Showing all posts tagged Heartland Pagan Festival

In witchcraft

It is over. I am free.

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

When I came back from Beltane, I learned that this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival would be the last. That knowledge sent me careening across the emotional spectrum. I talked about it in my last post, but it bears some reiteration: I have been attending the Heartland Pagan Festival for my entire adult life, and arguably longer. (Was I really an “adult” at 18?) Since I first attended in 1999, whether I was able to go or not, my year revolved the festival. Even after I was chased out in 2017, the hole the festival left in my life was a gravity well around which everything else orbited. When I learned that 2023 would be the very last year, I was … extremely upset at the possibility that I might not get to go.

But I am a witch, and the world sometimes bends itself to my will. Help – and sales – came out of the woodwork. Not only were Aradia and I able to get out to festival, so was two thirds of our Lunar Shenanigans crew. Alvianna and I were out there Thursday through Monday. Aradia and Kraken joined us Friday afternoon. Juniper joined us Saturday. Kraken and Juniper were only there for the weekend, and left Sunday morning. Aradia, Alvianna, and I saw it through to the end.

The final iteration of the Heartland Pagan Festival wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I couldn’t get the whole Shenanigans crew out; of the Big Damn Heroes, only Cat still comes; and no-one in Camp Taco even still talks to each other, anymore, let alone comes out to festival. The fires were lackluster, and the dancers all tired quickly. Too many people were more interested in pickling their livers on Leather Lane.

But I did get what I needed. The weather was lovely: warm during the day and cool at night, and not a drop of rain. There were fires and dancing, if not enough of either, and there was a lovely afternoon at the beach. We drank mead, and we told stories of festivals past, both good and bad. We wandered from one camp to another, our wagon of blankets and bottles in tow. We tried our best to make new friends, and we huddled close to one another in the warmth of love and companionship. And Kraken did get to see the festival at least once. After eight years, my best friend finally got to see me in my natural habitat (if, granted, in a degraded form).

Few of the people most active in running me out of the organization were there, and those few who were there lacked the spine or spleen to start shit. A couple people even tried to make amends – though one was so drunk, he immediately forgot that I existed, and the other never really understood what he’d done wrong, in the first place.

In the end, the festival died as it lived. I attended the main ritual every night, but I was unable to hear most of what was said because the ritualists used neither voice technique nor amplification. The temple pilgrimage that replaced the vision quest and displaced both Saturday Night ritual and concert was a logistical mess, with one temple running their last workshop so late we couldn’t visit without interrupting, another closing early, and one simply never being set up.

The closing ritual reminded me a lot of the “Passing the Torch” festival from one of my early years, where the weary founders passed control over to the next generation of leadership. But, where that ritual was magnanimous and hopeful, honoring attendees and everyone who had ever helped to put on the festival, this ritual was a self-aggrandizing eulogy for the ambitions of the remaining members.

The current president, a woman whose own son was hurt by the same predator-friendly policies that my crew and I were tarred and feathered for trying to change, took the closing ritual as an opportunity to blame “lack of volunteerism” for the festival’s failure. She made a point of calling up any “current or past members” of the organization that runs the land to thank them publicly, but only brought up current leadership of the festival organization for similar recognition, ignoring current ground-level members and past leadership, including some founding members that were on site.

The Heartland Spiritual Alliance has promised that they will be back with something new. They’ve asked for community input, asked what the community wants. I doubt they’ll pull anything off, honestly. I know who’s left. Whatever they achieve will be as deeply cursed as the Heartland Pagan Festival was at its very worst, and I wish them all the very worst of their own bile.

I expected to spend much of the festival in tears, or deep depression, or possibly even being sought out and tormented by people who blamed me for the festival’s demise. (An absurd accusation, but well within the standard deviation of accusations flung at anyone who ever worked the festival then left.) And, certainly, there were moments of sadness, regret, and loss. But, mostly, what I felt was relief and closure.

I’m glad that I was there to see it end. I’m glad that it’s over. I couldn’t mourn the zombie the festival became after I was chased out. I can mourn the now-still corpse.

More than that, the corpse has no hold on me. The lines the zombie held me by have gone slack, and I can pull out the last of the hooks. I can retrieve the last of my power and bits of my soul that were stollen by the festival. My wounds can now well and truly heal.

It is over.

I am free.

In Uncategorized

Requiem for a Dream

Author Satyr MagosPosted on 2 Comments

I first heard a rumor when I came back from Beltane, but Tuesday night I learned for a fact that this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival is to be the last. I am … deeply conflicted by this knowledge. For half my life, that festival was the axis around which my year revolved. I first attended in 1999: fresh out of high school, new to the pagan community, innocent and naïve. I only went for a single day. Twenty-four years later, the memories are hazy – the awkwardness of coming and going to the remote  location, buying my first sarong, meeting people from the townie community in a very different context – but that first daypass changed my life.

I went back the next year for the full weekend, and about every other year from then until 2006, just before I moved to St. Louis. I came back in 2008 and didn’t miss another year until 2014, which May I spent studying abroad in Greece with my Classics program. I met new friends and lovers there, some of whom I know to this day. I brought old friends from Lawrence whenever I could. I was sexually assaulted there in 2008 – an experience I now know to be frighteningly common – by a man I wanted to fuck but who didn’t want to take “later” for an answer; he was later arrested for being too disruptively high around the bonfire, and all my food was confiscated with his because we were camped too close together, and lived off the generosity of my friends for the rest of the festival. I brought my partner to HPF 2009 as a field test before we moved in together. I had profound and powerful magical experiences as a part of public rituals, there, both good and bad. One bad experience, in 2012, set off a massive public shit-fight between me and the sacred experience committee that ended up in face-to-face mediated meetings and, ultimately, an invitation to put my money where my mouth was and join the ritual crew. I was just starting college, and couldn’t commit, then, but when I came back in 2015 it was as a staff member.

My partner and I skidded in to the June 2014 post-festival staff meeting not two days after our epic road trip celebrating my graduation and her escape from her corporate hell job. We signed up to work with the Sacred Experience Committee, the same crew that we’d had our blowout with in 2012, expecting to cut wood and carry water. By January 2015, we were hosting meetings and more of our ideas were going into the rituals than theirs. Two months later, we learned that none of them had any intention of performing the rituals we were writing – all  of which required four or five ritualists – and Aradia and I were left scrambling to recruit bodies. We reached out to everyone we knew worth their salt, rebuilding bridges we’d burned to get competent witches and magicians to help us put on the festival.

I have tried before to write about those years in detail. Getting involved with the organization, getting swept up into leadership positions and being lauded for our efforts and ideas … only to have those efforts and ideas undermined at every turn. Ultimately being chased out for trying to improve the safety and experience of the attendees, and for refusing to submit to the corporate culture of “naming the problem is always worse than the problem”. It still hurts too much to go into detail, and the trauma makes some of it incredibly difficult to remember.

The short version is that we wrote and performed a series of initiatory rituals, each year sending attendees back into the world with the charge of doing more magic. Our first opening ritual was nonverbal, every action a dance, with shills among the participants to help cue their responses. Our final closing ritual was a bonfire ritual where, through enchanted masks finished at festival, we dropped almost fifty gods into various ecstatic dancers. Masks and coordinated costumes were our signature style. Prometheus featured prominently every year. None of it was perfect, but we did our very best to make our rituals as participatory and experiential as we could.

At the end of HPF 2015, I was informed that I was being nominated for chair of the committee. We had had designs on that, of course, but we’d anticipated years of work, and for Aradia to wear the title. By HPF 2016, we had found ourselves stuffed into gaps on the Board of Directors. We proposed and passed a five year plan to get the festival back on track to growth and sustainability, and to work on repairing its reputation as a drunken rape fest by fixing those problems. By 2017, I was chair of the board and she was Vice President.

But things were never quite right. I was on the edge of transitioning to gender neutral pronouns when I came back from college. The clear and abundant transphobia of entrenched leadership made me put that off, something that hurt me far more deeply than I realized at the time. As chair of the board of directors, I got to hear the then-president joke at an informal meeting about covering up the assault of a transwoman because she “had brought it on herself”. When Aradia shut down after outbursts by the malignant narcissists in the group, and I tried to reiterate her points, I was accused (in back channel discussions) of speaking over and abusing her … but no one ever tried to help her.

After 2017, though, the measures of the five year plan that the members had voted to implement were too radical, too real, and we were chased out. In particular, our desire to change security and safety policy so that records were kept of every incident and accusation, so that patterns could be tracked over time and so that the whole of leadership knew what was happening, not just the chair of the security committee, was taken as a personal threat by entrenched leadership. People were furious at our suggestion that everyone come to meetings sober. Strangely threatening was our proposal that, every few years, all staff be required to take a sabbatical year to prevent burn out, and be admitted to the festival for free as attendees. The final straw for me was in mid-2017, when I learned that both our not-for-profit status and insurance had been allowed to lapse. Chirotus had already left, as had half my crew. Aradia stuck on till November. The members of my crew that stayed on past that all repudiated me publicly.

We learned through the grapevine that new rules had been passed to prevent our return. That people believed (or said they did) that we had cursed the president and caused him to fall through a faulty ceiling. That we formed the Lunar Shenanigans Crew for the express purpose of cursing entrenched leadership. (We were not cursing anyone. We were ritualists, we wanted to ritual. The only magic we did about them was some cursebreaking and some “return to sender” work against the Evil Eye. In retrospect, I may have been flinging some Evil Eye of my own [I have an astounding capacity for hate], but I promise you, if Aradia, Chirotus, and I – let alone the three of us plus a half dozen compatriots – had been flinging curses, not a one of them would still have had a job or home.)

We were exhausted. We were hurt. We felt betrayed.

We were literally traumatized by the cult-tactics employed by senior leadership, starting with love bombing and moving immediately to trying to control the information we had available to us and trying to force us to either recruit or cut off our friends who were not a part of the organization, to ostracizing us when we could not be made to submit. I ran into one of the committee heads at the store a few months later and they literally fled from the sight of me.

To this day, I do not trust my judgment about people anymore. I am afraid to go to public events, lest I run into people who I sincerely believe want me dead. Chirotus will no longer set foot on the grounds of Gaea Retreat Center.

And yet, though I kept it to myself, I always wanted to go back. I had attended the festival since I was a literal child. I didn’t want to cede the territory forever. To my surprise, it was Aradia who brought up going back toward the beginning of April. She wanted to go bonfire dancing. We were talking about getting day passes, joking about wearing masks and claiming a vow of silence if we ran into anyone we didn’t like. I was excited to finally be able to bring Kraken to something that had always been such a huge part of my life, and whose shadow darkened the first years of our friendship.

Hearing that it’s ending has hit me hard. I got drunk and went off on twitter last night. I was already in a bad mood when tree-trimming in the neighborhood woke me up and chased me out of the house. (I’m writing this on my laptop in a park, though I’ll have to go home soon to refill my coffee.)

I don’t know who, if anyone, of the people who hurt me are still involved. I know that some of them have left because I know that someone else holds their positions. I know that one of them – the one who betrayed me most personally, and who took my place as head of the sacred experience committee – has moved on to leadership at the organization that maintains the Gaea Retreat, and runs their public rituals as badly as anyone ever has.

I find myself wishing I had the money for a whole weekend. If it’s going out, I want to be there with it. For good and ill, it made me what I am.

Some of my crew are saying “good riddance”. I can’t blame them. None of them ever loved the festival the way that I did. Maybe I should feel that way, too. But I’m not there, yet. I might not ever be.

If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to get those people out of power, fine.

If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to kill the drunken predatory culture that developed around it, fine.

Those things need to go, and I would drive the stake home, myself, if I thought I had the reach.

But, for now, I am just … sad.

Prepare yourself for some waves of Heartland memories on my various socials, and probably here, as well.

In Uncategorized

HPF 2016: Skidding In Home

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

A week ago yesterday, at almost exactly midnight (and about twelve hours after we had intended), Aradia and I disappeared into the woods for the thirty-first Heartland Pagan Festival.  Last night, just an hour short of a full week away, we pulled back into our driveway.

Last year, I found myself spearheading the ritual crew for the thirtieth anniversary extravaganza.  It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, but it was an amazing experience.  Then some cruel bastards decided that I should be in charge: first they put me in the chair of my committee; then, when someone stepped down, I let them put me on the Board of Directors.

A year as ritual crew lead did not prepare me in any way, shape, or form for the amount of work I found waiting for me as Chair of the Sacred Experience Committee.  The decision to put on four workshops (three of which were interconnected and had to happen the same day) didn’t help.  And it turns out that coordinating with guest speakers to participate in the main rituals is hard.  And where the FUCK did all the Heartland drummers go?  (Seriously, you used to trip over at least two drum circles on the way to any given port-o-john; now I struggle to recruit three drummers for ritual.)  Oh, and that whole near-miss-with-the-tornado thing?  Yeah…. that happened.

I’m still processing.  There was a lot of really good stuff that happened.  There was some really shitting stuff that happened.  There was just a whole lot of STUFF that happened. And the weather.  Did I mention the tornado?  I’ll be processing all week.

And if you’re in St.Louis this coming weekend, you should come process it with me, possibly over beers or coffee, because I’ll be wearing my PR hat and schilling for the festival at St. Louis Pagan Picnic.  And, speaking of Public Relations, if you were there at the festival with me, please fill out our post-festival survey!  The survey is anonymous, and you will have the chance to enter for a free pass to next year’s festival!

In hedonism, witchcraft

HPF 2016 Elemental Excursions: A Preview From the Sacred Experience Committee

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

It’s the final stretch, y’all: one week from today, Aradia and I will be disappearing into the woods to begin setting up the site for this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival.  The thirty-first of its kind, it will be my second year as a member of the ritual crew and my first year as a ready-to-take-the-blame committee head.  I’m stoked.  I’m scared.

elemental excursions art

We have a lot of fun and excitement planned for you all.  We’ve got great pagan speakers and musicians from across the country, and a local legend for our Saturday night concert.  Three days of workshops and rituals led by both our honored guests and members of our own communities.  Public rituals on all four nights, as well as the traditional night-hike Vision Quest on Saturday.

I don’t want to give too much away, or overstep myself by blurring the line between my HSA work and this, my personal blog, but I’m really excited about the four rituals.  For most of my time as an attendee, there were three main rituals: opening ritual Thursday, main ritual Saturday night, and closing ritual Monday (moved to Sunday a few years ago). Then, for a while, there were only two rituals: Thursday and Saturday.  Last year we re-introduced the Sunday night closing ritual.  This year we’re upping the ante by taking the elemental theme and escalating to four rituals.

First, Thursday’s Earth Ritual will banish the outside world and welcome everyone to the festival by introducing us to the spirit of the land.

Then Friday’s Air Ritual will clear our minds to find our truths, and help us name our ambitions in order to pursue them.

For Saturday’s Water Ritual, we will dredge up our individual fears so that we may confront and conquer them as a community.

Finally, with all obstacles out of the way, Sunday’s Fire Ritual will stoke our divine spark to roaring flame and impel us back into the world charged for action.

I really hope to see some of you there.

In witchcraft

HPF XXX: 0 – Processing

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Aradia and I skidded back into the mundane world almost two weeks ago, now.  Between her end-of-semester madness and my retail work schedule, we’d left something of a disaster behind as we dipped out to spend a week in the woods, and it’s taken quite an effort to calm down and clean up.  There is, in fact, still quite a bit of mop-up left to do, one way or another.

The festival, as a whole, was a success and to date we’ve heard hardly a peep of criticism for our rituals or workshops.  The HSA forum has not had much chatter on the subject, but all public conversations have been highly positive regarding the festival as a whole — “best festival in years” has been bandied about quite regularly — and I cannot but hope that our rituals were a contributing factor to that.  A few technical critiques have found their way to us, one way or another — some very poorly timed — but the responces have been overwhelmingly positive … especially from the people at festival that we respect most.

The process was a strain on all of the ritual crew, and our support communities.  Some bruised feelings remain on several sides.  Many lessons were learned about how to do things differently next time around.

But there will be a next time around.

In witchcraft

Looking Forward to Heartland Pagan Festival XXX

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

A week from today will mark the beginning of the 30th Annual Heartland Pagan Festival.  There’s a lot that could be said, perhaps a lot that should be said, about the speakers and bands and history of the festival.  I think for all that, however, I will permit the HSA to speak forthemselves, except to point out the pink elephant: that this is also the first year that the festival will be facing direct competition.  What makes this coming festival significant for me is that, having attended far, far more often than not since 1998, this will be the first festival that I have helped put on.

The HSA is a public organization, and I could have paid my dues and “membered up”, as they say, at any time.  There are a lot of reasons I didn’t, but they mostly revolve around a few highly negative encounters with influential members of the organization, and my personal distrust of any org large enough to handle money.  Several events at the 2012 festival, however, fundamentally changed my relationship with the fest and the organization.

Firstly, staggering back broke from my first year at real college, I came to the festival not as a paying customer, but as work exchange: twenty hours of labor for “free” entry. Working for parking and security, I got to know a lot of the people who actually run the org.  More importantly, though, that was the year I started a massive public shitstorm over the gendered implications of the public ritual arc.  At the end of those mediated discussions, I was asked to join the organization.  Living and attending college in Indiana at the time, however, I was unable to do so.

I graduated in the Spring of 2014 and celebrated with a victory lap studying abroad in Greece then going on a three-week road trip with Aradia.  We made it back to civilization and the internet with exactly enough time and money left to join the HSA, vote for committee chairs, and join the Sacred Experience Committee.  From June to December, we helped hammer out the theory and framework of the three main rituals.  In January, the first prose drafts of the ritual appeared, and Aradia and I recruited Chirotus and Pasiphae from the old proto-coven to join the SEC.  Last week, I got on the phone with Brianna Misenhelter of the ATC Pagan Information Network and HPS of the KC chapter of the Wite Ravyn Metaphysical church, and talked a little bit about what y’all will be able to look forward to at the festival.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve gone from hiding behind a shroud of plausible deniability (anyone with a serious interest in doxxing me could probably do so without much difficulty) to being a public pagan.  Whoops.

I can’t begin to say how excited I am about the rituals we’re going to put on.  From the brouchure:

Over the course of this year‘s three rituals we will cleanse ourselves of the preoccupations
which prevent us from fully participating in the festival, reclaim our Promethean light,
and launch ourselves back into our lives with power, passion, and purpose.
Opening Ritual—Thursday, 6:30p
In this wordless ritual we are each killed and resurrected in order to cleanse ourselves of
the baggage which prevents us from seeing clearly. The first priestess appears and obtains
the tools of magic.
Main Ritual—Saturday, 7:00p
The priestess draws her consort from the crowd and, with his aid, restores the Word and
the Light to humankind. Tokens of power will be handed out to attendees.
Closing Ritual—Sunday, 10:00p
Final ritual focuses on turning words into actions and manifesting our visions in our lives.

You, my dear readers, get an additional sneak preview.  Below are four of the ten masks that I’ve made for the ritual.

Elemental Masks

In witchcraft

HPF 2013 After-Action Report: the Public Rituals

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

This year’s public rituals consisted of two main rites around central circle, a vision quest, a funeral for one of the better-known merchants, and the usual Memorial Day service.  Having not known the gentleman in question, I did not attend the funeral, and, being an anti-nationalist, I never attend the Memorial Day service.  I did, however, attend the main rituals and vision quest.

The Main Rituals

The main rituals were a marked departure from the norm in that they consisted of two rites—an opening rite on Thursday and a main/closing rite on Sunday—rather than the usual three, with the main rite on Saturday.  I heard rumors that the ritual had been altered to accommodate some last-minute change—perhaps the funeral—but am uncertain as to their veracity.

Owing to Saturday night’s full moon, the theme for this year’s ritual was The Dragon Moon, and the Sacred Experience Committee elected to build their ritual around the theme of the five Chinese elements.  For the opening ritual, five persons bearing lantern-like globes were spaced equidistantly around the circle, which was traversed first in pentagram shape and then circumnavigated by a fairly large paper-mache dragon.  The ritual, itself, told a story of creation and dissolution: order rising from and then collapsing into chaos.  We, the audience, were implored to consider our own life stories and determine where we wanted to go, and how the cycle of creation and destruction could aid us.  We each took a ribbon, which was to be tied to the dragon and would be burned to fuel the rite at the end of the festival.

The main ritual, as is often the case, used the same setup and partially reenacted the first.  We gathered around the bonfire about to be lit.  There were more incantations by the ritual leaders, our intention-charged ribbons were thrown into the pile, and it was all lit to send our intentions out into the universe.

Overall, the rituals were highly theatrical: very pretty, well orchestrated, and fun to watch.  Unfortunately, I did feel that there was a strong divide between the ritual leaders and the audience and that we were more “watching” than “participating”.  There were few callbacks, and not even any real energy work for us to do.

My party and I did find ourselves a little frustrated at the generic quality of the magical aspect: “what do you want out of life” is a rather large and nonspecific question to tackle in any ritual, let alone a public one.  On the other hand, it rather amused us that, given the synchronicity which rules these things, that was the question that apparently everyone was wrestling with this year, as well.

Finally, I was a little troubled by the fact that we were a group of largely White witches performing a ritual based in “ancient Chinese lore”.  While I don’t think the Chinese are harmed by this sort of thing the way, say, Native Americans and other aboriginal populations are, there was definitely an air of appropriation to the whole thing.  Even something as simple as greater specificity in the pamphlet description of the ritual—“… based on the Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing, which is often imprecisely translated as ‘Five Elements’…”—would have gone a long way, and it would have been better if they could have found a primary source to cite for us.  The sad thing is, “ancient Chinese lore” (much like “ancient Native American wisdom”) is often code for “some shit I just made up”; the imprecision puts my back up (as an academic if nothing else) and the whole thing comes of as a bit racist.

The Vision Quest

Since  returning from my failed life in St.Louis, the vision quest has been a major part of my Heartland experience.  This was the first year that, having gone (I didn’t last year), my party didn’t make a point of being the first in line.  That proved to be a mistake.

The theme of the year was Heroes and Villains.  Villains included the Banshee, Baba Yaga, the Pied Piper, Lucifer (if I read the marks on his chest correctly), the Boogie Man, Lilith, and at least one figure I was not able to identify.  Heroes included Queen Boudica, Robin Hood, Sigmund, and Beowolf.  There were definitely some themes that resonated with me: honor and honesty and promices not kept, the question of what you’re willing to do to achieve your goals.  At the end, though, the message I received was more direct and immediate: chill the fuck out, go have fun.  I’m finding this charge painfully difficult.

The people playing each of the roles did fabulously.  They had clearly worked very hard to find the “voice” they were aspecting and deserve nothing but commendations. 

The overall experience, however, was deeply marred by logistical complications.  I’m not sure what, exactly went wrong: maybe the gatekeeper was letting people in too quickly; maybe one or more of the guides on the path was consistently taking more time than they were supposed to.  Regardless, despite my best efforts to move at a moderate pace, I caught up to the person in front of me after the first station.  By the fourth I was caught in a pile-up that went at least three ahead of me and at least five behind.  The long waits, my own irritation, and the increasingly frustrated presence of other Questers made it extremely hard to maintain the appropriate mindset.  Ultimately, I spent half of the time on the path increasingly furious at the orchestrators of what had turned into an ordeal of patience.

In witchcraft

HPF 2013 After Action Report Part I: Overview

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I was more than a little surprised to find myself at Heartland Pagan Festival this year.  Although last year’s debacle was negotiated to an amicable conclusion, many of my friends had not seemed interested in returning.  I had just completed the two most grueling semesters, personally even more than academically, of my life.  Money was (and is) tight, and my spiritual practice was in shambles.  But then Pasiphae and Aidan decided they wanted to go, and Aradia got really excited about it, and that got infectious.  Then I learned that not only would it be a full moon, but Janet fucking Farrar was going to be there, and I have dabbled in Wicca/witchcraft for far too long to turn down an opportunity to see Janet Farrar and hear her speak.

There was one further complication, however: as a part of the aforementioned negotiations, I had agreed to join the Heartland Spiritual Alliance and get involved in the Sacred Experience Committee.  That never happened: first I was broke, then I was busy, then I was overwhelmed and nearly crushed by the last year.  So, before leaving, I sent an email to Bousiris, Mr. Crane, and Alexandros inviting them to Camp WTF to partake in my mead as an apology for my failure to act as I had intended.  Ultimately, and to my chagrin, although all three accepted that invitation, either by email or in person, we never managed to actually meet up to clear the air.

Planning and packing were both achieved with unprecedented efficiency and alacrity.  We arrived at the front gate for our traditional pre-fest camp out at shortly after midnight, despite the fact that preparations included baking four loaves of bread and two dozen muffins (Aradia is a badass).  We were able to secure one of our top four pre-selected camp sites, despite the fact that one had been closed off to “rest” for the season, and another had been selected as the location for the Lushes in Exile, as their usual encampment was likewise closed.  After setting up our encampment at a pleasant and leisurely pace, we set up the best camp-altar ever, and proceeded to relax for the rest of the day until opening ritual and public dinner… both of which were slightly disappointing, but inoffensive.

Friday started with approximately the average amount of confusion over my Community Service (after an above-average amount of confusion last year, the rest of my encampment bribed out), slightly complicated by an unusual number of  musicians and merchants who felt the rules didn’t apply to them.  Meanwhile, Aradia and the rest of our camp went to Ed Hubbard’s first workshop, which they enjoyed, and found me afterwards for breakfast.  We went to the first Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone workshop that afternoon, followed by Ed Hubbard’s second workshop.  After dinner, Aradia and I demonstrated the Stele of Jeu to Pasiphae (whom I think would benefit from doing the rite a few times) and Aidan, then went for a long walk before performing our own private Esbat.  The results of those rituals were impressive.

Saturday was slow to start, and we ended up not going to any of the workshops we had considered.  Instead, when we finally got moving, we went down to the lake, where we had the misfortune to discover a solid dozen unsupervised children, most in the single-digit age range.  That disaster-waiting-to-happen was kind of a buzzkill, and by the time their parents showed up and then finally left, the day had cooled and the lake was too cold to be any fun.  In the meantime, we did divination.

Sunday we caught a workshop on working with spirits and the final lecture by Janet Farrar.  The former was disappointing, but the latter was interesting: the origin story of Lake Onessa and her name.  Although much of our party crashed early, Aradia and I stayed up until the wee hours searching for a party.  We were sadly disappointed.

Monday morning began a little before dawn with the threat of a storm.  By dawn, the threat had been made good on with nickel-sized hail and a torrential downpour that made packing difficult and brought everyone’s temper to the surface—particularly mine.  Although I won’t name names, I will point out that this is why we don’t do weather magic.  Seriously: does anyone know any stories, mythic or personal, of anyone of European descent doing weather magic for good?  It’s all crop-destroying, drought-causing, malicious evil-for-evil’s sake in the myths I know.

In witchcraft

Public Ritual Gone Wrong 5/5: Moving Forward

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Before getting to anything else: it has come to my attention that the gentleman I have referred to as House Arcanum is not, in fact, the sole individual to whom that title belongs.  My apologies to my readers, and to the rest of that House: the misunderstanding is entirely my fault.  I will henceforth refer to that gentleman as Bousiris, and edit previous posts to reflect that reality in the coming days.  Again: my apologies to all involved for that misrepresentation.

From beginning to end, the process of dealing with the ritual and the Sacred Experience Committee was terrifying, emotional and exhausting.  Still, I’m glad that I went through with it.  If nothing else, the festival which has been so central to my social and spiritual life over the last fourteen years remains a safe (if now slightly stained) place.  Several in my encampment would not even consider returning had I not secured an apology—though there are still no guarantees that they will choose to attend the festival again.  Above and beyond that, I have been encouraged to follow through with my intention to join the Heartland Spiritual Alliance and get involved with the Sacred Experience Committee, once I have the money to do so.  The apology itself … well, having spoken with Bousiris personally, please allow me to say that I believe it to be more sincere that it may appear[1].

Thank you, Bousiris. Thank you, Mr. Crane, Alexandros, and Aradia for working with us toward closure and progress on this issue.  I look forward to working with you all in the future.

The festival, the email exchanges, the meeting, and the composition of the apology all took place under the influence of Venus retrograde through Gemini.  I cannot believe that this fact did not greatly shape both the ritual  itself and the fallout afterwards.  One wonders if the astrological “weather” of the moment at which the ritual was destined to be performed could shape to process of writing that ritual over the course of the preceding year.

The old hurts which were dredged up by the ritual seem well within the character of the Venus retrograde.  The old ways of responding to hurt—particularly on the part of Bousiris , who would later admit that such behaviors were not only counterproductive but something he wished to excise[2], and on my own part[3]—are even more perfectly aligned with the way Austin Coppock characterized the retrograde through Gemini.  None of this excuses anything, of course, but it does shed light in some interesting places.

With all that said, there remain a few points which I was either unable to bring up in the meeting, and/or which  wish to address to the public at large.  I do this not to try to “score a second victory” but because I think these issues are important to the community as a whole.

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Public Ritual Gone Wrong 4/5: the Apology

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

XII.  “Garrish Light”

Concerning the main ritual arc at HPF 2012;

The rituals we presented at Heartland this year were unorthodox, did not follow a prescribed tradition or format and left some to ponder our meaning.  And it was, in fact, that very freedom to perform magic in any way the practitioner can find value in that we were trying to communicate.  The ritualistic destruction of the established temple by the disruptive, ill dignified elemental aspects in main ritual was in no way designed to inhibit or castigate participants.  It was designed to do the exact opposite; to liberate.  I value self-exploration as a form of, and a powerful tool in the practice of, magic.  All of this was done by design and in the execution of that part of the design, I personally feel a sense of satisfaction.  It is my wish that people continue to ponder our meaning and explore the heavy, introspective themes we chose to present.

It has, however, come to my attention in a very personal way that my ritual had a wide range of deep impact.  It has been sufficiently illustrated to me (no small feat to do for a Taurus) that some people were made very uncomfortable, even done harm, by the ritual’s execution.  It was built into the intent of the magic we were to create, among other things, to shine light into the dark places of the self.  I did not foresee the full impact that light would have across the very broad spectrum of the festival participants.  Not everyone is at a stage to have light thrown on every part of themselves; not all wounds are ready to heal.  I think Florence said it best, “I never knew that light could be so violent.”

Questions regarding the intent of our ritual have been posed to me and I would offer the two evocations as an illustration of our intent:

We evoke the ever-vigilant Sun; Lord of Light, Heat and Gravity.  We loose your arrows and split the pregnant, fertile darkness.  We enjoy the warmth of your walls; keeping the cold shadows at bay.  Your gravity unifies us into a single, communal force standing together against the vicissitudes and inclemencies of primal waters of kaos.  Will it so!

The evocation of the sun done first and by the Priestess sought to create a yielding, safe place of unification for people to return to after venturing into the darkness we evoked in the next part.

We evoke the fertile Moon; Guardian of the Dark, the Forbidden and the Mysterious.  We seek the heroic perils living in your shadowed breast.  We seek to try ourselves in the courts of our own fear.  We seek to journey at midnight, to witness your uncounted, nameless mysteries and arrive fearless at dawn.  Will it so!

The evocation of the Moon was designed to bring the “Heroic Perils” to the edge of the light crated by the Sun.

I would also offer this from the closing ritual as a further insight into my intent;

We gather back here after the temple crumbled under its own weight.  We are free of trappings and formalities and we bear only the lessons of ill dignified aspects.  It is a new beginning; The Dawning of a New Day.  Free of the dogmas and restrictions of tradition, we are beckoned to explore the self and the world with four simple, powerful tools; one from the howling east, one from the simmering south, one from the deepest west and one from the mountainous north.

I cannot guarantee that my work will not have a similar magnitude of impact in the future.  I am not timid in my exploration of magic and the self and I cannot make apologies for that but, I will certainly go to further lengths in the future to attempt to foresee the entire spectrum of impact.  I cannot share with you the exact phrase that cast light on all of this for me but, I can say it was my intent only to shed light on darkened places.  It was never my intent to summon up demons of the past and stand them in front of people and for that I apologize.

Sincerely,

House Arcanum