GENESIS, MARY, AND THE MOON
© 1996 by Sea Raven. All rights reserved
All inquiries regarding this publication should be addressed to:
Sea Raven
c/o Gaia Rising
237 Warren Street, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002
Quotes from THE REINVENTION OF WORK by MATTHEW FOX.Copyright © 1994 by Matthew Fox Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Quotes from MOTHER WOVE THE MORNING by CAROL LYNN PEARSON Copyright © 1992 by Carol Lynn Pearson. Used by permission.
"Declaration of the Four Sacred Things," from THE FIFTH SACRED THING by STARHAWK. Copyright © 1993 by Starhawk. Used by permission of Bantam Books
Quotes from HEALING WISE by SUSUN WEED Copyright © 1989 by Susun Weed. Used by permission of Ash Tree Press.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
APPENDIX: The Wheel of the Year
My name is Sea Raven. Sea Raven is not my birth name, but it is my legal name. My sister Carol and I created it in 1992 in honor of the Fish Crows on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina. Ocracoke is the last inhabited island in the Outer Banks, and the Fish Crows are a truly magical tribe of crows who have lived on the island for as long as there have been crows and the island. Now there are some feminists who would have called themselves "Fish Crow Woman," but that's a little too "in your face" for my taste. Sea Raven is much more romantic. I took Sea Raven as my legal name in honor of my 50th birthday in 1995. It's one name divided into two like Blue Jay, so please call me Sea Raven.
I was born and grew up in the mid-west - Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I have very close ties to the land in south central Illinois, where my cousins now run the Biggs family farm. My sister lives in Minneapolis, my brother lives in New York, and my parents live in Kansas City, Missouri. I graduated from Albion College Michigan in 1967, and earned a Masters Degree in Counselor Education from American University in Washington, D.C. in 1975.
I grew up in the Methodist Church, and my Grandfather - my father's father - was an Evangelical United Brethren minister. I also got a good dose of religious liberalism, especially in those heady days of the 60's when Time Magazine announced the death of God. It was an interesting time to be around what we called "pre-theos" at Albion - young men hanging out there for a couple of years before going on to Seminary or Antioch College, or Oberlin, or other bastions of the 60s revolution. In truth, it means more to me now than it did then - but that's another story!
I always had a calling for some kind of mission, and worked on social action issues both in church and society, including The Hunger Project during the late 70's. Then in 1982, I became active in the United Church of Christ (UCC) as a lay leader in just-peace issues. I ran the Social Action Committee in Potomac Association (the Washington, D.C. area) for several years; I went to Nicaragua in 1987 for five weeks and lived in Esteli with a Sandinista family under Just-Peace sponsorship, and learned about Liberation theology; I visited El Salvador with CISPES in 1991; and began running the Task force on Integrity of Creation, Justice & Peace (ICJP) for the Central Atlantic Conference in 1990. That Task Force seems to be all that's left of the ICJP priority in the UCC - and that's another story too.
In 1992, the ICJP Task Force sponsored a conference-wide seminar on "New Theologies for the 90s." We invited Susan Thistlethwaite - who became ill and sent Dr. Kwok Pui-Lan instead. Dr. Kwok talked about theology from the underside, meaning that theology develops from the experience of the people, it does not come down from the ivory tower. She presented a series of slides illustrating the many forms that the story of Jesus takes in the diverse cultures of the people of this Planet.
Truly there is more than one way to worship God.
In preparation for that seminar, I began a self-directed study of feminist theology. This study coincided with a great rising of earth people - politically, socially, and religiously - demanding that their voices be heard. Women especially were part of that rising, women from all sorts of indigenous as well as main stream cultures. Whole new countries were birthed, and some are still struggling to be born: Bosnia, Quebec, a united Germany. Native People demanded respect for their ways, justice for past evils.
On the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landfall in the Western Hemisphere, Rosemary Maxey, a Native American of the Cree/Muskogee tribe and UCC clergy, was one of the voices crying out for the return of the treasures of her people, precious pearls stolen by the invaders from Europe; whole cultures over-run, sacred sites looted, old ways invalidated and nearly lost.
I attended a national meeting sponsored by the national ICJP Working Group in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1993. A group of Native Americans called Earth Ambassadors assisted us in running the weekend. It was during that weekend that a Truth rose up from the earth beneath my feet. We Europeans - conquerors, destroyers, consumers, takers - we have forgotten that we are Tribes of the Earth too. We have forgotten our own native roots.
We European/Caucasian folk need to reclaim our own tribal traditions to the extent we can. We have taken enough from Aboriginal people the world over. We must not appropriate their newly-rediscovered traditions yet again. We must find our own.
PART ONE
GENESIS, MARY, AND THE MOON
Since the time of the Babylonian exile in Judeo-Christian history, the idea that humans have power over the Earth has defined our relationship with the natural world. We domesticated everything: the Earth, the Air, the Fire, the Water, animals, plants, and each other. The "domestication" of women has been pretty thorough, and the institutional Christian church has been the prime mover in the process among the western tribes of people. The Greeks gave the early organizers a good start in that direction by separating the spirit from the body, the mind from the soul, emotion from intellect. It was a short jump in male logic to consign all of those aspects of life having to do with the circular, unpredictable, and emotional to the "lower orders" - and women were thrown onto the heap. Within 400 years of the death of Jesus and the birth of the Christian faith, fear and loathing of the natural world and human participation in it had taken root and begun to spread like a cancer.
Whole civilizations were destroyed in the name of Jesus and male Christian superiority. From the 10th through the 18th Century, nine million women along with their children and men were executed for practicing witchcraft in Europe and the Americas. Whole villages were rounded up and destroyed. Anyone found guilty of thinking in ways that the church did not approve of were imprisoned, tortured into confession, and then either hanged (in the British Colonies here) or burned in huge, public autos-da-fey. In addition to this war against thought, word, and deed by the church, governments got into the act and began the "enclosure" movement, in which the people were moved off the land and into the cities. As late as 1880, Scotch and Irish Crofters had their lands confiscated, and came in waves of immigration to the United States.
The rise of Patriarchy is now well-understood, and the existence of an alternative, matrifocal - or female-centered - way of life is being rediscovered. Nevertheless, today, the Catholic Office of the Doctrine of the Faith - the modern name for the Inquisition, run by Cardinal Ratzinger - still maintains the 15th Century Malleus Malificarum, or The Hammer of Witches, to be authoritative Church doctrine. That book is a horror of misogynistic so-called "theology," and it is still considered to be the definition of womanhood and how to control it by the largest denomination of Christians in the world. Today, instead of governments confiscating our family farms and destroying small businesses, large corporations are taking over every aspect of our lives:
Rain forests are being destroyed to create more grazing room for beef cattle to feed United States Citizens what they want for dinner. Yes, we are the major consumers of beef on the Planet. We see the results when weather patterns shift and change, as winters become warmer, seasons stop changing, the seas begin to rise, cancers and other systemic illnesses become epidemic: AIDS, breast cancer, asthma.
There is a lot of work to do. A lot of this looks and feels overwhelming. It may even look like the men have really screwed things up, and now - true to form - we women are left to clean up the mess. But it's going to take all of us changing our lifestyles and expanding our spiritual understanding. When we view the creation as sacred, we will treat it in a sacred manner. In Starhawk's novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, the Prologue suggests a statement for 21st Century communities:
DECLARATION OF THE FOUR SACRED THINGS
The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.
Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.
The long period of patriarchal prominence in our human history may be drawing to a close. Women began in the 19th Century to really agitate for equal rights, but the revolution we all know best happened in the 1960's. Women began writing about our bodies, our experience, ourselves; we moved into the seminaries; Time Magazine announced the Death of God. Neo-Pagan organizations were invented and re-invented, and these organizations included the Goddess as well as the God in their worship. It's called "polarity," and some occult philosophies insist that without polarity - or balance - between the masculine and the feminine, we are not healthy human beings. Our organizations - governments, corporations, churches, all our institutions - become rigid, exclusive, and detrimental to the health of not only the non-members, but to the members themselves, and the planet.
CG Jung was the master of polarity. His method of dealing with mental health, especially in his dream work with what he described as archetypes, is part of the process of the return of the Goddess - the divine Feminine - to our conscious lives. His view was that we need a balance of the masculine and the feminine to be healthy. So we search out and welcome the Animus if we are women, and the Anima if we are men. The Christian church did not start out as a patriarchal institution that oppresses women and men. It took that turn in the 4th Century with Augustine. What we need to do is find out what the church was about before then. The Jesus Seminar is one source for information. Feminist theologians and spiritual writers are another.
There are many references and stories about women in the Bible. Here are two references from Genesis:
"So God created humans in God's own image, in the image of God they were created; male and female, God created them." Gen. 1:27
"And God said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations." Gen. 17:15-16
Some Bible stories are "texts of terror," as Phyllis Tribble points out. Many are illustrations of the clash of religious cultures as the believers in Yahweh first lived in harmony with the goddess-worshiping Canaanites, then gradually suppressed the ancient matrifocal ways - including their own. Jews still trace authentic Jewish lineage through women rather than men, but like Christians, the balance between male and female tilted and the wealth of feminine spirituality was forgotten or dismissed. Today, however, Jewish women are reclaiming the Shekinah - the female part of God - and interest in the mysticism of the Kabalah is growing.
Christian women know very few stories about the women in Jesus' traveling group of disciples. The most famous among them is Mary Magdalene, about whom there is a lot of speculation, some of it pure romanticism based on a hope that Jesus was not the patriarchal despot many are led to believe he was. In the politically correct story of Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, there is no whisper of the kind of scandal there is with the Magdalene. Christian scholarship does speak of strong women leaders in the early Christian church, within the first 50 to 75 years after Jesus' death. Even Paul speaks very highly of the women leaders in the communities he writes letters to.
The one woman we all know about who has taken on the mantle of Goddess since 431 C.E, is Jesus' mother Mary. Carol Lynn Pearson in her play "Mother Wove the Morning" has a delightful segment called "Paula, the Christian at Ephesus - 431." Paula says,
You have not heard? Oh, you should have been here this morning! When the bishop said the words, oh, I will never forget - "It has been decreed, you may worship Mary as the Mother of God." - oh, we were transported with joy. ... My husband danced like a child! Men need their Mother too, you know. But women, oh, we need her most especially.
***
Constantine ordered all the goddess temples destroyed. Oh, we have such a wonderful temple to Diana and we refused to destroy it, for we have had Diana for centuries! Large crowds gathered. We besieged the bishops. Oh, we were angry! We cried, "Give us our Diana of the Ephesians!" I felt like the woman in the book of Jeremiah, who cried out to him, "Let us worship the Queen of Heaven!" But Jeremiah said, "No, no! She is an abomination!" But our church fathers are kinder to us. Well, they saw, I think, what Jeremiah did not see, that we hunger for our Mother as we do for good bread, and we will not be content with a stone!So they told us that we could have Diana, but that her real name was Mary and we were to call her that! They re-dedicated the shrine to the virgin Mary. Well, they baptized the temple! So now we say the word "Mary," but we think "Diana" in our hearts.And today they have told us we may call her Mother, the Mother of God, the Mother of us all. You should have seen the dancing! We may pray to her. We may reach for her consoling, maternal arms. Oh, it is hard to be a woman and not have a woman to reach to!Mary must have had a soul. I will have to ask the bishop!
Sadly, we Protestants have almost no mother image of God. Our connection to the Earth as our Mother, and all nature as our home, was burned out of us - literally - beginning in the 10th Century.
As creations of God/dess, in God's own image, we in turn imagine God as images of ourselves. The Patriarchy has made sure that the only acceptable image of God is male. But archaeologists have found prehistoric images of what is slowly becoming accepted as a great Mother Goddess. We have seen these images - often headless, with exaggerated breasts and belly, sometimes shown giving birth. These are not images of a "fertility cult." They are the signatures of a people who did not separate themselves from their mother Earth, and who saw women as life-givers, protectors, sacred messengers of the life force.
Before electricity, before St. Augustine, before the Patriarchal hordes swept in from the East overturning whole civilizations, before - perhaps - humans had figured out the male role in the creation of human life, women were honored for their magic: for their blood times and birth times and death times, which coincided with the phases of the Moon: New, Full, Dark. Our work was our life, and our life was our work: birth/rebirth, fulfillment, death. Diana is the Goddess of the Moon and of the Hunt. Kiva, of Rockville, Maryland, chants on a recent tape: "Diana of the Maiden Moon, With your Crescent Bow, She protects us all." These are the aspects of the Great Goddess, the phases of the moon, the rhythm of life, and of all women: Maiden, Mother, Crone. This is the deepest magic, the path to power, the heart of Women's mysteries and women's work - the original trinity - and women were the priestesses.
PART TWO
SACRED SPACE/SACRED WORK
Perhaps we should start with what is Work? and What about Work is Sacred?
Matthew Fox's "The Reinvention of Work, A New Vision of Livelihood for our Time" (Harper San Francisco, 1994) is the text for this section. Fox begins with Thomas Aquinas:
When he wrote, "To live well is to work well, or display a good activity," Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century saint and theologian, laid out in clear words how deep the issues of work are to the human species. Work touches life itself - "to live well is to work well." Good living and good working go together. Life and livelihoods ought not to be separated but to flow from the same source, which is Spirit, for both life and livelihood are about Spirit. Spirit means life, and both life and livelihood are about living in depth, living with meaning, purpose, joy, and a sense of contributing to the greater community. A spirituality of work is about bringing life and livelihood back together again. And Spirit with them.
Fox then goes on to discuss the differences between having a job and doing work, and how society got to where we are today with millions of people "jobless," while meaningful, fulfilling, and important work goes undone.
For my purpose here, work is what we do when we know who we are. A job is what we do out of necessity given the state of society today. The bottom line is, very few of us are able to make a living doing our real life Work. We all know about (and may even be) starving artists, living in garrets and waiting for the big break. Even those of us who truly know that our most meaningful and sacred work is to raise children, are unable to do so without some source of income. Our lives are based on monetary prerogatives.
Everyone knows how we feel about unfulfilling "work." There is a sign that has been faxed around the U.S., coming soon to a mail room near you, I'm sure. It says: "This Job is a Test. It is Only a Test. Had it been a Real Job, You would have received Raises, Promotions, and Other Forms of Appreciation." A country-music song says "take this job and shove it." I have for years made a distinction between my "real work," my writing or singing, and "my job." In Washington, D.C., when introductions are made, the question isn't "what's your sign?" it's "what do you do?" I have never been happy with that question. I don't want to be identified as a "legal secretary," although that's a cut above merely "secretary." I usually say "I'm an activist in justice and peace issues with the United Church of Christ," or "I'm a writer and creator of earth-based rituals for Christians," or "I'm a singer and a student of feminist theology and earth-based spirituality." Then I follow it up with, "I support my real work by being a legal secretary." People generally laugh as though they understand perfectly.
But listen to the sexism in those words. Women are only "secretaries," albeit "legal" ones. Men can be writers, singers, preachers, community leaders without making excuses about how they get the support for that work. I haven't yet heard a man introduce himself and what he does with an excuse like mine.
This discussion begs the question, what is sacred about work? Obviously our true work, our real work, what we do when we're not worried about paying the rent - is our sacred work. But Matt Fox argues that even those mundane jobs we have to do in order to be able to do our real work are sacred as well, because they support the true work - what Fox calls "the Great Work." Fox writes (pp. 61-64):
We should not allow ourselves to be deceived that today's crisis in jobs is just about more jobs; it is not. The job crisis is a symptom of something much deeper: a crisis in our relationship to work and the challenge up to our species today to reinvent it. We must learn to speak of the difference between a job and work. We may be forced to take a job serving food at a fast-food place for $4.25 an hour in order to pay our bills, but work is something else. Work comes from inside out; work is the expression of our soul, our inner being.
... Work is not just about getting paid. ... for example, raising children, cooking meals at home, organizing youth activities, singing in a choir, repairing one's home, cleaning up one's neighborhood, listening to a neighbor or friend who has undergone a trauma, tending a garden, planting trees or creating rituals that heal and celebrate....In pointing out the distinction between "job" and "work," we don't want to create an unnecessary dualism. Given a deep spirituality, one can turn even a job into work, re-envisioning its place in the whole. (pp. 5-6)
***
A cosmology teaches us that there is only one work going on in the universe, the "Great Work" of creation itself - the work of creation unfolding, the work of evolution or creativity in the universe....Just being able to name the reality of a Great Work in the universe has the power to restore our dignity and to restore dignity to our work.Perhaps so much destruction, confusion, and death of all beings is taking place today because we have indeed lost the sense of the one work and imagine, in our anthropocentric arrogance, that we are the sole actors in the drama of the world's work.Out of a Newtonian world view we think of ourselves merely as parts of a piecemeal universe. ... Because we lack a cosmology - an experience of the whole - our lives have become fractured and broken, as have our hearts. We have lost a sense of community, and our efforts at work seem at best self-serving. Instead of recognizing what is really a cosmic hole in our souls, we think that perhaps money will plug the hole, and so we strive for bigger paychecks. Our cosmic energy seeps away; work becomes lonely and alienating. We have become strangers to the Great Work.***
Eckhart goes even deeper into the mystery of our interrelatedness with the Divine in work when he says that if we humans are emptied fully enough, "God operates one's own work and a person sustains God in oneself, and the Divinity itself is the place of one's operation, since God is an agent who acts within itself." In this sense, our work is neither just our work nor even our co-work with God; it is a sacred space, a temple, we might say, where God operates the divine work on the world. In our creative moments we often feel this - the presence of a mystery greater than ourselves actually emerging from our work.
So when we see our work - whatever it is - and ourselves as connected to the Great Work of the universe, then we can experience our work and ourselves and life on the planet as sacred.
We women are in a double bind. For centuries - millennia - we have been treated as sub-human (not men) because of our natural work. We are the ones who birth the babies and clean up all the messes that life produces. Using Clarissa Pinkola Estes' metaphor, women know all the muck and the blood - the stuff of life and the elements. Unfortunately, we have been defined by the muck and the blood, and consigned to dirtiness, filth, and impurity. The only way to rise above all that whoredom, of course, according to the Patriarchy that defined us, is to be a virgin.
There is other work that we do because of our natural female abilities. We create beauty and order. We nurture and protect. That's not all we do, nor all that we are able to do, but it is all we have been allowed to do by the Patriarchy. So periodically we rebel. The great rebellion of the 19th Century culminated at last in our gaining of the power to vote. The great rebellion of the 1960's isn't over yet, but it has produced the schizophrenia in the women's movement between embracing and celebrating our natural and traditional work, and branching out into other aspects of ourselves that embrace the masculine: warrior, savior, defender, leader. We end up fighting with each other over which is the more valuable, birthing babies or joining the National Guard. That's not the question. The question is how can we be whole people, valued for all our talents, not just one or two.
A forgotten talent, and one that the Catholic Church is fighting tooth and nail, is our natural calling as the keepers of the hearth - the wise ones, the priestesses. The one sacrament denied by the church to women is ordination to the priesthood.
We used to know the herbal remedies for earache, coughs, cuts, and fractures - all the accidents of rural life. We used to know the charms for love, conception, abortion - all the accidents of communal life. We used to be healers and guides to the spirit world, oracles to the political world, and grandmothers of time. We have been systematically robbed of our sacred work. We have been forbidden to do it or forfeit our lives, and millions of us have paid that price, some in wasted abusive marriages, some in mind-numbing corporate job-slots, whole communities burned at the stake.
Women continue to pay the price. A recent article in The Washington Post reported that 50 million women are missing from the 1995 census in India because of deliberate abortion of female fetuses. The figure was derived from the fact that there are only 96 females born for every hundred males in India. The natural human balance is 103 females for every 100 males. That's 4 out of every 100 destroyed. After a while it adds up to 50 million. 50 million songs to the morning. 50 million pairs of healing hands. 50 million chances to reverse environmental patriarchal destruction, 50 million opportunities to discover the cure for AIDS. 50 million. Just in India. Just in the last 10 years.
We can rediscover and reclaim our sacred women's work. The way to do it is right within our own bodies. Unlike men, we can't avoid our bodies totally. Every month, during specific moon phases, our bodies change, prepare to bring forth life, and if no life is forming, we recycle the ingredients. Usually, here in the fastidious end of the 20th Century, we plug up our bodies with cotton and dispose of the remains in stainless steel receptacles. The signs always remind us "Do not flush sanitary materials." There are often little brown sacks on the backs of the toilets.
A lot of us are squeamish about touching any of this. It's dirty, messy, impure, unclean, cursed. We make jokes about PMS, plug up the leak with a super, chug Midol, and by-damn run the Board meeting. Back in the 50's and 60's it was OK to call in sick on the first day. Now, of course, it's politically incorrect. We might be thought to be wimps, or unable to control those raging hormones. Now that Whiz Kid in the President's Office will be glad to run the meeting if we're not there, and that Whiz Kid is just as likely to be a woman as a man. If it's a woman, the chances are she has her period at the same time as you, so it's even more important to be there, regardless of the circumstances.
Different native cultures have different customs regarding women's mysteries. They all, however, from the ancient Celts to contemporary aboriginals, no matter how corrupted by the prevailing patriarchal winds, by custom, allow women in their moontime to withdraw. Some who have been corrupted over time require that women isolate themselves to keep all that powerful blood contained and controlled. But the purpose is the same, however it is interpreted. Women need to withdraw, be silent, listen, let go of the old unneeded ingredients for new life, refresh, and renew themselves.
Here is what Susun Weed writes in Healing Wise:
We all come from the same mother. She is the wise woman. We all return to her embrace, her bloody-rich womb place, when we die. Every woman is a whole/holy form of her, able to be whole/holy mother of all life, able to be whole/holy destroyer of life. Her power is her blood that flows and flows, her blood which is life and gives life. Every woman's menstrual blood and birth-time blood is a holy mystery.Blood mysteries teach that menstrual blood and birthing blood are holy blood, power blood, healing blood. The blood mysteries teach us to remember that life and healing come from and return to woman, to the wise woman, to the woman who bleeds and bleeds. And does not die.Blood mysteries reveal that menstrual (moontime) blood and birth blood are so holy, so full of potential, so full of the void, that they are to be used only to heal, to heal by nourishing. Holy woman-blood is nourishing blood, blood of love, blood of abundance, blood that heals the earth.These are the natural powers of menstruating, menopausal, and post-menopausal women:
Oneness with the earth as a responsive nurturing presenceCommunication with plants, animals, rocksWeather makingShape shiftingInvisibilityCommunication with fairies, devas, elves, dragons, unicornsForeknowledgeAcutely sensitive senses of smell, taste, hearing, sight, touchHealing
There's your list of women's work. What are we waiting for? Let's take them one at a time.
1. Oneness with the earth as a responsive nurturing presence.
This sounds like a description of God - and so it is. To complete the description, let's add "/dess" or "de" to the word God, so that we have something to work with: "God/dess" or "Godde." We can also use the word "Gaia" as an all-inclusive word for the responsive nurturing earth-presence we are searching for. Where do we look?
Let's start not with the obvious places, like mountains, wheat fields, riverbanks, or beaches. Let's start with an inner city back alley, an apron of cracked, weedy concrete extending from my back door out to the parking space. The only signs of life are thistles, burdock, blue gentian, tiny daisy-like flowers on long weedy stems, and the song of crickets. The whole place smells of feral cat. There are bags of trash, and pieces of junk blowing about: bread wrappers, used baby diapers, and if you look closely, used syringes, The logical thing to do, of course, is to close and lock the back door, and never go out there except to add your own bag of trash to the pile. But the tiny daisy-like flowers catch your eye. What are they? A breeze makes them nod a bit and call out to you. Guess who we are?
You decide to look for a book about weeds and herbs. Sometime - maybe your mother - told you that "weeds" are the plants you don't want in your garden. So what is this plant? My New Age Herbalist says this about Feverfew (p. 191):
Feverfew (Chrysanthemum parthenium) is an example of an ancient remedy that modern research has turned into a spectacular medical success. Thorough clinical trials in the late 1970s found that feverfew relieved migraines in an overwhelming majority of cases, and users are now reporting beneficial side-effects such as relief from depression, nausea, and arthritic pain.
Wow. Right out there in the trashed alley. What other properties might feverfew have? Scott Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs says "Carry with you for protection against colds and fevers as well as accidents." Sounds pretty Witchy. Maybe you shouldn't pursue that line of thought too far, but the flower calls to you. The trashed alley begs to be reclaimed.
It is a lot of work to reclaim a garden from a trashed alley. The desire to do so springs from Gaia herself.
2. Communication with plants, animals, rocks.
"Communication" with non-human species is easy at one level. The dog barks at the door and we let him/her in or out. The cat taps your face at 6 a.m., and you remember you were going to get up and write this morning. The soil where the jasmine is growing feels dry when you touch it, so you water the plant. But what about rocks? Where does communication end and imagination - if not delusion - begin?
While visiting the Avebury Ring in northern Wiltshire in a thundering rainstorm, my sister and I watched a woman go from one massive standing stone to another and press her ear to each one, hands touching the rock, listening. We didn't interrupt her private ritual, so can only guess what she might have heard: strength, perhaps; endurance; timelessness; secrets of Gaia herself. Nor can we know what she later did with the knowledge she absorbed that day, but she did something with it for herself and those she loves, without a doubt.
The way to communicate with non-human species is to simply do it. Of course the thoughts that come into our heads are our thoughts. But who is to say they are not the creature's thoughts as well: Leave some of the plant in the garden this winter ... I think as I crouch beside the lavender, clippers ready. So I do. My protective crystals must be exhausted, I think. I have worn them daily all summer, warding myself from my abusive "boss." So I decide to carry them with me in a special bag, and dip them in the primeval springs behind Wells Cathedral in Somerset. Hang us in the baby maple tree in your garden in the moonlight; let us listen to the fairy bells you left there ... my other special stones and chains whisper to me. Who cares what the neighbors think? My fence is tall. The full moon is brighter than the street lights in the alley, and it calls me out into it with my jewelry, and a bowl of water to draw down the power I need - not to rule the universe, but to care for myself and the creatures, human and otherwise, who depend on me.
For the last three summers, there has been a rainstorm over my garden on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. just regularly enough to make up for the fact that I don't have an outside water source - until the drought of this past August. I hauled buckets of water and just barely saved the Lilac and the Rhododendron. Weather is not to be played with. The systems are vast and affect much more than the small world I inhabit. But we do affect the weather. Not one of the hurricanes of 1995 - the most active season since the 1930's - made landfall. In the Washington, D.C. area, weather systems that dump yards of snow everywhere else dump rain here. People here hate snow and cold weather, so we often have 70-degree Christmas Days, and any snow that achieves any depth at all seldom stays for more than a day or two. Now which comes first? The weather patterns, or the people that like them that way?
Shape-shifting doesn't need to be so esoteric as it sounds. Every woman knows that one day she feels fat and her hair doesn't work, and the next day she feels fabulous, and her jeans fit. If that's not shape-shifting, I don't know what is!
More mysteriously, of course, we become pregnant, and nine months and many shape-shifts later, a child is born. Through some spiritual alchemy, we manage to integrate the aspects of maiden, mother, and crone, and can draw on the wisdom of each of life's stages whenever necessary.
But none of that is the fun stuff. We all want to shape-shift into Ravens or Owls or Deer or Salmon - or to "be a fly on the wall," as the saying goes. Doing that takes a deeper understanding, or a willingness to let go of our familiar and comfortable identities, and "be horses," as my childhood friends and I used to put it. Most often it happens in dreams, but whenever we draw on the power of an element - whether animal or plant or fire or water - we shape-shift, we become that being - wind or wave - and our lives and situations change.
Susun Weed says "The Wise Woman tradition is invisible." She says, "The reasons for the invisibility .. Are manifold: Nourishing is an invisible process. ... Mothers are invisible ... Women, especially women of color, are invisible to white men and white male society ... " More to the point, she says later:
Spoken words are invisible. ... There is no visible structure in the Wise Woman tradition. There is no hierarchy ... no difference between above and below, no order of authority, no sense of "man" as better than all other forms of life. There's no president, no guru, no chairman of the board. There are no rules to follow. You can't get a degree or certificate in the Wise Woman tradition. You can't be tested on it because there are no right and wrong answers ... Uniqueness is invisible. Each healing/wholing ritual encounter in the Wise Woman tradition is unique. Repetition is neither sought nor valued. In the Scientific world view, a single instance of anything is virtually invisible. The more repeatable something is, the more visible it is.
What she is talking about is magic - doing what works - from the roots of our natural knowledge and intuition. The problem is that most of us have forgotten our natural knowledge and intuition because it is educated out of us from the moment of birth. Dreams are a source of natural knowledge and intuition, but dreams are not taken seriously. Look at our language: "In your dreams!" we chant when someone expresses some desire that looks impossible. "Dream on!" But the old Walt Disney song from Cinderella says:
A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you're fast asleep.
In dreams you will lose your heart aches;
Whatever you wish for, you dream.
Have faith in your dreams, and someday
The rainbow will come smiling through.
No matter how your heart is grievin'
If you keep on believin'
The dream that you wish will come true.
That's the invisible, non-provable world Susun Weed invites women (and men) to live in. It's a world of wonder, where our wild child plays - and it's invisible.
6. Communication with fairies, devas, elves, dragons, unicorns
Talking about invisibility is a natural segue into the realm of spirit. Mothers especially need to be conversant with this realm, or their children will forget even more quickly how to move between the worlds and maintain their sanity. To this day, my mother "knows" there are gnomes and elves in the trees and gardens surrounding her house. As I worked to reclaim my back-alley and create my magical herb garden, a spirit grew more and more present. Now, even in winter, when the plants are sleeping under thick piles of mulch, maple leaves, and snow, when I come in through my garden gate, I can feel a difference. Perhaps it's the combined essences of the spirits of the maple, the sage, rosemary, wormwood, yarrow, strawberry, comfrey, lavender, basil, lilac, flowering quince, purple cone flower that produces the sensation of a prescient being. Perhaps as the garden grew and flourished, a creature from that other world was attracted to take up residence. It is impossible to know the answer. It is quite possible to communicate with the faerie.
Most of us never have direct physical, waking encounters with faerie, or the spirit world. Some of us who do end up in institutions. Others, however, manage to move between the two worlds, carrying wisdom. That's what I call living on the sword's edge of metaphor. On one side is linear reality. On the other is the spiral dance. The way in is to listen: to myth, to animals, to small children, to plants, to grandmothers, grandfathers, to Gaia, to God/dess.
Foreknowledge is a benefit of living in the metaphor. Sometimes foreknowledge invades our consciousness whether we want it to or not, and frightens us. A woman friend who is a surgeon frequently dreams about upcoming surgical procedures and what the outcome will be. She often "knows" whether cancer is there or not, whether a particular procedure will work or not, and frequently she has saved lives because she acts on her intuition - which of course in today's medical climate she has verified by the lab!
The point is that foreknowledge is a natural talent that grows from conscious experience. The key word here is "conscious" experience. Most of us live 80% of our lives unconsciously. We just don't notice where things are; what time the sun returns every day; we have our routines that get us started in the morning - bathroom rituals, breakfast rituals (even if it's gulping a cup of coffee at the sink before tearing out the door). We grab our keys and our brief cases and we're gone. We only run into problems if the keys aren't in their ritual place by the phone machine in the front hall. We search frantically, not seeing, not remembering what we did with them. Then suddenly they appear on the coffee table where we threw them last night because the phone was ringing when we came in the door. The more whimsical among us blame the disappearance on the resident leprechaun, or Coyote. Actually, being distracted from our usual unconscious placing of keys and briefcase in their habitual places by the phone, we unconsciously left them where we dropped them, and forgot they weren't in their usual place when we hung up from the call and went on to the next unconscious activity - switching on the evening news, pouring a glass of wine, feeding the cat, etc., etc. Occasionally, we may have a dream during the night in which we are late for work because we can't find our keys. We ponder the deep theological implications of such dreams.
Foreknowledge is consciousness, not mystery. Magic is also heightened awareness and consciousness about the great powers we have at our fingertips. Perhaps we really could conjure hand-fire in a dark place if we really needed it - without matches!
8. Acutely sensitive senses of smell, taste, hearing, sight, touch
These words are descriptions of awareness, of an awakened consciousness. Most of us sleep through our lives, barely noticing fragrances, for example, unless they are overpowering, and even then, we ignore them. How many times do we drive by the sewage treatment plant with a momentary wrinkling of noses?. We train ourselves not to pay attention to the tiny sounds in the night that might alarm us. As a result, we sleep through our neighbors' burglaries and even fire alarms. When we start paying attention, our natural powers will sharpen.
I like to watch my cat Loki in the window in the early morning when the season allows the window to be open. He tastes the air. It is erotic to watch him. He tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and opens his mouth just a crack, and breathes through his mouth, moving his head back and forth. He knows what's been happening in the garden and the alley behind the fence all night long. One of these days, he'll tell me, but until he does, I can just imagine as I sit and watch him. The only human activity that approaches this is the method for tasting a vintage wine. You take a tiny sip, roll it to the back of your tongue, and take a light, long, slow breath through your mouth. This brings those sensors that meld both senses of taste and smell together. This is where terms like "bouquet" come from. It's not just from sniffing. Try eating a flower if you're afraid you'll choke on the wine. Try a rose petal.
Touch is another woefully neglected sense, now that we often live in isolation, even among our children. Touch has been demonized into abuse. We need to reclaim it and use it for healing ourselves and the world around us.
Mommies still know how to kiss it and make it better. Most of us haven't forgotten how to do that. What a magical concept! Healing kiss. Healing touch. As long as we don't hang out a shingle and claim to really heal people, we're fine. Occasionally we discover that we can heal physical illness or injury, and that frightens everyone - the doctors, the lawyers, the preachers - healing is only for people with degrees in medicine, and only applies to specific maladies that you specialize in when you leave medical school. So our Christian Science friends are constantly having to defend themselves for their spiritual healing practices. If you do anything other than the prescribed course of treatment for your children, your children will be taken away from you. It's that simple. It's been that way for centuries, ever since the wise women, the herbalists, the midwives, were accused of having no education (women, of course, don't need an education and couldn't really learn anything anyway, since women are not men) or of practicing witchcraft, and the learned men of the church co-opted our most basic work.
All of this has been and is our sacred work. Most of our sacred work has been denied us through derogatory acts and attitudes of the men who run the world, and our complicity with those men. We want a piece of the pie too, after all - so we have gladly agreed to do things their way. It is time for all of us - men and women - to rediscover and reclaim it.
Community, says Matt Fox, "means 'to work on a common task together.'" What task is more important than rediscovering the nature of our sacred work? More fundamentally, what is more important than rediscovering the sacredness of life, and with it ourselves, and our work? That is the spiritual dimension that is missing from life at the end of the 20th Century. It is why you are either reading this book or attending a seminar. We are starving for spiritual nourishment, and we aren't being fed by our institutions: the church, the education establishment, leisure activities, or what we do to "make a living." The fifth huge institution that affects all of our lives is the Government - and that entity is prohibited by the Establishment Clause of the 4th Amendment from making any real contribution to the spiritual well-being of the citizenry. We "the People" have combined the Establishment clause with our belief that true religion is "not of this world," and have effectively separated the sacred and the mundane to the extent that "spirit" other than "team spirit" is relegated to the irrelevant, if not lunatic, fringe.
For an example, read the Religion page of the local paper. There you will find the usual sop thrown to minority religions during feast days, Enquirer-type stories about visions of the Virgin Mary in rural areas, occasional pieces about women pastors as anomalies on the local landscape, and other out-of-the-so-called-mainstream pieces on speaking in tongues, faith healing, snake handling, and the strength of "faith" when "God" "sends" disaster.
As a result of this separation between church and state, sacred and profane, mind and body, physical health and spiritual health, communities are at a loss to solve problems such as crime and drug abuse. We attack the symptom, not the underlying cause - which is spiritual alienation. Even our churches are caught in the dichotomy. The churches with strong social consciousness such as the UCC and the Methodist Church, still have problems combining religion with everyday life. Mission and social action are concepts for "outreach," not personal transformation or understanding the importance of the integration of the sacred with the profane, or more theologically, integration of immanence with transcendence, or the integrity of creation, justice, and peace, which was dropped as an irrelevancy by the UCC General Synod of 1995.
So the work of Community - "to work on a common task together," in Matt Fox's phrase - as a spiritual concept is large enough to keep us all busy. Too large, in fact, overwhelming without a way to replenish energies, to return to the Source, or in Paul Tillich's phrase, "the ground of our being." This is the task of Worship, or to use an old word, "Ritual."
In Greek, the word liturgy means "the work of the people." Liturgy or ritual may be the human work par excellence. Ritual is the primary means by which a people get their inner houses in order, both as individuals and as a community. It is the primary tool by which macrocosm (our relation to the whole of the universe) and microcosm (our personal and more local relationships) come together ...Ritual puts our "small acts" to use in assisting the accomplishment of the "great task"; it is the way by which we reconnect our daily lives of time and space (and therefore of work) to the Great Work of the universe. It is the surest way by which to bring forth the gifts as well as the grief and suffering of the community. If we lack the means to allow the latter to happen, the former will never occur at any level of depth and honesty. Ritual is the primary means by which a community names itself and comes to life, responding to the deep mysteries of life, whether these be mysteries of joy and hope or of sorrow and angst. Ritual is the primary means by which the elders pass on to the young the gift of their own stories and especially a Big Story - the creation story by which the young see how they got here, what "here" is, what they might be doing here, how to get there, and what the vision of "there" might be. It is through ritual that the young can become excited enough about their existence to throw themselves into the adventures of living, learning, relating, forgiving, letting go, and letting be. Ritual puts them in touch with generosity of heart, with the courage and gratitude that will energize them for the journey. ...In ritual we say thank you for the gratuitous gift of existence, as Thomas Aquinas teaches. "Worship does not exist for God's sake but for ours. God has no need of human worship. It is we who need to demonstrate our gratitude for what we have received." It is through ritual that the passages of life, from birth to puberty, from marriage to parenting, from sickness to repentance, from leadership to death are named as sacred moments for the individual and the community to behold and celebrate. It is through ritual that we are reminded of a deeper time than everyday time; we can truly enter timelessness, where past, present, and future are one and where the ancestors are truly present as a viable communion of saints - communing with us and imploring us to accept their gifts of courage, grace, and imagination. Through ritual we are also reminded of a deeper sense of space, of how interconnection and relationship are the "essence of everything that is." In ritual we reinvigorate our sense of connectedness to all things: to our pain and grief; to our joy and dreams; to others' holy existences; to beauty, grace, zeal, moral indignation, outrage, play, creativity, and healing.* * *Ritual is the core element of African (and most native) communities. Without ritual a community rapidly loses its soul. Meladona Some, an African spiritual teacher who underwent a forty-day rite of passage in the jungle as a teenager, believes that without rites of passage a civilization is sick: "When a civilization lacks rites of passage, its soul is sick. The evidence for this sickness is threefold: first, there are no elders; second, the young are violent; third, the adults are bewildered." The young lack tools for survival if they have not experienced some forms of initiation or rites of passage as a child. The grounding of a person's life depends on the kinds of rites of passage he or she has experienced; therefore we all need some rituals to help us pass from one stage of life to another. Ritual ferries us across to a realm higher than the one prior to it. Elements of ritual include invocations; attitudes toward the spirit world; our response to our spirit allies; and symbols and metaphors by which we penetrate other worlds. Rituals are both individual and communal.
So the purpose of Ritual is to renew, to grow, to teach, to heal, whether as individual meditations or as community-building rites. Ritual springs from a deep need that we can only call spiritual because it transcends the merely psychological or mind, and gets into the part of ourselves we call "heart," which can only be accessed when the mundane world with all of its demands is kept away. Christians (and others) call this "prayer." But "prayer" turns out to be a process that includes those aspects of ritual that Fox mentions above: "... invocations; attitudes toward the spirit world; our response to our spirit allies; and symbols and metaphors by which we penetrate other worlds." Jesus is credited with saying "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by everyone. Truly, I say to you , they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your God who is in secret; and your God who sees in secret will reward you." Matt. 6:5-6.
When we follow Jesus' recommendation, we discover that we first create a sacred space in which to pray or meditate - we "go into [a] room and shut the door." We often come together on Sunday morning as congregations in church buildings - places set apart specifically for this purpose of community ritual. Too often, however, those Sunday morning services fail to produce the intended result. "Renewal" has come to mean "more money in church budgets and larger numbers on the membership rolls;" "Growth" means more new church starts; "teaching" means indoctrination into the tenets of the faith, and the reinforcement of the "traditional" meanings of the stories we have learned since childhood; and "healing" is practically taboo because we have forgotten the connection between health and wholeness, spirit and body. "Healing" in such a context takes on the connotation of wishful thinking and "magic" or "miracle" outside the realm of nature. Clearly much of our Sunday morning liturgy could use some re-creation.
But back to the first element (and purpose) of ritual: creating sacred space. From the most ancient of times we have found evidence that people have created sacred space in circles. The Avebury Ring, Stonehenge, and other remnants of sanctuary sites can still be visited, used, and studied. In the folk lore of European Americans, we know about "fairy rings" found in forests, magical spots where a clearing seems to have been made in a circle. We find reference to sacred circles in blue grass gospel from the Appalachian Mountains "Will the Circle be Unbroken By and By?" The Ring is an ancient symbol of eternity, wholeness, completion, safety. Black Elk, the Lakota Medicine Man who was interviewed at length and who's story was first published in 1932 by John G. Neihardt says this about Circles as sacred space:
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man [sic] is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
So the first element of ritual is to mark out a circle for the sacred space. This can be as simple a task as re-arranging the pews in the church sanctuary, or joining hands in a small group, or walking around the periphery of a space. The casting of the circle can be as simple or as dramatic and "ritualized" as necessary. The result is that the people become focused and centered, ready to participate fully in the task at hand - whether that task is celebration, teaching, healing, or raising power toward some other corporate or individual purpose.
The next element of ritual, as Matt Fox tells us, is invocation. In church services we often light candles, and the choir might sing an "introit." When we understand God as transcendent, what we are doing is calling God to come to us. When we understand God as immanent, we are invoking the Holy Spirit within us, calling upon our deepest selves to open to the presence of the Christ, which includes the integrity, the wholeness, and relatedness of all creation. Because we cannot live outside of the biosphere of our home planet, it makes sense to also invoke or awaken our awareness to the elements of the natural world: the earth, the air, the fire, the water. Because we are creatures of space who become disoriented without some sense of place, it makes sense to also call the four directions of North, East, South, and West. We may also want to include above, below, and within, thereby making seven - which is an ancient holy number - but that part is a matter of taste and personal truth - what makes ultimate sense to a group or a person. Finding the words for such invocations comes from considering the attributes of each of the elements we are including in our sacred space. In other words, allow the spirits of those elements to speak to us about their individual natures. Different cultures and people are going to come up with different experiences about the meaning of the South Wind, or the Eastern Sea, or the Western Sun, or the Northern Lights.
With the phrase "attitudes toward the spirit world," Matt Fox uses some esoteric language that doesn't seem to fit with the usual ideas most Christians have about God. We have been taught to reject any ideas about "the spirit world" as superstition if not heresy. But I think this phrase is a more universal or cosmic way to say "our relationship to or with God." If we can move away from gender-specific references to God, we can open ourselves to a far greater range of possibility in terms of the power that is available to us in doing whatever sacred work we wish to do inside our sacred space. For example, look at how the prophet Isaiah tells the story of his experience of being called by God to do God's work. Isaiah 6:1-8. It is a powerful vision, with all of the elements of sacred space we have discussed so far (with the addition of the burning of incense, which is part of the invocation):
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said" "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!
Isaiah's "attitude toward the spirits" is clear. "I am a man of unclean lips ..." It is a confession (sound familiar?); but confession does not necessarily mean self-abasement or guilt, it is a statement of relationship to (or with) God. Isaiah's vision continues:
Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth, and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven." And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Then I said, "Here am I! Send me."
Isaiah's "response to [his] spirit allies," to use the next element of ritual in Fox's words is to accept that God has purified him, and has presented Isaiah with an opportunity to serve.
The final elements are the "symbols and metaphors by which we penetrate other worlds." Isaiah's vision is told in words and symbols that meant something to Isaiah and to the people to whom he later told the story and brought his prophecies of justice, peace, and yes, the integrity of creation "the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and a young child shall lead them." The tough work we have to do in our sacred spaces is to find the metaphors that speak the truth to our own need or purpose, whatever it may be. Some of those metaphors can come to us through the work itself as suggested earlier by Susun Weed:
Any sacred work should be done from within a sacred space. Ultimately, all our work is sacred, and we carry the sacred space within us. But in the conscious world we live in, there is the need and the call to withdraw, to renew ourselves, to create the sacred space for the strengthening of purpose and the gathering of resources to continue to do the work we are called to do.
There are two more parts to a complete ritual, which Fox does not discuss in quite the same way. The first is Celebration. Once the work is complete within the circle, it is time for praise, thanksgiving, and the sharing of food and drink. Wiccans call it "Cakes and Wine." In a world where dealing with alcohol abuse may well be some of the work that the circle is cast for in the first place, "wine" may or may not be part of the ritual. But certainly sharing of food and drink is an integral part of ritual. It serves to "ground" us and bring us back from the heady business of vision, trance, or deep prayer, and it ritualizes the relationship among the participants in the circle. If there is only one corporeal participant, a bite of bread and a sip of water serves to remind of the connection with the larger community that produced the bread, provided the water, and in whose behalf we have gone into meditation and prayer - even if it is for ourselves.
The last part is to return to the mundane world by once again acknowledging - thanking - the spirits: the directions, elements, aspects of God that we called upon in the beginning, and then to open the circle: retrace our steps around the periphery, take hands in the group and dismiss ourselves, open the door and come out of the closet.
PART THREE
THE ELEMENTS OF RITUAL
This section expands and specifies the general discussion of ritual in the previous section.
Because we can see each other more easily, a circle is best. Black Elk explains that circles are a natural form for living in general - nests are round, the Earth is round - wedding rings symbolize eternity, wagon trains in the 19th Century pulled into a circle for defense. The quickest way to create sacred space is to join hands and form a circle - any number more than one can do this. If you need more space, after joining hands, step back to the limit of your arms' reach. If you need even more space, take three steps back - etc. There are magical reasons for having a circle be nine feet across, or other multiples of three. These are mythically sacred numbers because they are multiples of the prime number of 3 - the Trinity of the Patriarchy: Father, Son, Holy Spirit; or of the Goddess: Maiden, Mother, Crone; or of life itself: birth/rebirth, fulfillment, death. Depending upon the purpose for creating sacred space, the circle should be as large as necessary.
A solitary person can create sacred space simply by extending arms out and turning around.
Various rituals can be used to cast the circle, from the most simple as described above, to complex dances including drumming, and tracing the perimeter with a magical tool such as a wand or dagger. If necessary, the space may need to be purified first: lay out the general path for the perimeter of the circle, then take a broom dedicated to the purpose and sweep the space. Or take a bowl of water - also dedicated to the purpose - and sprinkle the perimeter and/or the participants. This usually invokes laughter and fun - which helps to banish negative thoughts and feelings from the space - or to use archaic mythical language - banishes the evil spirits or demons so that the space is claimed for the sacred work.
For ancient reasons, the circle is cast with sun-wise (deosil) movement - in other words, clockwise - or moving to the right. This is an opening movement. In magical or mythical terms, we are opening the door to the place between the worlds of spirit and mundane where sacred work can be done. In the same vein, when the circle is closed at the end of the working, the movement is counter-clockwise - against the sun - or widdershins, to use the old Saxon word. It seems obvious that the observation that the light comes from the right and moves to the left (comes from the east and moves to the west) would take on major mystical significance to a dawning human consciousness. The sun brings warmth, light, growth, life. To move in the same direction should enable humans to do the same work as the sun. So the circle is cast in alignment with the most elemental of observable natural phenomena.
It stands to reason, as humans are so good at mythical association, that whatever the work is that is to be done in the circle may be associated with the qualities of particular elements of each of the directions. So in some Native American practice, one may start the circle in the south and move to the west, north and east. A working to invoke a change in the weather such as to bring back the sun might begin in the South where the sun resides in the winter, etc.
B. Invoking the Spiritual World
People depending on their knowledge of the natural world for survival would instinctively call on those aspects that have the greatest impact or the most direct influence on well-being. For example, travelers on foot or by animal means would be very much attuned to direction, or orientation. The first skill one learns in survival training is how to find North, and from there to orient oneself to find safety - food, shelter, assistance. Direction is also important because weather patterns move in a particular way - normally from West to East. So the concept of The Four Winds - the Four Directions - is basic. It's also logical to consider the fact of the Earth beneath our feet and the Skies above. So in our sacred space we have set aside, we call on the directions from which the four winds blow - North, East, South, and West - and perhaps the powers coming from above and below - to attend to us - listen to us - lend their powers to us in our special need.
The Powers of the Four Directions are described in various ways according to the experience of the Tribe. Generally, for North American Europeans and Northern European Celts, the Four Elements of the Four Directions are Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. It is a short imaginative reach to ascribe specific personalities or qualities to each of the elements - and very shortly the Tribe has a pantheon of gods upon which to call for assistance in every aspect of life. For example:
Earth: North - Strength, sustenance, stability, mystery, Winter, Crone, Hecate
Air: East - Spirit, thought, freedom, inspiration, spring, Maiden, Diana
Fire: South, passion, warmth, safety, community, summer; Mother, Demeter
Water: West, emotion, cleansing, healing, autumn, Jesus (the sacrificed god)
Pretty soon one notices that each of these elements is reflected in particular animals, birds, fish, trees, flowers, herbs, insects - and it is possible to realize that we are surrounded by a universe that supports and sustains our lives. We start to dream about animals and other personifications of the natural world as we look for solutions to problems. Being the symbolic people we are, we are soon looking beyond the natural world for what created the natural world, and we discover transcendent great spirits as well as immanent ones. It is another short intellectual hop to realize that some of us are better at getting results from this natural pantheon of power than others, so we begin to listen more to them and we have spiritual leaders: priestesses, shamans, counselors, clergy.
The trick is not to abdicate our autonomy, but to keep our own senses alive. If the shaman or the pope strays too far from our own experience of the truth of our own lives, she loses credibility - unless her position is assured by a system - but that's another book! See Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure among many others!
"Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will," according to Dione Fortune - a very well known occultist of the first half of the 20th Century. This phrase contains an astonishing truth. The way to get at that truth is to ask, what is consciousness? What does it mean to be "conscious"?
Here is Webster's definition of Conscious: "able to feel and think; awake....knowing what one is doing and why ..." and Consciousness: "the totality of one's thoughts, feelings, and impressions; mind."
So to "change consciousness at will" would mean to change our awareness of the totality of our thoughts. This is another definition of prayer.
If we are going to change consciousness, we need to know that we are safe and secure, and will not be interrupted. So Jesus advised going into a closet and shutting the door, so that the God who knows us in secret can hear us in secret. We can also cast a circle and invoke the directions and elements and the powers of the universe to attend and listen to our need: for healing, love, wealth, peace - or more specific needs such as money, a lover, safety in childbirth, healing a particular condition, selling a house, etc.
We can light incense, lay out the Tarot, burn a candle, drum, chant, do any of a great variety of things to help us focus, center ourselves, quiet the constant mind-chatter, and actually change consciousness. We can become whatever it is we desire: healthy, wealthy, wise; some of us who are adept may become ravens, wolves, salmon, flying horses - and make journeys to visit ancestors and bring back answers to the people.
Some of us may create magical tools on behalf of others:
Spells for love: "On Friday (which is Venus' day - the Goddess of Love) - light a pink candle, and scatter the contents of this crystal bottle into your bath. As you soak in the warm silkiness of the water, visualize the one you love. S/he will come to you."
Spells for money: "Take a green candle, anoint it with vetivert oil. Set the candle on top of the bill you need to pay. Center yourself, and visualize depositing the money to pay the bill, writing the check, and reducing your debt balance to zero."
We may also work together in a visualization/prayer for healing for a member of our family or community. The items we use to help us focus have no power to change anything. The power comes from the mysterious alchemy of the sacred space and the alignment of our free will with the universe - the Great Spirit - God/dess Creator. It is an art, this changing consciousness at will. It allows us to have some sense of control, order, purpose in our otherwise random lives.
D. Celebration/Raising Power/Sending/Consecrating the Work
The place for this in usual Christian liturgy is in the closing hymn before the benediction (which opens the "circle"). The closing hymn is usually one of praise and of commitment to the principles discussed in the sermon or the theme of the service. In a pagan circle there is a different expression of the idea of praise and commitment. This is the concept of "raising power" in order to send the prayer or consecrate the work that has been done. Often a central fire is lit, chanting and drumming and dancing begins.
The drumming and chanting and dancing gradually increase in intensity until at the point of highest expression of energy, the priestess or priest ends the chant, The power arcs off into the Cosmos, and the participants drop to the floor (or the ground) and let the remains of the energy drain back into the earth. This is called "grounding." It is essential or the residual free-flowing energy that is left will cause people to feel incomplete.
The best way to learn the truth of that last statement is to try it - or to observe what happens at the end of a conventional worship service that is a particularly powerful one - for example, the Easter celebration, or a wedding. There is no grounding. The service builds and builds to a great sending forth at the end: The choir sings the Hallelujah Chorus, or the bride and groom run back down the aisle and out the front door, and after all the shouting is over, we often feel let down or even depressed. Watch young children in such a situation. They are excited, wound up, run screaming through the crowds at the reception, and then get cranky and whiny. Conventional wisdom of course says the adults who feel depressed or let down are remembering disappointments, or waxing nostalgic. Children are dismissed as being over-stimulated and tired. What would happen if at the end of a great celebration or sending forth, we all sat down for a few moments, and listened to a drumbeat that gradually slowed from a dance to a heartbeat. Some of the children might indeed fall asleep. But the general feeling would be one of completion. Then we would be ready for a little food and drink to bring back a little more energy for the drive home, and for the tasks of the rest of the day.
E. Feasting and Closing Sacred Space
In times past, especially during the great persecutions of the 11th through the 18th Centuries, it was essential to return the appearance of the space to its original purpose or configuration so that the sacred rites would be kept secret and the participants safe and secure. Now it is important to do so wherever a ritual is held in a borrowed space, whether a park or camp, or a meeting hall - or even a church, if the purpose of the circle is not the same as the purpose of the space in which it is cast. In the case of a park or a camp, it is simply good manners to clean away all traces of our presence there.
In some traditions, it is customary to open the circle by first thanking the powers and elements and gods and sending them back to their customary realms. We are really returning ourselves to our everyday world once more. One way to "come back" is to walk the circle "widdershins" or counter-clockwise - from West to South to East to North - to retrace our steps. We end with a blessing or a sending forth:
Our Circle is open and unbroken
Merry Meet, Merry Part, and Merry Meet Again!
Blessed be.
A criticism that is often heard about an approach to life, worship, and spirituality such as described here is that there is a great risk of worshiping the rocks, the sun, the rivers, the trees, and the animals instead of God. This criticism may assume that God is a separate force for judgment in the universe. This criticism may also simply reflect how difficult it is to live on the sword's edge of the metaphor between literal belief and mystical certainty. Humans always prefer something we can see, taste, smell, hear, or touch, and the more corporeal the better. Aaron and the Israelite band waiting impatiently at the foot of Mount Sinai certainly were trapped in that dilemma.
The moral of that story seems to be that the true God is to be found in the Law of relationship among all aspects of creation, not in some animated image invented by human artistry. But if we look closely, we see that even Moses was caught in the dilemma. He had to bring something back for the people to see and touch - two tablets of stone, upon which God wrote the Law. When Moses returned and found the people worshiping the golden calf they had made, he smashed the stone tablets that God had provided. There is much here to ponder in addition to immanence and transcendence. Somehow, God realizes the need of the people for tactile reality.
Environmental awareness and activism is slowly being recognized as a legitimate Christian focus. In 1989, the World Council of Churches declared the Integrity of Creation part of a trinity that encompasses Justice and Peace. Since then, the United Church of Christ embraced the Integrity of Creation, but has now abandoned it as a priority. Other denominations, however, have realized the importance of transforming the traditional theology from indifference if not hostility toward God's natural world to respectful stewardship. Dialogue among seminaries, secular environmental activists, and national adjudicatories has begun. To the surprise of the traditionally more liberal Christian denominations, Evangelical Christians have taken the lead. An article in The Washington Post for Saturday, February 17, 1996 by Bill Broadway discusses this development ("Tending God's Garden - Evangelical Group Embraces Environment"). A sidebar contains excerpts from "An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation." It says, in part:
We call on all those who are committed to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to affirm the following principles of biblical faith:
The cosmos, in all its beauty, wildness and life-giving bounty, is the work of our personal and loving Creator.
Our creating God is prior to and other than creation, yet intimately involved with it, upholding each thing in its freedom, and all things in relationships of intricate complexity. God is transcendent, while lovingly sustaining each creature; and immanent, while wholly other than creation and not to be confused with it.
The Creator's concern is for all creatures. God declares all creation "good" ...
Men, women, and children have a unique responsibility to the Creator; ... Created in God's image, [we] also have a unique responsibility for creation. Our actions should both sustain creation's fruitfulness and preserve creation's powerful testimony to its creator. ...
The earthly result of human sin has been a perverted stewardship, a patchwork of garden and wasteland in which the waste is increasing. "There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land ... Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away" (Hosea 4:1,3). Thus, one consequence of our misuse of the earth is an unjust denial of God's created bounty to other human beings, now and in the future.
Regardless of national leadership vacuums, or dogmatic points of view, individual Christians can and should open themselves to the wonder of all of God's creation.
"And how is it that we hear, each of us in her own Native language?" Acts 2:8.
Our Native language is the Earth Song - silent speech of Standing Stones, or the sound of corn growing in the Illinois prairie; the winds, gentle breezes or ravishing storms; our great Sun to light us by day, or the watch fires to guard us by night; all the waters of our sacred world - the oceans, lakes, rivers, wells, and the mists and rains that replenish them.
We hide away from the Sun in the summer and from the Moon in Winter; we change our clocks so that we can spend more time away from the natural world making money so we can consume and destroy more and more of our Native Earth Song. Women especially feel the alienation deep within - bone deep; blood deep. We can no longer breathe the air; we are allergic to the scents of the once-sacred herbs. We plug up our bodies to contain and absorb the sacred blood flow that was once a sign of the potential to bring forth life. We consign our wise elders to nursing homes because we can't take care of them ourselves. Our elders comply because they too believe that to be old is to be useless. To be near Death, to be able to see between the worlds of Life and Death, is terrifying because we no longer understand the circular nature of life, death, rebirth, and our own part in it.
We deny the natural rhythms of once-sacred work.
We are victims of breast cancer, AIDS, asthma, and mysterious, energy-robbing fatigue syndromes. As our Mother Gaia - the Earth - is dying, so are we.
There is a great statement of faith in Matthew 5 and 6, which we would do well to read carefully. In particular, Matthew 6:28b and 33:
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ...
But seek first God's realm and God's righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.
This passage has been used by charlatans to feed the greed of the masses. But these passages are not about "acquiring" anything. They tell us to consider, to seek, to listen, and to trust.
There is a saying from the 60's that is still valid today: "Stop and Smell the Roses." It's a beginning. Stop and smell the roses. Stop and notice the Moon. Stop and notice how the Earth tilts away from the Sun in winter, and back toward it in the Summer - and that this begins to happen at specific times on specific days.
Stop living as though the Sun really does come up in the morning.
After a while, you will start hearing the voices of the elements speaking to you. You will have an idea about how to care for a house plant one morning while you're asking it why it's not thriving. It may want to be moved into the sun, or into the shade, or have more or less water, or be repotted.
You may have a sudden desire to walk barefoot in the newly turned soil of your garden right before you start planting. Do it. The earth has asked for your blessing. You have a blessing to give.
You may hear your Name called by the wind. Answer it. It may not be the name you were given at birth.
This is the beginning. One person at a time. The hole in the ozone layer shrinks; a new vine finds its way through the burned-over wasteland of the rain forest; a song bird is heard where he hasn't been heard for years.