July 2020 - A Ritual In Lockdown.

Sacred wild places are best

Since lockdown began, and we’ve all been staying at home, for me and lots of people, that means we've not been sharing our spiritual path with like-minded others. Whether it’s church, synagogue, mosque or temple, getting out to share worship has been terribly missed. 

At least I’m lucky; my place of worship is any place in nature where natural life flourishes, but especially wild areas where the trees, and the creatures living under or in them, are untamed and free.

And I’m also blessed with my own tiny, self-built stone circle, which takes up a more secluded area of my garden. These stones, although they are miniature, have long memories of previous rituals; Jim, my husband and I transported them from Bristol when we came to Wales, and so they have witnessed a continual pattern of outdoor seasonal celebration for twenty years...they certainly have stories they could tell.

Enter through the rose arch

We had planned to celebrate the Vernal Equinox in the circle with the usual group of friends, but I cancelled that, as full lockdown approached. Then Beltaine went by, at the start of May (and, for us, the start of summer), noted with just a couple of Zoom meetings with other pagans.

However, we have been using our stone circle, just the two of us, lighting the firepit and drumming and dreaming around it.

 On a sunny evening this week, we entered the circle again, robed and ready for ritual. I’d been re-reading a recent Indie Pagan*, in which the writer quoted an old saying…ask a stone a question and you will get an answer.

Jim said, “I’ve heard something like that Tell a stone a story, and it will remember for ever. Because the consciousness of the mineral kingdom is different from ours; slower by millennia, and deeper and more retentive.”

We decided to loosely base our ritual on the one described in that article. 

Casting the circle

That evening, we lit a fire and readied the circle, tidying it, brushing away the empty beechnut shells and bits of twig. As the smoke swirled high, we herded the hens into their enclosure, but the dog wandered freely, settling in a corner to 
watch. 

We entered the circle through the rose arch, each carrying four stones, to represent our four grandparents. Jim brought his staff to cast the circle, and I brought two big potatoes which I threw into the red hot coals of the firepit.

Consecrating with water

We always set our circle up in the Druidic fashion, asking Great Spirit for guidance and protection as the circle is cast, calling in peace, consecrating with fire and water and then welcoming the power of the four quarters – East, South, West, North – into the circle. We also invited the spirits of the lower, ancestral world, and to balance things up, the spirits of the upper shamanic world, too, calling ‘hail, and welcome’ to each of these.

We  took four other carefully chosen stones (there are a lot of stones in this ritual!) to further represent the quarters and their elements. A peice of white quartz for the airy East, a cracked stone previously from the firepit to stand in the fiery South, a beautiful fossil for the watery West, and a piece of sacred Bluestone for the earthy North.

The western quarter

We had worn our ovate crane bags into the circle. These function in the same way as a shamanic spirit bag, holding the memories from our time as Druids. We emptied them, going through the tiny objects and natural products, crystals and broken down bits of leaf, talking about the memories they brought to our minds. Leaving them on the Southern Alter, we spent some time smudging our eight grandparent stones and ourselves with white sage. Then we took our time thinking about each grandparent, and choosing where we would put  each of their representing stones around the cross-quarters. We took our time, because we were looking for the grandparent who gave us the biggest and most welcoming smile.

The alter is shielded by foxgloves

For Jim, that was easier. He remembers both his mother’s parents and loved them very much. Often, his grandmother visits him in his dreams. She was smiling very broadly indeed. 

I knew none of my grandparents. My mother was the last of seven, born in 1908. My father was the eldest of three, but born 8 years before the start of that century…an actual Victorian. Their parents were dead long before I was born. But I could feel each of these next generation ancestors as I moved around. This was probably influenced by their sepia photograph, and the stories I’d heard about them. I chose my father’s mother, whose name was Elizabeth.

In silence, apart from the crackle of the fire and singing of bedtime birds, we asked this chosen grandparent our question, and waited for their answer. Then we shared a story with them. I told my grandmother something I knew about her that Dad had told me. 

Once we had said farewell, we sat together in the circle and shared both the questions and the stories.

Growing dark...

It was time to ‘take down’ the circle, thanking the spirits of the four quarters (who function, for druids, as a hawk, a deer, a salmon, and a bear) and the spirits of the upper and lower worlds, saying ‘hail, and farewell’ to each, before Jim uncast the circle, widdershins. 

We left the stones in place, and pulled our chairs closer to the fire, which had died to glowing embers. We fished out the baked potatoes and lavished them with butter. Mmmm…a delicious way to ground ourselves after ritual.

Several days later, the memory of the occasion still resonates in my mind. We will visit our stone circle again soon, I’m sure.

A Ritual in Lockdown was Published in Indie Shaman Magazine in 2021

* Steven Ash; Finding Your Ancestors in the Medicine Wheel, Issue 43 (January 2020) available from https://indieshaman.co.uk