I remember having an argument with Them once because I do not like to be wrong and because They have enough patience to keep after me until I admit that I am. I had created my first Kemetic oracle deck and pulled cards for a reading. Sixty-nine cards--showing words, not images. One of them? "Daily Ritual".
I didn't want to use the word Senut--though I knew of Senut and knew it existed in the temple and that it was meant to be exactly that: daily ritual. But I hated the idea of it. I hated the idea of being told "This--this here is what you will do to connect with the gods, and by the way? Do it every day." Even if you don't want to. Even if you don't feel "in the mood". Even if you have other stuff going on. Every day. And I hated feeling like there was that expectation of me--that there was a need to develop some sort of spiritual discipline in me because my own way of talking to the gods somehow wasn't already enough of a dedication on my part.
It's actually a wonder--given how much my less mature self hated the idea--that I included it in the deck at all. I purposefully set out to not have a "daily ritual" in my personal practice. it seemed trite to me to schedule a time to talk to the gods. I talked to them everyday, in a sense, through prayer and devotional art. Why formalize that relationship? Surely, that was something only those who were deprived of that relationship,who had no practice speaking to gods, would do. So I went before shrine whenever I felt like I needed to and was convinced that it was perfectly fine to do things that way. But They had other ideas...
They did not hesitate to nag me with that card. It got drawn every time I did a reading. Every. Damn. Time.
Let me put that in perspective:
There are, as I said, sixty-nine cards in the deck. On a given drawing, I would shuffle the cards very well and draw nine. Even assuming that the first eight cards are not the card in question, thereby limiting the pool of possible cards by eight, the ninth card still only has a 1/61 chance of being the Daily Ritual card, or about a 1.6% chance. For every hundred times I preform a drawing, I should only draw that card at most twice. I have done drawings less than a dozen times and all of them have contained that card.
You think I'd take a hint. But in my usual defiant style, I didn't.
But now, like so many other things, I am reevaluating my stance on it. Here's what I learned once I stopped and listened--really listened--to the temple:
It's not about the expectation. It really isn't. It's also not about the spiritual discipline. It's not a practice meant to make me into a good little Kemetic. It's not meant to change my interactions with the gods or stop me from doing my impromptu ceremonies. Because--and this is the important part--it's not about me.
It's about knitting a community together through a shared act of Heka which draws its power from the forces of exact wording and mass repetition. When one does Senut, one does it as much to contribute to the community as to enrich one's own religious experience.
That's why there is no personalization of ritual words and no free choice in the ritual actions. To use a cliche, there is no I in Team. This isn't about how I talk to the gods--in fact, that's the one part of the ritual which is left open for the practitioner to improvise a bit--it's about how I share in a fellowship which is in diaspora, scattered across the globe. It's the song from American Tale (Somewhere Out There): "And even though I know how very far apart we are/ it helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star". It's the idea that whenever I say those words, at any time of day or night, there's a chance that somewhere in some remote place, another person is saying those exact same words along with me.
That's...beautiful.
Are there other ways to connect with the gods? Of course. But Senut is about more than that. It's not about me. It's about us.
And that is what I told Them I wanted, after-all.
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