On ritual engagement
My dear friend Lorxus posed a question recently that really caught my attention. Paraphrasing slightly, they wanted to know what I think our ritual circle gets out of having a participant who attends but doesn't "believe" — and conversely, what that person is themself getting out of being in the circle, whether they know it or not.
I love this question because it's a thing that I think about myself. I do ritual because I really believe there's something more than us physical folks there. I did it for myself long before I invited other people to do it with me, and I started doing it with those other people because I believe that's part of the agreement of being able to do ritual where I do it. I have an agreement with this land, to honor it in ritual, and to make a place for community here. However, making place for community also means crafting experiences that don't require everyone to believe exactly how I do. I have had more than enough history with groups of people who wield explicit or implicit tests of belief as social weapons. At our ritual events, the expectation isn't belief. It's engagement.
And yet, I know, the actions I invite people to engage with are shaped by belief. They speak of a circle as a thing that's more than people standing around. The circle includes the spirits of the land itself, the spirits of the cosmos that we call in from dawn, noon, and dusk. The circle is the spirits of those people, that land, that cosmos. So, the first thing I wonder, when a skeptic asks what "the circle" gets out of their participation… are they talking about the people standing around, or about that gestalt spiritual presence?
With the question being asked from a materialist frame, I'm happy to start by answering in kind: What do the other physical people in the circle get out of someone who attends, and engages, but does not believe? I think the answer is simple. That group of people is stronger, and feels more vivid to those standing in it, when there are more folks there and they're all participating. The belief doesn't matter nearly so much as the engagement does, simply because people generally like to do things with other people. In the argot of paganism, this is orthopraxy, and in that materialist frame, it's basically the entire point of ritual.
But, being who I am, I also have to answer that question from the spiritual perspective. And the beautiful thing is, if I look at the circle as being formed of one or more spiritual entities, I find the answer to be almost the same. Animism is, after all, founded in relationships between people… just not all of them being physical humans. The non-physical people of the circle delight in that engagement as much as the physical people do. That's why they're in the circle.
It's worth going a bit deeper about this though, to pick apart some common assumptions I see about 'belief' in a magical, polytheist, animist context: I do not believe that my gods and spirits require belief, at least not in the urban-fantasy-writer sense of wasting away without it. But I do think they generally benefit from attention in the same way most of us do. When someone is participating in the circle, they're giving that attention, adding to the circle metaphysically in the same way they're adding to it socially.
But there's another part to the question: What might the skeptic themself get from their participation in the circle, even if they don't believe they're getting anything other than a positive social experience? I believe that the same principles apply there, perhaps just inverted. Someone in the circle, engaging with the ritual, is by definition having an experience. They're not just paying attention, they're being paid attention to: by the other physical attendees, and by the spirits of the circle. And if they find that experience valuable, and return to it, they're clearly being nourished by it too.
That might sound again like just the psychological perspective, but to me it goes deeper. One of my favorite ways of thinking about gods and spirits is that they literally are their purviews, at least in part. Non-physical folk are made of thought and concept. And that means, if someone is having a liminal experience, then the Dancer-Between is with them. When someone is expressing themself, they're walking with the Player-with-Light. And if they find those experiences beneficial, they've been blessed by the Wanderers.
In my ritual work, I'm called to craft spaces that invite engagement and facilitate experience. It's not up to me how someone makes sense of those experiences. I see those experiences as a form of connection, not just with the other attendees, but with the spirits among and around us. But I wouldn't be doing a good job of facilitating experience if I told someone that that's the only experience they were supposed to have. When I see someone engaging with the experience itself, that's enough for me to know I'm doing right by them, and Them.