" Culture Vulture" does seem to be a very appropriate description in many cases!
I have never done ceremony for anyone, just never felt a personal justification in doing so.
My own thought is that ceremony, any ceremony, belongs to the originator, because this was truly his/her personal prayer.
The person who "first" created it, used it for a specific purpose or a specific need, and not for this person themselve, but for someone else.
The creator of the original ceremony was acting as an "interface" between himself/herself and the Greatest Mysteries...in order to petition for a particular outcome.
This, would have been an extremely personal event, involving very long internal struggles to even get oneself close enough to a place where this sort of communication is possible.
No man off the street, so to say, is anywhere near to this capacity.
So even trying, to copy something of such profound sincerity, is a mockery.
And yes, some were taught to carry on the prayer in the same way, but many others have not had the sincerity or the internal struggles, or even the intentions that the originator had at the time.
And I would think that it takes a very special sort of person to do this the right way, and not just someone thinking it`s cool, to pretend to do it.
And because of the real potential through knowledge and sincere communication of this kind, of course it would be among those first things high jacked or appropriated by the spiritually asleep or...better known, as the new age movement.
Another thought, is simply that if a ceremony becomes a (ritual) in this way, it loses it`s power and becomes a block to the place, it once led to, so those new age-rs attempting to use any of these things through simple repetition, copying or the in the wrong way, are already stopped from gaining anything from them, other then a few bucks for the performance.
