It's a bit of a pain in the ass to manage that ritual thing - it's horribly done, honestly - use prepare ritual, then choose another unit on the tile, and you'll be able to designate them as the "target" of the ritual. It should really have been done through a popup menu of some kind, but as with many things it was abandoned when it became clear RifE 2.0 wasn't happening.
As for bloom not working - I have no idea why that would be. I would check it out, but my time is severely limited these days - we'll see if I have the time.
Re: council of esus - it is a religion, and as such only one of the three leaders can adopt it. Shadows don't require the religion itself, but require it to be present in the city, so you can build those regardless.
When it comes to game settings, make it a habit to always do a "Play Now" start before you go into a custom game. It resets all the settings to the defaults, so you won't have trouble with other mods' settings interfering.