Ritual Basics: Creating Your Ritual
The point of any ritual is what works for YOU. You are the one building relationships with the gods, your ancestors and the spirits of the place/wights(referred to as the unseen for brevity) as well as any friends or family who are practicing with you. Anything I say here is a loose guideline.
I’ve drawn heavily on The Elder Troth: An Introductory Course of Study by KveldufR Hagen Gundarsson(which is an excellent guide for understanding standard Troth practice), some ADF bits and my Wiccan training for how I do rituals.
Questions before your ritual
What type of ritual would you like to do?
A basic blessing/prayer is known as a blot. All that takes is a horn/cup/glass with something a little special, like mead or sparkling apple juice or apple cider. However, if you can’t afford that, then water you have prayed over is fine. It is the speaking words of prayer or praise over it that make the container and what is inside sacred. Then you drink and pour a bit aside to pour out on the ground later(or if you are practicing outside, right there at the time).
A building block you can add is the sumbel/sumble/toast, boast and roast. A sumbel is toasting, or if you are practicing with others, passing the container of special juice around and have people toast a god/ancestor/spirit of place/person/event(depending on what your ritual purpose is). This is also a community building exercise, both between you and the unseen and between you and the seen. If you have accomplished something difficult, this is where you brag about that, take pride in it. If you need help with something, this is where you ask for it, so that the unseen/seen can help you. If you have something hard to do and would like someone to hold you accountable for doing it, this is where you vow to do the thing, with the expectation that the community, unseen and seen, will witness your oath.
Are you giving thanks? Are you honoring an astronomical event?(half of the “Wheel of the Year” is based on equinoxes and solstices). Are you honoring a widely held pagan holiday? Are you honoring a life transition?(birth, adulthood, marriage, identity transition, death) Are you asking for help?
Who are you asking/thanking/praying to?
Are you speaking to your deity/deities of choice? Are you asking your ancestors for advice? Are you asking the spirits of place to bless your garden/pet/houseplant?
Part of my practice is giving offerings/gifts to whoever I am speaking with. Each god/ancestor/spirit of place will have an appropriate offering and you get to choose what that is. For example, if I am giving thanks to Odin for his help with my disabled ass, I offer him a poem or a song(he also likes brain teasers and word puzzles). I try to choose offerings that are easily disposed of and take more devotion than money. I spent most of my pagan life poor, so elaborate offerings of expensive components is not something I do often.
Many deities have some overlap as to what offerings are acceptable, for instance in my experience, Frigga and Sif have a grain/cornmeal/barley/rye/flour overlap. My wife is gluten free (GF), which means we don’t have conventional flour in our home. I have gotten good results with GF oat flour and birdseed. In my experience, the Norse gods are especially impressed/gladdened by flexibility, frugality and ingenuity.
There are practical as well as spiritual compromises that must be made whenever you add other people to a ritual. If you are practicing alone, the only person you have to worry about is yourself.
For a practical example, if I am doing a simple blot, I can do that anyplace I can hold a glass. However, if I am adding members of my household, then I need to clear out and clean up a space to hold that practice.
Practical considerations:
Are is there space for singing/dancing/gesturing?
Is there anything that can be tripped over or run into?
Is there a quiet space for someone to process their experience?
Is it accessible to the people I have invited? (As I have grown older and more visibly disabled, I have to look out for pitfalls that many pagans don’t see).
Is your space close to public transportation?
For a spiritual example, if I am doing a simple blot, I have a dedicated place that has been blessed and cleansed and holds the grooves of rituals repeated daily for years. However, if I am adding the members of my household, then I need to purify and cleanse that space so that it is easier for me to see it as sacred, protect it from the unfriendly unseen and help those people with me to leave better than when they came in.
Spiritual considerations:
Am I in a relatively stable emotional/mental state?
If someone is affected deeply by the ritual, do I have the spoons to take care of them, to help them through their distress?
If I don’t have those spoons, do I have someone that can step in and do that?
Especially for people that are new to ritual work, the energy raised and used can be overwhelming. It can stimulate damage from religious or family of origin trauma. It can stimulate damage from past relationships with unseen and seen. It can also stimulate manic joy and gladness, which can be distressing to some.
As the host of the ritual, it is your responsibility to have at least thought about what to do if someone is distressed in your ritual.
Constructing Ritual Space
Wiccans have a cleansing/casting/calling routine for creating sacred space. ADF druids have an offering/calling cycle that invites the unseen. Heathens use a variety of sacred space creation methods, from making the sign of the Hammer over the assembled to the elaborate ritual laid out in The Elder Troth.
Purifying/cleansing can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. I like the four element Wiccan system, sprinkling salt water for water and earth and wafting incense for fire and air as I claim that space as sacred.
I also like claiming the space with fire, or carrying a torch or candle around the area, using a chant to Thor out of the sagas. Many Norse pagans just make the sign of the Hammer(which looks a bit like making a giant T in the air) to make a space sacred. The nice thing about claiming the place cleansed in the name of Thor also calls upon the most valiant protector of Asgard, adding to my mind an extra level of protection.
As a performance note, it is common during public rituals for the ritual facilitator to do the cleansing in the presence of the people as part of the ritual. Because of my increasing disability and general lack of spoons, I will either do that part ahead of time or have someone else say the words to reassure people during the ritual, even if I have set up my protections beforehand. So making that space sacred ahead of time is fine.
Many pagans keep that space dedicated for ritual use only. I don’t. Up until recently, I have lived in small apartments, so I didn’t have the ability to have a dedicated ritual space/room. That did give me the flexibility to honor Frigga in my kitchen when I’m cooking and Freya when I’m having intimate time with my wife and Odin when I am writing at my kitchen table and communing with my spirits of place while I sat on my porch. That put me in the habit of speaking with the unseen bit by bit throughout the day, which makes me feel closer to them continuously.
One of the few things I am insistent on is: write what you want to say before you say it. You can use someone’s else’s words(Wiccans use Gardner’s ritual words, I use the prayers from the Eddas and sagas) read it off the back of your hand, forget it totally, read it from flash cards. That’s not the part the matters.
If you construct what you want to say beforehand, you are setting your intent in a way we in the modern world understand and respond to. (By writing it down, I don’t mean the physical pen and paper. Dictate it, draw it, paint it, sing it, dance it, type it, use any method that works for you)
Rituals are often constructed in three acts or multiples of threes.
Act One is the opening, establishing the space, blessing/thanking those unseen and seen in attendance, and explaining what the purpose is to the gathered(if this is a solitary ritual, you don’t have to explain why you are there most of the time. The unseen appreciate the heads up sometimes, but if you’ve established relationships, you can skip this. They know.)
Act Two is the heart of the ritual, constructed from why you are there. This is so varied that I’m going to use an example here from my household.
Yule is a very important holiday to me and my queer household. We always celebrate it in a much more elaborate fashion than any other holiday. This year, because of events in the outside world as well as personal transformations, we focused on the death and the rebirth of sunlight, as a plea for continuing hope.
Our honored deities were Sunna and her brother Mani, Frigga as the matron of our home and our spirits of place for keeping us so well over the year before. We also have some Hellenic and Etruscan practitioners in our household, so we made space to honor them as well.
We assembled a variety of offerings, some baked goods we had made for Christmas celebrations later in the month, some whole grains, wood, the last of herbs we had grown in the summer and household spices. We also had words we had written for those deities that are more drawn to poetry. We have the privilege of a backyard with a fire pit, so we could throw our offerings in the fire. (In the past, I have offered spring water, pennies, rainbows through prisms, and lots of poetry, more ephemeral things that I didn’t have to find ways to dispose of.)
We spent some part of the day thinking about what we wanted to focus on during the ritual. We gathered together at sunset and had our youngest member make sure all the lights were off in the house and then carried a candle around the dark house, “relighting” our home fires. Then we offered to our deities of home and hearth. Then we offered to Sunna to return and Mani to call her home. We made offerings and prayers through the night, and kept the fire pit burning until dawn. Then we thanked Sunna for her return and let the fire burn out.
Act Two of the ritual is the most individual, the most flexible and deeply dependent on what you want to accomplish. Simple, elaborate, informal, formal, all things you get to choose. In my experience, some unseen are more formal than others, and you will learn that as you build relationships with them.
Act Three is saying goodbye. Usually in the opposite order as they were invited or acknowledged, final offerings are given, final hugs are offered, final prayers flow between the seen and unseen.
Attending someone else’s ritual is a different thing and I will post some ritual etiquette in a later piece.
Please DM me if you have any questions.
Your mileage will most certainly vary :)
Most pagan worldview systems have problematic stances on queer people, usually non-binary and/or trans folx, although there are factions of all of them that are any queer antagonistic. I try to choose sources that have less of that bias baked in, but I am not always successful.
The Elder Troth: The Elder Troth: An Introductory Course of Study by KveldulfR Hagen Gundarsson (this is under $5 on Amazon and is a great guide with exercises and readings from the lore that correspond to almost any basic question you may have as a Norse practitioner.)
The ADF Dedicant Path through the Wheel of the Year by Rev. Michael Dangler (this is under $10 and has a different ritual construction that has some great aspects)
Wicca: A Guide of the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham (This was one of my first books about Wicca and it is super problematic as to gender binaries, so read with much caution. However, it does have some useful practices that have just gotten folded in to my practice)
Positive Magic: Ancient Metaphysical Techniques for Modern Lives by Marion Weinstein (lots of problems here too, in the same Wiccan binary ways, so read with much caution, but some useful techniques for cleansing/purifying)
