What is The Ritualist?

This is primarily a nexus for my (Ulysses Black) research into the subject of ritual. I have spent some 30+years studying esoteric subjects, practicing ‘Magick’, working with the Tarot, undergoing ordeals, imbibing weird potions and howling at the moon. During this time part of my focus shifted to exploring and examining and testing rituals directly:
How do they actually work (as distinct to the beliefs we invest in their efficacy)?
What are the margins for error or tolerances for difference in different enactments?
What does it take to better understand if we can improve our rituals?

Questions like these propelled my own spiritual path into one that incorporated artistic expression as a means of embodying and communicating ritual ideas, along with academic study into, not only rituals, but every other aspect of study i find that can somehow inform our understanding of ritual.

In the past this research has found manifestation in a side project called The Ritual Len’s, and now, here online it is arriving as The Ritualist.

If you are interested in Ritual, Art, Performance, Thinking about stuff, Magic and Occultism, Ritual, Symbolism and Mythology, Ritual, Me or Ritual… then The Ritualist should be sliding into your inbox

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I have, I’ll admit, really struggled with social media - not with an absence of content, but rather the better way to present it. The Ritualist seems to be just the right place to provide a point of contact with the wider world (without succumbing to ‘doom scrolling’ etc) for the purposes of exchanging ideas on this area of interest, without having to kowtow to the dread ‘algorithm’ - speaking of which social media aside, Algorithms are themselves a fascinating potential avenue for exploring in my ritual research.

Anyway, expect to see, at the least weekly(ish) shortform ruminations on some nuance or other about ritual and its performance, along with stuff about my artwork if it is thematically related.

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Thanks for taking the time to visit this publication,

Ulysses Black