Humans love to celebrate and to create rituals and traditions around those celebrations. Modern Paganism utilizes rituals for holy days, lunar observances, magic, and for personal rites such coming of age, initiations, and weddings. To those outside of Paganism, the word ritual itself sometimes will evoke images of some sinister practice being performed in a dark, out of the way place in the woods. For Pagans, ritual is one way to interact with the divine in all things.

We will look at two meanings of the word and how ritual is actually a common theme in all of our lives.

All of us have daily rituals whether we are of a spiritual bent or not. We wake up, bathe, dress, and perform our usual daily activities. This repetition of actions over and over is the basic definition of ritual. Our routines, which are the order in which we perform the daily rituals, may change, but the rituals themselves will generally stay the same. What transforms a ritual act from mundane to spiritual is adding ceremony or carrying out your ritual in a sacred way.

Repetition is sometimes seen as boring or eventually making the ritual stagnant and not open to new expression. However, many faiths utilize repetition in honoring their gods and traditions including such things as praying upon awakening or before bed and saying a blessing over food before partaking of a meal. These repetitive acts can become a strong foundation upon which to build a personal Pagan practice. In fact, many Pagan or magical groups will encourage their members to begin daily ritual and/or meditative practice. In this small way, we can eventually train ourselves to tune out the daily mind chatter that invades our thoughts and begin to listen to the divine.

Many Pagans use repetition in order to attune themselves to a certain energy or bring it into their lives. For instance, honoring a nature spirit or a deity associated with nature opens a doorway of communication between you and the natural world. We can certainly perform a single ritual to open this doorway. However, repetition not only proves our sincerity to the spirits we honor, but again, we are training our minds to be receptive to the interaction we seek.

Rituals also take the form of celebratory rites such as those previously mentioned. Handfastings, baptisms, sabbats, and esbats are all events that have rituals and traditions created around them. Even if a group changes the way it celebrates one of its holy days, the fact that it continually celebrates that time of year creates a tradition for its members to count on.

We do not necessarily have to create elaborate ceremonies around these events, but we choose to anyway. We do this because as humans we need to mark special times in our lives instead of letting these times pass without notice. We like to feel that we are an active part of the cycles of the planet instead. By creating sacred space for these special events we will in turn begin to see the sacredness of even the most mundane tasks. In this way, we begin to see the divine in all things.