Ritual Orbit

These are the Principles of Ritual Orbit.

1. Ritual is most effective when crafted by an individual for personal use.

Human Beings are essentially animals that have rebelled against the helplessness of a purely instinctual existence. We grow food because hunting and foraging are unpredictable. We use complex language because it maximizes the efficiency of our rebellion against the forces that would do us harm..

As animals, the universal order would have us fighting amongst one another to stay alive, but as Humans, we fight the universal order instead.

Our nature is to control to survive, and in order to control, we must understand. Therefore, it is that which we cannot comprehend which terrifies us the most, and ritual is our natural defense against these things.

When primitive man witnessed the death of a loved one and then attempted to relate the reality of that death to him self, he was unable to understand it and thus unable to control it’s influence over his existence. So he crafted a ritual as a temporary bridge between what he could and could not comprehend. Inevitably, his tribe found comfort in this satisfying explanation of the darkness- and they began to craft a simple mythology to support it.

Remember, though, that the ritual originated with just one man. If any new insights concerning the true nature of death were revealed to him, he could easily craft a new ritual to accommodate them, or simply modify the original- but since the tribe has adopted his ritual as their own, since there is now a complicated group mythology to support this ‘temporary bridge’- it would be quite difficult for the ritual to adapt itself to anything sudden or new.

2. The focus of a ritual will decrease proportionately to any increase of adherents to that rituals unified community of shared belief.

Say a man crafts a ritual to soothe his fear of the unknown (of death). He sees the sun and calls it a Golden Button and he says that when he dies, his life will wash away into the tide of the Golden Button where he will be warm and happy for all of eternity.

The rest of his hears of this ritual and are immediately comforted by it’s reassurance of protection from the unknown- so they begin to observe it as well. But now, instead of one man focusing all of his attention on one ritual, there are now several people, all slightly less focused on the object of that ritual, and slightly more focused on one another- on the woman they are courting, or the man they are about the marry.

Soon a friendly neighboring tribe hears of this ritual, and gradually, they too begin to attend. There are now so many distracted people involved with this one mans temporary description of the unknown, that when he finally passes away, they are left with a ritual that has no individual interpreter for its design. Since they can no longer turn to him, they turn to what he created instead; they turn to the Golden Button.

They begin to worship it; make sacrifices to it- anything to get some answers or guidance out of it. They create temples and complex manuscripts to bolster their beliefs, and when someone finally stands up and asks the very serious question, “Why are we worshiping a Golden Button?”


3.Societal order is entirely dependant upon the effectiveness of its ritual order, and its ability to adapt to local shifts in culture and science.

It should come as no surprise that a civilization builds itself on principals of shared belief, on common values and similar ideologies. We hold each others hands in the darkness to ward away the helplessness from what we do not understand. We soothe each other against the unimaginable emptiness of space.

When the focus of a ritual has been entirely forgotten by its people- the civilization to which those people belong begins to deteriorate- the people begin to forget why they belong to that civilization in the first place. No longer are they unified in comfort against the darkness. No longer can their sluggish rituals adapt themselves to the rapid shifts of culture that are inherent to such a massive population of people. Their temporary bridge is falling apart, and when it does- the world that they built on top of that bridge will go down right behind it.


4.Local shifts in culture and science are always predicated by effective rituals that have been crafted by an individual for personal use.

One day, a scientist walks out of his laboratory after 40 long days and 40 long nights of research- and proclaims that he has discovered a theory which may very well describe mans fate after death.

But the people are so involved with their ancient ritualistic system that they ignore the scientist because their static principles cannot react quickly enough to adapt. Because of this, they are unable to further separate themselves from the malevolent universal order which their ritual was created to protect them against in the first place.