Penn: Purpose Poetry Performance

I got a comment on Patreon from Weronika on my ritual self-immolation, “I Feel Flames,” noting that she appreciated the chance to look at the construction of a ritual, and somewhere around the thousand word mark of my reply I decided maybe I should just make a standalone Patreon post about it. It hits on a thing I’m doing with a much larger work that I’m still deep in research on, and I’ve long believed that one of the more ridiculous barriers to entry into the magical is the sense that there’s any authority on how it should or does work. Certainly, you find any number of well regarded books on magic that want to teach you how to construct rituals in a rote manner, but ritual design isn’t a single process any more than any other kind of art. So while I may well return to the topic in a more Big Essay format, here’s some off the cuff thoughts picking that process apart a little more. 

The important elements of ritual, as I see it, are Poetry, Performance, and Purpose. They’re interconnected, and will speak to each other when the shape of the ritual snaps into place, which in general it will do all at once. It’s that aha moment that fuels critics, mathematicians and wizards in the exact same way.

Poetry is both the hardest and easiest of the three, and I’ve written about it a little in the past. I do mean poetry as in words to any extent–a well written ritual should sound polished, but mostly I mean that you need your symbolism to line up with your Purpose. A ritual is a work of intention, and so you’ll get a lot more out of one you put together purposefully. As I’ve said before, magic is convincing the world you’ve got a better story to tell than the other guy, and I just don’t believe the world is impressed by sloppy work and mixed metaphors. 

That’s where you get into the fact that, under the hood, I’m a damn chaos magician. I’m very annoyed by this fact, not gonna lie, but I truly believe that if you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and can make the argument for it, wholeheartedly, it’s probably good enough to work. A magic sigil copied thoughtlessly out of a book has as much magic to it as eating a whole bag of bagel bites. Unless your ritual is about being hungry for bagel bites, in which case the sigil is still useless. Writing about the Poetry of magic in general is, however, work for books and not work for random Patreon posts.

For the Loki ritual, the poetry was relatively simple. Let’s look at the altar set up for it: The space around the tent was designed to evoke community, with each of Loki’s children’s altars decorated with tokens I’d have taken from the people involved in the event. I was still working on that when it crashed, but it had things like a braided lock of a member’s beloved horse’s tail for Sleipnir, and a doll I’d made with my grandmother for Loki’s sons by Sigyn. With that space, I’m declaring Loki as a god of community, and highlighting the ways that, as outsiders ourselves, we were touched by these monstrous figures. 

Inside the tent, much of the poetry is obvious: broken chains to symbolize, uh… broken chains, right? My favorite touch is the bowl. In the myth of his binding, Loki is set under a snake, whose poison drips painfully down into his face. His wife Sigyn catches that poison in a bowl. This was going to be the broken ceramic bowl that had at one point been my altar piece for Sigyn. I dropped it years ago, and dutifully glued it back together, but it was missing pieces. I was sad, but things break, and a new bowl never felt right. It wasn’t until we were building this ritual that it occurred to me that Sigyn’s Broken Bowl is a perfect symbol of her escape, and with that bit of poetry snapped in place, the bowl itself became something new for me.

The juxtaposition of that opulence to the stark tent interior, and the use of an enclosed space in general, are lending the sense of a shift out of reality and into ritual space. Much of the design of ritual is about this shift–see casting circles, waving wands, and incanting the names of Angels. That’s all just Poetry (in the chosen symbol set) and Performance in its most obvious form.

The Loki ritual as described in Act Two was not the actual ritual I performed. Ultimately, that was the essay itself. Or perhaps it was the manic evening spent writing everyone’s questions followed by the essay, but either way, the point here is that ritual can look like anything. That’s what I mean by Performance. It is simply the media that the ritual will be in, whatever that is. It’s all about mood, drama, and direction. I say drama, but it doesn’t have to be flashy to be a Performance, nor does it have to be for an audience any larger than yourself.

For example, I have a fountain pen I’ve been using as a wand for a while now. I’ve never been a wands guy, on account of I have little use for sticks, and I rather insist that if I have a tool it will damn well be something I use. But I decided that, fuck it, I was going to do all the stupid wizard things I’d skipped when I decided ceremonial magic was ridiculous. (It is, of course, ridiculous, but that’s neither here nor there, and has little bearing on its efficacy.)

But if you follow the thought of a wand out to what it’s doing: a wand is elemental fire, so it is a tool of creation, and of directed intent. Well, that’s just a pen, and I had this nice little Shaeffer sitting around that I’d bought years ago because it felt powerful. She took to the job immediately, and I decided I wanted to formally offer her the title Providence. So, I took her to a Kendrick Lamar concert. Concerts, which by their nature are both a communal and intimate experience, are a great setting for personal ritual, if you connect with music at all in a spiritual way; on that tour, he was closing his set with “Gloria,” a song about writing, and his relationship with his pen that he’s personified as the titular Gloria. So when Lamar started “Gloria,” I took my pen out of my pocket, felt her weight in my hand, and silently told her, in words I’d prepared earlier, what her job was, and that she was Providence. That was the whole ritual; exceedingly minimal, but designed to be one I could perform exclusively for myself within the context of a show.

The Loki ritual was first conceived to be performed within the specific context of a spiritual retreat in a culture where there is a long established default ritual structure. American Heathen rituals tend to be in a format called a blót (commonly pronounced ‘bloat’) wherein a crowd gathers into a circle and will usually pass a drinking vessel (usually a horn full of mead) around the circle, in some number of rounds. Each person, when they get the horn will say something–hail a god, tell a story, remember their dead uncle Joe–whatever happens to passably fit the theme of that round. These rituals are very rigid, and in my opinion generally fail on both Poetry and Purpose, though do at least ask for active participation from its audience.

The group I was making the Loki ritual for always uses three rounds for theirs, usually after a bit of an introductory theatre: one for the god that is being actively worshipped, another to one’s ancestors, and finally a round to boast about your achievements or ask the community/gods for help. It’s rote. And in fact, that group has a schedule for what rituals they do in a year. Every February it’s the Freyja blót, with letter writing to Freyja, a fancy feast, and a three round blót. Bragi and Idunna get a scavenger hunt thing and a three round blót. Mani gets a fire pit, a scrying bowl, and, you guessed it, a three round blót. 

I’ve run them plenty in my past, but I don’t like a blót. It is, however, the expectation and context that existed around the Loki ritual at its conception. When working for an established group, you do have to take expectations into account, especially if you’re going to subvert them, and so the Loki ritual as designed was shaped like a blót. The last request, where Loki tells the crowd to go break a chain in his name, was originally going to be framed as a second round: come back in one year (when, presumably we’d be doing our second version of this event) and tell Loki about breaking your chains. 

Even stepping into the cave to see the ritual leader playing the part of Loki is based on the expectations of that group; they have one ritual where they put on a little play, having their Shakespearean actor take on the role of the god Frey. It was one of their better aesthetically, yet more disappointing constructions, as the actor playing Frey was in no way embodying the god. Which there’s no real excuse for, as they are a group with an understanding of oracular trancework. In fact, that understanding is why the Loki ritual was designed to open on drums; they were working more to introduce the idea that trance might be involved in the ritual than to actually aid in the trance. 

But, as I point out in “I Feel Flames,” I didn’t get to do that ritual. The event was not going to happen, but the underlying magic was insistent that it wasn’t done with me. It’s generally a good idea to make things that ask to be made, so I had to consider other mediums for it. Still considering the active participation aspect of a blót, we tossed around the idea of writing the ritual up as a story and mailing it to them. Performance there becomes more collaborative, asking the spiritual leader of the group to facilitate at a distance. She’d have been asked to read the ritual description, and each member of the Kindred would have been offered an envelope. If they wanted to participate in the ritual, they could open their envelope and see their question. Not ideal, but I’d still be around to talk about it with them online if they wanted.

That was the working plan when El and I got the questions together. Obviously, the situation devolved into something too hostile for that kind of gift, and that format was also dropped. 

Next I tried it as a zine, writing something a bit more like this, in a sort of instructional tone describing how one might put the ritual on. Meh, that stopped feeling like a ritual quite quickly, failing both the Poetry and Performance checks. The reader isn’t part of the magic–they’re just reading /about/ the magic, and I wasn’t actively part of the magic when it was a zine, either. Not to mention that this ritual is almost certainly a bad idea in most contexts. But no, I didn’t want to write about my ritual, I wanted to give it life, and I was starting to feel like  I was the only practical audience that remained for it.

So, what was the Purpose, then? This element is by far the most important of the three, and is the one that is most often completely ignored. I am broadly disinclined to accept the over-broad “worship” as a good Purpose for magic or ritual. What does “worship” mean? Does this god you’re worshipping really want the same oversweet mead, backwash, and long winded anecdotes the last guy just got offered? I’d say the blót as described above has little Purpose in regard to worship, and is more about community cohesiveness. A fine goal for a ritual, if that’s what you’re trying to do, but we’d not been designing a Community Cohesiveness ritual. We’d been designing a Loki one. 

My first thought when creating a ritual for a god is to ask why I am doing it. What is this ritual doing? What is it offering to the god in question? Is that a meaningful gift for that god? What am I asking of the audience, and what are they expected to get out of the experience?

The best Loki ritual run by someone else that I’ve been to was a blót where we were given a mirror and asked to talk to ourselves. Loki isn’t a god of chaos, he’s a god of change, and change is an action. So, we each were asked to look into the mirror and thank ourselves for the changes we’d seen ourselves through. I forget how the priest worded it at the time, and I know I’ve gotten some of the nuance wrong here, but that was roughly it. It ended up being a bit mid, in practice, but it passed the Poetry and Purpose checks.

It was a ritual about facing the Loki within the self, and offered him the gift of introspection, and more to the point, it offered a moment of vulnerability to each person gathered. Hell yes, introspection and vulnerability is a meaningful gift to Loki.

But Loki is also not a god of looking back; he is a god of moving forward. What more could Loki want from a follower than that? The Purpose, then, was to offer a spark toward intentional change. Before the ritual the altar space would offer the participant a moment to sit and consider this very uncomfortable myth, and during the ritual itself, that discomfort transforms into a meditation on the ways in which they themself have been bound. After the ritual, we were planning to open up the Sága shrine, which we always set up as a social space, and offer rune or tarot readings, conversation, and guidance, because a Purpose that big isn’t served by dropping it on someone and walking away–as I said, your Performance, Purpose, and Poetry all need to be speaking to each other, and if you are leading a ritual that’s inclined to be emotionally disruptive, you really do have to be there to deal with that disruption. 

When my ritual became an essay instead the Purpose changed with the Performance. I wrote it with the knowledge that I’d probably send it to my mentor as a resignation, and to you all as an explanation for the decision to use a mononym, but I was the audience from that point forward. The Purpose was no longer even remotely “worship,” although I struggle to imagine any Loki that does not accept a ritual burning away of the self as a prized offering. My ritual was about closure, and fire containment; an active decision about what was allowed to burn, and what would survive, and sheer bullheaded stubbornness.