[The following is something I've written up for internal coven documents, because I wanted to spell out what I thought my role was. I've run most of it by my covenmate, and included some other thoughts at her suggestion.]

Or, rather, I should say roles: I think there are a number of things going on here. To many people, the HPS is the one responsible for making sure the spiritual and religious stuff happens. At a basic level, there’s three parts to this, in my eyes: anchoring the spiritual core, providing direction, and making sure the practical details fall into place.

Anchoring the core:

No one group - no matter how fantastic, or how skilled the leadership – can be all things to all people. Part of creating the spiritual core is deciding what the core focus of the group will be – and what things are not on that group’s map, or are lesser parts of their work together. We have and must make choices. There are only 24 hours in the day.

Are we going to focus on being a working coven, with relationships developed over significant time? Or are we going to focus on training new witches? Are we going to focus on the use of music and dance in ritual, or something else? Are we going to be a small group, where everyone can fit around one table – or a larger community, with lots of people to talk to, but maybe less time to talk to each other one on one?

There isn’t one right answer here. While Phoenix Song is aiming at being a small working coven with a heavy emphasis on music and other arts in ritual, I deeply enjoyed my time in the group I trained in – what has now become a larger, enthusiastic training coven with many wonderful people.

Providing direction:

Rather than seeing or feeling energy, I ‘hear’ it – what you’d expect from a music major and composition geek. One thing that’s fascinated me since I started taking on various ritual roles is how the different roles sound to me.

Priestessing often sounds to me not like the melody (as you might assume), but like the bass line: the foundation that everyone else builds off of. Musically, these are things like what key and harmony we’re working within, or setting the pace we go at. Magically, It’s setting the basic functions, what possibilities might fit in the large cauldron of the song. As in music, everyone else gets some input – but we need to agree on some basic things, or it’s going to sound chaotic. And someone needs to make sure we’re all staying more or less on the same beat, and in the same key.

(Incidentally, I ‘hear’ the priest’s role as the melody: it is also crucial to the nature of the song, but it solidifies a particular line of potentials into something more clear-cut: it is a specific iteration, rather than the well of possibility. Consider also the elements of ‘conductor’ and ‘artistic director’ which are roles I think are more easily split by ritual leaders.)

There’s also the question of style. There are many types of music: most of us are good at some, but not all. The HPS who trained me, and who I love dearly, is such a Leo. She adores the shiny, and she radiates warmth and love and acceptance, and community simply by being there.

I tried, honestly, for about six months, to do what she did. It was always a struggle, always a constant effort. It was such an effort it got in the way of other important things. Details fell out of my head. I couldn’t relax and experience in ritual. By the end of six months, I could manage it for short periods, if I kept some of my concentration and focus on being open and welcoming in that style (and away from other needs). It never really got easier.

Me? I’m the water (and air) type. Where my former HPS is the fire at the center of the hearth, I’m the pool of water, or the well. I want to stand around it, and talk to you, and watch the dragonflies and the birds, and the ripples in the pool . Oh, but I want to talk. Talking to people, engaging the mind, is the way I best create and strengthen relationships. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the quiet presence, or the simple touch, or other modes – but the one that’s easiest for, the one that’s instinctual, is what’s going on in my head, and what’s going on in your head, and which bits we want to share, and why they’re interesting and linked to this other interesting thing.

Part of my hiving, therefore, was realizing that to be the best priestess I could be, to do the things that called to me, I needed to be working in a different bass line, a different song. One song isn’t better than another – but some fit us more closely than others.

Practical details:

This is the simplest of the functions in theory, though complex in practice. When and where are we gathering? What do we need for this ritual? Is anyone going to be absent? What needs to happen in order for all the spiritual work to go forward? What training or experience or skills do people need to participate most fully?

The priestess is not the only one taking care of these details. Delegation (and healthy delegation) is critical here. But if the priestess is responsible for keeping the spiritual work on track, then she’s got to keep an eye on these things.

That said, there are some other important roles here.

Incluer:

One of my friends, Jo Walton, is an SF author who coined the word ‘incluing’. She uses it to describe the process by which you tell the reader about details of your created world in small ways, without ever sitting down and dumping information on them.

I’ve thought a lot about the implications for coven work. Imagine that someone walks into a group I’m leading, (often a new and sometimes strange culture for newcomers.) In this case, people look for context. They are going to look at how I behave, and at how people behave towards me. A lot of that, in some ways, is seeking incluing: they are looking for small cues and details that help put what I’m doing into some sort of context they understand.

Now, making assumptions based only on these clues can be a bit dangerous – you may misinterpret something, or assume something is more or less important than it actually is. But the basic idea remains: what I do, how I behave, how I set that bass line and tone and key for the group is going to echo out in ripple effects.

It’s my job as priestess – as one of the people who most clearly have direct influence on the nature of the group – to be as careful as possible to be aware of those interactions, of what information I’m putting out for other people to pick up. It’s not just what I say, or how I respond to someone – it’s also in my body language, in the pauses in my speech, in all sorts of unconscious details. It’s also in how things like a problematic comment by someone else is handled. Are they slapped down in public, or quietly redirected in a gentle way? Which one’s appropriate in that setting?

I am obviously imperfect at tracking many of these things. I’m human, after all. But I do keep an eye on it, and I do think it’s important.

The one person who can’t simply walk away:

In some ways, the priestess is the one person who absolutely can’t walk away without fundamental change. If, as noted above, she’s the one who sets the spiritual work in place (and in many traditions, you can function, if needed, without a priest, but not the other way round), then there’s a logical outgrowth.

Anyone else up to and arguably including the high priest of the group, can theoretically decide to go do something else. There will be consequences if they do, of course, depending on how they handle it. But fundamentally, they have an easier time walking away: it’s elements of harmony and variation on the melody, rather than deciding which song we’re singing together and setting the foundation.

This is not to say that priestesses are irreplaceable. We are replaceable.

First, there is no one true perfect priestess. And second, it’s obviously a good idea to have a backup in case of illness or other emergency. But it is to say that they’re not interchangeable: the fundamental experience is – and really, *should* be – different, depending on who is running ritual.

Priestess and the Gods:

When I sent the first draft of this to my covenmate, she pointed out that I hadn’t talked a lot about the actual ritual steps: does the priestess mediate between participants and the Gods? Is there some other role? In many witchcraft traditions, people are considered to be their own priests and priestesses when it comes to their relationship with the Gods. I strongly agree with that: there is an element of personal responsibility and interaction that I think it is crucial.

Ritual is song, ritual is theatre, ritual is art: my job as priestess is to make sure it happens, and to keep it going, but I think it’s up to everyone else there to share in keeping the song going, to step into the experience, and to see what they will take away from it this time. One person might make a decision, another might decide a hard conversation with a loved one is needed. Someone else might feel comforted or enfolded. A fourth person may feel nudged to try something new. Very different answers, but all from the same basic situation.

That goes for people’s interactions with the Gods as well: my greatest hope is that I will help create and hold spaces where that happens regularly – but whether it does is not just about what I do, but about what other participants in the ritual do. I want to help – and Gods know, I will offer advice and analysis and theory discussion at the drop of a hat. But I also don’t have all the answers. I’d much rather help people figure out how to find them on their own.

Outside of ritual:

The other question my excellent covenmate asked me was about what happens outside of ritual.

I have this theory: inside of ritual, you may have different people than usual taking on specific ritual roles (priestess or priest for a given ritual, act as handmaiden or summoner, Draw Down, etc.) all of which depend on lots of other factors. In the training-centered group I hived from, this is an obviously important part of training.

But likewise, the HPS and HP over the overall group set a lot of the tone for group interaction outside of ritual. Done well, this creates a welcoming and thoughtful and caring space. Done poorly, people can feel left out, as the currents of the ritual group swirl around them, or even attacked or scapegoated. All of these things spill over into ritual: we are constantly changed and affected by our lives, and what happens in a coven meal after ritual is certainly part of that, no less than the ritual itself.

So, boiling this down, I feel I, as high priestess (and shared with the group’s high priest), am responsible for:

1) Setting the guidelines for the space:

I’m a big fan of the Greek idea of xenia or the guest/host relationship. In that, both sides have benefits – but they also have specific responsibilities. In all communities, there are some things that are utterly unacceptable, a lot of things that are iffy but possibly okay, and a bunch of things that are just fine. Some of these are big – murder, abuse. They’re obvious.

But many are small. How do you get into a conversation if people are talking rapidly and energetically without interrupting? Is it rude to correct a factual error someone’s made, or polite? (I spend time in communities where each of these is true.)

The trick is that the standards in Pagan settings are not always the same as in other places we spend time. I believe it’s part of the HPS’s job to help set the standards, and then to make sure the community standards are held to (as well as modeling and explaining them to new folks as needed.) I think everyone else in the community has responsibility for the group culture, as well, but it’s important to set the tone.

2) For generally modeling how I’d like people in the coven to treat each other

Beyond the above, I also think there are models of behavior. Someone studying, seeking to go through initiatory experiences, is often reshaping many of the ways they see the world. It’s important while that process is going on to have models to work from.

I thought a lot about this while I was in the process of getting divorced. I ended up talking a lot with several friends and acquaintances who’d been divorced, and looking at how people I respected and whose opinions I valued helped me handle some things better, and to deal with bouts of misery far more easily.

3) For setting the tone before and after ritual

I believe that a ritual event doesn’t just begin when we all form up in a circle, and end with the ‘merry meet and merry part and merry meet again’. It also begins when we’re setting up, when we’re talking beforehand, when we’re clearing things away, when we’re eating.

Phoenix Song has already made some steps in this direction: we’ve deliberately simplified our set-up so that it’s easy and stress-free for us, so we can focus on the details if we wish, but don’t feel overwhelmed. But it also can mean everything from drawing people out and asking questions, to making sure everyone gets a chance to speak. (This is, incidentally, the part I’m probably most nervous about.)

4) For making sure that people in crisis have a reliable, thoughtful, competent source to turn to if something goes wrong.

I don’t think that always has to be the HPS or HP: certainly it may make sense for someone to turn to a mentor, or to a covenmate with specific experience. But because all of these things come back into ritual eventually, if we’re doing this right, I do think the HPS and HP need to be aware of major concerns, etc. to balance and adjust appropriately in the planning.

This is a work in progress: there things I don’t know how I want to handle yet, because they haven’t come up in that specific way. On the other hand, I think this is a fairly clear idea of what I see my role as being – and how I see it playing out. The key with much of this is not about dictating something, or demanding something – but about being the kind of person that people who want that kind of space want to be around. Being that person consistently, even if I’m stressed or tired or crabby.

This is true of everyone, naturally. Just, the ripple effects are more obvious when there’s a clear group attached. What I do always has consequences, and the more I’m attentive to that, the better.

It’s also, of course, something that changes over time. The steps that are most important right now, when there are two of us looking at adding new people, are different than where we’ll be focusing (I hope!) in a few years with a stable small group who’ve worked together for a while. Which is the final role, I think: adapting gracefully and maturely to change.

The shiny new coven, Phoenix Song, celebrated our first Summer Solstice today.

It’s become the practice, in our tradition, to use the solstice as a time to revision the group for the coming year. (Yes, the timing’s a little odd, but it’s something that grew organically from stuff we were actually doing, and it turns out to work nicely.) What do we want to do together? What do we want things to be like? How do we want to honor where we’ve come from, while continuing to move forward?

In the group I hived from, the tradition has been to create something that is present in the temple all year as a reminder. In our case, that’s a little impractical (we’re doing ritual in two different spaces, and neither of us has space to spare.

We decided, instead, to do a deliberately impermanent piece of art. (Before I go any further, I want to be clear: L and I discussed whether we were okay with my posting photos, and she’s fine with it. While our interpretations and thoughts about some of this are private, the basic photos aren’t.)

L has a very lovely garden, in which she spends tremendous amounts of time. Her garden also has a flat paved part: this is what we used as our canvas. We used entirely natural ingredients: no artificial colorings like food coloring. We also paid attention to what will not cause havoc to L’s garden as things blow away, get rained on, etc.

Our materials included:

• bentonite clay (white)
• green french clay (the pale green)
• red french clay (the dusty red/brown)
• tumeric (the far more orange red/brown)
• dried safflower (the red/orange dried petals)
• dried lavender (the gray/purple ones)
• dried hibiscus (the dark red)
• rose petals (undried, from our friend’s garden last night: these are from a rose called Dart’s Dash)
• powdered eggshell - we tried something to get it to mesh to blue/purple, which did not work, but they produce a lovely dusty white that shades differently from the white clay.)
• marigold, dianthus, and a few other flowers from L’s garden.
• spoons and paper funnels to direct materials (and fingers!)

For next year, we’d really like something in the blue/purple range: this may prove to be tricky. We used far less of our materials than we’d anticipated: maybe 2 ounces each (and probably less) of the clays, and about an ounce or two of everything else. The finished space is about 8×6 feet, give or take.

Timing: I arrived at 1, we finished at 4. We didn’t do other formal ritual set-up, etc. but there was some setting up and getting things ready, and so on. It took less time than I was anticipating, but it was intense work.

If you’d like larger versions of the images (plus a couple I didn’t include here, you can go to my LiveJournal gallery.

Our workspace: note cat perfectly positioned for maximum difficulty. (This is L’s cat, a Bengal by breed. She was actually *very* good once we got started.)

Our first spiral: Everything starts at the center. Bentonite clay, red and green French clays, marigold.

Our first pause

(There was a second pause, too: check out the gallery for that one.)

We’re done:

My favorite detail shot (another in the gallery)

(People reading my LiveJournal already know this one): I finished some great conversations yesterday with the head of the school I work for, where we have found a way for me to earn enough more money I can afford to stop looking for a new job. This is very good, because the library job market right now is miserable, and this gives me some time to continue to build some specific skills and do more professional projects. (And continue working at a place I very much like, which is no small thing.)

The other side the good news is that this means I’m not moving any time soon, and thus, can truly make longer-term plans about the coven. This means I should probably start calling it by name, and note a few upcoming things.

Name: The shiny new coven’s name is Phoenix Song (my home tradition has a particular focus on the phoenix imagery), and I wanted a name that would bring together that focus with the group’s heavy focus on music and arts in ritual.

What’s coming: I do plan to have a very small website (elsewhere on this domain) by early fall. I’ll have a few more details up in a post soon about some of the structure and other choices (summarising much of what I’ve been talking about here.) We have plans to opening to considering new members sometime this fall, but exactly how is still in process, and we intend to proceed very slowly and gently.

Expect to see lots of discussion here, not so much about what we’ve chosen to do (though I’ll use it as an example) but as what I’m thinking about as I move forward with this, and what matters to me.

Friday rec:

Since I spent Monday making a new kind of bread, a bread recommendation.

I stumbled across The Fresh Loaf site a while back, and used the pita bread recipe linked from the right column of the main page with great success. They’ve got all sorts of great articles and comments and ideas for all levels of home baking.  (well, not bread machines, maybe. But everything else.) Also many really nifty recipes, many of which have photos and other commentary.

Bread is one of the most magical and nifty things I do. First, the whole process of baking bread is about transformation and change and getting something new, nourishing, and powerful out of some pretty minimal ingredients.

But more than that, it’s such a sensory process. There’s the dusting of the flour on your hands, the sweetness of the honey, the feel of the dough as you knead it, the delight of hands in warm olive-oil rich dough in the winter. I take a great joy in having fresh, homemade bread, for ritual, too.

If you’re at all interested in making your own bread, go check them out.

Something to be going on with, while I get through my last week of work before the summer. (Working for a school has some schedule benefits. The not-getting-paid for 3 months of time off, however, is not the fun part.)

So, tonight, I show up at L’s home, my covenmate, for what was supposed to be a scheduled role-playing game night (we play about once a month with several of my former groupmates. Yes, we’re geeks, but we have fun.) Due to computer emergencies requiring urgent repair, gaming got cancelled while I was on my way there. So, we hang out, she feeds me fabulous food (hamburgers from humanely raised reasonably local cow, and homemade hamburger buns, and and…), and somewhere in the food prep, I say

Me: Hey - I tried out new adventures in bread baking last night. I made pita bread.

L: You did? I did too!

We blink at each other in mutual amusement, comment about how it was surprisingly easy and fun, and we plan to do it again. We wander off to other subjects, and sometime later…

Me: Y’know, when I did the pita bread, I ended up using half whole wheat: it came out surprisingly well, I was really pleased.

L (looking at me slightly oddly): I did too. And yes - they did come out well.

We wander off to other topics again. Another 20 minutes down the line…

Me: Ok, I’d ask if you used honey and olive oil, but that’s probably a given.

L: Yes. But yes.

(Those being our general preferences for bread baking for the sugar + fat component in bread when needed.)

At this point, I decided I should probably blog it, just for everyone else’s amusement.

Ah, well. We’re nicely matched up, at least. And we can talk endlessly about making good bread. There are far worse things to have in the world.

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.

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.)

I actually really like the equinoxes though I know many people who struggle with them. I like the fall because, well, it’s my birthday (specifically, the 22nd), and I can’t think of a better way to spend it than ritual and feasting afterwards.

The spring, I enjoy because I love that moment of balance and quiet before the spring starts bouncing out in all due force. Minnesota is weird: some months, spring comes quickly, and if we’re lucky, it falls on a weekend. Some years, winter drags its feet about leaving (like this one, apparently: it was 35 and clear and melted snow on Thursday. Friday? 3+ inches of snow.)

Anyway, Thursday, before a busy SF con filled weekend, we did our first Sabbat ritual. Have a photo of the altar after we dyed eggs. You can see the altar here - it’s had a little photo editing done, as I am apparently incapable of pouring red wine into a cup on a white cloth without spilling some.

You can see the eggs on the left: we each wrote words or designs in wax pencil on the egg, and then dyed them whatever color seemed appropriate (using a ‘dowsing’ sort of method: hold the egg over the dye cups briefly and see which way they feel pulled.) We then used them as a divinatory/oracular source; what did the color + design suggest to us?

Some of them were fascinating: the red one, for example, says “Remember this color”, and it’s a gorgeous bright red. (Or was.)

This is the picture of our feast afterwards. One of our group goals/desires is good food and drink. This is what happens when you clear off the altar desk and use it for a dinner table. You see here, left to right:

• green beans, tomatoes (from my covenmate’s garden last summer) and garlic
• challah bread (same loaf as on the altar, obviously. It did try to take over the world, but was delicious. Recipe in Reichart’s Breadbaker’s Apprentice)
• The glass bowl has chicken salad - it had parsley and other green herbs in it, and tasted absolutely like spring. (We made sandwiches using the challah bread.)
• devilled eggs (in this case, made with mayo, mustard, and dill, with more dill as a garnish. I like dill. So does L.) Made, of course, using the eggs from ritual.

And liquid - wine from the same bottle as for ritual for L, who wasn’t driving shortly, and water (in the horse mug on the side of the table) for me.

We are currently alternating hosting rituals: this is my tiny little house: the curtains behind the altar lead into my bedroom alcove (big enough for my bed, a bookcase, a freestanding closet, and the desk when it’s not being an altar. Which altar tools we use depend a bit who’s hosting; whoever hosts mostly provides things like the water/salt/incense holders from our own tools right now.

Last night, as I mentioned, was the first ritual for my new group. While I want to keep the details private, I do want to talk about the process a bit.

Ritual for 2 people is different: We paid attention to this in our planning, but as we all know, plans and reality are not the same thing. This isn’t to say things flopped - just that there are things we want to continue adjusting.

Both of us, obviously, have group experience (in sizes ranging from about 5 to 20). We both have personal ritual experience. This was somewhere in the middle: a need to say things outloud, because there’s another person who doesn’t know all the details of what’s inside your head.

But at the same time, not needing to play things large enough that someone across the room can see and follow intimately, because we were rarely more than an arm-length away. Most of it worked just fine (especially if taken in the “Some of this is slightly silly for two people, but is a good habit for when there are more”, which we were.)

But we did have a couple of notes: despite it being somewhat silly to have two chalices on the altar (one of which, in our practice, is drained by the high priestess after the Great Rite, and one of which is shared as part of Cakes and Ale), we actually wanted to do that next time (this time, we had one, and split it.) Never say that energy doesn’t make a difference… It also takes a certain amount of just going ahead and doing things (like singing) even though they are not quite ideal for 2 people. Once we started, we were fine, though.

Naming and blessing: For the actual “There is now a group” naming part, we borrowed something out of an idea in Judy Harrow’s Wicca Covens, which goes like this:

• Take a pitcher of suitable liquid, enough to fill the cups of everyone present.
• Pour out a cup of liquid for each person.
• Each person, in turn, names something they want to have be a part of the group, and pours a little bit of liquid from their cup back to the pitcher.
• When your cups are empty, pour back out of the pitcher (the mingled hopes for the group) into each cup. Drink.

We did a couple of slight variations on this.

1. We used mead - after some discussion of best liquid choice, and we liked it a lot for this use (for the sweetness, the symbology that comes with honey and bees, of effort and practicality, and for the condensed light that’s so present in it.)
2. We had a little extra in the pitcher, which then went into the cup for the Great Rite.
3. We echoed the other person’s phrase as they poured.
4. We ended with two general statements intended to cover anything we’d managed to leave out somehow.
5. I wrote down the items as we said them: the list is a full length of notebook paper, so there’s 20+ things listed.

Joint meditation:
The other part of our work was preparatory for some tradition specific things we intend to do in early March. This bit is totally irrelevant to people not in the group, but there’s one bit I want to talk about.

I have, through the years, developed the useful talent of being able to write while in a meditative trance state. I find it most useful for doing astral work or shared meditation work. (There are times I can’t do it, but I’ve done it in .. oh, 95% of my personal meditation work over the last 3 years.) This has the handy benefit of producing a written record that can be transcribed later, which is particularly useful when forming something that you want to have last and grow. (And yet, meant we didn’t have to stop after ritual and try to get down all the details immediately: I just quickly checked my notes to make sure they were sufficiently legible.)

The trick, of course, is that you need to be able to write sufficiently legibly with your eyes closed (which is what I do), or theoretically, stay in trance with your eyes open (which I suppose is possible, but not a talent I have: blinking tends to disrupt me.) I can actually manage to do basic sketches, as well. I go through a number of sheets of paper (stuff that’s been printed on one side would be a fine thing: you just need to be able to turn the page when you think you’ve run out of space.) I write down words, phrases, quick arrows, and aim for “will trigger more specific memories when I look at them”.

This is a talent I discovered the first time I played a party game called Cranium, which asks people to do various tasks (one of which is drawing with your eyes closed). My point is not necessarily that you should pick up *this* skill (though it’s handy, I have no idea how to teach it to anyone), but to figure out how to apply the skills you have.

I’m in the midst of the next post in the Seeker series, but I want to pause here - because tomorrow night is the first working for my new group.

The upcoming workings (currently scheduled through Beltane) are being done with a longtime friend and covenmate, and are intended to give me a chance to try out some things before settling into a pattern (and to give her a chance to get a chance to try out some new things). And, of course, the “Not quite sure where I’m going to end up job-wise, so can’t make longer-term plans yet.”

We’re both excited.

Tomorrow’s working is by way of being a preparatory working - setting up some patterns for future use, so that we don’t need to do it next month (when we actually will need it for one of our tradition-specific rituals). We’re also trying out a new circle cast (that I finished Wednesday), new quarter calls, and maybe some new other things. We wanted to start simple, before we get to the more complex work coming up. (You can tell that she’s an engineer by training, and I’m a librarian: we prefer our change in stages where we can isolate what happened if something goes wacky.)

I have bread rising (a variant of my spice and honey loaf that I hope will work), and I’m now comfortably trying to figure out last minute details. But there’s always last minute details.

1) Do we want to try a new chant or two? Which ones? Should I make a mix CD of background music for some of this?

2) What do I want to wear, and how does that set the tone for what we do going forward? (Hey, by this point, I have a range of ritual clothing.) What jewelry do I want to wear, and what are the ritual implications of it? (I have a number of specifically dedicated or focus pieces.)

3) Thinking about various parts of what I’m responsible for tomorrow, and how I want to approach them (quarter calls, deity call, etc.) Have I forgotten anything? I’m a big fan of “Begin as you mean to go on” these days, so I want to make sure I think of things in advance.

4) Remembering to pack various and sundry things. (We are, for the time being, alternating locations between her home and mine.)

So, Wednesday night, I showed up at my friend L’s house, and in the hour before we left for our evening meeting, we came up with a plan.

Our basic outline:

We currently have 6 rituals planned out through Beltane:

• February 16th : A full moon
• March 8th: A tradition specific one
• March 20th: Combined spring equinox (the 19th) and full moon (the 21st)
• April 5th: A new moon
• May 3rd: Beltane

I’m going to stop attending rituals with my current group on March 7th, but L’s going to continue ritual with them for the time being, so part of our scheduling is about not requiring her to be in two places at the same time.

We also need to schedule an evening of prep work for the March 8th ritual: this may not be a full blown ritual set-up, though.

Our goals:

Our immediate goals look something like this:

Goal 1) A regular ritual cycle.

We’re eventually aiming for Sabbats, full moons, and some sort of shared practice or focus for new moons (but not necessarily a group ritual or even getting together.) You’ll notice that this isn’t there yet. That’s because of goal 2.

Goal 2) Not overwhelming ourselves.

We want time to think about each ritual, and to have time to deconstruct and fiddle and play with things in the planning stages. (Plus, we’re starting from scratch on these, in many ways.) We also are working around L’s ongoing commitments elsewhere.

Thus, we’re aiming at 1-2 rituals per month for the immediate future (and expecting we’ll be getting together for dinner to talk and plan more often.) The fact that the Sabbats and full moons are tending to line up close together in early 2008 doesn’t hurt here, actually (especially after avoiding whatever day the current group is scheduled for.)

Goal 3) To spend these rituals doing some work toward determining ongoing deity work.

Core discussions about the tradition have come down to the agreement that our initiatory deities should be the same, but that moons and Sabbats are open to other combinations than we currently work with. I am fond of those deities, but not particularly pulled towards them (and L feels the same way), so exploration seems in order.

Discussion and thought has lead us toward three potential pairs (possibly with a summer/winter model or exchange), and so our first four rituals are going to include work with each of them in turn. At that point, we’ll evaluate and see if there’s something we want to have turn into a longer-running set of work/exploration, or not.

Goal 4) To share ritual writing and responsibility for the time being.

Eventually, I’d like to go to a more complex model, but for two people, collaboration is great and in many ways, ideal. We are going to explore how 2 person rituals are different from rituals designed for 8-20 people (the sizes we have the most experience with.) and I expect to write quite a lot more about that as we try things out.

What’s after that?

I’m desperately hoping that I’ll have a good idea of long-term job choices by Beltane, in which case we can move forward with longer-term plans. We do not want to open up to other potential members, never mind potential students, until we’re sure I’m going to stay in the area.

If we don’t know where I’ll be by early April, we’ll schedule some more, and come up with some other things to try. (One we know we want to do, but that isn’t currently scheduled, is a Roman feast, complete with garum, or at least as close an approximation as we’re going to get.)

The thing we’re not worried about is seeing each other for discussion: I’ve ended up over there for dinner about every third week, easily, and it’s something we enjoy a tremendous amount. Or tea. Or walking. Or gardening, when it stops being winter.