So I am fighting off a sinus cold and trying to gear up to work on school work and some personal projects. The school work is for the 6-week restaurant front of house course, the personal projects are designing a community building themed ritual for Lammas (for myself currently but it’s something I want to have in my repetoire in the new year), this leads me to some thoughts on public ritual.

~First off, despite it’s beauty and power, I really do not think that the standard Wiccan Esbat/Sabbat ritual form is necessarily practical for a public rite. The Esbat/Sabbat right was designed for a small, well-acquainted, working group, who has worked to develop a group mind.

~One of the most moving and personally powerful public rites I ever had the privilege to attend was the Anchorage 2005 Pagan Pride ritual organized and priested by Guilford and Danielle, a druid and a heathen respectively. It was simple, effective, and deeply moving. It was elegant in its simplicity and it came from the heart.

~I sometimes think that the Standard Wiccan Format for ritual can get in the way for those who are either a) not Wiccan, or b) off a differing trad from the host group/ritualists. Of course I also think that sometimes we don’t do enough to lay out the what and why of public rituals. For their weekly services a lot of Christian Churches will have a small flier outline that weeks hymns, music, sermon, and affiliated activities like bible-study and pot luck. Why can’t we have that?

~ Think about it you go to a public ritual and you get a little pamphlet letting you know the basic structure of the esbat/sabbat and why it’s set up that way, what sort of audience participation was involved and how the ritualist envisioned it, and maybe some advice on who to talk to about what and when the potluck feast was and such. At a number of the public rituals I have attended this sort of thing could really have made a difference between a good ritual and a rite of power.

That’s all for now. I will probably have more to say on public rituals later.

Peace,
Pax