Rituals and getting into the Mood

 A lot of magicians are very strict when it comes to ritual magic and how a ritual shold be composed, what a magician has to do and how he needs to prepare himself. While it is right to "follow the rules" when it comes to already established rituals or rituals that stand withing a specific context, the magician is pretty free to use all her immagination and creativity to create her own rituals. 

A lot of the side details are merely created to get you in the mood, shift your conscious from your everyday personality to the person who communicates with the gods and spirits. In this respect I like to get into the gear, step into ths circle, take a deep breath and start to swing the sword. However, I do not believe that all of this is really necessary, at least not in those cases where I follow my own ritual purpose. 

I like to improvise, act on impulse and to go with the flow. Maybe it is related to my mundane profession (I am a lawyer and used to stand in court having to react on situations that develop completely different from how you had thought they would go). However I do recommend to have some basic experience and understandiong of ritual work before going on your own. 

This also helps me a lot since I have changed my focus from the more formalistic ritual practice of the GD to Germanic heathen practice. There are no real established traditional rituals and little "cook books"for this. And whenever you read a book about Germanic or most likely Nordic Magic, you will find that the person who wrote it has  - to some extend  - some roots in the GD, OTO or Wicca. Thus, words have changed of course but the ritual structure often is similar. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I like to keep things - as much as possible - within their context and you can not just exchange one got for another. It becomes worse when these authors pretend that the ritual described consists of or is based on ancient Germanic traditions. Likely it is not as we have very little knowledge about how the ancient Germanic peope had practiced and structured their rituals . 

And exactly this lack of knowledge gives me a lot of freedom . In this regards, I invite you to go out and play, be creative, innovative. You will fail, you will learn, you will adjust and you will have success. And  - although some people say this is serious stuff - you will have fun!!