I wanted to talk briefly about Ritual Lab, “Actual Rituals” (for lack of a better term) and how they relate.
Ritual Lab
Ritual Lab is a practice I’m refining, and that I recommend others try out: Get together with a smallish group of people, try out either a half-baked ritual or a couple “ritual-fragments”, and discuss how to do better. Ideally someone shares notes with the broader community.
Ritual lab is important because it allows us to rapidly iterate without worrying if an idea is perfect.
The goal of ritual lab (individually, and as a growing practice), is twofold:
- To refine the overall art of Rational Ritual
- To help ritual-enthusiasts transition into ritual practitioners, and to help ritual-practitioners become a strong community (able and willing to help each other achieve great things, while maintaining a strong intellectual integrity)
- People interested (or curious) about becoming ritual practitioners (i.e. people who actually help make Actual Rituals happen – this can be as a “creative director” or as a “logistics person” or “the person who helps get coffee/wine/boiling-water-representing-the-universe, etc”)
- People who are interested in experiencing ritual and are willing to experiment (and be experimented on, in a safe/consensual way)
“Actual Ritual”
By contrast, “Actual Ritual” is the output of Ritual Lab that you take back to other, broader communities. You can do Actual Ritual without a Ritual Lab, but it’s helpful to have an explicit community who is willing to beta-test ideas enthusiastically.
By “Actual”, I mean there are values involved other than Ritual for its own sake. You’re celebrating something emotionally or intellectually significant.
When designing Actual Rituals, it’s important to keep in mind the goals of the community. Are you trying to foster a particular set of principles or moral code? Are you trying to just get some friends better in touch with their emotional sides?
Does the community have reputational goals? You may want to use ritual-techniques (such as singing, dancing or storytelling) but not explicitly brand them as such. (i.e. there can be something ritualistic about a TED talk, especially if there’s some audience involvement, but it feels very different than gathering around a circle of candles in the darkness or some such. Simply using (or not using) the word “ritual” can matter a lot to the emotional tone or reputational effects.
Ritual Lab is R&D, which I think is really valuable and needs to be cultivated. But it’s also important to test our work in the “real” world, outside of the tiny demographic of people-super-into-ritual.
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