At the last full moon, my ritual crew and I joined Sorita d’Este’s Rite of Her Sacred Fires. It was our fourth round – 2018, ’19, ’21, and now ’22 – and the fifth anniversary of the point where, at least for me, we crossed the line from a working group that (singly and together) happened to do a more-than-average amount of Hekate-oriented rituals into what I now jokingly call the Accidental Hekate Cult. Having done the ritual three times before, all as-written, we could not help but give it the Lunar Shenanigans treatment: elaborating on and escalating the ritual, taking a relatively short and to-the-point ritual intended for a solitary practitioner and turning it into something that six people could do collaboratively.
We started by adding an opening purification of self and space, drawing on elements of our various syncretic practices and the opening rites of the Hekataeon. We added a protection spell written by one of our members. We included an invocation of Hestia. We added a space for each participant to pour offerings, and to prophesy or speak as called, and a divination to confirm that our offerings were both worthy and sufficient. And then we divided up the ritual so that everyone had a key part in the overall ritual.
Alvianna consecrated the candles in earth and water the night before. Someone else in the crew made special incense for offerings. I built the altar while cleaning the house for company. We had a lovely dinner and then transitioned quickly to ritual.
It all came together beautifully. Our offerings were accepted, and then we went outside together to look at the eclipse. As a personal bonus, though I did have a section, I was not *in charge* of anything.
We may make further changes – that’s who we are as people – but we’re definitely keeping the changes we’ve made so far.
And yet, for all that …
I think everyone else got more out of it than I did.
That disconnect is why it’s taken so long for me to post this.
I am still, as I’ve spoken about before, more sorcerer than priest. I work with gods and spirits far more than I worship them, and the Rite of Her Sacred Fires is more devotional than magical, more theurgy than thaumaturgy. Religion, in any conventional sense of the term, remains strange and uncomfortable to me. It’s not like ancestor work – no matter how many people I otherwise respect advocate for it, they will ever convince me that white people can ethically do anything with ancestors other than bind them, and the very subject makes me physically ill – but it is deeply alien.
I know when a magical or ecstatic ritual is successful – I know that feeling intimately. But devotional ritual? We had divination, this time, to confirm that for me. And I will say that I felt the presence of the goddess. But the very impulse of worship continues to make me uncomfortable.
Why am I even doing it, you ask? I don’t entirely know. Each of the various devotional practices that I have taken up in the last five years have made sense in the moment. Each has been a natural and obvious outgrowth of the work I had done up to that point.
But together, in aggregate? I’ve reached a point where I barely recognize my own life. I remain deeply hostile to anyone practicing a mainstream religion, or who is willing to submit to a god-king. There are powers in the universe that we can work with, but those are edge cases. Like the mortal parts of the world, the majority of the supernatural and spiritual realms of the cosmos are indifferent to or hostile to human life.
You know what, I take it back. Just thinking about religiosity does make me angry.
And yet, here I am? Twenty-two months into daily devotional work, mostly centered on my familiar spirits, but increasingly encompassing a handful of gods. Five years into an increasingly devotional Hekate practice wherein she is the de facto patron of my jewelry business (I sell more Hekate devotional jewelry than everything else combined). Ten years into my devotion to Dionysus, the only god who has ever felt more like home than a threat or a challenge.
When I’m just doing it, everything’s fine. Maybe I’m a little bemused. But the harder I think about it, the weirder and more uncomfortable it gets.
Three weeks out from this latest encounter, I am still struggling to write this, to reconcile my feelings around this. What does it mean, what does it cost, to offer devotion and sacrifice to a god?
My Christian upbringing teaches me that devotion is submission and slavery, not just to the god but to their worldly representatives – priests and missionaries. Large parts of the neo-Pagan movement exist ostensibly to cut out those intermediaries. But, frankly, so was the entire Protestant movement, especially in the US, and all that did was establish smaller and more absolute fiefdoms for charismatic priests. And sometimes Paganism feels like it’s just reproducing US Protestantism, just with different questionable fashion choices. But I know that it doesn’t have to be that way.
So, I continue the work to the best of my ability. And I wait. and I wonder.