From the Fall Equinox and Beltane to celebrations of peace and justice, A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book offers more than 700 prayers for the rituals of lifefrom the sacred to the mundane. A companion to the popular A Book of Pagan Prayer , this handbook of rituals and prayers is organized thematically, making it convenient to use if one is seeking prayers for specific occasions, seasons, times of day, meals, or milestones. Included is an extensive section on the requisites of ritual and how to use ritual and prayer to create lasting change in your life and in the world. A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book is suitable for all pagans: Druids, Wiccans, solitaries, Greek & Norse Reconstructionists, Mystery Cult Reconstructionists, and more, offering perfect petitions or invocations to invoke, embrace, and honor the major events that make up our lives. Ceisiwr Serith (David Fickett-Wilbar) is a writer and teacher in the Pagan community.  His interest in prayers and rituals grew naturally as a result of working in the Wiccan and Druidic traditions, as well as writing books such as  A Book of Pagan Prayer  and  Deep Ancestors:  Practicing the Religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.   He is a member of Ár nDraíocht Féin, a Druid fellowship, and is priest and liturgist for Nemos Ognios grove in Durham NH.  He has been published in the  Journal of Indo-European Studies  and  Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. A PAGAN RITUAL PRAYER BOOK By Ceisiwr Serith Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC Copyright © 2011 Ceisiwr Serith All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-57863-484-2 Contents IntroductionPART I: THE FOUNDATIONS OF WORSHIPChapter 1: PrayerChapter 2: RitualPART II: BUILDING RITUALSChapter 3: BeginningsChapter 4: The HomeChapter 5: CallingsChapter 6: PraiseChapter 7: Thanksgivings and GracesChapter 8: Consecrations and BlessingsChapter 9: Times of the DayChapter 10: Times of the MonthChapter 11: Times of the YearChapter 12: Times of LifeChapter 13: EndingsPART III: PETITIONING THE GODSChapter 14: General Requests and OfferingsChapter 15: ProsperityChapter 16: Thought, Speech, InspirationChapter 17: Healing, Comfort, Safety, TravelChapter 18: Society and the LandAppendix A: Index of OfferingsAppendix B: Glossary of DeitiesWorks Cited CHAPTER 1 PRAYER Prayer is communication with some form of the sacred, most often seen as aperson or persons. It is a form of speech and, like speech in general, can bedivided into marked and unmarked. Unmarked speech is informal. It can be called"conversational," since it is the style we use in conversation. It's a prosestyle, friendly, using everyday words in everyday arrangement: nothing fancyhere. In prayer this style is most appropriate for deities with whom you are onvery good terms, and for those who are close to people in general and thereforelikely to be friendly to us—for instance hearth goddesses, homey deities wholive with us and with whom we interact daily. Prayers to other kinds of beingscan be in this style as well; ancestors, who were people like us, may enjoy it,as long as it is respectful. High gods like Zeus, on the other hand, may notappreciate being treated on chummy terms. Conversational prayers are almost nonexistent among the prayers we have fromancient times. Although this may be due to the vagaries of survival, it may bebecause these less formal prayers express a theology that sees littledistinction between the deities and humans—a belief not common in those times. For other sorts of prayers, marked speech is most common. Marked speech issimply any form that is out of the ordinary. At one end of this spectrum iselevated prose like "newscasters' speech," in which grammatical niceties areobserved, and words more common in written than spoken speech are used. Theinterest here is clarity and precision rather than decoration. The more formaltypes of elevated prose include technical terms; a good example is legal speech.Elevated prose may include sentences that have become ritualized: "I nowpronounce you husband and wife." It may contain archaic terms like "thou," orwords that still exist but are used with archaic meanings, such as "suffer" for"allow." These words are used not just for their basic meanings, but also fortheir psychological and social implications. Fancy words are seen as expressingfancy thought. In elevated prose, grammatical rules for word order may be played with—forinstance, "For this I pray" rather than "I pray for this." The style may bemagisterial, conveying, without actually stating, that the occasion is animportant one. Here we see the beginnings of poetry, in which the way somethingis expressed is as important as its literal meaning. Elevated prose is often used in speeches. A classic example is the GettysburgAddress, which uses archaic and unusual terms: "four score and seven" iscertainly not the common way to express "eighty-seven"; "brought forth" is notlikely to be found in everyday speech, and "conceived," at least in the