This paper investigates the dynamics of ritual failure in Hong Mai's twelfth-century collection Yijian zhi, situating its anecdotal narratives within the socioreligious context of the Song dynasty. Drawing on Ronald Grimes's taxonomy of ritual "infelicities" and Edward Schieffelin's distinction between procedure- and outcome-oriented failure, the study identifies two categories of failed rites. The first encompasses performance-centered breakdowns—flawed petitions, impure personnel, and procedural errors—that Grimes's framework diagnoses effectively. The second, however, resists such explanations: rituals that are correctly performed yet catastrophically rejected. To account for these cases, the paper introduces the concept of "cosmological invalidation," whereby a ritual's efficacy is nullified not by human error but by a higher moral-bureaucratic order governing karmic debts and underworld adjudication. The paper argues that narratives of inevitable retribution served a theodical function in a period of political instability, challenging the universality of performance-centered and strategic-negotiation models of ritual theory.