I had intended to go into the form of ritual next, but some of what I've been hearing leads me to believe that purpose of ritual should probably be addressed first. People tend to forget that religion has a purpose. It is not about doing rituals for ritual's sake nor reciting prewritten prayers by rote. It is about filling some need in our lives. It is about forming a relationship with you Deity, no matter how you might see him/her/them. In order to have purpose a ritual must have meaning.
I'm going to use an example that we're all familiar with, a wedding ceremony, which is simply a binding ritual performed between two people.. All a marriage needs to be legally binding is for paperwork to be signed by both parties and an invested person such as clergy or a judge. That's all it takes if you don't mind your marriage being reduced to a business arrangement. Most of us probably want a bit more. We want the right music, and colors, and vows that have meaning to us. A wedding is meaningful because the couple (or at least the bride's mother, LOL) has filled it with meaningful symbols and words. Just so a ritual of worship should be filled with the things that will make it meaningful to the person or persons performing it.
There is a certain stigma that seems to follow Wicca that it is a mysterious lost knowledge that can only be found in ancient dusty books and is all about drawing the s sygils just so, pronouncing the words exactly right and the candles being precisely the right length. And woe betide he that make the smallest error as it will summon powerful dark forces to take vengeance upon the foolish mortal that allowed such an oversight to happen. Yeah, forget all that. Remember it is about bridging the physical and spiritual worlds and forming a connection with the God and Goddess. To do this this it is necessary to calm the spirit, the mind and the body, focus them an open ones elf up to a larger world. This is not going to happen while trying to follow a set of instructions from a prewritten text.
Now there are guidelines about what should go into a ritual. It is not just going out and dancing naked under a full moon chanting nonsense, but we'll get into that as we go on. The point I am trying to make now is that in order to be effective ritual must be personal or at least touch something personal inside of us that helps us the bridge the planes.
I'm sure that all off you at one time or another have had the experience of a song, or a beautiful view, or something that has caused an energizing swell of feelings to over come you, so much so that it didn't feel like your body could hold it, like the power of the emotion was literally radiating out of you. That is what a proper ritual is meant to do. It is meant to put you into connection with a deeper place within yourself that can more easily bridge the physical and spiritual gap and let you step slightly into that world. As such it is important that your rituals touch that place in you otherwise it is just so much wasted time a incense.
This is a excellant article on the subjectNext time I will try to get into what makes a ritual, unless something else derails me before that.
Here it is
http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=21782291 
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