you going to do it alone, or with a group? There’s a lot of juiciness that comes from
group ritual that you won’t get from solo ritual, and vice versa.
Cultural Influences On Your Ritual
● If you didn’t inherit ritual forms, then it’s probably because of a breakdown historically
that moved your ancestry out of earth-connected ritual.
● The interruption of the transmission of ritual skills can be connected to racist idealogies,
colonialism, etc.
● In a sense, when you begin to relearn ritual skills, you may bring up feelings of being
disconnected; you’re engaging in cultural repair by reclaiming these skills.
● Animist values inform the practice of ritual. Non-human participants in the universe are
real beings, and we need to acknowledge them, and understand that some of them are
harmful, and not necessarily focused on our good. There are all kinds of other beings
visible and not visible.
● This is about relationship, and building relationship through ritual.
● Just because established traditions have been abused, it’s important not to dig into a
non-structured, not-traditional practice. Structure doesn’t necessarily mean “evil,” so
don’t jump into that mindset. Tradition doesn’t mean oppression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQLs7ejAct0