Konfessionen einer Ritualtäterin
... WHY DID I JUST SPEND TWO HOURS WATCHING OLD MEN IN DRESSES TALK IN LATIN AND PRANCE AROUND UNDER BLUE ROMAN SKIES. OK, not exactly prance. You know what I mean. WHY IS THIS PAPAL STUFF SO ADDICTIVE.
I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for ritual. And for living history. And for costumes. And they're good at all of that. That was probably real gold brocade, too, not some poly crap. OK, maybe it was gilded copper. It was still real metal, that's the point.
Ritual story time!
In my first years at the Drachenfest, I played a minor magician, a temple servant (at least I was smart enough NOT to start as a fully-fledged priest :P). So did my brother (albeit from a different world). Now, what with plot needs and everybody being really busy, even the minorly and marginally magically talented characters frequently got drawn into major rituals to create some major artifact or ban some evil influence or whatever. (I was involved in the first Chronofactum ritual, which started out as an excuse to make the Golden Avatar disappear in-characterly, so the guy who played him could out-of-characterly attend his best friend's wedding without anything getting broken IC. And then it sparked an entire series of AU-prequel LARP events, the Zeit der Legenden ("Time of Legends"). I WAS INVOLVED IN THAT AND IT WAS FANTASTIC. -- Anyway.)
I loved that. A lot of time and effort and performance went into those rituals, and as a result, they felt pretty real. My brother stopped playing a minor magician because he found ritual service unbearably tedious; I stopped for a different reason.
When that DF in (I think?) 2008 was almost over, the inofficial master magician of the Grey Camp had to do one last, lonely ritual in order to officially become a master magician. It was sort of his final exam. And everybody went to watch because Talogon (that's his character's name) was known for putting up quite an amazing show. There was the tiniest bit of rain, and it was getting dark, which only added to the atmosphere. And Talogon began to invoke the Four Elements (TM) for whatever purpose.
Everything was very convincing and atmospheric and goosebump-inducing, but things were going slightly wrong as far as I could see. As I said, there was the tiniest bit of rain, no proper drizzle but occasional lonesome drops, and every now and then, one of them would hit the candle Talogon had lit to invoke Fire (obviously). I would've taken that as a sign that maybe the whole thing wasn't meant to be, and in Talogon's place I would've gracefully called it off. Or at the very least, I'd have repeated all the formulae and hand-waving for Fire.
Talogon, instead, simply used a fire-lighter (hidden by his sleeves, so it wouldn't break the show for the audience) to unceremoniously re-light that candle. And I thought, "meh".
Finally, the preparation was done, and in came the Four Elements (TM). For that purpose, Talogon had actually gotten four friends to dress up in (quite amazing and elaborate) garb with masks and huge headdresses and come into the circle. And I...
I was disappointed. For me, that totally broke the spell and turned a magical and believable ritual into a cheap trick. Before those four dressed-up people appeared, I could've believed that the ritual was actually working: The occasional rain-drops in the bowl of water, the gusts of wind in the prayer flag, that could've been taken as proof positive that the elements (or Water and Air, at any rate) were present. And something was clearly not going according to plan as far as Fire was concerned, right? And then the actors came, and turned it from mystical into... well, acting. Some people probably prefer it this way, but for me, it ruined it. So when my brother, who was again getting bored, asked whether we could rather go and find supper now, I agreed readily, and we went off.
Later on, we learned that the ritual had gone wrong and Talogon had almost been killed - by Fire. But NOT because of what I had observed about the candle, but because according to the script for the ritual that he'd handed in with the Magician's Guild (you always have to hand in a script, so they can decide whether something works or not -- people from all sorts of worlds and backgrounds come to the DF, so there are various different forms of magic and the Guild can't know them all, so they need some guidelines to judge by), he'd accidentally forgotten to draw a protective circle around Fire. Or somesuch. (A beginner's mistake, of course, not worthy of a Master Magician, and so Talogon almost payed with his character's life.)
And I thought, "Meh. You could've had that result without the script and without extras - just by saying Look, that candle went out, so clearly Fire wasn't going to play along." It pretty much summed up what had been bothering me about DF rituals before (even when I had enjoyed them): The general trend to make them ever more bombastic and dramatic, to use ever more special effects and ever more complicated scripts. I was involved in a couple of simple, spur-of-the-moment-quick-write-it-down-and-hand-it-in-and-then-improvise rituals that had been convincing AND (IC) effective, so I knew it didn't have to be like that. This sort of magical arms race had been getting on my nerves before, and this final ritual drove the point home. I didn't want to advance to that, and I would have to - even temple servants make their way up the ladder at some point, especially when they've participated in several important rituals. That was part of the decision to abandon that character and, the next year, take Olóriel to the DF instead, and oh, was it ever liberating. All Olóriel ever had to do with rituals was occasionally standing guard over one (you always have to guard a ritual circle, given the war-like background of the DF - even if all the dragons agree on something for once, there are still the Orcs and the warriors of Chaos to take into account).
So there's a fine line where a ritualistic ceremony stops working for me. For instance, if you see those evangelical [was nicht das Gleiche ist wie evangelisch, falls gerade jemand verwirrt ist] events on TV some time, where people pretend to speak in tongues (or maybe they really believe they do) or sway with their arms held up like they're possessed by the holy spirit (or maybe they really believe they are) - that makes me deeply uncomfortable and, I admit it, disdainful. Like the appearance of those dressed-up extras in Talogon's LARP ritual. It turns a ceremony (fictional or otherwise) into play-acting. But the predominantly symbol-based ritual of a "normal" service, or a coronation, or even this papal inauguration? I totally dig that. Both in fantasy and in real life.
There, I admitted it! I'm a ritual offender.
And you have to admit that they just have the prettier costumes in Rome.