thoughts from a threshold

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.

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.

1. 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.)
2. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.