One of the easier bits of shared-practice discussion I’ve had in the founding of the Shiny New Group has been about figuring out how to handle ritual texts.
The options:
There’s a spectrum.
- Some groups memorise everything (i.e. there’s a prewritten script, but everyone works in ritual from memory.)
- Some groups work from a written script, with notes used during ritual.
- Some groups write things out in advance for planning, but then memorise or improvise in the ritual as makes sense.
- Some groups figure out the goal of the ritual, but then collaboratively create (often referred to as co-creating) the ritual together. (In this last one, ritual roles or methods may not be assigned: people step forward to take on the roles they want to do, and do them as they see fit.)
- Some groups combine one or more of these.
My past experience:
The group I’ve hived from is closest to #2:
- Ritual roles are determined in advance (though people may find out about smaller ones that don’t require advance preparation when they arrive for ritual.)
- The ritual is pre-planned, and the working, explanations, ritual texts, and such are pre-written, and used basically intact. There’s some discussion of how to read from cards/script without burying your nose in it, and keeping the energy going.
- Everyone with a significant ritual role (HPS, HP, handmaiden, summoner, sometimes other roles) gets a copy of the ritual, and works from that.
- That while things are pre-written, there’s still a fair bit of room for seeing how things go - a lot of working notes would say “X, Y, or Z may happen now” and we’d run with whatever made sense.
- Deity and ancestor invitations are generally not pre-written (though someone who is new to doing them may write something up for reference in case they blank while doing it.)
- Some parts of the ritual (blessing text, circle cast, songs, quarter calls) are memorised over time. (Most people can do them fairly comfortably by memory by the time of their initiation or not long thereafter.)
There’s a lot of benefits to this - especially in a teaching group, and where sometimes people can’t be at a given ritual, or you may have guests with varying levels of experience.
What benefits?
- You can preplan more, and discuss anything that might be an issue for specific students or guests (or things to do to avoid confusion or problems.)
- People can take on roles they do not yet have fully memorised (which requires a high level of comfort)
- Those learning larger roles within the ritual (such as someone beginning as handmaiden) could see clearly what was expected of them in advance during the ritual, and plan ahead better.
- It allows for a lot of conversation about ritual design (since we’d have a script to go over before ritual.)
There’s also some less useful parts. Working from a script or cards requires a lot of work to *prepare* them (my HPS usually did 2-4 sets of cards, with different parts highlighted, plus often a separate sheet for people with smaller roles that was generic. (And then there’s the cutting them apart, keeping track of them, keeping them in order, etc.) There are times this is very useful (something like an initiation, where it’s a ritual that isn’t done often, and there are a lot of specific sequence details and wording to keep track of), but it can be a lot of work to do for every ritual.
And, of course, some people will get ‘caught’ by reading off a sheet. We actually rarely had this problem, but it does take some training and practice to read with feeling and attention to the group energy while you’re looking at a card. It’s not an common skill without practice.
Our choices:
Our choice so far has been to work far more organically. (Of course, this is a lot easier when there’s only two of you, and you’ve been working together for over 6 years in various forms…)
- We set our general focus for the ritual well in advance (i.e. we can say “Next moon’s ritual will be focusing on X and probably involving Y”) We like this: it gives us a chance to mentally prepare and roll around different ideas without time pressure.
- A few weeks before the ritual, we figure out precisely what we want to do for the working, and how we want to approach it.
- We keep notes, but we have not (so far) written up formal scripts. I do send out an outline of what we need to remember to bring/have ready, but that’s about it.
- We have some standard texts (circle cast, a few songs, etc.) but in most other cases, we’re improvising.
- We’re also (so far) not pre-writing the welcome comments, or even specific meditations (because, by default, if one of us is reading the medication, we can’t both be doing it equally: we’ve done shared-meditations where we both share what we’re seeing, though, or where one of us has talked through a set-up, and then we both have time to explore.)
We’ll obviously continue to adapt (especially when we we add more people) but I like the combination of advance preparation (everyone, going in, knows what the focus and intention will be well in advance) and openness to trying out different ways to get there when it’s appropriate. (It also means that if we get a brilliant idea in the last week before ritual, we don’t have to scramble to get scripts together: we just note what we want to do and run with it.)
Since this also just turned up in my search engine results, I thought it might be handy to mention. One of our coven desires is good food and drink: we’re both big believers in food being a pleasure as well as a necessity, and we want our ritual work and celebrations to reflect that.
What does that actually mean?
Food in ritual
As is true with many Wiccan influenced groups, we have a ‘cakes and ale’ portion in our rituals. Most commonly for us, this is bread and wine, mead, or sometimes beer (depending on the season and ritual focus.)
I started baking bread maybe four years ago, and I’ve discovered that I really like baking bread for ritual use. It’s also remarkably easy - my basic bread recipe (which I’m not going to post today, as it’s long, and I want to talk about other things, too) takes about 3 hours start to finish, and only about 15-20 minutes of actual work.
Why bake for ritual? Why not buy something from any one of the excellent bakeries within easy driving distance?
- I know exactly what’s in there.
- I know where those ingredients came from (for example, I use locally produced honey rather than sugar in most of my bread.)
- I can adapt the bread precisely for ritual use: I did spice-based breads over much of the winter, but now that we’re in spring, I’m doing herb breads. Both are fabulous, but they evoke different feelings.
- I can shape the bread in ritually beautiful ways that help reinforce the focus of the ritual.
- There is something powerfully transformative in making bread: I begin thinking about the transformation and change the ritual will bring even before I get there.
- It requires that I spend about 3 hours at home, which turns out to be a nice and happy scheduling thing for me: it means I am far less likely to make too many plans the week before group ritual (and thus am less tired, have gotten stuff done at home, etc.) Definite bonus.
My recipe for Beltane is actually going to be a new one for me - one of the friends who is coming as a guest has an oatmeal bread recipe she thinks would be fantastic for ritual, so I’m going to try that.
Likewise, what we pick for a liquid varies. We’re happy to do an alternative for people who don’t drink alcohol (currently not an issue, as everyone attending also drinks socially) but I do find that alcohol holds energy better than other liquids, and that that is sometimes very useful. My non-alcohol of choice is either sparkling juice, or some kind of interestingly flavored not-too-sweet juice. (The ready availability of pomegranate juice, for example, is handy.)
Food for Beltane
There are a few traditional foods - white wine with woodruff and strawberries, for example, or rose petal scones or other baked goods. However, we’re in Minnesota - neither of these things are actually seasonal for us, unless we have an unusually early spring. (And even then, that’s only roses, not strawberries. And one of our guests has rose allergies to many common varieties.)
Our plans, therefore, are for *good* food - homemade foods that feel right to us right now. I’m contemplating a chicken salad (to go with the ritual bread) but I’m still figuring out exactly what I want to put in it.
I just posted something to a mailing list that I thought might be useful over here, too - a time line of how we’ve been going about planning ritual.
Beltane is going to be our first ritual with guests, so we’re being extra-careful with the planning. That said, it’s one of my current goals to have a decent idea what we’re doing for the ritual (not all the details, but the basic working, goals, and stuff we need to have on hand) a month before the ritual.
Starting in early April would be fine for many people if you’re starting from scratch with no idea of what you want to do. (Starting in mid-April is stressful, in my experience, unless you already have a good idea what you want to do and you’re working with people who can adapt comfortably.)
March 5th or so:
Discuss the fact we’d like to have guests, and that Beltane seems like a good time. Discuss which guests.
March 10th:
Do an initial invitation - the three people we want to invite are often busy, so letting them know *well* in advance helps everyone out a lot. (Also, our plans might be different if only some of them could come.)
March:
Do some general discussion of different things we might want to do. Do some thinking about past rituals we’ve been to and how to fit them to a smaller group. Get a couple of brilliant and inspired ideas we think will work well. Start pulling those together in ways that will make them work well with our ritual structure, style, and the people who will be there.
April 2nd:
Send out our “month before ritual invite” with formal date/time information, and a short background on what we’ll be doing (the friendship bracelet idea), and what they need to bring (food to share, a few colors of embroidery floss to contribute to the project, etc.)
April 10th:
Get everyone’s food and scent allergy information back, send out an email with specifics so people can avoid each other’s allergens. (If we were a bigger group, I’d probably go the ‘avoid stuff people can’t be in the same room with’ and ‘label clearly’ route, but for five people, I’d prefer to have everyone able to eat everything. That said, our guests have a complicated combination of requirements.)
April:
Continue discussions with my covenmate about exactly how to make the practical things work. Come up with more good ideas, and work out the rest of the details (what kind of bread and wine for the cakes and ale? Do we want altar decorations? What kind? How do we want to phrase the working? Raise energy?) Draft the formal ritual outline.
April 28th:
Send out a final reminder email (just did that).
April 30th:
Run a few errands (fortunately, can be done quickly, on my way to another appointment), picking up necessary materials.
May 2nd:
Bake bread for ritual after work. Pack up carefully for the morning.
May 3rd (when we’re actually doing this):
Our gather time is 1:30pm. I’ll be up there around 12 or 12:30 to do a final check through and set-up. We expect ritual to take about 2 hours, and will have feasting and companionable conversation afterwards.
Looking through my blog stats, I noticed that someone had searched on this and found a link here. So, I thought I’d give a little more answer to the question.
Why incense?
1) In a number of traditions (including the one I work in), it’s used in part to represent the elements of air, and more specifically the elements of air and fire during the blessing of the circle. (Water and earth are represented with saltwater.)
Incense is a lovely way to mix these: it’s also something that can be carried around the circle and shared with everyone there.
2) Scent is an extremely powerful trigger.
Some scents bring us back to our childhood. Others remind us of a specific person, or setting. Scent seems to get far into our hind brain, in ways that we’re still learning about scientifically.
Some groups use the same scent for every ritual - simply smelling it helps trigger everyone into ritual mindset. Other groups use appropriate scents for a ritual (so Beltane might involve flowers, and a meditation ritual might include sandalwood.)
The shiny new group is looking at the consistent scent approach, but we’re still figuring out what that might be.
3) There’s something very alive about it.
Watching the tail of smoke rise and shift is - like the candle flame - a moving, changing thing on the altar, transforming as we do things. Nifty.
One of the reasons I like incense is that it has all three of these things: some of the other options (a feather, or a oil burner) don’t do all of these the same way.
I had a need for two figurines for specific shrines/ongoing workings I had in mind, and was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find what I wanted elsewhere - so I made some! It’s the first time I’d done much work with clay since middle school (and definitely the first time since then I was doing figures), and it was both very fun, and a fascinating magical process.
The first one I did is for ongoing job/prosperity working foo. She lives right now on my main altar, and I shower her with water with money-related magical oils mixed in every day. (Little spray bottle. Seriously. It’s a little silly, but it makes me smile, and it serves the purpose.)
The other one is the second I made, for my professional shrine (especially right now, as I’m job hunting). She’s designed to sit on a shelf, and she is - more or less - Hypatia, a historical figure I have a great deal of attachment to. (She’s popularly considered to have been the last librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria, but the actual history’s a bit more complex than that. However, she *was* devoted to learning and knowledge, and its preservation.)
When it comes to professional patronage, she’s a pretty obvious ancestral figure (far more, in some ways, than deities associated with either writing
or learning, which are only parts of what I do as a librarian.)
She is designed to sit on the edge of a bookshelf, as you can see - she’s about 5″ from the bottom of her skirt to the top of her head. The thing she’s holding looks like a book, but it’s properly a leather cover and some sheets of paper/parchment, as bound books are not quite appropriate to her time period.
There’s an alpha (the first letter in the Greek alphabet) on one sheet, and an Omega on the other (the last letter). As they were so thin, they browned on the edges before the rest of the clay was fired fully: I actually really like the effect. She’s also got this odd trick of appearing to be looking at different pages (or different parts of the page) at times. A trick of the lack of facial features, or something more, I don’t know. It delights me.
Time for another ‘day in the life’ post, I think.
8:15: Wake up, having not set my alarm until later that morning. (8am is about normal for me on a weekend: I finally stopped waking up at 6:30, regardless of when I went to bed, which is nice.) I’d gone to bed fairly late, due to having been out at a concert the evening before (a local Baroque ensemble: I’d gotten a comp ticket from my boss, who plays with them.)
8:15-10am: Catch up on email, online forums, and other various tasks (a question about some web research for a friend, who’s getting stuck on something, re-uploading an old essay of mine someone’s asked about to this site, and do other miscellaneous puttering around.
10:30am: Leave for the day’s activities. I have a meeting near where the friend I walk with regularly lives, so we’re walking beforehand.
11am: Show up, walk with her for almost 45 minutes, doing some very excellent and needed conversation about various topics of interest in the current shiny-new-coven work (managing, I think, to resolve several points of concern.) One of my tasks for Monday is sending email to my covenmate to discuss them.
noon: Walk into the place we’re having our Pagan Pride board meeting. The event is in October, and we just finished filing for 501(c)3 status (the topic that’s been eating our meeting time and energy for the past few months), so we spend a lot of time discussing various issues like our budget, the fund raising we need to do *have* the budget we like, and what implications this has for future events. We set up a wide range of things - two people take on exploratory research for simple fund raisers. We talk about the web site (one of my current projects), where I need to do some serious work in the coming week to get the forms up we want for programming and vendors, so we can get mail out about those.
The meeting lasts about 3 hours, which is par for the course for us, but we all feel it’s been generally very productive and a good time, which is really good.
3:00pm: I stop by the library branch I use in this neck of the woods to pick up a book that came in on hold (I use two different library systems - Minneapolis and Ramsey County - fairly regularly. ) Drive home.
4-6pm: Take a break in my day to play World of Warcraft, getting a chance to chat briefly with one of my friends, and setting up an older (long-unplayed) character somewhere I can get used to her again.
6pm: Have a bath, as my back is stiff.
6:30pm: Finish up other computer things.
7pm: Tidy up around the house for 30 minutes or so (mostly putting laundry away). I need to do more cleaning sometime soon, but this was apparently not the weekend that was going to happen.
7:30-8:15pm: Take notes on one of my current personal practice projects: reading the book in question and making notes in a blank book for later review. Have about 10 minutes of the cat insisting on sitting in the middle of the book and notebook in the middle of this, so pause for petting of the cat.
8:15-8:30ish? (I didn’t actually look at the clock when I was done): do the meditation work I intended to do tonight. I didn’t have a particular time requirement: this was more about ‘get in, do what I need to do tonight, get on with the evening’
8:30ish to 9:15: Read and make notes about a book my sister gave me for the holidays, because she’s going to be in town next Saturday (she lives about a 4 hour drive away), and we will probably talk about it.
9:15: Pick up my current pleasure reading (related to the personal practice topic, but not one I need to take notes on) and read until my eyes start closing. Turn off the lights, pet the cat, fall asleep.
I’ve been sleeping somewhat poorly the last week or two (lots of weird and disjointed dreams, waking up several times briefly overnight, etc). I keep a variety of sleep-enhancing oils on hand, and I think it is perhaps time to try a different one tonight.
We’ve been talking, in terms of group work, about how to handle things like food allergies.
Why relevant?
Food allergies are relevant in a couple of ways.
- We share some kind of food and drink in ritual.Generally, this is bread and wine (or mead, or maybe beer or ale), but generally alcohol. I generally make the bread, which uses white flour (wheat based). I’ve done cornbread, but I haven’t experimented with gluten-free baking (and because of the relative expense of the necessary ingredients and storage issues in a tiny kitchen, don’t anticipate doing so, honestly, on any kind of regular basis.)
- We make a point of shared food after ritual.Good food and drink is actually an explicit value of the group, and we like paying attention to where our food comes from, seasonality, and other details like that. Currently, we’re just planning a shared meal (as it’s a little weird to do potluck with 2 people) - you’ve seen the photos of our Ostara meal. Our new moon meal last weekend involved cold roast chicken (roasted that afternoon), herb bread, baked mushrooms, salad, and oatmeal cookies, along with wine.
The trick is, people have food allergies. In our previous group work, we’ve seen everything from people who can eat anything, but who show up with a bag of chips, to people who can only eat 2 or 3 very specific foods - and the people who (despite being prompted twice beforehand) don’t mention they have food allergies until 2 minutes before ritual.
Clearly, we want a way to handle all of these competing issues in a way that is sane for us, and sufficiently healthy for others. Equally obviously “Do you have any food or other allergies” is a necessary part of our pre-ritual questions for guests.
Ritual food:
I have two major goals for ritual food.
- That we do our best to come up with an in-ritual food alternative that they can have at the same time.For example, we might have alternate chalice with juice or water for those who don’t drink alcohol, or a small bowl of apple slices for someone who is gluten intolerant.
- That the alternate be appropriate to the season and ritual.My preference for this is to talk to them in advance, figure out an alternative they can eat (by running through some options) and provide it in the same way we provide the bread. (Either I provide it, or whoever does has it ready to go when they arrive.) This reduces pre-ritual fussing. If that’s not possible (their diet is so restricted they need really specific foods), then I’d ask them to bring what made the most sense.
Advance warning:
Obviously, this means they have to let me know in advance - so “Do you have any food allergies or other medical needs” is high on the list of things to ask when inviting a guest.
That said, I’ve seen more than one situation where people have been told clearly they need to let people know about allergies - and not mentioned it until they show up in ritual. This leads to my own personal policy:
If you don’t tell me at least 24 hours in advance of ritual (barring truly last minute changes) of an issue, I’m not going to run around trying to accommodate it by running out to the store, trying to find an alternative in the cupboard, an appropriate size bowl to put it in, etc. It’s important to me that the immediately pre-ritual time be as calm as possible.
If someone doesn’t tell me, they still have options - the most obvious being to simply bow their head over the food and drink to acknowledge the blessing. Again, I’m not expecting them to know they need to mention it: I’m just expecting they’ll tell me when asked, or cope with the consequences of not doing so.
Post-ritual feasting:
My current favorite phrase for this is ‘additive, not restrictive’.
In other words, if you can’t eat something, but it will not cause you physical harm to be in the same room with it, then other people may bring it. And, of course, if it will be unhealthy for you to be in the same room, we want to avoid it.
On the other hand, if it’s just something you can’t eat (but can be around) or just don’t like, we will do our best to make sure there are at least 2-3 foods that any given person can eat. And if we have people with restricted food choices even from what’s there, perhaps that they get first dibs at the food in the very sensible tradition of alt.polycon’s Decadent Brunch.
L and I do not have food allergy issues, but all three of the guests for our Beltane have foods they can’t eat or shouldn’t have. I just sent out the email for that, which is somewhat complex (because it includes both “Don’t bring at all” lists and “Here’s specifics for stuff that must be carefully labelled/someone can’t have” but at the same time, means people can see for themselves whether something will work (and know who to contact in case of questions. I believe this will work - update when we get past May 3rd.
General theory of ritual food:
As it says in one of my info-documents-in-draft: “If you bring a bag of chips, you may be teased.”
There is encouragement to bring ‘real’ food (few preservatives, perhaps from the local area/your garden/the farmer’s market/other sustainable sources.) I can’t always afford to do what I did for the New Moon, and spring for a free-range no-hormone chicken to roast (or the equivalent) for all my food needs, but I do try hard to do so for ritual and post-ritual foods. There are a surprising number of inexpensive but filling post-ritual options (must do a post about those, too.)
That said, people have different resources - money, time to cook, ability to get to local markets. I would be quite happy with almost anything *except* “I stopped by the gas station on the way here and got a bag of chips” (which shows lack of forethought). Even a deli salad or fresh fruit (assuming it’s seasonally appropriate) makes a lot more sense.
My real concern is that people are thinking about it somewhat in advance, and trying to find something that will be lovely and suitable for the day. (i.e. bring a food you yourself will enjoy, and that is not served miserably out of season. Supermarket tomatoes in winter are an okay ingredient, but they shouldn’t be served like you’d serve a heirloom tomato warm from somone’s garden in the summer - which, okay, needs very little help or additional preparation, in my book. Maybe a little basil and olive oil. Mmm.)
You get the idea, I hope - it’s mostly about attention to what you bring, and how you wrap that into the total ritual experience, for me. There are many paths to that goal.
Time to catch up on a few bits of recent events.
Life of a coven:
We have, so far, done several rituals together.
- a founding of the group ritual.
- a ritual further exploring potential interested deities.
- a trad-specific ritual that falls around January/February most years.
- Ostara
- the April new moon
They are going very nicely, and we are beginning to see our particular preferred methods and adaptations for 2 people, and different sized spaces coming together. We have plans for altar cloths, and for how we generally want to handle quarter altars. More on this in a bit.
For the new moon, we did a meditation focusing on the Great Library, one of the shared astral/pathworking type places that a whole lot of people I know sometimes end up in. For fairly obvious reasons given my profession of choice, it’s a place I’m particularly interested in, and I wanted to introduce L to it as well. (She found it equally fascinating, and we both agree it’s a group working we’d like to revisit.)
It was also our first meditation work with us doing separate things at various points, so we learned quite a bit about how to manage the timing on that, and how much intro and exit verbalisation we need. (And I learned that I can *facilitate* that intro and exit work while still having a very functional and useful and enjoyable meditation experience.)
Discussion:
The next logical step therefore seemed to be a discussion or learning aspect of some kind. We did a bit of back and forth on books we thought we wanted to talk about together (and now have a list of about five) but decided to start with Deborah Lipp’s Elements of Ritual. We picked this for several reasons: we’d both read it earlier in our training (both not long after it came out), and we’d both liked the organization. I knew that there were a number of things I wasn’t sure I agreed with, but that I was pretty sure it’d make for good discussion.
While L and I have done a lot of discussion about our shared preferences and ideas, it seemed like a particularly good time to work through it in detail (and make sure we’re not forgetting something), both because of where we are in the shaping of the group, and because we’re hosting a few guests for Beltane.
(These are friends who are not initiates in the tradition: in part because the scheduling would be otherwise complicated. Also, because I, at least, would like to be a little more comfortable with some of our changes before I go showing them off to the HPS and HP who trained me. I’ve obviously got reasons for them, but I’d like to be comfortable with them in practice before I do the full explanation of why a particular change makes sense.)
So, what did we talk about?
We started with the first three chapters (which comes to just under 80 pages) and skimmed over some topics (the breakdown of tools) that we’d recently discussed in prior group work. We’re aiming on doing chapters 4, 5, and maybe 6 (depending how far we get: it’s about 150 pages) in two weeks.
We both read and came with some notes, and with a lot of things we wanted to talk about (and basically had questions about the same things, which was handy.) Some things we talked about are:
- A revisit of the associations with air/fire (specifically, whether you do sword = air, or wand = air). Neither of us feels hugely strongly about this, but we really should come up with some sort of answer that we can apply consistently.
- Lipp discusses the difference between a pentacle (spirit at the top, normally), and a quartered circle. We went around about this for a bit, and the different pros and cons.
- How to handle people with food allergies.
- Varieties of pre-ritual cleansing, what we do individually, and what we’d like to establish as group practice, and why.
- Her ‘magic box’ idea (a list of tools that comes with/is always available for unanticipated needs.)
- Do we want to use statues/icons of deities? If so, what matters to us in them? (our end decision was that we prefer statues to flat images for a couple of reasons, but that we want the right thing: we are in no hurry to have something just because.)
- We have traditionally placed the altar in the north, but we’re curious to try the altar in the center and see what it’s like.
- Whether we want to develop a consistent incense scent for use in ritual, and if so, where to start experimenting with that. (One part of our ritual work is much easier with stick incense: our thought is to buy incense blanks and scent them with oil, but this will take a little playing around.)
- How we approach tools and their use in other parts of the home. (This definitely needs a separate post).
- Our desire to establish a practice of doing a formal center + ground before ritual (not so much because we need it - we both do it fast and easily these days - but because it will be a good habit for later with more people.)
- Wanting to come up with some sort of formal phrasing for “We are now in ritual, and this is our focus” (what Lipp refers to as the Declared Opening), but probably not the ones she directly suggests.
- A discussion of memorised material versus improvised (often with planning, but not pre-written) material vs. reading from scripts.
(A number of these really deserve posts of their own, so they’ll get them, somewhere down the road. If you, dear reader, have preferences for seeing one sooner rather than later, please do tell me.)
Not so much in the book:
We did also notice things that Lipp doesn’t discuss in much detail (and that are either part of our own experiences, or that we made notes we’d like to discuss more significantly with future students.)
- Dealing with the limits of rented space (both in terms of preparation - often a broom or other tools aren’t accessible - and in terms of limits the space may impose.) We both have fairly extensive experience of this one, as our first 4 years of our group work were almost always in rented space.
- Alternatives to fasting that still involve conscious eating and choices about food. (She alludes to this, but sort of glosses past it in a paragraph. L and I actually have fairly different approaches, but we both pay attention to this, at least for major rituals.)
- Alternatives for ritual baths, and other possible adaptations.
- There also has not yet been much discussion of how the early parts of the ritual work (and preparation) might be affected by the working. I seem to remember there is more discussion of this later in the book, but we’re looking at how the preparation work helps set up the later work (in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways.)
These do not make the book bad, of course! There’s only so much material that any given book is going to fit, and only so much any given author is going to have significant personal experience with. Especially as in this case, when we were using the book for other personal discussion, having stuff that wasn’t discussed is not a huge issue.
There are also a few glitches: she mentions briefly that glass is not suitable for altars because it’s modern. (Incorrect: it’s actually quite an ancient substance and the earliest glass containers date to around 1500 BCE) but she’s clarified this online in a couple of places.
She also discusses salt as a representation of earth on an altar, without also mentioning that it kills plants. (Don’t get me wrong: salt is also on my altar and it has many uses in ritual. But if I’m doing prosperity or other abundance-related work, I make sure there’s some other earthy representation around as well.)
Why is it that coming back from vacation always feels far more tiring than before vacation? This week has been full of work, and catching up with other things (like a professional self-education project that’s got an April 16th deadline.)
On top of that, I’ve been feeling somewhat stuck and therefore crabby in the ongoing job search, and as with many reasonably self-aware witches of my acquaintance, am trying to figure out which things I could be doing better, which ones I’m okay at, and whether magical or ritual work might actually help any of these. (The last one, naturally, is what makes it ‘witches’ of my acquaintance, rather than ‘people’)
My weekend, however, promises slightly more sanity: after some schedule conniptions, I have tonight free, am gaming tomorrow (after a walk with a friend), and have Sunday to work on a couple of larger projects (some form design for Pagan Pride Day, for example) before a new moon ritual in the evening.
Of course, there’s a lot of other miscellaneous tasks in there, too - I’ve got to go food shopping tonight for food for both tomorrow and Sunday (pepperoni, and a small chicken to roast) and I need to start a loaf of bread for ritual and so on and so forth. But I can also look forward to a nice long bath by candlelight, and reading, and good company, and those always improve my world.
More content forthcoming, maybe this weekend, maybe early next week.