If you were covered with sweat and dirt, would you walk into a ritual?
If you were seething with rage, would you walk into a ritual?
If you had just killed someone—accidentally, say—would you walk into a ritual?
Probably not, I'm guessing, And rightly so.
States of ritual purity—and impurity—were important to the ancestors. Very important. While these are not something that the new paganisms have (for the most part) spent much time thinking about, I'm going to argue that, without being consciously aware of it, we generally observe such purity laws ourselves. If that's really so, then we as pagans can only benefit from becoming more consciously aware of what we're already doing unconsciously.
In some ways, I think that language often gets in the way. “Clean/unclean,” “pure/impure”: this kind of language seems alien to us. We've had it used against us so often—and against women in particular—that we've largely excised it from our thought and our practice.
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That's right, I'd forgotten about the old Hebrew practice. If you were Dinee, your family would hire a hata'ali to sing an Enemy W
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When we had some Shinto priests visit our church from Tsubaki Grand Shrine the minister showed us a film of some boys standing und