What are Ritual Arts?
Most, if not all, forms of art (music, theater, painting, storytelling) have their shared roots in ritual acts performed by our long-gone ancestors, where creative means and expressions were developed and employed as spiritual offerings, honorings, used in celebrations, or even directed as potentially destructive forces.
While often those acts, such as real or symbolic sacrifices (whether the life of another animal, or giving up certain foods for a fasting period), can be viewed as “Bartering with the Gods” — attempts to gain favor with unseen entities and thereby control the conditions of day-to-day life and the impending future — they also arose out of the natural, creative impulse inherent in all…that seeks expression through individuals and the tribes and communities they form together.
Ritual Arts are living arts, and, indeed often involve acts — an individual committing to doing one sketch a day for a month is practicing a ritual art by that daily act. A group of Tibetan Monks laboriously creating a sand mandala, over the course of a week or longer, then washing the completed work away into a river, are also performing a ritual art and act.
Ritual Arts are not confined to specific religions or spiritual traditions, but are employed by most if not all religious observations and belief systems, by their very nature. Rites observed by various religions and spiritual traditions grew out of our ancestors’ own ritual arts, and include the symbols, imagery and trappings of such acts: invocations, dedications, offerings, observations, symbolic or other sacrifices, transactional timing (daily, seasonal, annual — or observances for specific or singular events, such as funerals).
Most religious and spiritual rites have been codified over extended periods of time, but traditions and such rituals also evolve into new forms, and either are adopted by new/different practitioners or perhaps finds them some other way. The energy that works through ritual acts and arts wishes to express itself, or be witnessed, and so is continually moving and circulating in time and space, through individuals and through communities and groups, through eras, through the personal and the collective unconscious, our unseen but tangible inner dynamics always in play.
Rustic Arts: Some ritual arts are rustic arts, that arose out of household or village life, such as keeping one hearth fire lit for the entire village to have access to when needed; storytellers weaving yarns while yarn was being woven by such a fireside; and houses/homes that were built with materials that reflected the gifts (certain woods or stones) and needs (protection from hard winters or extreme sun) of the specific landscape they occupied. Rustic arts use the materials on hand, or create new ones out of what is available. Rustic arts are ritual arts because they observe time, space, placement/arrangement, and organically express the natural creative drive in daily and seasonal life.
Devotional Arts: Devotional arts are usually ritual acts with a specific dedication to a spiritual entity or element. Mantra repetition, chanting, Rosary prayers, Bhakti yoga, mandala drawing, choir singing and altar-tending are some forms of devotional art practices. Other devotional rituals include preparing a space for a specific purpose, or cleansing one that has been subjected to some wounding. Devotional arts may be part of an established traditional religious context, or independent of traditional religions/spiritual practices.
Magic Temple Arts is a sanctuary devoted to observing ritual, rustic and devotional arts, and serves as an archive and resource for their use and experience.
~ Carli Castellani