Circles and Ceremonies
(1986 and beyond)
Though you thought you had destroyed
The memory of the Ancient Way,
Still the people light the bale fires
Every year on Solstice day
And on Beltane Eve and Samhain
You can find us on the hill
Invoking once again
The Triple Will!
—from “we won’t wait any longer”
by gwydion pendderwen, 1980
NARRATOR: The revived Church of All Worlds was a tax-exempt corporation, just like the original had been in St. Louis. The primary functions of their board of directors were the secular, legal, and business aspects of running the Church, which were minor in comparison to the Priesthood Council, which handled the primary religious and liturgical aspects. The rituals, beginning in 1986, were written and organized by the Clergy: Priests and Priestesses. The board of directors had nothing to do with the rituals other than a few other legal matters like making sure the liability insurance was current.
The primary ritualists were the Zells, Anodea Judith, and Marylyn Motherbear. Tom Williams and Avilynn Pwyll did a few, and others occasionally. It was, as always, an eclectic mix of people, and the rituals reflected that. Though OZ had studied Witchcraft and learned from it, and MG was, of course, a Witch, the CAW was (and is) not a Wiccan tradition. It is always evolving and being shaped by the lives and experiences of its members as they explore their relationship to each other and to Mother Earth. Motherbear had decades of experience doing the back-to-the-land trip. Anodea was involved with chakra work, yoga, and psychology. (She has since written several books, including Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System and Waking the Global Heart: Humanity’s Rite of Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love.) With this structure, and these people, the CAW regularly held eight celebrations each time the Earth went around the sun.
OZ: Morning Glory, Diane, and I designed and held our first May Games to select our first official May Royalty in 1987. We invented a series of games—some based on traditions and others that we made up—that were erotic competitions to be engaged in by couples. The first one was “Strip Your Partner.” The first couple who managed to get each other completely undressed would run over to a bell and ring it. Whichever couple would get the highest total score after all the games were finished would then become the new May King and Queen.
So Friday night we would have the Walpurgisnacht ritual; Saturday we would have the games; and then on Sunday we would set up the Maypole. The men would carry the pole in a ritual procession through the forest into the meadow, where the women had dug a hole for it. And the women would decorate it with flowers and ribbons.
The May Queen would reign until the following Beltane. But the King would only reign until Samhain, at which time the crown would be laid to Earth—whether it had his head in it or not. We would then have, as part of our Samhain rite, a ritual to sacrifice the kingship without actually sacrificing the individual person.
Throughout the summer the King and Queen would hold court. For the winter season the Queen would hold court herself. During the time that they held court at each of the rituals, they would dispense favors; give awards, knighthoods, and honors to people; and stuff like that. Their lives during that period of time would be wrapped around those roles. They would visit people and be welcomed as houseguests, just like a royal tour.
The next year, the couple who had been crowned previously would conduct the May Games to select the next winner. They would pass on the crowns. That was the first time that we created a cycle that involved people taking a role and holding it throughout the entire year.
The winners of the 1987 May Games had entered as a triple, so when they won, we were obliged to have all three of them crowned as May Queen and Kings. As it turned out, that didn’t work out very well. They all broke apart just a few months into their reign, leaving us without seasonal royalty for the rest of the year.
From these early experiments, we came to a deeper understanding of the proper role of the May Royalty as the avatars of the land and the community—the Sacred King representing all the men, and the Queen representing all the women. So after that we agreed that we would not have any more same-sex couples—or triples—entering the Games (or at least, not eligible to win). This was (and remains) a controversial decision, as the Church of All Worlds has always embraced people of all sexual persuasions and proclivities. But for this seasonal cycle of avatars to work, we realized it was essential that both the men and the women of our Tribe be represented in the May couple. And so it has been for more than twenty years.
ZACK DARLING: I started emerging as sort of a kid leader with the whole group of kids. I was the oldest one. So what I did was, I went out with a friend to another part of the meadow where we were holding the May Games, and we built a kids’ Circle. We facilitated our own rituals and had kids’ May Games. We would elect the May Prince and Princess. It was the first time that we really integrated the kids into the CAW, into festivals and gatherings as an active part of it that we were doing on our own. It was kind of cool, because we kids did our own thing while the grown-ups did their thing.
OZ: The following year, 1988, Morning Glory and I entered the May Games. We were getting a bit long in the tooth by then, but we thought it’d be fun. We were quite surprised when we won the Games and were crowned King and Queen of the May! Just three weeks later (May 27), MG turned forty, so she referred to herself as “the forty-year-old May Queen” (an homage to an underground comic by Ted Richards called The Forty Year Old Hippie).
Then, right after becoming the Queen of the May, she hurt her neck badly in a way that paralyzed her for weeks and pretty much crippled her for much of her reign. She was really in bad shape; there were months when she couldn’t even get out of bed, and it wasn’t until January of ’89 that she was fully recovered. Meanwhile, I had to support the whole family from my job at the Green Mac. I did more and more freelance work to pay for the expenses—including illustrating a book on apocalyptic theology by a fundamentalist Christian preacher! I drew many pictures of Moses, Jesus, the Crucifixion, angels, and Heaven. There were still some circus royalties, but they had begun to peter out at that point.
MG: The year I turned forty was a very “auspicious” year for me. Understand that the word auspicious doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as lucky; the real meaning is more like “transformational.” The first auspicious thing that happened was that OZ and I were chosen in the May Games to be the King and Queen for that year. We had really only played as sort of a lark and to make sure that there were enough players to make it fun for everyone. They say that the best rulers are those who really don’t want the job, but it’s not as if we actively didn’t want it; we could have refused it, but we felt completely surprised and yet honored. Still, there were a lot of jokes about having a forty-year-old May Queen, and I was going to learn a hard lesson about trying to run that Spring Maiden energy through a forty-year-old, out-of-shape body!
Late that summer I saw one of my favorite musicians from the ’60s in concert: Country Joe McDonald. Did I mention that I love to dance? I do love to dance, and I am pretty good at it even if I do say so myself. I become completely entranced when I dance, and my body moves of its own volition with no conscious thought on my part about how or where or when; I feel like I’m flying. I used to work as a go-go dancer in the late ’60s, and I was an exotic dancer for a while in the ’70s. I studied belly dancing and a little Tai Chi, and so all these elements sort of take over when I am dancing. Sexuality, spirituality, and dancing have always come from the same center for me.
Anyway, here I was at this concert dancing my heart out to Country Joe’s music, and I started doing some of my old go-go routines that involved a complex movement where I dip my head down, let my hair hang low, touch the floor with one hand, and then push off and leap back upward reaching for the stars with the opposite hand and snapping my head back in ecstasy, which makes my long hair travel in a flashing arc. This movement looks really great and it feels wonderful, like you are freeing your spirit to soar upward. So I repeated it a number of times during that set. I was so high on endorphins that I could not feel any pain as my May Queen spirit expressed itself through a body that had not been living on the Ranch for three years at that point and had slumped into a comparatively sedentary lifestyle.
About two weeks later, OZ, Diane, and I were doing a workshop at Isis Oasis on “Going into the Underworld to Meet the Dark Lady.” It was sort of an outgrowth of the work we were visioning about the Eleusinian Mysteries. We had been planning this for months and had worked like mad on this fantastic script. Everything was going great, and then I started having this sharp pain in my neck, which kept getting worse and worse until it reached the proportion of a migraine. Diane gave me some medicine for migraine headaches, and I pushed myself to finish the ritual in spite of the dizziness, nausea, and difficulty in seeing. But I had to leave as soon as I could get away. I could barely drive myself home, I was such a wreck. I’m lucky that I made it safely because I stupidly didn’t ask for anyone to drive me; I just wasn’t used to asking for help like that. OZ and Diane had decided to stay longer at Isis Oasis to enjoy the rest of the event, which seemed reasonable. I always hate to rain on anyone’s parade; and why make a fuss about a pain in the neck?
NARRATOR: Morning Glory was alone for the rest of the weekend till a friend learned of her situation and came over to help her. The next morning she woke up and found herself paralyzed and in agony. Her neck was locked into a frozen position and she could not move her head. When OZ came home, he tried to help her but there was little he could do to fix the situation. After a phone conference with a doctor, she got some prescription drugs but nothing helped. It was twelve days before she was even able to find a position where she wasn’t in pain so that she could sleep.
MG: The hardest thing of all for me to understand was Diane’s reaction. As a lover, sister, and fellow medical person I would have thought that she would be sympathetic and certainly curious as to what the hell was going wrong with my body. But that was not the case. Oh, she got me an appointment and helped me get to the doctor when I could finally move at all. But when the x-ray did not show what the problem was, she decided that there was nothing really wrong with me and that I was just faking it to get attention; and what’s more she began to tell this story to my friends, who would of course believe her because she was a nurse.
Now, the karma for being a drama queen really came down on me like a ton of rocks! I couldn’t believe this was happening when I was in such desperate straits; I guess it was partly the fallout from my years of lying to people. Even though I had changed my ways, some people still did not trust me and there was no way that I could prove what I was going through.
As it was, since pain medicines did not really work, we ended up trying some pretty far-out therapy, and one that finally worked was laughter . . . yeah, that is pretty nutty. But it turns out that direct nerve pain responds to the brain’s own endorphin rush better than any other synthetic pain remedy. One of the best ways to pump out endorphins is through laughter . . . so it really is the best medicine. That and a $25 over-the-door traction unit put me on the road to recovery, along with a visit to my chiropractor when he finally returned.
All this trouble was actually caused by a ruptured disc between my C4 and C5 vertebrae. This happened when I was dancing my head off at the concert. A ruptured disc can act like a slow leak and take weeks to finally go flat. When mine finally did, it settled down and locked hard onto a pair of spinal nerves, pinching and grinding them into the flayed agony that I experienced. Eventually, I had another x-ray done, and by that time it showed up so I finally had proof I could point to; but the damage was done, trust was breached, and many people never got around to finding out the truth of the situation. For my own self I discovered that a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Eventually the injury stabilized naturally. I did not want to get surgery at that time even if I could have afforded it, because the state of neurosurgical medicine was still pretty primitive and the outcome of such surgeries had a high failure rate. It took two years to stabilize naturally, and in the long run it was probably for the best.
I learned some of the hardest and most important lessons of my life during this journey into my own heart of darkness. I eventually learned to befriend the pain and the darkness, to use the sleeplessness and hallucinations as visionary journeys. I found out that I was a lot tougher than I ever thought. I learned that I had true friends who came through for me. And most important of all, I learned that OZ would not abandon me in my need nor would he believe a calumny against me even when it came from someone he also loved and trusted. Knowing that my lovemate would continue to love me even at my worst was evidence that he would come through for me as a lifemate for the rest of my life no matter what tricks the future decided to play on either of us.
OZ: At Samhain (Hallowe’en) of ’88, it was time for me to lay down the crown of the May King. While we had been holding our Samhain rites every year at Annwfn, on this particular year Richard Ely—a professional “Gaeologist” and Anodea’s husband—arranged to hold our rites at Pinnacles National Monument (now Pinnacles National Park), not too far from Salinas, California.
Pinnacles is a remarkable geological site. It’s where the first crack of the San Andreas fault first tore apart the California landscape with a huge outpouring of molten lava called a shield volcano. It was in the largest and uppermost cave that we held our Samhain rites that year. As the outgoing May King, I was the first to be sent down the long, winding stairs cut into the walls of the caves into the Underworld. Being that my consciousness was already enhanced by sacrament, it was a very spooky descent—down into the deepest, darkest depths of the San Andreas fault. Glow sticks were placed here and there to provide enough illumination to avoid deadly missteps.
Finally arriving at the bottom of the descent—which had seemed to go on forever—I came to a barred gate, before which stood a masked figure, who read to me from a scroll, informing me that I was to pass through the gate to meet the Queen of the Underworld Herself. Proceeding further along the cavernous corridor, I came to the throne room of the Goddess, who welcomed me and set me to meditation on my life, my journey, and my Mission. As I did so, I had a profound revelation based on my travels with Belladonna throughout the caves, tombs, catacombs, and Underworld sites of old Europe—especially those in Greece. I envisioned a restoration of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries to be held in these caves.
As I came to the gate on the way out, I was told that I must now replace the Gatekeeper. The mask and scroll were turned over to me, and the former Gatekeeper returned up the stairs to the cave above where everyone was gathered—sending another to descend into the Underworld. After the next pilgrim had completed his encounter with the Goddess, and had in turn taken my place as Gatekeeper, I returned up the long stairway to present my revelation to the assembly. And everyone agreed that re-creating the Mysteries of Eleusis at this site would be a wonderful thing to do.
NARRATOR: At Mabon (Autumn Equinox) of 1990, the Church of All Worlds returned to Pinnacles National Monument to do their first Eleusinian Mysteries cycle.
OZ: Morning Glory and I had been doing all this historical research since Samhain of 1989, and together with Anodea we worked up an elaborate ritual, replete with her lovely poetry and songs.
ANODEA JUDITH: And so I talked to Otter about it, and he said, “Well, let’s do the Eleusinian Mysteries there.” So he and Morning Glory did research and crafted a bunch of the tools, masks, and headpieces. I wrote a lot of the music, poetry, and script. We got permission from the park service to do a re-creation of the Mysteries.
The cave is like a half-mile long. A lot of it is steps carved into rock walls that go down around a waterfall. It’s a remarkable place, and we had a very powerful ritual there.
OZ: The Mysteries of Eleusis were founded around 1600 BCE and continued uninterrupted for two thousand years, until the Roman emperor Theodosius I closed the sanctuaries in 392 CE. The last remnants of the Mysteries were obliterated four years later, when Alaric, King of the Goths, invaded, accompanied by Christian monks “in their dark garments,” bringing in Arian Christianity and deliberately desecrating and destroying the old sacred sites.
Traditionally the Mysteries were held at the Harvest Moon in Greece, during the week leading up to and culminating in the full moon nearest to the Autumn Equinox. We followed the same schedule ourselves—only on a single weekend—so that on the night of the Mysteries, there would be a full moon to illuminate them.
The park gave us special permission to stay there overnight, but only for a certain number of people. We had to arrange it every year. And the other factor was simply how many people we could process in the course of a night. We came up with a total number of twenty, and almost half of those were needed to conduct the rites. All the participants had to wear authentic Greek costumes. When it was almost dusk, and the park was closed to everyone else, we would come in and everyone would then process up along a winding path to a particular area. Nobody had been allowed to go up there before that. People would come for the whole weekend, and this would be done on Saturday night in the particular area where the caves were. And the landscape is so bizarre and alien that you would have no idea they were there until you turn the corner. It’s like stepping into another world.
So as people went along the path, they would encounter little tableaus. It was basically a walking version of the kind of rituals that we had created before—especially for Walpurgisnacht. But instead of having the tableaus in the center of the circle, they would be at various stages in the journey, like a “stations of the cross” kind of thing. At each place, the characters would enact the next little part of the story.
MG: I had been at several rituals with other groups dedicated to the Eleusinia, but I wanted to be part of the creation of something different—something more intense and shamanic that would reach down across the centuries and try to recapture a sense of the power, pageantry, and most important of all, the transformational quality of the original cultic Mystery that was so influential in shaping a part of Western spirituality for two thousand years. During its time, thousands of the most influential people in classical antiquity—like Pythagoras—had been initiates of the Mysteries. Though there are a few personal testimonials surviving that tell of how people’s lives were changed for the better by their experiences, actual specific information about the Mysteries themselves is almost non-existent. All those people over all that time never broke their sacred oaths of silence and managed to take their knowledge with them to the grave. Certainly that was an amazing tribute to the enduring power of Eleusis, but it sure made it a bitch to try and dredge up enough facts to re-create a real ritual!
Oddly enough, some of the only extant information on details of the Mysteries exists in the form of the Christian diatribes against the practices dating from the spread of Christianity into Greece. How ironic that those ancient poets’ and priestesses’ only chroniclers would turn out to be the very people who railed against them and eventually succeeded in extinguishing their sacred flame. So we were able to gather bits and pieces of material from an assortment of authors, but we needed to take lots of it with spoonfuls of salt since some of the information came from such biased sources.
Fortunately, there is a kindred spirit in Pagan peoples from all over the world, and certain themes that are rooted in the worship of divine Nature replay themselves constantly, becoming universal themes. We were able to stitch together those fragments and find the common threads that allowed us to glimpse the underlying truth of the original Mysteries and then re-create and reframe those truths so that they would be accessible to a modern English-speaking Pagan. The original script that we wrote for the Mysteries has been fiddled with and changed around by each and every Priestess and poet who has taken them on since we first started performing them; what has occurred is a kind of evolution, where the ancient Gods and Goddesses have been provided with vessels to speak through and are allowed to continue the process of working out these ancient family dynamics in ways that teach us and are applicable to our modern lives. Given enough time, even the Gods themselves evolve.
OZ: The Homeric Hymn to Demeter pretty much lays out the narrative of the whole story of the exoteric (“outer”) Mysteries. It tells how Demeter’s daughter, the flower maiden Kore, is out picking flowers and she sees a mysterious black narcissus. When she pulls it, the ground opens and up comes Hades, Lord of the Underworld, in his black chariot pulled by black horses. He sweeps Kore up and carries her off into the Underworld to become his Queen (henceforth called Persephone). Demeter goes searching for her. And in her grief and anger she doesn’t attend to the nurturance of the land—the land grows cold and barren, and winter comes upon the Earth. The harvest fails and people are hungry. The Gods aren’t getting their sacrifices, and everything is falling apart.
So the Gods say that this has to be settled. Demeter tells them that she will not relent until she has her daughter back. So then they try to reason with Hades to release her, without success. That’s where, eventually, the mortals come into play. A pact is made between the Gods and the humans. To fulfill their pact, the humans have to go into the Underworld and try to persuade Hades to release Persephone. And that’s tough—how do you persuade the Lord of the Underworld to relinquish his Queen?
In the esoteric (“secret”) Mysteries, each of the pilgrims one at a time has to be prepared to go into the Underworld to encounter Hades (and Persephone) on their own. And there they discover things about themselves and the nature of Life and Death and the Mysteries. They have to confront their darkest fears. But before they go down, they are brought before the throne of Demeter to give their last words. Demeter asks, “If you don’t return, how would you like to be remembered?” And people have to sort of give their own eulogy.
We have conducted these Mysteries over many years now. And as people were initiated, they also began to contribute songs and stories. People would return in the following year, and the stories would evolve. It finally all concludes as the dawn sun arises and the world returns to normal.
ANODEA JUDITH: I participated every year. I played several different parts. I priestessed the ceremony. I played Hecate. One time I played Demeter and my daughter played Persephone.
We did it for about ten years, and then an endangered species of bat moved into the cave, and the park service closed the cave so we couldn’t go in there anymore. But we have continued holding the Mysteries at Pinnacles to this very day—just no longer inside the main caves.
NARRATOR: OZ also continued doing rituals elsewhere, with people who weren’t involved with the Church of All Worlds, and with people who weren’t even Pagans. His biggest public ritual since the 1979 eclipse came about as a result of his involvement with his local community. He and Morning Glory were representing the Church of All Worlds at planning meetings for an interfaith ceremony to mark the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, and found themselves facilitating all the planning due to their prior experience with interfaith ritual. They brought a wide swath of people of different beliefs—Catholics, Jews, Chinese Buddhists, Pomo Indians, Sufis, Krishna followers, Tibetan Buddhists, several congregations of Protestants—together in creating a unique and touching ritual by asking each group what they’d most like to contribute to the ceremony and hanging it on a ritual framework.
OZ: And so we went, singling out each faith group to do what they most wanted, and plugging their part into the basic liturgical structure we’d used for years in Pagan ceremonies.
On the day of the ceremony, after the four directions were called, each faith group did an invocation or prayer to their respective deities. I think no one will ever forget the voluptuous Morning Glory, naked under her diaphanous blue Priestess gown, standing proudly in the center of the Circle intoning Doreen Valiente’s “Charge of the Star Goddess” in her stage-trained voice!
Ayisha passed a large inflatable Earth ball with a pledge to the Earth; the Methodist minister led “A Confession of our Carelessness” responsive reading; and various songs and chants were sung.
The Working was the planting of a Tree for the Future by the Methodist youth group, while Tibetan Lamas intoned a trance-inducing “Auoommm . . .” The Krishnas served prasadam (holy food) for Communion; everyone thanked their respective deities; the Pomos concluded their pipe ceremony; and the Catholic priest delivered the final benediction.*
(* This story originally appeared in a longer version in Oberon and Morning Glory’s 2006 book Creating Circles and Ceremonies.)