Learning and Memorizing Ritual

[jducoeur]

It occurs to me that there might possibly be other people interested in this:

About ten years ago, I wrote an essay on how to learn and perform Good Ritual. It's written towards a Masonic audience, but most of its advice is probably applicable to any situation where you're trying to deliver pre-written ritual effectively. It's mostly common sense advice from an actor's perspective, but non-actors might find it useful.

If anyone's interested, Wor. Gary Dryfoos (aka Dr. Foo) has put it into HTML and PDF. Have fun...

Comments

Thank you for reminding me

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

of some important lessons I learned from my experience as a Rainbow Girl :)

(although our rituals weren't encrypted... interesting additional wrinkle...)

[cellio]

The encryption thing is interesting. I'm used to contexts where you memorize and contexts where you work from text (or notes that you wrote yourself), but not this. What's the goal? Compression so people aren't just reading the page, I assume?

[jducoeur]

Actually, it's mostly secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

Masonry has always had an interesting attitude towards secrecy. In the early days, of course, the Fraternity really *did* have secrets, and they really were important: they were the little geometric and architectural tricks that allowed one to build cathedrals, which were the livelihood of the craft. That engendered a notion that Secrets matter, and that they are a positive good.

Of course, by the end of the Renaissance, the geometric secrets were all well and truly out of the bag. But by then, there were secrets already built into the tradition, and those have largely been preserved to this day.

I characterize Masonic texts as falling into three categories, which I think of as "open", "semi-secret" and "secret".

The open texts are written out in plaintext in the books. These tend to be discussions of historical, cultural or biblical subjects, with no secret information therein. No one (in this jurisdiction, anyway) even bothers to pretend that they are secret.

The truly secret work is mainly the modes of recognition. That's the handshakes, motions, words and stuff like that that allow Masons to recognize each other. That stuff should never be committed to paper at all, except in very restricted circumstances.

The middle ground is the "semi-secret" work, which is in cypher -- the usual cypher is writing the first two letters of each word. This basically serves as a useful crutch for an oral tradition: you can't actually learn the ritual just from the cypher, but it makes an excellent reference while you're learning it orally. The semi-secret work is mostly talking *about* Masonry in various ways, along with the bulk of the non-lecture ritual.

Now the question is: why? Of course, there have been innumerable exposes of Masonry over the years (with variable levels of accuracy), so you can't really claim that much of this is at all secret in reality.

But the *claim* of secrecy provides some interesting social effects. It gives a bunch of the ritual a focus, elevating its importance in the candidate's mind. Even more, it provides that division of "us" and "them" that most large organizations thrive on. "We" are the ones who know the various secrets.

Personally, I think the most important aspect of the semi-secret stuff is that it makes it *inconvenient* to cheat and learn it from a book. In particular, I strongly prefer that candidates, or guys who I think might someday become candidates, not know what they're getting into. The initiatory rituals are specifically designed to be discovered by experiencing them; reading them first will usually weaken that experience.

Indeed, this leads me to the odd position that I'm actually a bit more casual about the semi-secret stuff with those who cannot become Masons, particularly women. Since there's nothing *really* secret in there, the only people I really try to keep it from is those who might learn it the right way someday...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how closely these overlap instructions my choral teachers have given over the years for learning and memorizing songs in foreign languages. Though there is a "get a good translation and match it up with the words" step near #1.5 that gets added, the rest are pretty darn close.

May be why so many rituals are sung. ;-)

[cellio]

Music provides an extra memory hook -- at least for me, but I think for lots of people. Music provides phrasing for a sequence of phonemes that would otherwise be near-meaningless in a case where you don't know the language, but even if you do know the language a musical pause, for example, can remind you that there's a new phrase coming up. I don't think I'm explaining it very well.

There's a downside, though: there are some texts that I simply cannot recite from memory, but I can sing from memory trivially because I learned them with melodies.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Melody is definitely a strong mnemonic enhancer, and helps you sequence words...I was more intrigued by the similarity between ritual phrases and the lyrics of songs, and noting that therefore combining the two was synergistic; if the words of ritual were something that didn't match well with song -- like the way, say, a weather report, isn't as well suited to becoming a song -- it wouldn't be such a natural match. Rituals are repeating, obscure, and need to be performed exactly -- much like grunge lyrics. ;-)

Hmm. Rituals as conventional solutions to recurrent behavior, and music as a coordinating representation which reduces cognitive complexity of that convention...I might have been spending too much time on my thesis this week. :P

[jducoeur]

There's a downside, though: there are some texts that I simply cannot recite from memory, but I can sing from memory trivially because I learned them with melodies.

Heh. My favorite example of this is the preamble to the American Constitution.

alexx_kay used to run a semiannual "con" known as KitchenCon, which mainly consisted of movie-watching plus chili. One year someone brought the whole Schoolhouse Rock collection, and were playing it in the breaks between movies.

So we get to the Constitution song, and pretty much everyone of roughly my generation begins to sing along, most of us word-for-word. It's such a catchy tune that I doubt I'll ever forget it.

Anyway, we get to the end of the song, and I notice that my apprentice Fiammetta is looking at all of us like we've suddenly grown second heads. She was *just* young enough to have not been exposed to Schoolhouse Rock growing up, and was utterly perplexed at the notion that we had all voluntarily memorized this thing...

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

Oh definitely. A friend was helping me come up with a verbal component to a new spell for my LARP char and I pointed out that while a phrase she had suggested technically was more representational of the spell than what I was leaning towards, the phrase I preferred caused a rhyme and contributed to a syllabic rhythm...

I've made all Bebhinn's spells into tunes, it's the only way I'll remember them. (Apparently I've done such a good job that if I'm running a healing circle that sees a lot of traffic for a few hours, half the people on site end up with my 'Raise Dead' tune stuck in their head for the next day and a half. Oops.)

[siderea]

Woah.

The most interesting thing about it is that an article about "Learning and Memorizing Ritual" turned out to be entirely about speaking text.

Now, there's an interesting difference of assumption!

[jducoeur]

Interesting observation. Partly that's because it's where people seem to have most of the trouble in my experience -- I've seen far fewer problems with people learning and performing the "floorwork" (what Masonry calls the physical movement) correctly than the text. There are some problem spots, but I've usually found them to be learned *far* more quickly than the text.

But the general point is valid nonetheless. Masonry is an *intensely* textual tradition, far moreso than, eg, most neopagan ritual. Indeed, one of the biggest problems with much Masonic ritual (which I didn't call out quite explicitly in this essay mainly because it's an advanced and somewhat controversial topic) is that most Masonic speakers, even the good ones, tend to simply stand and talk at the candidate. Dr. Foo and I are unusual in that we actually wander around, point things out and generally use body language as much as possible, rather than standing like a block of wood.

Of course, Masonry is also somewhat unusual in having immensely long speeches as a routine part of the ritual. That's not universal -- indeed, the more physical rituals (such as the Third Degree) have much more interplay between the participants. But there are a lot of 2-6 page monologues, and those are the bits that present the greatest problem for most of the officers...

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'd say none of the Rainbow lectures were more than a page and a half (depending on the definition of 'page') and the examples before me did seem to imply the notion that if one were "doing it right" one should be talking as if one were the primary source for the material (and therefore there should be all the little physical nuances that come with delivering a heartfelt self-created soliliquy. You _have_ delivered a heartfelt and self-created soliliquy before, right? ;) rather than just recited.

*shrug* Just a note :)

The physical part of the ritual is.... well... it's not terribly unlike kata in some ways. You get to a point where certain motions just sink down into you, as if someone suddenly turned your personal snap-to grid on.

[jducoeur]

the examples before me did seem to imply the notion that if one were "doing it right" one should be talking as if one were the primary source for the material

Oh, that's certainly correct. However, I doubt that I'd say that one officer in a hundred actually does it "right". Sadly...