There is a fire. The people are gathered on the dancing ground. The priestess sings a chant; the drums begin. The people respond, with their voices, their bodies; chanting and moving in the pattern of the dance. From their voices, their bodies, arises the power to call down the Orishas, the Gods. Moving together, singing together, the people are one. The drums and the power unite them in a common bond, relinking them with each other, with the ancestors who down through time have chanted, have danced in this way, with the land that supports the people and the spirit that enters into them.1
There is a circle. The people hold hands; they chant together to the Goddess, the Gods. Now one is inspired to begin a chant; now another. They move together in a dance. The power moves through them, uniting them in a common bond with each other, with the land that supports them and the spirit that enters into them. Perhaps they are meeting on a beach near San Francisco or in a farmyard in Wisconsin. Perhaps they meet in the living room of an apartment in Manhattan. Their immediate ancestors probably did not dance or chant like this. Nevertheless, their circle is like the dancing ground of Africa, the kiva of the Southwest, or the Sundance of the Plains.
They are experiencing the power of ritual.
Rituals are part of every culture. They are the events that bind a culture together, that create a heart, a center, for a people. It is ritual that evokes the Deep Self of a group. In ritual (a patterned movement of energy to accomplish a purpose) we become familiar with power-from-within, learn to recognize its feel, learn how to call it up and let it go.
The pattern of the movement of energy in a Craft ritual is based on a very simple structure.2 We begin by grounding—connecting with the earth. Often we use the Tree of Life meditation. Then we cleanse ourselves, perhaps with a meditation on salt water or a plunge into the ocean, taking time to release our pain and tensions through movement or sound. (This may also be done after casting the circle.) The circle is cast: separating the ritual space and time from ordinary space and time, as we invoke the four elements. We invoke the Goddess and the God, and whatever other powers or presences we wish to greet.
Then we raise power by breathing, meditating, dancing, chanting. The power is focused through an image, an action, or a symbol. We may enter a trance together, taking a journey together into the underworld. After the power has reached its peak, we return it to the earth, grounding it through our hands and bodies. Then we celebrate with food and drink and take time to relax and be together. Finally, we thank all the powers we have invoked and open the circle, returning to ordinary space and time.
Rituals create a strong group bond. They help build community, creating a meeting-ground where people can share deep feelings, positive and negative—a place where they can sing or scream, howl ecstatically or furiously, play, or keep a solemn silence. A pagan ritual incorporates touch, sensuality, and humor. Anything we truly revere is also something that we can ridicule respectfully. The elements of laughter and play keep us from getting stuck on one level of power or developing an inflated sense of self-importance. Humor keeps kicking us onward, to go deeper.
We break eggs over the initiate’s body as she lies in the ritual bath. The eggs are symbols of her rebirth. She is a woman who loves calm, peace, order.
“This must be eggs-scruciating!” says a priestess.
“Oh shut up. This is a serious business.”
“Eggs-zactly!”
“Would you stop it?”
“Don’t egg her on.”
Her coven becomes embroiled in a staged fight. They are pushing her to her limits—and past them. Soon everyone is laughing, close to tears, at silly puns. But under the laughter is the power—shining, throbbing. When we fall silent, as she is dried, and laid on towels, and stroked with feathers, and told a sacred story, we feel the power rise, strong because the laughter has pushed down our barriers.
Rituals can, of course, be planned and led by one person. But in a collective they are best worked collectively. In a small group, in which the bond is strong, where everyone knows the ritual structure and members trust each other, most ritual requires no planning at all.
Coven Raving meets. We spend a long time talking about our lives, catching up on gossip, taking care of business. At last we are ready to begin the magic.
We set a bowl of salt water in the center of the circle. We begin making sounds, naming aloud for each other—because we know and trust each other—what it is each of us needs to release. Diane speaks softly; Kevyn is dramatic, making loud noises and wide gestures. Each of us has an individual style.
When we are done, there is silence. In the silence, it becomes apparent to one of us that she is called to invoke the East. She takes the athame (the knife) from the altar, and stands facing her direction. Breathing deeply, she says whatever she is inspired to say, moves, sings, chants, cajoles, or softly whispers as the energy inspires her. Sometimes more than one of us will invoke the same direction, our voices blending, merging, playing against each other in counterpoint, while the rest of the coven moves, or chants, or makes soft sounds that help our energy.
After the East has been invoked, another woman moves to the South. Someone will be called to the West, and someone else to the North. Perhaps one of us will lead the invocation to the Goddess—or perhaps we will all begin to sing spontaneously, or we may chant sounds together. Maybe we will call the God with a poem, or a rhythm. We have no set plan when we start, and we don’t need one because we have learned, over the years, how to flow with each other.
We have learned that if we can wait in the silence without a plan, inspiration comes. We know that if we stand facing a particular direction and see that element in our minds, words will come—or perhaps a sound or a motion. We have learned to wait for the up-welling of that inspiration, and we have learned to express it when it comes, to let it out without censoring it or feeling shy. So we stand, and when we hear the voices in our minds we say what we hear. If we try to judge it, or hold it back, the voices stop, or the words repeat over and over again, so nothing else gets through. Yet this process, which seems so simple, so unconscious and easy, has taken us years to discover, or remember, or invent. It required years to realize that we do not need hierarchy among ourselves, that we do not need to feel shy, that we can trust each other. But having learned this, within this safe, small group, our knowledge is sustained in other areas and in large groups. We find that in our writing, our work, our lives, we are able to wait in silence for the inspiration to arise. We have changed.
We can work the magic in the same way. Perhaps we are doing a healing. Our friend who is eight-months pregnant has been told she has a virus in her bloodstream that may make her baby deformed or diseased; the baby might be born dead. We put our friend in the center of the circle, place our hands on her belly, her arms, her face, her breasts. We begin to chant. Each of us closes her eyes. We visualize the baby healthy. Our voices rise and fall. They weave a new fabric of power for the baby—they re-weave its fate. We sing to it, call it. Now the power strikes one of us—now it rises in another. But in the moment of working magic we are all facets of the Deep Self of the group; we do not get in our own way.
When the power peaks and falls, we all know it because we are all sensing the same power. Together we ground it. None of us has to direct, or even point out the transitions. So the ritual moves as smoothly as a well-directed play in which each of the actors knows her or his part. Yet it is utterly spontaneous, created in the moment. We could say that it is the Deep Self of the group that writes the lines, casts the parts, calls the cues—all as the ritual happens. Nothing blocks the rising of power, so it can be channeled to work, to cause change. The baby—who is the focus of many healing circles that work in the same way—is born in perfect health. Working together, with a common focus, all the circles, the community itself, grows stronger.
In a large group, especially one consisting of people who do not know each other well, we cannot reach the same level of closeness—nor can the power flow as smoothly—as in a small group. Yet larger rituals can also build community, and they have an excitement and an air of festivity that small coven meetings cannot attain. When bonding occurs in a larger group, and a Deep Self is formed, the energy may move by itself in the same way it moves in a small group.
In the early years of both Raving and Compost (my first coven), one or two people generally planned the larger rituals and I led them. Later, the whole coven would plan the ritual, and different individuals would lead different parts.
Our rituals then were, in a sense, more formal. We often wrote beautiful invocations and memorized them. We invented ritual dramas and led guided meditations and trances.
As Raving moved away from hierarchy to function more collectively, our interest shifted from leading and performing beautiful rituals to facilitating a flow of energy that could evoke power and inspiration in each person who came. We realized that energy would not flow collectively unless the rituals were planned collectively, so we invited our sister and brother covens, our students, and other interested friends to help plan the rituals as well as to participate.
To plan a ritual collectively, we begin by going around the circle asking people what the time and season mean to them, and what they need or want from the ritual. From their answers we develop common themes and images. Generally, someone gets an inspiration for a symbolic act that can focus the ritual.
For example, a year ago, members of the Reclaiming collective planned a ritual for the fire festival on February 2 called Brigid,3 which is sacred to the Goddess of smithcraft, poetry, and healing. At that time, we felt as a group that we had a strong need to confront our feelings of political despair and powerlessness. Different needs surfaced as we went around the circle:
“I need a banishing—a purification.”
“I need the ritual to move somewhere—I don’t want to get stuck in my helplessness.”
“I need some way to connect with people—I have a hard time feeling close in a group of a hundred people.”
“To me, Brigid means fire. I really want a cauldron.”
“Candles. For me, Brigid means candles.”
The ritual we finally created began with about eighty or a hundred people gathered in a large circle in an open room. Different covens had prepared the invocations, to the four directions, the Goddess and God. Then we began a banishing dance, moving counterclockwise, with different people yelling out the phrases that had kept them powerless. The group repeated these in mocking, screeching tones until the energy of each phrase had died away.
“I’m Mommie’s good girl.”
“I’m Mommie’s good GIRL.”
“GOOD GIRL!”
“GOOD GIRL!”
“Big boys don’t cry.”
“BIG BOYS DON’T CRY!”
“DON’T CRY BIG BOY!”
“DON’T CRY!”
“DON’T! DON’T!”
“DON’T YOU DARE!”
“You can’t do anything anyway.”
“You can’t DO ANYTHING!”
“YOU CAN’T!”
A banishing dance is sometimes deeply moving—and sometimes hilariously funny. That night it was funny, partly because the circle was so large that its energy tended to scatter. Still, humor is always good for bonding, and the group as a whole felt closer after the banishing.
In another part of the ritual we asked people to move into four small groups, according to their preference for one of the four elements. In the small groups we could feel closer to each other than we had in the large mass. Within each of the smaller circles, we passed a bowl of salt water counterclockwise. Each person, in turn, told of the times when they felt powerless.
“I felt powerless during the war in Vietnam.”
“I feel powerless when I lie, or when I can’t say what I’m feeling.”
“I feel powerless when I go to work and have to spend the whole day filing somebody else’s memos.”
“I feel powerless when I can’t reach out to people.”
Then we passed the salt water clockwise. Each of us spoke of the times when we felt powerful. When we finished, we sprinkled salt water on our heads, naming ourselves and saying, “I bless my power.”
“I feel power when I make contact with people—when I can be there for somebody else.”
“I feel powerful when I sing, when I let my voice be heard.” “I feel powerful when I write.” “I feel powerful when I act.”
“I felt powerful giving birth, weaving, planting my garden.” “I felt powerful joining together with other people to act.” “I feel powerful when I tell the truth.”
To me, this was the most moving part of the ritual. It taught me that power is truly within our reach—that the things that take it away, and the places in which we find it, are very simple things and places. To find our power we need only look at the ways in which we give it away.
We danced, we chanted together, we raised a cone of power and dropped down into a guided trance/meditation to find a vision of our power—and one way in which we could use it in the world. A central cauldron was lit, and each of us lit our candles from this fire as we spoke of our vision, our commitment. Afterward we celebrated with food and wine, and then we opened the circle.
Another aspect of collective planning is the post-mortem, the discussion of which elements different people liked and didn’t like in the ritual, and how the ritual could be made better next time. When rituals are fluid, open to change, they can be improved constantly—unlike traditions with set rites and liturgies.4 The consensus was that we had put too much into this ritual—that it was exhausting, but that moments within it had been deeply moving.
It also worked—in the sense of empowering us, moving us beyond grief and despair into action. Many of us who were confronting our feelings of defeat and futility a year ago, today are committed to ongoing political work.
There are many factors we have learned to be aware of in planning large, open rituals. A ritual can alienate as easily as it can empower.
The first element to plan carefully is grounding. For a ritual to be powerful, we must start grounded, stay grounded, and end grounded, because the power that we raise comes into our bodies through the earth, and then returns to the earth.
We always begin a ritual, or any act of magic, by breathing together, by visualizing our connection to the earth and our connection to each other. (Most often we use some variation of the Tree of Life.) One of my favorite visualizations follows:
Breathe deeply, from your belly. Let yourself stand loosely but firmly planted on the earth. Straighten your spine, and release the tension in your shoulders.
Now imagine that your spine is the trunk of a tree that has roots that go deep into the center of the earth. Let yourself breathe down into those roots, and let all the tensions and worries you bring with you flow down with your breath and dissolve into the earth.
Feel the way our roots connect under the earth, how we draw power from the same source. The earth is the body of our ancestors. It is our grandmothers’ flesh, our grandfathers’ bones. The earth sustained the generations that gave birth to us. As we draw on their power, the power of the earth, as we feel it rise through the roots in our feet and through the base of our spines, let us speak the names of our ancestors—of the ones who came before us, of the heroines and heros who inspire us . . .
And feel the energy of the earth rising into our bellies as we draw it up with our breath, feel it rise into our hearts and spread out from our hearts up through our shoulders and down through our hands. Feel it move around the circle through our hands—feel how it connects us through our breath. As we breathe together—breathing in, breathing out—we link ourselves together, and we speak our own names . . .
And feel the power rising up through our throats, and out the tops of our heads like branches that sweep up and return to touch the earth again, creating a circle, making a circuit. And the branches are our children and grandchildren, the generations that come after us, and we feel them intertwining above our heads, and we know that they are not separate from us, and that, like us, they too will return to earth. And we speak their names . . .
And through the branches, through the leaves, we feel the sun shining down on us, and the wind moving and the moon and the stars shining down. And we can draw in the power of that light, draw it in as a leaf draws in sunlight, and feel it spread down through all the twigs and branches, down through the trunk, down through the roots, until we are filled with light, and as the light reaches the roots, we feel them push yet deeper into the earth.
And as we relax, we feel the connection, the ground beneath our feet, and we know that we cannot lose that ground.
Whenever energy is raised, we ground it, return it to the earth, by touching the earth. Sometimes we place our palms on the ground; sometimes we crouch down and release the power through our entire bodies. We may ground the energy periodically during a ritual, and we are careful to ground it thoroughly after the cone of power is raised. Otherwise, we are left feeling nervous, anxious, unfinished—and the excess energy easily turns to irritation with each other.
The cone of power is raised at the point in the ritual when the energy we have drawn up through our bodies spirals upward into a cohesive whole, reaches a peak, and then dies down. In a large ritual, the energy needs a clear focus, something easily seen or heard, and understood. In the Brigid ritual described above, for example, we chanted for power and focused on the cauldron, symbol of the Goddess’s transformative power.
Not everyone in an open ritual will be familiar with the techniques of moving energy. However, if a few strong people shape the power, others will sense its rise and fall. The cone can be directed visually if we throw our arms up in the air. When some people do this, others will instinctively do the same thing, and the energy will follow everyone’s body movements. When we touch the earth to ground the energy, others will naturally imitate these actions too. Again, the flow of energy will follow our movements.
In a large, open ritual, language is also crucial. Words that are abstract and New-Age buzz-words drain power, and they cause people’s lips to curl. Far better to say, “Let’s hold hands and breathe together” than, “Let us have an attunement.” William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum to poets, “No ideas but in things,” is a good guide for ritual-makers as well—since magic is the language of things. The metaphors we choose reveal both our spirituality and our politics. We should be careful not to reinforce dualism by focusing on light to the exclusion of dark.
If we wish people to participate in chanting and dancing, then the songs we use must be so simple that they can easily be picked up on the spot. The words must be understandable; nothing drains energy more than a large number of people fumbling with an unfamiliar name, unless it is stopping the momentum of the ritual to instruct people. (A selection of chants is given in Appendix C, Chants and Songs.)
When ritual is used in a situation that is not religious, such as a political demonstration, we need to be sensitive to the different needs and perspectives of all the people who may be involved. Religious trappings, the Goddess’s names, even the word Goddess itself may offend many people and cause dissension. But if we speak of the things and people that embody the Goddess, that are manifestations of power-from-within—the earth, air, fire, and water, natural objects, each other—we speak a common language that can touch everyone, no matter what her/his philosophy or ideology.
The rituals Matrix facilitated in camp and in jail at the Diablo blockade put everything I knew about open rituals to the test. We wanted to share the power of ritual to create a group bond, but we were also aware that most people in camp were not Goddess-worshippers, or interested in becoming Witches. We were very sensitive about not imposing our religion on anyone—yet we did want to share the experience of magic.
Rose and I were the first members of Matrix to arrive at the blockade, the day after the alert was called. For several days, affinity groups gathered at the campsite, waiting until enough people were present to begin the blockade in force. During the waiting period, we took part in nonviolence trainings, helped with the work of the camp, and facilitated informal workshops in ritual. At one workshop, we planned a ritual collectively for the night of the full moon. It was very simple in structure. The main symbolic act would be to join our hands together in the center of the circle, reflecting the image on our camp buttons: joined hands across a stylized nuclear power plant, surrounded by a red circle that was crossed by a diagonal line (the international symbol for no).
We knew that because the underlying structure of the blockade was circular and nonhierarchical, no ritual we attempted to lead could work. Although we had a plan, we knew that, at most, we could facilitate and channel the group’s strong, spontaneous energy if it arose.
As always happens, things did not go according to plan, yet everything we intended happened. The full moon rose while people were cooking and eating dinner. It was so fat and beautiful over the hills that everyone began howling, chanting, and banging on pots and pans. We had planned the ritual for much later, but friends came and told us that people were gathered down in an open field, waiting for the ritual to begin.
We went down, announcing the ritual as we went. I found myself deeply grateful for Rose’s presence. In a structure so strongly oriented toward collectives, no one person alone could have worked a ritual. I am by nature a shy, introverted person, (although I have often been accused of overcompensating) and my first instinct in large crowds is to wish I could disappear. Rose, however, has flair for the dramatic. She combines a warm heart with a striking appearance. She has very short, hennaed hair, clothing in bright, contrasting colors, and a resonant voice. Together, we made an effective team.
In the field a crowd of more than a hundred people was gathered, singing, and some musicians played guitars. We had, of course, no lights, no sound system. We could not even have candles because of the extreme danger of fire—there were no props.
Our plan had been to start with a Tree of Life meditation, and build this into a visualization of a circle of protection that would surround each person, each affinity group, the camp as a whole, and even the police and workers we would face on the blockade. We were going to invoke the elements with a simple chant, do a spiral dance, and build power.
However, the power was already built before we began. We asked the musicians to get people into a circle, thinking that this would quiet them so we could begin. But as soon as the circle formed, people began dancing inward in a spiral. I looked at Rose, and she looked at me. We both realized that we needed to abandon our expectations. I knew that if I could put myself in the silent place that I can find in my own coven, and let the inspiration arise, the ritual would work. I also knew that I couldn’t relax that much. But the dance was moving inward—and we had to do something. So we joined it. As it became a tighter spiral, and the musicians ducked outside it to avoid being squeezed to death, we began a Native American chant to the elements:
The earth, the water, the fire, the air
Returns, returns, returns, returns.
People picked up the chant; it grew in power, becoming an expression of our purpose at the blockade, our commitment to a return of the balance of the elements. Someone picked up the beat with a drum. Suddenly, spontaneously, everyone joined hands and moved together, just as Rose had envisioned in our planning. We were swaying and chanting with our hands entwined, and I slipped into the twin consciousnesses that a priestess develops, let myself go into the power, lose myself in it—in the exhilaration of it—and yet consciously remaining grounded in order to keep the power grounded. In fact, I finally began to sing a Tree of Life vision above the chanting. Rose also began to sing a vision, and soon others’ weaving voices carried words and melodies above the chant.
At last we grounded. As people sat on the ground, we led the meditation we had planned, and then we asked people to speak of their visions for the blockade. Although hearing people’s visions can be moving, after a while the descriptions usually begin to deteriorate into spiritual or political catch-phrases. When we felt the energy begin to dissipate, we thanked the powers we had invoked, and started the group singing. The faithful musicians kindly led the singing as we slipped away. The ritual was over.
Chaotic and backward as it was, Rose and I loved it. While some people who took part were frightened by the intensity of the energy, I suspect that most people also loved it as one loves a big, shaggy, clumsy dog who is terribly good-natured but cannot be trusted near breakable china. Certainly, people seemed to want more exposure to ritual. Weeks later, after a long, painful, all-day meeting, the decision by consensus to end the blockade included an agreement to have a closing ritual.
The closing ritual took place at the new moon. Members of the nonviolence trainers collective asked me to facilitate. Most of the original members of Matrix had gone home, including Rose. This ritual followed the usual structure more closely, although three weeks on blockade had made me an expert at letting go, and I was prepared, I thought, for anything.
We met in an open space under the central parachute. The trainers rigged solar-powered lights so we could see each other. We sang while people were gathering, and then grounded with a Tree of Life meditation.
“In my tradition,” I said to the gathered crowd, “we begin by calling in the four directions and invoke the elements of earth, air, fire and water. I’d like to do that if it’s okay.”
The group murmured its agreement.
“Shall we do it formally, or just by chanting?” I asked.
“Formally,” several people cried out. I then called for volunteers to call in each direction. These four people spoke the invocations. Two seemed to be from pagan traditions, and two from Native American traditions. Yet together they cast the circle. Again, I realized how easily the traditions fit together. The words and symbols may differ, but the thought-forms are the same.
We began a spiral dance, singing:
She changes everything she touches,
And everything she touches, changes.
As I began to unwind the spiral, I felt an impulse to make it a kissing spiral, one in which we kiss each person with whom we come face-to-face as we dance. We rarely do this in large, open groups, because many people find it threatening. That night it seemed right because I thought there were about fifty people gathered—a good size for a kissing spiral.
However, while we were invoking and dancing, the spiral had grown. What I didn’t realize, until we began unwinding, was that there were about two hundred people in the dance.
We danced, and chanted, and kissed and danced and kissed until we were nearly dizzy or half-way into some other state of being. The situation was funny, but the hilarity only seemed to deepen the power. The spiral unwound, snaked, opened out, and threaded back. The chant went on and on. I began to fear that the energy would dissipate before it could be drawn into a cone. Then it changed. We began to sing:
We are changers,
Everything we touch can change.
The chant affirmed our purpose, affirmed the strength of the groups going out the next morning, on the last day of the blockade. The power built. We drew together in a tight spiral again, swaying, chanting, and singing in free-form melodies and wordless harmonies until the power peaked. After we grounded, we sang the names of the affinity groups who were present. Again the singing was both funny and beautiful. Chanting, “Mother Earth,” can be solemnly spiritual; chanting, “No Nukes, Hold the Anchovies,” demands an appreciation of the absurdities of life.
Three hundred women are gathered on a San Francisco Street outside the Bohemian Club, an exclusive playpen for heads of corporations and heads of state. The men who frequent the club make decisions to build nuclear power plants, to produce weapons, to cut back on social programs. Here the decision was made to produce the atom bomb.
“Weaving spiders come not here,” is the motto of the Bohemian Club. It is a quote from Shakespeare. The women have come to weave. We are making a web that shuts the club’s doors, that surrounds its ivy-covered walls and extends across the sidewalk into the street. All along the walls we have planted cardboard tombstones bearing the names of women who are victims of violence. As we weave, we chant:
We are the flow, we are the ebb,
We are the weavers, we are the web.
We raise power.
But this is not a ritual; it is a political demonstration by a group called the Women’s Pentagon Action West. On the East Coast today thousands of women are marching on the Pentagon. They too will enact their mourning, anger, empowerment, defiance. They too have created an action that is also a ritual, an act of magic.
If magic is “the art of causing change in accordance with will,” then political acts, acts of protest and resistance, acts that speak truth to power, that push for change, are acts of magic. Political organizers are fond of drawing distinctions between direct actions—those that literally attempt to stop some harmful process (as the Diablo blockade attempted to stop workers from loading fuel rods, or a strike attempts to shut down a factory or corporation)—and symbolic acts, such as marches, demonstrations, street theater productions, and rallies which make statements but have an indirect effect.
I once defined a spell as “a symbolic act done in a deepened state of consciousness.” When political action moves into the realm of symbols, it becomes magical. If we apply the principles of magic to politics, we can understand political actions better and make them more effective.
A demonstration is a ritual because it has elements that are repeated. People gather and they process along a route. Their chants are usually simple, rhythmic slogans that raise a certain kind of power. Then they gather for a rally at which there are speakers—some interesting and some boring, and often there is music or some other entertainment. Finally everyone goes home.
Two years ago a group of artists and pagans decided to organize a demonstration in which the ritual elements would be heightened and would appeal to all the senses. It would be a moving ritual. We called it the Three-Mile-Island Memorial Parade, and it marked the first anniversary of the Three-Mile-Island nuclear accident.
The march itself had a score like a performance that was divided into two main acts. The first illustrated the negative future we can expect if nuclear power development continues. It was led by survivors from Hiroshima who chanted a Buddhist liturgy, and by Native Americans whose homelands in the Southwest were being destroyed by uranium mining. It was followed by a company of wailing women dressed in gray and black robes. A twenty-foot-high wood and papier-mache mockup of a nuclear cooling tower was carried on a flatbed truck. A street theater group dressed as scientists, government officials, and businessmen continually climbed to the top of this and tossed in babies, bodies, and piles of money. Another theater group followed; they were dressed as the mutant sponges rumored to be growing off the Farallon Islands where nuclear wastes have been dumped. A veteran, spokesman for a group who had been exposed to radiation in the early years of nuclear testing, told (from the back of another truck) of death and disease among his fellow servicemen. Finally, a medieval plague cart piled with bodies was drawn along by a crier who rang a bell and called out through the streets:
Bring out your dead!
Bring out your dead!
The second act of the march was heralded by a beautiful batik banner5 showing a rainbow of people of many colors that stretched over a natural landscape within a circle of enclosing hands. It was followed by contingents of people representing the four elements. They were dressed in appropriate colors and carried representations of the renewable power that each element offers. Local affinity groups created wonderful effects—including water-dragons and a huge bird mounted on a bicycle wheel, with a windmill on its head. Other groups brought a giant Goddess puppet. In general, the procession featured the color and costumes San Franciscans love.
The Parade was designed to speak in the language of things—to convey its message in sensual, creative, and funny ways instead of having speakers at the rally. We compiled facts and printed them in a booklet that we handed out along the way. Our somewhat cynical idea was that no one listens to speeches anyway, and, certainly, few people remember facts. How much better to have them all written down for easy reference, in plain English, with no catch-words, no slogans, no leftist jargon to get in the way.
The Parade attracted about five thousand people. They marched a three-mile route from San Francisco’s Civic Center through Japan Town (in memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. There, we created a simple ritual. Ropes were drawn out from the cooling tower, and the people representing the four elements pulled it apart in a tug-of-war. As it collapsed, it released a flight of balloons with white origami doves attached, that sailed up over the Panhandle. With great enthusiasm, the crowd stomped the remains of the cooling tower to pieces. Several of us began a chant. Nobody could hear us because we were not using a sound system, but we started dancing amidst the litter of the cooling tower, and crowds of press photographers pointed lenses at our faces. Somehow, a few of us raised enough power so that it caught the assembled crowd. Suddenly, people were chanting sounds together. As one, everybody threw their arms above their heads and turned towards the sun.
The chant went on for a long, long time. It was smooth, peaceful, strong. Thousands of people became, for a moment, one voice. The chant ended all at once. When some of us sat down and grounded the power the rest followed suit. The day ended with small groups picnicking in the Panhandle, where they could circulate among information tables that many groups had set up.
The Parade was a powerful, joyful experience for those who took part, because it was structured as a ritual and honored the principles of magic. It had a clear focus that was linked to a particular time—the anniversary of the Three-Mile-Island nuclear accident. It had a beginning, a climax, and an end that grounded the power we had raised. It was collectively planned and organized; we spent a great deal of time networking, going to meetings of other groups, exchanging endorsements. It generated a great deal of enthusiasm and energy at a time when the antinuclear movement in San Francisco was at a low ebb. It has become an event that people remember.
In planning a magicopolitical event, the importance of having a clear focus cannot be over-stressed. If the purpose of an action is vague or the target is obscure, no spark is kindled in potential participants. An action speaks to Younger Self, not Talking Self; if a target must be explained, it may not be clear enough. Such explanations may have educational value, but will probably make organizing more difficult.
The oak trees of the back country around Diablo Canyon are the oldest oaks in the world. I don’t know who told me that, or where the information came from, but I believe it. The oaks stretch around us and above us, high and sheltering. There are about eighty of us hiking on a secret path in the back country near the plant, a path that our guides have scouted. We are dressed in our darkest clothes, greens and blues, so that we can blend into the brush when helicopters fly over.
I am tired. Or rather, I am in a state beyond tiredness, between waking and sleeping, brought on by broken sleep and bad food. I am sustained now by energy that is no longer physical. In this state, the trees, the earth, come alive. They speak. They are angry, and we can let ourselves be pulled by the currents of their deep earth power. This must truly have been a sacred place to the Indians, for it feels like an open crack between the worlds, a place where even in bright daylight we are half in the underworld.
In my haze, I begin to see the whole blockade as a giant hex on the plant, an elaborate ritual. It has its own rite-of-entry, nonviolence training. Our way to the camp was secret—like the secret of the labyrinth. First we checked in at a site in the nearby town; then we were handed a map that guided us in a roundabout, circular fashion to camp.
The action takes place on a mythical landscape.
Strangely, the camp and the women’s jail were in parallel valleys, separated by conical hills. From each valley you saw the same mountains—only different sides—the opposing sides: as if the Goddess, as cosmic set designer, was saying to us, “Now, see the two contrasting principles of power and choose.” For in the jail everything embodied power-over. The basis of that power—the guns in the guards’ hands—was always clearly evident. And the location where the women were held was an old gym, once part of the California Men’s Colony prison. The building, made of corrugated iron and concrete, was so bare and institutionally ugly that it seemed an affront to the human spirit that some creative person had been required to design it. Yet it was not very different from any school gym.6 The men’s jail had been a gym at Cuesta College. The men were incarcerated on campus, across the street from playing fields where cheerleaders and football players practiced. The college and the Men’s colony had both been part of the same military base. They all interconnected, as if all these institutions—the school, the military base, the football field, and the prison were simply different facets of the same institution. (As they are.) Everything was grey, drab, or off-white.
But in the camp everything was bright and colorful. Although the land itself is in a square bounded by fences, the camp center was a circular meeting ground, and the surrounding areas were laid out in wedges, like a giant pie. People pitched their tents in clumps and circles; the tents were orange, yellow, bright blue, green, and all the happy colors favored by the makers of camping equipment—colors meant to be visible across vast stretches of mountain terrain (in case their owners get lost) and the tents hugged the yellow-gray straw on the ground. Everything was close to the ground: the tallest structure was a white tepee. There were banners and flags and pinwheels. Anyone seeing the camp from far away had to feel happy. It seemed magical—like a medieval fair from the past or a premonition of a better future. When we were in it, the space had the kind of order found in a messy room (where you can find anything because you know where you put it)—an order like that of an Arabian bazaar, a gypsy camp, or an Indian village. Everywhere there were circles of people meeting, talking, singing, standing with their arms around each other. The camp itself embodied the thought-forms of immanence. The space warped time around it, so that it got harder and harder, as the blockade wore on, to schedule anything, especially things like rituals—by the clock.
The camp lacked only one thing, a center. We needed a central fire, a hearth, a heart. In the hot, dry central California autumn everyone fears fire, but one could have been made safely. And of course, the people who planned the camp had their minds on logistics and serious problems, not on singing around the campfire or doing rituals—not until the end. But if the camp had had a center, a sacred fire to feed and house the Deep Self of the group, it might have been easier to keep the group’s energy focused.
In the action we became Persephone, as we were dragged off by the forces of patriarchy to do our time in the underworld and then emerge again. We became Demeter, who sits at the gate, who rends her clothes and says, “This cannot go on!”
“It is categories in the mind and guns in their hands that keep us enslaved.”7 Somehow, facing the guns in their hands makes clear to us which categories in our minds are their agents. We go against the dictates of the self-hater, we ignore the voices that warn, “You’ll get in trouble,” and the constellations of fears that reflect the way power-over keeps us intimidated. We speak our truth to the police and the guards. We express it to the judge, to all who enact the role of authority. And the power of the internalized authority, the self-hater, is weakened. We see it for what it is, and we are confirmed in our ability to confront it with a deeper truth. We are changed—more deeply than any growth workshop, or therapy, or packaged adventure-tour could change us—because we are confronting something real, and our transformation of consciousness is integrated with our transformation of the reality that surrounds us.
And now a group of us hike into the back country. In a surprise action on the morning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is scheduled to grant the low-power testing license to the plant, some of us will block the seven-mile-long road that leads from the main gate to the plant at its midpoint. This will catch both the workers and the police off-guard. When the first contingent of thirty people is rounded up, another thirty will appear suddenly a little further down the road.
Some of us are climbing up the hill because the next day is the eve of the autumnal equinox, and we are determined to celebrate it within sight of the plant. Our ritual will be a political action, a threat to the plant’s security, an expression of defiance. It will assert—on a day when we know hundreds of our people will be arrested—that we are still here, that we are loud, and strong, and will come back in force.
And it will be an act of the magic-that-works. I will go with others from Matrix, from Sabot (a group that takes its name from the saboteurs, workers who tossed their wooden shoes into machines in the nineteenth century) and another group, TMI (Trainers, Monitors, Itcetera) About twenty of us will go together.
It is very hot, even under the trees. We keep on, and now we are become a spirit army, the people of the land returning. The land has become the ancient oak forests of Europe, the jungles of Central America, the New England woods—or the echo of someplace I have been but cannot quite remember.
“Copter!” someone says quietly. We step quickly into the shadows. Movement is noticeable; but if we stand still with our greens and blues fading into the forest cover, we will not be seen.
Someone catches my eye, and we smile. For a moment, I feel as if I were ten years old, playing spies with my friends Barry and Randy in the hot back alley behind our apartments. Now we are a big gang of kids who have somehow hooked the Highway Patrol and the National Guard into a giant game of cops-and-robbers, complete with real guns, real helicopters, real jails. The truth is—the blockade is fun. I hadn’t expected that. I had expected to be tired, to be hurt, to be scared. I had expected to be home already, having done my bit—gone to the front gate, gotten arrested once, and done my four days in jail. I hadn’t expected the physical action to feel so good.
It does feel good. It is a release. My life at home is embedded in words. I spend hours, weeks, months, putting words on paper at the typewriter. I spend hours every day listening to people as they talk about their pain, trying, with some combination of words, touch, and vision to repair the damage. All the time the frustration keeps building, building—why should this be? What we experience as individual pain is the failure of our way of life. Yet everything I do, eat, enjoy—if I make a cup of coffee or drive to the movies or turn up the heat—somehow contributes to the gathering destruction. The truth is that we are always under the gun. My city is a target of missiles carrying bombs that are thousands of times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. Yet it is not the Russians but my own government that gives me this constant uneasiness, an omnipresent fear, but one I can rarely touch, a rage so deep it has settled into the bone.
Yet here frustration is gone. I feel like a victim released by a vampire—my blood is my own again. What has freed me is action. I have acted with my body, using not just words, but my whole being. I have become fully a part of this community of resistance, putting forth effort and taking risks. To be present with skills and patience I have for listening, for evoking feelings, for soothing hurts, for saying the right thing, and for knowing when to shut up is healing; it is the only spiritual discipline that makes sense to me in a nuclear age.
I feel better on that trail. Though I am hot, dirty, exhausted, and painfully aware that it is not really a difficult hike, it is that I am out of shape—I feel better than I have in years. Maybe ever. The blockade is well worth the price of admittance.
One gift of the blockade is clarity. All the issues that seemed amorphous, all the interconnections that were so painful to puzzle out in the abstract, have become real. At home, I neither deal nor use illegal drugs. I don’t shoplift, make phony credit-card calls, or indulge in petty crimes. I drive at or below the speed limit and lead, in general, a blameless law-abiding life, so I have grown used to thinking of policemen as my friends. Here, however, it is very clear that the powers of the police, the courts, and the military are at one with the nuclear-power industry, with all the forms of power that threaten to poison these oaks, this ocean, our living human bodies. That is obvious when the police have dragged me away and locked me up—obvious to my sore wrists and scraped knees. Not that I mind having skinned knees—it adds to that sense of being a child again, even though the stakes here are not playful, but all too real. With every step into the power of these woods I am beginning to care about them in a way I didn’t before. Even sitting in front of the main gate, even riding past the twin domes in the police bus, the danger the plant represented was still somehow unreal to me. It was an intellectual threat, a hypothetical enemy. But now, as I feel the power of this earth, these trees, this place, and envision it contaminated, off-limits, ruined forever, I begin to get unspeakably angry. The anger twists out of my bones—with each breath, each step, the anger twists into my will. Changing anger to will is one useful magic trick I have learned in all these years of training and practice. I will that this land remain clean.
Not my will alone. Something deeper is pushing us all up the hill. Let us call it the deep will, the will of the Deep Self of the blockade, of all of us. In terms of magic I could say that for two days and two nights I have been riding on that will—since the last night I spent in jail.
Some of us from Matrix, and some of my friends from Moonstone—an affinity group from the nearby town of Cambria—wanted to do a ritual together on the fourth night in jail. After lights out, we filtered unobtrusively out the door to the smoking patio, and formed a small circle between the walkway and the honeyhuts (the outdoor toilets). We cast a circle, concentrating heavily on invisibility—or at least on not being noticed. In eerie whispers, we invoked Hecate of the waning moon, and began to chant. We worked magic while women passed behind us on their way to and from the honeyhuts and the guards smoked on the patio ten feet away—and nobody did seem to notice. We raised our cone of power by pounding straight into the earth, bending down and chanting in the dirt, pounding with our fists on the hard ground, our drum.
“Isis. Astarte. Diana. Hecate.
Demeter. Kali. Innana.”8
As we chanted the words suddenly became: “Diablo Canyon will never open,” and we were filled with a conviction that this was true.
The conviction was scary because it was not rational. Even though the blockade was continuing and our supply of people was continually being replenished, it seemed that the likelihood of our actually stopping the plant from operating was slim. More than a thousand people had been arrested, but we just didn’t have the enormous numbers it would have taken to keep the roads blocked with our nonviolent tactics. One hundred or two hundred people could be removed by the police in a very short time, whether they cooperated by walking with the officers or went limp. At most, we could delay the busloads of workers by an hour or two.
But the feeling was there. It was strong, in the way it is when a spell is working. And if we didn’t believe we could stop the plant, what were we doing anyway?
We grounded the power and went to sleep. At three in the morning, the Moonstones woke me. They had put our names down on a list to cite out. This was an opportunity offered to those of us who had been held past the legal time limit without being arraigned. We could be released if we promised to appear for arraignment at a future date, and those of us who planned to return to the blockade accepted.
And so I find myself out of jail and back in camp just in time to be enticed on this new adventure, moving into the back country to celebrate the eve of the Equinox in sight of the plant.
For two days, we hike intermittently, eating cold foods because fires are both a security and a fire hazard in the back country. We sleep huddled together under thin blankets because the police are confiscating property and not returning it, and we do not want to lose our good sleeping bags. We hike in the dark and in the hot sun, as the logistics of our secret journey requires.
Finally, as dusk is falling on the eve of the Equinox, the guides lead us over a hill onto an open ridge. The fog-dipped coastal hills roll softly away from us. Below us lies the plant, square, hard-edged, and out of place, like a bad science fiction fantasy cartoon imposed on the landscape. In this place where the earth stretches out her arms and rears her soft breasts, this plant is the emblem of our estrangement, our attempts to control, to impose a cold order with concrete and chain links.
The sun is setting. We sit on the hill and eat our meager dinner, chanting:
We are all one in the infinite sun
Forever, and ever, and ever.
A helicopter flies by. It does what can only be called a double take, and returns. On the third pass, some members of the group moon it. That seems to be the signal to start the ritual.
We gather in a circle on the ridge. The helicopter flies around it, as if to seal it for us. In the center is a living tree the Sabotniks have brought to plant in the back country for a member of their group who was killed during the summer in a highway accident. We plant a flag they have made—a black one for anarchy, for the power of the dark, that is embellished with the pentacle of the Goddess. Some of us have brought offerings—I leave an abalone shell on the hillside.
The ritual is loose and wild. Dark falls, and as we feel our power and our anger rise, we break from the circle, line up on the ridge, shine our flashlights down on the plant, and scream. We yell out curses. We want them to know we are here, shining our flashlights down, to draw their searchlights playing over the hills. We are banging on pots and pans, pointing our anger like a spear.
Hiroshima.
Nagasaki.
Three Mile Island.
No Diablo!
We can think of no worse forces to invoke.
The power peaks, at last, as power always does. We send it down to find the plant’s weakest spots, the fault lines within its structure-of-being. We ground, and open the circle, and pick our way slowly, silently, in the dark, back to where we have made our camp.
We wake at three in the morning and hike down the hill in the dark, to plant the tree and to climb over the fence onto the grounds of the plant, breaching their security. Again, the police arrest us.
As Kore returns to the underworld, we return to jail. We celebrate the Equinox once more, among women. But just as Kore emerges in the spring, we know that we shall also return to the hills, to this blockade or another one, to whatever action we must take to bring about the renewal of the earth.
Our Equinox ritual was only one small action in the larger ritual of the blockade. It was another step in a dance of many actions, many rituals, many focused powers.
After the blockade ended, new problems were suddenly discovered in the plant. Blueprints had been reversed; structures had been built wrong; equipment had been inaccurately weighed. The safety violations were so grave that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission took back the license it had earlier granted. At this writing, the power company is embroiled in audits and litigation. No fuel rods were loaded, and still the land is uncontaminated.
So the blockade succeeded—not by physically stopping the workers, but by changing the reality, the consciousness, of the society in which the plant exists. Not the blockade alone, but the years of effort and organizing that preceded the blockade, created that victory.
The ritual, the magic, spins the bond that can sustain us to continue the work over years, over lifetimes. Transforming culture is a long-term project. We organize now to buy time, to postpone destruction just a little bit longer in the hope that before it comes, we will have grown somehow wiser—somehow stronger—so that in the end we will avert the holocaust. But though power-from-within can burst forth in an instant, its rising is mostly a process slow as the turning wheels of generations. If we cannot live to see the completion of that revolution, we can plant its seeds in our circles, we can dream its shape in our visions, and our rituals can feed its growing power.
As we see the Goddess mirrored in each other’s eyes, we take that power in our hands as we take hands, as we touch. For the strength of that power is in the bond we make with each other. And our vision grows strong when we no longer dream alone.