Art by Stuart Griggs
Intentional rites and rituals are meaning carriers of great spiritual and psychological importance. They bring us back into belonging with the wider whole we are part of. As we call on the unseen to meet the seen, the higher and the lower worlds to meet us in the middle, we re-animate the world around us. We call everything back into life, into relationship and into co-creation.
For our early ancestors, ritual was the language for communing with the unseen. It held their prayers and offerings that appeased the Gods and Goddesses of disaster and called on the powers of protection. Ritual acts supported a complex emotional connection with the wider energies of life outside Self and community. They also weaved individual and tribal identities tightly together through their intrinsic meaning making process. Indigenous cultures and communities that have retained their links to the tribal soul keep their rites and rituals richly preserved and embedded into their social fabric of life. In the western world, ritual lineages have either been isolated from their spiritual and instinctive dimensions or have been completely forgotten and long-lost. Severed from our mythological and mystical roots, our spiritual capacity has been displaced from its rightful expressions.
Rituals are usually held by the wider container of ceremony or initiations and rites of passage. Our tribal ancestors knew that during transitions from one threshold to another, in order to preserve one from psychic injury, adequate containers are essential. Rites and rituals held the crucial tensions that underlie significant developmental transitions. They safeguarded a sacred and meaning-full space that supported the adult to emerge from the child, peeling back the layers of the Self into greater truth and maturity.
These rites are not to be romanticized in our yearnings for what we have lost. These initiations are bruising and painful transitions that require the shattering of what once was in order to re-assemble us into what will be. But the act of ceremony and ritual would render these spaces safe for surrendering one’s innocence and the community would be there to tend to the open wounds and transmit generational wisdom that would restore a new and yet ancient order of being. Rituals guarded the threshold between one way of being and another, one way of seeing and another, one way of living and another, holding the space sacred while a deep transformation was under way.
Our secular modern western culture has retained very little of our ceremonial past. What still remains has been mostly locked within the remits of organized religion, devoid of its once serving truth and purpose. In the absence of collective initiation rites that mark the developmental transitions of life, young men and women seek these thresholds unconsciously through dangerous and self-destructive thrills, guided by a soul that seeks the next stage in its journey. The soul always remembers what we seem to have forgotten. But with no adequate internal or external guidance, these attempts remain incomplete and can fragment instead of deepening the Self.
Our Great Forgetting has left these forces to reach us only through fate, accidents, love and grief. These come complete with inner rituals and initiations that we tend to fear and medicalize, as we lack safe containers that can support us in offering ourselves to their transformative intentions. These archetypes of initiation unfold into inner rites of passage that can lead us into a greater knowing of ourselves and the world around us. Not always easy or palatable, they are tasked with ensuring we travel where we need to.
A ritual act is a form of soul prayer that ignites from the farthest, faintest recognition of Self deeply within and moves towards the greater collective soul of the entire universe. During inner work, ritual acts invite the wider forces to witness our journey and gift us something of the collective wisdom. They align our psychic energies with our intentions and amplify the potency of our work. They penetrate our ego structures and guide us through the liminal spaces between the worlds of reason, heart and soul, summoning buried layers of Self into action. These symbolic realms nourish our hidden depths and offer a safe container for opening up soulfully.
As we stand collectively at this point in time before the threshold of radical change on so many levels, the timeless wisdom of rites of passage can be a significant resource. What we are collectively tasked with ahead is as old as earth herself. It rests on the elemental wisdom of ritual initiation spaces that restores our connection with the cycles of life, death and rebirth. Unless we recover conscious rituals around the cycles of renewal we will lose our direction in our experience of the visceral flow of life. Restoring our ritual connection to the thresholds of death and rebirth opens us up to receiving the gift of life.
