The Twelve Wild Swans

by Starhawk

  A very different pilgrimage ritual form was created by Reclaiming’s Multicultural Ritual Group in the early 1990s. Instead of working within a magic circle tightly bound in time, we were able to have rituals that lasted an entire day and evening. The transition into sacred space was made not by casting a circle, but by the entrance into ritual space, where black cloth was hung to make a winding maze. At the turning points, priestesses were stationed to challenge participants, perhaps asking, “What is your pride in your heritage?” or offering a pinch of salt to place in a bowl of water to symbolize the tears we shed for our ancestors’ pain.

  In one ritual, we had a huge altar to honor the ancestors of many cultures. As participants emerged from the entrance, they were welcomed and brought into an African singing game. Then they were free to visit the other altars, each of which included interactive processes: questions to answer, things to write or do, stories to listen to. We had an altar that was a shattered mirror with the simple legend “We have all been victims of violence.” Another altar acknowledged the perpetrators of violence, with questions such as “What turns an innocent baby into a torturer?” We had an altar for those who resisted oppression and fought for justice, one that included pictures, collages, tapes of Union songs, and a large board where we could write our own family stories. In the center was a healing altar—a pool created with a huge wooden bowl and an overhanging leaning tree—that provided pillows, massage, and a chance to express our grief. Each altar offered participants a strip of cloth to take, to symbolize the stages of their journeys.

  In the ritual, we later divided into small groups, where we told our own ancestor stories and braided our strips of cloth together. Each small group then tied their braids into a rope, and those ropes were then tied into one long, long strand. We had built a basket form that stood in the center of the circle. Singing and chanting, we literally wove an ancestor basket from that long rope and raised a cone of power to charge it with the energies of healing and transformation.

  Portals

  A transformed space can itself become an opening to another realm and a deeper level of experience. Pomegranate is an artist and painter as well as a priestess and teacher. “As an artist,” she says, “I’m either painting a portal, where people are going to pass through into another realm, or painting an invocation, where something is going to come into this realm. That’s my work as a priestess, too. Everything I do—decorating my house, working in the garden, talking to the plant spirits—it’s all about portals and invocations. The house is a shrine; the garden is a shrine. That’s the work of the shaman—to open a gateway and then to invoke and make offerings of healing and gratitude.”

  El Dia de los Muertos, November 2, is the traditional time in Latino communities for honoring the ancestors and the dead. In San Francisco, that night is marked by a candlelit procession through the streets that ends in a ritual in a small park, near housing projects, that has been the scene of violence and murders.

  Many people in our Bay Area Reclaiming groups participate in the event and help with the planning. Juan Pablo Gutierrez and Rosa de Anda are two of the major organizers of the event. They have carefully considered the problems of orchestrating an outdoor ritual for thousands of people with no sound system. Artists, youth, old people, and neighborhood volunteers come together to create postmodern, multimedia art-installation altars based on the Latino tradition of building altars for the dead. The park is transformed. Shootings and gang fights are suspended for a night, while the whole neighborhood turns out to wander among the amazing altars, to sing, drum, and dance together. People light candles and pray, make offerings to their ancestors, or perform rituals from their tradition. One year, the ground was covered with puddles from a recent rain. A group of youth surrounded the largest puddle with greenery to protect people from slipping in it. They placed floating candles on the water, and it became a magic pool. Throughout the night, I saw people gather together in rapt meditation at the mud puddle. It had truly become a portal, a basket to carry us between the worlds.

  Ritual Drama

  A ritual can also enact a story. Ritual drama does not have to be wailing Greek choruses or highly costumed actors spouting memorized lines. In fact, unless the priestesses involved are truly connected to their intention behind the drama, the dramatic aspects will serve to distance the circle, warns Marnie, who teaches theater and mask work as well as magic. She is brilliant at combining some of the aspects of theater games, role-playing, and improvisational humor to create a transformational experience.

  When we taught together on the Vermont team in 1999, our theme was the pentacle of life: birth, initiation, ripening, reflection, and death. Death, of course, leads back to birth. The team decided to start the ritual cycle with death, but because that ritual occurred very early in the week, we didn’t want to overwhelm the group with grief and loss before they’d had a chance to bond. We knew that death was an important issue for that community. One beloved woman had died of liver cancer two years before. Another woman active in the local community had recently lost her husband. And others were struggling with serious and possibly terminal illnesses.

  During the invocations, we honored those who had died by singing “Weaver, Weaver” (see The Pagan Book of Living and Dying), a beautiful and haunting lament. While people were still in a sad and quiet state, Kitty came forward.

  Kitty, our first second-generation Witchcamp teacher, is a brilliant biologist who also looks stunning in gold lamé. Nobody can play the gracious hostess better than she. She informed us that because it was still so early in camp, the teachers wanted people to get to know each other. We were asked to circulate around the group, introducing ourselves and letting people know what we did back home.

  Instantly the ritual circle became a cocktail party as people milled about. Although we had planned this section of the ritual purely as a setup for what was to follow, I found myself learning new things about people I’d known for years and enjoying it a great deal.

  Our ritual space is a high, pristine meadow on a mountainside. Suddenly, we heard the roar of an engine, and a pickup truck careened up the grassy road, blaring loud music from the radio. It swung into the edge of our circle and stopped. Headlights pierced the fire circle. Everyone became silent, with just the music blaring. Some people were moving unobtrusively away from the “scene” as fast as possible, while others quickly moved forward to protect the circle.

  The music stopped, and the doors were flung open. Out came a figure in a baseball cap, flannel shirt, and overalls, smoking a rolled cigarette (strictly prohibited!). The campers who had come forward approached with alarm and asked the driver of the truck what they could do for him. Even though they were looking directly into the interloper’s face, it took them a few long seconds to register that this was Marnie, who truly has the ability to transform herself into another character.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she demanded, swaggering up to the fire circle and putting her foot on a log, drawing on her cigarette in silence as she looked around the group. “Who told you you could have a party here? This is my land. My name is Mort.”

  After talking back and forth with several campers who challenged him, Mort proceeded to tell us that if we were going to have a party on his land, we had to play by his rules, which were these. We were to sing and dance. Mort would secretly tap a few of us and turn us into Morts. The rest of us wouldn’t know who the Morts were, but if we were dancing with someone who squeezed our hands twice, we had to die—to go over to the “graveyard” by the fire and lie down. (We based this on the old party game Murder.) We began madly dancing and singing:

  Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think,

  Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink,

  The years go by, as quickly as a wink,

  So enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself,

  it’s later than you think!

  Beverly and I stood in the center and drummed. One by one, people began falling
. Periodically, Mort would blow his whistle, everything would stop, and other teachers would make reassuring “official announcements”: “This is just to inform you that the Committee on Public Safety has investigated this situation and ascertained that there is no immediate danger to the public!”

  The dance would resume, and the deaths would continue. On the surface, the mood was lighthearted and hilarious. But as more and more people fell away, an uneasy undertone began to grow. The game slowly seemed more and more real.

  Finally Raven, one of the camp organizers and a lifelong political activist, could stand it no longer. “What are we doing?” she cried out. “Why are we singing and dancing when our friends are dying?” We hadn’t planned her intervention, but it was perfect. “Somebody kill that woman!” I called, and she was rapidly assassinated.

  Another woman, Joan, ill with life-threatening cancer, kept dancing and singing and not getting killed. When Mort finally went up to her, she approached him and said, “Thank, God! Somebody finally killed me!” and went gratefully down to die.

  After everyone had died and was lying still and cold on the ground, I moved into the center and began the drum trance.

  The trance took us fairly quickly through death, but we spent a long time letting go of our bodies, step by step, letting them decay into the earth and feed the billion hungry mouths of the soil, the creatures that take us back into our original elements, which become food for roots and grasses and trees. As the dead lay looking up at the stars, I had them imagine the night sky as the womb/cauldron of the Goddess, the stars as all the new possibilities that could be born.

  “It was a deep experience, to lie there and to let go of the body,” Joan said later. “By the time Mort squeezed my hands, I was so grateful I said, “Thank God!” I was far outside of the fire circle. As I hit the cold ground I thought, ‘How am I going to get through the rest of this ritual?’ But as I lay there, something floated through my body, and I could feel the cold seep away into the ground. It came to me that the ritual was quite real to me because I really was facing my own death. The question arose: Was I going to be able to let go of my life essence? My partner? Again, something floated through my body, left me, and sank deep into the ground. I became the ground. The peace I felt was profound. When it was time to rise, I realized that my connection to life had changed.”

  Eventually, we rose again and danced ourselves back into life.

  True humor is of depth, Marnie reminds us: “Just think of the times you’ve been in deep trauma, when humor has come ripping through and you laugh uproariously through your tears. We are, in reality, maybe laughing and alive one minute and maybe without warning we are dead the next. The priestess who makes the transition from a ‘light’ game to a deep trance must be strongly feeling the integration of life and death. If she can go to a truly deep place in the midst of laughter and chaos, she can then drop the group into a deep emotional and spiritual state. Experience and confidence are helpful in making this type of transition work, but most important is working from the heart.”

  Mummer’s Plays

  One way to gain experience or to experiment with ritual drama on a smaller scale is with mummer’s plays. Mummer’s plays were brought to Reclaiming by Pandora, who has a background both in theater and in medieval studies. Mummer’s plays are miniplays on a sacred theme that are brought to an audience in a place where people gather. In medieval times, they might have been performed outside the church or in the market square. At a gathering, they might happen in the dining hall or on a path people take to go to a session. At a demonstration, they can take on a political theme and become street theater.

  One year at the British Columbia Witchcamp, a group of students enacted the children’s story of “Hortense Lays an Egg” in mime over a period of several days, appearing on the path to the dining hall or down by the lake at unexpected moments. In California, two women who had environmental sensitivities and were being made ill by other people’s scents and bug sprays got tired of making plaintive announcements, dressed up as bandits complete with the masks they used to protect themselves, and raided the dining hall. A mummer’s play might also enact a myth or even retell a nighttime story in a new way.

  Mummer’s plays and street theater are often effective ways to communicate a political message as well. Dancing sea turtles may be more effective than a hundred speeches at calling attention to the destructive impact on the environment of the World Trade Organization’s rulings.

  The Perfect Act

  A ritual may also be built around a simple, perfect action that the group takes. Such a ritual is much less dependent on any individual’s skill or brilliance. When we plunge into the ocean for cleansing at sunset on the Winter Solstice, that act alone will change our consciousness. When we each step up to Brigid’s cauldron to make a pledge, we are individually responsible for the depth and intensity of our work. The priestesses and ritual structure can create a setting conducive to transformation: the invocations can draw in power, the chants can create an energy base, but no one person is responsible for guiding the transformative work.

  Action can also intensify the work of a drum trance or a drama. In Missouri last year, our theme was weaving. In one ritual, we invited the group into the House of Spiders to weave. People were given rolled balls of pastel yarn and asked to toss them across the circle, back and forth, creating a web that glowed beautifully in the moonlight.

  When the web was woven, we danced with it joyfully, until the drum trance leader began to spin a meditation that identified the web with all the structures of society that confine us. We were directed to drop the web on top of ourselves. Instantly we were all immobilized in the tangle. We were asked to think about the political, economic, and social structures that tie us down, to attempt to move and literally feel where we were held back and how firmly we were caught.

  We let our voices raise energy. Slowly, priestesses began to move around the edges of the web, with scissors to help us get free. But we were not allowed to simply discard the strands of the web. Instead, we were asked to roll them up again, to take back the energy that had confined us and transform it into the creative power we could use to reweave our lives as we wished them to be.

  At the California camp, we led a very similar ritual in the dark of the moon. There was no light to see by, and participants were at first utterly incredulous at the idea that they were expected to roll up all that yarn in the dark. We almost had an outright rebellion. But as they began to work, they got involved in the challenge. People who had flashlights helped those who didn’t. Small teams developed, and groups cooperated to help each other. They searched the ground to find the last lost threads. They became the living model of the web of interconnectedness that could underlie a new vision.

  Praising and Invoking

  A ritual intention may also be simply to invoke the powers that sustain our lives and offer praise and thanksgiving. Its form may be simple, organic, and fluid.

  One year at mid-Atlantic camp, our theme was “The Charge of the Goddess,” the beautiful liturgy by Doreen Valiente that is widely used throughout the Craft. One section of the Charge says: “May there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.”

  We had used those pairs of qualities in many rituals throughout the week. On the night we worked with beauty and strength, we set up a simple ritual format. “We decided to do it simply,” Pomegranate remembers, “just to offer praise and gratitude and thanks, and be present as fully as we could.” In the center was an area where people could come and dance, express their own beauty, and be witnessed. Around the edge, others sang, danced, and kept the energy base high. The drummers stood together and kept the energy flowing. We sang a beauty chant and let people move in and out of the center. For about three hours, we sang and danced together, then let the energy peak and ground.

  This ritual form has a tribal feel. Its power is not dependent on any one person’s skill or b
rilliance, but on the willingness of the group to support and feed the energy of the whole.

  Weaving the Basket: Safety in Ritual

  As leaders, we are responsible for the safety of the circles we create. But the paradox we face is that transformative change requires risk. To gather power, we must be willing to face great challenges, to be brave, courageous, willing to take a stand. Of course, there are days when we feel like echoing three-year-old Kore, who, on being told she was a brave girl after having a piece of glass dug out of her heel, said, “I don’t like brave! Brave is stupid!”

  How do we be brave without being stupid? The risks that build our power come from the challenges of our internal healing and from the real situations we face in the outer world. The challenges that make us feel stupid are the ones that arise from badly conceived and ill-thought-out rituals.

  We cannot make anyone heal. We cannot force or manipulate anyone into facing their challenges, nor can we bully anyone into empowerment. The challenges that empower are those that we freely choose to face. So when we create a ritual that offers a chance to deal with powerful material, we must always offer a choice. That choice might be built into a trance: “And breathe deeply, and ask your deep self if this is the right journey for you to make tonight. And if not, what is right for you might be just to remain here in your place of power, exploring, deepening your connections. And if it is…”