Damien Echols - Ritual : An Essential Grimoire

Also by Damien Echols & Lorri Davis

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Damien Echols & Lorri Davis

Boulder, CO 80306

2022 Damien Echols and Lorri Davis

Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the authors and publisher.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical recommendations of physicians, mental health professionals, or other health-care providers. Rather, it is intended to offer information to help the reader cooperate with physicians, mental health professionals, and health-care providers in a mutual quest for optimal well-being. We advise readers to carefully review and understand the ideas presented and to seek the advice of a qualified professional before attempting to use them.

Published 2022

Book design by Linsey Dodaro

Cover sigil, signatures, runes, and talisman illustrations by Damien Echols and Lorri Davis

Practice and Rose Cross illustrations by Meredith March

BK06254

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Echols, Damien, author. | Davis, Lorri, author.

Title: Ritual : an essential grimoire / Damien Echols and Lorri Davis.

Description: An essential grimoire. | Boulder, CO : Sounds True, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021035650 (print) | LCCN 2021035651 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683648208 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781683648215 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Magic. | Ritual. | Grimoires.

Classification: LCC BF1623.R6 E28 2022 (print) | LCC BF1623.R6 (ebook) | DDC 133.4/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035650

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035651

To Tami Simon,

who brought us back to life

T he need for ritual is innate. It is born of a deep need to articulate our times of transition, our profound experiences. It is an essential part of what makes and keeps us human. Rituals can act as the punctuation marks in our life, providing us with a sense of structure.

Humans are ritualistic. We use rituals to frame our lives, even when we dont realize that weve built our lives around them. For me, ritual has been an anchor, a buffer from the outside world.

As a child I was fearful. Scared of interactions with others, my first day of school ended abruptly after I threw up at the threshold of my first grade class.

Once I was able to keep the butterflies in my stomach at bay, I realized that there were things I could control all around me. I could sit in the same chair each day. I could eat the same lunch, and I could have my lunch at the same table, day after day. These things I could count on kept me grounded.

The realization that I could calm my nerves by living my life in a ritualistic way got me through many transitions.

I began using ritual to heal after my husband Damien got off death row in 2011. Id worked on his case, managing a huge legal team and partnering with supporters from around the world in the work that would eventually see him freed.

What we werent prepared for was the total destruction of our relationship, our health, and our ability to live productive lives after the locusts of complex PTSD took their toll.

Five years later, we had traveled the world promoting books and films and giving public talks. Wed moved five times. Through it all Damien was barely functioning. His traumatic brain injury went unseen by most. He presented as healthy and capable, but inside he was as frightened and savage as a wild animal trapped in a corner. Reeling in fear, I exacerbated his condition by fighting and blaming. Finding ourselves suicidal, we eventually sought therapy, but most importantly, we began to rebuild our lives through ritual. Im happy to say that not only did we survive, but we are thriving, and I attribute it all to God and the rituals that we have built our lives around.

Many of the rituals youll find in this book are the very same we used to come back to life. We collected them together in this grimoire to give everyone access to the healing power of magick.

H umans have performed rituals since the dawn of civilization. Those ritual actions created grounding points that enabled divine energy to enter the physical realm. This is exactly what ritual magick offers to us today.

Rituals are moments when we acknowledge this life is a vehicle we are using to break the chains that bind us to fate. They are actions we carry out in order to marry the energies of the heavens to the energy of the earth. In essence, rituals are the way we gradually lift ourselves out of an unsatisfactory, distracted, and purely materialistic way of interacting with life, and instead walk with one foot in each world. Its through ritual that we each become our own priest and sovereign. In magick we use rituals to unite that which is above with that which is below to achieve completion of the Great Work, that is, crystallizing all of the levels and layers of the aura so that they survive the death of the physical body.

Defeating death probably sounds like a lot more than you bargained for when you picked up this book, but even the most basic ritual teaches us that we are never truly powerless. With repetition, a ritual allows us to exert more and more control over the reality we are creating until even a prison cell can begin to feel like a control tower from which you can reach out, touch the world, and bring about change. Ritual not only allows us to wield divine energy to change the world, but also to create our own world and dwell within it.

When I first started having success with magickal rituals, I still doubted myself and was tempted to chalk it up to coincidence. However, as the years went by and I experienced more and more results, I eventually not only lost any doubts I had but became more surprised if it didnt work than if it did.

In my previous books I have written about magick as the Western path to enlightenment. I am convinced that all of the modern Abrahamic religionsJudaism, Christianity, and Islamare actually vehicles used to pass along the same coded information. The whole point of the story of Jesus was to make this ancient magickal information more available so that anyone could become a king. He was bringing an end to the divine right of kings to rule, giving everyone keys to obtaining sovereignty over their own existence. This is why magick is called the royal science. It is the means by which a slave can become a monarch.

In magick, when we say, God created the world, it means something different than when religions use that phrase. In magick, think of the word God as shorthand for that infinite consciousness that lies outside the boundaries of time and space. It is eternal, without borders, qualities, or characteristics. In order to experience any sort of change, it must pour itself into the boundaries of material existence. God didnt just create the world, it became the world. It became us. This is why the Bible says that God gave humans dominion over the earthbecause we were meant to continue the process of creation, to pick up where Source left off and continue attempting to create heaven on earth. This is the meaning behind the part of the Lords Prayer that says, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.