Dark Goddess of Star Fire: A Meditation

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As the sun passes from water into fire and the moon swells full over the cold, hardening ground of the land, I ready myself for a night of ritual. In preparation for tonight's work, a few days earlier I spent some time in prayer and meditation, seeking the wise company of whatever guides might appear.

It began with a few tenuous notes turning and echoing out across the waters, the keening of the violin striving against its own tension and yearning. I was there, on the same familiar rocky cliff that curved in around a small bay, the dark waters of the ocean stretching out far beneath me. The murmuring wash of waves among the pebbles of the beach below, rocking in rhythm until the music faded again into silence.

Above me, the stars began to slip out into the night, one by one, as though disrobing from the dark veils of the night sky. One by one, they turned and shot a gasp of brilliance blazing out in a spiny halo of light around them, then pulled back again, glistening and humming with a silent energy. I lifted my head to ask them for their wisdom. It seemed as though one beckoned to me, glimmering more brightly than the rest. The vertigo of a wild night sky thrown open from horizon to horizon swept over me as my gravity seemed to shift — and then before me, solid as stone it seemed, a staircase spiraled upwards into the starscape. Step by step I climbed, my feet steady, my eyes on the scattered specks of light. Each step fell thick and heavy as though on stone draped over with the deep, plush fabric of night and darkness and stillness. As I reached the final stair, the star before me stepped close as a woman, dark and brilliant with features that seemed to shift as she turned, as though I gazed into her eyes from across countless light years. She smiled, and lifted her hand to caress my cheek and temple.

Then all at once, her other hand was at my throat, grasping my jaw firmly. With one quick motion she wrenched my face away, palm hard against my forehead, and I felt my spine snap as my body crumpled beneath her hard, cold fingers.

Keeping the Days: Meditation in Autumnal Woods

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On a beautiful autumn day just before Samhain, I headed deep into the woods that border our neighborhood
for some meditation among the trees, rocks, wind and sunlight.




Music by Pamela Bruner, "The Surrender" from Circle of the Soul

The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual

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The sun has set, and twilight settles dark over the autumn landscape. In another half an hour a harvest moon, swelling but not quite full, will rise over the eastern horizon, but for now the grove is thick with gray mist and half-seen shadows. In the center, a thin white altar cloth drapes a low, square stone; the cloth shifts once in a while, ghostly and almost whispering with the silent breeze that barely moves the trees. The altar itself is decorated with gourds, dried pale aster blossoms and pressed fall leaves collected from the local landscape over the past week, bringing out subtle shades of yellow, orange, russet and deep greens that are, nonetheless, difficult to distinguish in the darkness. A small bowl of incense smolders and smokes, its scent mingling with the damp late-night fog, and in the center of the altar a small lidded cauldron sits waiting, the waters of life inside ready to be ignited. When the time is right.

Suddenly, the strike of a match and a flame flares into life, held delicately between the fingers of a white-robed figure. Opening the cauldron, she tosses the match inside and within seconds a column of fire is dancing and leaping upwards as if out of the very womb of darkness, lapping at the round, black lip of the iron pot. Flickering light illuminates the entire grove, revealing other figures standing poised on the threshold of vision, some dressed in white, others in the colors of the elements or of the autumnal season. As the cauldron fire grows stronger, the center figure raises her arms in a gesture of gratitude and exaltation, and those in the surrounding circle do likewise. Together, all begin to chant the familiar words of prayer, the syllables weaving and repeating, their voices cascading over one another in a rising harmony of sound and vibration. The energy is palpable, flowing through each tongue of fire, grounding in the deep earth and arcing towards the celestial realms — and each participant adds their own energy, opening themselves to the awareness of connection moving and dancing through the grove.

This is the cosmos recreated, the three realms meeting in a center which is everywhere at once.

The chanting prayer drops suddenly to a slow-whispered awen, and the grove falls once more into silence, the only sound that of the flames trembling and sizzling on the altar. Everyone waits expectedly, their skin shivering with energy, for the ritual to continue.

Participating in Enchantment: Reflections on Magic

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Susan Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic.
New York: Berg Publishers Ltd, 2009.
Review by Alison Shaffer

After the flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, two days earlier, I had learned one thing for certain: I was not a natural flyer. My first time in an airplane in more than fifteen years had left me feeling queazy and disoriented, retreating to the quiet sanctuary of my hotel room for the evening as I attempted to ground myself in a new landscape and a new city hundreds of miles from my home in chilly, hilly western Pennsylvania. High-rise buildings, a depressing lack of trees and green park space, people walking around without jackets in early December: I'd spent the trip feeling out of sorts and cut off from my usual sense of place. Now, I sat anxiously in the claustrophobic cabin of the plane, preparing for the flight back to Pittsburgh and worrying that I was in for another nauseating, jolting ride.

Susan Greenwood's latest book, The Anthropology of Magic, was tucked into my carry-on. The text was academic in flavor as well as subject matter, and clearly it had been written with the new student of anthropology, rather than the lay magical practitioner, in mind. A more accurate title for the book might have been "Competing Theories About Magic, And What It Really Is, In Anthropology," though that would have admittedly been far less catchy, and a bit cramped on the spine. The text introduced a good number of scientists and researchers who had spent their long, distinguished careers studying the practice of magic and shamanic techniques in tribal cultures throughout history and all over the world. Some of the names I recognized from my college days studying comparative religions, but even still I had often felt my head swimming as I worked through Greenwood's arguments. I'd spent the past few days reading her intense (and sometimes convoluted) discussions of the myriad competing theories of consciousness, ritual, reason and myth that have been informing and shaping the field of anthropology for the past several generations. While I knew such a book wasn't your typical how-to Magic 101 that many Pagans might enjoy, I also knew that the text held something immensely valuable for those seeking to deepen their understanding of magical work as a spiritual practice. It would take time, and some rigorous intellectual work on the part of the reader, but it would be worth it. As our plane taxied into place on the runway, I took a deep breath and pulled out the book, flipping through the loose pages of notes I'd taken and thinking once again about the nature of magic.

Ruby Sara :: To Pray in Color

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Greetings, friends, from the sweltering streets of the fiercely-wild urban midwest! I am honored to be posting here at Meadowsweet & Myrrh this month — many thanks to Ali for the opportunity!

From where I write this, the land is up to its ears in late summer weather — hot, muggy, days and restless nights. The rise and fall of cicadas and the smell of roasting corn. These days between, when the Beloved has died again for his people (say Hail to that Sweet King of the Raw Feast, Master in the Wheat and the Corn; the Fire in the Whiskey, the Burn in the Blood!) and the orchards settle in for apple season, I anticipate the double-edged lessons of harvest — bread and death, decay and abundance. The days grow ever shorter, but still the Mama overflows — gardens run weedy and rampant with fruit. The tomatoes ripen and swell into a ready red, the rose hips begin to turn, and those who garden anticipate zucchini bread, and zucchini casserole, and zucchini soup, and grilled zucchini, and zucchini conversations, and zucchini jokes... and sacks of zucchini left on doorsteps by anonymous hooligans with green thumbs and dwindling storage space. All hail the mighty zucchini! If we were to create a green saint of determination and fortitude, we might do worse than to nominate this outrageous vegetable/fruit. Zucchini may take over the world yet, haunting our days with its yellows and greens. I love zucchini like I love the summer — the flagrant, saucy ripeness of it, the fiercely mad dancing that goes on and on forever — a whirling, roiling drumbeat of moths and moons, of color and life.

Yes, summer passing slowly into fall is a season of outrageous color. The Mama, giving up her precious ghost, gasps her last in shocking, glorious extravagance — soon the sunset season in red and copper, thrust against a matchless blue sky. Yellow corn, squash and apples. Golden honey, and rain that turns the wind into diamond music. The smell of smoke, even... the colors of harvest not only in those our eyes perceive but our other senses as well. The color of heat, the smell of ripe apples rotting on the open ground, the sound of bees in the field.

Three Realms of Druidry Travel Altar

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Handcrafted by Ali herself, this travel altar contains: a decorative carry-all box, three wooden three-realms plaques, three holders for fire, water and earth, a white handkerchief altar cloth, a sachet of herbs and acorns, a tea light candle, an incense holder, several cone incense, small book of matches, a small bag containing peace prayer beads, a miniature heart-shaped compass, stones and tokens representing the three realms.




Visit Meadowsweet & Myrrh's Facebook Page to see more photos.

Contemplations on Polytheism and Gods of the Land

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There was a lightness of being in my solitary walk to the library this morning, after yesterday's long-rumbling thunderstorms growling out of the dense haze and heat of the city.^[1] For the past two weeks I have been getting up early to hillwalk through the wooded park down the block, and even in the dawn hours everything hung heavy and damp, dark green, sticky, slick with heat, heat, heat. The pond was a low patch of thickening mud, the stream in the ravine a gully of trickling gutter-water between the tree roots. The mulberries from the neighbor's drooping tree were slowly fermenting on the sidewalk, and giving birth whenever someone walked by to a swarm of iridescent flies. This is not exactly unusual for July around here (certainly not as out-of-character as the hotter weather farther north). But the cloudless domed sky fading to muggy gray on the horizons unbroken for so many rainless days became a little disconcerting in a city centered on three rivers and so near a great lake, where the mountains rising to the east back up the westerly winds carrying their rainstorms over the land. We get a lot of rain here in Pittsburgh, but for the past two weeks it seems we've had nothing but hot, thick, hard-to-breate damp — sliced through with burning arrows of sunlight.

So yesterday was a blessing. An early twilight by midafternoon when the storms rolled in, and it was finally cool enough to fall asleep a few hours before midnight for once. For the first time I felt refreshed when waking up this morning, as if I had slept well and without that constant, unidentifiable anxiety that the body seems to absorb and store up from the enforced stillness of long, hot summer days. And the morning is beautiful. During long weeks of constant heat, coolness becomes a kind of abstract in a sun-fogged brain. Jeff and I kept talking about our upcoming vacation in cool, ocean-hedged Acadia National Park, and my trip soon after to Ireland — the misty green lands that my skin and bones remember, like a gift from my ancestors, without ever having been there — but I don't think I could really believe in these things or imagine them with any kind of realism.

Ah, but this morning I can almost taste the very first hint of crisp, cool autumn, sneaking in just after the high, bright peak of the solstice! Walking down the streets of my neighborhood, I had flashbacks to that feeling I used to get during the first weeks of a new semester back in college, when everything was light and fresh and free, with new classes (and, glory be!, new books to devour!) and new faces roaming campus, and a new year ahead. And in all of this, that special kind of solitude, the aloneness of stepping out and away from home, cut loose from routine or rather in the early stages of a new one when it still feels wide and spacious and full of possibility. It was as if heat had become my home, and I thought it would go on being home forever. It is hard to describe, but I could taste it like gentle sunlight — after two weeks I'd almost forgotten that sunlight could feel gentle and smooth, not always burning and oppressive — and light wisps of clouds that go skipping now from horizon to horizon in a cool lake of blue sky, awash in relief. And I am so thankful that my gods, if I have any, are changeable, full of movement and utterly beyond me.

Delving into Divination: A Long Story of Silliness

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Temperance (XIV): Dressed in faded red, she perches perfectly balanced and at ease on the twisted limb of the old tree, suspended in air rippling, spiraling, tingling with the great powers that surround her. In her pale arms she cradles the pulsing sphere — wisps of energy, the tiny fey beings, drift and rise like steam, swirling and weaving, twining around each other as they climb until they blossom into full, solid forms. Watery blue, fiery gold, the great-talonned dragon and the frantic phoenix entwining, arching skyward, each with an orb of its own, pure color. The stony gargoyle makes offerings; the little songbird opens its wings wide, about to take flight. Her thoughts turn around them, seeking the power of their presence. She touches the sphere, undisturbed, her long fingers moving lovingly in contemplation — the perfect, pale-white glow of a halo exactly framed by the curve of her small, delicate wings, the light of it whispering to her, her thoughts turning around each other, dark and bright, water and fire, a sensual dance of power, duality, tension and life. The brown curls of her hair float as if caught up in a warm, rising current. She holds the churning forces of the world in her mind, between her hands, and every movement is poised here, utterly, in this moment, like a gulp of delicious air, like a quiet gasp in the center of a storm.

- excerpt from my tarot journal

For one reason or another the practice of divination has been something that, for a long time now, has given me trouble. I just never seemed to "get into" it. Perhaps because of the amount of study and memorization it seemed to require (though for other subjects and practices this has never stopped me). Or perhaps because my day-to-day life is often so exquisitely routine that daily readings hardly seemed relevant. Or maybe both. Though I consider myself a generally intuitive person, cultivating this aspect through my creative writing, divination as a regular practice seemed... unnecessary, one of those things people did to feel "occult" rather than taking the time to analyze their motivations and behaviors in more mundane ways, or maybe to wow their friends at parties. But I don't go to many parties, lovely readers, not many parties at all.

Bemused by Brigid: How I Met My Goddess / What I Did to Keep Her (Part Two)

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Almost three years ago I began this musing and stumbling over polytheist theology, utterly unconvinced and unsure. Not that I thought others were deluded in their worship — quite the opposite, in some ways I was almost jealous. I pictured myself in a quiet grove penetrated through with soft fog amidst the twining green, my form draped in blue, my skin tattooed with spirals and other elusive but beautiful signs, perhaps now whispering gently words of adoration and gratitude, now reaching my arms up and out to touch the surging sense of divinity, now leaning down to tend the lighted fire and scatter offerings of herbs into the flames, their smoke trailing off like prayers to linger in the mist.... I imagined myself a shaman or priestess, a Druid in her nemeton, sure and at peace with herself and with her gods. And somehow, unseen except in the peripheral shadows of unsteady imagination, was the murmuring, dancing throng of the Many shining opalescent among the stars and beads of morning dew.

My First Pagan Festival: Doing Paganism

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The world is gray and white and shades of brown, and every inch of me is screaming for spring, restless and aching and urging me to quit, to give it all up, to leave my stupid job and drive south, to keep driving until snow and dark are left behind, to keep driving and burning and thrashing through night until the sun comes up and I'm surrounded by palm trees and blue skies and wide, warm oceans rocking, rocking. But of course, I can't. So instead, I light a homemade candle in a dented, old tin can. I set it out on the front stoop, nestled in the three inches of snow, and I let it burn. And evening settles and the snow continues to drift down from low clouds to cover everything — but that single wild flame is still clawing its way up out of that tin can, bright against the dull, wet brick, melting a tiny circle from around its hot metal sides. Whenever I begin to feel trapped and unfocused, I step outside and spend a moment squinting through the white-darkening cold that falls and bites against my skin, squinting at that candle, and feeling a little bit of triumph.

And I think of my cat, born in late September and abandoned in the gutter, seeking shelter under our car where we found him and brought him home as a tiny, half-starved stray. For him, the world has only ever gotten colder, and darker. I cuddle him in my arms as we look out the window together, and I tell him, "It will get green again — greener than you know. It will be so green, so warm and colorful and lush, and there will be birds for you to watch, and bugs to chase. You have no idea, kitty! You've never known a spring!" He just blinks at me with his cat eyes, and I have to put him down and slip on my shoes and step outside again to look at the candle, burning like a beacon, and tell myself, yes, it will come... it will...

It's been slightly more than a week since I attended the Feast of Lights, and oddly enough, all those ideas and topics jostling around in my head, vying for a good airing, have settled back down into relative calm, smothered by the snow. Which may be an interesting observation in itself: on my own, my spiritual life is about doing Paganism, engaging in embodied spiritual living; around other Pagans (at least in large group settings such as at a festival), my spiritual life becomes about being Pagan, and what exactly that means.

This is not entirely a bad thing, really. One thing I noticed immediately, despite my worries about being too "normal" (in my plain navy-blue long-sleeved shirt and sensible shoes) was that I felt comfortable, at ease and intensely interested in everything going on. These talks about interfaith work and establishing workable definitions that remain inclusive without becoming so vague as to be useless, these discussions of "mainstreaming Paganism" and "Paganizing the mainstream" and what such processes might mean... they were always too short for the subjects they wanted to explore, and they left the voices in my head yammering to have their say, to speak to old assumptions about the nature of community, and language, and archetypes, and political upheaval.

But what impressed me most was the first session that Jeff and I attended that Friday evening, a round-table discussion on sustainable living. Just a few of us in the room, skipping immediately to the question of work, to questions of activity and efficacy, sharing stories about what we did and why. No need to qualify or cite years of expertise, or quibble over definitions. We were not merely Pagans mulling over notions of self-identity, we were more than that, somehow, simply by allowing ourselves to be just folks, trying to live better. Yet we were Pagans, too, no merit badges required. After brief introductions, one moderator led us in a moment of quiet breathing and centering — and for the first time, I knew what it felt like to be a part of a community where no one looked askance at such a suggestion or rolled their eyes or shifted uncomfortably. The same was true when, after an intense discussion of sustainability options (which left me singing the praises of poverty and fungi, bless them both), we circled around a tight cluster of chairs, humming a simple tune I cannot now remember, and then settled down to breathe, hold hands and light that flame within each of us that would guide us in our choices. Nothing fancy, no pretensions — we were practicing the simple: breath, intention, togetherness and flame.

And, as appropriate to a weekend of beginnings and bookends it seems, the final session we attended was equally impressive, an amazing concert and sing-along led by the group Northern Harmony, whose eerie, soaring and guttural vocals sent shivers slipping up and down my spine as they set my soul to wandering. The experience was intense, and set me in mind of the other large-scale festival I have attended with some regularity for the past fifteen years: the Dodge Poetry Festival.

At the Dodge Poetry Festival, there were some panel discussions about the craft of poetry, what it means to be a poet, what the life of a poet is like; and there were some workshops on technique, exercises to experiment with and new approaches to try. But by and large, what makes up the Dodge Festival is folks doing poetry, getting up there on stage and giving voice and life to their work, performing their art in all its power and polished form. The debates about what counts as "real poetry" are left in the dust of this kind of living engagement with the work, and you always know that "something" is there, that poetry is alive and well, when it moves you to dancing, laughing, sighing and silence.

This is what I want from Paganism, and from Pagan festivals: this doing and being with each other, without constant navel-gazing and comparing notes. Knowing ourselves is essential, of course, and it was immensely satisfying to sit and listen to ideas being bandied and concerns being raised. But I also want that community of doing, so that I am not always doing the doing alone. I want to be able to set aside our differences long enough to do the work together, to practice and share that engagement, even if we each go home with our own impressions and interpretations of what just happened. I want our rituals to be full of songs that send shivers down my spine, not just the latest drumming technique imperfectly practiced. I want little candles lit and flickering despite the falling snow outside. And I know it will take a long time to get there, and there is much work to be done in the meantime, each on his or her own. But for now the questions of self- and community-identity that had been stirred up in the muddy waters of last week have all but faded away again, and what I want is to ground myself again in practice, in doing my Druidry as deeply as I can. So that when the opportunity comes to practice with others, I can do my part to make the whole thing move.

Song of a Daily Druid: Elements of Ritual

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For those of you who enjoyed or were intrigued by the Samhain rite and subsequent ritual musings I shared here earlier in November, this month's Song of a Daily Druid (over at Pagan Pages) focuses on The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual and explores some of the theory behind creating powerful rituals and daily practice. Hop on over and check it out!

What is the purpose of ritual? In many Pagan circles ritual is seen primarily as a method of magical work or spellcraft, a way of raising and directing energy for a particular goal. This might take the form of blessing candles for healing magic, or invoking the presence of a particular deity to provide guidance or aid for a specific problem. In Druidry, however, though magic has a role to play, sacred ritual holds a far more poetic place in both personal and group spiritual practice. In previous columns, I have talked about the way poetry connects us to one another through memory, imagination and creativity, how it reaches beyond the tensions of duality and opens up in us a sense of metaphor, how it speaks to us of space and potential that can transcend and reconcile, clarify and illuminate. Although it can be used for specific magical purposes, Druidic ritual serves primarily as a way for us to live our poetry in the world of physical reality as well as in the world of words.

Just as the art of poetry requires a certain set of skills — a grasp of language, its rhythms and sounds, a strong sense of concrete sensory details, etc. — the art of ritual has three basic elements or aspects that a practitioner must come to work with and know intimately. These aspects echo the Druidic elements of calas, gwyar and nwyfre, found in everything, everywhere: the stability and solidity of stone, the fluidity and movement of water, and the "breath of life," the energy and life-force of wind (and fire). Learning how to incorporate all three of these elements into Druidic ritual helps to ensure a powerful and meaningful experience, more poignant, authentic and spiritually fruitful than the kind of melodramatic role-playing that Pagan ritual can sometimes risk becoming. But more than this, these three elements serve as symbols, a means of connection and a reminder of the three elements of calas, gwyar and nwyfre that dwell within all things. Likewise, by mindfully incorporating these elements in a way that is beautiful and aesthetically moving, we re-create or invoke the cosmos within the ritual sacred space — as above, so below — and so our actions in that space themselves become cosmic or mythic in meaning. What are these three elements of Druidic ritual? Put simply, they are: matter, sound, and energy.

......To read more, check out Song of a Daily Druid

Writing the Right Rite: Lessons of Experience

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Although I've been slowly cultivating a personal practice of meditation and ritual as a solitary Druid for several years now, until last week I'd only ever participated in exactly one Pagan group rite — and then, not even as a Pagan myself, but as an academic, observing and collecting data via field research. But last week, in honor of the founding of Sycamore Circle, Jeff and I celebrated our first "group" ritual — an intimate Samhain rite in the backyard.

I'd never written a group ritual before; in fact, I'd never really bothered to write down the rituals I usually did for holy days and other magical work. For the most part, I utilized the basic outline provided by AODA to open the grove — declaring peace to the four quarters, welcoming the energies of the four directions, and reciting the Gorsedd Prayer (also called the "Bond of Druids") — performing the opening from memory and then proceeding to improvise whatever central work I'd intended, often lighting candles and reading poetry, followed by personal meditation and pouring libations. I disliked the AODA's closing of the ritual; the mythological references to Arthur and Excalibur didn't speak very strongly to me, and I found the closing unbalanced and too abrupt, without the appropriate thanking of the directional energies or the necessary time needed to ground back into ordinary mundane consciousness. So eventually, I began supplementing the AODA outline, adding a circle casting with the three elements (calas, gwyar and nwyfre), and repeating, in reverse, a simplified form of the invocations at the close of each ritual. Still, the core substance of each rite, between these two formal bookends of movement and speech, remained fairly quiet and internal. No elaborate gestures, prayers or chants, and only occasionally some overt use of tools to charge or direct energy. For the most part, my personal rituals were a way of creating a nemeton, or spiritual sanctuary, that was within the physical world but also set apart from mundane space-time, a consecrated place in which I could sit in meditation and do inner work with heightened psychological and spiritual potency.

This worked well for me as a basis for private ritual activity, but because so much of the activity was internal and unspoken, I knew it wouldn't serve for group work. Group ritual must, it seems to me, be about acting out the spiritual life together in community, particularly in a way that is aesthetic and powerful. Guided meditations might play some role, to heighten emotional connection and focus attention, but the primary activity of group ritual must be external, visible for all participants to witness together — like a play, dance or musical performance. I knew it would be a challenge to write out as physical acts the kind of meditative work that I usually engaged with in solitary rites. Where I might effectively imagine myself at once in a beautiful inner grove standing before a flowing stream or a flickering bonfire, now I would have to find ways to represent and invoke these experiences with physical objects immediately present in the real, external circle — objects with which all participants could safely interact in ways that were still moving and meaningful. A bowl of water had to become more than just a bowl of water; an altar had to be a place of aesthetic focus and not just a storage place for tools.

It took me about a week and a half to come up with and write out the small group Samhain ritual that Jeff and I ended up performing. The writing itself was an intense experience. There were times when I found myself inadvertently composing in rhyming couplets or stumbling upon phrases that seemed absolutely lovely, simple and satisfyingly concise. Other times, I went back to the same brief prayers and chants over and over, rearranging single words or copy-pasting whole parts of the rite into different orders, struggling to realize some sense of aesthetic balance. Eventually, the rite as a whole began to come into focus; when I could not remove or revise anything more without some adverse effect to the flow and sense of balance, I knew I was finally finished. For a time, I was quite honestly a bit enamored with the ritual I had composed on paper. I would open the file at random to read through it during the day, tweaking or just turning the words over in my mind and imagining the actions and gestures of the presiding priest or priestess. I set about organizing the main roles into a form that could be effectively performed by only two people, and then sent it along to Jeff to begin memorizing.

Jeff has very little experience with writing and performing ritual. The word "none" comes to mind, actually, although this isn't strictly true as he has attended a few small rituals with Hopman's Order of White Oak. Still, as he himself admitted, few rituals had really moved him or meant much to him, perhaps because he was usually more distracted with herding and helping children through the rites. I had not anticipated the effect lack of experience would have on our performance; I thought to myself, well, all the "stage directions" are right there in the script, and the chants are easy enough to memorize with a bit of practice. But on the day that we'd planned to hold the rite, Jeff became increasingly nervous, struggling to remember the order of the prayers, chants and blessings, and lacking the confidence to improvise those invocations and actions he could not remember. I began to realize that, without a solid understanding of the theory behind the rite, it could all seem kind of random and befuddling. I worked to coach him during the last few hours before we began, explaining some of the structure and printing out two decorative scrolls for invocations to Cernunnos and the four directions. In the end, his nervousness and my own feeling of uncertainty kept both of us distracted from really experiencing the ritual as powerfully as I had hoped.

Of course, I failed to anticipate other things as well. In the past, I had performed most of my personal rites indoors, and what few outdoor rituals I'd engaged in had been informal and simple, rarely involving more than a bit of lit incense or, maybe, a candle held close during sitting meditation. Now blessed with a backyard and understanding neighbors, I was excited to be able to perform a formal outdoor rite for the first time. I eagerly incorporated the sprinkling of herbs and water to trace a literal circle upon the ground (already outlined in tiny pumpkins and gourds) to open the grove, and during the one part of the rite I included a dramatic lighting of a cauldron fire in the center of the altar, to symbolize the fire of life springing up and persisting through the dark winter days. What I hadn't anticipated... was wind. It didn't even feel all that windy that night. But, while setting up the altar and decorating it with pressed leaves the children and I had collected earlier that week, the breeze soon swept every single one to the ground, leaving the altar sadly bare. Later, as I sprinkled water around the circle, my fingers quickly became numb, and then painful, with the cold damp.

And best of all — the cauldron refused to light. At first. After Jeff had broken circle to slip inside for matches (after the lighter clicked and clicked without a spark to catch), it took five attempts before the rubbing alcohol in the tiny cauldron finally suffused with a hot blue flame that spread and anchored itself firmly in the dark iron pot. But even then — there was still the wind. And though I'd had practice burning alcohol in this same cauldron before, never had I stood on a windy night, watching the flames leaping dangerously sideways towards the bowl of dried herbs and the mortar full of ground incense, expecting at any moment for the whole thing to go up in flames. Jeff and I stood "in quiet meditation," as the script read, waiting for the flames to eventually die down as a signal to end the rite... but our gasps belied the reality: tension and worry. There was relief, more than anything else, when one final gust of wind blew the fire clean out and I quickly slapped the lid back on and began the ritual closing (thanking Cernunnos, sardonically, for blessing us with his wild presence).

Jeff insists that this whole experience was entirely appropriate, and it is true that we had sufficient water and blankets to stamp out a fire in case of emergency, but still I would have preferred a safer wildness, or a less dangerous symbolic center for the rite. On the other hand, it certainly proves that, no matter how many books on ritual theory you read, nothing compares to attempting the thing in real life and learning just how powerful even a light breeze can be, or just how dark it is, even in a city, before the full moon rises over the horizon. The experience also brings home to me the utmost importance of working up to formal ritual, beginning at the beginning with a thorough understanding of the theory and an established comfort level with the basic structure. As much as I loved writing a full-blown formal ritual to celebrate one of the most important holy days of the Druidic calendar, I have decided to revise my approach in the future, and develop a course of study to gradually introduce elements of ritual to the inexperienced. Jeff has agreed to be my guinea pig for this experiment, and periodically I hope to share these developments and learning experiences for others to read and try on their own.

Meanwhile, dear readers, I would love to hear about some of your experiences with ritual — both private and public, solitary and group. What disaster stories do you have? What lessons have you learned the hard way, and what potential pitfalls have you learned to avoid? How did you learn to write and perform effective ritual, and how might you go about teaching others?

Song of a Daily Druid

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The October issue of Pagan Pages is up, and with it the second installment of my column, Song of a Daily Druid. This month's column begins to explore the subtleties of the Bardic way and the role that poetry can play in the spiritual life, working with the relationship between creativity and imagination and the importance of memory, experience and the physical body.

All poetry begins in the dark. In the cave of memory, the new poet lies awake, wrapped in the simple, loose-fitting shift of a sleeper, listening to the echoes of her own breathing and the whine of her own blood in her ears, the only sounds. The close stone walls are damp with her exhalations, sighs of longing or uncertainty, muffled sobs or murmured joys. She can see nothing in the darkness, not even the low ceiling above, but in that senseless obscurity her memory moves, conjuring up fleeting images of apricots, water spigots and firelight, half-heard sounds of bare running feet or the rubbing of tree branches against brick. Sometimes the dank, unmoving air of the cave seems to bring her scents of autumn leaves rotting in the riverbed, or tangled woolen yarn, or muddy earth turned over and mixed with the smell of blossoms. These memories are in her, and they are the beginning of her art. She must seek out the language—its rhythms and articulations, the shapes of its vowels, the teeth and tongue of its consonant stops—seek out the words that evoke and mirror sensation.

In the unlit recesses of the cave, her mind works as her body lies still, remembering. The small round stone rests heavy on her belly—she can feel its weight through the soft fabric and the way it rocks gently as each breath lifts it and lets it drop again. Her mind travels the stumbling, sometimes frantic pathways of the past, aflame with inspiration; she brings it back again, turns it over and over to the weight and solidity of the stone. Fire in the head, anchored in the earth. When the night is over, the waking world will come for her. She must find a way to bring poetry into being, to carry it forward, to bring it from the empty depths of the cave into the morning sunlight. To carry it like the stone: concrete, real, substantive in her hands. Light moves behind her eyes, and the stone wobbles on her solar plexus. All poetry begins this way: an image in the mind, a feeling in the gut, a moment in the dark.


(......To read more, visit Song of a Daily Druid)

The Group of 20 and the Mythology of the Market

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A Modern Creation Myth

In the beginning, there was chaos and darkness and scarcity, and this disorder was called the State of Nature. And man lived in the State of Nature as a savage beast, constantly fearing for his life lest another come along and kill him for his possessions, for man had no way to relate to and communicate with his fellows. But such chaos was unbearable, and so eventually the State of Nature gave birth to Social Contracts, and these children of Nature grew strong and powerful enough to rein in the chaos and destruction of their mother. And the most powerful of these Contracts was the Market, and he was their ruler and king.

Now, the Market brought gifts to struggling, destitute man: the gift of order and security, the gift of relationship to his fellows through the exchange of goods and services. Man no longer needed to fear his neighbor's killing blow, for instead each could barter and bargain for what he needed in sacred rituals the Market had designed. In return, man offered the Market nonperishable votives, and these became relics preserved and hoarded through time, beautiful though useless objects like shells, gold and printed paper. And the Market imbued these with value and meaning, so that they too could be traded in exchange for goods and services, or could be saved up against times of scarcity and hunger.

And this is the story of the beginning of man's worship of the Market, king of the Social Contracts, children of the State of Nature, who subdued and brought order to the world.

Last year around this time, you may remember, we were undergoing some pretty startling economic ups and downs (mostly downs). This year, the Group of 20 comes to the city of Pittsburgh to discuss the current economic crisis that, although slowly stabilizing in the U.S. and other rich countries, continues to plague poverty-stricken nations the world over, making it likely that by 2010 there will be 89 million more people living in extreme poverty. The World Bank has prepared a paper on this data to present to the G20 this week, urging the political leaders of the wealthiest nations to consider taking further stimulus measures to prevent the worst of this forecasted slip into desperation, starvation and poverty for a large chunk of the global population.

"Outside my city is bracing for the next killing thing..." That line from an Ani DiFranco song plays over and over in my mind as I watch the cops patrolling the streets on intimidating, revved-up motorcycles, and the locals grumbling about protesters camping in public parks and blocking up roads. Rumor has it downtown is almost completely boarded up for fear of the disruption angry mobs might cause, and they'll be closing the bridges on Thursday. In a city whose very heart lies at the point where three rivers meet, the idea that we might not be able to cross the water feels like the severing of a limb, slashing the city into pieces. Amongst all this hype and inconvenience is the pride and gratitude Pittsburghers are told and expected to feel at their city having been chosen; millions of dollars have already been spent not only on increased security measures, but on city beautification projects, patching up roads and planting more trees where tourists and visitors might see them. The front page of the local paper features some story about the coming G20 Summit almost every day of the week. Last week was an article noting almost casually an incident during the G20 Summit in London, in which the police beat a man to death during a protest rally.

And yet, to hear the casual conversation of ordinary people around here, you would think there were no larger implications of the "Group of 20" meeting in our city than inconvenient business closings and dangerous "anti-authoritarians" (alternately read: teenagers freed early after a half-day of school) roaming the streets making trouble. If a respected science-fiction author were to write a dystopian novel about a future in which an elite group of select men in power converged on a city to revel in its local color while debating the fate of the impoverished and disenfranchised of the world, readers would shake their heads wisely and think how lucky they were not to live in such a society. Yet today, in my city, the very notion that there is something odd or unjust about the existence of the G20 — their presumption to the kind of power they take for granted let alone the exercise of that power for the benefit of the "little people" — doesn't even come up. All the righteous anger and talk of justice is reserved for the out-of-town protesters clogging up the works, preventing good honest folk from getting to their jobs and earning a living.

Perhaps it is merely coincidence, or perhaps a more vital synchronicity, that just as these concerns are overtaking my city and churning in my own mind (right around a holy festival of harvest and balance, as well as the soon-prevailing dark), Hrafnkell Haraldsson, over at A Heathen's Day, writes on the importance of mythology. Yet while Hrafnkell suggests that one problem with modern society is that we lack a coherent mythology of our own and have grown dismissive of and deaf to the value of the old myths, I do not believe that this precisely true. In fact, I would argue that we moderns have not lost myth at all, but are so deeply entrenched in our own that we do not recognize it as such. Although the mythology of our times incorporates and synthesizes almost every major aspect of individual and social life — as all healthy, relevant living mythologies do — its prevailing theme can be described as the Mythology of the Market.

This mythology is so pervasive, we take it to be a fundamental truth. It is a coherent story about who we are, how we fit together (that is, how we "sustain collective unity") and how we should live. Even during times of economic crisis, for instance, the myth of the Market is not questioned but only reinforced: we're urged to more faithful trust in the Market, which will restore prosperity if the appropriate ritual acts are observed (including believing the economy will stabilize, the necessity of consumer confidence). This mythology has its own rituals (working that nine-to-five job as a necessity for security as well as meaningful self-identity and respected social standing) and institutions (the Stock Exchange and the financial sector as a whole) and holy days (Black Friday and the entirety of the Christmas shopping season, President's Day sales, Back-to-School sales, etc.). This mythology is so ubiquitous that even socio-cultural events that have nothing to do with economics are viewed primarily in those terms. In response to 9/11 we were told by political and cultural leaders that the most important thing we could do as a community was not pray, or grieve, or make art — but shop. The debate over universal health care centers on the effect it will have on the Market and whether or not the Market will support it, and not the common sense concern for the health and well-being of citizens. My mother, an intelligent woman by any standard, once told me that the "best way to stay healthy is to have health insurance" — as though paying someone else money was far more effective than, say, good hygiene, a healthy diet, regular exercise and proper rest.

And yet, if you ask most people today, they could not identify this as a mythological worldview even after prompting. They do not see the Market and all its rituals merely as a useful allegory for guiding behavior and shaping relationships — they believe it is real, with a solidity that rivals and sometimes even surpasses the monotheistic God of the Judeo-Christian mainstream. In a way, they're not wrong: the Market is real, insofar as it has measurable effects on society as an agreed-upon social construct. How people view and interact with the Market through rituals of employment, investment and consumerism quite often shapes their individual lives in obvious ways, and these effects are taken as confirmation of the Market's reality and meaningfulness. Even the economists and political pundits who speak about the Market in abstracted metaphorical terms and treat it primarily as an allegorical device still live as though these metaphors were literally true, investing a vital importance in how we think about and relate to the economy as a real thing, perhaps the realest thing in our shared social existence.

This in part explains why the people in my city do not even question the existence of a "Group of 20" or its role in shaping and responding to a global economic market. If the Market takes on the role of deity within our modern mythological framework (hardly avoidable, with its thriving stock of golden bull idols and votive offerings inscribed with devotions like "In God We Trust"), then the necessity of prophets, priests, heros and heretics is no more jarring or unexpected than it would be in any other mythology. Amusingly, the nature of our modern worldview as a mythology is best brought into stark relief when it is directly compared with already widely-acknowledged mythologies like those of the ancient Greeks or Celts (though there is no need to prove, for instance, that the Celtic myths are indeed myths because they match up with Greek ones, we do not have such a clear perspective of our own).

(In my next post I'll explore some of the archetypes of Market Mythology and how these relate back to the inefficacy of protesters at the G20. I would include it here, but this post has already started to reach an unreasonable length!)

Plan for Advanced Druidic Study

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Since I've formally committed to continuing my degree work within AODA (OBOD's Bardic correspondence course ended up being a bit too touchy-feely for me), I've been giving some thought to what kind of work I want to pursue over the next few years.

Some of it will be guided in part by the AODA Second Degree curriculum, with its focus on the four elements and corresponding emphases: earth: a foundation of continual connection with the natural world and a developing understanding of ecology; fire: more intense and creative engagement with ritual and holy day rites; air: scholarly study of Celtic mythology, Arthurian legend and the history of Revival Druidry; and water: emotional and community development through teaching and mentoring. In addition to these four areas of training, AODA also encourages the development of practical skills in the arts and spiritual crafts by requiring three "spirals" of study in things such as poetry, music, magic, and divination, as well as a "fifth element" (spirit) focus on comparative religion and the theory and history of nature spirituality in particular, in order to develop a broader perspective on the role of Druidry in our own lives and within our contemporary historical-cultural context.

This is all very structured and task-oriented; e.g. "read x number of books on this topic and write an essay y pages long," or "develop n holy day rites and perform them at least z times a year," or "choose a musical instrument and practice p times a week, memorizing q number of songs you feel skilled enough to play in public." In some ways, I very much like this approach, since it sets out very clear, attainable goals to work towards without putting too many restrictions on what exactly each individual will learn from or get out of such work. Of course, there's a general assumption that, for instance, committed regular contact with nature will rub off on a person in terms of appreciation and care, or that the self-discipline required to meditate daily, or the creativity and knowledge needed to write a certain number of self-designed rituals, will have similarly predictable effects, all working together and playing off each other to shape a person walking the uniquely AODA Druidic path while also ensuring they have at least some of the skills necessary to teach newcomers and neophytes, passing the tradition on to others. In some ways, the structure of the AODA degree program works to inculcate and train its Druids in the same way a graduate school program trains its students to become competent professors within the academic institution. (And, as with graduate school, this type of institutional training, despite its benefits, is not cut out for everybody.) Obviously, the part of me that eventually rebelled against the influence of inadvertent or unacknowledged "indoctrination" in my creative writing graduate program struggles, too, from time to time with this aspect of AODA training. However, because I do enjoy the challenge of specific, outlined goals and I believe the process of training and growth in Druidry is valuable in itself, I've decided to take up the challenge and confront whatever obstacles that may come up with a commitment to my own future goals in mind.

As I mentioned, the AODA program is very much task-oriented, and so to help "flesh out" this approach and give it depth, another aspect that will guide my Druidic work over the next few years will be a personal emphasis on "Ovate"-related aspects of spirituality. Although for some reason (not entirely clear to me) AODA very much downplays the traditional (Revival) Druidic division of training into Bardic, Ovate and Druidic levels adopted by groups like OBOD, I feel that these broad categories make a kind of sense to me. Because I first came to Druidry through my "bardic" work with poetry and creative writing (and chose poetry as the "spiral" for my First Degree work), metaphors of music, song, dance, imagery and imagination have echoed strongly through my Druidic study so far. As I continue to explore and grow, however, I find two new interests coming into focus: a fascination with shamanic and trance or dream work, divination and magic; and a growing need to articulate my spirituality in theological and philosophical terms that encompass questions of ethics, justice, politics and metaphysics. These correspond, very roughly, to the emphasis found in Ovate and Druid training. While I will certainly continue to develop the latter on my own (as if I could stop myself!), I've decided that my Second Degree work will benefit from a good dose of shamanic, intuitive exploration. The "spirals" I've chosen (divination, magic and a self-designed "faery spiral") all deal with nonrational, Otherworld aspects of spirituality, learning how to shape consciousness, connect with sacred or trans-mundane beings and energies, and working more closely with liminal experiences in the human life cycle (such as birth, love, grief, death, illness, initiation, etc.).

One way I've thought about this threefold division within Druidry is to imagine the Bards as the poets and story-tellers, the Ovates as what we would think of as "priests" or spiritual counselors, and the Druids as "judges" and advisors in both worldly and spiritual matters. Thinking through AODA's Second Degree curriculum, one thing that strikes me is the important role that mentoring, teaching and group leadership comes to play over the next few years. By the time an Apprentice is ready to become a Druid Companion in AODA, their work has supposedly prepared them for formal ordination and the responsibilities of organizing and leading a chartered Study Group.* The exercises and reading of the Second Degree's Water path place heavy emphasis on encouraging emotional maturity, exploring various models of spiritual development, and learning effective techniques for teaching, coaching and counseling; meanwhile, the Fire path requires students to write, memorize and be able to effectively perform ritual with others (including the Candidate initiation ritual). Once again, in its own task-oriented way, AODA's curriculum works to impart the skills and knowledge a person needs to act competently as a priest or priestess for their local community. Intuitive shamanic and dreamwork seem, to me, to be a natural compliment to these more overt, exoteric leadership skills. After all, how can you help to counsel and guide others without personal exploration and experience of your own.

But this is where I find myself almost immediately running into difficulties. The next two or three years of my Druidic study are fairly well mapped out, with lists of important books, exercises and techniques to pursue and correct, and a given number of hours of "community service" to provide. Not to mention, I have the added benefit of knowing a few people within AODA who have worked through and completed the Second Degree already, who can and often cheerfully do provide advice, encouragement and personal examples from their own lives. But for me, this isn't enough. Instead, I keep asking myself, "What does spiritual growth look like?" There was a time when I thought I knew, or I at least had a kind of ideal to shoot for, to work towards. Now... I find myself honestly unsure. For all its structure and challenge, in many ways the AODA degree program strikes me as imparting barely more than a skill set. Valuable, useful skills, of course, but.... still. I've seen people who can effectively read runes or competently perform moving rituals, but then I've also seen Catholic priests who preach movingly about love and service, and then afterwards go diddle some poor altar boy in the rectory. Not to put too fine a point on it. Certainly, skills are important, but as I read Judy Harrow's book, Spiritual Mentoring: A Pagan Guide, for instance, I read again and again about how necessary it is to encourage real, substantive spiritual growth... and yet nowhere do I find any indication of what this might be or how we might recognize it. So I'm left asking (skill-sets, knowledge-bases and charisma aside): what does spiritual growth look like?






* One thing that bothers me about AODA is that Groves can only be established by Druid Adepts, who are initiated based not on a clearly outlined program of study as with the two previous grades, but according to the whim of the Grand Grove and its members, who must approve a self-designed program (or decide to bestow the title honorarily on people who impress them). This is where hierarchy becomes an issue for me. In theory, this "freedom" of study is meant to encourage self-discipline and commitment, demanding that truly serious students of Druidry prove themselves by taking up the responsibility for their own development after they reach a certain level. In practice, however, it seems to work to keep very few people from attaining to the higher degrees. Instead, it seems people at this point more often "take the iniative" by leaving AODA altogether to establish their own groups or groves (and if/when I reach that point, I will most likely do the same). The current archdruid of the Order often seems quite satisfied (almost suspiciously self-satisfied) to allow members "without the commitment" or who take issue with this hierarchical structure to drop away, move on, or simply stay put at their current level. I find this a shame, since it means that AODA's membership (which consists almost entirely of Candidates and Apprentices) is likely to remain fairly stagnant in the coming decades. I can only hope that, as membership grows to include more younger members and the current leaders finally being to retire, a new and more refreshing attitude might take hold that encourages growth both for the group as a whole and for members personally. Since, as part of my Apprentice initiation, I promised to work to help the AODA community, I will continue to try to be part of that more promising trend.

Altar Overhaul

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This past month of blogging has been heavy with abstraction and theory, but that's not all I've been up to. In those moments when I step back and take a look at myself, I'm still a bit stunned at this sudden surge of energy and focus I've had since the winter solstice.

It was a little less than a year ago, just after passing my First Degree Exam with AODA, that I decided to cease formal study with the Order for a little while. I didn't perform the ritual self-initiation to enter the first degree of Druid Apprentice at the time, since one aspect of the ritual was to describe what you had learned during your time as a Candidate; while I'd written twenty-seven pages worth of reflection for my exam on this very topic, I wanted to be absolutely sure, to gain some perspective about some of the fundamental ways that Druidry had thus far shaped and changed me, before I committed to formal membership and further study. The following year was quiet and contemplative when it came to my spiritual path. I kept blogging, thinking and spending a great deal of time out in nature. I read a bit of Celtic mythology and other texts that were beyond the "Druidry 101" types I'd been lining my shelf with up until that point. But for the most part I lapsed back into observer-mode, the role I had occupied for several years as a student in college, studying Neopaganism from the outside-in before finally trying my hand at this whacky nature-worship hoopla for myself. For the past year, I've done very little actual spiritual work. I've continued to go on walks and attend to nature, but I haven't prayed, meditated or even done much ritual on the holy days. I just... didn't feel like it.

I'm not sure what exactly changed this Alban Arthan past, but something sure has kicked back into gear. I've felt a sense of renewal and more solidified commitment. Along with the intense serial posts that I've spent a great deal of time working on, I recently determined that it was absolutely essential to address the issue of my altar, which had been bothering me for quite some time. Over the year--especially in the autumn, as a means of coping with some annual bad-memories-relived issues--I had turned my altar area mainly into a kind of shrine to the local landscape of the natural world, scattered with leaves, seeds, nuts and stones I'd collected on my weekly walks. But with this new spurt of energy, and a renewed commitment to regular meditation that I'd already started to make good on, I decided to sit down and work on an "altar overhaul."

Assessing Needs

First, I made a list of the ideal uses that I would like my main altar to serve:

• as a shrine, to display important and/or aesthetic objects (such as candles, statues, paintings, cards, other objects)


• as a space of offering, incorporating objects from nature such as leaves, stones, flowers, shells, seeds, etc., to be placed in an offering dish or among the other ritual items on display


• a focal point for meditation and prayer, with comfortable seating and an aesthetically pleasing balance in design, to draw me naturally and eagerly into the space

I quickly realized that my current altar set-up, in trying to meet all these needs, failed to meet any of them fully. I also noticed that I had no real interest in the kind of "working altar" and its tools that was commonly found in witchcraft and other kinds of magical practices, although this model of functionality (and elemental correspondence, especially) had been the first type I'd been introduced to and was still shaping my expectations in many ways.

Next, I tried to pinpoint some of the biggest problems with my current altar, to give me a clearer picture of what issues I would need to resolve:

• using the top of my bureau as a shrine meant having a mirror as a permanent backdrop; not only did this limit the amount of decorative elements I could incorporate (as well as providing a distracting full-view reflection of myself during ritual), but using the mirror for mundane purposes meant that I had to literally "overlook" the shrine on a daily basis


• a lack of comfortable seating (in particular a floor cushion that would allow me to sit in my preferred cross-legged position) discouraged me from extended or regular use; pulling up a chair required inconvenient furniture rearranging, plus the shape of bureau made sitting close awkward, with no room for my knees


• the shape of the bureau top was flat and long, so that my altar was broken into smaller areas some of which had no organized theme whatsoever; it often felt too long to be practical, and didn't have an aesthetic "flow" or coherence necessary to create an inviting or inspiring space


• at the most basic level, the area was impractical for activities such as burning candles or incense, or lighting small controlled fires in my cauldron; not enough space to allow for ease and comfort, amplified by my worries about wax or burn marks ruining a nice wood finish, provided too many causes for distraction or discomfort

With these problems clearly identified, I soon began to prioritize and scope out my apartment for possible new locations and set-ups for a more practical altar space. I found a corner in my bedroom that had become a kind of random-pile-of-stuff mess, so I buckled down and cleared it out, brought an old round end table up from basement storage, lugged a huge forgotten cushion out of the closet, and followed my instinct.

Over the past month or so, my most pressing priority had become a practical altar for meditation. I'd already begun meditating again before going to bed each night, sitting on my bed in my pajamas working at simple Sphere of Protection visualizations and occasionally going to my inner nemeton or sacred grove. But I wanted something more, something set off from the nightly routine: a candle to light, burning incense to mark the beginning of meditative time and permeate the space with a sense of quiet, sacred stillness. And for some reason, I really wanted to pour water over stones.

Cultivating Enchantment

I can't really explain this last desire--it is essentially nonrational. During family summer vacations in Acadia National Park, ME, in recent years, I'd taken to pouring out small amounts of water onto the ground when I stopped for a drink during long hikes. The huge granite slabs of the coastal mountain peaks, warm with long hours of sunlight, seemed to drink up the offering, glistening and growing darker where the water pooled and trickled between rough patches of lichen, into invisible fractures in the rock. I did it without thinking, as a way of showing my gratitude for the mountains, the earth, the pacing rocky shoreline and the sea racing out to meet endless sky. And now, thinking about my meditative practices and what my ideal altar would include, I found myself imagining the cairns and boulders of Acadia again, and seeing myself in a peaceful grove, kneeling and offering clear, fresh water (or maybe sometimes a bit of mead) to the earth.

This kind of nonrational ritual activity--pouring water over a small pile of stones, to soak into the soil beneath--had a strong aesthetic sense that enchanted and inspired me, so I decided to go with it. Rather than organize a new altar around the traditional four elements, I decided to focus instead on the Three Realms of Druidry: earth, sea and sky, represented by the bile (or sacred tree), the sacred fire, and the sacred well.

• My mother had given me a beautiful hand-turned clay candle holder for Christmas, a deep gorgeous blue that rippled around a carved image of the sun, so I set to work washing out a small jar in which I could safely burn a tealight; this would be my sacred flame, a symbol of the sky and solar energies.


• Next, I found a small blue bowl I'd bought more than a year ago, collecting dust in my kitchen cabinet. Filling it with sea salt infused water and laying a small mirror on its bottom, over which I scatter a few chips of moonstone and tiny snail shells I'd gathered along the beaches of Acadia, I now had my sacred well, to serve both as a symbol of the sea and of the lunar energies that would compliment and balance those of the sun.


• Finally, I filled a round, green tray (which used to belong to a decorative planters pot) with rich, dark soil and built a small cairn out of river stones and rough pebbles; this would be my symbol for earth, this dish with its tiny axis mundi reaching upwards, circled by decorative green boughs.

I arranged these three items on the circular end table in the corner of my bedroom, rearranged a few chairs and bookcases to open up the space to allow for both standing meditation and sitting cross-legged on a cushioned elevated platform (i.e. a sturdy old wooden kids-sized table from my childhood that has outlasted every piece of brightly-colored plastic junk I ever owned). The altar faces southwest, and I often feel the interplay of fire and water, grounded deeply in the earth, as part of its inspiration and enchantment. During sessions of meditation, I place a small stick of incense to the left of the solar candle, and a pitcher next to the bowl of water. I fill the pitcher with fresh water before hand and, during my meditation, I infuse this with a few drops from the bowl before charging it with intention and gratitude and pouring it gently over the stones.

Back to Work

Soon after completing the overhaul and set up of my new altar, sewing my new white cotton meditation robes and practicing regularly for a good week and a half, I decided that I was indeed ready to finally commit to AODA's first degree of Druid Apprentice through the formal self-initiation ritual. So, once again, I found myself in need of a "working altar" arrayed with the four elemental cauldrons of the traditional AODA ritual. My meditation altar proved unsuitable for these purposes, and the shrine-like altar on my bureau was utterly impractical as well (not least because it did not allow me to walk circles around it, being up against a wall). Then it dawned on me: I had a perfectly good table already available, the one I had been using as a platform for my seated meditations. I kept it intentionally clear of clutter during the day to minimize the need to shuffle and rearrange objects when setting up my meditative space each evening. How simple it would be to pull this table out into the center of the room, arrange a chair in the south facing north, and set up a temporary "working altar" for practical ritual that could be easily dismantled again after the ceremony had finished.

This is precisely what I did. The dish of earth set in the north and the bowl of water in the west were complimented by a candle and incense in the south and east, and in the center I placed the solar candle as a focal point. Rather than merely representing the sky realm, as it did on my meditation altar, here it could serve to symbolize all Three Realms together: the candle inside still represented the sky and sacred fire, but now it floated in the jar I had filled with salt-infused water representing the sea, while the pottery itself, sculpted lovingly out of clay, came to represent the realm of earth. This jar full of water, which had felt the warmth of the sacred flame, I would later transfer into the lunar bowl on my meditation altar, where it would eventually blend with fresh waters and bless the soil and stones of the dish of earth. In this way, the energies and intentions at the center of my working altar would circulate in a fluid dynamic among the Three Realms in the sacred space where I quieted myself to meditate and pray, forging and reminding me of the intimate relationship of exchange between my receptive stillness and my active ritual work.

Out of respect for the oath I have sworn to the Order, I cannot go into more details about the nature of the initiation ritual itself, but you can also see on the working altar the symbols of my Druid Apprenticeship: the red cord, the knife, the red stone or "Druid egg" (though some scholars believe the Druid egg, said to have been made from the spittle of a ball of writhing serpents, was actually a bit of coral, not in the literal shape of an egg), and the tiny crane bag. These special objects now, too, sit on my meditation altar when they are not being used for formal ritual, representing my store of potential and the essence of my connection with the Sacred hidden and kept safe within.

Spiritual Aesthetics: Part IV

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This series of posts is, in some ways, an excellent example of the on-going creative process I have been discussing. Publishing each part before I've definitively finished the series as a whole, I find myself often back-tracking and returning to previously discussed ideas in order to clarify before I can move forward again (for instance, I found in the last post a need to continue the in-depth exploration of aesthetics that I had begun in Part II); however, each return, each clarification, is guided by my overall original goal to explore the role of irony in both art and spirituality. Although I had intended Part III to be the final post in this series, in which I finally reached that goal, it reached its natural conclusion (and reasonable length) without arriving. This time, though, I mean to get there.

So: irony. Let's get right down to it.

Irony in Creative Practice

We left off in the last post having developed two fairly useful working descriptions (with handy-dandy diagrams!) of both the scientific and aesthetic creative processes. Plenty of you have probably anticipated where this discussion is headed and have already been pondering the way in which magic, prayer and other spiritual practices fit these models, so I won't belabor some of the more subtle implications here. Abiding by my previous supposition that aesthetics offers a more satisfying metaphor and enlightening comparison for such practices than the scientific method can provide, I would point out what to me seems to be the essential point of clarification, which is: a "work of magic" is not the same as and cannot be identified with either the ritual act or objects of the magical working, or the resulting experiences of the practitioners or recipients of that work. Like a work of art, which cannot be equated merely with either the art object or the experiences it produces, so too does the "magic" itself exist in some kind of difficult-to-define space in between, drifting in and out of potential, acting on and shaping experiences in a mutual exchange.

This new way of understanding the actual "work" of prayer or magic, I believe, resolves the main stumbling block that leads to a sense of irony; it also brings us to a new understanding of what exactly that irony is that deo and others have such difficulty in overcoming. If we look again at the diagram of scientific method, we see that in the place of the more internal and subjective "experience" in the aesthetic process, instead we have "results" in the external world, quantifiable and verifiable through repeated experiments. The relationship between experiment and results, in other words, is always clear and causal in only one direction; whatever the hypotheses that led to the experiment or the conclusions drawn from its subsequent results, the scientist can at least rely on a linear and consistent relationship between the two mind-external aspects of the one-way cycle. But disrupt this cycle, and the whole process falls to pieces.

The difficulty that deo perceives in magical work is precisely the disruption of this causality. Magic and prayer, if they are to mimic a well-constructed scientific experiment, should not only have "results" (rather than mere subjective interpretations of experience) but those results should proceed in a relevant and repeatable manner from specific activities incited in the world beyond our own minds. But the reality is that magic does not work this way at all. At one point during podcast episode #38, deo jokes that the only time two identical spells ever produce the exact same results are if both of them fail to work. (Of course, if we consider art rather than scientific experiment as the more helpful metaphor for magic, we quickly come to understand that spells (and prayers) can fail to work in almost as many ways as they can succeed, depending on the cultural and historical contexts, for instance, and the individuals involved.) Insisting that there is a relationship between magical "experiments" and their "results" similar to the one we find in science, without being able either to describe how that relationship actually works or to produce intended results with any consistency, pushes us into the realm of the ironic, where the disjoint between reality and our expectations or beliefs about reality are distinctly at odds. In short, our sense of irony arises when we correctly perceive that a "work of magic" is not reasonably identified with either the act or the experience, but we willfully ignore this perception because we have no satisfactory alternative explanations.

Since I have provided one, I seem to have once and for all solved the problem of irony.

Just kidding! Actually, by turning our attention once again to art and aesthetics, we discover a plethora of further insights into the matter. Take the concept of "dramatic irony," for example. In dramatic irony, the relative ignorance of the characters in a story is played against the broader knowledge of the audience. The tragedy of Oedipus, for instance, is tragic precisely because we, as an experienced audience familiar with the story and "in" on earlier events forgotten by the protagonist, can see the tragedy coming and the ways in which, with a slight turn of circumstance, it could be prevented. Of course, dramatic irony must be artfully done in order to be effective; a character who is simply too silly or too apathetic to struggle towards knowledge is unlikely to capture an audience's attention. Indeed, it is precisely those characters most concerned with seeking knowledge and awareness (though often they look in all the wrong places) who best provoke a sense of dramatic irony. This is because irony as an aesthetic device not only works with, but calls attention to and relies on the distinction between the "art object" and the audience's experience of it. Rather than seek a linear causal relationship between the two, they are deliberately put into tension with one another. One aspect of this tension is that the art object is governed by its own internally-consistent "rules" and their results, so to speak (these may come from the physical nature of the medium, as mentioned before, as well as established cultural conventions, etc.), and yet the audience engages with these causalities subjectively and imaginatively, as veritable "outsiders," sometimes even seeking (as in dramatic irony especially) a way to circumvent them.

Another example of irony, which can be turned to either tragic or comedic effect, is verbal irony. Here we have an exciting overlap between aesthetics and magic: the ancient Celtic use of satire. To quote (shamefacedly) from Wikipedia: "The essential point is that 'in satire, irony is militant'. This 'militant irony' (or sarcasm) often professes to approve the very things the satirist actually wishes to attack." Once again, we have a deliberate tension cultivated between the art object as apparent praise or celebration, and the artist's intention and audience's experience of just the opposite. The "work" of art and its satirical nature relies on and exists within this disjoint or disruption. The ancient Celtic bards utilized this tension not only for aesthetic, but also for magical purposes. That is, they engaged in magical practices (in this case, composing poetic verse) with an inherent sense of irony, a willful disconnect between action and result (one that usually echoed the faults and failures of the subject of the satire) that in a scientific experiment would have rendered the process meaningless.

I think that modern practitioners of magic and prayer can take heart from the example set by these bards of old, approaching their spiritual work comfortable with their own sense of skepticism and even with a bit of humor. While a "fake it 'til you make it" approach to the scientific method fundamentally compromises the cycle of discovery, the give-and-take nature of aesthetic creativity provides us with an approach to spiritual practice that is more stable, and thus more flexible (as John M. Greer always says, a Druid takes two opposites in tension and seeks to resolve them not by settling for a compromise, but by finding a new, third aspect; that is essentially what this whole series has attempted to do). So what if, for now, your experiences of the power of magic are shaped mostly by your own expectations, or your prayer requests are themselves manifestations of conflicts and obstacles of which you are only subconsciously aware? The fluid relationships between these three aspects of spiritual work ensure that any honest, persistent effort made in one direction will ultimately engage and reaffirm all three.

Note of possible interest: For the last three or so paragraphs of this post, I've had an increasingly intense sensation of deja vu which has made it difficult to finish writing. Has anyone already written this before (or have I)? On the other hand, this may simply be because I'm tired and have contemplated these ideas to near exhaustion over the past week and a half. I hope this series has been interesting. I now return you to your regularly scheduled spontaneity.

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I promise, a substantive post is on its way. Meanwhile, enjoy some avatar absurdity, courtesy of Meez.com.



I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but I would really like to see an RPG-like program developed that's designed specifically for Pagan work and ritual. I'm sure there's plenty of Pagans who'd be interested in doing ritual online as a kind of "cybermagick," but I'm thinking more as a useful tool to help with the design of ritual and its visualization. Putting elements of guided creative visualization together on the screen in order to develop a "script" for real-life work might be very useful to some of us who are more visual learners.

Perhaps there are programs out there (I'm thinking specifically of Second Life) that people are already adapting for use in this way. If anyone knows of any, please let me know. I'd be curious.

Considering Samhain.

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The following are excerpts from a few letters I've written to my cousin, after he emailed me asking what kinds of holy days or "feast days" my religion held around this time of year. He'd heard a mention on an NPR program about "the veil between the worlds" becoming thin during these darkening autumn days and wanted to know if my spirituality incorporated this idea at all. This is some of what I wrote back in response (after explaining, as briefly as I could, the basic structure and history of the eight-festival "Wheel of the Year" celebrated by many modern Pagans).

Most Celtic-based Pagan spiritualities (including Druidry and some Witchcraft) acknowledge Samhain (Halloween) as the Celtic New Year and the most holy day on the calendar. It is a Fire Festival and is very closely connected agriculturally with the "late/last harvest," which was the harvest of the very last fruits of the season (such as apples, gourds, etc.) and the slaughter of a good percentage of livestock in order to thin the herd for the coming winter. Thus, the festival is heavily associated with
blood and death, the coming of cold and darkness and increasing scarcity as winter comes on--but it's also a time of gathering and celebration, lighting the fire and feasting in spite of the cold. Like most Druidic things, it carries in it a bit of a paradox. This tension is probably where the idea of a "thin veil between worlds" comes from. Animal sacrifice has been used in almost all religious traditions at one time or another as a way of "parting the veil" that separates the mundane and the sacred realms (even Christianity, which is based on a blood sacrifice to reconcile the profane with the sacred), so it's understandable that during a time when animals were being slaughtered out of practical necessity (to make sure they didn't have so many animals to feed over the winter that they became sickly or a burden on the family), the death and subsequent consuming of red meat became associated with communication with the Underworld. That's where you get a lot of the "Day of the Dead" stuff around this time of year, as well as the practice of honoring ancestors or loved ones who have died. Most of the secular Halloween traditions comes from this pagan association with death (also natural considering the dying off occurring in the natural world), and it actually influenced the Catholic Church to adopt November 1 and 2 as All Souls and All Saints Days to commemorate the dead within the Christian tradition.

To be honest, this time of year has never been anything particularly special to me. Everyone has their favorite holy day, I guess, and I think mine is actually Imbolc/Candlemas, probably because it was the first holy day I officially celebrated as a not-quite-Catholic-anymore. Samhain has a bit of mischief and darkness to it, which I think appeals to many Pagans, who tend to be rebellious, fun, independent folks. It's also the easiest to celebrate in public as part of the secular celebration of Halloween, which for people who have to practice their Paganism in solitary, without a community to have parties and rituals with, helps a little bit. Back in high school, one of my best friend's birthdays was just a few days before Halloween, so she always loved the holiday and really got into the whole costume parties and ghosts and hauntings and such. Then later, in college, after 9/11, it always seemed to me that it was really the fall equinox that had the strongest association with death, grief and loss for me, and this persisted until only a year or so ago when my political angst finally seemed to settle into something solid and workable. Meanwhile, my break up with R. just happened to occur on Halloween several years ago, and ever since, to be perfectly honest, the month of October in general has been hellish for me, usually accompanied by major bouts of depression and regret, so that I tended to try to just ignore autumn altogether until I could make it through to Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season (and then, only a month and a bit until Imbolc!). While I was doing my year of formal study with AODA, I performed personal rituals to mark each of the days (small ceremonies involving candles, incense, meditation, nothing spectacular or strange--well, unless you count candles, incense and meditation as strange)... Then I kind of fell out of the habit.

But then last year, by the time Samhain rolled around, it had been only a few months since my friend F. had died. I was still grieving a little, though coping, and I decided to actually use my personal Samhain ritual for some prayer work specifically focused on "talking" to and honoring the memory of F. (though my beliefs about what exactly happens to a soul after death are still a little shaky, I think maybe for a short period of time at least there could be some coherence and retention of individual awareness and even personality.... maybe). In any case, the experience was startling and I even had the pungent sensation of smelling his familiar smell for just a second (a combination of deodorant and hair gel, plus the overlapping smell of grease from work). Whether this was some "communication" or whatever, I have no idea, but afterwards I did begin to feel, for the first time, like a rift had been healed or something had slipped back into place and relaxed a muscle that had been tense so long I'd ceased to consciously notice it. I found I could accept his death more understandingly than I had before. I've never given much credence to ghost stories and such, mostly because I don't think that's really how it works, though I can believe there are energy patterns left "impressed" into physical objects or places that kind of echo through time. Around this time of year, I do always get the craving to indulge in some good ghost story-telling, and I end up rereading some E.A. Poe and watching shows like "Ghost Hunters" or "Real Hauntings" or whatever those shows on the Discovery/History Channels are called. So who knows, really?

This year, I've been trying to keep up my spirits through October (and it's been working pretty well), and I've also worked more at decorating my altar for the season. Each day on my walks to and from work, I keep my eyes open for autumn leaves to bring inside and place around my altar; and once or twice I've gone on long walks through the local park to pick wildflowers that are still in bloom and just appreciate nature and the shifting, overlapping seasons as the weather gets colder. The other day, I had one of those great walks where all the colors just seemed so saturated and intense, as sun slit down through low, dark clouds and wind shook leaves from high up in the canopy. I love moments like those, when you almost can't believe how beautiful the world is. I very much like Druidry because it's so much about getting out there in nature and opening yourself up to the energies around you, revving up your intuition and imaginative faculties until you can almost see the spirits of air and color dancing through the landscape, and the trees seem to have unique personality and soul, and even rocks and streams take on a kind of liveliness. It's not all reading books and studying theology and listening to preaching. You just go out and try to feel the world with your heart and mind, you just try to be open to it and what it's sending your way, to feel the rhythm of it. In Druidry there's an idea that everything, every "soul", has a song, and all of these songs work to create harmonies and melodies that actually "sing" the world into being and guide its course. So you go outside and sit in the chill and the dim light and watch the leaves fall and try to listen to the song of things. And there is darkness and discord, too, it's not all light and happy and peaceful and such (though Druidry does focus strongly on peace, as well as on truth, and poetry). It's hard to describe exactly--you just kind of have to trust the process and also trust the basic exercises in meditation and visualization, even though they can seem repetitive and overly-structured and boring at first. It's like teaching your spiritual "ear" how to hear the music.

I was going to say more about the "thin veil," but once again I feel like this letter is already too long. Simply put, the Celtic worldview holds that there are basically "three worlds" (this is horribly simplified and dumbed down, mind you): the Otherworld, the Underworld and the everyday mundane world that we live in. The Otherworld is not necessarily a "heaven" up in the sky, though it is associated, like I said in my last letter, with solar and stellar energies, air and electricity. Really, the Otherworld is seen as existing in the same space as the regular world, but kind of overlapped or slightly off, like a dimensional shift or something (to put it in sci-fi terms). It is ever-present and interpenetrates our own, and people with "the Sight" can see it and the beings that live on that plane kind of moving and existing all around us. The same is true of the Underworld, except that instead of being solar/stellar energies, the Underworld focuses on earthy energies. There is a myth about a "star" being falling to earth and impregnating it/her, giving birth to creatures whose "center of gravity" is not the Otherworld, but kind of within the earth itself (the idea that the very center of the earth is another "star" or hot fiery heart, which actually it is!). This is why old burial mounds in Ireland and Wales are associated with some spirit beings, they are said to live "within" the very ground itself, but really this is just another way of saying that, like the Otherworld, the Underworld is all around us and yet "shifted" slightly out of our everyday experience.

So, with that kind of worldview in mind, the cycle of the seasons sometimes help to "shift" various worlds into closer alignment, effectively thinning the veil and allowing experiences from the Other- or Underworld to kind of spill over into our middle existence. The shift that puts our world in closer alignment with the Underworld occurs around Samhain--though really, some people think that it lasts as long as the winter solstice, so that the time between Oct. 31 and Dec. 21/22 is a period of dark "no time" when communication with the Underworld is easiest (I once read a Druid idea of a "Torc of the Year" instead of a Wheel of the Year, illustrating this idea). Our peak alignment with the Otherworld occurs on May 1, Belteinne, and is believed by some to last all the way until the summer solstice ("midsummer," which is why both May Day and Midsummer are closely associated with faeries, even in Shakespearean plays and such).

It is really kind of thrilling if you think about it. Again, you can imagine it in terms of song and music, and the respective melodies of different planes coming into harmony at certain times of the year, allowing for sympathetic vibrations and echoes, the way hitting one note on a piano will cause other notes at various higher and lower octaves to hum slightly. And the idea of much of the ritual found in modern Druidry is to "tune" yourself, to teach you the best way to get yourself open and listening to these vibrations. I always felt like Catholic ritual was rather empty and rote, but really the purpose of ritual in most religions is the same. Just as the way you think and feel will affect how you act, likewise the process happens in reverse, so that by performing certain actions repeatedly (whether it's lighting a candle, sitting in a particular position in order to pray or meditate, or walking a circle and raising your arms to greet the four directions), the pattern of action will come to shape how you think and feel and respond to the world. It's potentially manipulative stuff when you always let other people dictate what those ritual actions should be, but when you actively and consciously engage in creating your own rituals, it's almost like making spontaneous works of art with your own body. The way a painting or song can evoke particular emotions and experiences in a person, you can cultivate spiritual experiences by choosing to act out certain rituals.

Even the most secular people do this almost without thinking about it around this time of year especially. Hollowing out pumpkins (the violence of the knife, the slimy guts inside), putting lit candles inside them and displaying them in windows, dressing up and behaving like monsters, zombies, ghosts, vampires, sitting around telling ghost stories and inadvertently looking for signs of spirits in the dancing pattern of falling leaves--all of these things are socio-spiritual rituals that help us connect to and experience "death" before actually having to die. The death not only of the physical self, but also of the social conventions that bind us and keep us "safe", so that mischief and wildness are also part of the celebration, average conventional women dressing up in promiscuous outfits, teenagers gathering together around Ouija boards and playing at the occult, testing boundaries, experimenting with chaos.

Damn, now that I think about it, I do rather like this time of year. Plus, out of chaos and darkness come new possibilities, imagination and new life. Which is why this is the New Year for the ancient Celts, the time when old things are dying off and making room for new potential.

Though I'm not sure about the whole vampire thing. Don't get me wrong, I like vampires--but the YA Fiction obsession with them lately seems to speak more to the fact that teenagers are treated increasingly as energetic parasites, leeching life off of others without the power or even expectation of ever giving back anything meaningful and substantive of their own--and how these days adolescence seems to stretch into eternity, people obsessed with staying and acting young forever, maintaining a college-party lifestyle well into mid- to late-twenties (or longer!). But that's just me psychoanalyzing society with a touch of personal bitterness. Do you find any of that to be the case? I mean, it seems to me like there must be some distinction between the "classic" conception of the vampire (and its associations with sickness, death, and all the wild passions free of social conventions I was talking about before, etc.) and the new vision of the vampire as a kind of deathless sex god who only bucks convention as far as the typical Hot Topic teenage goth consumer can be expected... Vampires-as-undead versus vampires-as-soulless-consumers.... okay, maybe there's not so much a difference after all.

This letter has gotten ridiculous. So I'll end on a ridiculous note. Last night I dreamt (probably because of writing that letter to you) that I was eating an almost-raw hamburger, when you came up and grabbed it out of my hand, wrapped the whole thing (bun and all) in wide lettuce leaves, then set it on the ground and started smashing it with a baseball bat. Apparently my vegetarian self was feeling bad about speaking so casually about slaughtering livestock for food!