The Twelve Wild Swans

by Starhawk

  Ecstasy: The Weave

  The first step is to create a weave of sound that a group can keep up for a long time. Beverly suggests that groups build this skill up in stages. “Some people think they can’t sing or can’t keep rhythm,” she says. “But everyone can make sound.” Beverly emphasizes that the weave of sound is what’s important; she stresses that listening is actually much more important in creating the weave than the skill of the sound you make. When people really listen to each other, even nonmusicians can create beautiful, or eerie, or passionate sounding together.

  In sacred space with your friends, start by simply sending a sound into the center of the circle together. This may begin tentatively, but if you keep listening to each other, you can allow the tone to build and change. When you hear something you like, you can pick it up or repeat it. A group whose members have struggled in traffic, or traveled long distances to be together, or had to juggle dinner, homework, and bedtimes to free up a few hours for circle may find their tone building at first into shrieks or howls, moans or groans. This is simply more purification, which the group needs in order to get all the way into sacred space. And it feels good to let loose! Finally, the toning will begin to come together, graceful or passionate, expressive or eerie, depending on the energy of the group. The first time this happens, it is a truly magic moment.

  Ecstasy: Group Chanting

  In the very first Reclaiming class I ever took, our teacher, Raven Moonshadow, started the group singing with a very simple chant: “Born of water, cleansing, powerful, healing, changing, we are…” We were a fairly large group, and we were passing a bowl of salt water around the circle as each person did their own private purification, releasing the tension from their day and any nervousness about the class into the bowl. As the first few people had their turn, I remember thinking how long it was going to take, and whether I could possibly put up with this. But as I relaxed into the chant, closed my eyes, and really listened, I got swept up in the beauty and variations of those voices and the simple nine-word chant. By the time we actually stopped, I didn’t want to. Fortunately, there is now quite a bit of pagan ritual music recorded, so that people everywhere can learn simple and beautiful music to help their ritual work. (See the Resources section at the back of this book for sources.)

  Beverly recommends choosing a chant that has two simple parts, or a simple round. Simple chants are important because they allow us to bypass our intellectual roadblocks to ecstasy. Begin singing and really listening to each other. Hold the image of the “weave,” remembering that the pattern is more important than any one sound and that variation of rhythm and tone add energy. When you are ready, begin to introduce a variation. A person who needs to sing higher or lower than the group might find a harmonizing tone above or below the chant and just hold it or make it rhythmic. Someone might introduce a finger snap or hand clap or a “bop, bop, shu-wop.” When you take the plunge and introduce a variation, stick with it for at least six repetitions. It’s easy to get embarrassed and give up on your variation too quickly, but your group’s chant will soon die away if it turns into a drone, so the variations are important. It’s also important for at least one singer/listener to keep the basic chant going so that the variation people have a base to return to. You can take turns with this role. If your group is small or if you are just starting out, it may help to use recorded music under your own voices to sustain you at first. Before you know it, your group will be carried away on a magic carpet of sound, voice, and breath.

  Ecstasy: Adding Movement

  Once you have learned to create a weave of sound and rhythm for yourselves, try adding movement. A very simple place to start is dancing in a circle. Although there are many fun and beautiful circle dances where the dancers hold hands, for this improvisation it’s better if each dancer has the full use of her own body, so people who easily make big movements, or people whose movement style is smaller, don’t impact each other. To begin, simply put something in the center of the circle. It can be a complex altar that you have built together, or it can just be a candle or saltwater bowl. Begin building a weave of sound and rhythm with a chant, and start moving clockwise around the bowl, letting your sounds and your bodies guide you. Allow the energy to build, peak, and die down. This exercise is so simple it’s hard to believe that it holds the heart of much ritual magic.

  Here’s another piece of circle work from Beverly’s tool kit that can help groups begin moving together. In circle, choose an energy to work with—an element, a deity, an emotion, whatever fits your needs that night—and choose one person to go first. She closes her eyes and allows the energy of, say, fire to come through her and create a movement. Fire may also make sound through her. Everyone else is watching her, and as she begins to move, everyone mirrors her movement and sound, until the whole group is moving fire together. Now the first person can open her eyes and see what has been created, and when she is ready she can pass leadership to someone else as the energy moves through the circle.

  Ecstasy: Moving Through

  Here is another Beverly exercise, one that allows a group to focus on one member and help her express and work through an emotion. Decide together what your group member is going to be working with, and either put on recorded music or create music that reflects that emotional state. Give her space to create movements and sounds that express her feeling. Support her, if necessary, to let go of any inner voices that tell her she doesn’t have the right to this movement, or that it’s not proper, or that she should consider what people will think. She can let her movement become whatever it needs to be. For some people it may get very big and loud; for others it may change or intensify or even get very small and compressed. When she’s ready, she can begin to release her movement into the earth. It’s very important to remember to release into the earth, and not onto each other.

  These exercises are a wonderful starting place for circles that want to bring rhythm and movement into their ritual work. And they are just the beginning, because Reclaiming Witches have used many resources to learn to let rhythm and movement bring them into an altered state where time runs differently. We know that the ecstatic, integrated sensation of our own living, moving bodies can open a deep sensory certainty of being one with the Goddess. Morris dancing, belly dancing, martial arts, tai chi, yoga, sitting meditation practices, backpacking, chanting in groups—are all possibilities, so let your imagination and intuition be your guide!

  Ecstasy: Committing to a Practice

  Choose one of these ways to bring rhythm, movement, and a heightened sensory awareness into your own altar work or circle work, and try it at least once. Try to commit yourself to practicing regularly in a class or circle or, if you are working alone, to a regular practice on your own. Bring your drums, or dance music, or yoga mats, or meditation cushions into your circle’s altar space, which is now beginning to fill up with a Witch’s paraphernalia of self-care, of soul care. Mirrors, roses, bread, ashes, basketry—we are continuing to build ourselves a multilayered spell for self-healing, following Rose’s story.

  Trance: Going Deeper

  In the Elements Path, we learned the basics of trance journeying and practiced a few beginner’s trances, including trancing to a place of power, trancing back into a mysterious dream, and trancing to the Well of Healing. If you have practiced these trances and made them your own, it is possible to go further in exploring your own Otherworld. Here are some additional trance workings you can try.

  Trance into a Tarot Card

  Choose one tarot card out of your deck that has a powerful and mysterious effect on you. You can let magic choose the card for you, either by simply praying for guidance and then cutting the deck, or by taking a card that “accidentally” falls out of your deck. Or you can choose a card that comes up repeatedly in your readings.

  Meditate on the card. I also like to either trace the card and color the tracing with crayons, or trace the card and needlepoint it. In this way I get every detail of the i
mage deeply into my awareness.

  Create sacred space, and prepare yourself for a trance journey. Arrange yourself so that you can see the card when your eyes are open and so that as you begin your induction and your eyes close, you can still see the card image, glowing in your inner senses. Allow the outlines of the card to become a doorway, and step through it into the world of the card. Now you can explore this landscape at will. The features of the landscape can come alive, and the characters can talk with you. You can return at any time simply by retracing your steps. Remember to thank this world for letting you visit, and also thank any helpful creatures or spirits you met. Step back out of the card, and see it again as though through a doorway. Reverse the induction, and return to normal consciousness.

  Trance into a Natural Process

  It is also possible to trance into any natural process or occurrence. Imagine trancing into a summer rainstorm, or into a snowy evergreen forest deep in dormancy and cold, or into the secret lives of plants and animals. Nature is a great teacher, and she has written an exciting, fanciful, humorous, powerful tale for us, should we care to read it.

  First it’s important to do a little actual research, either in books or, even better, with fingertips, eyes, ears, and nose. Remember, the meditations of our tradition are based on simple natural processes that we can easily observe for ourselves, such as the way salt dissolves in water or the way trees reach and open to earth and to sky. While it would be wonderful to trance into the lives of eagles, if you live in a city it may be more productive to trance into the lives of pigeons, because it’s possible to actually observe them closely over time and to get a receptive, sensory understanding of their lives. Much can be learned from a humble bird: patience and perseverance for nest building, care of the egg, ruffling up the chest feathers and spreading the tail feathers for courting, soaring.

  Once you have gathered your own sensory information and impressions of the natural process you’ve chosen, create sacred space, and prepare yourself for trance. Go to your place of power, and at the center of your place of power allow the Tree of Life to grow and appear. You can find any natural process or event either among the roots or branches or in the trunk of the Tree of Life. Once you find what you are looking for, you can enter its world. You can learn from the inside out both about the natural world and about yourself. You will find that every natural process gives you images and insights and powers that can become tools for your own growth. Wouldn’t you like to have bark, so that the next mean comment doesn’t hurt you? Wouldn’t you like to be able to make pearls around the little things that annoy you? Wouldn’t you like to get an owl’s-eye perspective, looking down on your life from a soaring height while everyone is asleep and the moon sails high in the sky, lighting up every detail with an unearthly glow?

  Trance into a Fairy Story

  Get to know a fairy story well enough so that you can tell the whole tale without forgetting important details. Your circle can choose a tale that illuminates some difficult issue in one person’s life or an issue that concerns everyone. In sacred space, take turns telling the tale with the lights low, while creating a soft rhythm behind the words. When you reach the part of the tale you choose to work with, go into trance together. You can explore the landscape of the tale together or interact with the characters. You can explore details of the story that are particularly powerful or moving. Each fairy story opens up into a world of ancestral wisdom. When you are ready, return to normal consciousness by retracing your steps out of the fairy-tale world. Finish telling the tale to the end. Once the tale is complete, come all the way out of trance, patting yourselves all over, stretching, saying your names and the names of your circle sisters. Share food and drink, and open the circle when you are ready.

  Flying

  Just as Rose steps into the basket and flies over the sea to the Otherworld, so do we—stepping into the basket woven by our love and trust of each other, creating ritual that takes us to ecstatic states through drum and dance, through chanting and trance. As we learn that we can change our consciousness at will, that ecstatic states are available to us for the taking, that we can reinvigorate our visions and our lives by “taking a long journey over water,” we build our self-confidence and our Goddess confidence. Like Rose, we are ready for the next stage of our initiatory journey.

  The Outer Path

  Dion Fortune called magic “the art of changing consciousness at will.” We could rephrase that slightly and term magic “the art of letting ourselves get carried away—and of arriving safely on the other shore.”

  In this section of the story, Rose is literally carried away by her brothers to the magic realm across the far seas. Her safe arrival on the other shore depends on the strength of the basket they weave for her.

  The brothers create a vessel, a container, in which to carry Rose. We can think of ritual as the container we weave in which we can be carried away by magic and ecstasy. To land safely on the other shore, that container must be strong enough to withstand the journey. A ritual must have a strong structure if it is to allow us to move into deep and powerful states of consciousness. We weave our vessel from the withes of clear boundaries in time and space, a clear and open intention, a commitment to ground the energy we raise and to reground ourselves after reaching deep states of consciousness. The symbols we choose, the actions we decide upon, the chants and meditations and the patterns of the drumbeats we use—all become aspects of the container we weave.

  In many versions of the story, the basket the brothers weave is made from willow. Willow is an ancient, sacred tree, long associated with Witches. Willow is flexible: it can be bent, twisted, and shaped into many forms. To be a Witch meant to be a person who could bend or twist fate, who could reweave reality.

  Our basket must be strong, but it must also be flexible, open enough for us to feel the wind and see the lands we pass over. Our ritual structure must leave room for openness and spontaneity. If it is too tightly controlled, if we are focused on following a plan instead of flowing with the energy, the basket will be too heavy, and we will not get carried away.

  In looking for structure, we might think about organic order, the structure that arises from the needs and energies of the work. Just as our muscles are formed and shaped by the work we do, so too the particular form a ritual takes is determined by our intention, by the work of transformation we hope to accomplish.

  Ritual has the potential to move us into altered states of consciousness, to move us into the deep places of our psyches where we are most vulnerable. To lead ritual with integrity, we must be aware of others’ boundaries and conscious of which acts or symbols might transgress them. We need to learn a deep respect for our own and others’ limits on sharing. We must never force intimacy, but rather learn to create the conditions in which deep connection may emerge.

  So too in any group endeavor, whenever we try to evoke creativity and healing in community with others, we must always weave a vessel that is both strong and open. We must always dance between earth and fire, between boundaries and exuberance. The Outer Path work for this chapter focuses on the dynamic tension between these poles, on learning to weave the vessel of ritual, and on some of the specific patterns of ritual we in Reclaiming have developed.

  When I first moved to San Francisco twenty-five years ago, I formed a circle of people interested in Wiccan ritual. None of us had much formal training, and all of us were interested in experimenting and creating rather than following directions. We would gather, begin chanting, drumming, and playing music, and let the ritual evolve. Those early rituals had an excitement and spontaneity about them, but after a while we noticed that a pattern had formed. Somebody led most of the beginning parts, casting a circle and calling the directions. Our spontaneous energy building tended to rise to a peak and then fall, leaving us in a quiet, meditative state. The same people tended to take leadership over and over again. Quieter, more shy people were hesitant to jump in. They didn’t know what was supposed to
be happening, and when.

  Eventually we realized that, rather than liberating us, complete lack of structure was actually preventing full participation. Only those of us who were either more confident in speaking out or perhaps simply more uncomfortable with silence were taking roles in the ritual. A structure that we all could agree upon would allow each person to make clearer choices about how they might contribute.

  Reclaiming rituals do have a basic, agreed-upon structure. Knowing the underlying pattern allows us to work together in planned ways and spontaneously. We have similar ideas and expectations about how the energy should flow.

  Basic Ritual Structure

  We begin Reclaiming rituals by grounding, casting a circle, and calling in the elements, deities, and other allies into sacred space. There are many creative ways we might do all of these.

  Within the circle, we do the work of the ritual, which varies according to our intention. In its simplest form, we raise energy and direct it through a magical image that embodies our purpose.

  We end every ritual by grounding the energy we’ve raised and by offering gratitude to the allies we’ve worked with. We say good-bye and thanks to everything we’ve invoked and then open the circle, releasing our sacred space.

  Within that basic structure is infinite room for creativity, improvisation, and spontaneity. But the structure serves as the ribs of the basket, giving it form and cohesion.

  Ritual Creation

  How do we create a ritual so that it becomes a basket to carry us to the land of magic? How do we set a structure that invites ecstasy, yet links us firmly to the ground? How do we make it possible to open up to altered states of consciousness safely?