If you were covered with sweat and dirt, would you walk into a ritual?
If you were seething with rage, would you walk into a ritual?
If you had just killed someone—accidentally, say—would you walk into a ritual?
Probably not, I'm guessing, And rightly so.
States of ritual purity—and impurity—were important to the ancestors. Very important. While these are not something that the new paganisms have (for the most part) spent much time thinking about, I'm going to argue that, without being consciously aware of it, we generally observe such purity laws ourselves. If that's really so, then we as pagans can only benefit from becoming more consciously aware of what we're already doing unconsciously.
In some ways, I think that language often gets in the way. “Clean/unclean,” “pure/impure”: this kind of language seems alien to us. We've had it used against us so often—and against women in particular—that we've largely excised it from our thought and our practice.
So let's say “fit” and “unfit” instead.
If you've just come back from a war, are you ritually fit to approach something sacred?
No, of course not. First, you need to be made clean of it.
It's a matter of hygiene.
Spiritual hygiene.
Well folks, we've got our work cut out for us. The ancestors had spiritual technologies in place to render the unfit fit. We, for the most part, do not.
So that's what we need to be thinking about.
If you're dirty and sweaty, how do you get clean of it?
If you're seething with rage, how do you get clean of it?
If you've killed someone, how do you get clean of it?
Above: The Goddess Hygiene