I was cleaning my altar after the ritual I did last night. I wasn't paying attention and I accidentally threw my ashes from my paper in the trash. Is there anything I should do? Is my ritual not going to work now? I feel ashamed that I did something so foolish.
I was able to salvage some ashes. I dont know if its enough. Any advice would be very helpful
The thing about not being disrespectful to ashes is related to the respect you give your actions. Because of a Christian past, people have a mentality that if you make a mistake in a ritual procedure that is described according to a certain type of respect, then you are disrespecting: so the result should be feeling guilty, worrying about punishment, Ask an excessive apology, tell yourself to be stupid because the punishment we are waiting for from the outside is still not enough and you feel that you must be the first to punish yourself, But then you feel that perhaps you do not deserve all this punitive hatred since you were only doing one thing in full love for the Gods, so you will ask if you can make up for sin in some way so that Zeus doesn’t condemn you to hell and you can keep doing things that might make him happy.
Instead of wasting time behind these absurd concepts, try to detach yourself from the association "error/fault" and especially from the attribution to the Gods of "error/fault -> punishment". Errors exist. In serious cases, a moderate fault indicates that it is a serious case. But the case must be really serious. And certainly almost nothing provides a punishment in the Christian sense. The Gods themselves see the punishments NEVER as "Christian condemnation to Hell", and always in one of these (mainly) schemes here:
Corrective punishment (Zeus allows you to be inserted in a corrective context where you suffer the consequences of your mistakes, even fully, when you have learned the lesson you will have seen the consequences that brings such a gesture) and Punishment by impediment (Zeus sees that you are doing really wrong things, which can compromise the society in which you live. So he has to block the evil that you are bringing into the world somehow).
Other forms of punishment are rare and require truly serious and personal acts such as directly challenging a God "face to face" or hurting someone who is useful to the Gods. I have seen that the Gods may have little pity for such a thing, but they are indeed very serious cases.