Rooted Ritual
Pagan rituals can be surprisingly abstract. We call out to elemental beings, to Gods – perhaps even Gods of far distant lands and ancient civilizations. We may honour archetypes, and Mother Earth but the specific part of the earth that is right beneath our feet as we speak can be entirely overlooked. We might call to our ancient ancestors, but spare no thought for the people and other life forms that were in this same space last week, or last year. We may honour the cycle of the seasons without uttering a word about what exactly the weather is doing today and where other living things in our space are, in terms of their life cycles. We may express a reverence for nature without acknowledging the nature in our ritual space. I’ve disrupted urban rituals to point out hunting kestrels and foraging rodents. It surprises me, repeatedly, that Pagans standing in ritual circle can be entirely unaware of nature as it’s manifesting right next to them. In our rituals we can be so busy thinking about Nature as this big, abstract concept that we forget it is also right in front of us. Sacred Mother Earth is such a big idea, that we can overlook the sacredness of our own specific bit of dirt. It does not help that our ritual language tends to direct us towards the large and distant rather than the immediate and experienced. If you call to the quarters, how often does the physical setting in front of you relate to the quarter you are calling? Have you ever faced a tree and called to the spirits of the air? Or looked out at a great vista of landscape while calling to the fire? Have you honoured the harvest amidst flooding rainfall or celebrated the coming of the spring when the snow is still on the ground? This is ritual as an abstract concept dealing with nature as we imagine it to be, rather than nature as we experience it. If you undertake ritual indoors, it is easier to fall into this habit of thinking that nature is something else, out there, separate, distant and compatible with the ritual script. However, even in the most sterile of indoors spaces, nature is with us. We wear it as our skin, we breath it in, and every last object surrounding us came from the natural world. Are there floorboards? They were once trees. Any plastic item was once oil, which was once life fuelled by the sun. Wherever you stand indoors, the age of the building can be measured in hundreds of years, at most. Underneath is the soil, layered up by the millions of years of life and change. All the history intrinsic to the land, is very close beneath us. In the most modern setting, we are but feet away from history. There is a huge experiential difference between working ritual with nature as an abstract concept, and working ritual in relationship to the land you stand on and all that dwells in it. The first option gives us something tidy and reliable. You can pre-script your seasonal ritual to fit what the seasons are supposed to be doing. Deal with the reality on the day and you may have to respond to unseasonal conditions. The natural world is not going to co-operate with your script, and instead of imposing assumptions onto the ritual, it becomes necessary to pay attention, observe what is going on and respond to it. I think this is an important issue, with huge social and political implications. So much of what humanity does revolves around imposing our beliefs, desires and expectations onto the rest of the natural world. Humankind has spent the last few thousand years largely working to conquer nature, rather than co-operating with it. The result is polluted air and water, deforestation, oceans awash with plastic, devastating habitat loss, horrendous extinction levels, and the growing threat of climate change. This is the inevitable consequence of imposing our agenda on the world. If, instead, we allow nature to lead and guide us, we are better placed to be harmonious participants rather than pillagers. If we as Pagans seek to live in more earth-centric ways, surely we must start by holding rituals that respond to nature as we experience it, rather than imposing our ideas upon the seasons. Mother Earth as an abstract concept can be almost anything we want her to be. All too often we see her as benevolent and endlessly giving, the eternal fertile mother who will nourish us. We need to look past the cheerful and affirming abstractions to take a long, hard look at the real impact we have on the actual land. The tarmac crusted, life deprived land of our cities. The earth exhausted by farming. The creatures who are no longer here. Druidry honours the spirits of place in ritual. What this tends to mean is that somewhere after the circle is cast, someone will say ‘Hail spirits of this place, spirits of the land...’ perhaps including a few references to what is manifestly there. It’s a start. It at least recognises that the ritual is happening in a place, and that the place has other occupants. It is their place, and we are the visitors, but nonetheless we may bid the spirits of place ‘hail and welcome’. We, the colonising, imposing humans with our ritual walk into a place and bid that which already lives there ‘hail and welcome’? It makes me queasy every time I run into it. Even if the ritual is in your home, the land and its spirits were there long before you turned up. Why are we not speaking to the land that we stand on? Why do we not, as a normal default, go into ritual space looking to see what else might inhabit that space? Why do we not habitually open our rituals by acknowledging the presence of nature as it is most literally with us? Why are we so happy to have our seasonal festivals defined by calendar dates, not by what’s really going on out there? Because for too many of us, nature is not a lived, experienced reality, it’s an abstract concept. We don’t live there, we just think it sounds like a nice idea. We miss out on so much. Now imagine going into a ritual space well ahead of when you mean to start – half an hour or an hour, perhaps. Imagine sitting down in your indented ritual space, to just watch and listen, noticing what happens there. Imagine being still and quiet for long enough that you become part of the space, and open to whatever else may be there. At the very least, you will have slowed down and stepped away from daily life. You will be aware of the place, and it may be aware of you. Perhaps richer and deeper understandings will become available to you. Earth may cease to be an idea, and will become the life-bearing soil beneath your feet. You will have felt the air where it touches your skin. Perhaps, you will have heard a voice that is not your own. Voice of spirit, voice of birdsong, voice of wind, voices of those who have been here before. If you want the gods of the land to notice you, it helps if you make time to notice them first. Imagine standing up to undertake ritual when you have listened to the wind and the birds. Imagine speaking sacred words when you feel a connection with the earth under your feet. Imagine asking for blessing when you know exactly where you are directing that request – not wildly out into the ether, but more immediately, to something you know is present and with you. Imagine a ritual that flows from your relationship with the space rather than from human habits of imposing. This is wild ritual, real, lived, immediate, rich beyond anything mere words could hope to convey. The person who is stood on the earth, whose face is touched by the air, whose ears are open, whose eyes perceive (so far as their bodies allow this) is a person who can undertake ritual with heart and soul. There is no struggle, no anxiety over remembering the words, because you are with the land, and the land is with you. There is no wondering if your words were heard, because you know what was with you when you spoke. There is also no issue of belief. You do not need to believe anything to make ritual in this way – you are simply working with what is. That may have a divine aspect for you, and it may not because experience is always filtered through our understanding. It doesn’t really matter how you name it at this point, because it will be real to you. Only by being fully present in the place of your ritual, only by being open to spirit in the most immediate of ways can we have this kind of ritual experience. Then it hardly matters what you are wearing, or what ritual aids you have. It doesn’t matter what you planned to say, or what you thought was important. It doesn’t even matter if you are indoors or outside, in a car park, under a railway bridge, or on a hilltop. It doesn’t matter because you are present, and therefore everything else is present to you. Ritual stops being a set of words and gestures, and becomes something else entirely. |
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