Ritual Space
So, firstly I have my healing altar up a running for a few folks today. Me, TK and mini witch all put our energy and personal touches on it, and for it.
What we did was healing, and spell work, and energy work. It wasn't a ritual.
A ritual as defined by MUCH smarter people than myself is
"A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests. Rituals may be seasonal, hallowing a culturally defined moment of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an activity such as planting, harvesting, or moving from winter to summer pasture; or they may be contingent, held in response to an individual or collective crisis. Contingent rituals may be further subdivided into life-crisis ceremonies, which are performed at birth, puberty, marriage, death, and so on, to demarcate the passage from one phase to another in the individual's life-cycle, and rituals of affliction, which are performed to placate or exorcise preternatural beings or forces believed to have afflicted villagers with illness, bad luck, gynecological troubles, severe physical injuries, and the like. Other classes of rituals include divinatory rituals; ceremonies performed by political authorities to ensure the health and fertility of human beings, animals, and crops in their territories; initiation into priesthoods devoted to certain deities, into religious associations, or into secret societies; and those accompanying the daily offering of food and libations to deities or ancestral spirits or both.*"
In other words the difference between a spell and a ritual is not who you call on, or how you call, it is the space. Not just the physical space, the place where something happens but the dilation of this place. The depth. The meaning of a kiss in a supermarket is very different to during a ritual. Again, if the ritual takes place in a mundane place, like the woods (though woods tend to be the dwelling place of "otherness") or someones living room, it's context changes vastly if it is placed within the dilated space of ritual. This otherness is defined and expected. It is the place for "otherness", it is where it is supposed to dwell. You know, instantly when you walk into a ritual space, regardless of faith you can feel it. You do not have to understand it, or know it's language but this "dream speaking" quality is somehow instinctual. The kiss, as must all symbolic acts must have a context, a background to inform us of the level of meaning. It is like the soundtrack in a film. It allows us to view simple things with the knowing and knowledge of emotion and content.
A ritual space can house the strange and bizarre comfortably, the horrifying and adoring, so long as the context is consistent it is not jarring. It is dreaming while awake, it is speaking in the symbolic, it is the place where all parts of the self that are usually hidden or buried have a voice and a place. A ritual is a process. It changes us. We always return to the normal space slightly differently than we entered. Something is eaten, digested and remains within.
That, and only that makes a good ritual. The things, the tools, the robes, do not matter if that space can not be made, maintained and then dispersed. I have been to many rituals and rites and how "good" they were had nothing to do with the physical place. You can have the perfect venue and yet it can feel like a bad rehearsal for a play. That "otherness" is missing. That lack of depth. You can be somewhere unassuming and suddenly everything is transformed by the depth, the space created. It can be truly dazzling.
We need rituals. We need the depth and the space of the symbolic to truly speak, listen and change. It is a wholeness. Rituals heal us in ways we are barely able to yet understand. They are vital, beautiful and important.
*Victor Turner.
