What do you think of Wicca?

[The Grand Nudger]

One has to wonder why the body of spellcasters in the world aren;t particularly self enlightened people, at this point.  They;ve been up to it for tens of thousands of years.  The thing with ritual is that its an intentional behavior.  A psychologist would tell us that ritual is an attempt to minimize or smooth over anxiety.  

The tricky part, though, is knowing whether that anxiety actually has anything to do with the intentional contents of the ritual, and whether that ritual actually does address whatever the anxiety is, even subconsciously.  A person who continues to engage in ritual behaviors doesn;t seem to have overcome the anxiety..or they would no longer feel any compulsion to the ritual..and a person who believes that the ritual has done something that it has not has done nothing to allay that anxiety in the first place.  

In the most extreme cases of positivist ritual..the sum total of the effect of the ritual(s) is that a person thinks they;ve turned their life around or they feel good about x..but in reality they continue to engage in their self destructive behaviors and their life is falling apart around them.  Think of the people who fill their trailers with jesus candles and pray every day to win the lotto and that their kid gets that sweet promotion.  The ritual provides them with a good feeling about how things are improving, and looking up, and about to change any day and reenforces their idea that they;re on the right track......but, a trailer full of jesus candles and praying for financial success strongly suggests otherwise.  Theres a natural defense mechanism when someone suggests that maybe they should do some actual work towards any of their goals ala "how do you know this wont work, how do you know my prayers wont be answered, some of my prayers have been answered, I have faith"...but what is that beyond the compulsivity defending itself to the detriment of it;s possessor?  

In short, ritual is a signal of distress, not the solution to it - though it can defer it. A spell is an elaborate theatrical construct that manifests that distress... but rather than seeking or providing resolution.. seeks comfort by validation through folklore and compulsive behaviors. This applies to rituals as simple as leaving a cup of water in front of a pile of stones all the way up to a catholic mass.

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Heres a fun one.

 We examined whether ritualized behavior will manifest spontaneously as a dominant behavioral strategy in anxiogenic situations. Manipulating anxiety, we used motion-capture technology to quantify various characteristics of hand movements. We found that induced anxiety led to an increase in repetitiveness and rigidity, but not redundancy. However, examination of both psychological and physiological pathways revealed that repetitiveness and rigidity were predicted by an increase in heart rate, while self-perceived anxiety was a marginally significant predictor of redundancy. We suggest that these findings are in accordance with an entropy model of uncertainty, in which anxiety motivates organisms to return to familiar low-entropy states in order to regain a sense of control.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26096971