I placed eight cushions in a circle on the floor in the compass directions of South, South-East, East, North-East, North, North-West, West, and South-West. Because we were in the Southern Hemisphere, I thought of this circle as turning anticlockwise—the direction the sun and moon move across our skies. I thought of these positions as corresponding with the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year, but I felt certain we would discover much more than we already knew about the festivals by this process, as well as learning about the directions and the circle itself. In the center I set a round, embossed tray for an altar, and on it I put a candle; nothing else. It felt as if I was creating the first circle, not just for this Circle of Eight but the first circle anywhere, ever, and I didn’t yet know what belonged on the altar. Only the circle could tell me that, and the circle was just beginning.
On that first night there were five of us, and we each chose a direction. I sat in the North. We agreed to remain in those positions for a month, and when we next met to turn the wheel one place onwards so that I would move from the North, the Summer Solstice position, to the North-West, the position of Lammas. Even though not all our cushions were occupied, the Circle of Eight itself seemed fully there, all eight positions represented by its cushions and directions; it was only the human component that was lacking. The second time we met, there were six people; by the fourth meeting, the cushions were filled with eight of us.
From the very beginning the Circle of Eight spoke up, letting us know it existed just fine without us—that the human element of this circle was the secondary one; the compass directions represented by the cushions were there with or without us. We might sit on those cushions or stand behind them—we might function as channels for these directions, as voices and explorers—but we were not intrinsic. This was what we learned before we even began. And as soon as we stood there, in our first positions in the Circle of Eight, looking at each other; as soon as we sat down in those places and began working magic, more and more things became clear.
Although the Circle of Eight looked like a circle, in fact its whole structure was based on lines. The spokes of a wheel are what hold a wheel together, as much as or more than the rim. The person sitting opposite me showed me this the minute I raised my eyes beyond the altar and saw her there. It was my friend Elvian, and in this circle she was immediately the most relevant person to me—or the South was the most relevant position to the North. It was her I looked at full in the face, and in doing so I looked straight through the center of the wheel, its hub and our altar; I looked from my direction but into her direction. My perspective was a view of the position that was directly opposite the position I held.
Elvian and I already had a strong connection; we had worked ritual and magic together for years and knew each other’s strengths and flavors. And we were, in many ways, opposites; we had played on that in both magic and friendship. I was earthy; she was fiery. I preferred to work and deepen within one system over years; she liked to be always learning something new. I was immovable in my beliefs and arrangements; she preferred to flow with how she felt. Sitting in the Circle of Eight and looking across the hub of the altar at each other showed us what we had already known between ourselves, but perhaps not known to apply more broadly in magical terms: opposite can be closest ally.
This immediately added a depth and dimension to our rituals for the Wheel of the Year; no longer did we consider that the Spring Equinox, for example, was closest to Imbolc and Beltaine, the festivals before and after it in the Wheel of the Year. Instead, it was glaringly obvious that the festival it was most deeply related to was the Autumn Equinox, situated directly across from it. What is begun at one festival may grow and change as the wheel moves around, but at its opposite festival it is completed. There something else is begun, which is completed in turn when the starting place is returned to. So the new growth in the fields of the Spring Equinox results in the harvest of the Autumn Equinox. That harvest saves the seeds for and is the vision that inspires the work required at the next spring season.
This especially made sense to me, who had been transiting between hemispheres for years, realizing repeatedly how festivals that are celebrated at the same time on opposite sides of the world, in fact on the same day—such as the Winter and Summer Solstices or Beltaine and Samhain—have so much in common. These festivals are opposites; they lie not just across the earth but across the wheel from each other. The birth of the Year King at Winter Solstice is completed by the height of his glory at the Summer Solstice. Samhain is the time of death and Beltaine, opposite it, of fertility. They reflect and complete each other across the globe, like tossing a ball back and forth in a complex game that crosses the circle repeatedly instead of passing it tamely around the edges.
Seated in the North, the line that crossed our North-South line on the square, the East-West line, also flared in significance to my eyes, though no one sat there on that first night. Those four positions looked like they held the corners of the world, the turning of the earth; we were grounded into the solstices and equinoxes, our points and lines bright and clear and obvious. We were the four arms of a cross within a circle, and it felt solid, like the foundations of a building, the structure of a sentence, or the framework of bars of music before the notes had been written. These two lines with four positions stamped at the ends of them were the axes of the world; on them you could imagine settling the middle earth that we lived in, with the heavens propped above and the underworld supporting below; the whole creating the cosmic sphere.
Between each of these quarter positions lay another quartered axis on the slant. These two lines ended in the four positions of the cross-quarters. One of those cushions was empty on the first night, but that was not the only thing that made that cross seem shadowy, hard to pin down. Those four points were in flux, held between givens, cradled between certainties. They shimmered, they hovered in and out of sight; they brimmed with potential as the meeting place between two differences, the overlap of two influences, like a tidal zone. Where the quarters of North, East, South, and West seemed absolute, predetermined, and definite, the cross-quarters appeared to be between the worlds, not quite belonging to the circle in the same way; instead questioning it, commenting on it, and offering an elusive alternative, like the sideways step it takes to enter fairyland.
Once we started turning our wheel and moving from position to position, I noticed a difference between moving into a quarter or a cross-quarter position; this got stronger as we continued. When we turned the wheel and I shifted into a cross-quarter, the whole room seemed to tilt. The patterned carpet we sat on looked suddenly crooked, the walls loomed out at me at strange angles, I felt dizzy and sickened. Trinda teased me, saying it was just that I was used to looking at the room from a certain angle. Next month when we shifted, she looked at me challengingly. It’s ordinary again, I said. A month later when we shifted, I felt her eyes on me as I sat down, by now in the cross-quarter of the South-East. I would have fallen over if I’d still been standing; it was as if the floor of the room swiveled round to meet me. It does look odd, she agreed from her own cross-quarter position. Yes, I said, it’s the cross-quarters—the whole room’s crooked, and this time she could only nod.
It became a given. When we moved into the quarter positions, the circle steadied; the room settled and seemed as obvious as it had ever been. When we moved into the cross-quarters the world tipped; we were off the square and into the realms of mystery. We tried putting the carpet on a slant, oriented to the cross-quarters, to see what difference that made; it made none at all. We had to learn to accommodate a slight dizziness in the cross-quarters, as we looked at the circle differently. It was as if we crossed the barriers into the other realm with every cross-quarter. One of the most fascinating things about this was it implied the otherworld—the shadowy, magical one—did not lie over there somewhere but was contained within where we were, in-between, somehow, the more standard realities. Each shift around the circle alternated stepping into or out of ordinary and extraordinary realities.
It confirmed what is written into the accepted celebrations of the festivals: that the cross-quarters of Beltaine, Samhain, Lammas, and Imbolc are more significant magically than the quarters of the solstices and equinoxes. But this does not seem to be enlarged on elsewhere, in magical or ritual understandings and ceremony. Why, for example, when we cast a circle into four directions, do we choose the quarters and not the cross-quarters if they are so potent? How did this come to be unquestioned, when the quarter festivals are not assigned greater significance than the cross-quarters? And further, why do we emphasize the fixed instead of the moving in magic, dedicating each direction to one element and doing everything the same each time? Having understood the potency and intrinsic magic of the cross-quarters, why do we not embody that in everything we do?
Discovering the nature of the cross-quarters changed how we cast a circle, how we celebrated the festivals, and how we understood the wheel. We felt it in our bodies, as was typical of our discoveries in the Circle of Eight. The circle spoke to us, spoke through us; and in our dialogue with the Circle of Eight, we could see glimpses of, catch whispers of the great Wheel that it echoed—that pattern of stars that spun around us, that Wheel of the Year we danced through blithely, thinking we knew it, thinking of it as a descriptor of seasons’ passing scenery rather than the great teacher, the endless depths of all the known and unknown realms. That physical unease, the almost-sickness I met again and again transitioning into a cross-quarter, brought me up short every time, reminding me I knew next to nothing and had placed myself bodily into the place of my unknowing.
The circle made patterns all by itself and irrelevant of who was sitting in which direction. They were structural patterns. There was the strength of opposites, a clear call and support, as if that magnetic tension of looking towards each other and yet almost pulling backwards to stay apart was what held my place on the circle. There was the bracing of those sitting on the cross to either side of me—as opposed to those sitting actually next to me—that felt like the bracing of the circle, whether we collectively held the quarters or the cross-quarters. The steadiness of this was helped by the fact that it was always the same people at the same angles wherever we were on the turning Wheel, because although we moved every time we met, we moved only around the perimeter of the circle, maintaining our positional relationships to each other.
The carpet might tip under you, the walls tilt about, and everything look shadowy and partly underwater, but the same faces looked back at you. The context is different, the surrounds; one time I see the wall behind Elvian, the next time the windows, but it is always Elvian there, like a complex dance where you swirl about the floor but look into the eyes of your partner, and that and knowing the steps of the dance is what brings steadiness, rather than the dizzying surrounds. Magically, this was our constant; the circle itself and our relationships to each other brought steadiness and resilience into the unknown, ever-changing whirl of directions.
The Circle of Eight has no hierarchical structure, and its emphases are always changing—with the time of the year or particular people or combinations of people in certain directions. I had longed for a magical group based in equality, shared leadership, and each person representing a dynamic force, not all following along after the loudest speaker or the most insistent personality. In the Circle of Eight I felt we were all working together; not so much because everyone took on leadership or was equally committed, vocal, or participative, but because the circle itself insisted on that equality. Of the eight positions, none could be called the lead position. Every direction was part of our working and essential to the circle. Even if a direction had no one sitting in it, no one representing it at that moment, it was still there, part of our magic and working.
Every new moon we came together, and each time we met we shared what we had learned in the previous month. We talked about the direction we had been holding—how it had felt and how we had sensed it. If the group was following some particular enquiry about elements or a myth, we gave feedback on that. But each of us also spoke of what was happening in our work, relationships, and physical and spiritual lives. We listened, and it was as if those words, those stories, were pouring through a filter of that direction. Looking and listening to someone sitting in the West, we were looking West to where they sat, and we were hearing West in what they spoke. Next month, when a different person spoke from the West, that also filtered through West, and so we gradually built cumulative pictures of each direction.
After we’d done our magic or working for the night, we turned the wheel. Turning the wheel was a ritual that evolved, gaining more and more magnetism as we continued to do it. We each stood in our place and stripped ourselves energetically of the direction we had been holding, imagining it spilling down onto the cushion as if it were a cloak we were shedding. Then, stepping free of its influence, almost hovering above it, we began to sing, each time the same simple song. We tuned our voices to each other’s, singing louder and clearer until we vibrated with sound. We put our left hands into the center of the circle, creating the hub of the wheel, and half-turned so we were facing the direction we would move in. Slowly, slowly we began to pace, taking maybe a whole minute to move the few steps from one direction to the next, each person turning through only one-eighth of the wheel each time. We turned our Wheel anticlockwise, the direction the moon and sun move through the sky in the Southern Hemisphere.
This turning of the wheel became a thing of great beauty for me, so much so that often I would have tears in my eyes as I felt the dance of the stars move through me, felt the moon setting below us, felt the year turn into its next season. I would look up and see the delicacy, the severity, of this slow turning; catch a glimpse of someone’s eyes or the turn of their head as together we became the wheel and I was cradled in it, carried by it and astounded at their grace. Sometimes I held my right hand out as well into the empty space around our circle, and it felt like I skimmed the stars with that hand, caressed the black night, or stroked the living sunlight into being.
We stepped outside time for that turning, but then as we arrived in our new places there would be a shiver through the space, as if we had floated free for a moment of the structures of gravity and time but now connected again, to a different energy than the one we had left. We lowered our hands and turned to face the center, seeing—again, still—whoever stood across from us, but in a different part of the room with a different orientation. Sitting down in our new places, we were silent a moment and then spoke, each only two or three words, the very first impression of what we had come into. It’s all bright. The room’s on a tilt. Quiet, still. Opening. If we had planning to do, practical things for our next meeting or ritual, we did it then from our new places. Finally we released the circle, grounding the energy back into its eight directions but each person continuing to carry the connection with their new direction.
Throughout the month, between our meetings, I would be in constant dialogue with my direction, meditating on it, opening to its learnings. I would ask myself what the North had to say about my relationships, what North characteristics I already held or could learn from, in what way the North was special or unique and how I could embrace it more fully. If one of the festivals occurred during that month, each of us would bring the energy of our own direction to that ritual. Doing this, it felt as if the directions themselves were meeting to hold the ritual through us, rather than us holding the ritual within their space. We were spokes of a wheel, holding it together, and even though each of us brought our own interpretation of each direction, that was merely an added flavor and not as strong as the direction itself.
The circle had its own imperative. At the beginning I felt I was anchored within it, overwhelmed in my position, saturated by it and unable to see or feel anything else. Everything I experienced came filtered through that lens—everything through eyes of East, if that was where I was, or everything through the eyes of South. I was completely immersed in that place. To shift positions at the end of the month was a wrench that felt either like a great release or deep mourning, leaving behind some place I had loved or loathed and heading into the unknown once again. I could see the rest of the circle—the other people in it, the other positions and other festivals—but they were like foreign countries, distant and not commensurate with any experience I was having.
After we had been around the whole circle a few times—and each circuit took eight months—I began to feel lighter in my journeying, as if I did not, each time, arrive in a completely new place with a different landscape than where I had been before, but instead traveled on a continuum; although the experiences and the scenery changed, they were changing in degree rather than utterly. I felt as if I trod more gently, not that I was ripped from one position and plonked into the next, but as if I walked delicately and continually around the wheel the whole time, shifting like a minute hand, which is only noticed each time it falls onto one of the marks set around the face of the clock but really is moving all the time.
And I became aware of the Great Wheel—the spiral of the universe, perhaps—this infinitely bright, fiercely sparking, living white starfire-light, spitting and electrified, gloriously celestial but also immensely present, a thought of it, an echo of it, here held between the eight of us, our eight cushions and our little circle, turning with the wheel on every new moon. It was not a smooth, sculptured wheel I felt in the vast background but more like endless thousands of sparklers bound together in an infinite circle and we—our little human lives, our circling—threaded through and amongst this. It was so vast that the sparklers were like stars in the sky, although they seem so close together, although this sparkler-light seemed dense and everywhere and everything, like the spaces within atoms they were also far distant from each other so that lives and planets and seasons fell in quite simply along the pathway and were not burnt to oblivion by their nearness to the fabric of the wheel.
One of the dynamics of our circle was the cycle of the moon. Because we met and turned the wheel on the new moon (when a crescent could be seen in the western sky), each position we were in followed the same development. We started in a new position on the new moon and gradually settled into it as the moon waxed. At the full moon it felt as if we were peaking at the height or depth of that position, then as the moon waned we gradually integrated our understandings and arrived at some resolution. We traveled through the dark moon and emerged again, now more familiar with that direction and its part in our lives, ready to release and be released by it as we moved on.
The yearly cycle of the seasons, of the festivals, and the year came through less regularly. The pattern was much harder to see of how the eight solar festivals interacted with our twelve or thirteen moon-based shifts each year. There was an energy—an almost tidal energy—to do with which part of the year we were in, as if whoever happened to be holding that place of the season or festival we were up to had a spotlight shining on them; that position momentarily had more weight and lent gravity to our whole circle. So when I was in the Samhain position and it happened to be Samhain, it was as if those energies increased for me not exactly in weight but more like in density—because not only was I energetically and magically in that place in our circle, but the whole year was there too, so I was doubly there, like a king tide. Whereas if I were in the Samhain position at the Spring Equinox, I held Samhain more closely to me, more personally, while the world around me—and I, to a certain extent—experienced the Spring Equinox. And so I learned the flavor of the Spring Equinox when viewed from a position of Samhain—and all the commentaries that all of these positions have on each other; all degrees of difference and similarity, all the ways one can highlight or accent each of the others.
There came to be a mysterious synchronicity and force as we ran this magic. In the very first meeting I sat in the North, the direction of fire and the Summer Solstice. It was not my favorite direction or festival, far from it; fire was the element I had always been least comfortable with. But that was where I felt determined to sit, as if the circle itself needed me there. Some years later, I turned forty. The direction I was holding at the time was the North. It was as if by entering into and doing this work with the Circle of Eight I had grown into my power; sitting originally in the North had signalled that and then when I turned forty the circle reflected that back to me.
Did some part of my subconscious calculate that? It seems unlikely, since I don’t have a particularly mathematical brain and of course hadn’t known our circle would even last that long or that it would become so meaningful to me. Was it coincidence? And yet it had so much meaning for me, and this type of incident occurred so often—with everyone, not just me—and seemed to resonate so deeply. We felt we merged with this circle, this magical system, and it spoke through our lives with authority and inspiration; we were in tune with it, and it with us; we co-created this magic. I couldn’t exactly say the wheel or the Circle of Eight was dictating the minutiae of our lives, but it seemed as if our lives responded to these patterns as again and again each of us created new things in the Imbolc and Spring Equinox positions, had successes or major challenges in the Summer Solstice position, and retreated and released on our way to the Winter Solstice place.
As we circled and circled through these eight places, we deepened our knowing of them. Over months and years this information distilled. When I knew not only this current experience of East, but all my previous experiences of East as well, I could begin to see some essential grains of how it was for me in the East—what all those times had in common—and that became more central to my understanding of East than just a single occurrence. And because I heard everyone else’s reports of the East as well, I began to differentiate what was mine when I was in the East from what was Cathryn’s or Glenn’s in the East, from what was common or seemed universal in the East.
Passing through these positions many times I went into deeper and deeper aspects of each direction; what each time I sat there had in common was often an understanding I would not have arrived at without this experience. Sometimes, for example, I approached my favorite position of the South-West with dread and sometimes with eagerness. Each time I left it I saw that regardless of my attitude or what had occurred during the month, my experience in that direction was always one of deepening. I heard each other person’s variations on each direction every time they traveled through it, and this built and built until I saw the layers far more clearly of which pieces belonged to the direction and which to the person and which to just this instance of that person in that direction.
I loved the journey of moving in this way; it was like being planets in the sky with a relentless, slow dance swinging about our center, visiting and revisiting places over years and so understanding how the energy shifted and changed from position to position, not just in me but in the circle itself. I loved the variations and the patterns. Sitting in the dark half and looking across at the light half of the circle, I would hear and hear again in those voices the brightness, while around and within me I felt the deepening, and I knew they were heading here and I there. I knew that we were all one thing, yet at different moments, holding different aspects of it. And it was ever turning, and relentless.
When we began the Circle of Eight, I had positions I favored—ones I felt were easy, familiar, or filled with gifts—and others I was wary of, reluctant to enter, or even dreaded. Approaching the direction of Lammas always made me anxious, not knowing what sacrifices would be called for but aware that whatever fullness I had built up over the previous four months must begin to shift and change while I held that position.
I was afraid of the power of it and yet it was indisputable. Each position flavored not just what roles I took in a ritual and where I sat, but the whole tenor and content of my life. It was not as simple as the East bringing new beginnings; it might well be that the East highlighted my longing for the new or my exhaustion or illness. Rather than a series of gifts, it was more like being put under a microscope. Each position challenged me, strongly, to prove myself in that place—to examine that part of my life, sort it out; some parts I found harder than others. Everyone had these dreads and wariness about certain positions, peculiar to each one of us. Each of us also had positions we looked forward to: places to catch our breath that felt familiar to us, nonthreatening.
The people in our Circle of Eight changed from time to time. We would make a commitment to a cycle of eight months, after which we’d reassess it, each person choosing to recommit or leave. People also left when they moved away from the area, when their relationships broke up, or as they decided to explore different spiritual paths. Most people stayed for years. We didn’t always have eight people in the Circle of Eight, though we always had eight directions and eight cushions. All of this compounded the sense that people weren’t the vital elements in this structure, the positions were. When someone was sitting opposite me in the circle, I would see myself reflected back in what they were saying, what they were experiencing in that direction—the differences and the samenesses—and when no one was there, when I was looking at an empty cushion, it was like a mirror to see and remember myself in that position a few months earlier. It was as if there were eight of each of us in that circle: eight different selves, and we could see them overlaid on each position.
As we circled round and round, as I came to see the beauty of the whole rather than the parts, gradually I lost this resistance, this preferencing. Gradually I came to feel that I held the whole inside me, and wherever I was on the edge of it was simply an indicator of a moment, not a singular truth I was wedded to. I began to feel the circle dancing through me, much as I danced around it. Each position—every position—arrived with the same feeling of wonder and recognition as I grew more and more into knowing how each held a part of the whole and how therefore neither the Summer Solstice nor the Autumn Equinox could even exist without Lammas, and how Lammas was in some ways a twin of Samhain, my favorite; how every position was its twin, all contained part of its flavor, as it contained all of them.