“Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in archetypes and images.
The world will not receive truth in any other way.”
-Gospel of Philip 67:9-12
The Universal Ritual
Everything in nature ritualizes. The unfolding of a flower, the rhythm of the seasons, the orbit of the stars, are all in accordance with the cosmic laws that reverberate throughout all of creation.
The purpose of ritual is to imitate that ordered and harmonious movement of the universe so that we may become organized internally.
The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches that when the unmanifested divinity unfolds into creation, it fragments and becomes multiplicity, like a mirror shattering into pieces. The inititatic path is a process of regaining our latent unity and divinity, while living in this world of multiplicity and contradiction. The divine energy which assists us to unify and organize the disparate parts of ourselves is called the Christic force.
To Be Put In Order
Rituals as we know them originate in the internal worlds, the higher dimensions, and through rituals we begin to harmonize with superior patterns, so that our Essence may be educated.
“When a myth is enacted in a ritual performance or when a fairy- tale is told, the healing factor within it acts on whoever has taken an interest in it, and allowed himself to be moved in such a way that, through this participation, he will be brought into connection with an archetypical form of the situation, and by this means enabled to put himself ‘in order’.”
–The Gnostic Religion: Meditations in the Mythological Transcendence of the Rituals
Ritual of the Ego
Without these rituals we simply perform the ritual of the ego, which are the the habits of normal existence. In a sense we are always performing rituals, but the unconscious rituals based on attachment to the material, which will not ever elevate our consciousness.
The fall of mankind happened as an internal collapse, via a certain pathway in the opposite direction that the rituals and the light of God travel. To reconquer this lost light we have the rituals, the processes of psychological work, the labor of raising the Seven Serpents, a process that is simply the reverse or the natural solution to the process of dreams and shadows.
To remember the beautiful essence that exists in our hearts and in our every cell, to love our fellow human beings, and to study the wisdom of creation, is to yearn for the influence of rituals that can edify the divine spark of God within. Our minds may not understand the rituals but our hearts do, our essence does.
Ritualize to Harmonize
“The Tattvic currents, which are encountered in the cosmos in harmony with structural forces that produce the evolution and devolution of the universe, are manifested as a boundary of creation, and the first-born of Nature, in such a way that it raises an immense potency and transforms the willpower of Vira who proceeds to blaze on the live coals of Maha-Kundalini.”
-Samael Aun Weor, The Mystery of the Golden Blossom