Reflecting On Five Years of Daily Ritual

The arrival of August marks five years of my daily ritual practice.

My streak began in 2020 with what (to the best of my knowledge) proved to be the last of Andrieh Vitimus’ periodic Do-Magick Challenges. The idea was to enchant for a series of concrete things; I took that as an opportunity to work more closely with my familiar spirits, invoking them to fulfill my desires. I can’t find back the spreadsheet with my enchantments and their results, but I think that my success rate was something like 20%; most significantly, I remember being gifted cake (yum) and green rocks (a baggie of malachite pieces that I still haven’t used up). Whatever I failed to manifest, however, I more than made up in the establishment of my longest-running streak of daily ritual.

I honestly don’t remember what the ritual looked like at the very beginning. I might be able to find my old notes back, but I wasn’t doing a very good job of journalling, back then, despite it being a key part the challenge. I do remember that I originally tried launching a sigil every night before bed, but quickly found that I had run out of brains by the time I’d made it there (a problem that has plagued my Solomonic pentacle experiments this past year, as well).

I’m really, really not a morning person. It sometimes takes me thirty, even sixty minutes to force myself to get out of bed after I wake up. But, by the end of that first month, it was very clear that “first thing when I got up” was the only place I could fit a recurring ritual into my life.

Again, I don’t remember exactly what my ritual was when I started, but I do know that by the end of that first month it had already crystalized around a practice that I had actually started back in college: pouring libations of coffee for my spirit court and having my first cup with them at my altar.

The ritual has grown and changed and collapsed and regrown at least a dozen times over the last five years. At times, it has involved a full formal circle casting with blades and bells and calls to the quarters. For a while, it included a daily tarot spread. There was a time when I was pouring out individual libations into little espresso cups and shot glasses, one for each god and spirit on every altar in every room of my house, and lighting a candle to go with every one of them. Since the summer of 2021, I’ve gotten pretty good about journaling my daily ritual, if not necessarily any of the other things I want to be keeping track of. At the very top of my game, I even managed to supplement my morning offerings with ten or even twenty minutes of sitting meditation in the afternoon. Other times, all I could manage was to pour myself a cup of coffee, light a candle and incense, and call it good.

Only one thing has remained constant over these five years. To this day, “coffee with my spirit court” remains the heart of my daily ritual. Still, for all the changes and variations that have come and gone, that continuity feels really, really good. With all the chaos in the world since Covid landed, I can’t begin to imagine how unhinged I’d be without this stabilizing practice.

Right now, my morning ritual starts with making coffee in a French press. While the grounds steep, I clean up the previous day’s offerings and gather the candles and incense (and sometimes other materia) and set out my coffee cup for that day’s ritual, and take note of the planetary day and hour, the position of the sun, how much and how well I slept, and record any dreams that I can recall, and (when needed) fill out the previous day’s diary entry.

When the coffee is ready, I purify myself with cinnamon and invoke Baphomet to bless the candles, incense, and coffee. I make my offerings under my motto and magical names, and then greet my spirit court by name. Then, finally, I sit in quiet contemplation, praying for aid and listening for any guidance I might receive.

I use a meditation app to time things. I used a different one for years, but when I finally paid for it, that didn’t actually make the ads go away, so fuck them. Now I use InsightTimer, which lets me set a bell for each stage of my ritual: ten minutes while the coffee steeps; six minutes to make my offerings and invocations; and, finally, five minutes to sit in quiet contemplation.

Some days, I follow up my quiet contemplation with a bit of candle magic. At a minimum, I do an uncrossing and cursebreaking ritual every Saturday and healing magic every Sunday.

Uncross my conditions, turn away the Evil Eye, break every curse that has been laid upon me. May the work of ignorance be undone, may the work of jealousy be undone, may the work of malice be undone, may the work of my enemies be undone. The work of ignorance is undone, the work of jealousy is undone, the work of malice is undone, the work of my enemies is undone.

Heal me. Heal me. Heal me. Heal my flesh that I may live and thrive. Heal my heart that I may better love and be loved and participate in community. Heal my mind that I may see and think clearly, and act in my own best interest. Heal my soul that I may approach the altars and the gods in good faith and with an open heart.

Some weeks I do one of those candles every single day. Other weeks, I add other magics to the morning ritual. Road openers. Fiery walls of protection. Whatever life calls for.

My daily ritual will continue to evolve. It will change as I change and my needs change. Honestly, even now I feel a need to change it up fairly significantly, but I don’t yet know what I want to change it to. We’ll see what inspiration brings when it finally strikes.

Other occultists sometimes push daily ritual as an ideal of praxis. For myself, I think regular practice is much more important than the specific frequency. I post pictures of my altar every morning because it’s fun, and gives me something “witchy” to share when my practice isn’t producing good stories, but I don’t talk about it much because it often feels like bragging.

Daily ritual works for me, very much to my own surprise. It works better than weekly or monthly rituals because it doesn’t require me to keep track of anything. Sure, there are a few details that change with the day of the week, but that’s not the same, at least not for me. I get up, I clean the altar and turn the page in my magic book, and drink a cup of coffee with my spirit-court.

Then, and only then, I figure out what day it is and what I need to do. Then I get to work and forget what day it is, what time it is, what’s going on in the world. Which is why afternoon mediation and Thursday prosperity altar and Venus Night and all the other less-regular rituals that I want to do never manage to reach the level of consistency that I’ve managed with my morning ritual. I’m trying to change that, trying to get more consistent with other things. But I’m not there, yet. And that’s okay.

So I’m going to take this moment and be proud of my accomplishment. Five years of daily ritual, ever-evolving in slow motion to suit my needs.

Hail unto you gods and powers, patrons and allies, friends and familiars. Hail unto all you who live on the altars of my house and in the pages of my sacred books. Come to the feasts that I lay before you. Hail! Hail! Hail!