It's October, which around here makes it Ritual Month, the one time of year everybody gets to be a little witchy without explaining themselves. We carve faces into pumpkins and set a candle inside. We dress up as someone else for a night. We leave the porch light on for strangers and hand them candy. None of it is strictly necessary, and almost all of us do some version of it anyway.
Most people who smoke have a smaller, year-round version of this, and most of us are faintly embarrassed about it. Same chair, same hour, grinder first, then papers, then the lighter that lives in that one drawer. If someone asked why you do it in that exact order, you'd probably laugh and say it's just a thing you do. That thing is doing more work than you'd guess.
Dimitris Xygalatas has spent his career figuring out the what and why around this. He's an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who runs a lab devoted to studying ritual, and his essay for Nautilus, "The Real Magic of Rituals" is the best case we've read for taking our little routines seriously. It's worth reading in full. The gist is that your brain is a prediction machine, constantly guessing what's about to happen based on what's happened before, and it gets anxious when it can't. A ritual is about the most predictable thing you can give to this organ. The steps are fixed, they come in the same order every time, and you can repeat them for as long as you need to. In a world that won't sit still, that small repetition of order seems to help.
He doesn't just argue it, either; there’s anecdotal evidence. On the island of Mauritius, his team gave a group of local Hindu women a stressful task, then had some of them go perform their usual temple prayers while the rest simply sat and rested. The women who did their ritual recovered faster, both in how they said they felt and in how their hearts were beating. Other research he cites found that even a made-up ritual, something closer to a little spell, helped people get through math tests and public karaoke. The ritual didn't need to be ancient or holy; it needed to be done the same way, with intention.
That makes the timing of Halloween feel like less of a coincidence, which is something that various cultures throughout history have been living out in practice. Día de Muertos celebrations in Mexico, for example, focus heavily on ritual and remembering the dead and falls around the modern Halloween holiday, as well as All Saints Day in the Catholic tradition. Halloween itself traces back to Samhain, the Celtic festival marking the end of the harvest and the turn toward winter, when the days were getting short and whether you'd stored enough food was a very real question. People have been answering seasonal uncertainty with ritual for a long time, and carving a pumpkin is, in its own way, the same move as blinging out, stocking, and constantly using your rolling tray.
This is where it gets personal for a lot of us, we think. Plenty of people learned to smoke weed under conditions that made ritual impossible: behind the garage, out a cracked bathroom window, a fast hit in a parked car before anyone noticed. Speed and secrecy were the whole window. That's the opposite of an intentional practice and it’s rooted in shame; many of us carried the habits long after the reasons for them went away. Legal shelves and nice pre-rolls haven't fully undone a generation used to smoking like you might get caught and even put in jail.
It wasn't always this way. For most of human history, the person who knew which plants calmed you down, helped you sleep or kept bad luck off the doorstep was the same person who kept the rituals. The witch and the herbalist were one and the same until someone decided otherwise. Mugwort went under pillows for dreams. Rosemary was carried for remembrance, which is why Ophelia hands it out in Hamlet. Lavender scented bathwater and linens. Cannabis was in the mix too, and Herodotus wrote about Scythians tossing hemp seeds onto hot stones inside closed tents some 2,500 years ago. Plants and ritual have traveled together for a very long time, and pulling them apart is the newer idea.
What turns a habit into a ritual isn't the steps. You can do the exact same thing twice and have it be a habit one night and a ritual the next. The difference is whether you're paying attention. A habit runs on autopilot and is over before you notice it started. A ritual is something you catch yourself doing, and that noticing is the part worth building around. Light the candle because you decided to, not because your hand went there on its own. Take the first breath slowly enough to actually taste what’s going on and the earth it came from.
Rituals don’t have to be a big production, either! This is likely one perception that prevents people from starting them in the first place; just another thing to worry about. But rituals can and even should be simple so that they are replicable: The rituals that stick tend to be the ones you can finish and come back to whenever you want, not the ones that call for a full moon, a dozen supplies and a free Saturday. Repetition is how the whole thing works, according to science, so a small ritual you'll actually repeat beats an elaborate one you'll drop after the second try.
That's how we think about our own pre-rolls. Quiet Times for the slow, eerie nights, Fast Times for the loud and campy ones, All Times for whenever. Every time, for all times. Rinse, repeat, and figure out your own ritual within it. Maybe it's the same chair and a slow-burn horror movie on the first cold night of the month. Maybe it's a pinch of lavender or mugwort in your joint, which our herb guide can walk you through. Maybe some nights you skip the weed and keep the candle, the chair and the hour, since the research suggests the ritual does its work either way. For those of us who enjoy it, cannabis is one more thing to bring to the table, ideally on purpose.
So this October, notice what you already do, and then do it on purpose. If you want the full science, read Xygalatas in Nautilus. And if anyone asks why you always use the same lighter, tell them it's literal science.
