[Trigger Warning for discussion of gendered violence in a ritual context.]*<\/p>\n
Let me preface this by saying that I\u2019m not categorically opposed to cutting-edge ritual.\u00a0 I think anyone who\u2019s read this blog for any length of time knows that I\u2019m willing to take magical risks \u2026 sometimes just to see what will happen.\u00a0 Frankly, when done responsibly between consenting adults, I\u2019m pretty much down with any sort of boundary-pushing you can think of.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think many of you are going to argue with me when I say that the main public ritual at a festival is not the place to try being edgy or experimental.\u00a0 That\u2019s how people\u2014unwitting bystanders\u2014get hurt.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The theme of Heartland Pagan Festival 2012 was \u201cDawning of a New Day\u201d.\u00a0 Honestly, I was expecting something fairly light and fluffy along the lines of renewal.\u00a0 In the end, I would have preferred some ineffective fluffy-bunny bullshit to what actually went down.<\/p>\n
Thursday night\u2019s opening ritual was very formal, even ceremonial[1], with ritual garments and flags, and elemental altars. The elemental powers had elaborate and foreign-sounding names and, once they were summoned, the High Priestess and Priest interrogated them to prove their identities.\u00a0 All the summoned elemental “ambassadors” were female.\u00a0 The circle cast and the powers summoned, ribbons in elemental colors and wooden tokens were distributed to the participants around the circle.\u00a0 We were instructed to charge the tokens with our intent for the festival, and to pass it off to the appropriate elemental minion who would deliver them to the fire.\u00a0 Then we were released.<\/p>\n
At this point I was ambivalent about the main ritual arc.\u00a0 On the one hand, it was interesting: I liked the costume and the drama of it.\u00a0 On the other hand, it had essentially amounted to ritual theater: the style was unfamiliar, the language was baroque, the ritual leaders were reading their lines from a script, and the efforts made to draw the audience into the ritual were insufficient to overcome these hurdles.<\/p>\n
The main ritual, Saturday night, began identically to the first, except that as each female ambassador was summoned, a male dressed in casual clothes came out from behind her and demanded “what is the meaning of this?” Once all four elements had been summoned, the male interlopers each berated and belittled the female powers in turn until they turned around and left. Then the men kicked over the altars. As the audience watched, stunned, the minions of each of the female powers came and claimed a single artifact from the overturned altars and left.\u00a0 The HP announced that the ritual was complete, and that the final ritual would be the following day.<\/p>\n
The only functional way to chart the things that went wrong with this ritual is chronologically.\u00a0 To begin with, even less attempt was made to draw in the audience than in the opening rite; this ended up being a good thing, but it\u2019s still a failure on the part of the ritual facilitators.\u00a0 The first male interloper was jarring, particularly when the High Priestess and Priest did not acknowledge or address him.\u00a0 Despite my best efforts, I was forced out of what ritual headspace I had been able to create, trying to figure out where the hell they could be going with this.\u00a0 Dissonance began to build as the yelling started; when the interlopers kicked over the altars, it was like a kick to the guts.\u00a0 The ritual area was stained with violence.<\/p>\n
When the ritual leaders\u2014speaking, at last, without acknowledging or explaining what had just happened\u2014dismissed everyone, imploring us to return for the final chapter the next day, I was shocked and confused.\u00a0 What had that been about?\u00a0 The Paleolithic rise of the patriarchy?\u00a0 A ritual reenactment of the myth of the Burning Times?\u00a0 I was sick to my stomach.<\/p>\n
The violence that had been brought into the circle was not generic.\u00a0 All the elemental ambassadors, as I said, had been women.\u00a0 All the yelling, belittling, violent interlopers had been men.\u00a0 The HSA Sacred Experience Committee had brought domestic violence into the circle, set it loose without warning, reason, or resolution.\u00a0 They had come very close to sanctifying it[2].\u00a0 Several of my camp-mates were brought immediately to tears; the rest were filled with righteous fury.<\/p>\n
Suddenly, I was very glad that the ritual had been performed in such an amateur fashion.\u00a0 Had it been done properly, with everyone brought fully into the circle and ritual headspace, the damage\u2014which was, looking about camp, clearly severe\u2014would have been a hundred times worse.\u00a0 Domestic violence would have spread across the festival like wildfire; there might even have been a rape or a suicide.\u00a0 Hell, I might have killed someone then and there.<\/p>\n
The Sacred Experience Committee had asked for our trust.\u00a0 They then proceeded to betray it.<\/p>\n
We took off our elemental ribbons and burned them, severing ourselves from the ritual arc.\u00a0 While most of my encampment went on the Vision Quest, I went to the Memorial Grove (the small graveyard at Camp Gaea) and performed the Stele of Jeu[3].\u00a0 We purged each-other as best we could, but the miasma lingered until Sunday night, long after the closing ritual of the arc was completed.<\/p>\n
No one in my encampment had the stomach to actually see the final ritual.\u00a0 One or two had talked about attending as a search for closure on the issue, but when the drums started and a parade came by to gather attendees, we watched disdainfully.\u00a0 Nothing could justify what we had already seen.\u00a0 Seeing the final part could only make things worse.\u00a0 Other contacts, however, were able to describe the closing ritual for my academic and ethical dissection.<\/p>\n
The final ritual, I\u2019m told, began with the same invocations as the previous two.\u00a0 The question the ritual sought to answer was, \u201cNow that the temples have fallen, what have we salvaged from the ruins?\u201d (All quotes here are from my source)\u00a0 In the previous ritual, the elemental powers had salvaged a single tool from each of the overturned altars\u2014a lamp, a wand, a bowl, and a book of meeting minutes\u2014and these were presented as the things worth salvaging from the old \u201cdogmatic, dysfunctional, and stagnant old ways\u201d, along with a \u201ctemple of the sun erected by the architects of the four directional temples\u201d which would be a touchst0ne for \u201cthe lessons of throwing off outdated and dogmatic structures.\u201d\u00a0 The authors of the ritual were thanked, and circles were formed around the soon-to-be-fire: first of the ritual performers, then of various in-groups within the festival organization, and finally of ritual attendees, each moving in contra-rotation to the one within them.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been assured that the gendered nature of the violence in the main ritual was not addressed.\u00a0 Inevitably, some have told me it wasn\u2019t actually there: sorry, dipshits, my eyes and Sight work just fine, it\u2019s yours that\u2019s veiled.\u00a0 Inevitably, someone is going to tell me \u201cthat\u2019s not what they intended.\u201d\u00a0 Intent doesn\u2019t magically make the consequences of your actions go away<\/a>.\u00a0 Hell, magicians should<\/em> know this better than anyone: tell me you don\u2019t know anyone who\u2019s ever botched a statement of intent; that you don\u2019t know anyone who\u2019s ever had a spell go horribly awry.<\/p>\n The fact is that the ritual hurt us.\u00a0 Out of the five hundred or so people at the festival, I\u2019d estimate that there were about a hundred or so at the ritual circle Saturday night; a hundred and fifty, tops.\u00a0 If even one of those people were harmed by the ritual, that would make it a failure.\u00a0 I know for a fact that at least<\/em> six were wounded by the violence\u2014I was there, and they told me.\u00a0 From things I overheard throughout the rest of the festival, I have strong reason to believe that we were not alone.\u00a0 By this measure, alone, the ritual was an abject failure.<\/p>\n The ritual is, in fact, still hurting some of us.\u00a0 After performing our severing ritual described above.\u00a0 After performing the most potent Stetle of Jeu of my career to date<\/a>.\u00a0 After calling down the blessings of Dionysus<\/a>\u00a0so hard that people commented Monday morning on how the energy of the camp had changed after the concert.\u00a0 I still feel stained.\u00a0 I still feel betrayed.<\/p>\n I have sent a letter to the head of the Sacred Experience Committee, expressing how badly the ritual went awry.\u00a0 I have demanded a formal public apology for the harm done.\u00a0 In the coming days, we\u2019ll see how things go.<\/p>\n * – ETA to add trigger warning<\/p>\n 1 \u2013 As silly as it is, this is off-putting enough to many pagans, especially, in my experience, those of the eclectic Wiccan and Heathen varieties which dominate the festival.<\/p>\n 2 \u2013 Given what was reported to me of the closing ritual, actually, they did sanctify it: framing male violence against women as the necessary \u201cchaos\u201d which must tear down the old order before a new can be built.<\/p>\n 3 \u2013 To potent effect.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get to that story in a bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Trigger Warning for discussion of gendered violence in a ritual context.]* Let me preface this by saying that I\u2019m not categorically opposed to cutting-edge ritual.\u00a0 I think anyone who\u2019s read this blog for any length of time knows that I\u2019m willing to take magical risks \u2026 sometimes just to see what will happen.\u00a0 Frankly, when … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[39,76,100,114,221],"class_list":["post-648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-camp-gaea","tag-ethics","tag-heartland-pagan-festival","tag-hpfail-2012","tag-ritual"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-as","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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