Thursday, October 13, 2011

Building religious acts from the ground up

So, I semi-jokingly refer to myself as a henotheist without a god. More or less, I accept most-to-all gods to be real enough... but none of the ones I've come across are MY god/dess, more or less. There are ones that I'm drawn to, but none that quite fit right. (I'm worried that I'm looking for a god that is me writ large. I hope to all the rest of them that no such god exists. )

Despite this, I have a frequent underlying nagging need to hie forth and get me some ritual in my life. The problem is, there aren't a lot of secular (or able-to-be-secular) rituals that I can think of; most of the ones I can think of involve the demarcation of time (birthdays, to a lesser extent anniversaries) or significant life milestones (weddings, funerals, graduations). And performing a ritual to a specific god I don't worship feels OK to me.

Possibly you could add seasons to that, but as I said to a friend, really we only have two; winter and road work. And while I could make offerings to the spirits of the orange pylons, I don't even know what that would look like.

I'm not much of a nature-type, either (heresy, I know), so a more earth-based tradition wouldn't work for me. The closest thing I've been sort of looking at is kitchen witchery, but that seems also awfully short on the ritual part I'm looking for. (And also doesn't fit with any of the gods I've tried hanging this stuff on, until I stopped trying for above-mentioned wrongbad-ick.)

So... I have no idea where to go from there. Keep looking for gods? OK, I can do that, but until then there's this big ritual-shaped space in my brain intruding and waiting to be filled. Find secular rituals? I am so open to this idea if anyone has suggestions that move beyond events that happen once or twice a year at most. Any suggestions for how to style ritual without an underlying religious belief system to set it up?

And I understand if it's hard to make sense of. It's take me several months to even be able to verbalize this much.

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