Spiritually Sterile (Part Two)

On Reclaiming our Spiritual Selves

Left to our own devices. 

That’s where we found ourselves last week in the first part of this series on ritual and ceremony, which you can find here. 

That’s where we’re at – left to our own devices, especially in matters of spirit. In today’s world, we have very little in the way of healthy spiritual communities, and because of this, most of us flounder. Again, very few of us have spiritual communities that uplift us and support us through periods of transition in our lives.

Some of us may be lucky to be part of a community that supports us, but that’s certainly the exception and not the rule. Instead of lush and luscious spiritual lives of connection and engagement, we suffer alone and with ourselves. Left to our own devices, we must take matters into our own hands.

This means, most often, we must become the community for ourselves that we should have in our lives. This means we are often forced to move through transitional parts of our lives by ourselves and for ourselves, and however limited that may be, even ritual and ceremony of limited scope is better than none whatsoever.

Function and Form of Ritual

The art of ritual and ceremony is as vast as the complexity of humanity and life. There are tea ceremonies in Japan, the bar and bat mitzvahs of Jewish boys and girls, respectively, and even the Burning Man festival of Nevada in the United States. Ceremonies and rituals are part of every facet of human life, and yet they all begin and stem from one universal concept:

Intention.

Why are you having a ritual or ceremony? We’ve already discussed many reasons to have a ritual or ceremony, and yet this will always be where we begin. Whatever ritual or ceremony we participate in – alone or with others – should always have a clear intention.

Each ritual or ceremony we participate in will require clarity around its intention. After we understand our intention and it’s clear to us, and whoever else is participating, we must plan our ritual. Planning includes what type of tools and accouterments we’ll bring into the ritual, whether it will be a reenactment of a myth or repeating something someone has developed before us.

As we plan our ritual, we should know where it will be held and how we’ll carry it out. This includes understanding how long it will take, whether an hour or an entire day. This also includes figuring out what tools, masks, or wardrobe we’ll include. After we’ve sufficiently planned out our ritual, it's time to carry that out once we’ve planned the what, where, how, why, and who of the ritual. This will look different, depending on the culture or tradition derived from the ritual. 

This part of any ritual is the Manifestation of our ritual. If we think of ritual as having a beginning, middle, and end, Intention and Planning would be the beginning, while Manifestation would be considered the middle or the “meat” of our ritual. When rituals begin, it’s generally accepted that intentions are stated, and larger energies and Helping Spirits are invoked for their help and their blessing. Ritual invocation can be silent and internal or aloud and external, which would be the appropriate case for community rituals. 

The final component of ritual (and remember that we’re speaking very generally) is the closing or Grounding. When working in a ritual or ceremonial space, it’s ideal to keep our workings as simple and balanced as possible, yet for all of that, some of the rituals or ceremonies we participate in may leave us feeling drained. The amount of power and spiritual involvement we’ll be exposed to will vary from ritual to ritual, but regardless of that, each ritual or ceremony needs an ending. This is what we would consider Grounding.

Your intention doesn’t matter; any successful ritual or ceremony will raise power or the ability to direct and guide energy and spirit to bring about change. After we’ve raised the power/energy/spirit and requested the change we’d like brought about, it’s appropriate to bring the ritual to a close with a blessing that helps integrate the energies into the parties involved. It’s important to remember the ending of each ritual to help bring about and actualize the changes you seek. 

Ritual as Art

We understand that we will continue to face dangers collectively and individually as we remain out of balance with our Natural and Spiritual Worlds. Again, ritual and ceremony can help us return to this balance. 

For those of us familiar with making offerings to Spirits, we know that one of the most potent offerings we can make are those we create with our hands. Spirits can appreciate maple syrup, tobacco, incense, and candles, but it’s widely accepted that Spirits love what we create with our hands because they don’t have any.

Art and beauty are pleasing to everyone, regardless of one’s ability to create art. Ritual is art in and of itself, and ritual can also be utilized in creating art, while art can be used in ritual. Any of these intersections between art and ritual will contain a core element:

Symbols 

Symbols are essentially pieces of existence representing something else that’s part of existence. A symbol with which we’re all familiar is the Peace Symbol. This upside-down bird's foot enclosed by a circle has become a universal symbol of “PEACE” since its inception in the counterculture of the 20th Century. 

There are symbols (like the Peace Sign) and symbolic acts (like eating a communion wafer to take the body of a god inside you.) Symbols are actually the language of our soul; as such, some are shared while others are individual to us as spiritual beings. We can easily say the symbol of the cross is a symbol of Christ and Christianity, and a four-leaf clover can be a sign of luck, yet some of us create symbols that have meaning to only us. An example of this is having a personal lucky number that means only one thing to you and you alone.

As the language of symbols is exactly that, we must remember that symbols and their use can fluctuate and change, just like any language. Some symbols will be shared across cultures and societies, while some are personal. Some shared symbols can gain personal meanings for us, and some personal symbols can become shared if given the right opportunity and exposure. Also, symbols can change given historical circumstances, and no better example of this can be seen than the Swastika of Nazi Germany. Long before the Germans co-opted the Swastika as a sign of their heinous regime, it symbolized luck in many cultures. Symbols may be simply icons or written glyphs, or they can simply be concepts, but no matter what shape or existence it takes in our reality.

Symbols also have the ability to speak to our subconscious mind, most often without us even realizing they are having an effect on us. These are the effects of archetypes upon our subconscious, as Jungian thought would dictate. In our modern era, think of a simple smiley face or an emoticon like this: 😀 Now, if you spent time in a room where that symbol was printed all over the wall, your mood would be elevated even if you were not paying conscious attention to the wallpaper. Now, if you were in a room with several 😠 you would feel completely different, even if you were not paying attention to the wallpaper.

Symbols also serve a very important purpose in magic and spirituality. Symbols can serve as an actual link between one item and the symbol they represent. This is known as sympathetic magic when something is done to a symbol of sorts, and whatever is done to that symbol happens to whatever it’s representing. The most well-known example is the idea of a voodoo doll carrying the essence of the person it represents so that whatever befalls the voodoo doll befalls the person it represents. While nefarious, this provides a solid example of sympathetic magic at work and why symbols are important in our magical and spiritual pursuits.

By their very nature, any physical symbol becomes a piece of art, or artistic, simply by existing. We may define “art” as anything of a creative or performative pursuit by humans (and remember, we’re not defining “good” or “bad” art - just art). By their very nature, symbols of a physical variety are art. Even through the movement of ritual, we see a creative expression using a combination of symbols. We cannot participate in any sort of ritual or ceremonial act without a symbol; we cannot participate in any sort of ritual or ceremonial act without it becoming artistic in its very nature. If one removes all physical components, tools, accessories, and symbols from their spiritual activities, it is not the ritual or ceremony one participates in; it’s prayer or meditation. 

Engaging in ritual is engaging in art.

We Are the Doorway

And in most cases, if not all, engaging in art is engaging in ritual. As we see, a ritual or ceremony has a structure of beginning, middle, and end, as do artistic pursuits. If you are painting on a canvas, there are so many steps involved, yet the first is always that inspiration, or intention, to create. To paint requires setting up your creative space, gathering materials, and finding that inspirational mindset. Once an artist puts brush to canvas, their own ritual has commenced and will not finish until they set their paint brush down.

Not all is ritualistic in nature, though. When we take our finger and write a funny “HELLO” or even the mischievous “WASH ME” with a smiley face on a loved one’s snowy or grimy vehicle, we have created art, yet no ritual is involved. The only thing involved was a sense of inspiration to leave a mark, say “HELLO” in both a figurative and literal sense, and express ourselves. Art is always intentional and inspirational, yet art is not always ritualistic or ceremonial.

Yet all ceremony and ritual is art. That means all ritual and ceremony are also inspirational and intentional by nature. 

In ancient Greek mythology and religion, the Nine Muses are the ancient goddesses responsible for all creative acts of artistic nature. Their original number may have been three, but later traditions numbered them nine. Prevailing over artistic expressions of all kinds, from poetry to song to dance, they are where the expression of a “Muse” comes from, in the personal sense of an inspirational and creative spirit outside an artist.

Many artists contend that as they are in the midst of creation, whether writing a novel to sculpting to painting to performing, they will feel lost or “taken.” It’s common for artists to claim they’ve lost control to their Muse, that something other than themselves is working through them. Many artists claim to be just an antenna, channeling their art from “somewhere else.” Incidentally, some artists will even forget themselves while immersed in the act of creation, falling into a trance state where they can’t remember the time that passed while creating.  

Indeed, the word “inspiration” comes from the Latin word “inspirare” or “to breathe into,” having a supernatural root as it refers to the gods or the Divine “breathing” into humans so they are “imparted with a truth or idea.” When we are aligned with the idea of animism, or that everything is alive with the “breath” of the Creative Source (whatever it is that is animating and enlivening the Everything), ALL of creation becomes a piece of art in and of itself. 

Creating art, no matter what it is, can be an intentional act along a spiritual path of devotion. We can also add our own strokes to the great canvas that this Creative Source is painting; we can share in the glory of creation itself when we partake in the act of creation. We become the Created, creating. We become the animated, animating. As we’ve already noted, humanity is in crisis, and it may very well be these intentional expressions of artistic devotion that may help us find our way back to balance. 

Art is not only a spiritual expression; as anyone who has ever participated in art as either a hobby or profession can attest, art can be an asylum from the world we find ourselves in, this unbalanced world full of strife. Art provides not only respite for those on the receiving end but also for those who create themselves. Art can certainly provide us with a therapeutic outlet, and it can also provide us with a village, allowing us to escape the present to travel back to the past or into the future so we may dream of what yet may be. 

No matter where you believe inspiration comes from, whether it’s an expression of our own spirit or another when we create, we are bringing into existence from our inner selves something that didn’t exist prior. Any spiritual path of merit will lead us to our inner landscapes and encourage us to become an active and beneficial part of the larger spiritual and natural ecosystem around us. When you see the River as your sister, the Ocean as your mother, or the Sky as your father, you will not be a person who unnecessarily dumps poisons into your family members. 

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Next week, I’ll present to you here a simple ritual you can do by yourself, most especially in times of transition. I am convinced we can reclaim our spiritual selves, most especially by reaching into the past and bringing into the present day the spiritual depths we’re missing.

It’s a journey I look forward to taking with you.