“Ritual … is a space and time that is set aside in which the participant is radically engaged with all their senses, and is promoting Beauty, giving thanks, celebrating the Holy Body, aspiring towards Awareness, and creat­ing/maintaining Sacred Relationship.”

— Ruby Sara

Neo-Pagan rituals use stylized actions, mytho-poetic language, and evocative imagery, including invocations of deities, recita­tions of myths, and sacramental acts, like lighting candles, liba­tions, etc., which are all imbued with a sense of mystery and the sacred. The goal of Neo-Pagan ritual is to restore our divine connec­tion to the natural world, to our deeper Selves, and to each other.

When the goal is to connect with the deeper Self, then ritual strives to evoke powerful emotional responses for the purpose of incarnating, communing with, and consecrating the arche­typal patterns of the unconscious. The purpose of this is to re­solve the intrapsychical conflicts created by the dissociation of the shadow components of the psyche caused by Western guilt culture, and to effect a healing reintegration, restoring the link to the wellspring of psycho-spiritual power.

Margot Adler explains that ritual aims to do on the uncon­scious level what politics aims to do on the conscious level: trans­form individuals and society.

“We are talking about the rituals that people create to get in touch with those powerful parts of themselves that can­not be experienced on a verbal level. These are parts of our being that have often been scorned and sup­pressed. Rituals are also created to acknowledge on this deeper level the movements of the seasons and the natu­ral world, and to celebrate life and its processes.”

Budapest explains ritual this way:

“The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective con­sciousness, the many lives, the divine eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. Those parts do not speak English. They do not care about television. But they do understand candlelight and colors. They do understand nature.”

Deep ecologist, Dolores LaChapelle, writes that ritual is essential to creating intimate, conscious relationship with the places where we dwell. It is no coincidence, she writes, that native socie­ties tend both to be ecologically sustainable and to have a rich ceremonial life.

“We have tried to relate to the world around us through only the left side of our brain, and we are clearly failing. If we are to re-establish a viable relationship, we need to re­discover the wisdom of these other cultures who know that their relationship to the land and to the natural world required the whole of their being.”

According to LaChapelle, festivals and other rituals “connect the conscious with the unconscious, the right and left hemispheres of the brain, the cortex with the older three brains … as well as connecting the human with the non-human—the earth, the sky, the animals and plants.”

Updated 2019