by Starhawk
Pain is not always where we expect it to be. Over decades of taking people on inner journeys, I’ve found that most people will quite happily dive into the depths of hell, but many will fall apart when we go to places of ecstasy and celebration. If we feel isolated, if the erotic has been for us a place of abuse and humiliation, we may feel unimaginable pain at the expectation of dancing with others in love and connection. If we were to take people to an envisioned Temple of Love and Desire, we might create a “pavilion” just before the gates, where participants can stay for the duration of the trance if entering the temple itself is too painful. Sometimes we literally create a pavilion in one corner of the ritual space, with pillows, blankets, and somebody to tend.
Choice is also something to consider in the construction of our imagery, especially in leading trance. Part of our work is to face difficult and dangerous parts of ourselves, but the trance must be constructed with a kind of openendedness. Not “You look down the road, and you see your worst fear,” but “You look down the road, and if it’s right for you, one of your fears appears. It may be just a small fear, or it may be a big fear, but it’s the fear you are ready to look at right now…”
Another way we create safety in Reclaiming rituals is by not using drugs or allowing the use of drugs or alcohol in ritual space. Many people in our community are in recovery from addictions, and this agreement supports their growth and healing. But even those of us who like a glass of wine with dinner find that we enjoy the atmosphere of our public rituals more without the presence of alcohol or drugs. We can take people into deep and vulnerable places and feel confident about bringing them back only when we know no physical or chemical influences will prevent their return. People who attend a ritual advertised as drug and alcohol free are more likely to be those interested in serious magical work, not “party Pagans.”
Support Roles
In a coven or close circle, we can do deep work because we have the support of the group. We know each other, and we have worked to build intimacy. In a Witchcamp, we can take people into deep places because we have a cast of thousands—or, at least, ten to a dozen—taking on different support roles. One person might be leading a trance; others might be deep witnessing, tending, gracing, wrangling.
Many of these support roles are useful in any large-scale or public ritual:
TENDERS: Tenders circulate through the group, keeping an eye open for someone who might be in trouble. Tending requires sensitivity, good boundaries, and a high level of comfort with strong emotions. We teach tenders not to automatically comfort someone who is weeping or wailing. The person who is sobbing is able to express her emotions and is moving energy. She may be having the breakthrough she’d been waiting years for, and smothering her in a hug might simply shut her down.
Instead, we look at more subtle cues to tell us if people are truly in need of help. Are they breathing? Where is their breath moving in their body? Are they stuck in one position? Do they appear shut down? How does their energy feel?
When I tend, I first move quietly into the aura of the person I suspect needs help. I might use my hands, or just my inner senses, to “taste” the quality of her energy. Do my hands itch to give her a brushdown? What do I start to feel in the pit of my stomach? Is she grounded?
Before I make direct contact, I ground myself and anchor to my core. Sometimes just standing next to a person and solidly grounding yourself will help her ground. Breathing deeply will help open her breath.
It’s wise to ask permission before touching someone. Unexpected physical touch can restimulate old memories of abuse.
If someone does need help in the midst of a ritual, I work with him on an energetic level, getting him to breathe, ground, release what is blocking him, and move the energy through. I don’t fish for personal details or information about the block; I am not this person’s therapist. If he volunteers information, I am receptive, but I don’t attempt to solve his problems or give advice. My goal in tending is to make sure the person is fully back in his body and not overwhelmed by energies or emotions. I might suggest he seek support in some way after the ritual or workshop is over.
DEEP WITNESSES: Deep witnessing is a role invented by Cybele, who perceived that we needed a role that would balance the intensity of the energies we were working with in some rituals. The deep witness is a useful role in a ritual where we expect deep work to be done, energies to be raised that may be difficult to contain or focus, or aspects of the Goddess or Gods to be called in to the priestesses. In a long ritual, deep witnesses may take shifts, and for a very large ritual we might have more than one.
The deep witness sits in a comfortable position in a protected corner of the ritual space, under a veil, and goes into dropped and open attention. She holds the ritual in her attention throughout the working, viewing it from “below.” She may visualize the entire ritual taking place on her plane of attention, or, to use Cybele’s image, she might let her attention sweep around the circle like a radar scope.
When a deep witness is present, the energy of the circle feels more coherent. The priestesses need to expend less of their own energy to keep the group focused. Deep witnesses sometimes receive information about the ritual or see visions. The meditative state has been described as “the next best thing to LSD.”
Although deep witnesses appear to be doing nothing, the work of staying in meditation for a long period of time is intense. When David witnessed the Spiral Dance, he described the experience as “the hardest magical work I’ve ever done.”
Deep witnessing is also one of those techniques that actually can be dangerous. The deep witness must be clear on the difference between observing the energy of the ritual and running the energy. Her job is not to ground the energy, channel it through her body, or attempt to affect it: doing any of those things from the deep witness state can be extremely draining and may even lead to illness. The deep witness simply observes. We affect what we observe: by holding the ritual as a whole in her attention, the deep witness makes it whole.
Before experimenting with deep witnessing, you should be able to ground easily and almost automatically. You should regularly work with an anchor and, again, be able to use it automatically to bring you back to your core worth state. And you should have a regular meditation practice that includes dropped and open attention. These are some of the safeguards that allow us to work in this state of consciousness.
A deep witness is a role that must be known and agreed upon by the priestessing team. Don’t just decide, on a whim, to go into dropped and open attention in the middle of the ritual without alerting anyone else. A deep witness must also have a support person, a “wrangler.”
WRANGLERS: Wrangling is the term we have adopted to describe the role of tending a deep witness or someone who goes into any deep trance state in a ritual. A wrangler is responsible for the physical safety and comfort of her charge. During the ritual, she watches out for dangers. Throughout the ritual, the wrangler checks on the deep witness periodically to make sure she is physically comfortable and to monitor her energy. When the ritual is over, she offers a brushdown and anything else that is needed, gets food and drink for her charge, and makes sure her charge gets safely home.
GRACES: Graces greet and welcome people at public rituals. They help move energy, people, and objects to enable the ritual to flow smoothly. With their aid, difficult transitions can be smoothly accomplished, whether it’s moving fifteen hundred people from their seats into a spiral or whisking a cauldron into and out of the center of the circle.
DRAGONS: Dragons guard the boundaries. They are the security force of the ritual, available to handle crises, remove intruders nonviolently, talk to the police, or do whatever needs to be done.
CROWS: The crow keeps an overview of the ritual, remembers what’s coming next, and prompts those who forget their parts. If needed, the crow stays aware of external time. We often perceive the crow role as “leader” but we do better to recognize this task as supportive to the whole.
FIVE
The Challenge
Comments on the Story
Rose receives her task from the Fata Morgana: she must gather stinging nettles, beat out the fibers, spin the thread, weave the cloth, and sew twelve shirts—all without speaking, laughing, or crying out loud. When the twelve shirts are complete, she must cast them over the brothers, who will then be restored to full humanness.
Rose has already faced many challenges, but in this section of the story she is given her true task. Her courage, generosity, perseverance, and willingness to surrender to ecstasy have proved her worthiness to undertake a great work of magic, and the task itself gives us a clue to the nature of the Goddess who is initiating her: the Weaver, ancestress of the Fates, who spin the thread of our lives, measure its length, and cut the cord at death.
In fairy tales, shirts are souls. Rose is asked to weave new souls for her brothers, souls that can restore them to the human world. This is a task that cannot be done in an ordinary state of consciousness. Rose must dedicate herself to the work and live as a priestess, keeping solemn silence until she is done.
From a feminist perspective, we might well question this part of the story. Rose is asked to suffer for the sake of others. Is this not what women are always called upon to do? Worse, she is told to suffer in silence. How can this possibly be empowering?
Great works of magic require great dedication. To be given such a task is a mark of respect, whether the challenge comes from the Goddess or from our inner self. We undertake a healing work because something in us believes that we can be healers, world shapers, active agents of change. We see ourselves as potentially powerful beings.
Creative work demands focus, concentration, and painstaking work as well as ecstasy. We may fly high, seeing visions of what the work may be, but we must still come back to earth and do it: write and rewrite every sentence, dig the garden, carefully thread the loom.
Nettles burn like fire, but the pain passes, leaving no damage behind. Rose is not asked to harm herself, but to bear pain. Soulweaving is a birth process, and birth is painful. But pain and silence can also be gateways into altered states of awareness.
As feminists, we have learned that silence can be oppression. Silence Equals Death is a slogan of the gay liberation movement. But what kind of silence is Rose asked to keep? She is not asked to keep silence about abuse, oppression, or hidden secrets. By discovering the truth about her brothers, she has already broken that silence. Nor is she asked to conceal her identity, to keep silent about who she is. She is asked not to complain about the task she has willingly taken on, not to whine or cry for pity. She is asked not to dissipate her energies or her attention, not to expend her creative force in talking about what she’s going to do instead of doing it. She is asked to enter into that state of solitude and receptivity where the great powers of life can speak to us. Her silence is that of the shaman who must learn to listen to the realms of nature and spirit beyond human discourse, the silence of the healer, the counselor, the therapist, the journalist in whom we can safely confide. No one who cannot keep silence can truly receive our trust.
To know the elements, to hear voices in the wind, to understand the language of birds and frogs and follow the tracks of the deer, we must be able to listen in silence to nature. When we still our own voices, the crackling fire and the rushing water can speak to us. We begin to hear the deep communication that is always happening in the natural world.
The inner self must also be discovered in silence. When our outer voice is still, a space opens within us that can be filled with our truest passions, our deepest desires. Our real life task can reveal itself when we quiet the demands of the tasks of daily living and allow ourselves to dwell for a time in the hermit’s cave.
When we are powerless or oppressed, our task is to find our voice, to learn to speak up for ourselves. But when we are in a position of power and trust, our task shifts. As victims, as underlings, we needed great forcefulness in order to be heard; but when we become authorities, that same vehemence can become abusive. Our words take on greater weight. A harsh criticism or an angry outburst can wound. In order for those we teach or lead to develop their own power, we may need to restrain ourselves, to hold back and not solve a problem, to let others make their own mistakes. To be a true healer or an empowering leader, we must know when to shut up as well as when to speak.
To know, to will, to dare, and to keep silent are the four powers of the mage in Western occult tradition. Rose’s initiation journey encompasses all four. First she must know the truth about her brothers. She must dare to leave her home and wander in the wilderness. Now she must learn to work with will, with focused concentration and intention, and with silence to complete her task. The work of this section of the story is to know the elements and plants that are our allies, to discover our true tasks and life purpose, and to learn the power of silence.
The Elements Path
In the land across the sea, Rose dreams that she has entered the castle of the Fata Morgana. Here she is told what she must do to free her brothers from the spell. She must gather nettles, beat out the fiber, spin thread, weave cloth, and make a shirt for each of them. During the entire project she must not speak a single word. If she can do this, her brothers, when she throws the shirts over them, will be restored to their full humanness.
We who walk the Elements Path will take this opportunity to learn with Rose. We will look at how our ancestresses developed their close relationship with the earth and the plant world. We will learn about magical ethics to prepare ourselves to study spellcasting—a basic magical technique associated with the element earth. And we will do some basic meditations on the element earth.
For women in ancient, earth-based cultures all over the world, making fabric and basketry from natural fibers would have been the most familiar sort of daily work. Once again this reminds us of the root word of our religion, wic, like wicker, because we are the ones who can bend and weave new balance for the worlds. The work of weaving fabric from gathered and prepared plant material, along with the growing, gathering, preserving, and preparation of food from plants, was the bulk of the daily responsibility and also the skill and power of ancient women.
Our ancestresses had encyclopedic knowledge of the plants, both agricultural and wild, that grew around them, and they knew many ways to harvest and store plant material and prepare it for medicine, food, and fiber. This knowledge was the oral tradition and science of our foremothers. This was the inherited wisdom they taught their daughters, so that the young women would also be able to feed a family, tend the sick, and create what their families needed out of the materials at hand. No wonder there is so much detail in the ancient tales about weaving and spinning!
Modern people in industrialized countries rarely know the names of the plants around them, much less the particular skill and handling of specific plants and their uses. Often our closest contact with a plant comes with our arms deep in the prickly needles and our faces in the thick fragrance as we try to make the Christmas tree stand up in its base. Even the produce in the supermarket comes prewashed and cut up in packages now, so that the great cauliflower, still crowned with leaves, or the beets with roots and bits of soil hanging from them and their garland of fragrant leaves have become unfamiliar sights. But our senses, fine-tuned from ancient times to the delicate perception of the green world and its life, long for these sights, smells, and textures. For women and men trying to rediscover a spiritual practice that honors Mother Nature, reconnecting with our instinctive, ancestral knowledge of plants is a basic practice.
Meeting an Herbal Ally
Wilow Fire Zacubi is a Reclaiming Witch who has spent her life learning about and working with herbs. A mountain woman, big-boned an
d strong, Wilow is as comfortable chopping the wood for the night’s bonfire as she is leading a meditation for a hundred people. Wilow has a favorite meditation she uses to teach her friends and students how to develop a personal relationship with an herbal ally. You are welcome to try it by yourself or with a group of friends.
For this meditation you will need a scarf and cuttings from a plant. Be sure you can identify poison oak, nettles, and any other toxic or stinging plants that grow locally before harvesting any wild plant. Remember not to take a whole plant from the wild, or any part of a plant, if it is the only one of its species growing in a certain location.
Next, create sacred space. With your scarf in your lap, remind yourself that the ability to understand plant life is your heritage from your grandmothers for hundreds of generations. Whether you are a woman or a man, your ancestresses closely observed and worked with plants for much of their waking life, and their knowledge is coiled tightly inside each of your cells and is your rightful inheritance. Breathe your reliance on the wisdom of the grandmothers into the scarf, and then pull it over your head. Take your plant, and begin to investigate it, using your curiosity and your wisdom. Look and touch; smell your plant and breathe in its green breath; listen to it. Taste it only if you have a positive ID on it and know it to be safe. Many useful and medicinal plants can also be poisonous.
After you have fully investigated your plant with all your senses, allow your attention to concentrate behind your third eye (a place between and slightly above your physical eyes, inside your head). When your attention is concentrated, ask the plant’s permission to enter its energy body, and express gratitude for its lessons. Drawing on your inherited wisdom and your curiosity, allow your concentrated attention to turn green and stream out into the plant. Find entry through the roots, leaves, flower, stem, or some other door. Sense the energy of the plant from the inside—its color, rhythm, texture, temperature, rate of vibration, and so forth. Journey throughout the plant from stem to leaf to root, from bud to flower to seed. First, observe all your impressions without judging or interpreting. Second, ask the plant how it is used. What is its name? What is its story? Third, ask the plant if it has any message for you.
