There are some times when
the rites must be practiced again. Tonight I feel like they have more meaning
than they ever had before. I remember the first time I went through the first
degree and the second degree and the third degree. They were fumbling and odd
and yet, after passing through them my life was changed. I remember them being
arduous. I don’t believe you can do something only once, not something like
initiation. You have to do it again and again, not simply go from novice to
knowledge to sage and then sit there again eventually you must start again,
remember why you came, go through these services and rites again.
The later half of lent is
that time for me. Having passed through the first degree and the second, having
moved in circles and lifted candles and worked the tools, lit the candles,
knelt at the altars and been anointed, I sit at the altar, legs folded under
me. Something has happened. Something has been done. I have made my vows. I have
promised to keep secret the magic and mystery save to the proper people in the
proper circle. Power has been placed upon me, the power of the tradition, the
power of the Goat Footed One placing his hand on my head, my own power, long
forgotten, I place upon me again. I feel it. You have been made witch and
priestess, having been made witch and priestess, you are made witch and HIGH
priestess, the knives, the wants the pentacles, the censor are yours, the
summoning of the circles is yours. You are no congregant. You are no bystander.
You are no theoretician. You are priestess and witch. Priestess I say because
even a female Christian priest is called a priest. Priestess of of the Craft,
of the Goddess, is the beloved of the God, and so I am priestess. I am witch. I
feel it.
And yet?
What the fuck does it
mean?
In a world where we have
seen Samantha Stephens sit on a cloud with Endorra and fly to Paris for lunch, where we have seen Harry
Potter dodge about on a broom and play Quidditch, what does it mean to assert,
I am the witch? In a YouTube world of often shallow or silly or disturbed white
people who have a great desire to sell pentagram charms and and call attention
to themselves, who display much gullibility and greed and very little skill,
power or wisdom, what does it mean to assert, I am the Witch? Once upon a time
a witch was what one was called when people saw what you were doing and how you
were living and called it witch craft. Now ex boyfriends who wear black and are
afraid of he dark or walking in the
woods buy a Wicca book from Barnes and Noble so everyone can see and tell
whoever will listen they are witches, so I must always ask myself what is a
witch? And as a witch, derwydd, priestess
and priest, what is my work?
Once you have moved past
the static of this questioning, the answers may not be so difficult. For those
of us who are initiated the first question is what is a priestess? What is a
priest? For us the word witch is tied in and inseparable from this first
question. So much of priesthood as we see it is defined by Christianity and
especially Catholicism. The priest here represents the establishment and is
empowered by the establishment. The priest here is said to have the power of
changing bread and wine into consumable God. When the priest offers rites, they
work because he has the power of God. When he forgives he forgives for
God. The priesthood is conditional. You
must be male and a certain type of male. You must make it through seminary, be
ordained. The priest is the mediator between the people and God.
This tends to be something many priesthoods have in common. The
Bible tells the very odd story that God formed his own religion in the Sinai
desert, had Moses make of his brother Aaron a priesthood and of the whole tribe
of Levi priests and stipulated how they were to be priests. Many people believe
that ancient Israelites would have had many priestly clans to many gods, or
many faces of what they would know as God. But some old glory remains in the
examples we’ve seen. The holy person does not stand between people and god, but
rather is the conduit of God. It is the difference between a shut water gate
and the river itself. The holy one is living in the conduit and needing to
remember that over and over again. The holy one does not stand for any
establishment, does not uphold the power
of males or nations or that which is already in power. The holy one is the
alchemist, changing bread and wine into God, changing the very ordinary into
the holy, changing what was impossible, by her or his very presence, into what
is blazingly apparent. But in most societies, and certainly he ones from which
our western world descend, that holy one, when working outside of the bounds of
male power and assumed established and approved ways of viewing God, the holy
one who works beyond the pale of what makes most people comfortable and is
unconcerned with orthodoxy, indeed is heterodox, and often enoughthe holy one
who is a woman and not a man is called THE WITCH.
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