First, I'd like to give a bit of background.

I'm currently in an intensive 12 month internship in my field. I attend 8 hours of classes each day, 5 days per week, and study at least as much outside of class as I spend in class. I'm not complaining -I worked hard to get into this program, and I love it. I have absolutely no doubt that it is entirely worth it.

But, it is a lot of time spent inside my own head. I read, I study, I practice, I study some more. I sleep. I repeat.

My understanding of Satanic ritual is thus (and please correct me if I'm wrong): Intellectual decompression, for the release of detrimental and distracting emotion, with the possibility of enacting helpful external change in addition to helpful internal change.

I'm not dealing with any seriously detrimental emotions, but at the same time, I really feel like some intellectual decompression would do me a world of good. My internship takes place in a hospital (a Catholic hospital at that), so I'm always dressed neatly and conservatively, on my best, professional behavior, and so on. I feel like I need to let the demon come out and play a bit, so to speak. I find myself craving ritual, craving the self-induced temporary ignorance and unleashing of unbridled emotion that is my understanding of Satanic ritual.

I often spend long hours at a microscope, and my instructors stress the importance of looking up ever so often and looking across the room, to let the short-range eye muscles rest and work the long-range ones, to prevent eye strain. That's what I want; I want to let my intellectual brain muscles rest and stretch the more primal, emotional ones for a bit. To prevent brain strain, so to speak.

But of course, none of the ritual types described in The Satanic Bible fit remotely, as I have a very satisfactory sex life, I'm not particularly angry at anyone, and I'm certainly not feeling sorry for myself.

So my questions: Would a ritual make sense to fulfill this craving of mine, or would the absence of the central driving force (lust, compassion, destruction, or anything else comparable) make it kind of pointless? I've never actually done a Satanic ritual before, but I've participated in both Catholic mass and Wiccan rituals with various family members, and although I didn't really get anything from the theistic aspects, the rituals themselves, with their imagery and rhythm, felt good.

I'm not sure exactly how I would design such a ritual, but I could work on that. Suggestions would not go amiss, of course.

And if a ritual doesn't make sense, do you have any other good suggestions? I try to find time to relax, to watch stupid comedy shows on TV, and to spend time with friends, and so on. But since I moved for this program, my only local friends are ones in the program with me, and I want to keep my religious inclinations well separate from that. And, as enjoyably mindless as an episode of The Simpson's before bed can be, I still find myself wanting something more potent.

(And if nothing else, the fact that I almost just wrote, "And if a ritual is contraindicated in this situation…" explains my mental state pretty accurately.)

Thank you,

Branwyn

You don't have to necessarily incorporate any of the three Conjurations just to do a ritual. So no, there's really nothing wrong with wanting to do ritual for the sake of ritual.

You could always take the standard 13-step ritual in The Satanic Bible, and leave out the part with the Conjuration. Then you could fill in that middle part with something else. I've done this myself plenty of times. The Satanic Rituals also has lots of examples of rituals you could incorporate in some way.

Thank you very much!

~Branwyn