Transformative Ritual Design with Sam Webster

We in the west are the only major culture without a living ritual tradition. The best we have are the Catholics and the Masons (I was raised by both), and they are both static forms.

Yet ritual is the tool humans have used onwards of 30,000 years for changing ourselves, for navigating the stages of life, for taking up or leaving a vocation, for healing failed adaptations and transforming trauma. Without ritual, we stay stuck in bad places, pain is held longer than it needs to be, children do not become adults, and trauma does not end.

Consider how different things would be if we had been able to turn to a collective ritual to acknowledge and move beyond the Pandemic? Perhaps there would have been less irrational thinking that the economy is bad, crime is rampant, and or being attracted to a demagogue.

We will use this collective loss to focus our learning by designing the ritual we need in class.

We will experience that ritual is not a bunch of inscrutable actions strung haphazardly together. That ritual has a grammar, one that is the likely precursor of language. It is made out of blocks of embodied meaning, lived and felt through a pattern that shows up all over the world. Its purpose can be spiritual, political, communal, personal, or all of these and more. Reason helps us craft ritual, and our art gives it beauty. Together reason and art make ritual meaningful and feelingful. There is no intellectual discipline or artform that can not be brought to ritual creativity.

Come, let us learn together how to design rituals that transform ourselves and how we are in the world.

Sam Webster, PhD, M.Div., Mage, hails from the Bay Area and has lead ritual and taught ritual design publicly since 1984. He graduated from Starr King School for the Ministry at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley in 1993. He earned his doctorate at the University of Bristol, UK, in 2015, studying Pagan history under Prof. Ronald Hutton.

He is an Adept of the Golden Dawn, a cofounder of the Chthonic-Ouranian Templar order, and an initiate of Wiccan, Druidic, Buddhist, Hindu and Masonic traditions. His work has been published in journals such as Green Egg, Gnosis, and Pangaia, and is the author of the book “Tantric Thelema”. In 2001 he founded the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, and in 2013 founded the Pantheon Foundation. Sam serves the Pagan community as a priest of Hermes.

You can learn more about Sam here: http://samwebstermage.com

Host or Publisher The Berkeley Alembic Foundation