Week24

Creating Your Own Ritual

It’s a full moon, and you really, really want to have a ritual of your own. Now what? Before you begin creating, you need to really decide on what the purpose of the ritual will be. Next, where will you hold it? Do you need a specific time and/or location? Are you doing it by yourself or will others be there? Is timing a factor? Will spell work and/or divination be involved? What other things need to be considered?

Are you going to write your own, use someone else’s existing ritual, or take parts of various rituals and bring them together to form your ritual? Or perhaps a combination of the three? Or maybe you just want to say what feels right at the moment. The words used are not as important as the intent behind them. If you make a mistake, mispronounce something, it’s still okay.

Some people really do need to have everything written down, with every line crossed and dot made. That works for them. Other people are spontaneous and go with the moment; and that works for them. But most of us are a combination of the two.

The lesson on "Components of Ritual" can help you with the planning. You can also find more information in the lesson on "Casting a Circle."

I’m not going to tell you what you "have" to include in a ritual. I’m not even going to give you a rough draft. This is your ritual you will be doing. And you need your thoughts to guide you, not mine.

But having said that, and since you’ve accessed this information on the web, any search engine can help you find rituals that others have prepared. There are rituals for Sabbats and for Esbats. There are serious rituals, and some very humorous rituals. (See the Chocolate Ritual or Bill the Cat Ritual for examples of ritual humor.) There are rituals for the day as well as the night. There are rituals for just about anything you can think of.

In addition, many books on the craft will cover ritual planning, and a number of them will include actual rituals for you to use when taking those first steps towards doing ritual. All these sources can and should be used to help you format your own idea of what you want for your ritual.

So, homework is just to research different rituals, and maybe design (and hold) one on your own.