Writing Rituals


to ritual. None of this is mandatory, but it is practical. I wouldn't want to do ritual on a dining room table full of crumbs with the dinner dishes still sitting at the other end, and I'm sure you wouldn't either. I also wouldn't want to do ritual when I've just come from the gym and my sweaty hair is hanging in my eyes.

I use a checklist to be sure I've gathered all my materials. While I'm writing my ritual script, I keep a running list of everything I'll need. Then, when I go to prepare on ritual day I know exactly what I need without having to scan through the script and possibly miss something. (And even then, you can still miss something. We forgot to bring Cakes and Ale to my recent Samhain coven ritual, even though there were several people involved in the planning including two elders!)

Setting up the altar is pretty self-explanatory as well. If you have a permanent altar set up, like I do, then you may be able to skip this step entirely, or just shuffle a few tools around to suit your working. With this step, the prep work is completed and we can get into the difficult area of actually writing the ritual script.

The first three steps in your ritual (Calling Quarters, Calling the Gods, and Casting Circle) are things you'll do at the beginning of every ritual. You may want to develop a standard script for these things to make it easier for you to memorize, or you may want to experiment. Note that the order I've listed them is the order I perform them, but you can shuffle those steps around if you feel they'd work better for you another way.

For Sabbat rituals, I tend to write Quarter Calls out ahead of time that deal with the theme of the ritual. For the Summer Solstice ritual I did for my coven, I used different sorts of Fairies for the elements. At another ritual, I used different heavenly bodies. At home, I usually just make up my Calls on the fly, keeping them fairly simple. You don't need to have a lot of flowery language to do this, and you shouldn't stress out if you can't think of anything original to do. Simply facing each direction and saying "Powers of the , forces of , be with me this night and lend your

The copyright of the article Writing Rituals in Wicca/Witchcraft is owned by Karen Mitchell. Permission to republish Writing Rituals in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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