Ritual
by Lady Morgan le Fay
Later this year PanOrpheus and I hope to open up of our trilogy of "Orpheus rituals" to the greater pagan community. We have looked back not just to the myth of Orpheus, but to strange fairy tales, to Dante, to images that haunt us. We have tried to capture something of the essence of the mystery rituals, like Eleusis where those who participate keep silent about the epiphany that is experienced.
I love ritual. Rituals that I love the best are those that have a sense of expectancy. Expectancy in the sense that you have done ritual before and know to a certain degree what to expect. But also there is the expectancy that the ritual will put you in that place that takes you out of the rational everyday world, a place where you see a flash of something out of the corner of your eye and you don't dismiss it. There is the expectancy that something wonderful and unexpected will happen, because you have let go and allowed for synchronicities to happen. Others may call that mistakes in the ritual - but I have found that if you let go those mistakes are actually the unconscious making itself known.
Great ritual is participatory, even big grand rituals can be made participatory. In fact, I feel without this key ingredient, the so called ritual is in fact theatre or pageantry - which can be very moving, however it is not the same thing.
Carl Kerenyi, in his book on the Eleusis ritual, says that Aristotle investigated both what happened in the minds of the audience of a during a theatre tragedy and what was offered by Eleusis. "The spectator of the tragedy had no need to build up a state of concentration, he didn't need to fast, to drink the special drink of Kykeon, to march in a procession. The spectator, did not attain a state of 'epopteia' - 'having seen' by his own inner resources, instead he had 'theama', the vision obtained in the theatre. The poet, the chorus, and the actors created a vision for him at the place designed for it. Without effort on his own part, the spectator was transported into what he saw. What he saw and heard was made easy for him and became irresistibly his. He came to believe it, but this belief was very different from that aroused by 'epopteia'."
In our small coven esbats (moon rituals), we take a long time to build up this state of concentration. However, in larger public rituals, you neither have the time nor usually have a group that is used to long inductions, and that’s where the participatory nature is very important. If the ritual can be made so the attendees organically and naturally feel drawn to participate, because something in the ritual is calling to them - calling within them for an outward self-expression, then you will have helped those people to achieve to a certain degree "epopteia", a "having seen" something significant that comes through the participates' own inner resources.
I have talked about the nature of rituals, but the most important aspect of ritual is what happens afterwards. Rituals don’t magically change you, but if you experience that "epopteia" and are open to it, the experience can crack open a doorway to a new path, a new perspective, a new attitude. Those words, "open to it", are casually thrown around all the time, but they are vital for a ritual to act as a catalyst for change. We have all experienced in our lives some sort of epiphany, but for so many of us, it simply becomes a memory, a hazy dream.
It is our hope and desire, that these rituals that we will be offering up will allow you to experience the "epopteia", but even more importantly that they will help transform you into who you really are.
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