Wolfpeach - "When Is Water Moon Water?"

My Evolving Sense of Ritual Purity


I was Kemetic Orthodox for many years. I left that religion long ago for a battery of reasons, and it's taken years for me to get out of the Kemetic Orthodox "mindset" of a lot of things. "No, you don't need to worship Wepwawet if you don't want to, you aren't bound by your Rite of Parent Divination anymore." "No, you don't need to use the name you got from Kemetic Orthodoxy, you aren't Shemsu anymore." One of the things that really burrowed into my head at that time was the concept of ritual purity... that I needed to keep my ritual space free of "ritually impure" materials. This included things like feces, blood, urine, and general biohazards like them.

This might seem really simple and obvious... who keeps feces, blood, and urine in a ritual space anyway? Well, actually... a lot of people. Cow dung is found in some traditional incenses. Urine byproducts are in a number of everyday things, and is used in a number of traditional cultures as a cleanser, and blood similarly is used in a lot of traditional rituals. Nowadays, as a very Witchcraft-Forward Pagan, I use urine in my protection bottles, my hand-written books and petitions use ink that has my blood in it, and I even have stuff made from feces (like the elephant dung paper I keep around just because it's interesting).

So it may seem as though I have completely up and abandoned the concept of ritual purity and just involve whatever the fuck I feel like into my rituals. And, well... I haven't. I've simply adapted my concept of ritual purity and made room for compromises I might not have made before. Because here's the thing: Those body fluids aren't ritually impure just because. They are ritually impure because they carry disease and represent general filth and mess. For instance, if you are wearing clothing that is soiled with feces, and you aren't actively in the process of changing that, you are at risk of getting people around you very sick... you are either at risk of contaminating things around you with fecal pathogens, or you soiled yourself as a result of being sick yourself. Our ancestors did not understand the concept of microbes, but they did understand the concept of contagion. Purity rules developed from the need to keep people safe from the illnesses and other maladies that can result from filth and injury.

Compare this to the ways these body fluids and other impure things are used intentionally. Incense made with cow dung and paper made from elephant dung are not the result of being sick or unwashed, nor are they particularly unsafe. You can certainly decide you think they're weird, but are they "impure?" The blood in my magical ink has been outside of my body for so long that it simply does not carry pathogens anymore, and since I donate blood and nobody's complained yet I know it's at least safe enough to be funneled into somebody else's body to save their life.

In addition, I don't do ablutions the same way anymore. When I was Kemetic Orthodox, I would have done a ritual involving putting ten pellets of natron into water, saying a few sacred words, and cleansing my body with it. Today, I still do ablutions, but I do them with soap and water instead of natron. Because again, the reason for ablutions is to become ritually pure, and if ritual purity is a way of preventing disease, soap is going to do a much better job of it than natron... I even have the option to use both, or buy soap that has natron in it.

Don't get me wrong... if you decide to keep to those old traditions as strictly as possible, there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that, and there are certainly still situations I can think of where I would do the same! But personally, after a lot of thought and discussion with my Gods, I don't do it this way anymore... I do my ablutions with soap instead of natron, and I determine "purity" based on safety, not ingredients.

But that does not mean I don't think of some things as ritually impure. And here's where we go way back... long ago, when I was still Kemetic Orthodox and reading the forums, their nisut said that she considered petroleum oil products (such as plastic) to be ritually impure, because of the environmental impact. This actually has really strong ramifications for most Kemetic practice... so much stuff is made out of plastic that it is extremely hard to avoid. Most Pagan statuary, including both deity statuary and tools, is made of some sort of polymer resin (plastic). Even things that don't look like resin are frequently made of resin, such as bonded marble. Most of the paint I used to make my own tools was acrylic (plastic). So much of our clothing, including the ritual clothing you find at a typical metaphysical store, is made out of polyester or other synthetic materials (plastic). And that's not even considering the other petroleum oil products we regularly use in ritual, like paraffin wax candles.

Now, I don't know pretty much any Kemetic practitioner including myself who thinks you're a bad Kemetic if you use resin statuary, and there was no ancient admonition against using plastic in antiquity as it did not even exist at the time. But when I was still shaking off the Kemetic habits I had developed, avoiding plastic was one that really stuck around, not because I think the Gods arbitrarily consider them ritually impure, but because avoiding petroleum oil products on my altar and minimizing it in the rest of my practice (and life in general) is an environmentally-significant choice that represents the same kind of thing that more ancient ritual purity requirements were getting at before developing into a list of mystical "do"s and "don't"s.

You don't show up to a temple covered in filth because it's just self-evidently offensive to the Gods... it's offensive to the Gods because being covered in filth is a public health hazard. In the same way, filling your altar with cheap, mass-produced goods made out of 10 different kinds of plastic that are eventually going to crumble into microplastics is a public health hazard. Because of this, I go out of my way to use natural materials when it's feasible to do so.

Does this mean I practice 100% plastic-free, petroleum-free Witchcraft? Of course not. Sometimes there simply is no safe, accessible, affordable alternative for something I really feel I need, and I'm certainly not going to just throw away all of the resin and polyester things I acquired before I started practicing "quality over quantity" when choosing my ritual tools. But once you understand ritual purity as having a purpose and not just being an arbitrary list of things you can't use, you understand that sometimes compromising is the best policy, and the Gods understand that.

Happy Trails,
Wolfpeach

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©July 2024, Wolfpeach