 Hi, my name is Danny and welcome to Esoteric Moment. Today I have another book review for the book Art of Ritual. The Art of Ritual is another pagan portal, so it's a very short book. It's not meant to be, you know, ridiculously in-depth. It's meant to really push people into a new section or get them started in research, give them enough tools to get messy and dirty and enjoy whatever it's about, but leaves you kind of in a good position to pursue more information. Using that in mind, The Art of Ritual is a very short book that has, frankly, a lot of basic information about what ritual is in a pagan path. So the first part of the book talks about typical questions like what tools you need, what does ritual entail, am I qualified to perform ritual? All of those kind of beginner questions that you might have. There is definitely a tendency to focus on kind of wicked as the baseline when doing beginner work, and this book has a little bit of that, but I did notice and appreciate that the author works pretty hard at at least mentioning other practices and mentioning that, for example, Druidry does this. While I noticed that Wicca was the baseline for some of these basic descriptions, I didn't feel alienated just because that wasn't my path. So I think this book does appeal to a wide branch, a wide group of pagans, not just the beginner Wicca student. The second half was the most interesting part of the book, in my opinion. The author had some other contributors present different rituals, and these rituals were written out pretty in-depth. They had what tools you would need, whether it was a solitary practice, or whether it was a ritual that involved many different people. It involved scripts, so what you actually could say, and usually a little bit of history about why this ritual was created, or who was involved the first time it was performed. You have some basic rituals for the seasons and for espats celebrations. You have some basic celebrations for rites of passage. There is one hang-up with rites of passage for me, and that is in the pagan community it's really easy, I think, for people to focus on biological females having their adult rite of passage be their first period, and then for biological males we don't have a ritual, and even in this book they kind of talk about, well there's a few examples, and 13 is a good age, but that was it, and it's really hazy in this book, and I think in our community in general, about how we handle young trans pagans, and you know what we can do to make sure that their adult rite of passage is as welcoming to them as it is to anyone else, whether you know someone who identifies as female but isn't menstruating, like you're still an adult even if that's not your thing, and you should still have a ritual that honors that feminine power that you identify with that is a part of you. So I wish that those two rituals had a little bit more in-depth conversation about those issues, and that in general we just talked about how do we make this better for our young people, but again this is a short book, so I understand that you can't go super in-depth to all of those issues and that there are resources slowly hopefully being developed for some of those things. There are also some rituals written in this book that are very specific to different paths, so there are some rituals for specific goddesses, rituals for very specific time periods for paths that honor something, and those I found to be really fascinating, especially because they aren't things that I incorporate into my path or have really considered incorporating them, but I found nuggets of ritual that were really interesting and called to me that I might incorporate into other celebrations and my overall recommendation is that this book is a four out of five stars for sure. It's great, it gives you the basics of what you need, and can really help you pinpoint other areas that you want to investigate. I also was surprised that this is something that you could keep on a shelf and actually want as a resource because the ritual examples were really in-depth and would be great if you're trying to develop your practice or you're working with a group and figuring out what you want to do. The only things that would have made this book better in my opinion would be a little bit more attention to the rites of passage and perhaps having a little bit more exercises or description about how one crafts ritual, not just the basics of what ritual is, but a little bit more about how to discern what inspiration means to you and how you kind of translate that inspiration into writing a ritual for yourself or for groups. I think that's the part of ritual that many people get hung up on and it was touched in a myriad of places in this book but could still use a little bit more meat to it, I feel like. Anyway, this is a fabulous pagan portal book. If you are looking for ways to kind of beef up your ritual or looking for rituals that you haven't seen published in other places, I really think this is a great investment and that you'll enjoy it. In the comments below, I would love to hear what your favorite ritual is. Maybe it's a time of year or rites of passage. You know, let me hear about your favorite ritual. They are always fascinating stories to me. Thanks for watching and as always, may you find peace in the sacred grove.