Ritual: An Essential Grimoire

Ritual

Also by Damien Echols & Lorri Davis

Yours for Eternity

Also by Damien Echols

Life After Death

High Magick

Angels and Archangels

Ritual

An Essential Grimoire

Damien Echols & Lorri Davis

To Tami Simon,

who brought us back to life

Contents

Introduction: Grounded in Ritual

Introduction: Welcome

Part 1: Working with Energy

Nourishing the Aura

The Fourfold Breath

How to Pray

Tree of Life Energizing Ritual

Directing Energy to the Hands

Energy Circulation with Others

Energy Circulation with Trees

Angelic Energy

Using Elemental Energies

Drawing on the Energy of Places

Part 2: Grounding & Purification

Literal Grounding

Sink into Earth

Grounding with Water

Vacuum for Anxiety & Overwhelm

Wet-Vac

Room Clearing

Clearing Your Commute

Black Stone Energy Cleanse

Black Ball Energy Cleanse

Fire Burning through Feet

Cord Cutting

Part 3: Centering & Balance

Meditation for Deep Stillness

Upon Waking

A Ritual Bedtime

Fourfold Breath for Sleep

Sleeping with the Angels of the Moon

Take a Trip to Dreamland

Preventing Nightmares with Rusku

Essential Oil Ritual for Anxiety & Fear

Candle Magick for Grief

Moments Lived in Light

Windows of Heaven Meditation

Resolving Resentment

Inner Knowing

Soften Your Eyes to Center in Love

Feathers

See People as Light

Part 4: Shielding & Protection

Sphere of Light Shield

Aura Shield

Power Shield

Shielding to Let Love In

Selective Shielding

Shielding for Abundance

Quick Ritual for a Private Conversation in Public Space

Shield for Invisibility

Protecting an Object

Part 5: Directing, Projecting & Charging

Bolts of Light

Charging a Glass of Water

Blessing Food

Directing Energy for Pain Relief

Charging a Candle

Charging with the Full Moon

Ritual Objects

Ritual Substances

Group Blessing Ritual

Plant Magick

A Talisman Tale

Rose Cross Sigil Creator

Part 6: Manifestation & Mastery

Thoughts & Words

Manifestation 101

Child Mind

Sleep Manifestation Magick

Lassoing Time

Healing Lack with Angel Magick

Thanks in Advance

The Path of Magick

Epilogue: Doing Work in Deep Waters

Epilogue: Joy in Every Moment

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Correspondences

About the Authors

About Sounds True

Introduction

Grounded in Ritual

The need for ritual is innate. It is born of a deep need to articulate our times of transition, our profound experiences. It is an essential part of what makes and keeps us human. Rituals can act as the punctuation marks in our life, providing us with a sense of structure.

Humans are ritualistic. We use rituals to frame our lives, even when we don’t realize that we’ve built our lives around them. For me, ritual has been an anchor, a buffer from the outside world.

As a child I was fearful. Scared of interactions with others, my first day of school ended abruptly after I threw up at the threshold of my first grade class.

Once I was able to keep the butterflies in my stomach at bay, I realized that there were things I could control all around me. I could sit in the same chair each day. I could eat the same lunch, and I could have my lunch at the same table, day after day. These things I could count on kept me grounded.

The realization that I could calm my nerves by living my life in a ritualistic way got me through many transitions.

I began using ritual to heal after my husband Damien got off death row in 2011. I’d worked on his case, managing a huge legal team and partnering with supporters from around the world in the work that would eventually see him freed.

What we weren’t prepared for was the total destruction of our relationship, our health, and our ability to live productive lives after the locusts of complex PTSD took their toll.

Five years later, we had traveled the world promoting books and films and giving public talks. We’d moved five times. Through it all Damien was barely functioning. His traumatic brain injury went unseen by most. He presented as healthy and capable, but inside he was as frightened and savage as a wild animal trapped in a corner. Reeling in fear, I exacerbated his condition by fighting and blaming. Finding ourselves suicidal, we eventually sought therapy, but most importantly, we began to rebuild our lives through ritual. I’m happy to say that not only did we survive, but we are thriving, and I attribute it all to God and the rituals that we have built our lives around.

Many of the rituals you’ll find in this book are the very same we used to come back to life. We collected them together in this grimoire to give everyone access to the healing power of magick.

Welcome

Humans have performed rituals since the dawn of civilization. Those ritual actions created grounding points that enabled divine energy to enter the physical realm. This is exactly what ritual magick offers to us today.

Rituals are moments when we acknowledge this life is a vehicle we are using to break the chains that bind us to fate. They are actions we carry out in order to marry the energies of the heavens to the energy of the earth. In essence, rituals are the way we gradually lift ourselves out of an unsatisfactory, distracted, and purely materialistic way of interacting with life, and instead walk with one foot in each world. It’s through ritual that we each become our own priest and sovereign. In magick we use rituals to unite that which is above with that which is below to achieve completion of the Great Work, that is, crystallizing all of the levels and layers of the aura so that they survive the death of the physical body.

Defeating death probably sounds like a lot more than you bargained for when you picked up this book, but even the most basic ritual teaches us that we are never truly powerless. With repetition, a ritual allows us to exert more and more control over the reality we are creating until even a prison cell can begin to feel like a control tower from which you can reach out, touch the world, and bring about change. Ritual not only allows us to wield divine energy to change the world, but also to create our own world and dwell within it.

When I first started having success with magickal rituals, I still doubted myself and was tempted to chalk it up to coincidence. However, as the years went by and I experienced more and more results, I eventually not only lost any doubts I had but became more surprised if it didn’t work than if it did.

In my previous books I have written about magick as the Western path to enlightenment. I am convinced that all of the modern Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are actually vehicles used to pass along the same coded information. The whole point of the story of Jesus was to make this ancient magickal information more available so that anyone could become a king. He was bringing an end to the divine right of kings to rule, giving everyone keys to obtaining sovereignty over their own existence. This is why magick is called the royal science. It is the means by which a slave can become a monarch.

In magick, when we say, God created the world, it means something different than when religions use that phrase. In magick, think of the word God as shorthand for that infinite consciousness that lies outside the boundaries of time and space. It is eternal, without borders, qualities, or characteristics. In order to experience any sort of change, it must pour itself into the boundaries of material existence. God didn’t just create the world, it became the world. It became us. This is why the Bible says that God gave humans dominion over the earth—because we were meant to continue the process of creation, to pick up where Source left off and continue attempting to create heaven on earth. This is the meaning behind the part of the Lord’s Prayer that says, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Trust me, I’m well aware that the Abrahamic traditions may have left a bad taste in the mouths of those who have experienced their more oppressive aspects. They may have left you with no desire to work with any system that reminds you of them. I myself once felt that way. But this system predates all of those religions. In fact, those religions pretty much hijacked the system entirely from the ancient Sumerians and just put a new spin on it—same as when they built cathedrals and churches on top of ancient pagan holy sites. None of that really matters when it comes to the rituals in this book. You won’t find a lot of arcane terminology or lengthy ceremonies here. What you will find are simple practices to develop your own connection to the energy and intelligence of the universe, whether you are on the path to becoming a full-fledged mage or are completely new to working with subtle energy.

Wherever you are on your journey, welcome.

Part 1

Working with Energy

Here’s the way magick works: even though infinite consciousness manifests itself in time and space, there is still an endless amount of it that lies outside the material plane. It’s all around us and within us, and we are within it, much like fish in the ocean. It has a kind of intelligence embedded within it and behaves as we program it to behave. It shapes itself to conform to our expectations. We can draw upon this infinite energy source that saturates the universe by using our breathing and visualization. In this first section all of the rituals are about developing these basic skills of energy work.

When we’re working with subtle energy, we’re working with a substance that exists on the etheric, or astral, level of reality. This level of reality overlaps and interpenetrates the physical but is more ephemeral. It’s said in magick that anything and everything that exists on the material plane began as energy on the astral plane and eventually became dense enough to gradually come into being in the physical. This is why shaping energy is such a vital aspect of