Limen: Thoughts from a threshold

There is no year of my life that has not, at some fundamental level, been wrapped up in the academic calendar.

My father was a university professor: our family vacations ran on his schedule.

Then there were my years of pre-school, elementary school, junior high, high school, and boarding school (a new and different schedule, that, but still, in principle the same.) College.

Working for my college for the year after graduation. I had very little to do with students, in general (I was doing web and project design for faculty), but you could still feel the ebb and flow of the school no matter what else happened.

I moved to Minnesota, for one year *not* working for a school - but in graduate school myself part time.

And then I began my current job, where I’ve been since fall of 2000, working in an independent day school. There are many things I love about it.

One of them is how often I get to pause and reflect on how much I love it. Every year, the last week teachers are around, there’s a parade of special lunches, ceremonies, in between the meetings. Some of the process gets a little tedious - but many of them help me remember just how fantastic the people I work with are, how neat the kids are, why I enjoy getting up almost every morning. (Almost. I *am* human, after all.)

And then there’s the part we’re in right now. The beginning of the year.

It’s unusually exciting this year. We’ve moved my desk (in the hopes being in the office will make noise-distractable me a) less stressed and b) more productive). We’ve negotiated some new duties that make my salary manageable, but that give me some significant challenges. And we have new carpet (the original, from the early 70s addition, was in place until last week) and a little new paint.

We come back a week before the faculty (who will be here next week.) They’re already trickling back to look at rooms and have initial meetings with colleagues, and it’s hard to go an hour without someone stopping by to chat about their summer (always too short!) and what they have in mind.

I’ve been sorting magazines (we get about 50), a process that always brings the news of the summer back in rush. Later this week, I get to start updating our patron database (something that has to be done manually.) And next week, we’re back to meetings and faculty gatherings. The week after that, students.

All of them remind me of cycles and new beginnings, and new possibilities. I love that.

But it’s also sometimes a little weird: it’s obviously (and for some historical reasons) off kilter from the traditional agricultural busy points. Just when my religious life is telling me to go be introspective and reflective, my work life is getting hectic with major projects. Just when my religious life is telling me to work hard on goals and projects, my schedule drops out from beneath me, and I often find myself somewhat adrift as summer vacation hits.

Now, there are advantages to some of this: four of the eight Sabbats fall in my vacations generally, so it can be easier for me to prepare in an unhurried way for ritual. I get a natural sense of ebb and flow to my schedule: things build and then diminish. I’m constantly turning from project to project as cycles shift and different things become easier to work on. I’m never bored.

But at the same time, it does give me a strange perspective on the Wheel of the Year. And one I think I’m never going to quite shake, even if I eventually end up working somewhere that isn’t a school.

[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.

I’ve been quiet for a few days, because I was busily off at the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention (I had a fabulous time and I am already looking forward to next year: many excellent conversations with interesting people about books and thoughts and the world in general.) It’s also sparked some thoughts about some things I really want to change in my life, and more on that in the coming days.

Today, though, a short post on something I was discussing else-net. One of the panels I was at this weekend was about the issue of message in a story: is it a good idea to be deliberately push buttons in your readers to make a point?

Emma Bull (one of the panelists, and one of my favorite authors to boot) made a comment I’ve been thinking about ever since: that all stories have your assumptions about how the world works. This comes through in the story, no matter what else you do.

This got me thinking. Ritual is, in many ways, a story.

Rituals are also stories, in their own way. Not in the sense they always have a plot, mind you - but in the sense that they have a context they exist in (what’s in their world), that stuff happens (there is a change between the beginning state and the end state of some kind), and that the successful ones have some kind of desireable emotional effect (because otherwise, we would eventually find them boring and never do them again.)

It’s that context (and my assumptions) that defines a ritual. And it’s how it works out for me that makes a ritual satisfying or meaningful (or, when it doesn’t work, frustrating and unsatisfying.)

And, likewise: if I do a given ritual only once, it still has a context: there are reasons that make sense to me that are why that ritual was that way. When I am done with the ritual, those reasons do not fall out of my head and cause a state of ritual experience amnesia: they continue to be part of my understanding of ritual experience, and how I’ll experience other rituals in the future, for good or bad.

It’s this, I think, that make public rituals so tricky: people bring such different experiences and contexts to them, that planning for all of their past experiences and buttons and such is just as complicated as writing a story (or novel, or whatever) that everyone will like. It is, however, a way I haven’t looked at writing ritual, and I think I’m going to keep it in mind for the next public ritual I do (probably for this year’s Pagan Pride, since the board traditionally does the opening ritual, and sometimes the closing one.)

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.)