The thing about spiritual practices is that that you have to actually practice them. Which means you need methods, formats, structures.

In Ariadne's Tribe, we have a ritual format that we use to celebrate our connection with the Minoan deities. I had the pleasure of sharing it with the delightful folx at Mystic South last weekend. I hope to get to do another, more colorful ritual next year.

So what's our ritual style like?

It's based on the way people in the Bronze Age Mediterranean practiced their religion. The Minoans were a Bronze Age people, so it only makes sense to key our ritual style to what they probably experienced when they went to the temples and other sacred sites on Crete.

Our ritual structure has six facets: Preparing, Inviting, Welcoming, Offering, Listening, and Returning. Each one of these facets has its own purpose in bringing us closer to the divine in a mutually respectful way.

You can read about them in detail via the links in the previous paragraph, but I'll give a quick summary here for the TL;DR crowd:

Preparing: While we're still outside the ritual space, we turn our attention to the ritual and make sure we're ready to give it our full focus.

Inviting: We invite the deities to join us. Their presence consecrates our ritual space. You could think of the Great Mothers as being the temple, in a sense.

Welcoming: We enter the ritual space in procession while singing our Welcoming Chant, welcoming each other and the deities as well as the sacred space itself.

Offering: We don't want to take without first giving, so we offer generously to the deities we've invited into the ritual space. During or after the offering, we sing the Offering Chant.

Listening: The only way to hear the deities is to be quiet and listen. That may look like a meditation, but it may also look like a dance, a mystery play, a labyrinth walk, or some other celebration that allows us to connect with the divine.

Returning: We thank the deities then return ourselves back to our regular lives while returning the ritual space back to its previous use. To do this, we leave the ritual space in procession while singing the Returning Chant.

I was delighted to lead the Tribe ritual at Mystic South last weekend, the first time we've used this ritual format in a major public venue. It works for large group rituals like the one last weekend, but it also works for solitary ritual - I've used it that way.

To me, the important thing is that it helps us connect with the deities in a way that feels familiar to them and that helps us, as modern Pagans, connect with the past.