Marion Woodman: Ritual: Sacred and Demonic
Ritual: Sacred and Demonic
All ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other. They have believed in the sacred and the profane, the good and the evil, the god and the devil. They have believed in the necessity of ritual to protect themselves from the demonic. They have believed in the necessity of ritual to invoke the sacred. They have believed in the necessity of ritual to mark the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the god and the devil, the good and the evil.
In our time, we have lost our rituals. We have lost our gods. We have lost our sense of the sacred. We have lost our sense of the profane. We have lost our sense of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the god and the devil, the good and the evil. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to protect ourselves from the demonic. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to invoke the sacred.
We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to mark the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the god and the devil, the good and the evil. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to protect ourselves from the demonic. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to invoke the sacred.
We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to mark the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the god and the devil, the good and the evil. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to protect ourselves from the demonic. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to invoke the sacred.
We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to mark the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the god and the devil, the good and the evil. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to protect ourselves from the demonic. We have lost our sense of the necessity of ritual to invoke the sacred.
Without the Church to mark out those strong boundaries between impersonal and personal, sacred and profane, God and Devil, we have to be extremely conscious in order to protect ourselves from the demonic within and without.
The projection of the Perfect was once on God. When God “died,” that perfection was often projected onto the husband. And now the terrible truth is that in many lives that projection has been taken off the husband and put onto a muffin. It holds that much numinosity; its captive cannot break the spell. At the same time, however, some voice of sanity or some inner laughter mocks the whole idea of participation mystique with a holy muffin. The muffin is not sacred and the power it is releasing is not holy power even when flavored with blueberries.
Then what is going on? In a religious structure, ritual is recognized as a transformative fire through which an individual moves on the journey from one level of society to another or from one level of awareness to another. Whether the fire is real or symbolic, the initiate submits to it, allows the old life to be burned away and emerges as a new person.
At the center of the fire is an archetypal force, a god or goddess so to speak, which the participant invokes in order to participate in its life. By contacting that energy in a numinous experience of suffering, dying and then rising again, the ego sacrifices itself to a Higher Power, is enlarged and transformed so that it returns to ordinary life with a new outlook.
But what happens when these innate spiritual longings are not structured within an impersonal framework such as the Church could offer? The muffin cannot replace the divine wafer, nor can alcohol replace the divine spirit, nor can starving replace a religious fast. When our animal and spiritual signals are confused, bizarre behavior results. The emptiness gnaws and the wolf prowls until some kind of ritual is performed. ~(Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride, pp. 31–32
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