A Literary Prescription for

Rituals

For the candle, the salt, and the thing you do that you cannot quite justify.

A ritual is a small set of actions you perform on purpose, in order, at a marked moment. That is all it has to be. Some people arrive at this by way of the moon and the seasonal wheel, herbs on a windowsill, salt on a threshold, a paper folded under a candle at the new moon. Others arrive by way of the same walk every Sunday morning, or the one cup of tea drunk sitting down before anything else is allowed to start. The mechanism is identical, and it does not appear to require belief. What it provides is an edge on a formless day, something orderly to do when you have no power over the outcome, and a few minutes of attention you would not otherwise have paid. These books, poems and quotes are for anyone building a practice of their own, or already quietly doing some of this and slightly embarrassed about it.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Three of these give you something to do and a way of thinking about why it works, from a Harvard divinity graduate, a practical green-witch handbook, and a record producer on practice as preparation. The novels are all about women and inherited knowledge: two sisters in a Massachusetts kitchen, a maiden aunt who declines to be useful any longer, and three centuries of the same Cumbrian cottage.

The Power of Ritual

Casper ter Kuile · 2020

Ter Kuile studied at Harvard Divinity School and noticed that people were getting from CrossFit, book clubs and Sunday runs the things they used to get from church: rhythm, belonging, a set time to stop. His argument is that ritual is a technology rather than a belief system, and that you can build one deliberately without signing up to anything. The most useful book here if the word ritual makes you slightly uncomfortable and you want to do it anyway.

Practical Magic

Alice Hoffman · 1995

Two sisters raised by aunts in a Massachusetts house where the lilacs bloom in the wrong month and women knock on the back door at midnight wanting love spells. Hoffman writes the domestic end of magic: the herbs on the windowsill, the things you do in a kitchen at three in the morning, the way ordinary women in a small town become the ones everyone is faintly afraid of. Far better than the film, and much stranger.

The Green Witch

Arin Murphy-Hiscock · 2017

The practical handbook, and unapologetically so: herbs, hearth, seasons, moon, what to do with rosemary and salt and a candle, how to set up a corner of a room without it looking like a stage set. There is no theology in it and no requirement that you believe anything in particular. If you have been quietly doing some of this for years without a framework or a vocabulary, this is the book that gives you both.

Lolly Willowes

Sylvia Townsend Warner · 1926

Laura Willowes is a useful maiden aunt in her forties, shunted between relatives who need her, until she simply moves to a village in the Chilterns and becomes a witch. Warner is entirely serious and extremely funny at the same time, and the argument underneath it is unmistakable: witchcraft here is what a woman reaches for when she wants to belong to herself. Written a year before Virginia Woolf made a similar case in an essay.

Daily Rituals

Mason Currey · 2013

A hundred and sixty-one writers, painters and composers, and exactly how they arranged their days: what time they rose, what they ate, how long they worked, what they did afterwards. Currey offers almost no commentary, which is what makes it addictive and oddly steadying. The pattern that emerges is that almost nobody waited to feel like it. They had a time and a place and they went there.

Weyward

Emilia Hart · 2023

Three women in the same Cumbrian cottage across five centuries: one on trial in 1619, one in a bad marriage in 1942, one escaping a worse one in 2019. Hart connects them through the crows, the beetles and the plants, and the book is about inherited knowledge that women passed on quietly because writing it down was dangerous. Propulsive, and very good on what got called witchcraft and what it actually was.

The Once and Future Witches

Alix E. Harrow · 2020

Three estranged sisters in an alternate 1893 New Salem, where witching has been all but stamped out and the suffrage movement is beginning. Harrow builds her magic out of nursery rhymes and old wives’ remedies, the scraps that survived because nobody thought them worth confiscating. Long, and worth it for the central idea: that a spell is just words and a way of doing something, handed down.

Poems about rituals and old belief

Incantation, superstition, and the shiver

A charm chanted at the court of a king who wrote a book on witchcraft, a poem about a village that simply does not go up a certain hill, and five lines about the moment something crosses your path and your body reacts first.

“The Witches’ Charm”

Ben Jonson, 1609

The owl is abroad, the bat, and the toad,
And so is the cat-a-mountain;
The ant and the mole sit both in a hole,
And frog peeps out o’ the fountain.
The dogs they do bay, and the timbrels play,
The spindle is now a-turning;
The moon it is red, and the stars are fled,
But all the sky is a-burning.

Written for a masque performed at court in 1609, which means the ladies of the household stood up in front of James I — a king who had personally written a book on witchcraft — and chanted this. Read it aloud and you can hear why incantation works on people regardless of belief. It is almost entirely rhythm. That is the practical point about ritual: the words matter far less than the fact of saying them in order.

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from “The Fairies”

William Allingham, 1850

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!

Allingham grew up in Donegal and wrote down what people there actually did: leave things out, avoid certain paths, decline to say certain names after dark. Note that the poem is not about belief. Nobody in it has decided the fairies are real. They simply do not go up that hill, because their mother did not, and it costs nothing to keep to it. A great deal of ritual works precisely like that.

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“The Warning”

Adelaide Crapsey, 1915

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk… as strange, as still…
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?

Twenty-two words. Crapsey invented this form, the cinquain, while she was dying of tuberculosis in her thirties, and this is the finest of them. It is here because it catches the thing that makes people superstitious in the first place: not a belief, but a moment when something ordinary crosses your path and your body reacts before your mind has a say in it. Everything on this page begins in that second.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about ritual to keep

Short lines for the corner of the room where you keep the odd things.

Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.

Zig Ziglar

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We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.

Tish Thawer

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Ceremony and ritual spring from our heart of hearts: those who see them as mere form or gesture are missing the point.

Sun Bear

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Ritual is the way we carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out.

Christina Baldwin

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A ritual is a decision made once and then kept, so that you do not have to make it again on the mornings you would rather not. The candle is not the point. Turning up to the candle is the point.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Practices you can actually keep

A few short things to mark a threshold with, and one that only works because you do it at the same time every day.

Connected to the Divine: A 432Hz Meditation

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A soundbath-style practice tuned to 432Hz, for settling into stillness and a felt sense of connection to something larger than yourself.

Listen Now For Free

Receiving Signs: Guidance, Synchronicity & Trust

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A reflective meditation for noticing the quiet signs and synchronicities around you, and deepening trust in your own intuition.

Listen Now For Free

Why One Small Thing Can Change Your Day

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A short talk on how one small, deliberate thing can quietly change the shape of a whole day, which is more or less the whole argument for ritual.

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The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations at the same time each day — which is, in the plainest sense, how a ritual gets made.

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Questions people ask

Reading for Rituals

Where should I start?

Start with The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile if the word itself makes you uncomfortable. He treats ritual as a technology rather than a belief, which lets you build one without signing up to anything. If you want the practical handbook instead — herbs, moon, hearth, what to actually do with the rosemary — The Green Witch is the one.

Do I have to believe in it for it to work?

Apparently not, and that is the most interesting finding in this whole area. What ritual reliably provides is a marked edge on a day, an ordered set of actions when you feel powerless, and a moment of attention you would not otherwise have given. Those work whether or not you think anything is listening. Plenty of people hold the two positions at once and do the thing regardless.

Which quotes about ritual are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “Ceremony and ritual spring from our heart of hearts: those who see them as mere form or gesture are missing the point” (Sun Bear), “Ritual is the way we carry the presence of the sacred” (Christina Baldwin) and “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (Tish Thawer). You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

What is the difference between a ritual and a tradition?

Roughly: a ritual is one you make, a tradition is one you inherit. Rituals tend to be personal and deliberate — the candle, the moon, the thing you do at the turn of the year because you decided to. Traditions arrive already made, from a family or a culture, and their power comes from repetition across generations rather than from your intention. There is a separate prescription here for those.

Rituals

Prescribed reading

Incantation, superstition, and the shiver

Quotes about ritual to keep

Practices you can actually keep

Reading for Rituals

Where should I start?

Do I have to believe in it for it to work?

Which quotes about ritual are worth keeping?

What is the difference between a ritual and a tradition?

More prescriptions await.