Drawing Down the Moon (29 page)

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Authors: Margot Adler

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Once we accept the notion of reality as this kind of psychic sea, from which a minority have been able to extract certain kinds of information, at least one purpose of ritual becomes clear: it is a sequence of events that allows this type of communication to take place. I asked Aidan, when I visited him in Oakland, “Why do you think people do rituals? What is the purpose of ritual?”
“No one really knows. It's a wide open question. Most theorizing that goes on about ritual goes on in a Christian context and Christians tend to be very heady people. The theories focus on what people ‘believe.' But you do not understand the religion of a culture unless you know what people
do,
and what people do is their ritual. Why do you do a ritual? You do a ritual because you need to, basically, and because it just cuts through and operates on everything besides the ‘head' level. And in this culture, this heady, agnostic, Christian, scientific, materialist culture, ritual is ignored. And since ritual is a need, and since the mainstream of Western civilization is not meeting this need, a great deal of what's happening these days is, simply, people's attempts to find ways to meet this need for themselves.”
Bonewits has defined ritual as “any ordered sequence of events or actions, including directed thoughts, especially one that is repeated in the ‘same' manner each time, and that is designed to produce a predictable altered state of consciousness within which certain magical or religious results may be obtained.”
19
The purpose of a ritual is to put you into this altered state “within which you have access to and control over your psychic talents.” He has also written that magical rituals are psychodramas, “designed to facilitate the generation of psychic energy and the focused disposition of that energy, in order to accomplish a given result.”
20
Almost every magical-religious ritual known performs the following acts: emotion is aroused, increased, built to a peak. A
target
is imaged and a goal made clear. The emotional energy is focused, aimed and fired at this goal. Then there is a follow-through; this encourages any lingering energy to flow away and provides a safe letdown.
21
A much more complete and complex explanation of how rituals work can be found in
Real Magic
and in “Second Epistle of Isaac,” published in
The Druid Chronicles
(
Evolved
).
It is important to note that when Neo-Pagans use the word
ritual,
they mean something far different from what most people mean. For the majority, rituals are dry, formalized, repetitive experiences. Similarly, myths have come to mean merely the quaint explanations of the “primitive mind.”
From my own experiences of Neo-Pagan rituals, I have come to feel that they have another purpose—to end, for a time, our sense of human alienation from nature and from each other. Accepting the idea of the “psychic sea,” and of human beings as isolated islands within that sea, we can say that, although we are always connected, our most common experience is one of estrangement. Ritual seems to be one method of reintegrating individuals and groups into the cosmos, and to tie in the activities of daily life with their ever present, often forgotten, significance. It allows us to feel biological connectedness with ancestors who regulated their lives and activities according to seasonal observances. Just as ecological theory explains how we are interrelated with all other forms of life, rituals allow us to re-create that unity in an explosive, nonabstract, gut-level way. Rituals have the power to reset the terms of our universe until we find ourselves suddenly and truly “at home.”
 
How do these principles work in practice? Many Neo-Pagan or Craft groups could serve as illustrations, but perhaps the best example is the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD), a tradition that has always emphasized ritual, poetic intuition, and vision.
NROOGD had its beginning in 1967. In 1972 an article in the order's journal,
The Witches' Trine,
declared:
The NROOGD (and we got that name from the Goddess) is an assemblage of natural anarchists, bootstrap witches and alienated intelligentsia. . . . By us, a major vice of Christians is that they take themselves Very Seriously; we don't. Our motto: It is all real; it is all metaphor; there is always more; all power from the Triple Goddess .
22
NROOGD took its rather mystifying name from the original nineteenth-century Order of the Golden Dawn, but added
New Reformed Orthodox
“because we aren't the old one . . . we're trying to operate on different principles from theirs . . . we're trying to cast back to principles that are much older than theirs.”
23
NROOGD is an entirely self-created Craft tradition.
n
The inception of NROOGD is revealing. It began not with one person's vision, but with a
ritual experience
that happened to a group of people almost by accident. Aidan Kelly, a founder of the group, described the event in an issue of
The Witches' Trine.
24
He calls his account “true to the spirit, fictive like all human craft, and, like anything that has ever been written, incomplete.” A woman called Morgana was taking an arts class in ritual at San Francisco State College. After the professor told the class that “the only way you can learn anything important about rituals is by doing them,” she decided, having read Robert Graves's
The White Goddess
many times already, to attempt a Witches' sabbat. She invited a few close friends, including Aidan Kelly and Glenna Turner. Aidan composed a ritual outline after combing through his notes on the writings of Robert Graves, Margaret Murray, T. C. Lethbridge, and Gerald Gardner. He wrote:
Reading through them, I began to feel intrigued and challenged. All I had was fragments, hints, innuendos, a riddle, a puzzle. But I also had some ideas about what general principles might weld these fragments into a whole. . . .
The outline was turned in, the professor said, “Do it,” and a large group of friends gathered to work on the ritual.
As we sat about the room, looking at copies, Glenna asked, “I assume there must be some point to all this, but what is it?”
“If I understand Gardner right,” I said, “the point is to raise the energy he talks about, and everything that goes on in the ritual is directed toward that raising. . . .” “Is there
really
such energy?” “Well, I dunno,” I said.
The group polished the ritual, practiced it a number of times, and performed it for the class on January 11, 1968.
We all enjoyed ourselves immensely. However, we realized afterwards that the ritual had not worked for us: we had noticed no unusual changes in our perceptions or emotions either during it or after it. . . . We made no plans to do the ritual again. . . .
However, Aidan noted, “a subtle change came over us.” And the meetings of friends that had once been for games and gossip turned into an informal occult study group. And the ritual “refused to fade into the past; we found ourselves talking about it again and again.” In the summer of 1968 the group decided to do the ritual again, this time as part of a wedding, a genuine participatory celebration rather than a performance, and this time something
did
happen. “As we lay around on the grass afterward, . . . some singing, some listening, and talking about the ritual, a comment kept cropping up, in one form or another, until it finally dawned on us that we were all saying:
this time I felt something.
” As a result, the group decided to do the ritual again, with a few changes, but this time on a true sabbat, Lammas, on August 1, 1968, in a grove of redwood trees. Again the group—this time numbering over forty—experienced a change.
As Glenna began the opening conjuration of the ritual, a silence fell over the circle. Through the castings and chargings of the circle, through the invocations of the Goddess, it grew, and as Albion and Loik and Joaquin Murietta hammered out a dancing rhythm on their drums, as we whirled in a double sunwise ring, that silence swelled into waves of unseen lightness, flooding our circle, washing about our shoulders, breaking over our heads.
Afterwards we wandered about the gardens, laughing and clowning, drunk on the very air itself, babbling to each other: it worked!
“We were hooked,” Aidan told me. “And the thing has been going strong ever since.” In the written account he added:
I had already hoped, of course, but that day I became sure that the Craft could be religion for us skeptical middle-class intellectuals: because it did not require us to violate our intellectual integrity, because it operated nonintellectually, striking deep chords in our emotional roots, because it could alter our state of consciousness. Thus, that day began our actual evolution toward becoming a coven.
By the end of 1969 the members of NROOGD knew that what they were doing was, in fact, their religion. They initiated each other, began to have meetings (esbats) during the full moon, and declared themselves a potential coven. Then, during the Fall Equinox, during that time when, traditionally, the Eleusinian Mysteries were held, Aidan broke the usual order of the ritual and led the group in a torchlight procession through a state park, crying the ancient words, “Kore! Evohe! Iakkhos!”
. . . down the hillside, across the wooden bridges, down to a spring, where, as I recall, I first spoke the myth of Kore's gift, then back to the circle, where with nine priestesses, we invoked the full Ninefold Muse, whom I, as Orpheus, audaciously led in a chain dance about the fire; then all joined the chain, and we danced until all but Isis and I had dropped from exhaustion, until again that silent energy rose and lapped its waves around us filling the entire campground with a warm mistiness that was everywhere except where I was looking.
By the end of 1971, “we knew,” Aidan wrote, “we had somehow been transformed, that we had indeed become Witches.”
All Craft groups talk about this “raising of energy” or “raising the cone of power.” But how is this done? And what does it mean in terms of
ritual?
Since the methods used by a particular group are usually considered part of the “secrets” of a tradition, and methods vary, this information is often unavailable. But one of the best published explanations I have seen comes, again, from NROOGD:
The coven, holding hands, and alternating male and female as closely as possible, dances sunwise, at first slowly, then gradually faster, perhaps singing, perhaps chanting a spell made up for the specific purpose the energy is to be used for, perhaps with music, perhaps silently. When the Goddess is the one who has been invoked, the Priestess stands in the center of the circle, in the persona of the Goddess, holding the appropriate tool. When she feels the energy reach its peak she calls out or signals a command to drop, which all in the circle do, letting go of the energy which the Priestess then directs onward to its intended goal. . . .
25
Aidan notes that this explanation leaves all real questions unanswered.
How
are these things done? What does the energy
feel
like? How can the priestess tell when the energy has
peaked?
How do those in the circle
let the energy go?
The answers to these questions, he writes, can be learned only by experience. It is this experience that constitutes the “real secrets” of the Craft.
Many Craft rituals—NROOGD's included—are primarily religious and mythical. The rituals touch on the mythic themes of birth, death, and regeneration and assert the unity of mortals and deities. It is these aspects that seem to link the Craft (as well as a number of other Neo-Pagan religions) to the mystery traditions. What is striking about both Neo-Paganism and the mystery traditions (from our limited information about them) is that both assume that human beings can become as gods. In some traditions (as with the Church of All Worlds concept of “Thou Art God”)
o
the idea expressed is that we
are
the gods, only some of us (perhaps all of us) have not realized it. In other traditions the idea expressed is that we are gods in
potential.
Many Western magical traditions have thus sought a path to the divine by strengthening the self rather than by obliterating the ego. And many Neo-Pagan groups have kept to this tradition, which is one reason why most of them have been blessed by a relative absence of authoritarianism, as well as a lack of “gurus,” “masters,” and so forth. The entire shamanistic tradition seems to assume that humans can, as I. M. Lewis has written, “participate in the authority of the gods.”
26
Aidan writes that all rituals in the Craft, at some level, celebrate the myth and history of the Goddess. That is similar, of course, to Graves's description of the true function of poetry as religious invocation of the Goddess, or Muse. Aidan describes the beginning of NROOGD rituals, all of which start with the Meeting Dance.
The dance begins with all facing outward, alternating male and female, and holding hands. We begin dancing withershins, the direction of death and destruction, singing, “Thout, tout a tout, tout, throughout and about,” which are the words the Witches of Somerset used to begin their meetings. The men dance with the left heel kept off the ground, in the hobbling gait of the bullfooted god, the lamed sacred king. The Priestess who leads the dance lets go with her left hand, and leads the dance in a slow inward spiral: Ariadne leading Theseus into the labyrinth to face the sacred bull; Arianrhod leading Gwydion into Spiral Castle, where his soul will await rebirth. When the spiral is wound tight, the Priestess turns to her right and kisses the man next to her, as the Snow-White Lady of the Briar Rose kisses the prince who sleeps in the Glass Castle, to awaken him to a new life. The Priestess leads the new spiral outward, sunwise, the direction of birth and creation, and she (and each other lady) kisses each man she comes to. The spiral thus unwinds into an inward-facing circle, dancing sunwise. In this dance, withershins is transformed into sunwise, destruction into creation, death into rebirth, and those who dance it pass symbolically through Spiral Castle: here all the traditions and myths of the Craft are pulled together into a single, moving symbol. In a very real sense, all the other rituals of the Craft are merely “explanations” of this dance.
27
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