Drawing Down the Moon (30 page)

To go through this experience with understanding is to repeat symbolically the initiatory experience each time the circle is formed and the dance is completed.

Another point where initiatory symbolism occurs in many covens is during the invocation of the “Lords [although they may as easily be Ladies] of the Watchtowers.” Aidan observes that these “Lords of the Towers”—the Craft may have stolen the term from Masonry—are archetypes, both human and immortal, who serve to remind coveners that they have “risen through the spiral of life and death and rebirth,” and who thus represent “the goal toward which the spiral of reincarnation strives: to become both fully human and fully divine.” An invitation for these “beings” to join the coveners and aid them in their work comes near the beginning of most modern-day Craft rituals, particularly those in the Gardnerian, Alexandrian, and other British Craft traditions. These archetypes are also called “the Mighty Ones.”

Most covens operating in these ways also have a ceremony of “cakes and wine,” during which the ritual dagger or athame is lowered into the cup and the cakes and the wine are consecrated. Aidan writes out of his experience with NROOGD:

It was Aidan Kelly who first made me aware that the phrase “Drawing Down the Moon” originates in antiquity. “The Drawing Down of the Moon” and the “Drawing Down of the Horned God” are, perhaps, the two most extraordinary parts of Craft ritual, as performed in the covens of the revival. For here, in true shamanistic tradition, the Priestess (or Priest) can become the Goddess (or God) and function as such within the circle. Aidan notes that:

I have seen priestesses who simply recited lines and priestesses who went through genuinely transforming experiences. I have seen a young woman, with little education or verbal expertise, come forth with inspired words of poetry during a state of deep trance. I have heard messages of wisdom and intuition from the mouths of those who, in their ordinary lives, often seem superficial and without insight.

In a diary that Aidan wrote several years ago there is an unusual entry concerning the training of a new coven—unusual, certainly, from the point of view of the common assumptions of what covens are and how they work. It reads:

Elsewhere, within his
Essays toward a Metathealogy of the Goddess,
he writes that poetry, “being emotionally charged language that operates on many levels of meaning at once, can arouse the interest of the Lady and open up a channel of communication with Her, whereas ordinary prosaic speech has no such effect.”
³¹

This is another key to the distinction we have been making between
belief
and
ritual experience.
The prosaic and poetic ways of looking at the world are different. But within the polytheistic framework of multiple realities, both can be maintained in a single individual. Once one comprehends this, much else becomes clear. One understands why the theories of Robert Graves have remained so popular throughout Neo-Paganism, despite the many criticisms of the scholarship in
The White Goddess.
One understands that it is precisely this visionary aspect of the Craft, with its emphasis on poetry and ritual, that is responsible for the creation of a group like NROOGD. Glenna Turner, a former atheist, described to me how she once told a newcomer to her coven (to his apparent shock) that she remained quite skeptical about all gods, goddesses, and psychic reality. This, however, had nothing to do with the fundamental reasons for her being in the Craft.

“I'm in the Craft because it feels right. I'm a visionary. The Craft is a place for visionaries. I love myth, dream, visionary art. The Craft is a place where all of these things fit together—beauty, pageantry, music, dance, song, dream. It's necessary to me, somehow. It's almost like food and drink.”

Aidan and Glenna are not alone in stressing the relationship of poetry and art to the Craft. Almost half of all Neo-Pagans and Craft members interviewed for this book told me, unasked, that they wrote poetry and created rituals. Many of them have had their work published, at least in the pages of Neo-Pagan journals. It is no accident that those who are most respected within the Neo-Pagan movement are the poets, bards, and writers of rituals. These include, first and foremost, the late Gwydion Pendderwen, whose extraordinary
Songs of the Old Religion
are used throughout the Neo-Pagan movement; the late Victor Anderson, the blind poet and shaman; and Ed Fitch, the creator of an enormous number of Pagan and Craft rituals used in both this country and England. But these are not all. The poems of Penny Novack (writing often under the name of Molly Bloom), Caradoc, Aidan Kelly, Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, Isaac Bonewits, and now countless new and younger poets fill the pages of Neo-Pagan magazines. Some of these people were always poets, but others told me that Neo-Paganism had opened a wellspring within them and led them to write poetry for the first time since childhood.

We have been focusing on NROOGD as a way to talk about Neo-Pagan (in this case Craft) poetry, magic, and ritual. But the emphasis on ritual in Neo-Paganism has other implications. A religion with such an emphasis is bound to have a different kind of theology and organization.

During much of the 1980s and early 1990s Aidan Kelly was in the curious role of theologian (or, more correctly, thealogian) in a most nontheological religion. His writings on the Craft seem to show more clearly than others the strongly antiauthoritarian nature of the Craft, since “No one has to believe anything” and “There is no authority in the Craft outside each coven.” And if this were not so, we “would never have touched it with a ten-foot broom. We value freedom above all.”
³²
Aidan has said that the Craft, unlike Christianity and other world religions, is totally defined in terms of ritual—of what people
do
—and not what people
believe.
The religion therefore demands a creative response from people.

“It's a religion of ritual rather than theology. The ritual is first; the myth is second. And taking an attitude that the myths of the Craft are ‘true history' in the way a fundamentalist looks at the legends of Genesis really seems crazy. It's an alien head-space. This is one of the ways in which the Craft
is
a type of mystery religion, because the classical mysteries functioned similarly. The promise of the mystery religions in the classical world was that of immortality and regeneration, something like that. And in one of the associated legends, after death the soul confronts the Guardian of the Portals and is asked the question, ‘Who are you?' The reply given was never, ‘I believe in such and such,' but a statement like: ‘I have eaten from the drum. I have drunk from the cymbal. I have tasted the things within the holy basket. I have passed within the bridal chamber.' These are statements of having passed through certain experiences. And this seems to be very much the Gestalt and tradition of the Craft as well. . . . What makes a person a Witch is having passed through certain experiences, experiences that happen down on a subconscious level and bring about a type of transmutation.”

A Witch, writes Aidan, is one who is “pliable, adaptable, changeable, in short, able to learn.” He notes that those who change their opinions often appear “wicked” to others:

This emphasis on ritual rather than creed makes the Craft a “shrew,” not a “dinosaur.” It is small, but can adapt and survive. It is not encumbered by those structures that have characterized the major religions of the last five thousand years. Aidan contends that the major religions evolved to rationalize an agriculturally based civilization, a civilization that has been breaking down for the past two hundred years. The Craft never developed in cities where complicated religious structures evolved; it operated out in the country among people who were close to the land and “who were still, in effect, living in villages like the first villages that evolved ten thousand years ago.” And, ironically, considering the many pronouncements against Witchcraft as a threat to reason, the Craft is one of the few religious viewpoints totally compatible with modern science, allowing total skepticism about even its own methods, myths, and rituals. This ability to coexist with modern science, writes Aidan, is a great strength, since “for many reasons one can strongly suspect that any belief system incapable of such coexistence has no future.”
³⁴

Noting the tendency for some persons within the Craft to regard it as merely another ancient and revealed religion, Aidan told me that, were that so, the Craft would have no chance of surviving. But, as he wrote in “Aporrheton No. 1,” the Craft is “not an ancient system of knowledge or metaphysics or doctrine, but an ancient way of perceiving reality that is again becoming available.”

If you asked Aidan, “Is the Goddess ‘real' ?”, he would reply that She
is
real “because human energy goes into making Her real; She exists as a ‘thought form on the astral plane,' yet She can manifest physically whenever She wants to. She does not exist independently of mankind, but She is most thoroughly independent of any one person or group.” And yet, he continues, “She is a metaphor because, great though she may be, She is finite, like any other human concept, whereas reality is infinite.”

Why do we need such a concept? “Because the human mind seems unable to grasp an undifferentiated infinity,” he continues. “By creating our own divinities we create mental steps for ourselves, up which we can mount toward realizing ourselves as divine.”
³⁶
But he cautions that any such name for this reality “is an attempt to map (part of ) psychic reality that seems all too willing to accommodate itself to any map you use, and you will get nowhere in trying to understand that reality if you don't keep its plasticity firmly in mind. The reason that dogmatism about magical systems is so poisonous is that everyone seems to live in a unique psychic universe. The magical system that works for one person may be totally contradictory to the system that works for another.”

The lack of dogma in the Craft, the fact that one can
worship
the Goddess without
believing
in Her, that one can accept the Goddess as “Muse” and the Craft as a form of ancient knowledge to be tested by experience—these are precisely the things that have caused the Craft to survive, to revive, and to be re-created in this century. “This is a paradox,” writes Aidan, but “the Lady delights in Paradoxes.”
³⁷

As of 2006, there are about fifteen NROOGD covens active in California, Oregon, Washington, and Michigan. Covens in the San Francisco area cooperate to host seven or eight public sabbats each year and to provide local and national leadership in the Covenant of the Goddess. As this edition goes to press, NROOGD was in the early stages of planning a fortieth anniversary ingathering for initiates and dedicants to take place in 2007 or 2008. As for Aidan Kelly, he has had a long and complex journey, and has dealt with a number of personal problems.