Creating Personal Pagan Rituals

One of the reasons that I - and I’m sure many other people - resonate with paganism, is the fact that it allows you to explore and build a practice that is truly yours, rather than forcing you to follow strict rules or religious dogma. There are some traditions that are more structured, such as needing you to work with specific deities, cast circles in specific ways, etc. These have many benefits; they can provide a framework through which we can learn, unite us in shared experience, and are great for beginners. However, personal pagan rituals allow us to express our devotion and connect to our spirituality in ways which truly resonate with ourselves, shaped by who we are, our beliefs, and how we move through the world around us.

Personal pagan rituals are intentional spiritual acts you create for yourself, rooted in pagan values such as connection to nature, connection to the elements, honouring specific deities, spirits, ancestors, etc. In fact, you may already have several of these you perform without even realising it! These rituals could be daily or seasonal. They can be as simple as saying a little prayer, or performed as elaborate rites. Whilst they are called ‘personal’ rituals, you don’t necessarily need to perform them alone, you may wish to perform them with other people. What makes them personal is how deeply they resonate with your own spiritual language and how you connect with them.

Focusing on personal pagan rituals helps strengthen our spiritual confidence, and can help deepen our relationship with our spirituality. It allows us to adapt spirituality into our everyday lives, helping it truly become a way of life rather than something we feel we need to carve out separate time for. Through personal rituals we can create a consistent practice without rigidity. But by far the biggest benefit of personal rituals is that it allows our practices, and our connection to our spirituality, to grow organically, rather than being borrowed from books or other peoples Instagram posts. They evolve over time, and reflect our beliefs and the stage of our life or spiritual journey we are at.

General rituals definitely have their benefits; as well as providing that framework for our learning, they are designed to be accessible and repeatable. They provide a structure that works for many different people across many demographics. They often use widely recognised symbolism and established correspondences, and often follow a predictable order. As well as being useful for beginners, they are great if you wish to connect with a wider tradition, or if you are working in a group by ensuring that everyone is aligned with the same information. However, I believe that if you really want to deepen your practice, then personal rituals with all of the benefits I have listed above, are the way to go.

Below is some guidance to help you in forming your own personal pagan rituals. Reading through these, you may feel that some of it is overkill - in fact, I myself don’t usually put this much structure into coming up with my own personal rituals! But these are some good starting points if you are wanting to delve into personal rituals for the first time.



Creating Your Own Personal Pagan Rituals:

First, consider your intention - why are you doing this? Is it to connect with a specific element? With a particular deity? Is it to honour a particular animal guide? Or perhaps it is for protection, cleansing, abundance, etc.? A ritual without clear intention becomes performance, and whilst fun, will most likely not have the outcome you are wanting. 

Next, think about the timing, and use your intention to help inform this. If you are creating a personal ritual to aid you in cleansing, perhaps you want to perform it daily, before you go to bed? If you are using it to connect with a particular deity, is there a certain moon phase that is connected with that deity? If the intention is protection, perhaps it is one you just want to use as and when you need it?

Think about whether there is any symbolism you wish to incorporate into your ritual. This doesn’t need to be a drawn symbol, but can extend to objects in general. For example, if you are using it to connect with a deity, is there a particular symbol associated with that deity, or even a crystal or a piece of jewellery you wear that you could incorporate into your ritual? Remember, choose items which have meaning to you. Let’s say, for example, you want to create a personal ritual to help you connect with a deity. In every book you read on this deity, it says that they are associated with the rose quartz crystal. However, you just can’t get on with rose quartz, and whenever you work with this deity, you feel obsidian is more aligned to them. Now, if you were following ‘general’ ritual, you might be tempted to suck it up and use the rose quartz because you want to make sure you do it right. However, personal ritual emphasises that personal aspect, and would encourage you to use the obsidian. Remember, there is no such thing as ‘wrong’ when using personal rituals; if it helps you feel connected with your intention, then it is right. 

Make sure that you use words that sound like you. This may sound like an odd piece of guidance, but trust me on this one. How many of us have taken an incantation out of a book and struggled to remember it because the language is one we don’t usually use? Or tried to read a dedication we got off the internet but stumbled over the words because the cadence just doesn’t feel natural to us? It can be very distracting! Make sure that if you are using words in your ritual, they come from the heart, and again resonate with you.

Next, ensure that you keep it simple! These rituals will likely change and grow as we ourselves change and grow. When you are starting out, small and simple rituals are a lot easier to integrate into our daily lives than long or complex rituals. It’s alright to admit if something isn’t working for you, to play around and change it. 
Finally, trust in yourself. One of the biggest challenges in pagan practice is unlearning the idea that spirituality must be externally validated. But you can be as wild and creative as you want! For example, I have a bobblehead Frankenstein figurine and a bobblehead skeleton figurine that I bought from a supermarket at Halloween about 7 years ago. Whenever I am leaving the flat for an extended period of time, I pat them on the head and ask them to protect my home whilst I am gone. I’m not even sure when I started doing this, but now I actively use them in protection rituals, and it just feels right to me, as bizarre as it may sound to others!


Personal pagan rituals are very common, but not often shared because of their personal nature, so it can appear as though they aren’t that popular at all! Considering the many benefits of these sorts of rituals, it is well worth taking the time to think about how you can build your own and integrate them into your everyday life, and use them to deepen your connection to your own spirituality.