Opening the Gates - A Reflection on Experimentation

I held the oak staves up crossed before me and spun around the fire. I moved to the drums, I moved to the sound of my friends as they chanted 'Open the gates!', over and over again. I danced on the energy as it rose.

“LET THE UNDERWORLD OF THE DEAD!”

I circled the fire sunwise, as the spear-carrying brothers of Sunna would.

“LET THE ABOVE WORLD OF THE GODS!”

The world moved around me as I continued to spin and make my final round.

“LET THE AROUND WORLD OF THE WIHTA!”

The moving became a blur.

“BE HERE IN THIS SACRED PLACE!”

Breathing heavily, but not entirely from the effort of movement, I stopped and gathered myself up. The staves felt heavy now, as though the threads of the worlds had been gathered up like the gossamer of a spiders web, and I pulled them apart from their crossed position.

“OH MIGHTY ALCIS, LET THE GATES BE OPEN!”

A shift occurred, a reality-bending shift that felt almost like reverb to me as I pulled the staves apart and then dropped to my knees to plant them in the ground.

“The gates are open”, I breathe, and then shakily make my way back to my seat to sit down.

It's not a shakiness born of weakness though, or of being unfit, but rather the shakiness born of energy coursing through the body. That feeling of being a conduit. I sit, I breathe, and I redirect the energy.

That night my dreams are laden with meaning, filled with liturgy and fire, wells, and trees – of recreating the cosmos as we understand it in ADF rites. They're not particularly restful though, dreams that are partially trance rarely are. They're half liturgy and rite, and half libraries, books, and parsonage. They feel like a homework assignment.

At Beltane, the gatekeeper will be Manannan Mac Lir – a deity with whom I have only more recently begun to worship and build *ghosti.

One of the things I like the most about ADF is our willingness to admit when we make something up, or pull it from non-Indo-European sources. The concept of gatekeeper and opening the gates was hard for me when first began in ADF, but increasingly it is with the gods and goddesses associated with the liminal, and of course portals that I work.

Yesterday felt right, yesterday felt like a tradition born.

Core Order of Ritual - Gatekeepers and the Druid's Sigil

Our ProtoGrove's Spring Equinox ritual is coming up, and so thoughts have been turning once more to creating liturgy. I usually try to choose a different ritual stage to write with each rite, and so this time, I chose to do the Gatekeeper invocation and Opening the Gates.

It's really one of my favourite parts of the Core Order of Ritual, even though it was adopted from non-Indo-European tradition (not that my liking something is dependant on the Indo-European status of something), but it's one role I've never taken on in ProtoGrove ritual before. I'm not entirely sure why, maybe it's nervousness, because from experience with my private rites, an effective gate-opening is one of the key points that make the difference between amazing ritual and something that feels more like going through the motions and simple piety in action. At least to me that is.

And I've had so many ideas for a gatekeeper invocation and gate opening.

In our PG, our solar High Days are typically Germanic in nature, and so for me the natural choice of Gatekeepers are the Alcis - the Germanic Divine Twins.
Warning, here is where I go into UPG.

I didn't used to worship the Divine Twins, but a conversation with a certain very well-read and intelligent gentleman about the layout of temples and the connection between the Twins and entrances planted a seed in my mind and it seemed like from then on, every night was dreams about door ways and athletic dancing with spears. Always Twins. I began to see the doorway - that liminal space between inside and outside - as being 'their' place. Rock paintings of the sun with (what we imagine as) her two brothers formed into UPG about the Twins and the Sun, and so the sun also took her place more firmly in my personal cosmology.

So when it came to the creation of my Gatekeeper/s invocation and Opening the Gates, these associations were what came instantly to mind.

What if - at least for the purposes of ritual - the spears were staffs?

What if  a rudimentary dance could be incorporated to 'dance the ways open'.

Soon, I'd written a basic outline for that section of the rite, I would give my invocation to the Alcis, asking for their aid in opening the gates and offer to them. Then, while holding two staffs crossed before me, I would then circle round the fire in a kind of wild 'dance' (because I'm under no illusion of my choreographic abilities here), three times as attendees chant 'Open the Gates!', before separating the staffs and planting them into the earth to form a physical gate of sorts and declaring them open.

Of course, this says nothing of the more magical aspects of this act, the more inner level of ritual.

After writing this piece of liturgy though, I started to find new ideas of ways to 'tweak' this section - like 'preparing' the staffs by turning them into Portals as outlined in Ian Corrigan's 'Sacred Fire, Holy Well'.

Separately, through my divinatory work for the Seers Guild training, I've been getting to know the Ogham a little better, and just this last week, this passage from Skip Ellison's book on Ogham (p26) almost jumped off the page at me:

"We can use the oak in our magic whenever strength or nobility is needed. It can be used as a symbol of a gateway or entrance into the land of Faerie."

And this got me thinking about the use of a Druid Sigil - with its two staves and circle of oakleaves - as a physical and magical representation of a gate. What if it might be considered a gate? Used as a gate in ritual? Do people do this already?

Needless to say, I have a lot to prepare before Ostara.

Magicians Guild Musings

My Dedicant's Path coursework passed early this month, and so I've been working on quite a few new courses. I also joined a couple of guilds; the Seers Guild, and the Magicians Guild.

As my background isn't in ceremonial magic, it's been a challenge so far, but that's one of the reasons why I opted to join the guild and work on the guild training courses. This exposure to ceremonial magic in the History of Magic section of the training is really giving me ideas for hybrid rites, or at least rites that take the effective ritual mechanics and techniques of ceremonial magic but that are inherently Pagan and conform to the Core Order of Ritual.

Blasphemy, right?

I have to confess, I do rather like this kind of experimentation. I've always been something of a pragmatist when it has come to the magical arts in the past - if it works I do it, and if I can hone what I already know works, then I'll take out that honing tool and put it to work.

The first ritual that niggled me for playing with is the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I learned how to do it years ago as another sort of weapon in my arsenal for exorcism (I used to get called in to exorcise places every now and again). However, I wondered if it would be truly possible to create a 'paganized' version that still maintained the same ritual mechanics as the original.

And thus began a crazy process trying to make that work. I have something that does work for me, but I'm still working on it. The main changes I've made though have been:

*Changing the initial visualisation to visualising myself growing so as to dwarf the earth and that I stand upon the earth - as a part of the solar system still - and draw energy from the sun. This helps to tie this non-qabalistic cross with the work of the Two Powers meditation.

*At what would be 'Malkuth', there is an added section in which earth energy is also drawn up in the visualisation - once more tying into the Two Powers.

*The language used is a prayer I wrote in Old English that I vibrate.

* After reading that the use of four elements in the Western Esoteric Tradition derives from the Tetragrammaton, I changed it to three - land/earth, sea/waters, and sky/fire.

* The pentagram is replaced by a swastika. The use of the swastika does present the problem of it being four-legged and more tied in with four elements (at least in Golden Dawn magic). However, the history of the swastika is far older than the Golden Dawn - or the Nazis -and I take it to be a holy and auspicious symbol. I also personally have good associations with the symbol after living in Asia (where it is commonly displayed) and protecting my home using that symbolism.

*The circle creation section of the ritual is also tied in with a recreation of the cosmos.

Like I said though, I'm not 100% happy with what I've come up with.

However, I *am* happy with my newest idea, very happy in fact, and I'd love to try it out.

It's a recreation of the cosmos type idea that's based on the Planetary Morning Star (a symbol that is now being used by modern practitioners of the Fairy faith). At the center is an axis mundi or tree, and the star is marked out using ribbon and stakes around the tree/post. The working area is in the center of the star, around the tree, and the representations of land, sea, and sky are placed in accordance with the diagram. It's intended to recreate the cosmos in a slightly more concrete sense, placing it fully within our solar system. Again, there are holes here, namely that we know there are more than 7 planets and that the earth isn't at the center of the solar system. However, it is not a scientific truth that we seek to express here, but a truth based in myth and ritual; that, as Mircea Eliade once wrote, '"Our world" is always situated at the center.'

If nothing else, I think it would make for a very beautiful and grand ritual setting and recreation of the cosmos (the ribbons then being used to decorate and honor the tree that served as the axis mundi after the rite is ended).

Notes:

* The center dot denotes tree/axis mundi.

* The triple division of the circle is not for replication, it's merely to show the positioning of the representations of the land, sea, and sky. So, for example, a representation of earth would go in the North, the fire (as representation of the sky and realm of Shining Ones) would go in the South East. The well would go in the South West.

* Start at Sunday and follow the line to Monday, then Tuesday, then...you get the idea. Neat, huh?