Rituals ...

"Doing magic is about being responsive to the challenges of your environment - often a response borne out of necessity. The mistake that newcomers to practical magic often make is that, having identified a problem, they go looking for a 'ritual' or spell which they believe will remove it...For me, the crux of the matter is that ritual magic is fun. Moreover, ritual magic is a skill. A magical ritual is more than the sum of its parts. Ritual has elements of performance, and its own psychology; yet it would be a mistake to consider ritual to be merely psychodrama. Ritual can be broken down into the arrangement of sensory cues, voice techniques, gesture, visualization, movement, symbolism, role-shifting, and trance induction, yet it is more than any of this. Unaccountably, rituals, when performed, create an atmosphere - a space - in which something mysterious and wonderful may happen. If nothing else, ritual demonstrates how little we know of our potential, of ourselves, and the world through which we move."--Phil Hine, Prime Chaos