So once we get pure, what do we *do* to honor the Netjeru?
<snip a very nice ritual>
My question here is what do we know from ancient rituals, what do we keep and what do we discard? I know hours long ritual in our modern world aren't doable, so what in the daily rite would be feasable to keep?
The offerings of fire, water and incense seem to be a consensus of what was offered. Do we keep these? Do we not? Do we full henu also called Embracing the Earth (bow with our head touching the floor), henu or also called dua (arms paralell to your chest and palms outward toward shrine) today or do we discard these ancient gestures of worship?
Do we shower and just light a candle or offer incense then the rite's done?
I'd like to also discuss the theological reasons behind the ritual too such as Darkhawk has done in the other thread on purity.
I think this may be a question of scaling, like the Hellenic folks are talking about in the other section.
For myself, the only things I do daily are a prayer and the full henu. Once a week I also offer fire, water and usually something else (bread, gemstones, feathers).
My invocations tend to one-liners:
"I offer cool water, may You be refreshed"
or something like that. (should note I'm not very recon at the moment.)
I suspect in terms of modern adaptation, the most practical rule for daily rite would be "must contain at least one of the following:" and then whatever the final list of elements is. So far we have:
-water offering
-fire offering
-incense offering
-food or other offering (should this be 2 points?)
-henu or full henu
This would be easily adaptable to various levels of formality / lengths of time by adding or removing elements. Elements for special purposes (seasonal, festival, what have you) would be easy to add in as well. I get this image of Legos while thinking about this ... it may be a good way to structure things. Each "block" could be classified as to purpose, individual vs group, required or not, and so on.
It would also adapt well to various numbers of gods being honored, as would likely be the case. F'ex, someone honoring one Netjer could do the whole shebang every day. Or someone honoring five netjer could do a water libation for each one. Or someone could offer fire and incense to their primary deity and only fire to other deities they honor. etc.
Maybe we should have a long and short version of the major rituals. Like, if the long version is five-line stanzas (like your example), the short version could be the first two lines of each. or the first and last line -- either way, a consistent rule.
I think we should keep the henu, at least as an option. It seems to me that it's good to have some *gesture* of worship so that we don't end up just sitting around reciting poetry.
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