#magic ritual

What people fail to do is realise the magic in the mundane. They fail to realise that the gods are working everyday all around us. They fail to see the benefit in the ritual of looking outside and being in that moment.

To

"In the words of Sam Webster, an accomplished ceremonial magician and a former webmaster at Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, ritual is “the principal technology for programming the human organism.” According to Webster, Pagan ritual serves as a kind of virtual theater that cultivates, or “programs,” intentions and spiritual experiences in participants. With its dramatic language of gesture, symbol, word, and scent, ritual bypasses the intellect and stimulates psychological and perceptual aspects of the self that register on a more subliminal level; by cutting a pentagram into the air or dancing a wild spiral dance, the self submits to the designs of human and cosmic powers on a more visceral plane than philosophical conceptions or sermons allow. Orthodox and Catholic Christians also recognize the extraordinary power of ritual, but they would describe the force of liturgy as arising from the spiritual authority of tradition. By rejecting such institutional claims, Pagans instead bring the question around to intent: what do we want to achieve with this ritual program? What powers—natural, emotional, social—do we want the self to engage? As Webster noted in an email interview, the metaphor of technology allows one to think about the transformative potential of ritual without lapsing into “fuzzyminded” mysticism. “By seeing what we are doing as tech, we can avoid seeing [it] as a sacred cow, and instead criticize it with accuracy and without attachment: is it doing what we intend? If so, can we improve on it? If not, how not: change or trash.”21 Though at first it may seem as if the notion of “ritual technology” would sap rites of their psychospiritual efficacy, Paganism’s creative and experimental approach to the sacred seems to actually profit from its self-conscious instrumentality. Of course, such technological thinking also brings along the familiar sorts of problems discussed earlier; Webster notes that many magic users get caught up with “the tech” for its own sake and pay much less attention to refining their spiritual goals."