Actually, something happened a couple weeks back that i wanted to share. Like i said, there's a small group of pagans at my UU church; they often meet in a room to perform pagan sermons in one of the rooms on the church grounds(also, if you want a surreal experience, try watching someone wave around daggers and cups and pentagrams in the middle of an empty daycare room). I've been to a couple of their events, and their generally nice folks. A couple weeks back, they asked me if i wouldn't mind performing an Erisian ritual for Eostre, since the lady they usually ask to do this is kinda unreliable, and i was honestly considering doing it, not because i've ever done a ritual, but because this just seems like too good a mindfuck to pass up. Given what i said earlier, is this more hypocritical than it is potentially hilarious?
I just want to remind you we've got a perfectly good Erisian Easter tradition - the Erister Egg Hunt. Hide a bunch of crazy crap in plastic eggs - the kind of stuff which you would not expect to find in a plastic egg (whatever that is)- and then let people discover them.
I think a good erisian ritual does the opposite of what these pagans might want. It unravels the tapestry. It intensifies the hollowness and meaninglessness of ritual. A good discordian ritual holds up a mirror, makes people question whether they ever want to do this stuff again.
I'd be tempted to just do something silly which only technically fits the ritual form. These pagans, they've got this fairly rigid sense of what a ritual is, what it's for, and some of them probably consider themselves "experts". Your job is to show them how meaningless it is, how they are playing childish games in the lap of Death. And that's why I wouldn't just do a ha ha silly ritual.
If I were you, I'd want to really shake these people up. Establish control of their bodies using
call & response and
Simon Says techniques. Then lead the group out into traffic and have everybody lay down in the road (you first!). The cars will be honking and it will feel dangerous. If possible, get a friend to SPEED up to the group and then slam on the breaks, screeeech.
As everybody flinches, as the discomfort and fear rises to the point that they physically resist your 'ritual' and walk away from it, you can tell them they have come through the eye of the needle. They have died and been reborn. They have taken control back from you. The Self which was willing to lay down in traffic because an "expert" or "priest" commanded it
is dead now. The robot is slain and the new self
is risen.
THAT'S a fucking Easter ritual.
