The Twelve Wild Swans

by Starhawk

  When Thorn and I taught a path together at mid-Atlantic Witchcamp, we created the following exercise to help our students own their true authority:

  Stepping into Authority

  In sacred space, take a few moments to think about the skills, knowledge, and experience you have. What true authority can you claim? You might be an authority on a subject the world recognizes: medieval drama or African percussion. Or perhaps you are an authority on something that emerges from your life: raising a disabled child or cooking on a welfare budget.

  Stand in a circle in the group. Breathe, ground, and anchor to your core state of being.

  One by one, each person steps forward, names herself or himself, and claims a true, earned authority. After each person has spoken, the group says, “We bless your power.”

  For example:

  “I am Daniel, and I am an authority on growing wine grapes organically.”

  “We bless your power.”

  “I am Joan, and I am an authority on facing loss with grace.”

  “We bless your power.”

  “I am Angela, and I am an authority on my own healing.”

  “We bless your power.”

  “I am Rose, and I am an authority on weaving shirts from nettles.”

  “We bless your power.”

  When all have spoken, dance, chant, and raise power to celebrate the group’s true authority. Open sacred space.

  We have visited the Fata Morgana and taken up a true task, a big task, one that will require all our dedication, fortitude, courage, and will. We’ve identified our sources of strength and learned the power of silence.

  Many tests still await us. We will need all our allies, skills, and strength to face them.

  SIX

  Holding Center

  Comments on the Story

  While Rose is spinning her thread outside the green cave one day, the king of the country rides by and, struck with her beauty, marries her. She bears a child, but his jealous mother steals the child and marks Rose’s mouth with blood, accusing her of being a Witch and of eating her baby. She bears a second child, only to have the acts repeated.

  Rose has learned to hold her focus in spite of pain and frustration. Now she must continue her concentration through love and loss. Rose is asked to live with the dedication of a priestess, but not to live as a hermit or an ascetic. She is able to love and be loved, to marry, to bear a child—all the life transitions that often distract us from our inner development and chosen tasks. But Rose keeps on weaving.

  Her weaving is her center, her magical intention. By holding to her intention, Rose stays centered and withstands all the projections thrown at her, even her mother-in-law’s jealousy.

  Jealousy is a powerful force in fairy tales. Almost universally, it serves as the negative motivation and greatest threat in these old stories. Jealousy is a primal emotion: dogs feel it; young children certainly feel it. In small communities, people often go to great lengths to avoid evoking the jealousy of their neighbors, and negative magic is almost always perceived as motivated by jealousy.

  A person of power must be able to withstand jealousy. A weaver of souls must be able to focus on the work without being swayed by other people’s perceptions, whether idolization or vilification. When we find our voice and speak our truth, not everyone is going to like what we have to say, especially if we are truly weaving something new. We will meet criticism and attack. If we attempt to defend ourselves against every accusation, we divert our energies from the work—which, in the end, will be our ultimate answer to the critics.

  In Rose’s case, the jealous accusations and attacks result in heartrending loss. Still, she holds her ground and continues weaving. No words she might speak could carry the redemptive power that the completed work of transformation will hold when she finishes it.

  Women are often accused of eating their babies in fairy tales, and puppies’ blood is generally the substance of choice with which to literally smear the reputation of the heroine. Accusations of baby eating are often directed at religions that the establishment wishes to discredit. Witches were accused of child sacrifice, as Jews were accused of baking ritual matzos with the blood of Christian babies, as the early Goddess religions were accused of practicing human sacrifice by the compilers of the Bible.

  Embedded in this image is some faint shadow of the ancient earth Goddess, to whom the dog was sacred, who births us into life and who takes us back into her body at death. We can also hear echoes of a more everyday mystery. Two-year-old Kore, admiring her Goddess-mother Juanita’s swelling, pregnant belly, asks, “What’s that?” “I have a baby in my tummy,” Juanita says proudly. “Yuck!” Kore exclaims and proceeds to inform her mother that Juanita has eaten a baby.

  Rose’s own baby has not been eaten by her, but it is lost, thrown to the wolves, abandoned to the wild. Nevertheless, she must hold her ground and keep her attention on the work of creation, the weaving of souls. Like her, we must find the core of self we can hold to through both admiration and attack.

  The work of this section is to know center: the center of the circle, the center of the ritual, the center of self that allows us to withstand projections and sustain our healing work.

  The Elements Path

  Now Rose returns to the human world, but this time she is the queen of her castle instead of the little daughter. She grew up as the princess in a castle, but she had to leave in order to come into her own as an adult woman. Now she is free and powerful, with allies she can rely on and with many skills and experiences to help her. She returns to the castle and moves back into the complex world of family relationships, in order to love and be loved.

  Like Rose, we have left the familiar world of ordinary consciousness and walked out the doorway into the wild. We have learned to create our own sacred space. We have traveled to each of the directions, learning some of the magical techniques that belong to air, to fire, to water, and to earth. We have learned to rely on their powers and have pledged ourselves to protect them as well.

  Like Rose, we must now return to the place where we started. We are back from our travels to each of the directions, back to the center of our own sacred space. But we return seasoned and powerful, with many new tools in our spiritual tool kit, confident in our ability to make magic and “change consciousness at will.” The Elements Path work for this section of the story includes investigating some of the magical techniques that correspond to the center and revisiting our relationship with deity.

  Element Path

  Center

  When we cast the circle at the beginning of any ritual, we begin in the north and greet each direction in turn, ending again in the north. Then, stepping into the center of the circle, we reach as high as we can with one hand and stretch the other toward the earth. We allow the circle we have drawn to spring up all around us, above and below, completing a sphere of energy that can hold us and our friends safely until our travels between the worlds are complete. We say something like, “Powers above, shimmering, shining ones, and powers below, magma heart of Mother Earth, welcome.” Drawing the energy from above and below, we place our hands on our own centers.

  A magic circle, like our own lives, has seven dimensions: the four directions, the sky above, the earth below, and the heart or center, because each of us is the self in the center of our own life story and in the center of our own consciousness. Just as Rose returns to the place she started, the castle, so we return to the center of our circles. In this chapter we will learn some of the magical tools, symbols, and techniques associated with the center.

  Center: The Great Wheel

  Any time of day or night, you can walk outside and look up. If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun by day, or the moon by night, will be making its way across the sky from the east toward the south and then to the west to set. The sun and moon, and the planets, too, if you learn to see them, follow this basic path over and over against the bright cloud of the Milky Way. The constellations of
the zodiac also make the same journey, always rising in the east and moving through the south and toward the west. During the day, if you watch the shadow of a tree or the shadow on a sundial, you will see the shadow swing from west to the north at midday, and then toward the east as the sun sets in the west. The shadows, of course, will always fall in the opposite direction from where the sun stands in the sky.

  We discover a basic fact about life on our crazily tilted, spinning planet. The lights of the sky—sun, moon, and planets—and their shadows always move “clockwise” around us, as though we were standing at the hub of a great wheel. In magic we call the clockwise direction deasil, which means “sunwise.”

  The moon will show us a different pattern if we watch her through the course of a month. At the new moon, she rides with the sun, and we cannot see her in his brightness. But as she becomes a new crescent, she falls behind him just a little, and we can see her briefly immediately after sunset, following him down into the west. As each night passes, she falls back a step, as though he were walking a bit too fast for her. So as the waxing crescent grows, we find her higher in the sky by a hand’s breadth each night, and by the time she is a quarter moon, she stands slightly in the south, at the zenith, at sunset. And so she continues falling behind a bit more with each passing day, backward through the sky, so that by the time she is full, she rises in the east just as he sets in the west. Now she has the sky to herself all night, and she sails free and full, setting only as the sun begins to rise.

  As she wanes she continues to appear to move backward through the sky, until he catches up to her from behind, and she becomes invisible once again.

  Although the moon always moves clockwise through the sky on any given night, in the course of a month she moves counterclockwise through the sky. In other words, if you look at the sky at sunset every night for a month, beginning at the new moon, the location of the moon at the moment the sun sets will move slowly from west to east, a little bit every day. This is a direction we call widdershins in magic, counterclockwise.

  This directionality of the great movements of nature gives us another powerful magical tool. When we want something to grow and strengthen, we can weave it into the powerful clockwise movement of the great wheel. When we hope for transition, for the release of the old and the beginning of something new, we can weave it into the counterclockwise movements of the moon through the month, which always disappears and then regrows.

  So a very basic ritual form we use is to begin moving counterclockwise around our circle, silently meditating on, or singing and calling and dancing out, something that we are ready to let go of, something that we are ready to let fall into the past. When we are ready, we change direction and begin going clockwise around our circle, raising energy for the new things that we want to bring into our lives and strengthen.

  Center: The Cone of Power

  In ritual, we often allow our energy to build up to a peak and climax. This is another basic tool of magic that we find in the center of our circle. We call it the cone of power.

  When we create a spell alone at our home altars, we have to begin with a clear intention, strongly imagined in as much detail as possible. The same is true in a ritual working: the group needs to be agreed on a clear intention.

  In a cone of power, we build an energy form as a group with our voices around a common image. We often allow the energy to rise with chanting, drumming, and dancing, but as the power of the moment begins to peak, the drums die away, and the chant becomes wordless toning and waves of sound. We build it to a peak and send it into the sky as a sensory, energetic prayer to the Goddess. Once we have released the cone of power, we ground ourselves again. We reconnect to our own normal energy, to our normal place between earth and sky, and touch the ground if necessary to drain off any excess energy we may feel in our own bodies as tingling, light-headedness, or dizziness. The energy form we have sent off will fall back to earth wherever it is needed, in whatever form is needed to achieve the desired outcome.

  In the magic of Reclaiming tradition, we no longer consider it necessary for a high priestess to “lead” or “direct” the cone of power. In great sex one partner does not have to control the building of the energy; it builds quite naturally in its own rhythm if each partner is patient and sensitive to the energy of the other. In the same way, the cone of power builds naturally in a group if the members are patient and sensitive as well as exuberant. When a group works with sound together, it is important for each member to be a good listener as well as a good creator of sound. The group tone may try to die away a few times, or it may try to peak prematurely as members continue to discharge excess or uncomfortable energy with dissonance, howling, shrieking, or groaning. One member of a group may need to hold a strong, low tone to help the group’s energy cohere, or various group members may take turns or work together holding this center. But eventually, as in a very hot fire, everything will be burned away except the clear, powerful tone of the group’s energy flowing together, and it can build to a natural peak, which can then be released either quickly, like an arrow from a bow, or more slowly, like a soap bubble from a child’s bubble wand.

  Center: The Cauldron of Changes

  When we look in the center of our circle, along with the great wheel of the sky and the cone of power, we also find the cauldron. The cauldron is a tool of the center, and it has an ancient lineage in Goddess tradition. Originally a great pot for boiling, the cauldron would have been a very important tool in the daily lives of our ancestresses. They would have used it for many purposes, such as rendering fat from slaughtered animals, dying cloth, making soap, or cooking nettles with wood ash for cloth making. Imagine how powerful the cauldron would have seemed, with its heat and violent boiling, and the strange steams and smells coming from it. Dead plants and animals would have gone into it, and something quite different would have come out, something delicious or useful, made by the art and craft of the mothers and grandmothers. So the cauldron became the symbol of the cyclic natural world and of rebirth. There are stories from many cultures of a fearsome boiling pot, sometimes of blood, in which the dead are revived and reborn.

  In our story, Rose’s mother-in-law accuses Rose of the monstrous crime of eating her own babies. The accusation rings with memories of the Great White Sow, one of the faces of Cerridwen, a Celtic Goddess of death and rebirth associated with the cauldron. Farm people knew that sows sometimes did eat their own young. Of course Rose, who is a human mother, has not eaten her babies; in fact, she is in terrible grief over losing them. But in the ancient mythology of the Great Goddess, the cauldron Goddess does ultimately eat all her children. This is an inevitable fact of mortal life; no mortal ever gets out of it alive. The Goddess of birth, death, and rebirth offers us no alternatives. Our lives will end in death, and we will be eaten, back into the dark belly of nature. And from that belly we will be reborn, in a new shape, into a new life. Into the cauldron we go, and when we climb back out, we are restored, reshaped, and young again.

  So the people fear Rose, whose mouth is smeared with blood, because they fear the Goddess in her shape as Death. Ironically, they want to kill Rose, as if one could fight Death with death. And so Rose has to face her own fear of death, which menaces her as a stake and pyre are erected in the city square to burn her. The ensuing events bring Rose to the moment of truth.

  In Reclaiming, we use our cauldrons, usually big cast-iron pots with three legs, as a tool for magic as well as a symbol of the Great Goddess of life, death, and rebirth. In our cauldrons we can build a safe, indoor fire that creates a physical center for indoor rituals when the weather doesn’t allow ritual outdoors. We use Epsom salts and rubbing alcohol in equal parts to make this fire, and we always keep a tight-fitting top for the cauldron handy. In case the fire gets too rambunctious, it can be quickly and safely put out by simply putting the top on the pot. When the alcohol finishes burning and the flames die away, a blue and flickering glow remains in the salts, which can last for some t
ime before it fades. This part of a cauldron ritual offers a wonderful opportunity for meditating and scrying in the mysterious, wandering blue flames.

  If you want to try a cauldron fire at home, please place your cauldron on a fireproof surface, because the bottom of the pot will become hot. Try out a small amount of salts and alcohol first, and let the fire burn out completely before adding more. Each pot, because of its unique size and shape, will require slightly different amounts of salts and alcohol to make a good, safe fire, so experiment with a close-fitting lid close at hand, and find out what works in your cauldron. Alcohol fires will not generally set off smoke detectors, but if you burn other things in your cauldron indoors, like scraps of paper or string from a spellworking, you might set off alarms.

  A cauldron can also be filled with water and dry ice to create a cold, mysterious mist that bubbles over its lips. This is also a great way to create a center for a dark, dreamy ritual.

  So now we have learned three important tools of magic that we find in the center of our circle. We’ve observed the directionality of nature, the great wheel, which holds us at the hub and spins around us. We’ve learned the basics of raising a cone of power. And we have investigated the symbol of the cauldron, perhaps getting an opportunity to try out our own cauldron flame.

  In the center of our circle we also find the invocation of deity, which we discussed briefly when we learned to keep an altar and create sacred space.

  Charge of the Star Goddess

  Hear the words of the Star Goddess, the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven, whose body encircles the universe: “I who am the beauty of the green earth, and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto Me. For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe. From Me all things proceed, and unto Me they must return. Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold—all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals. Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you. And you who seek to know Me, know that your seeking and your yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.”